The Octopus Organization | Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation + Drawing on Experience Modernizing Technology Across 38,000 McDonald’s Restaurants & Advisory Work w/ Hundreds of Global Companies

Audio Transcription

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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. This 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, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. We are in a world right now where everything is constantly changing. I mean, things have always been changing, but now there’s an increase, increased perpetual transformation that’s happening. The world with technology, it’s consistently changing. to the point that I think a lot of people feel like their heads are going to explode.

And today’s guests, they’ve written a book called The Octopus Organization, The Octopus Organization, A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation. And with that being said, Jana, welcome onto The Thrive Time Show. How are you? Thank you for having me. I’m awesome. Now, Jana, before you hopped on today’s show, what have you learned? were you doing or what have you been doing as far as, give us some kind of a look into your career before writing this new book.

Sure, I’m an executive in residence, fancy title in Amazon Web Services, so supporting the executives of our customers to hopefully ensure that they don’t make the same mistakes that I certainly have all made in leading and driving change and instead make their own new interesting mistakes instead. I’ve been a bit in academia, I’ve done a bit of startup as well and had the mad idea to help transform some large companies like banks and logistics companies. That’s why I’m at least 10 years older than I look. Now, Phil, you are also a beautiful person. You’re obviously really deep into the anti -aging world. You have been a successful entrepreneur, and you have worked together here with Yana to put together this new book.

Phil, walk us through your background a little bit, what you were doing before you wrote this book there, sir. Yeah, well, I’ve been, like Jan, I’m executive in residence at AWS too. I’ve been here six years. Before this, I spent 31 years selling hamburgers. So, 31 years working at McDonald’s Corporation in various roles, particularly around technology. So, you walk into any of the 40 ,000 restaurants around the world, you’re probably going to touch technology my team built.

Can you talk on a practical level maybe about a little bit of the technology that maybe your team helped build at McDonald’s just to give people a little bit of a look into what your footprint was or what your impact was at McDonald’s? Sure. Anywhere you place an order. So whether it’s at the front counter, whether it’s on the mobile app, whether it’s on the kiosk, whether it’s through Uber Eats, that goes through the technology my team originally built. So it serves about 1 % of the world’s population every day, about 70 million customers.

And that’s across 119 countries. All right, so what we’re going to do now is I’m going to unpack this book. There’s a lot of books that exist, a lot of books being written this just in, a lot of new books are coming out, and therefore our listeners have a lot of choices. Yana, if somebody picks up the book, The Octopus Organization, why should everybody, why should our readers pick up a copy? What are they going to quickly learn if they do read this book cover to cover? Well, Phil and I both worked in large organizations, and we find this to function a bit like the Tin Men and the Wizard of Oz.

They’re quite rigid characters, quite clumsy, and actually it’s a rusting construct built on this idea of how we build factories and organizations that are siloed, control -based, top -down, and mostly built on a foundation of permission. permission to think, to have ideas, even to speak. And that just doesn’t work anymore. You just said it, Clay. The world is changing. Technology is advancing fast.

Nobody has the answer anymore. And so we suggest and invite leaders and people in organizations to exchange this rigid factory model for something more organic, like an octopus, because bizarrely that creature has two thirds of its intelligence in its arms and has distributed intelligence. And we’re suggesting to tap into all those smart people you have in your organization and to learn your way through this incredible technology change and volatility that’s happening right now. So I got to ask you this here, Phil. I mean, you obviously worked on this book together with Jana. If somebody were to pick up a copy of this book, what can they expect to learn?

Well, it’s a choose your own adventure. What we did when we originally came up with the idea, we sat down, I think it was over a glass or a bottle of four bottles of wine, came up with about 300 reasons transformations fail, dysfunctions, put those into what we called anti -patterns. Those anti -patterns we found boiled up to clarity, ownership, and curiosity. And within each of those, we give some practical examples of things which We do as executives all the time, we come up with these gobbledygook mission statements, like we’re going to be a platform -based, data -enabled, AI -driven organization that leverages our corporate synergies to drive outstanding customer outcomes. We all do it because everyone else does it.

And we hold a mirror up to organizations and say, look, there’s a different way of doing it. And for Each of these examples we give some practical levers, things you could try tomorrow or next week. This isn’t about trying to blow up your organisation and start again. It’s very practical, can be done at every level of the organisation. Yana, back to you, because we like you slightly more. What are our listeners going to miss out on if they don’t read your book?

I mean, if somebody listens to this show and they go, ah, hard pass. I think I’m going to go watch a comedy special, maybe invest $30 in downloading iTunes songs, and I’m not going to buy the book. What is somebody missing out on? What’s an entrepreneur, what’s a business owner missing out on if they do not read your book? You would definitely miss out on learning that octopuses can play the piano. Jokes aside, I think what you would miss out on is understanding that all this madness that happens around us can be addressed and helped with in much more natural ways than we think and with much less stress to the organization, with much less cost.

There’s a human angle to this and how we can drive and support people to advance organizations. I hate the word change because change doesn’t usually mean something better, it just means something different. And some very counterintuitive and quick and easy ways that make this happen. I think there’s a lot of examples in there. And also, we don’t feel bad enough to make fun of ourselves and all the madness.

This is all born in the dust of our terrible mistakes and have some fun about it, some good anecdotes on it. Now, Phil, you know, so many entrepreneurs, we get stuck, and when we get stuck, there’s certain patterns to how entrepreneurs get stuck. And you in your book, you’ve documented these three traits of adaptive organizations that don’t get stuck, but they continue to adapt and innovate. You talk about clarity, ownership, and curiosity. Again, clarity, ownership, and curiosity. If you could talk about clarity, ownership, and curiosity, and then we’ll go to your better half of the book team here, to Jana to have her maybe clarify that which you did not clarify.

Can you talk about clarity, ownership, and curiosity, sir? Sure. So we took these 300 dysfunctions, we boiled them into 38 what we call anti -patterns. An anti -pattern is one of these habitual conditioned responses. If you’re a multinational company, let’s centralize everything because it’s going to be more efficient without realizing you’re creating a massive bottleneck. So within clarity, we talk about simple things.

Is everyone clear about the mission of your organization? Do they understand the strategy or is it another strategy? If you took the name of the company off the strategy and left it in a McDonald’s and someone picked it up, they still wouldn’t recognize your company. Are people clear about what they’re being measured on and how they’re performing? Most organizations give feedback like it’s a corporate colonoscopy. It happens once a year.

It’s unpleasant and you just want to get it over with. With ownership, it’s really about this idea that we hire these incredibly bright people and then we put 42 levels of management on top of them to tell them how to do the job we hired them to do in the first place. So, how do we genuinely give them ownership? So, if I feel like I have ownership for something in an organisation, I’m going to care for it in a very different way if my boss instead comes and tells me what to do without explaining context. So understanding the why, being able to drive value rather than just doing a task or a job.

And then curiosity is one of those innately human characteristics which is so important today and we see so lacking in organisations, which is how do I think bigger? How do I reimagine a business process or my product or even my organisation? How do I experiment my way to success rather than come up with these ridiculous robust allegedly robust five -year plans which at the end of five years out pops a magic answer which we know never works. So enabling people to use their curiosity to figure out what works what doesn’t work very quickly and then pivot or scale those ideas. Jana, I want to go back to you there again. People say, Clay, why do you favor Jana?

I mean, it’s obvious she’s a doctor, first off. Second, she sounds like she’s from Texas. I mean, she could be from Texas, maybe Alabama. It’s the accent that got us. So Jana, tell us what Phil didn’t tell us. Clarity is an incredible one.

It actually helps you understand what’s important in the organization, what’s the context you need. We have this great story where Reed Hastings from Netflix was really messed up and upset about someone taking a bad decision and he got very upset and confronted the person and he walked away going, wasn’t this person’s fault. The person didn’t have enough context and information from me. With the context and the clarity they had, they actually made a really good decision. So this is all about us as leaders thinking about how do we set the conditions for action. And this clarity is often found in the actions that happen in your organization.

Who gets promoted? Who gets put on stage? Who is the person that next gets to speak in a leadership meeting? So a lot of clarity. clarity I think what people don’t realize is in the actions or organizations, not a big proclamations ownership is all about responsibility and authorship. The biggest failure of all that we see again and again is a workforce that waits for permission instead of taking initiative.

And that really needs to be changed. And that’s not something you can force. People need to claim it. Often, there’s no upside. I learned this brilliant English term can have career -limiting implications if you make a mistake or take ownership. So no career limitations here.

And curiosity, it’s about questioning sacred assumptions. We speak to lots of CEOs right now that are saying, with the advance of AI, we’re missing leaders who are imaginative. If the cost of delivering initiatives converges towards zero with AI, the one differentiator organizations have is curiosity and imagination. And we don’t have enough of that anymore in organizations because we train it out of them. Let me ask you this. How’s the book organized there, Phil?

I’m going to go to you, Phil, and then we’ll go back to you, Ana. How would you describe the book? There’s a lot of books. I love Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I also loved the Steve Jobs autobiography. I love that book by Walter Isaacson.

I really like the way that Titan was laid out a book there. There are certain books I enjoy, certain books where I go, I don’t know. necessarily know that I like the format. It seems like you spent a lot of time organizing the format of this book, so the book is inviting for readers. Tell us how the book is organized. Yeah, so it’s very much around choose your own adventure.

We don’t believe in this linear process of transformation where you set a strategy, then you roll out the strategy, and then everyone follows the strategy and out pops the results. So we know every organization is at a different starting point, even every team in every organization is at a different starting point. So it’s a book you can pick up, you can flick through until you see an anti -pattern that really with it. And you normally see this in your own teams. Their shoulders grow heavy.

They start laughing when they read what tin men organizations do. And then there’s a set of practical levers within each of the anti -patterns. And pick one and try it. Come up with a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. If it works, brilliant.

If it doesn’t work, you’ve still learned something. So open the book. Choose a chapter, read it, see what resonates with you. Each of the levers is based on systems thinking. So we know that if you change one thing, let’s say how you reward someone, it’s going to have the second, third, fourth order effects you can’t predict. So the idea here is this continual experimentation with your culture, just as you’d experiment with chemistry to find the ideal formula to solve a problem.

Yana, how would you describe the organization of the book? Again, there’s so many books out there where you look at the format, like 4 -Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and it’s laid out in a beautiful way that people want to read the book. There’s other books where you say, despite how great the content is, the format’s kind of odd or difficult to get through. How would you describe the formatting of this book? Because I know you guys have been very intentional laying out the book. Yeah, I actually have the four -hour workweek in my shelf right behind me.

It’s one of my favorite books that I read a long time ago. I need to go back to that. I need to work less hours, I think. Yeah, it’s really cool. What you can do is, literally, we’ve given every chapter quite a funny name and say, this is the madness that’s happening, like corporatees or why we want more pigs and less chickens in our organization. And you can basically look and go, oh, man, this is annoying me.

And then we have a really simple intro for each chapter, we can say, this is what how the Tin Man behaves. This is what an octopus organization does. And here’s how you know the difference. So it’s really, really easy and really quick to see. You can actually just enter those 36 summaries and you have a starting point for conversation.

So I think it’s really easy to dive in and to just start doing something at the end of every single chapter. We say here are six really quick things you can try. Like try for one day to go without making a decision that you don’t need to make. Why do they still come to you? Or try a jargon jar to Phil’s point earlier. try your version of corporate bullshit bingo.

And every time someone uses jargon as a digital jar, you have to put in some money and see what happens and start to realize what happens when people just use this jargon all the time. So lots of little practical things that people can try, not some abstract grand suggestion of how you have to change everything. Phil, how can this book make our listeners more money? If I’m listening to this show right now and I’m a executive, I’m a business owner, how can your book help to increase the revenues of organizations? We waste so much time and money in organizations today. The most valuable resources we have, money, time, people, they’re all stripped away.

We actually borrowed an idea from Gary Hamill, BMI. bureaucratic mass index so if you look at the average employee in an organization how much time they waste waiting for someone to do something so they can get back to delivering value, or just working on bureaucracy that’s been imposed on them, it can be as high as 80 % of their time is wasted. So if you want to make more money, have more of your people’s time dedicated to the things which drive products and services for your customers. It’s that simple. Get rid of the impediments, all of the dependencies, all of the things we don’t need to be working on. All of those things all of those gatekeepers we have.

Jana talked about pigs and chickens. We have, we often tell a story about the pig and chicken in an organization. Pig and chicken walks down the road, chicken says to the pig, let’s open a restaurant. Pig says to chicken, great, what are we going to sell? Chicken says to pig, ham and eggs, of course.

Pig stops and says, You know I have to be far more committed than you. And this is what we see in organizations. Lots of chickens, lots of people coming into meetings, half -formed ideas, saying no to other people’s ideas. We need more pigs. Don’t call them that, but we need more pigs in organizations. Folks who are trying to drive value and get the chickens out of their way.

Jana, how do you believe this book, maybe in addition to what Phil said, how can this book help to drive profitability, to drive growth for organizations? By creating the clarity and then letting more people lose in their ownership, you switch on all these beautiful brains that you have hired and then actually put lots of structure and bureaucracy in front of them to do work. They’re close to the customer. They’re close to how the problems are in the organization and close to how technology works. So getting more out of every single person. We’ve had this great story from a colleague of Phil who went to work for a company, I think it was Netflix.

And he did a big great keynote and then someone in the audience, ironically or sarcastically said, well, it’s great for you to talk like that, but you are a Netflix, you have all these amazing people. And he said, well, no, I don’t. I hired your people and just got out of their way. So to Phil’s point, free up and get ownership into these people and then work on the right things. You make more money by knowing what you work on. We spoke to Astro Teller, he’s the CEO of Alphabet Access Moonshot Labs, responsible for self -driving cars and other moonshot innovations.

And he said, if you want a monkey on a pedestal to talk and recite Shakespeare, what do you work on? Most people build the pedestal. In other words, in big projects, they try to show progress. They work on something where they can show they’re advancing, show their boss they’re doing something, but they’ll never get the monkey to talk. So in other words, work on the difficult questions first, get to a no quickly, or a yes.

And if you get to a no, it means you can then use these resources and free them up for your next big problem, rather than sinking costs into pet projects and things that will never deliver value. Folks, if you’re watching today’s show and you’re learning anything at all, I’d encourage you to take notes, take notes aggressively, and then also let’s check out the book. We’ll put a link on the show notes for people to check out the book. Phil, with this book, how can this book help organizations save money? We talked about increasing revenue, and I know you’ve hit on it a little bit, but how could buying a copy of this book actually help organizations to save money? Well, I think it’s in a very similar vein.

The amount of money we waste doing things which add no value day to day is incredible. And no one wants to do this. None of us as employees want to do this. It’s the system in which we operate and the system which leaders have created over time. So I think a lot of this is about being more self -aware as a leader, about understanding where all of the friction is, about understanding also how to go about experimentation. Many of experiments start off in organisations as if They are the answer rather than as an experiment.

And people don’t want to let them go and fail. We get into loss aversion. If we started an experiment and we don’t want to see it fail, so we’ll continue to put more and more money into it. How do we save money? By quitting those experiments when they’re clearly not going to work much faster. And then also encouraging an environment where people say, hey, I tried this experiment.

It was designed to solve this problem. didn’t work, here’s what we’ve learned. And sharing those learnings so we don’t repeat the same mistake time and time again in organizations. Phil, how did you and Jana meet? How did you two first meet each other? Or what was that?

Because you guys are writing partners. You work together now. You both had a lot of success in your career independently. So how did you two come together? Well, we started at Amazon about the same time.

But it was about two and a half years ago. We have a big show in Vegas. Amazon Web Services brings together about 60 ,000 people who descend on Vegas. Jana and I walked past each other on the floor of a hotel casino, slot machines on either side. And I said, I think flippantly at the time, let’s write a book. And that’s where it started.

And it came from both of us being frustrated from seeing the same mistakes being made time and time again. That was the genesis of the story. Jana, if you want to clean up the mess there and tell us how you really met, that’d be helpful. I’m just kidding. Can you share with us, how did you guys, what’s your version of this or how did you meet and then how did this idea of putting this book together come about? We really had a movie moment, like in a beautiful Hollywood movie where we walked in opposite directions and he turned around and said, let’s write a book.

And I said, yeah. And then we just kept walking. So the story is true, but I feel like I can tell the story way better than you feel. Now, you two have worked on this book, and for a lot of people who haven’t written books before, there is a methodology for writing the books. My final question I have for you guys is, what was the process like, Phil, for writing the book? Were you guys doing a lot of Zoom calls, doing a lot of meetings, doing a lot of email back and forth?

What was the process that you guys put into putting together this very well -written book? Phil has PTSD from that, so. I was going to start with the word traumatic. I mean how hard can it be to to write a book after all it’s uh we actually you know from from the get -go, we ended up writing, I think, about 140 ,000 words. And I wrote this whole history lesson.

It must have been 50 pages on lamplighters, and steam engines, and history. I think we got that down to about one sentence in the end. But we spent a lot of time, like many people who are in a creative space around a whiteboard, arguments, but positive arguments in terms of coming at things from a different perspective. And we always ended up coming up with a better way of thinking about things. And then we conducted about 70 interviews, everyone from Bernadetto Vigna, the CEO of Ferrari, through to people like Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, Annie Duke, one of the top female poker players in the world, who also has a doctorate in decision science. So we met these fascinating people that every time we spoke to someone, the same patterns came up, the same behaviors from these incredible leaders, this humility, all of these stories came out.

And then we had a fantastic editor, Scott Bernalto at Harvard Business Review, who really helped us then shape that into a story. Now, Harvard Business Review doesn’t just pick up any book. I mean, you have to have a certain academic standard in order to be teaming up with the Harvard Business Review. So Jana, how did you know that this project was one worthy of discussing with the good folks at Harvard? And I’ll put a link on the show notes so people can buy the book. I pulled the book up on the screen so everyone can see it.

How did you know that this book was the kind of book that, wow, we should go talk to the folks at Harvard about it? We thought that it’s at the same time a different pattern of thinking, and I think that’s what Harvard does really well. Their books and their HBR journal articles, which we also got to write one about, by the way, if you find the book too long, have a look at the article. The idea of you just your pattern of thought, or you approach this whole thing from a different perspective, and then combining this with the background that we’re both Amazonians, so we have kind of bringing the culture that we propose is one that can work and being really innovative at scale. And then combining that with insights and practical things.

We’re both practitioners. We know what we’re talking about. We’ve got all the battle scars and the PTSDs. And we are now at the point where we can laugh a bit about the madness that we did and that we see. And it comes from a place of care and warmth and kindness with all the leaders that are going through these mad journeys. And I think that was the winning combination.

OK, final question for you, Phil. I’m pulling up the link right now on the show notes. People can see it. We’re going to Amazon . com. That’s where we can find the book.

I’ll put a link on the show notes. Why should everybody with a sound mind who leads an organization or who wants to pick up a copy of your book, The Octopus Organization, A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation, sir? We all want to go into the workplace and make a difference. Every one of us can do that. Fair. OK. I’m sorry.

I thought my screen suddenly went blank. Oh, well, I thought you blacked out. Are you there? Are you good? OK, now, anything else you want to add there, sir? No, we all want to go to work and make a difference.

We all want to see the connection between our job and something of value, something sustainable, something we feel proud of. We can all do that. We can create an environment where that happens. We can all be leaders in the workplace. Don’t we all aspire to do that? So that’s why I’d go and read the book.

Yana, final word. Again, I’ll put it up on the show notes so everyone can see it. I’ll put it on the show notes as well as on the screen here. The new book, The Octopus Organization, A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation. Why should everybody check out a copy of the book? First of all, because octopuses are insanely cool and adaptable and you can learn a lot about them.

They also have a wicked sense of humor, which hopefully we do as well a little bit. I mean, this comes from a German, so you really can’t believe me. But there’s also some like really wonderfully things of relief in there for leaders whose shoulders are very, very heavy right now. And we have light relief for what you can do, subtracting things, working on the system, not in the system. So hopefully that gives some courage in these times. right now.

Yana, thank you so much for your time. Phil, I appreciate you as well. And you’re welcome on the show anytime. Thank you guys so much. Thanks for having us. It was awesome.

Thanks. Bye -bye, guys. She just lets him be Clay Clark. I mean, he’s endorsed by his mother and he’s doing magnificent work. So it was great meeting you out there and all the people that he surrounds himself with. Clay Clark starts his days at five o ‘clock in the morning.

It’s incredible. Yeah. He’s a machine. He’s a machine. But I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock. He has hundreds of people showing up at 5 a .

m. in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Man, he’s a leader of a leader. He’s a fantastic young man. No, he is. He is.

Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today, I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise and Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing.

This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crockrell, head of Disney with the 40 ,000 cast members. He’s friends with like Mike Lindell. He does reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10 ,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day He does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week.

So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 -step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi -millionaires teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into organizing everything in their head to building into a franchisable, scalable business.

Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, like Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about, where you’re going in.

your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you and Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends.

I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. And when we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal. And they were super excited about working with him. And he told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it.

I’m going to turn it down. Because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. And the guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot.

He’s helped navigate any time I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or, you know. navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months. And you have $350 ,000 of bills you’ve got to pay. And we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that.

And of course, we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. He’s a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing. And I encourage you, if you haven’t ever worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s gonna help magnify you. And there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does.

He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day. And literally the rest of the time he’s working. And he can outwork everybody in the room every single day. And he loves it. So anyways, this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank you, Clay.

And any more questions, there that’s wanting to work with Clay, it’s a great, great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys. Bye -bye.

Hi, I’m Aaron Antus with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them. And I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes and then I met Clay and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed after Doing $800 million in sales over a 15 -year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes.

And, I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually, in a four -month period of time, has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month, just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us. And it’s just been an incredible experience.

I am very glad. that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field.

Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it. is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental.

It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic, and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town.

And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 -year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us. And I know if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way.

I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1 ,800 % increase in our internet leads, going from 10 a month to 180 a month. That would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick, and I am the founder of DSprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

After being a stay -at -home mom for 12 years and my three kids started school and they were in school full -time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide, what do I want to do? My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that, I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. has been suggested real estate. He’s a home builder, so real estate and home building. go hand in hand, and we just rolled with it. I love people.

I love working with people. I love the building relationships. But one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things, the processes and the advertising and marketing. I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time. And he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents.

The homes that we represent, everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago. And in that time, we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week, we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents. But I have to give credit where credit’s due.

And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way.

I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer to insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways.

I mean, I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63 ,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world.

He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business.

I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. 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. expecting maybe $250 ,000 this year to, we’re at $400 ,000.

That’s what we’re going to hit or exceed. So we’re pretty excited about that. It’s been pretty much just listening to what they have to say. Their hiring process has just really been incredible as far as finding good quality help and just the accountability of meeting up with them weekly and like such good insight, the resources that they have for specific business questions. It’s all been really incredible. It’s been a great experience.

So I’d recommend it to anybody. What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system. And it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around. They’re the ones that people can work with on a day to day basis. Hi there, my name is Stephanie Pipkin. I am 24 years old and I own Black River Falls Cleaning Services.

We opened in April of 2019 and it is now mid -June of 2020. So I wanted to talk today about the success and growth I have achieved by implementing the Proven Path with Clay Clark’s team and my business coach, Luke, from Thrive Time. It has been insane, to say the least. I started working with them in mid -February of this year, so we’re about four months in of working together, and it has completely transformed my business in pretty much every facet. So I’m going to check my notes here. Um, so in four months my leads have tripled.

Um, I was getting probably like two leads a week. Now I’m getting more in the like 10 to 15 leads a week. Um, I have doubled my number of employees. Uh, I’m now hitting the highest revenue weeks in the history of the company. A week to week it seems like. Um, we went from about six appointments today as our highest in February.

to now 14 to 15 appointments a day. Hiring quality employees has become much simpler and less stressful by using their systems for hiring. I typically only get maybe two complaints a month, if that, and everybody shows up to work. I just have really high quality employees now, especially in something people typically consider a high turnover type of work, you know, cleaning houses, cleaning businesses. I have amazing employees now and I get rid of the ones who are not so amazing and bring on new ones because of, you know, group interviews, and interviewing every single week. It’s just been great and I don’t waste as much time.

low -quality candidates anymore. And your coach will hold you accountable, which I love. Again, the tough love is really great. Luke’s like a stern father figure, but he’s also nice, but also stern when he needs to be when I’m being lazy and not doing the things that I know I need to do because I don’t want to do them. So that’s just great. Worth every penny.

I’d pay him a million dollars a month if I can, and maybe someday I’ll be able to, but I would just say go for it. If it seems like a good fit, just go for it. Do what they say, even if you think it’s stupid or ridiculous, just do what they say because it’ll work. You know, people, when they look at my business, you know, people in my town, they think I’m lucky. They think I’m just, you know, things just happen for me. And you know, maybe I am lucky, but it has a lot to do with hard work and, you know, perseverance and, you know, working until you cry sometimes.

That’s just being an entrepreneur, which if you’re a business owner, you understand that. But it’s having these systems in place of, you know, of course I’m going to be successful. It’s an absolute, because I have all this stuff in the background happening. And I have Luke and Clay and everybody on their team working really hard to make sure that I’m a successful person. I can tell that they are just so excited every single week when I’m having all these wins and things like that. They’re so excited for me.

So it just it’s the best thing ever and I would suggest to anybody to work with them. So sorry for the long -winded reply, but I just had so much to say and I could go on for hours probably about how amazing they are. But thank you to Clay and Luke and the entire team there everything you guys have done for me, and I am so excited to continue to work with you for years to come. Thanks so much for watching. My saying is, if it’s important to you, hire a coach. And I think that’s one of the reasons people are not successful is they eat a cheeseburger instead of hiring a coach.

And so my coach pushes me. They’re younger than me. They push harder. They’re trained. And as my rich dad always said, amateurs don’t have a coach, but professionals always have coaches. So I’ve always had coaches for whatever was important.

My rich dad was one of those persons. I wanted to learn how to play Monopoly in real life. So he was my coach. The Thrivetime Show, two day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13 -point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website.

We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two -day, 15 -hour workshop. It’s all here for you.

You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and do it all over again. systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because, as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness.

And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big, get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying.

And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner, and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever, and we’ll even give you your money back if you don’t love it.

We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it.

Transcribed with Cockatoo