MichaelAaron Flicker | Want to Move Beyond Smoke Signal Marketing? Learn from American Marketing Master + Breaking Down the Game-Changing Marketing Strategies of Five Guys, Steve Jobs, Redbull, Starbucks, & More

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

One smoke signal coming up just for you.

Light it up, J -Man.

All right, bro, hand me the matches.

You were supposed to bring the matches. I brought the blanket for wafting. No, I brought the chips to eat, and I brought the DVD for entertainment.

Surfer Dudes starring Matthew McConaughey.

Okay, let’s do it the old -fashioned way. Oh, you mean like with a lighter? Just get a couple sticks and rub together. Sure. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get this thing fired up.

What I want you guys to do is to go to a window facing to the west. I think it’s probably the best way to go. Or even just getting on top of your roof or finding a parking lot or something that’s a wide open expanse.

Look to the west and be looking for us.

We’re going to get the…

Here you go.

What are you doing? Oh, it’s too small.

I’ll get another one. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi -million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you, and they have a lot of time on their hands.

They started from the bottom, now they’re here.

It’s The Thrive Time Show, starring the former U .

S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark. and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body. Dr. Robert Zilner. Two men, eight kids, co -created by two different women.

Thirteen multi -million dollar businesses. We started from the bottom, and now we’re at the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Colton Dixon’s on the hooks. I break down the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks.

As the father of so many, if you see my wife and kids, look on your right. Well, folks, on today’s show, you’re in for a blasty blast. We’re going to have a great time learning a lot on today’s show. So how are we going to fit it all into 30 minutes? I don’t know. So until we can change the space time continuum, we’re just going to go fast, rapid fire, coming in hot with massive questions for today’s incredible guest, Michael Aaron Flicker.

Welcome onto the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Clay, I’m great. Very excited to be with you. Now, somebody out there goes, Michael Aaron Flicker. I feel like I’ve heard that name from, tell us about your background.

How did you, I mean obviously you were born, but from the time you were born until now, how did you kind of go from there to here? Well Clay, I started as a kid in suburban New Jersey, outside of New York City, and I believe something my parents told me when I was very young, that I could do anything. if I set my mind to it. And I think a lot of people hear that. I believed it. And I started my company when I was 14 years old, as a freshman in high school.

That’s the company that I still run today, 28 years later. And it started as a computer programming company on the internet. It’s done a lot of things. And now it’s nine separate companies. And I’m just a kid who wanted to be an entrepreneur.

And I’ve gotten the chance to do that.

For people who want to go online and learn more, your website, the different companies there, what’s the best place to go to, or where’s the best place to go to find your work? We created the company name when we were freshmen in high school in Latin class, and we named it Xeno Psi. Xeno, the discovery of, the wonderment of, and Psi, the unknown. So it’s X -E -N -O -P -S -I . com.

And that has all of the companies that I own and I operate. And yeah, that’s the overarching brand now that houses all the other companies. And what exactly do you do at this company? So Xenosci started with the idea that we could solve problems using technology. And for 20 years, it was a professional services company. We made advertisements.

We made marketing strategies. We helped companies solve their problems using technology, using marketing and advertising. In 2022, we evolved it, and now half of those companies are still marketing and advertising agencies. The other half, we make our own brands and products in the world. So we make our own line of premium bamboo compression socks. We make a line of healthier -for -you soda companies.

We have ownership in a sunglasses company. But through all of these companies, the big idea is that We all can understand what motivates people to change their beliefs and change their behaviors. That’s the study of behavioral science. And we can apply those to make our companies and help our clients as they grow. So for somebody out there that’s saying, wow, this is a lot to take in here. Let’s say I’m a doctor, I’m a dentist, I’m a lawyer.

And let’s say I reached out to you to become a client and to hire your firm to help me.

Where would you start?

with a dentist, doctor, lawyer, home builder when it came to helping them build a brand and a marketing plan? What we would say is if you are on the front lines working with customers every day, you have a front row seat to know what customers claim they want. is not always actually what they want. And what they say they’re going to do is not always what they actually do. And we specialize in understanding what drives human behavior, what drives people to buy one brand versus another, what drives them to make decisions one way versus another.

And what we do is we work with our clients to help them better understand human nature so they can work with it instead of against it. And if that sounds a little high -minded, Clay, the real idea is how we can use human nature and human’s natural biases to help our companies grow, to help our brands do better, and do better than the competition. Now, I’m going to pull up your website there so that way everybody can follow along for a second. That’s xeno, P -E -N -O. Xenopsi .

com. That’s the website. X -E -N -O -P -S -I dot com. I know our listeners. And I know our listeners well. And I know they always say, could you repeat that website again?

I’m driving in my car.

So our listeners are pulling over.

They’re in the shoulder right now. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. They’re writing it down. They’re looking for a piece of paper. They’re putting in their phone. OK, we got it.

So now that we’re there, tell us about some of the companies that you’ve worked with in the past.

Not trying to paint you into a corner, but maybe are there some brands in particular that you’ve worked on? the past where you could say, you know, this is something interesting we worked on. I know so many, but just for anybody out there that’s kind of looking for some mental traction, who are some of the brands that you’ve worked with in the past? Sure. So if you scroll down, one of the operating companies is named MethodOne. MethodOne specializes in indulgence brands and products.

So that’s ice cream, coffee, anything that maybe is a little bit of bad but makes you feel good when you have it. Alcohol, THC, all of these are the types of clients MethodOne works on. And in working on these brands, we had a specific example. We were working for a nationwide bourbon company. And it was about a decade ago, and the bourbon boom was just starting, Clay.

There was tons of people starting to find bourbon for the first time and getting very excited about it. But this particular brand was not catching fire like all the others. And so we went to research, like large companies do, and we looked and said, why are people not choosing this bourbon brand versus all others. And what we found was they gave lots of answers and none of them made sense. Like they were saying, well, we didn’t choose it because it didn’t have an age statement or we chose it because the age statement didn’t feel old enough. But using behavioral science, what we saw was that they were actually passing over the product altogether because of the shape of the bottle.

So rather than the bourbon brand being chosen because it looked like everything else in the category, people felt it looked more like a rum bottle. So rather than run a big expensive advertising campaign, rather than run tons of media in market, we took an entire year and we re -reviewed blew the glass to be a package that made more sense for people in the market. And when we launched that new package, sales started to take off. And then we did the ad campaigns and the social media campaigns. But making that change would not be something most marketers or advertisers would recommend. But it made a big difference to those shopping down the aisle before they stopped and saw it.

You kind of remind me or your brand reminds me a little bit of Y Combinator, the legendary brand built by Paul Graham. For those of you who don’t know, Paul Graham is the guy who largely invented the concept of internet shopping. He’s the guy behind Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, so many legendary brands. Do you have anybody that you have kind of looked up to or have gleaned insight from or have researched? Does Paul Graham, does he even fit into that category?

Because I’m trying to give people again some mental traction as to what you do. Because it sounds to me like you are an entrepreneurial incubator. Well, the brands that I own and run, absolutely. And then those that are… professional services companies, we work with clients to help them bring behavioral science into their businesses. So somebody I look up to, he’s been on the podcast that I run called Rory Sutherland. He’s out of the UK and he runs Ogilvy’s Consulting Business.

And he has thought, he looks at problems beyond just what a marketer can do, just what an advertiser can do. And he thinks, how can you solve business problems through all the things at your disposal, whether that’s changing your package, changing your price, changing the perception of your product in the marketplace. So a guy like Rory Sutherland would be someone I look up to.

Les Binette is a very famous marketing academic that we use his work all the time. Mark Ritson, if you know Mark Clay, these are all marketing experts that help build businesses using Google. studies and research to get it done. Now, this just in, folks, Amazon’s where you go to buy books. This just in, Amazon. And on amazon .

com, this startup sensation, amazon . com, there’s a book called Hacking the Human Mind, the Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World’s Best Brands. Again, folks, that’s Hacking the Human Mind, the Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World’s Best Brands.

And as I look at who wrote this book,

it appears as though you are one of the people behind the creation of this book. Is this your handiwork? And what can listeners learn if they pick up a copy of Hacking the Human Mind? So I’ve built nine companies using behavioral science. And as I was going through building these companies, I thought, what if everyone could learn the secrets behind some of the world’s best brands, if they could understand what drove their success? So with my writing partner, Richard Shotten, and I, we wrote this book.

It took two and a half years, Clay, of research, finding studies. And here’s how the book works. It’s 17 of the world’s best brands, like Five Guys Burgers, Starbucks, Pumpkin Spice Latte, Snickers all brands that hopefully all the listeners at home would know and what we’ve done is we’ve looked at their marketing advertising and whether the brands know it or not we picked some of the behavioral science insights that they were taking advantage of we share the academic studies behind them that help. give everyone who reads it confidence of why they should believe that this is what was at play. And then we break down at the end of every chapter, we have three ways that small business owners can use this in their businesses right away. So we’re trying to learn from the big guys who are doing lots of marketing and media, and then take it and apply it so that everyone and all entrepreneurs can use it in their businesses.

And that’s why I wrote it, because I just really believe that this could help give businesses an edge, can give people an edge, and I wanted to share it with everyone. Let’s get into, if we have time, let’s get into five case studies, if we can. Five examples we can find in this book. And someone says, I was driving in my car, and then you mentioned the book title, and I was looking for my pen, and I was struggling to find the phone. And then it’s hacking the human mind there, folks. Look at it on the screen there.

Hacking the human mind. OK, so in this book, are case studies you break these case studies down let’s go through a handful of them so liquid death I don’t know that the average person would want to by default drink liquid death but then they came up with this concept of murdering thirst or walk us through liquid death and what your book tells us about that success story So if you walk into any convenience store, any supermarket, and you walk to the water aisle, what do you think in your mind? You see natural spring lakes. You see mountains with ice cap tops. What you don’t think of is a tall boy can with a skull and crossbones on it.

By every marketer’s playbook, You would think that liquid death was an outlier that should not work based on the category conventions. creating a brand that stood apart from everyone else, they took advantage of a very well -known behavioral science insight called the von Ressdorff effect. So the von Ressdorff effect is named after a German psychologist who back in 1933 studied what happens when one thing is different from the rest. So here’s how the study worked. She put together nine related items, let’s say for example, animals, and then one odd one out, let’s say an item of clothing. And when she asked people to recall what they could remember, they always recalled the odd one out, the animal versus the clothing or the clothing versus the animal.

So we ran the study, Richard and I, to see does that study from 90 years ago hold up today? And here’s the way we ran it. We went to 500 participants and we showed them logos of different brands, 11 car brands and one fast food brand. And when we asked them which they could recall, four times more likely to remember the odd brand out rather than the list of all the others. And this holds true in study after study. So if you want your brand to be more memorable and to be more effective, Breaking category conventions in the right way can be really effective.

So what Liquid Death did by choosing an unusual can and using this outlandish language like murder your thirst, they’re standing apart from the Evians, from the Dasanis.

And by doing that, they’re more memorable and they’ve been more effective. OK, second example here, Amazon Prime’s sunk cost fallacy. Tell us about this case study. So Amazon Prime on its face, seems like an unusual offer. If you pay us $140 a year to be in our membership program, we will give away free shipping. But if you think about all your orders, especially when they launched this program 20 years ago, how much were you spending on your shipping?

$140 in shipping would be a lot, but they get people to sign up for the Amazon Prime and We call it the sunk cost fallacy because even if it doesn’t make sense, you come back and shop at Amazon more and more because you’ve already become a Prime member.

replaying what you’ve already done to not waste a prior investment has driven tons of success for Amazon and it can work for a lot of entrepreneurs in their businesses. Here’s the original study, Clay, that I think everybody will find interesting. The original study was carried out in 1985 by Hal Arx and Catherine Plummer at the University of Ohio. And they asked a very simple thought experiment. Which trip would you go on?

One ski trip on a weekend that was $50 that would be a great ski weekend? And then a few weeks later, you realize that you booked a Wisconsin ski weekend for $100, but that would just be an OK weekend. So do you take the amazing ski weekend that you’re going to love, but you only paid $50 for? Or do you take the more expensive $100 trip that you know is going to be just so -so? 54 % of respondents chose the more expensive trip that they would have a less good time on. Now, that doesn’t make any sense.

Why would you choose a worse trip? But because you want to be consistent with your past self, if you spent more money on it, you’re more likely to choose it. Again, your book is packed with case studies like this. I mean, you talk about five guys in the book. Tell us about five guys. I know some people are getting hungry just talking about five guys.

Tell us about five guys. What were they doing that maybe went against the grain of conventional marketing wisdom? So Five Guys is a really great story because it starts with the original Five Guys, founder Jerry Morrell and his four sons. These are the original Five Guys. We’re talking about whether Jerry’s oldest son should go to college or should he start a business. And they’re having this discussion on a Maryland beachfront boardwalk.

And as they’re talking, Jerry notices that there’s only one stand on the entire boardwalk that’s got a line piled up. That store was Thrasher Fries, and he makes a insightful point. bet. I wonder if Thrasher’s Fries is so successful because they only do one thing. They only make fries. All the other shops on the boardwalk sold burgers and fries or salads and other things.

Thrasher Fries did one thing. And he made the bet that if five guys burgers, only did one thing, burgers and fries, no chickens, no salads, no ice cream, could they do, could people believe that they were an exceedingly good burger and fry joint? The result of that is making a global franchise with $1 .6 billion in sales last year, 1 ,800 locations. But what he tapped into that he didn’t realize was something called the gold dilution effect. And the gold dilution effect is a well -studied psychological insight. And here’s where it comes from.

Ayelet Fishback in 2007 at the University of Chicago runs a study where she gives people information describing how eating tomatoes could either A, help prevent cancer, or B, achieve two goals, help prevent cancer and reduce eye degeneration. And then participants were asked how effective eating tomatoes was at preventing cancer. Strangely, people rated eating tomatoes as 12 % more effective at preventing cancer when it was given as the only benefit, compared to when it was listed with eye degeneration as one of two benefits. It’s not logical. But people feel more confident when you focus only on one goal, only as one benefit than many. Now, entrepreneurs can learn a lot from that, Clay, because when you are an entrepreneur, you want to prove that you’re great at many things and you have a million reasons why somebody should come to you.

But actually, the science shows if you only focus on one goal, truly best at in the world, not only will it be more believable, people will be more likely to come to you because you focused on one thing you’re best at. Let’s just say that somebody is watching this right now and they go, man, I want to get this book. And there’s 17 success stories in here. Can you rattle off a few more of the case studies that you talk about in the book? I mean, what other companies do you discuss in this epic marketing book here, sir?

One of my favorite stories from the book comes from Steve Jobs and the moment that he launches the iPod for the first time. He stands up on stage and he pulls the iPod out of his pocket and he says, imagine 1 ,000 songs in your pocket. Now, that was a radical idea at the time because every other MP3 player, Apple was not the first to the MP3 market, talked about gigabytes and megabytes and sound quality. And he did something that taps into an amazing human insight called concreteness. Here’s the study that backs this up, Clay. It was from Ian Begg at the University of Western Ontario.

In 1972, he recruited 25 students, and he read them a list of two -word phrases. Everybody listening at home can take the challenge right now. I’m going to read a few phrases, like impossible amount, rusty engine, white horse, subtle fault. He read 20 of those types of two -word phrases. And at the end, he asked them, jot down as many as you can remember. Now, on average, people recall 23 % of the terms.

But that’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting is that only 9 % of what folks could recall were what we call abstract phrases, like impossible amount. But 30%, 36 % of those that they could recall were concrete terms, like white horse. or square door. That’s a fourfold increase. And what Begg argued was that vision is one of our most powerful senses.

What entrepreneurs can learn from this is when you want to talk about what you’re selling, when you want to talk about what you’re bringing to market, if you use things like timeless quality, You may think that means a lot, but we can tell you the science says people won’t remember it, versus if you can draw something in their minds that will help them remember it and make you more believable. Now Seth Godin, the legendary marketing guru, expert, he endorses your book strongly, Seth Godin says here. This is a great book, and I’m quoting, practical, generous, and insightful.

That’s Seth Godin, bestselling author of multiple books, including Purple Cow.

And Seth Godin, every time I’ve seen Seth speak on marketing, he talks about how if your product isn’t remarkable, by default it is invisible. He says that in some way, shape, or form. If I gave you the mic to a room filled with entrepreneurs, who wanted to learn marketing from you, what’s maybe a big quote or a big idea or a big phrase that you would tell that audience? I would tell them that you cannot underestimate the power of a single word. And I’m going to give you a backup story behind that, Clay. But the most common mistake we make as entrepreneurs, as business people, is we think, live, dream our businesses 24 hours a day.

But people that want to buy your services have a very short amount of time to think about your brand or your product. And one word can make a massive difference.

Here’s a story.

1970s.

The gentleman’s name is Lee Lance, and he’s an American fish importer. And his whole goal is to bring this amazing fish that he has discovered into the U . S. market. And he tries for 10 years and no restaurant will bring in his product. He can’t understand why.

And then he figures, wait a second, maybe it’s the name Patagonian Toothfish. It’s not a very appealing name for people to put on their menus. So he changes the name Chilean sea bass. And Chilean sea bass takes off in the 1990s, a 30 -fold increase in sales alone. And that seems a little fishy. Dolphin fish was rebranded as Mahi Mahi to stop people from thinking about their favorite dolphin flipper, and it did much better.

Mud bug linguine got renamed crawfish linguine, and surely it’s doing better. And so really, there’s this impact of even a single word. And the study that backs this up is so interesting. 1974, Elizabeth Loftus at University of Washington, she shows all the participants of her study the same clip of a car crash. And it’s one of those crash test dummy videos everyone can imagine, Clay. They run the car, they hit another car, and the challenge for everybody is how fast do you think the car was moving when the accident occurred?

But here’s the twist in the experiment. She changes the verb between participants. Sometimes she says, how fast was the car going when it collided with the other car? How fast was it going when it hit, when it bumped, when it collided, or when it smashed? The choice of just that one word, contacted, people estimate it was 32 miles an hour. Smashed, they estimated it was 40 .5 miles an hour.

That’s a 27 % change in the speed that people thought they saw on the video by just changing one word in the question. So as entrepreneurs, as marketers, every word we use matters, and we should be very careful. about how people who don’t think about our services all day will be impacted by what we choose. Now, folks, I don’t care what product you’re selling. Your business will go to hell if you can’t sell. It’s just it.

It doesn’t matter what product it is. It doesn’t matter what service it is. It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have. You could have more degrees than a thermometer. You could have more skill than anybody. I mean, you could have invested your life savings in developing the product or service, but if you cannot sell Your business will go to hell and your life will not do well financially.

So this is the kind of book that has the power to really wake you up to some ideas, to provide you some insight. It’s well -researched. It’s endorsed unapologetically by Seth Godin. The book right there, Hacking the Human Mind, folks. Michael Aaron Flicker.

Michael Aaron Flicker, I want to give you the final word here.

A lot of times I interview wonderful people on our show and I think to myself, oh man, I should have asked him this. Sometimes as a guest, you leave going, that guy, if he would have just had two less cups of coffee, he would have asked me this and that. So I’m going to give you the floor. What’s the final question that you would have liked to have been asked, or maybe the final thing that you want to just share with our audience today? What I would tell every entrepreneur listening today is two things. Number one, behavioral science insights.

Insights into human psychology. are the things that give us as entrepreneurs an edge. The stuff we write in this book, corporate America is very cautious about. Big companies want lots of studies, lots of research. If you take the insights in the book, it will give you an unfair advantage against more conservative competitors in your marketplace. That’s number one.

And number two is the book gives you ideas and insights that have proven academic them, but it’s not guaranteed to work in your business case. So what we want everyone to do is build a culture of testing and learning.

Try something. If it doesn’t work, adjust it and try something else. You want to have a culture in entrepreneurial companies of testing things and learning. Either we win or we learn, Clay. And if we can instill that into entrepreneurial companies, we’re going to make them better, faster, have better learnings, and have better companies at the end of it. Folks, in this book, which is filled with ideas, by the way, we’re talking about 17 leading brands, including Apple, Dyson, Red Bull, Starbucks.

Don’t buy the book just because Michael Aaron Flicker is a beautiful man.

No, no, no, folks. Buy the book because it’s a beautiful book. Michael Aaron Flicker, thank you so much for your time today, sir.

I really do appreciate you.

And we would love to have you on the show in the future. Thank you, Clay. Thanks for everyone for listening. Take care. you let these pinheads get in your way, you’re in trouble. Octononverba is the motto of the U .

S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kingspoint, New York. I had appointments with Naval Academy and Kingspoint Merchant Marine Academy, and Merchant Marine Academy’s motto was Octononverba. In other words, don’t listen to what a person says. Watch what they do.

Clay, my honor, my honor to be on your show, and thank you for all you do. I hear The ripple effects from you are good ripple effects. You know what I mean? People rave about what they learn from you. So congratulations. My name is Kevin Thomas and the name of our company is MultiClean.

We are a commercial janitorial service and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma and Kansas and soon to be Arkansas. We have probably grown probably five times. We’ve added, I think when we first started with you, we had 60 to 65 employees. And now we have a little over 300 employees. Before we got involved with Thrive Time, we didn’t really have any systems or processes in place.

I’ve probably been to, oh, in six, seven years, I’ve probably been to 12 to 13 business conferences. And Amazingly, each time I go, I learn something new and I’m so excited to bring it back and show the team about marketing and how to help you guys implement the SEO. And the coaching is just great because there’s accountability and it’s just a fantastic way to grow your company. Having a relationship with Thrivetimes, it’s just been amazing for multiclaim.

Oh my goodness, it frees me up because then I don’t have to get take a class on search engine optimization or learn marketing or shoot video. That’s not what we do. What we do is commercial janitorial service. And you guys were the experts on marketing and you teach me and hold my hand and show me how to do it right. And therefore now my company is much, much larger. Folks, on today’s show, we’re joined by a real client.

He may look like a male model.

He may look like a hologram, but he’s a real person.

He’s a longtime client. He’s a man that we consider to be a friend of The Thrive Time Show and a friend of mine.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the show Kevin.

Welcome on to The Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir?

Clay, I’m doing great.

I had a great Christmas holiday, and I’m glad to be here.

OK, so first question, can you tell us what is your name, first and last name, and what’s the name of your company, sir?

My name is Kevin Thomas, and the name of our company is MultiClean.

We are a commercial janitorial service, and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma and Kansas, and soon to be Arkansas. And how long have we worked with you approximately at this point, sir? It’s been about six, seven years. Clay Clark is here somewhere. Where’s my buddy Clay? Clay’s the greatest.

I met his goats today.

I met his dogs.

I met his chickens.

I saw his compound. He’s like the greatest guy. I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs. So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. Four thousand percent from February to February.

Now, I can better that. OK, Clay, I don’t think you know this. I don’t think you know this. I’m pinching myself. And if I cry, forgive me.

In the last two and a half days, we have bettered our entire month of February and the last two and a half days.

So and the phone’s blowing up. Everything’s just blowing up. Well you’re right. It is like a rocket ship.

So we’re pinching ourselves. Actually I learned at the Academy King’s Point in New York. Octa nonverba. Watch what a person does. Not what they say. But I recognized at the age of 15, I’m going, you know what?

I am not going to live that way. And so I started a company out of my parents’ basement called DJConnection .

com. And I decided I am going to have success. And so I reached out to millionaires and people that I kind of knew through church and friendships and people that, parents of my friends. And I said, what book would you recommend that I read? I’m a 15 -year -old asking this question. True story.

And I kept being told, you got to read. Hello, hello, hello, Robert Kidman. Rich Dad Radio Show. It’s an exciting time. Also, I think a treacherous time, a spooky time also, but it’s always, you know, danger is a good time. Today, my guest is Clay Clark, and I went out with Tom Wheelwright to visit Clay with Eric Trump also.

And the reason I wanna talk to Clay this morning is a very important subject called study. And the reason I say that is things are changing so fast, and many people are completely missing the show. You know, things are changing at rapid, rapid, rapid speed. Technology is changing. And so I went to Tulsa, well, again, with Tom Wheelwright and Eric Trump. And the thing I was so impressed about Clay is this word called study.

I don’t know. You guys must must be in your water or something, Clay. But boy, I was so, so impressed how big you guys are. But what really impressed me was you have this huge congregation. They’re all about guys your age. They’re on fire.

And you start your classes at five in the morning. Now, let me talk to you about study here. We show our books here. This is how I study. You know, this is the creature from Jekyll Island. It’s on the Fed.

And Clay’s doing the same thing. We study. So I go out to Clay’s place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s built this huge compound out there. And you guys start at 5 o ‘clock in the morning. That’s not by Zoom.

They drive there. They show up 5 o ‘clock, bright -haired, bushy -tailed, and all this. And they’re on fire. Your group is on fire. So that’s what was on. Clay, this technology, you tell your group I was sick.

so impressed because like I said, studies became a bad word. I got into fights in my own company because our staff didn’t want to study anymore. And I just, I don’t know how they cannot do that.

So Clay, anyway, welcome to the Rich Dad Radio Show.

That’s what I want to talk to you about, is how do you do it?

Five o ‘clock in the morning, you have hundreds of people showing up in your huge, huge, huge auditorium on your property to study. Anyway, welcome to the show, Clay, and what turns you on so much?

That’s what I want to know. Give us a little bit about your background. My name is Karime Schofield, and the name of our company is Whistle While You Clean.

I am Sophia Schofield. We live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and we service the tri -state. So Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana. We were getting a phone call and we were like, why is someone calling our business line? That’s unusual. And we picked it up and it was a lead.

I mean, it’s, it’s been incredible, Clay. It’s, we’ve had like, we’ve gone from zero to like a hundred percent growth. Like we’re like a full functioning company. It’s great. Like we were blown away at how well we’re doing. So working with you guys, you guys have really taught us a lot about generating leads and pursuing our dream 100.

So we have a list of customers that we want to market to. And so we’ve been making phone calls, we’ve been showing up in person. We’re trying to get near the businesses that they would visit if they were visiting like a hair salon or something. And then we start calling them and we just start pursuing them. And then the other thing that we do is when we do do cleans, we take a lot of video testimonials and we post those to our website so other customers can see. And then we also upload a lot of images

of the things that we do. And so we’re also asking our clients for Google reviews after we’ve cleaned their houses. And so it’s this constant cycle of doing those things over and over and over again. I would say if you’re on the fence, go to one of Clay’s conferences. They are hilarious. They’re fun.

They’re educational. They’re so good that even my teenagers like them. And I would say, don’t let fear hold you back. If you want to start a business, do the obvious thing and hire someone who knows how to run businesses. If I wanted to get in shape, I’d hire a gym person, you know, a personal trainer. This is like the personal training for business.

It has been absolutely amazing. I mean, our coach is encouraging. When he first met with us, he said, Do we want him to be like a drill sergeant with us? You know, what level of intensity do we want him to give us? And I will say he is incredibly, incredibly encouraging all the time. And he just hits the same mark with us every single time.

It’s very repetitive, but I feel like I think we both really learn a lot every time we sit down and have a conversation with him over the phone. It’s it’s he keeps pushing us to go further and he can recognize when we’re afraid to do something and he’ll give us a little bit of grace. But that next week he’s drilling us again, like pushing us to go harder.

Our no brainer offer is we are offering your first clean for a dollar.

And that sounds absolutely insane.

It even sounded insane when I was talking over it with our business coach. And I will tell you that that has generated some of our hugest clients. I mean, that has been like a game changer because it opened up the door to more clients, more recommendations, more leads.

And we were surprised how far that dollar clean got us.

How important has it been for you to work out that scripting?

Even though you offer a dollar for the first clean, how important has it been for you to nail that down? It’s been really important, because it kind of, it hones in, so that you’re not just all over the place when you’re trying to explain what it is that you do.

And a lot of times, it’s like you’re a good person offering a good product, and you have integrity, and you want to communicate that.

But when you go to communicate without a script or without practice, it’s just like, a mess coming out of your mouth, as opposed to having this, you know, honed in practice where you know what you’re going to say, you know how you’re going to say it, and you can almost expect better results when you do it that way.

Had you ever been an entrepreneur before starting this particular business?

No, never. Did you ever think about wanting to own your own business someday?

Or what was the first time you thought, you know, maybe I would like to open my own business? Absolutely.

I’ve probably been dreaming about it for about 10 years. Okay.

And let me go to your daughter here.

Uh, had you ever thought about wanting to team up and open your own business or was that something that you were maybe excited about or not, not so much? Well, for me, my parents would always listen to your podcast and business podcast. And as I started listening to them, I started realizing that I wanted to own a business. It’s www . WhistleWhileYouClean . com.

Honestly, the hardest thing was getting over the fear. It was the fear of the unknown. It was there was like a cloud of doubt that, you know, you can’t do this, you’re going to fail. There was a few sleepless nights there when we did pull the trigger and join your team and start the coaching process. Even my husband put a little bit of pressure on me from time to time because it was just absolutely scary to take that jump and actually start a business.

Transcribed with Cockatoo