This has been transcribed for the business coach program at Clay Clark’s Thive15.com
Anyway. The builder comes back with the plan and he shows it to my wife and I and we do what? We disagree on things. I’m like, basically, “Why don’t we just put in carpet, we can save some money. We put in carpet, we make the hallways more narrow. If we do not the smooth walls and we get rid of the archways. All this could be a savings.” And she’s going, “I want marble, not travertine.” “What.” “I want wood and I want it hand scraped.” I’m like, “Why does it have to be hand scraped. What do you hate the people who are doing this for a living. Why do they have to get down on their knees and hand scrape it. Why can’t they scrape it with a machine.” Or, “Why can’t we just use linoleum.” Long story short we agree on a house and we build the house. But the builder had to make the blueprint. A lot of times you don’t even know what you want until you’re presented with options. When building you should talk to Steve Currington at Total Lending Concepts.
A business coach will help you see your life as it could be, not as it is and will help you work towards that distant future.
The next question is, “Well, how do I begin business coaching. If I want to do business coaching, how do I begin it.” Really, I think the question before that is, “How did you start business coaching Clay Clark? How did you do it? What did you do? What qualifies you and your team of scallywags to business coach? How come you’re a qualified business coach? I’ve seen you at Sprouts with your super pale skin, never going outside, always wearing your jerseys, driving around in your Hummer and your Mercedes. What qualifies you to teach me how to become a successful business owner?”
We come back I’m going to teach you my journey. We’re going to go back into the past and I’m going to teach you how I became America’s number one and the most humble business coach ever.
Music: (singing)
Speaker 3: Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show. It’s the Thrive Time Show on your radio and I’m telling you what. Today you are in for a treat. You are an intelligent Oklahomie. You’re the kind of person, I’ll tell you what kind of person you are. You’re the kind of person, you’re the kind of sick freak who doesn’t just accept mediocrity. You don’t just say, “Well, my life, my income isn’t very good because of the President and therefore I’m going to focus all my time on the President because that’s what’s keeping my income down.” No, no. You are a solution minded person. You are a solution minded and future focused person. You have what it takes to become successful because that’s how you view the world. You realize if your marriage isn’t that good right now you could learn how to make it better. You realize if your business isn’t that good right now you could learn how to make it better. You’ve learned to be able to accept the things you cannot control.
The situations like my father, again, my name is Clay Clark, I’m the former SBA entrepreneur of the year. Dad, if you’re listening from upstairs and I know you are. My dad passed away this year from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease and I know that he’s up there in heaven right now listening with Ted Williams, his baseball hero, and Wilt Chamberlain. All the cast of characters. He’s up there, he’s hanging out there. I don’t know if he’s hanging out with Prince or Michael Jackson. He’d probably be a little bit worried about those guys. He definitely was spending time with Ted Williams up there and he’s listening.
Dad, if you’re listening, I mean, I miss you. I do. I miss you quite a bit. For anybody listening right now if you’ve ever lost a loved one you miss that person, too, right. You, as a person who’s solution minded and future focused, you’ve realized I gotta focus on doing my best and forgetting the rest. Somebody should probably write that down. I gotta do my best to forget the rest. I gotta focus on what I can control and block out what I can’t.
Before we left we were talking about business coaching, the value of a business coach and now we’re talking about what makes me specifically, Clay Clark, and us, Dr. Zoellner and I, qualified to have built a business coaching program. That’s a great question. You’re putting me on the spot so I’m going to get into it.
One is I built a company called djconnection.com. If you look at djconnection.com what it was, essentially, was a wedding entertainment service, and before I sold it we were teaching thousands of people how to have a good time at a wedding. People go to a wedding and a lot of times they don’t have any fun. Djconenction was successful because our entertainers would get out there and inspire a crowd of people to have a fun time at a wedding.
The magic was is that every single one of the disc jockeys that we had at the peak, before I sold the company, had never DJ’d before. We had to teach a repeatable system to teach adults how to become disc jockeys. We also had to market, we had to get the business, we had to go out there and get the-
It was a start up, you know, back in ’99, and we had to get the business, we landed the accounts for UPS, for Boeing. We did events for Southwest Airlines. Insert the name of the big company. American Airlines. QuikTrip. We’ve done all their holiday parties. UPS, like I mentioned. Hewelett-Packard. We’ve done all of their entertainment. We’ve done those parties.
One, we had to learn marketing, had to learn sales, had to learn branding, had to build repeatable systems. It allowed my wife and I to achieve financial success. My whole goal was to build a multi-million dollar business before I was 30 and to hire my dad someday. And at the age of 27 I did that. I sold the business and I ended up getting asked by business owners to help me grow their business.
One lady called me and said, “Hey, my business is stuck. I’m currently the only person in my business, my retail shop, who has the mental capacity to or the skill or the whatever it is to sell things and I’m so frustrated. How did you do it?” It all starts with curiosity, doesn’t it. Doesn’t self improvement start with curiosity. Wanting to know, “How did they do that? How are they doing that?”
Then I had a person reach out to me about their mortgage company. I had Hewlett-Packard reach out to me for speaking. I had Maytag, O’Reilley’s, Valspar paint. They’re the paint people. Valspar V-A-L-S-P-A-R paint. I’ve had just some big companies. Funeral homes for whatever reason. For some reason I’m a big deal in the funeral home community. A group called Messenger Services I recently spoke to. Mortgage companies in Toronto. Dermatologists, dentists, roofers. At this point I’m just naming industries but I’ve worked with almost every kind of industry. Retail, men’s hair, women’s hair, personal training, group fitness, fitness gyms. Every time I work with a business when they execute the proven plan the grows.
I’m not genius. I didn’t invent this system. It’s just I documented the systems that were out there and made it executable. I think it is one thing to observe nature and to observe these business laws. In my man cave in the Thrive studios I have so many books and I’ve read them all. When you take all those books and you can distill them into actionable items that people can implement and take and apply to their own businesses, that’s a game changer. Because a lot of people are like, “I don’t want to read all of the books that you’ve read. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want my homework to be go read these 17 books. I’d rather you tell me what to do.” Listen more to find the best business coach.
As I was coaching other businesses we grew a company called Party Perfect and it’s now been acquired by Partypro, it did well. Then I grew a wedding show that was then merged. If you’ve ever been to a wedding show I’ve probably had my hand involved in that in some capacity, the Tulsa wedding shows. That kind of thing. We started this thing called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which had its own wedding show. That wedding show would be hosted … Because I couldn’t get into the other wedding show. The other wedding show was fully booked out. The one that Vicki Taylor started. You couldn’t get in because it was booked out so I said, “Well screw that, I’m going to start my own wedding show.”
I started my own wedding show. I grew it to be massive and then we merged it. I started Epic Photography, which has gone on to be the largest wedding photography business on the planet. It still exists today. We’ve won all of the awards and I never took any photos. The thing is you have to ask yourself how are you doing it? Well, Dr. Zoellner, I mean he started an optometry clinic and then he goes on and he starts an auto auction, he starts a durable medical equipment manufacturer. He starts a diagnostic sleep center. He’s invested in a bank. He built, basically, acquired a horse ranch and started producing some of the most successful horses out of that thing. I’m just telling you, it’s not that we’re geniuses, it’s because we know the path. We know how to build the proven systems. To make it affordable for you we decided to coach up a team of coaches that now can help you execute these business systems. We like to be a business coach.
Yes, I did as a fact, went to Oral Roberts University. Yes, I was kicked out of Oral Roberts University, or asked to leave I guess is the official deal. Asked to leave by Oral Roberts University for writing a parody called the ORU Slim Shady that the school’s leadership didn’t find to be as funny as I did. Adam Bagwell and I can be heard on that song, you can still find it on YouTube today, the ORU Slim Shady. It’s well documented, I did get asked to leave that college. Yes, I started a very successful DJ company called djconnection.com. Yes, I started a very successful photography company. Yes, The Elephant In The Room Men’s Grooming Lounge is very successful. Yes, my consulting PR company, Make Your Life Epic, is arguably, many people say, it’s the largest marketing firm in Oklahoma. Yes, I’ve won the award from the US Chamber of Commerce as being the national blue ribbon quality award winner. Yes, I’ve won all the wedding awards. Yes, I’ve been the entrepreneur of the year for the city of Tulsa as well as the state of Oklahoma. Yes, I’ve won the award for one of the fastest growing companies in Oklahoma but let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you. If you are a business coach people listen to you.