Want to Grow a Business? Discover Why Growing a Business Is Like Growing a Garden (Requiring Daily Diligence, Sewing Seeds, Pulling Weeds & More) + Celebrating 7 Clay Clark ThrivetimeShow.com Client Success Stories

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

We’ve got one of our brand new mentors. It’s Jerry from Jerry’s Landscape. Jerry, welcome to the Thrive 15 family. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. Is there anything, before we get started with our episode here, that you just want to tell our Thrivers?

Just a nice tip for them. Well, I think, as I learned from my grandpa, he used to always tell me that you can lead a mule to the feeder, but you can’t make him drink. Wow. And so I’m going to be talking fast. I don’t repeat. That’s my style.

And you guys be ready to take notes. So you’re saying you can show us the path, but we’ve got to put action to it. That’s it. I love it. I think that’s great. Great, yeah.

OK, well, let’s get started with what you’re going to teach us today here. Now, I see you’ve got some samples. What are we looking at up front here? That’s a weed. OK. Any specific type of weed, or?

I mean, just your basic weed. How do you get rid of weeds? Yeah, well, you’ve got to pull them. OK. I can show you how to do it. I’d love to see. I’d love to see an example.

It’s really simple here. So let’s pretend this is the soil. OK. This is the ground. Yeah, this is your weed, right? Yeah.

So what you want to do is you want to get down, get low to the soil like this. Sure, yeah. So you want to bend your legs. OK. Lower your buttocks. Sure.

OK. Stick out your chest. OK. Because you don’t want to be pulling with your back. You’re going to have a short career. Yes.

OK. So you get your hands down as close to the soil bed as possible. Get your fingers on that root. Yeah. And then when you pull, you don’t pull with your back. You pull with this.

you pull with that right there, that’s what you want. So you pull it, and so it’s just a real simple, you grab, you grunt, and you pull, and that thing should come straight up. And you’re going straight up. Straight up, right out. And you’ll see the root underneath that. That’s exactly right.

That’s a great lesson for our thrivers. Now, what would you say has driven your business for the past 20 years? I would say my Chevy 1500. Okay. It has been a workhorse. What is this right here?

This is the key to growing really nice grass. OK. What this is, this is soil. OK. And is this soil? that I can touch?

Sure, absolutely. Get your fingers in there. Okay. It is, I would say, probably 80 % manure. Okay. Okay.

There is an aroma with it as well. It’s kind of a spiritual thing for me when I mix it, but you can go to my website, jerryslandscape . uk, to order that. Dot UK, that’s United Kingdom, London, Great Britain. Why are you dot UK? It’s kind of my style.

Sure. I learned from the British. You learned from the British people, yeah. They’ve got some great landscape. They’re known for their shrubbery. Yeah.

They’re known for their grasses. Does that ever confuse anybody, the . UK? Oh, absolutely. I mean, we get calls all the time. People are like, you know, hello, could you come to Milan in New Brunswick?

And you don’t travel. It’s like, no, man, you know, we’re from Oklahoma, sorry. We don’t do that there. Have you ever thought about making this a franchise where you do have Jerry’s landscape in other states, other countries, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, France, wherever, Paris. I don’t know, man. That sounds like a ton of work.

Just in travel time alone, I don’t know when I would even take up all my time. If somebody really wants to create a brand and has a long -term vision and sees something out in the far future that’s just not there yet, sign up. because it is total encompassing. It’s not marketing. It’s not, you know, different businesses that you guys coach probably have weaks and strengths, weaknesses and strengths. And one might be accounting, one might be marketing, but it’s the totality of it.

It’s the org chart. It’s understanding every nut and bolt that works into your business that makes your business thrive or operate. And so I don’t know, if somebody thinks that they just need marketing, maybe they need to. feel a little bit more pain out on their own trying to start something out. And then maybe they’ll call you guys back later.

But I’d say pick up the phone, give you guys a call and just get fully committed to doing something without questioning it too much, because it’s proven systems, you know, and it’s still tailored to any business. You know, you guys coach, you just mentioned accountants, pool guys, I’m a builder, you guys do all kinds of business is business. Well, folks, on today’s show, we’re talking about why growing a business is a lot like growing a garden. What? Yes, you see, growing a business is a lot like growing a garden. If you don’t pull the weeds consistently, you don’t water the seeds consistently, you’re going to have a failed garden.

If you buy a business, you buy a franchise, you start a business of some kind, if you don’t follow the daily systems, the whole thing will quickly implode. And here to talk about it is the franchise brand developer for a brand called Oxifresh that has well over 500 locations throughout the United States. Fresh . com. Again, that’s oxifresh . com.

His name is Matt Klein. Matt, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? I am doing good. Doing good. Nice to see you again.

So Matt, I got to talk to you about this real quick. When you buy an Oxifresh franchise, if someone buys an Oxifresh franchise, an existing business, or they start a new one from scratch, why does the business owner have to participate in the business to some capacity on a daily basis? Although some of the franchise owners, you know, like to work and run the business themselves and some like to manage it. But why does the owner or maybe what does the owner need to do to interact with their franchise on a daily basis? Yeah, I mean, somebody’s got to be the one making decisions, overseeing things, fixing problems, being the motivator, right? You can’t expect to hire a tech

and then do all that for you. So I don’t care if you do jobs ever for your franchise, but you should be the one that is the resident expert on everything, right? Because at the end of the day, When your employee needs something, you’re going to be the one delivering the answer. If the scheduling center calls you for something that’s kind of outside the norm, you’re going to be the one to either give them approval or work with that customer, right? You’re the one that sets your schedule. You’re the one that eventually will decide your pricing structure.

So, you know, we have all this great automation for our franchise, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to run your company and make decisions and hire the right people and fire the wrong people and all that. So, yeah, you are very much still the owner and decision maker of your business, which is what you want. want if you are the business owner. Talk about the franchise owners that are super successful. What kind of daily diligence do you see in place from the franchisees that are very successful? Because again, an Oxifresh is designed to be a turnkey business model that a business owner can use so they can avoid the guesswork.

They’re just following a proven plan. But talk about the daily diligence you see from the super successful locations. Yeah, in all the things I just said, right there, they’re in control their business, they’re running everything right, they’re hiring the right people, they’re, they’re a training organization. So they’re making sure that you know, their employees that are not you know, up to snuff on certain things like upsells or getting reviews, they’re working on their behavior and getting them better or replacing them. They are absolutely in tune with their marketing. They understand where their dollars are going through looking at our reports.

They’re understanding what is their best return on investment. They’re able to exploit their marketing for the best returns that are sitting there and hoping they are managing their customer bases. They’re also requiring larger commercial contracts that increase margins because you’re getting a lot more on those. They’re looking at the past, present, future of what their business was what it is and where they want to be to make sure that they’re they’re accelerating their growth every year. I would say that they’re not sitting behind a desk 40 hours a week or in the truck 40 hours a week, but they are in tune with their business enough that if you ask them a question about it, they would have the answer, right?

What were your sales last month? What is your marketing ROIs? Like, what’s your best employee and why? They would have those answers. Let’s talk about a handful of the non -negotiables, if you’re going to buy an Oxifresh franchise. Because I think a lot of people, they want to go to Oxifresh .

com. They want to buy a franchise. Maybe they even know somebody who’s run one, or maybe they’ve even used your services before. They know it’s an established brand. They know about the success. Let’s talk about a couple of the non -negotiables.

Non -negotiable number one, you have to wow the customer. and gather an objective Google review from real customers. You just have to do it. You have to wow the customer and get a review. What would happen if somebody wowed the customers but didn’t get objective reviews? Or they didn’t wow customers?

What would happen if that non -negotiable of wowing the customers and getting those objective reviews was not present in the business? Yeah, eventually what’s going to happen is your competitors are going to get those reviews. You might maintain repeat customers for a little while, but eventually you’re not going to be seen online. You’re going to fall down the list of visible companies that are options. You will no longer be a competitive company because you just won’t be you know, in a visible view. Customers, Google allows you to rank high by paying for ads and building things correctly and getting reviews, right?

It is maybe not the most important factor, but without getting reviews, the other factors don’t matter either. You have to get reviews or your business will not show on Google. Recruiting people. On a daily basis, you can just never stop recruiting people. I think a lot of business owners get comfortable. They start to say, wow, I’ve got a great team of technicians.

I’ve got a great team of employees. I’ve got great people on my team. Therefore, I do not need to constantly interview new job candidates. Matt, what happens if an owner stops constantly recruiting people? talent, bringing new talent into the business? You know, I mean, you’re going to be stuck at some point, like your employees aren’t going to be there forever, something’s going to happen, their family takes them away, or maybe they’re not a good fit, or whatever it is, and you’re going to have to be stuck with trying to, from scratch, try to find another employee.

Right. It’s going to take longer. You might have to go through several different hiring process to find the one you want. It’s going to make you inefficient to a point where you’re going to, if you normally want to hire someone in a week, it’ll take you three. Now, Matt, for a guy like you, you know that whether you’re on vacation or whether you’re at home, it’s a holiday, it’s a vacation, it’s a workday, there’s certain things you stay on top of. I mean, you just never, ever take a week off from looking at your numbers.

I think a lot of people are used to being an employee where it’s possible to take a two -week vacation and not look at the numbers. What would happen if an Oxifresh owner were to not look at their numbers for, let’s say, two consecutive weeks while they were enjoying a beautiful vacation? Yeah, I mean, you can take a vacation, you just shouldn’t shut anything off, right? I mean, there’s really a one is that if things happen, you’re not in tune with you can’t fix it. So something very small can become very big problem. So you might lose really great opportunities, right?

So like you’re on vacation, because you want to enjoy that, I would argue that stay on vacation, but just keep, you know, you don’t have to be on your phone all the time, but you should be very in tune with your business. Like if a great opportunity comes, and you’re on the beach somewhere, should you not take advantage of that great opportunity? I think you should. Right. It just might make it might pay for the vacation you’re on at that moment. Right.

I think if it’s important to you, I talk about I talk about this to a lot of people. Having a great, great, productive, small business is all about priorities. If it is not a priority to you to be successful in that business, your actions will certainly suggest that you won’t be in tune. You won’t be doing your things. If it is priority, you will make it a part of your day. You’ll make it a part of your conversation.

of activities, you’ll make it part of your checkpoints, and therefore nothing gets by you. I mean, the better, the more knowledgeable you are about your company, the better it’s gonna be. Oxifresh . com, that’s the website to go to. Matt, when people go to Oxifresh . com and they request information, what are the most commonly asked questions that you’re asked by wonderful potential franchisees when they reach out to you at Oxifresh .

com? Yeah. Is my territory open? How much does it cost? What does that include? What are the biggest pitfalls of owning a company?

What are our advantages? Who do I compete with? They ask me questions like, why wouldn’t I do this myself? I love that question. And so I get all of that, right? Just depends on how much research they’ve done on the front end before they start asking me questions.

I get questions all the time. What is a franchise? Now, okay, a franchise, in my opinion, is a proven system for running a successful company. But let’s say I do buy a franchise from Oxifresh. What are some of the things or systems that I get with Oxifresh? If I buy an Oxifresh franchise, what are some of the systems that I’m paying for that I get with my franchise?

Yeah, you get right to the front line. If you start your own company today, you’re going to have to go through R &D on whatever service that you’re providing. You have to figure out the vendors you’re going to use in terms of software and bookings and credit card processing and some of the wrap your vehicle and website design. Those are all individual people you have to hire. For us, you get the entire infrastructure already built already gone through 20 years of this. Get all the websites in Google and Facebook and Yelp and all the directories built for you.

You get search engine optimization built for you. You have a full all -in -one software CRM that shows you where your employees are at every day, where your customers are coming from. It also gives you access to our print and apparel store, gives you access to your product store, gives you access to all your KPIs and the dashboard that shows you how you’re operating against the brand average. You also get access to our national scheduling center that takes calls for your book’s jobs, online scheduler, an AI bot that will answer phones after hours and on the weekends. You also get an entire team.

Most of our team has been with us for over 10 years. So you can expert at technology software going to be used, vendor relations. You get experts on the cleaning system, experts on the marketing front. You get a franchise coach for six months. So what I consider us to be is a fully functioning, fully supported franchise. We’re a marketing and technology company now.

We just happen to be a carpet cleaning company. That’s how we need to be thought of. In your mind, what makes a successful Oxifresh franchisee and what makes a non -successful one? Like maybe who’s a good fit and who is not a good fit to buy an Oxifresh . com franchise? Yeah, if your priority is to make money and we’re the vehicle to do that, we’re a very good option.

If you’re looking for somebody to make money for you, that’s not a good option, right? We have all the tools and resources and marketing and support to make your path to business ownership faster and more successful, but it doesn’t mean that we run the business for you. And I think that is sometimes a misnomer to folks, right? You are still a business owner. You’re still the decision maker. You’re still the one hiring and firing.

You’re still the one making decisions, but we aren’t running the business for you. What does that mean? You’re not going to run the business for the franchisee. Yeah. Like take reviews, for instance, we’re not getting reviews for you on a local level. You have to do that locally.

Okay. We are going to set up all your marketing to be functional, but you need to have a budget set for the marketing. We’re not going to put our company credit card on your marketing because it’s yours. You’re going to have your own insurance for your business because it’s yours. You’re going to hire and go through the review process. interviewing process with your own employees.

We don’t hire people for you, but we give you the job posting, we show you how to use Indeed, right? We’re getting you to be more efficient as a business owner, but you’re still the one in charge of your own company. Final question for you, Matt, what kind of money does it cost? Again, if somebody out there’s maybe just tuning in, maybe they missed part of the broadcast or they missed other interviews, how much does it cost to buy an Oxifresh . com franchise? So it’s $47 ,900 to become a franchise owner.

If you are a veteran, it’s $43 ,110. That includes your protected territory, your entire equipment setup for carpet and upholstery, three, four months worth of product, the training in Colorado, plus the seven -year agreement. So that’s all included in that $47 ,900. Best practice is you want to have about $25 ,000 to $30 ,000 in additional operating capital that just stays with you to cover everything else. Final question for you. What’s your take on the Denver Nuggets?

You’re a Nuggets fan. You’re a Nuggets man. You live right there in Colorado. You love basketball. What’s your reaction to the Denver Nuggets, where they’re at? Are they at a crossroads?

Are they at a pivot point? Are they bringing in some new talent? Are they going to blow it up? What are they doing? I think we’ve had four years. We’ve won one.

I think we’re capable of winning two. So I think they have to blow it up. They have to blow it up? Have to, at least some part. Come on. You serious?

Yep. You’re not a patient, man. You got to give it a couple of decades, Matt. You got to see, just keep this line up for a couple of decades, and then we’ll see what we can put together. We have Michael Jordan on our team. You can’t wait for that.

OK, that’s fair. That’s fair. Matt Klein, you’re a beautiful man. You’re a basketball genius. We appreciate your time, your energy. I encourage everybody to go to oxyfresh .

com, oxyfresh . com. Should you be listening to today’s show and you want a part -time general manager to run your NBA team, check out oxyfresh .com. com. Ask for Matt Klein.

He’s available. Matt, I really do appreciate you. Thank you so much for your time and your energy, and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks, Clay. Bye -bye. Clay Clark, man, he is one character.

That’s a good word for him, character. Yeah, that is it. Good, driven, smart, and I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time. He’s doing so much good. And then I met his mother and she just says, she just lets him be Clay Clark. I mean, so 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. His Clay Clark starts his days at five o ‘clock in the morning. Oh, it’s incredible. Yeah. He’s, he’s like, he’s, he’s a machine. He’s a machine.

But his, you know, I got, I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock. Yes. But 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. One of our accountants had said, you’ve got to meet this guy, Clay. So we ended up meeting with Clay. He’s helped us go from right before we opened the third location now to six locations.

And so we’ve more than doubled our revenue. And these are ground up build gyms. And so it’s not the barrier for entry is pretty high. It’s 20 plus staff at each location. So yeah, it’s been a lot for us running systems, checklists, workflows, who does what, when and how training us on that. Clay’s helped a ton.

We would not be where we’re at without him. So huge win. Charles, from an ROI perspective, if someone’s going to look at it and go, return on investment, I pay you $1 ,700 a month. Will I make more money than I’m paying you? How would you maybe tackle, or how would you respond to, what kind of return on investment have you seen for the $1 ,700? a month you’re paying?

Well, for example, Clay has got, there’s no better business coach in the world that has the way he works, the way his mind works, but he’s also got a team of other business coaches that have worked in lots of different industries. So he’s worked in every industry. His staff has worked in every industry. He’s got videographers, web designers. I mean, just for the fact of like, just the website alone is worth the $1 ,700. Just the ability to take any of their proven systems, whether that’s a marketing thing, or whether that’s a staffing thing, like one thing done in the month, it pays for itself.

And then to understand this, there’s a part of where, you know, some maybe some week you may be like, well, you know what, I’m not getting a whole lot out of this call. But the bottom line is, it’s like when you read the Bible, there’s times you’re just reading it, and then you’re like, You know what I really and then you read it that one time and it’s like God really speaks to your heart. And the whole truth is like there’s no way that you can get that kind of value for $1 ,700 to have a whole team of coaches. Graphic designers, web developers, anybody that has that type of knowledge, you know, in your back pocket. And then in the whole thing is run your business with being somewhat conservative, make sure you don’t run it to the edge all the time. But by doing that, you have that that skill set, you have that you have those.

tools on your tool belt. And I just think it’s just like, it’s just like the cost of doing business. Like, just, just understand it. That’s a, that’s what you want to do. I think there’s a, there’s a, sometimes the payment we make, I feel like is peace of mind, even because there have been multiple times throughout the years that we will, we will either be butting heads on something. Um, we’re super confused about something.

We’re fearful about something, something in the markets changed and it’s a quick call to clay. Well, Thrive Nation, it’s a very special occasion because a lot times on The Thrive Time Show, I get to interview people that I am friendly with or have an acquaintance with, that kind of thing. And I enjoy that. But it’s really an honor whenever I get to interview someone who I consider to be a friend or people that I consider to be friends of our family. And it’s awesome when we can celebrate a success story because it’s a life -giving thing.

And for somebody watching today’s show, if you feel you need like a checkup from the neck up, if you feel stuck, if you feel like you don’t have the resources to get started but you You have the resourcefulness. Maybe today’s show is the show you need to hear, because this is a couple. They started this business together out of their house, and they’ve now grown it into a multimillion dollar, super successful company. And I’ve had the opportunity to work with them in a consulting or coaching capacity over these past five or six years. And I am so excited to have them on today’s show. That being said, Amber and Charles Cola, welcome onto the Thrive Time Show.

Amber, how are you? Great. Thanks, Clay. It’s awesome to be on here with you. Yes, we are excited. Okay, so I got to ask this real quick, because people think you’re a hologram.

How long have we had the opportunity to work with you? Or how long have we worked with you guys together from a kind of a coaching relationship? We probably started back in 2017. Yeah, we’re looking at seven, eight years. Yeah, it’s coming up on eight probably, a little over seven. And from that time, I mean, you guys have experienced tremendous personal growth and business growth.

I mean, could you, Charles, maybe talk about, I’m not looking for your specific financials, but could you maybe talk about maybe the size you guys have grown over these past seven or eight years at colawfitness . com? Absolutely. We started off, we were getting ready to open our third location. And one of our accountants had said, you’ve got to meet this guy, Clay. So we ended up meeting with Clay.

And he’s helped us go from, you know, Right before we open the 3rd location now to 6 locations and so we’ve more than doubled. our revenue. And these are ground up build gyms. And so it’s not the barrier for entry is pretty high. It’s 20 plus staff at each location. So yeah, it’s been a lot as far as running systems, checklists, workflows, who does what, when and how, training us on that.

Clay’s helped a ton. We would not be where we’re at without him. So huge win. Now, I’m going to ask you guys this story, because I want you to be able to encourage somebody. I’m not sure who’s going to watch this show, but I view every show as kind of a message in a bottle. So somebody’s watching this show, and they’re going to relate to this story.

I’m going to let Amber go first, because I think she’ll maybe have a less rosy view of how it was. But you guys started colawfitness . com doing personal training to individual clients in your actual home. So like your living room was where the squat rack was or the bench press was in the kitchen or Amber, what was that like when you started colawfitness . com? Well, um, I think when you’re starting something like that, you don’t see bigger picture.

You’re not thinking that far ahead. You’re just kind of thinking you have to work. You have to survive. You’ve got to make money and you’re doing what you love. Um, And so with that, it was just it was kind of more as a of a survival. And also, we couldn’t afford furniture to go in our formal living room, a formal dining room.

And so. So, um, we were kind of stuck in a situation where Charles needed a place to train and he had a full clientele. And so we just were, why don’t we find like a big universal piece, stick it in the living room that, cause it’s just an empty room. And, um, the dining room became more of the office. And so we bought a big universal piece and threw down some rubber flooring, ripped up the carpet and put some big mirrors on the wall. And, um.

We just started doing what we needed to do at the time with no, I mean, I definitely did not think it was going to be in my house. for a couple of years for sure. But yeah, a lot of it was fear of failure. I was like, I want to make sure that, you know, I can provide for my family. And we were trying to just, I was every lead I had and follow up with every client I trained, want to make sure that it gave me good results. And yeah, next thing you know, we have about 160 clients coming in and out of the door a week.

And it’s me and about four or five of the trainers training out of there, out of our living room. And so it became a revolving door of fitness. And then Amber also did some hair. So she had a hair salon in the back of the house. So it’s like a training studio in the front of the house and then a hair salon in the back of the house. So yeah, the win.

Now, I want to share this story because I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this story with you, but I think our listeners need to hear this because your story is better than mine. But let me just show this to the listeners real quick here. If we go to 111th and Memorial in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my wife and I, we were 20 years old -ish, and I remember I was so excited to be able to build our house. I remember telling my wife, honey, We can afford to build a house. We are going to build a house, a brand new house. She was so excited.

I remember we were driving down Riverside. She was like, we’re going to buy a house? I go, yeah. She’s like, we’re going to build a house? I’m going, yeah, because we’re a young couple. We’ve just been married a couple of years.

Right here at 111th and Memorial. I found a builder named Rob Brewer who did a phenomenal job. I would hire him again. And this is a true story. So I built this house from scratch. And so my neighbor comes by, Wendy, God bless her.

I’m not going to mention her last name. Wendy comes by, and she’s like, hey, what are you doing? I go, what do you mean? Because I’m having like 40 couples a week that are walking up to my front door, hanging a right at my office. And there’s, not kidding, there’s probably eight DJ vans in my backyard. And she’s like, what are you doing?

And I’m going, well, what do you mean what I do? She’s like, this is a residential neighborhood. What are you doing? I said, well, I’m running a business. She said, you can’t run a business here. So I had back here in the backyard.

No kidding. I had eight different vans. back there. And then neighbors kept asking me if I was running drugs. I mean, people were concerned because the first DJ would come to load up gear at 4 in the morning. And our last guy would come home at 3 in the morning.

And it was just a wild thing. I got to ask you with the gym, Amber, how early were people coming to work out, to do squats, and bench press, and cardio? What time were they showing up? How many people were showing up? Oh yeah. So Charles is, he’s relentless and he’ll fill any hour he can.

And so he would start as early as 5 a . m. with his first client. And, uh, you know, sometimes it would last until about 10 o ‘clock at night. And so it was, it was, it was just a revolving door. And we always blocked out the middle of the afternoon at two o ‘clock every afternoon and him and I, and, um, as we added staff, we would all work out together.

So it became this big, you know, workout session together. It was awesome. And this is a real thing. Now, Amber, I’m not looking for anything super salacious. But I mean, did you ever have awkward situations? I mean, because you’re sleeping there.

You’re living there. Do you guys ever have just, like, I remember with the DJ business, my wife, about once a week there for a while, she would come downstairs. And one of my DJs would get, Clay, where’s the bathroom? I’d say, right there. And they would walk into our master bedroom. And I’m like, get out of there.

That’s my bathroom, you sicko. I mean, did you ever have just weird client interactions? Oh, yeah. Totally from, you know, our kitchen became like the staff break room. And so all of a sudden I’ve got everybody’s lunches in my fridge. And I remember one day a guy had went to get the barbecue sauce out of the fridge and just drops it.

And it just shatters all over the kitchen floor that his client was here. So he, he looks at me kind of like, uh, and I was like, just, just go. I got like some cleaning up barbecue sauce. out of the kitchen. One morning I had gotten out of the shower and I come out of the bathroom, which is at the top of the stairs, and I’m just making that short little. jagged over to my bedroom door.

And so I had my hair in a towel and a robe on. And I opened the door and right there at the bottom of the stairs, Charles has one of the clients doing calf raises. And they just good morning. And I thought get this out of my house. Yeah, yeah, the trainers napping on the couch between clients and our middle son was in pre K at the time and so he come home half the day. And he’d sit on the couch, he was just so little, his feet would just stick straight off the couch.

And he’d try and watch cartoons and there would be someone on like a ab mat on the floor, right in front of the TV doing crunches. And so he’s just watching his little cartoons and someone’s doing crunches in front of him. And so, oh yeah, the whole family was in on it. I just remember when I was building DJConnection . com, I would train my DJs out of my house. So we would practice announcements, like, ladies and gentlemen, coming up in just a moment, we’re going to introduce the bride and the groom.

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, get ready for the intro. And we would practice, ladies and gentlemen, coming up next, we’re going to be cutting the cake. Once again, we got the bride, we got the groom, we got an act that should be exciting. And I’m practicing, and they have a script, and I’m practicing. So adult males are in my house, and we’re practicing introducing. Because, you know, we grew DJ Connection to do 4 ,000 weddings a year.

So I’m training 30 disc jockey every week. So Havana, my oldest, who’s now 20, she starts running around in the office going, ladies and gentlemen, coming up next, the cutting of the cake. Because she heard it so much. She’s like, ladies and gentlemen, coming up next, the Soul Train line. She knew. Because it was like, and I don’t think if you’re watching today’s show and these stories, you can’t relate to it.

That’s OK. But I’m just trying to make sure we’re getting this idea. This is a real couple that I would now classify as a super success story. but they had to start somewhere. And it’s not about resourcefulness. It’s not about resources.

It’s about resourcefulness. Again, it’s not about resources. It’s about resourcefulness. Look at the backyard. I turned half my backyard into a concrete slab so that we could park all the vans back here. I mean, look at all the trees I planted to block the view.

So now you look at Colaw Fitness and you go, Wow, this is a super successful company. Wow, I want to be the next Koloff Fitness. Wow, these guys are really doing it. I want to be a kolofffitness . com. I’ll get the website to pull up in just a second.

And people always come to me and they say, Clay, what do I need to do? What’s the most important thing? I just had a guy today, huge ministry, huge ministry, multi -million dollar massive ministry called me and said, what’s the one thing I can do to grow my ministry? And I said, buddy, I’m gonna send you today’s show. There are 14 things you can do. that we need to do and a lot of details on those 14.

So we’re going to go step by step on today’s show. I’ll go back and forth between Charles and Amber. And for sake of time, we’ll just go back and forth rapid fire. So here we go. And Charles, by the way, you get 60 seconds on the clock for each answer. So here we go.

Box number one, you have to figure out your revenue goals. You just have to know your revenue goals. You have to know your revenue goals. What are your gross revenue goals? What are your weekly revenue goals? What are your annual revenue goals?

You have to know your revenue goals. Charles, why do you have to know your revenue goals? calls. Yes, you have to know your revenue goals so you know if they’re going to be making money or not. And for us, we want to make sure that we’re staying bankable, that we can open more locations. Our gyms are a ministry for us.

We want to make sure that we continue to expand and making sure we got at least a 20 % profit margin off of all of our expenses to income over expenses. And we know how many memberships we have to sell. We know how many clients that we have to service to hit those goals for our set overhead costs. And yeah, you got to know how many units of items you have to sell. every week, every day, and so we track that stuff. And for us, we have a lot of recurring revenue.

But the whole point is that we want to make sure that we have enough of the payable, viable buyers in the system to continue to grow. And you track this stuff. And so we’ve got wonderful members of our team. We’ve got a young member of our team named Natalie, who’s learning all of this because she’s developing into a coach. When you work with a new client, a lot of times the client’s going to have a bias to focus on just marketing, just branding. But you have to know these numbers.

Amber, anything else you want to talk about as far as the numbers? Because I know your husband is passionate about fitness, and you are as well. But why do you have to focus on the numbers and not just marketing, or not just branding, or not just social media? Why do you have to focus on those numbers? Well, I think the numbers, it’s like the steering wheel that steers the ship. I mean, if you don’t understand the numbers, you have no idea where you’re going.

And so I think that’s probably the biggest thing. It leads the whole way. And I think a lot of people tend to do, I’m going to do the marketing, or I just want to perform the service. I think a lot of it because people are scared of numbers. I think they feel like numbers are overwhelming, and they try to make numbers way too difficult. So I think that’s the biggest thing.

This is such wisdom, folks. I’m telling you, if you’re not familiar with colawfitness . com, go to their website. These guys give away a Bible. Every time they sell a new membership, they set aside a portion of the funds to give away a Bible to first -time members at their gym. It’s an incredible, it’s a ministry, it’s a business.

It checks all those boxes. Let’s move on to box number three. Define the number of hours you’re willing to work. Now, Amber, you happen to be married to a man who’s willing to work every hour of the day if need be. I will say this, though. Most of my clients, if I had to think about my 160 clients I work with, And I had to think about the average client.

90 % of them are not willing to work as hard as you guys. Most of my clients are willing to work 40 hours a week. week or 50 hours a week. Some will work 60 hours a week, but nobody is willing to go sprint from 4 a . m. to 8 p .

m. , 10 p . m. every day if need be. Your husband is willing to do that. Why is it important for you guys, Charles, to define the hours that you’re going to work?

The hours that you’re not going to work, block out time for the family cruise, for the family trip. Why is that an important box there, Charles? That way my wife will stay married to me. Well, I’m like you. I like to just go, go, go. And then we do definitely, we take off and we go to church on Sunday.

It’s important for us to hold the Sunday as a Sabbath, as a day off. Other than that, I like to work. You talked about vacation, to vacate or to leave something. I love to work. I love to build the systems and build the documents and train staff, build the systems and so on. But we do have to make sure that once a quarter we try to look Don’t get taking time off.

Go ahead. Well, I would say the biggest thing that we always talk about in marriage, family, and work, expectations and boundaries. Those two things have to be very clear all the time. So as long as he understands what my expectations are, and I need him to fulfill a husband role in addition to working, as long as he understands that these are my expectations, and then these are my boundaries, and as long as we communicate that, then we’re good. I’ll say one more thing is that for us we’ve kind of at the spot to where you know we just work on the business not in the business so we don’t actually do the day -to -day stuff but we work on the business systems, checklists, workflows, training, coaching people remotely because we do live in Florida. Our clubs are in the Midwest, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Kansas and so running remotely and running all that stuff we’ve got to

of say, how do we want to live our lives? Like you’d say, Charles, how do you really want to live it? You got to kind of map out and clearly define that. For us, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, those days are just all in on Zoom calls, training, coaching, working with staff. And so those days are really, really full days. And then the rest of the time, like on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, those are all lighter days that we don’t block in a lot of meetings.

It’s like no meetings that we plan, but we are still I’m still working on things that I want to work on, but I’m not leveraged to having to so I’ve kind of created my three day. Work week that’s like super long. And then the rest of the time I don’t have meetings. I don’t get held hostage on a lot of stuff and people have to kind of have a gatekeeper to get to me. But other than that, that’s how I’ve tried to map that out so that I can continue to mastermind and kind of grow the brand and have some meta perspective on how I want to continue to grow. So there’s just So much, again, for folks, if you want to learn entrepreneurship, this is real people.

If you’re in the Florida area and you’re looking for a job, if you’re in the Joplin, Missouri area and you’re looking for a career, not just a job, Kola Fitness is a company that’s going places. I’m not prophetic. I’m not claiming to have some view of the future. I just see patterns. And I work with clients, and I help them implement patterns that work. And I also know of the clients that’ll work.

Nothing works unless you work, right? So nothing will work unless you work. And I look at the Colaw family, and I look at the fuel that you put into the business and the diligence that you bring. And I’m telling you, folks, this is a brand that’s going somewhere. If you’re looking for a career, check it out, colawfitness . com.

Box number four and five, these kind of fit in together. Box number four is you have to determine your unique value proposition. That’s a unique thing. unique? What is it that separates you from the competition? If you’re watching today’s show, let’s think about your website, your print piece, your auto wraps, your business cards.

Let’s think about everything about your business. Let’s think about the sights, the sounds, the smell, the ambiance, the employees you have. What is it that makes you different from the competition? What is it that makes Chick -fil -A successful when there are many other fast food chicken restaurants? What is it that makes Quick Trip super successful when there are so many gross, nasty, dirty convenience stores?

What is it that makes Chick -fil -A successful? What is it that makes Quick Trip successful? What is the secret sauce that allows Brad Stevens, the coach of the Boston Celtics, to bring out a winning lineup year after year. Brad Stevens took a dysfunctional Butler College basketball team and turned them into a top -four basketball team. Think about this. He took a college called Butler, the size of Oral Roberts University, and took them to the Final Four multiple times.

And then he takes that same recipe and goes to the NBA, and they win a championship, and he’s putting out a winner year after year. What is the secret sauce that allowed Phil Jackson to win year after year? Michael Jordan couldn’t win a championship. without Phil Jackson? He played a lot of seasons without Phil Jackson. He only won his championships with Phil.

Kobe Bryant never won a championship without Phil Jackson. By the way, Kobe Bryant played a lot of seasons without Phil Jackson. What is that magic formula? A big part of it is you have to understand your unique value proposition. So Amber, what is it that makes Kola Fitness unique versus other fitness companies? Oh, for us, it’s culture, hands down.

It’s culture all day long, and we worked really hard at our first location to set the culture and make it what we wanted it to be. We wanted a fitness center that everybody could come be a part of. And I mean, not everybody, not everybody likes it, but It’s, it’s definitely our culture and that was something we knew we had to be able to duplicate when opening other locations. And so that is probably the number one piece that we train, develop, encourage, that we’re the biggest part of the company that we are still a part of is the culture part. Yep.

And that’s the big part. I’m going to just kind of jump on a little bit more. We’re unapologetic in our Christian component to that. Think of if Planet Fitness is the McDonald’s of gyms, Colaw Fitness is the Chick -fil -A. And what I mean by that is, We are a strong Christian culture. We hire and we look for people that match that.

They don’t have to be a Christian, but they do have to align with those values. All of Christianity summed up in one word is the word agape. That’s an unconditional love. We want to make sure that we actually hire people that are into customer service, that likes people. Who’d have thought customer service, we’re going to find people that actually like to serve people. And so we really vet that pretty heavily on the front side, on the onboarding with our, you know, like our Christian culture.

We play a video, we talk about who we are. We talk about the Christian values, devotion to God, discipline in living, denial of self, dream great dreams for God’s glory, determination to stay the course. So the Christian side of it is kind of strong. So either people lean in or lean and lean back. And so when we do group interviews, this is where you’ve taught us a lot of great systems, you see people lean in and see people lean back. So when everybody’s on the boat rowing in the same direction, and they really match that value set, the culture is just it’s just better.

And when you hire people to actually like people, like hire people that like people. They want to acknowledge your presence, close the gap, give them a fist bump, a high five, make somebody feel like the highest, like the highlight of the day when they walk through that door. So we train people on those systems. So we took the culture that we did when we first opened the club and we defined it into actual ways that we can role play and script it with our staff so that you have not a purple hair, McDonald’s, perpetually distracted, Cran -mark tattoo person. You have a person posted like a McDonald’s, something that runs up to your car like a Chick -fil -A that’s you got their polo on and says my pleasure. So that’s really.

have to be very, very, very specific on how we do culture differently than the competition who’s just scaling out like crazy. But people like the greatest currency in life is how you make somebody else feel. We want to make other people feel like the highlight of the day and hire people that are sincere. They’re just genuine, that truly like people. If you do that well, you have to lock the doors to keep people out. This is, I’m telling you folks, this is so important.

I talked to a guy the other day who applied to work for your business, true story. And he’s kind of a gremlin. I know him because he didn’t get hired by a friend of mine. And so a friend of mine’s like, hey, I didn’t hire this guy. He’s kind of a gremlin. I said, what do you mean, gremlin?

He’s like, yeah, he’s just kind of a curmudgeon, kind of a negative guy, Debbie Downer. And he’s got a big background in fitness, though. And he’s into fitness. And he played sports at a high level. And he’d love to come work for you, Clay. And I go, OK.

And he’s like, yeah, I guess he applied for the Colaw guys a couple years ago, didn’t get the job. And I’m going, OK. Interesting. And I knew that you, and I met the guy, I’m like, this guy, I understand why you didn’t hire him. And I didn’t hire him either. And I’m just telling you have certain standards.

And if people aren’t up to those standards, they can come back and reapply later after they turn that frown upside down. But you have a certain standard there. Now, box number six, the three -legged marketing stool. At Colaf Fitness, with every business we work with, every business that I work with, what we do is we develop a three -legged marketing stool. Now, I’ll give you a moment, Charles and Amber, to reflect on this. And maybe this is true for you, maybe not.

But a lot of my clients that come into my life, I think about Stacey Purcell, longtime client, great lady. I think about Shaw Homes, shawhomes . com. We helped Shaw Homes grow from $14 million a year to $150 million a year. I think about Satellite Phones, Tina, her company, SAT123. We’ve helped them grow to $100 million a year of sales.

I think about Oxifresh, oxifresh . com. We’ve helped them grow now to 500 -plus locations. And every single time I sit down with a business owner, they have not a three -legged marketing. No, no, no. They have a variety of things that might work.

And through tracking, we start to figure out what doesn’t work. And so with Stacey Purcell with her wonderful business, we found out that LinkedIn didn’t work 100 % of the time, thus saving her $8 ,000 a month by turning it off. I just had a client this week. True story, we found he was spending $4 ,000 a week on YouTube ads, Instagram ads, and TikTok ads. Got a lot of clicks, got a lot of views. No leads.

Another client, I’m using a stream of consciousness, another client of mine, they were doing mailers, getting zero response. Another client of mine was doing billboards to the tune of $6 ,000 a month between all their locations. And as you look at the different businesses and you track, you can really, really become much more profitable by nailing down a three -legged marketing stool. Could you talk about that, Amber? Maybe the impact it’s had or hasn’t had, tracking the results. getting rid of what doesn’t work and focusing on what does work.

Yeah, well, I would say none of that is my part of the business. And I’m so thankful. I hate marketing. But I would what I would say to that is that has everything to do with like we were talking about your numbers and the tracking. So you’re talking about tracking these things. That’s my side, the financial side.

And I want to know that when the money’s going out, that that return is coming back. Right. And so I don’t know. I do that side of it with we talk about a marketing budget and watching that and holding true to that and watching those numbers and watching, you know, the revenue that comes back from that marketing. So you may be able to talk more on the marketing. That’s your.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, we’ve tracked where they come from. Sometimes you do get clicks or you have like sometimes Facebook shows you make it. It’s really not getting people to walk through the door. convert people into members and convert people into higher ticket items. And so you really want to make sure that what you’re spending money on is actually quantifying out into dollars.

And so Clay’s really been good with us to track that. We’ve done that for years. And so we can really kind of see in our industry, we market, you know, in a five mile radius, really heavy. That’s kind of our ideal and likely buyers within that five mile radius or a 12 minute drive time. We target those. We see what marketing works best.

And a lot of times it’s the same proven stuff that Clay teaches with a lot of his clients is really seeing to making sure that you’re dominating on certain platforms. And I can go into that, but the whole point is, is Clay has done it in every industry. And when we follow the system, track it correctly, we can monetize our marketing dollars a whole lot better. And so there’s, there’s ways you want to get in front of your ideal likely buyer. We make sure we got the right product offering in front of the right ideal likely buyer. And the things that Clay’s been doing with his clients over the last seven years with us, it doesn’t change much.

There’s a few little things that adjust, but it’s a proven system and that’s what works. And we’ve just, we’ve done that. We’ve gone from three locations to six and we’ve more than doubled our revenue. So it’s been a huge win. Well, I think sometimes people want to market in a certain way because that’s the cool thing to do. Like I want to be on TikTok.

If TikTok doesn’t pay me, if TikTok is not, it’s not paying my bills, I could care less. I mean, I watch TikTok on my off time, but I’m not going to put my marketing dollars into it just because that’s what everybody else is doing. And I think another part of that is everybody has marketing advice for you. Everybody, everybody thinks there’s a marketing guru, you know, because they see ads. And I don’t think that’s true either. I’m going to ask you this, Charles, and I’m not ready for your answer yet.

I got to mentally prepare myself for this, but you do not have the ability to not be honest here. Okay. So, um, a guy called me here today and I thought, man, I’m going to send this to him. right away, OK? Guy reaches out to me. He’s in the construction space, OK?

And he goes, what would it? This happens every day, by the way. But he says, what would a relationship look like if I hired you guys as my coach? If I hired you, Clay, and your team, what does that look like? And I said, well, we charge you $1 ,700 a month. So it’s less money than hiring a minimum wage employee.

That’s what it is. We have a weekly meeting. And we follow a proven system. And anyway, and I said, there’s accountability. So there’s kind of three parts to it. One is we have a team that helps you get your photography, your video, your web, your search engine done for you, all those things.

The second is we provide coaching down a proven path. And then the third is we have workshops every couple months so you can kind of get a tune up. And I said, Mr. Client, Mr. Potential Client, who I’ve known forever, I said, Clay Stairs describes me as the ass man. And he’s like, the ass man? And I said, yeah, Clay Stairs, longtime client of mine. He’s been a client of mine for like 15 years.

He literally tells people that I’m his ass man. And they go, what? He goes, Clay has helped me grow my company, claystairs . com. He’s helped me get into political office. But he kind of is like an irritant who follows up on the same things every week until they get done.

So I wanted to ask you, Charles, how would you describe what the coaching relationship looks like for somebody out there that’s saying, what is it like to work with specifically me and my team? Well, to shoot you straight, I mean, Clay’s highest desire isn’t always your comfort in that coaching. His highest desire is your continued development that you do hit your goals for financial. And a good coach, think of a good coach. A good coach tells you what you need to hear because he doesn’t just care about the comfort in the room or the comfort of the conversation. He cares about your character development, your personal development to becoming the better leader.

And if you want to run a great company, you have to be a great leader. You have to be the avatar. You have to be the great person. And Clay’s really pushed that in me. And for me, I thought I’ve always needed that. And I was just like, okay, Charles, stay humble, stay coachable.

And that’s the biggest thing is most business owners, they don’t have the ability to stay, keep a humble, coachable heart and be willing to grow. When you work with somebody that has a proven system, they’ve worked in every industry, they’ve got a team of videographers, graphic designers, web developers, people that will help you grow build the back end of your business correctly, the proven systems of continuous hiring. of staff team, like group hiring, that you always have staff ready to go. Somebody in the bullpen, so I’ll take it. You always have continuous training staff. You’re never held hostage because there’s somebody that doesn’t know a skill set.

You can always replace somebody. Because if you don’t create a system, you’re going to be a limited resource. And Clay creates the systems, helps you with document creation, file organization, and make sure you’ve got that stuff so you have a proven template. It’s really more like a franchisable prototype that you can handle the lowest skill set. So great people are great, but Clay’s been really good at shooting me straight. If you have a humble, coachable heart and you’re willing to grow and you take two or three action items every week, next thing you know, 50 weeks, 52 weeks in a year, you’ve got a bunch of systems.

You’ve got a way better website. You’ve got checklist workflows. You’ve got staff following systems. You’ve got backup for each position because if you don’t have people in the bullpen, you’re going to be held hostage. And so you want to make sure that you’ve got the right systems, checklists, and personnel ready to go. And to run six different businesses in four different states, From Florida, in the Midwest, we have to have good systems, checklists, workflows, and so on, and making sure people are holding to that.

Clay’s been really great for helping set up those systems. But it’s it’s to be honest, it’s not always the conversations are definitely sometimes challenging, but understanding that both parties, me as the client, him as the coach, is really help trying to have the highest desire to make you grow as into a better person and to help your company grow and be better. And for me, that’s a good coach. And that’s why I like working with with Thrive and Clay. So yeah, Amber, I wanted to tap into your wisdom on this, you know, there was a statement that was made years ago by Robert Kiyosaki. It really resonated with me. I heard this about 20 years ago.

But he said, amateurs don’t have a coach. Professionals do have a coach. And at the time, I thought, you know what? From a legal perspective, I probably need a coach or a coach. or mentor to help me. So I hired wintersking .

com, and I’ve used that company for, what, 10 plus years? And it’s really helped me. And I thought to myself, from an accounting perspective, I need probably to have her a coach. So I hired CCK. And so in the areas where I want to improve, I really do firmly believe in having a coach. When I wanted to become a better speaker, I hired Carlton Pearson.

And I worked with Carlton for as long as he would work with me, because at the time, he was the top televangelist in America. And he was a phenomenal verbal communicator. It wouldn’t have worked if I wasn’t coachable. and if he wasn’t willing to coach. And you guys have done such a great job over these years implementing, and I just see the future is so bright here. So when we look at your website now, could you talk about just that weekly meeting and making those little iterations and every week making it a little better?

Because I think some people want to get rich quick. They want to become successful in 10 minutes. They want to ready, set, let’s go. But you guys, every week we go to colawfitness . com. Every week we enhance the website.

Every week we enhance the scripts. week we enhance the value proposition. Every week we’re doing little tweaks that are improving the brand. Could you talk about that mindset of that weekly improvement? Yeah, absolutely. Well, your numbers, you have to have good feedback tools, some key performance KPIs, or key performance things you look at for sales over cancellations, and how much dollars you’re spending on marketing.

When we track that on a regular basis, we can see that we’re doing well or not doing well, we make pivots, we get coaching feedback from you on best practices. And one thing is, is that you’ve not just worked in our industry, but lots of industries, and having a team of people, a team of coaches that say, hey, this is what’s working, this is what’s working, it’s super valuable. um, like, I, I, I, I mean, I’ve got an MBA in, in school, but I’m telling you, like, it’s real life is so much more important and having good people that have good feelers. It’s like, it’s, you’re, you’re only as good as your team. And Clay brings a whole team to your team. Um, and anyways, are, we have a weekly meeting, our weekly meeting, we look at like, what are the key things that, that, impact us, it’s going to be signups, signups over cancels, what are those signups, which one’s upgraded to higher tier options, whether that’s membership, higher tier membership options, or whether that’s tearing up into higher services like fitness coaching, like one -on -one coaching or fitness training or nutrition coaching or group training.

But getting people into those things and understanding the scripts How to roleplay that over and over again, making sure your staff understands how to communicate effectively with the customer, roleplay, roleplay until that socially awkward, you know, young person can totally get it and they understand how to how to do it until the cognitive, the critical thinking face has gone away. They know how to do it. Now you’ve got staff that knows how to communicate well, how to show the product offering benefits over costs, and then show them that if you don’t do it, this is what won’t happen. And you want to show them that you’re going to really change their lives and save their life, add years to the life quality to your years by changing new habits. And when people see that value, you’ve got the right staff articulating it, you close a lot of deals, you upgrade things, and you change a lot of lives. Well, one thing, Clay, I think with the coaching is it’s been beneficial.

It’s kind of like you’re our blind side, blind spot coach. We, this is what we’ve created. There’s a lot of emotions attached to it. It’s what we love. It’s what feeds our family. And so we can become very emotionally charged.

And I think you’re super helpful to kind of bring us back in and go, Hey, like, so you kind of keep us focused, separating the emotions from it. And um, I’ve, I’ve heard a lot of people say to you, or, you know, in conversations we’ll have, and they’ll say, yeah, but you don’t understand landscaping. It’s not about understanding landscaping. We don’t talk fitness every week when we meet. Um, but it’s about, um, it’s, it’s the, it’s about business and it’s about where we’re going and you really help keep us on track.

There’s that accountability, like you talked about. Your set of eyes is super valuable. I’ll just say this. I mean, Colawfitness . com, if you’re looking for a career, folks, I’m telling you, check out Colawfitness . com.

Now, point number seven, sales conversion. We have to have scripts, recorded calls, one sheets, lead trackers. What? We need to have sales scripts, recorded calls, all the visuals in the store. We call that internal marketing. There’s external marketing, marketing to your ideal and likely buyers.

But internal marketing, letting your current gym members know that you offer personal training or group fitness. Box number eight, you have to have a sustainable customer acquisition cost. What? You have to know what does it cost you to land a new customer. Box number nine, you’ve got to create repeatable systems. When you clean the bathrooms every day, when you clean the showers every day, when you clean the locker rooms every day, when you clean the equipment every day, when you clean all these things multiple times a day, when you change the light bulbs every day, when you have to maintain your fitness equipment every day, when you have to hire people every day, you have to build repeatable systems or your head will explode.

You’ve got to have checklists and processes. Box number 11, you have to manage people. Manage people? What? This just in, we have to manage people. We’ve got to hire people, manage people.

How do you hire, inspire, train, retain? We have to do it. Box number 11, you have to be able to sustainable schedule. What is the schedule that your company will keep? What hours will you be open? What kind of shifts do you have?

What kind of org chart? Who’s in charge? Who isn’t? How do you deal with somebody that doesn’t want to follow the systems? Because this just in, a customer will fire you if you won’t fire your bad employees. In box number 12, you’ve got to have a high standard with the A players, the B players.

You’ve got to coach up the B players to become A players. You’ve got to coach up the A players to become future leaders. You’ve got to coach the C players out into another job or to the local bus station. You’ve got to get them out of your life or they will ruin your business. And then box number 13, you’ve got to make sure you’re making money.

It’s not about how much money you make, it’s about how much money you keep. Box number 14, you have to sit down every day and say, What does God want me to do? If every day is a gift, what does God want me to do? If every day is a gift from God, what does God want me to do with my faith, my family, my finances, my fitness, my friendship, my fun, my focused time? What does God want me to do with this day? That’s all these things we have to think about there.

And I’m telling you folks, everything we’re talking about on today’s show, it wouldn’t matter if Kola Fitness was not obsessed with wowing the customers. Charles Kola and Amber Kola are obsessed with helping you take your fitness to the next level. If you’re out there today and you are in doubt, Joplin, Missouri, you’re in Texas, you are in all the different markets they’re in. Go to colawfitness . com. You can see the markets they’re in.

I’m telling you, these guys are obsessed with wowing customers. So I’ll go to you, Amber, then I’ll go to you, Charles. Everything we talked about doesn’t work if you scam your customers. Everything we talked about doesn’t matter if you don’t wow your customers. Could you talk about why at the core, even though we’re going over all this business stuff, all these details, at the end of the day, you guys at Colaw Fitness have to wow the customers. Why is that so important, Amber?

Well, I think for us, it’s important because we love people and, um, everybody needs a belonging and worth and they need to feel, um, important and they need to feel cared for. And like, that’s our passion. We just love loving on people. That’s where, that’s what made Charles such a phenomenal trainer. When that was the initial, uh, start of the whole company, it was just his desire to help people and his love for them. And that was the same reason.

a million years ago that I did hair. So I think for us, that’s just what we’re passionate about. We’re passionate about people feeling like they are loved and they have value. And if we can pass that on through all of our front desk staff, if we can open more locations and bring in that many more people in these communities to feel loved, excuse me, and also spread the gospel at the same time, you know, let them know God loves you, you know, and so that that’s really what drives our passion in the coaching and development even of our staff. I’m Charles Cole. I got two final questions for you.

And your wife can one -up you. So here we go, two final questions. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. There’s somebody out there right now. They’re thinking about coming to one of our in -person workshops.

They know Tim Tebow’s going to be there. They know Eric Trump will be there. They know that you might be there. But maybe if they haven’t been to a workshop in the past, how would you describe the in -person, two -day interactive workshops? How would you describe them, sir? It’s just, it’s raw and real.

I mean, if you really want to try to get, if you really, really, really want to build a company, not just get like a, like if you go to school, you get a business degree, you, you know, they would say Clay’s program is, you know, business, business without the BS. There’s no bull crap. He tells you the proven system, real proven systems, that have grown and scaled hundreds, if not thousands of companies, add millions, like we are millions of dollars more in revenue because of these systems that we’ve implemented. And we’ve been able to scale and not have to actually work in the business. We work on the business, just the business system. So we can live in Florida.

We’re definitely engaged with our staff that runs these locations and they’re great lieutenants, but we have the systems, we have the checklist, we’ve got the workflows, and we have the systems that we can hold people to. We’ve retained the right talent we’ve got really people in the bullpen for every position so they were held hostage to happen to do that. But all that to say, it’s going, it’s funny. He’s very, very. I mean, Clay’s pretty much like a comedian. It’s hilarious to listen to.

If you’re willing to be coachable, if you’re willing to have a humble and coachable heart that’s willing to grow, he’ll show you proven processes. There’s going to be a pathway that you can be successful. And if you’re a diligent doer and you just do one or two action items every week with your coach, the whole thing is, it’s just being more of a marathoner than a sprinter. When you’re working with a coach, just do your two or three action items. And that two or three, If you times that by 52 weeks, that’s 150 next day. You got a way better website.

You got a way better lead funnel. You’ve got way better staff hired. You’ve got systems, checklists, workflows, all document created into mind -free templates, sales flows, training and development of staff, all that. So you got people in the bullpen for each position and you’re no longer being held hostage as an owner and you’ve got a proven system. So that’s Clay and his team. I’ll one up you.

I will one up him this one time. Like, there’s truly nothing more exciting than to come to the conference. And we’ve been to almost every conference you’ve had for the last seven to eight years. And it is completely refreshing. I always get something new out of it. It’s very practical.

You’re not sitting in this huge ballroom with speakers that you feel like are trying to sell you something and you’re trying to stay awake. That’s not the case at all. It’s kind of a circus. There’s a whole lot to take home. Even if you go to the conference and you decide, hey, this is not for me right now, or coaching is not for me, Hands down, you will leave with practical business application items. Final question I have for you guys, just like Colaw Fitness, I mean you put your name right there on the screen.

Colaw Fitness. You can’t really go to Thrivetimeshow . com without seeing my cranium. And so I take a lot of pride in what I do and wowing our customers. But for somebody out there, in particular, this guy today who’s in the construction space, who’s like, hey, what would coaching look like for me? Or is coaching for me?

He’s reaching out. Charles, what do you say? What kind of impact has the coaching that we’ve had with you guys over these past seven or eight years made on the impact or the success? Or what kind of impact has the coaching made on kohlawfitness . com? Well, I would say first off, personally, I’ve developed a great friendship with some really great people.

And I thought that’s been huge for me. That’s personally, and to know people that are in the same type of pressure that you have is running a company running a business to have people that have that are intelligent, and they care. As a friend, that is huge. That’s number one, personally, and then professionally, to have a whole bullpen of a whole whole data set of lots of different industries, best practices, whether that’s, you know, generally, it’s either a sales issue, like you don’t have enough sales, or then it’s a staffing issue, you don’t have the right staff, whether it’s a scaling it, how do I, you know, build this into a franchisable prototype, it’s all stuff that they’ve done over and over and over again. And to where you have like a cognitive dissonance, like a mental disease with understanding it, they don’t. And when you have somebody that gives you peace, because it is something they’ve done before, that’s it’s priceless.

So yeah, yeah. Oh, and I would say that You were talking about it hasn’t just affected us in our business, but it has affected us in our personal life, too, because all of these things that you learn can be rolled over into your personal life. Yeah. So that’s been huge. And like Charles was talking about the connections that we’ve made with other business owners. You know, Clay, you said at the very first conference we went to, your network is your net worth.

I mean, that is hands down. If you’re hanging out with people, the old friends that have unsuccessful businesses and you’re hanging out with the old people who are complaining about having to work an eight hour day, you know, if you’re spending your time with them and, you know, it’s just going to break the bank to go to Chili’s for dinner that you’re going to stay there. You’re going to stay in that influence of people. And every conference we meet new people and we’ve got some of the most awesome friends that own businesses across the country, from the cheesecake store to a pizza shop, right, to dog training, to, um, I mean, we’ve got, we’ve got some of our friends that live in cities that we have gyms and they’re members at our clubs. And it’s just, it’s so powerful.

It gives us a whole community to bounce ideas off of and get encouragement from. Charles, from an ROI perspective, if someone’s going to look at it and go, return on investment, I pay you $1 ,700 a month. Will I make more money than I’m paying you? How would you maybe tackle or how would you respond to what kind of return on investment have you seen for the $1 ,700 a month you’re paying? Well, for example, Clay has got, there’s no better business coach in the world that has the way he works, the way his mind works. But he’s also got a team of other business coaches that have worked in lots of different industries.

So he’s worked in every industry. His staff has worked in every industry. He’s got videographers, web designers. I mean, just for the fact of like, just the website alone is worth the $1 ,700. Just the ability to take any of their proven systems, whether that’s a marketing thing, or whether that’s a staffing thing, like one thing done in the month, it pays for itself. And then to understand this, there’s a part of where, you know, maybe some week you may be like, well, you know what?

I’m not getting a whole lot out of this call. But the bottom line is, it’s like when you read the Bible, there’s times you’re just reading it, and then you’re like, you know what? I really and then you read it that one time and it’s like God really speaks to your heart. And the whole truth is, is like there’s no way that you can get that kind of value for $1 ,700 to have a whole team of coaches. Graphic designers, web developers, anybody that has that type of knowledge, you know, in your back pocket. And then in the whole thing is run your business with being somewhat conservative.

Make sure you don’t run it to the edge all the time. But by doing that, you have that that skill set. You have that you have those. It’s tools on your tool belt. And I just think it’s just like, it’s just like the cost of doing business. Like, just, just understand it.

That’s a, that’s what you want. There’s a, there’s a, sometimes the payment we make, I feel like is peace of mind, even because there have been multiple times throughout the years that we will, we will either be butting heads on something. Um, we’re super confused about something. We’re fearful about something, something in the markets changed and it’s a quick call to clay. And so that quick call to Clay, and he’s outside the situation, and he has other data points. I mean, we’ve had times that, Clay, you’ve got a quick response, and you can tell us and direct us real quickly, and we’re right off the phone.

And there’s other times you’ll go, I’ll call you right back. And Clay will jump in, and he’ll call his other contacts and get back with us. Sometimes it takes longer. But there are times when you feel that way, when you’re like, Is this worth it? You know, I don’t feel like we’re doing much right now, or we’re not growing. Inevitably, something like that will come up.

And like, that’s our peace of mind. Like he’s, you’re like a crucial team player, you know? Well, you know, I it’s an honor to serve you guys. And for those watching right now, I encourage you if you’re looking for a career now, if you’re looking for a job, don’t fill out the form, but if you’re looking for a career, go to colawfitness . com. Because if you live in Washington,

Joplin, Missouri, Charles, Dallas, Texas, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Amber, we live in Topeka, Kansas. If If you’re out there, Arlington, if you’re out there, go to colawfitness . com if you’re looking for a career and not just a job. Thank you, too, for carving out time with your busy schedule. Oh, yeah. And I’m so glad to have you here today.

Thanks, Clay. Awesome. Take care, guys. Bye -bye. 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 build these proven 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 -ready -to -go product. 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.

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 loan it.

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

Transcribed with Cockatoo