Business Coach Clay Clark and Dr. Robert Zoeller: So what you do is in your mind, you fire them, and then you hire somebody, and then on your schedule, on your pace, at your convenience, you then let them know that they are no longer needed there, and there is it there is a magic phrase I use that saves hours of aggravation and hours of debate.
Clay Clark: But I want to talk to everybody who’s going to be fired about how they feel, about how I feel, and how they feel, and whether we did it right, and however they did it wrong, and what they feel about that, and how we all-
Robert Zoeller: How bad all the other employees are, and then why are they getting to do what they do, and they’ve got to be let go now, and all of-
Clay Clark: I want to have all those conversations as a young business coach.
Robert Zoeller: Oh, yeah, that drama, trauma, conversation.
Clay Clark: I want all those.
Robert Zoeller: Well, then you will not follow this advice I’m getting ready to give.
Clay Clark: That’s good. I’ll just tune out for a minute, eat some of Oklahoma Joe’s baked beans here. I’ll just stop being a business coach
Robert Zoeller: Hey, maybe you can find a soft pretzel over there at the bar or something.
Clay Clark: They’re all out.
Robert Zoeller: There out. Someone ate them all. You can get on the intercom system and make some random announcements.
Clay Clark: Over there, folks, we have a beautiful man on the microphone over there on the far left. Back to you.
Robert Zoeller: Okay, so what you say is this when you’re ready and the time is right because I promise you this, they will quit you and leave you when the time’s right for them, so you deal with it when the time is right for you. You’re the business owner. Remember, you come first. That’s a whole nother show. We’ll get into that another day.
Clay Clark: I’m ready. Just give it to me. I’m ready.
Robert Zoeller: You look at them and you say, “Things just aren’t working out. You’re fired. Leave.”
Clay Clark: But I don’t want to … I think I can change.
Robert Zoeller: Things just aren’t working out.
Clay Clark: I got the whole Michael Jackson [inaudible 00:34:29], you know, where I can make the change, you know, got the whole Man in the Mirror, you know?
Robert Zoeller: Oh, you use Michael Jackson. Now I got to take the bait.
Clay Clark: Yeah.
Robert Zoeller: Don’t take the bait because they’re going to want to know why, and then, all of the sudden, you’re telling them why. Now you’re debating it, and it wasn’t that bad, and they didn’t do that, and what are you talking about? They didn’t know that.
Vanessa Clark: And somehow they weasel into another chance then.
Jason Bailey: Right.
Robert Zoeller: Oh, yeah, and then pretty soon now you’ve got all the people you’ve fired are still working there, and you’re like, “Hey, what did I do?”
Vanessa Clark: What’s going on?
Clay Clark: And if you don’t do Dr. Z’s move, we have audio of what’s going to happen to your life if you don’t fire these people-
Robert Zoeller: Yeah, this is exactly what can happen. It’s verified.
Clay Clark: This is live audio from an office in Tulsa where people weren’t fired.
Audio Clip: Now you kids are probably saying to yourselves, “Hey, I’m going to go out, and I’m going to get the world by tail and wrap it around, and pull it down, and put it in my pocket.” Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re probably going to find out as you go out there that you’re not going to amount to jack squat.
Clay Clark: That was pretty intense audio there, you business coach you.
Jason Bailey: Yeah, that was great.
Robert Zoeller: It’s audio, yeah.
Clay Clark: I guess I should do the move. Now the next move, the next step, is you have to act. So once you’ve defined what you want your life to be, you’ve got to get to a point where you actually act, and I think that part is tough for people because you don’t know what I am about to tell you. So I’m going to give this notable quotable from a business coach to you. This is from Eric Ries. He is the founder of … He actually wrote this book called the Lean Startup. He used to be an advisor for Kleiner Perkins. Who’s Kleiner Perkins? They funded Square, Uber, Google, and this is his notable quotable. He gives this business coach advice: “We do everything wrong.” He’s referring to startup businesses.
“We do everything wrong. Instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash your computer. Yes, really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready, and we charge money for it, and after securing initial customers, we change the product constantly but much too fast by traditional standards, shipping new versions of our products dozens of times every single day.” Eric Ries. So he’s like … This is basically the behind the scenes of what happened with Uber. They were-
Robert Zoeller: Oh, yeah.
Clay Clark: Uber, just so we’re clear, he cold called taxi drivers and said, “Hey, would you be willing to use this system to stay booked all the time?” He called 10 people, and a couple of them are like, “Yeah, I’d be interested.” So then he made something that didn’t work, but he found out they would actually use it. They would try to. And he kept doing this and making it better, and better, and better, and this I the part … It’s frustrating because you know you have to go through this, and so Jason, I want to ask you this because … What states is DJ Connection now in? What states and what cities are you now in?
Jason Bailey: We’re in Tulsa. That was the easy one.
Clay Clark: Yeah.
Robert Zoeller: Okay.