The Empire State of Mind – The 4 Step Path to Building a Business That Produces Time and Financial Freedom

During this training America’s #1 business coach and the former U.S. SBA Entrepreneur of the Year teaches you about the 4 phases you must go through if you want to produce a business that can provide both time and financial freedom for you. He also discusses the dangers of creating a business that does not serve you and the feelings of emptiness that this can produce.

Get back inside your audio dojo of mojo it is the Thrive time business coach show. My name is Clay Clark and I am heavily hopped up on Dayquil today. I woke up this morning and for whatever reason I felt like those spring allergies are coming to get me.

And if you are maybe new to Oklahoma if you’ve ever experienced this before about half the state starts to have crazy allergies sinus issues. As soon as the spring gets here when the summer gets here and it has hit me and so because I am committed to being here on a daily basis with you the Thrive nation I have bought all of the dayquil  that they will sell me. I have ingested enough Dayquil to kill a small goat and today we have a great business coach radio show for you today we’re talking about the empire state of mind the mind that you would need the mindset you need to have if you wanted to build an empire in the world of business and specifically the four step path to financial freedom. Yes there is you know 72 things you need to do over here in 16 things you need to do here. But there is a four step path to financial freedom and I want to go through it here with you today. The first phase is the early phase where you’re basically searching for your first customers and you’re just scraping and clawing and hope hoping to make profitability. This is the first step and unfortunately according to Forbes eight out of 10 entrepreneurs don’t ever pass this this level this area. Basically they start a business because they have a big idea and they never actually move on to the idea of just trying to secure the initial customers. However the next step. Step number two is that is where you actually begin to build your core team.

Right you build your core team and you can escape the actual day to day workings of the business. And so as your business coach my focus is to make sure that you have a clearer understanding of where you are and then where you want to get to. So let’s start off with phase number one securing those early clients. Well what does that look like. Well one you definitely want to get your branding nailed down. You want to get your branding nailed down at this point you want to have awesome awesome print pieces you want to have awesome marketing you want to have great one sheets at your landing page to look great. You want everything to do that the customer season touches to be powerful to look high quality and the reason why is because people definitely will perceive you based upon the branding and in the absence of value you know price is the only consideration. So imagine going into Starbucks let’s say and let’s say Starbucks didn’t have great branding Let’s say you went in there and their signage looked like it was home grown home made let’s say that their logo looked like it was different from store to store each store had different logo. Let’s say their website wasn’t updated it didn’t look sharp. Well say that the actual pricing on the menu and the names of the beverages were not clearly defined and let’s say that every employee wore their own outfit. There was no universal uniform. Well what happened is is that you would begin to judge that brand that that business based upon the contextual clues that you have.

I mean that’s how we as a human race have been able to you know that God’s given us a gift to avoid danger by giving us this thing called discernment. Or maybe it’s a conscious conscience or maybe it’s it’s just the ability to sense that something’s not right. You know. So what you do is your fear defenses automatically go up. So give you an example. I typically wear a hoodie sweatshirt. You know I used to wear I used to wear blue suit and red tie and white shirt for like 16 years. That was my move. I always wore dress clothes. You know and this is before I started working as a business coach I mean I was I was always dressed up always dressed sharp because when you met me I wanted my first impression that you had of me to be that of somebody who’s credible who you wouldn’t mind doing business with well over time. One of my secret goals is I always wanted to wear a hoodie everyday. I thought the idea of someday just kind of going straight up. Bill Belichick the coach of the other the Patriots and just wearing a hoodie every day that’s sort of like my my Narnia. That’s sort of my heaven of apparel. I wanted to get into the the only zone. Well long story short let’s say that you came and you attended one of our workshops at the Riverwalk here in Jenks America. So you’re on the left coast of the river walk. You’ve been there all day and the workshop ends at about 3:00. They start at 7:00 a.m. until 3:00. By the way if you would learn more about it go to thrivetimeshow.com

They are the most comprehensive business coach experiences you could possibly have. There’s more, we teach you search engine marketing branding sales it’s all right there. But just say you go out to your car and when you go out to your car you say you know what I got some paperwork I’m going to come back in here I’m just going to stay late. So now you’re staying from three o’clock till about 11:00 o’clock and for some reason you get out there to the parking lot your car won’t start. Well let’s say that a guy in a suit with a bluish blue sweat suit in a red tie and a white shirt walks up to you and says hey we need some help. You would probably have the initial signs you would initially probably guess that this person is there to help you. They are safe. They’re going to help you and that’s probably how you would would would perceive that situation. Now let’s say that this same person approached you to help and they had a hoodie sweatshirt on and this is the night time 11:00 at night. They have the hood up over their head to keep warm or to keep out of the elements whatever. They have a hat pulled down low. They have baggy jeans. And what would be your initial impression. Well you’d probably be less accepting or less trusting of the the person trying to help you regardless of whether the person that great intentions or not and regardless of whether that person has the tools and the prerequisite things needed to help you get your car going.

So what happened is you would actually reject the messenger because of the branding. You would actually judge the book based on the cover. I see it all the time at the mall. Woodland Hills Mall you know Dr. Robert Zoellner has the massive optometry clinic located there and just on the 70 sorry 65th in memorial there that’s where his Dr. Robert Zoellner and Associates his eye care center is located. If you go inside the mall. There are certain guys that dress sort of you know dress to impress and there’s guys who dress sort of thuggish and it’s amazing to watch people in the mall. But people will react a certain way based upon the way the person dresses. Another example is whenever I am traveling on an airplane I’ll typically wear my hoodie sweatshirt and a warm or warm while wearing my baggy jeans. But I will also intentionally be trying to avoid conversations because I have a ton of work I want to get done on the plane right. So I’ll actually put my hood on the entire time that I am on the plane. It is amazing how few people will approach you and ask you questions when you are when you have the hood on your hoodie sweat shirt when you keep it up. It just shows that hey I’m antisocial. I’m trying to get paperwork done or whatever you might perceive me as. But it limited conversations. Now when I go on the plane and I’ve got a suit on and I have my tie on and I’ve got my white dress shirt. Man it’s like a conversation starter. People ask you hey what do you do.

And so maybe if you want to get business on an airplane maybe you should wear a suit and red tie and a white shirt maybe that will open up conversations for you and maybe if you’re wearing a hoodie sweatshirt right now and you wear when every single day and you don’t have a big enough business then maybe you need to start to you know change in your ear apparel a little bit. I want to give you a notable quotable from Elon Musk and Elon Musk is the guy who was most notable. He most notably started PayPal he started Tesla he started SpaceX he’s basically a guy who has gone on to have prolific success. He started Solar city and as a business coach I spent all my time studying these people. And Elon Musk had this notable quote Well he says Brand is just a perception. And perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead other times it will be behind but brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product. So that first phase as we’re talking about the empire state of mind and the four phases the four phases the four steps and the path to financial freedom. That first step is you want to secure your early clients and get to profitability. So one is you definitely want to get your brand knocked out of the brand is not solid. You don’t want to move on here OK. Also you want to get that three legged marketing stool going. Now the three legged marketing stool is the ways in which you go out there and acquire customers. How do you get your phone to ring.

So right now I’m working with an entrepreneur that’s a young couple and they’re great great people and they are in the construction business. In this first phase where we have their Web site built for them now it looks very sharp. We have their business cards made it looks great. We have the one sheet made we had everything that we need to have done in terms of branding. However now they have to come up with a way to secure our clients. We have to do this and as the business coach I’m showing them the proven path. So if you happen to be in the construction business I will give you the big three because I’ve done this with lots of contractors is one you would want to implement a system called the Dream one hundred two you’d want to implement the search engine optimization strategy that will get you right to the top of Google and 3 you want to add words retargeting ads and Facebook ads and you know repeat that if you’re taking notes if you are in the construction business you want to do the dream 100 too. You want to have a search engine optimization strategy being implemented to get to the top of Google. And three you want to have Facebook ads you want to have retargeting ads and you want to add word Jew and have all those those three legged marketing tools you want to have that all three legs running at the same time so that you can begin to acquire customers.

And if you don’t know how a search engine works it’s ok we can teach you at our next in-person workshop if you go to thrivetimeshow.com you can get your tickets and we’ll show you exactly how the search engine optimization strategy works. If you don’t know how to do that dream 100 will the dream 100 was a system that was developed by Chet Holmes and what happened was as Chet Holmes is a bestselling author and he actually was the former business partner of Charlie Munger and Charlie Munger by the way is Warren Buffett’s business partner. If you’re scoring at home Charlie Munger is actually worth one point four five billion dollars today so Charlie mugger’s do it. Well as Warren Buffett’s unsung hero don’t don’t feel bad that you haven’t heard the name Charlie Munger yet. Trust me Warren is taking care of his main man Charlie. But anyway he went to work for Charlie Munger and he distilled some of the marketing systems that he saw being implemented over and over again. And one of those systems is called The Dream. One hundred and it is documented in a book called The Ultimate sales machine. But I wanted to read to you a short excerpt from this book so you can kind of see the power of the dream 100 system. It says about 3 percent of buyers at any given time are buying now 7 percent of the population is open to the idea of buying the remaining 90 percent fall into one of these three equal categories the top third are not thinking about it the next third are I think that the next think they’re not interested in the final third are definitely not interested. So at this construction company they’re reaching out to their top 100 ideal and likely buyers the people that they want to sell to the most.

Knowing that about you know 90 percent 95 percent of people are going to reject him. But if they stay in touch they are eventually going to sell something to their ideal unlikely buyers and that in combination with search engine optimization with the Facebook ads with the retargeting and the ad words they’re eventually going to make their phone ring right when we come back we’re going to talk to you more about this phase one of growing a successful business that has the potential to create both time freedom and financial freedom for you and your family. Stay tuned to thrivetime Show on your radio during the break check out thrivetimeshow.com to learn more information about our next upcoming in-person two day workshop they were designed with you in mind. There are 15 hours of power week teach branding search engine marketing it’s a game changer too.

Thrive NATION. Welcome back to the Thrive time show on your radio. My name is Clay Clark and I am your host with the most. I’m America’s number one business coach and perhaps the most humble man in the city of Tulsa. I’m normally joined here with Dr. Robert Zoellner. But today he could not be here as he is out expanding his vast entrepreneurial empire. And as luck would have it. The allergies have hit me hard. So I’ve been taking dayquil copious amounts of dayquil so much dayquil that it would kill a tiny goat but I am here with you pushing through the pain and providing you with that business school without the B.S. experience that you can’t get any where else.
Today we are talking about the Empire State Of Mind. The four steps that you need to take to achieve financial freedom as a business owner. Step number 1 you have to secure those early clients and you’ve got to get to profitability as a business coach. I’m pleading with you you have to do this. You’ve got to find those early customers and you’ve got to reach profitability as soon as possible and just tuning in who wants to know will that’s great idea but how will I do it. Well that’s a great question. One you definitely have to get your branding on point you’ve got to get your branding looking world class. Elon Musk, We talked about them on the previous segment but he’s the guy who launched Pay-Pal Tesla Space-X Solar City. He says Brand is just a perception and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead. Other times it will be behind but brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product. So you’ve got to get that branding nailed down that’s the business cards. The Web sites the one sheets it I know it might be a little self-serving but yes we do that for clients but whether you use the 315 dot.com team to help you transform your business or you use somebody else. Just get that done as soon as possible. But now what you’re branding is done. You can have the most overhyped brand in the world but if you don’t sell something things are bad things are going to happen.
So what happens is you have to learn how to get those early customers to call you. And there’s three moves that I would recommend that you would implement right now if you’re a contractor. And a lot of contractors e-mail the show text into the show. E-mail us info at 3:15 dot Sovs to give you an example in the previous segment if you’re a contractor and you want to know well what are the three best ways to get customers. One is by implementing the dream 100 system which is simply you make a list of the 100 ideal unlikely buyers that you want to go after the one hundred ideal unlikely buyers that you want to earn their business. The referral sources that you want to go after as an example years ago I worked with a landscaper and on his dream 100 list he had a major major commercial account and he also had a home builder on his list and he was able to land both of them in to get all of those referrals with those referral sources weren’t just like one landscaping job at a time. Those were massive amounts of referrals. Years ago I worked with a guy who did home flipping it on his dream 100 list. He made a list of bankers because he wanted to be the first one who was notified about homes that the banks unfortunately had to reprocess because he knew that if a bank repossessed a property that they don’t want to hold that property too long they want to sell it and get it off the books.
And so he wanted to be the guy that could go in and look at these houses and help basically buy them from the bank and fix them up and sell them at a profit. And so he put on his dream 100 list a list of hundreds of different banking contacts. And sure enough he ended up landing the affection and the referrals of a certain bank in Tulsa and he had generated so many referrals from this bank that he was able to build a monstrous a very very successful company. So with the three legged marketing stool I suggested for the contractors was what you want to have a dream 100 to you want to have a search engine optimization regiment you want to have that in place because a lot of people want to get to the top of Google. They want to do that and they to view that as an event but it’s more of a process. And Google has built their search engine in a way that has design it’s been designed to keep scammers off of the rankings. So as a business coach when I sit down in the coach with a business and teach them how to grow their company one of the things that a lot of people tell me is they want to get to the top of Google but they don’t have really a concept of how that works. And so getting to the top of Google is a four step process a requirement for variables that will impact your overall Google score. So the first the first variable that will impact your Google score is the amount of content. So as an example for this radio show this shows typically it is a two hour show. And so if you are going to transcribe the entire show it would produce about 16 to 20000 words of original high quality content.
And so as a business coach I asked business owners Hey what are ways that you could add content to your website that would add value using existing documents documentation things you’ve already created in a lot of times they don’t have any original text.

But that’s what’s that’s what Google is looking for. So what they have to do is commit to a weekly process and that process could be doing a weekly podcast that they that they transcribe. It could be writing articles on their Web site every day. I mean if you google Tulsa insurance today Tulsa insurance would go out and pull pull out the Google pull out the Google of one. All right Google Tulsa insurance who comes up top. Well I’m seeing the Tulsa insurance guy I’m showing I’m sure that he comes up top in the organic search. Well why. Well because he has an incredible amount of content. I mean this guy has committed to writing content on a very consistent and faithful basis and I don’t know how long he’s been writing content. He’s not a client of mine. I could say if you google Tulsa cookies you can see a line of mine and that’s Barbie cookies. She’s top in Google. You can see right we’ve worked with there. If you google Tulsa basketball camps you can see a client we’ve worked with. If you google a lot of things in Tulsa you’re going to find Google if you google search Tulsa mortgages you’re going to find a client we’ve worked with. But that comes up top in the engine.
But if you google Tulsa insurance you get to find t

he Tulsa insurance guy and this dude has over two hundred and eighty nine pages of content. Right. The second thing that impacts your. And by the way you have at least a thousand words per page for it to count. Right. So figure out your process if you don’t know how to write content or you don’t even know where to start. Just book a ticket to our in-person thrive time workshop and we’ll answer your questions in one of the sessions and you can ask any questions you want after we can show you examples you can actually do. Kind of a many hands on tutorial will teach you. I promise that you will leave now empowered. Now the second variable that impacts your Google score is the number of reviews you have. So if you google thrive 15 and Jenks if you Google that there you can see reviews from people like you that have attended our actual in-person workshops. We have 134 people that have attended and wrote nice comments and we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of people come through but we had 134 people that have made the time to write a review about our business with the number of reviews that you have impacts your score fairly dramatically. So if you google Tulsa men’s haircuts that’s one of the companies I own. Bam you’ll find elephant in the room near the top and by the way your first haircut at the elephant in the room is always just a dollar. So get in there man. What do you do and why have you not been to the elephant in the room.
Men’s grooming lounge your first haircut is just a dollar and it’s a parafin hand. It’s a hot towel treatment. It’s a we have a beverage of choice for you. We’ve got the. But the Rustic barn decor and we’ve got the Edison bulbs. I don’t know why you haven’t been out there yet. I’ll tell you why we GMX been out there yet because we haven’t done it enough of a we haven’t had a good enough of a job of marketing the business yet because that’s the whole phase of the whole first phase the business is just marketing and branding. Generating customers we come back we’re going to teach you more about how to effectively market in brain your business state to thrive type show.

You will get back to be heavily inspired version of a thrivetime show on your radio.

My name is Clay Clark. I am your business coach. The former United States Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the year and the father of five human kids. You know this past weekend my wife and we celebrated our 16th anniversary. I that we’ve been together I’ve been tricking the same woman into staying married to me for 16 years so was it we were talking about the four phases of a business and the four phases you need to really grow a business. The first phase right the first phase you’ve been talking about is that early phase where you focus on the branding and how to acquire customers. Let me tell you what branding according to Ilan Musk branding is brand is just perception and a perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead. Other times it will be behind but brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product. I must be a branding expert if I’ve been able to trick my incredible wife. Mrs. Vanessa Clark is staying married to me for 16 years and if you go on Facebook and you look for Vanessa Clark or you find her on the Internet you type and now I see and Vanessa Clark you can find her in her book. It’s truly I assigned to my marketing skills. I mean I do I do pride myself on being one of the most humble people on the radio. But I really want to just say to myself Good job Self good good job with your marketing because there is just zero.

It doesn’t even make sense that I was able to attract her and to get my branding game up to a level that she would actually say yes to me some 16 years ago at TARP chapel in Broken Arrow. Now let’s assume drivers that you now have a system where you have great branding and you can acquire customers and you can operate at a profit. That’s what the first phase is all about branding marketing operating at a profit. Now you move on to phase two. This is that in that middle phase and there’s a business coach I know most business owners never move beyond phase one because according to Forbes 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs fail. Eight out of 10 entrepreneurs are failing. It doesn’t mean that they’re doing OK or just getting by. They are failing they go out of business. Eight out of 10 entrepreneurs. And that’s not good and that’s what this show is all about. That’s what the thrive 15 business coach experience is all about. That’s why we’ve built our two day interactive thrive time business coaching workshops. If you to thrive time showed up you can see them the next ones coming up here soon. You definitely want to get your tickets because everybody who’s attended the workshop has told me Man this was like a game changer for me and we have a scholarship available for you. So if for some reason you can’t afford it now you can go to thrive time showed up book your tickets and we’ll make it happen. We will help you learn how to do that.

Next we’ll dive deep into this phase two but today because it’s a radio show I can go super deep and go as deep as I can get on to phase two. So build your core and you want to escape the the self-employment kind of death trap here as an example you’re really good at plumbing. Let’s say you’re a very good plumber. People call you step one. You have good branding good marketing people call you when they need plumbing. So now you are getting customers. You don’t want to stay there though you don’t want to you know be clean and toilets the rest of your life. There’s nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. I mean I used to work at Applebee’s I worked at Target I worked at DirecTV. I’ve done every kind of job I’ve done construction. Have to start somewhere. You can’t be too awesome to be willing to. You know you can’t have that ego to the level where you are not going to start and do what it takes to be successful. But also you can’t have the mindset where you just are staying in that trap of really just creating your own job. So you’re self-employed you have a job but you’re self-employed but you don’t you don’t own the business the business owns you. So Phase 2 is where you begin to build systems so that other people can do the job and the systems must be very very detailed. So I’m just going to go with the plumbing example. But if you’re a plumber you’d want to make a checklist for how you leave every job site. I’ve worked with a lot of plumbers helped them do this. You want to have a a checklist for how you leave every job site very detailed you know.

This is what we did. This is what we’re this is how much is going to be. And then we check off the box that we did leave the job site clean that we didn’t collect payment from the customer that we did show up at this time we did leave at that time. But you’d want to have a job checklist a job site checklist and if they can what’s common sense I don’t know I need a checklist I mean I’ve been doing this for 20 years why do I do that checklist I mean what kind of person would need a checklist. Well I will tell you once you start hiring people you’re going to find that the majority of people that you hire they’re not going to be mentally engaged at the job. And so this is a thing that I think people don’t understand OK. But there’s a thing called employee engagement. And I’ll give you a second to Google if you want. It’s employee engagement. And Gallup did research on this in what Gallup found is that the average employee is not engaged in work. OK. So what does that mean. That means that the average employee is not thinking deeply on their job when they’re doing it as an example I went in to grab a coffee the other morning at a local convenience store. Not a quick trip. This actually happened by the way. I go in and the guy’s got headphones on. You know he’s listening to headphones and at no point does he recognize that I am in fact there. So he just keeps on doing what he’s doing.

He doesn’t stop and say hello. He doesn’t say hey can I help you. He just has headphones on and he’s probably you know cleaning up the coffee machine and it ended in his defense. It’s like 3:00 a.m. It’s you know but it’s not the level of engagement you would find at quick trip. I mean a quick trip because people are on it you walk in. The buzzer goes off and they say hey it will be a quick trip how can I help you. I mean they’re on it. But the average employee is not engaged. So as you’re building these systems this phase two when you want to do is you want to build the systems so that your business is entirely dependent upon systems and not people. OK so one is you want to document everything the second aspect of this is after you document everything you want to make sure that the presentation layer is solid. So you need to have a training video for almost everything or you want to have some sort of visual graphic for everything you want to make it easy for anybody that you hire to know what to do quickly. You don’t want it to be a thing where the new person you just hired has to search around everywhere to try to find the information they need to do their job. Well you really really want to document everything and you want to make sure. Point number two that the presentation is very solid.

If you don’t do this though if every time you hire somebody they are unable to do the job well and you decide you know what if you want it on your site if you want it done right you got to do it yourself.

I see entrepreneurs all the time saying that well if you want to have it done right you know you’ve got to do it yourself because you don’t do it. No one is going to do it yourself. You know like years you just get to do everything that you’re going to do yourself. And if you don’t your business is going to fail.

Well if you believe that if you buy into that concept that you must do everything then you are never going to build time freedom and financial freedom and a lot of times it’s just you don’t know where to start. You don’t even know how do I even begin making a repeatable process because for you so many things are common sense for you so many things are just normal. This is what you do every day. Well as a business coach that’s all I do every I spend my time in I yes I own my own companies but my spend my entire day even in my own business as I spent all my time working on the business and not in the business. So an elephant in the room or men’s grooming lounge. I don’t cut hair. You know. But I help build the systems that allow art. You are wonderfully talented stylists and grooming professionals to cut your hair in a way that generates great reviews. So I encourage you though I encourage you thrive nation. If you are in that level where you have the business come in and you have some money come in you have some customers coming in please begin scheduling time to work on your business and not just in your business so we come back I’m going to talk about how you can find time to work on your business and not just in your business.

We’ll come back to the Thrive time show on your radio out there who’s been searching for a business coach. Sort of a business. Yoda if you will to help you grow your business. While I may not be your Yoda but I am your broda and I am from Minnesota. My name is Clark and the former SBA Entrepreneur of the year sent here to help you get into a great financial position.

Typically I’m joined here in the Thrive time business coach show with Dr. Robert Zoellner but he is actually out today expanding his vast entrepreneurial Empire and as luck would have it on the day that he is gone I am just being smashed just destroyed. Have you ever been just destroyed by allergies. I mean where you wake up and you’re just is very good. I mean that’s about where I’m at. And so what I decided to do is I decided I’m going to take so much day quilt that I’m going to rebuke the negative waves from the technically speaking medically speaking and rejecting the negative waves of our GI’s by slamming copious amounts of day quill. And I feel creative. We’ll just leave it at that. You shouldn’t operate a motor vehicle when you have that much Day. Well but you can do a radio show and so here I am. Today we’re talking about is why most small businesses don’t work in really at the end of the day what you can do about it. And so we’re teaching you the four steps that you need to go through in order to create financial freedom in your own life. So phase number one is you must secure early clients you’ve got to get the clients and you’ve got to make a profit. How do you do it. We can teach you very in-depth at our next in-person workshop how to do this but it really comes down to the branding. You’ve just got to nail down your branding right away your business cards your logo your website everything has to be solid.

Then you have to figure out your marketing. You’ve got to come up with a turnkey three legged marketing stool to generate customers. And when I say turn key it cannot be person dependent. You can’t just have one person on your staff who is the unicorn. You know a lot of people they hire somebody and they just watch the person put on a laser show. Sales are coming in all the time. What do they do in that unicorn is generating sales and you don’t know how they’re doing it. You have no clue how they’re doing it so you pull him aside one day and maybe maybe get curious one day and you say Greg how are you generating sales. And Greg says you know offer me SALES I’m more like oh Gannett you know I just why do I go out here. And then boom. Next thing you know I got a deal and I got another deal. I mean I generate customers all day. I mean some people have a restaurant and you see a manager who just very very effective. The other day for my anniversary we had to celebrate our 16th anniversary as a Clark if you’re listening you are a great American. Thank you for marrying me. But we went to Russos Rousseau’s is a restaurant there at ninety first and Heyl and their manager is the man he’s the man. I mean he makes that place happen he does such a good job. Very impressed with the manager over there Rousseau’s. But the thing is if you took that manager out of that business. It’s a franchise. And so he executes the system well.

But the idea of building a systems dependent business would be that if you took him out of the business and I wouldn’t want to do it and I’m sure he wouldn’t want to do it either. But that the business should still be able to run without him. And the best example I could think about is the New England Patriots and I know that I talked about them all the time on the show and I know that I’m obsessed with them but I just want to give you an example of what I mean here. So the Patriots every year they do the same thing. What they do is they go out there and they trade away their draft picks for you know basically proven players. They want a guy like his third year who is a proven player as opposed to rookies. And if they don’t get a rookie they want rookies that are very intelligent and people they can plug into their system. To quote Bill Belichick they’re looking for good football players. They’re not out there looking for tons of potential and who could be the best. They’re just looking for guys who are good who can actually execute the system. So I’m going to read to you some of the recent transactions that they’ve picked up and you tell me if you know who these people are so Connor McDermott they just got this guy they drafted him in the sixth round from UCLA. He’s 305 pounds. He’s six foot eight.

Well he also by the way thrivers He also was a Mr. Basketball which means that he was the best high school basketball player in his state or one of the best high school basketball players in his state. And now it’s just scary. The guy is 300 in the 300 again 300 and we pull it up here pulling up the stats here. There we go. He’s three or five pounds and he’s six foot eight and they just drafted him to be an offensive lineman to protect Tom Brady and every year they keep doing it. They’ve drafted guys who were they drafted a guy years ago who was a wrestler at the college level they brought him in and he became an unbelievable offensive lineman. But the thing is they have a system and they know what they’re looking for and so every year year after year for 15 years in a row the team just keeps on winning because they’ve built a system they’ve built a culture they’ve built a process for winning and that’s what’s allowed them to be successful year in year out. I mean there’s been years where Brady was hurt and Matt Cassel comes at some random quarterback who actually had not played any downs don’t you know that. But Matt Cassel had not played any downs in college. He never played a college down. He was on a college team but he was the backup the entire time. He comes in it puts on a laser show and they still have a great year. And then last year Tom Brady gets hurt again. They bring in Grapel. Who the heck is Grapel below. Well they’ll grab was the guy that everybody’s trying to get. All these NFL teams are going out. You’ve got to get Grapel.

We’ve got to get this guy he’s a top. He’s a top level dude. Well that’s what happened with Matt Cassel. People are just salivating. The NFL general managers are just salivating over over bringing in Matt Cassel. It’s just unbelievable how the Patriots have had success year after year after year and they do this because they have a system in the system means that it’s dependent upon the system not the individual players. If you do not do this you are going to be stuck in the self-employment trap whereas if you have a job and you’re the only one who knows how to do the job. And so now you have to work all of the time at that job. You’ve created a job that not only that no one else can do because you save your invoices over here and you have your checklist over there and 90 percent of it’s trapped in your head right. You want to get it out of your head and put it on systems instead. And if you’re stuck with it you don’t know how to do that. If you don’t know how to work on the business or you can’t find time to do it. Well let me tell you when Bill Belichick watches film that guys the first guy at the stadium like every day he’s in that Torrijos for being the last guy out the first guy and he watches the game film. He breaks it down like a science and that’s when he does it. I would say the good news though for you is you’re not running an NFL team you’re running a business. And so once you build the systems you get your time freedom back.

And so I would recommend for every coaching client I work with every single business coach client I work with I tell them this and to tell you the same thing. You’ve got to block out time to do this. So for me I find between 3:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. is an unbelievably great time on a weekend to get ahead and to work on the business because my kids aren’t up yet. My wife doesn’t miss me at that point. It’s a move it’s a move. This past weekend we were doing some major major search engine updates there. The thrive15.com world headquarters as we’re putting out copious amounts of business coach content and we got there at 1 a.m.. There was a team of Robert and Eric and Devin and myself and Jonathan Kelly and Steve Curringtom even showed up there but we were there from 1 a.m. until noon. Well guess what. No one misses us at 1 a.m.. I mean it we’re we’re up early yeah we missed some sleep but we got it done. And so if you want to escape the self-employment trap where if you get sick and all of you get sick at all. Everything is going to crash. I mean if you’re if you’re gone for a week and you can’t go on a vacation because you’re the only one who knows how to do anything and you’re worried that if you get sick no one can do the job if you if it if. God forbid if one employee quits your whole business falls apart because only one person on your team knows how to do sales.

If one lady stops working one guy starts working now. No one knows what the customer files are. If one cabinet installer puts in his two week notice now you can’t deliver the product if that’s you. We need to move beyond that. We don’t want to be self-employed and be trapped there. We want to build a system. We want to be the owner of our business. We don’t want our business to own us. And so the two action items I would encourage you to take is one go to thrive time showed up and schedule your free assessment during the assessment we’re going to help you figure out the biggest limiting factors and show you where to start and show you the proven process to success. That’s what a business coach does. And Step number two I would encourage you to go to Thrivetime showed up and book your tickets for your next in-person workshop. It’s so easy to build a scalable business if you know how to attract customers and sell things at a profit. It’s so easy we can help you do it. I promise that you can do it. Now phase three this is a great place to be and this is where the business is entirely reliant upon systems. And you’ve begun to establish a core management team people that have your values your philosophies and they can execute the system. My friend you have what it takes to start a successful company or to grow one.

But many of you have been waiting for a sign maybe even a bad well that’s you you just heard it this is your google this. Check it out source one 18:24. This is the day the Lord has made we will rejoice and be glad in it. You have what it takes. You have the air in your lungs to get it done. And now it is on you it’s incumbent on you to take the action. I encourage you to be a doer and not intend for in the start that business because once you have time freedom and financial freedom everything changes. You get to be the person you want it to be you to do the things you wanted to do. You get to go to Atwood’s for two hours and talk to people about chickens raising chickens. Nothing I’ve ever done that you could burn Pelion wood all day.

Today we are talking about the specific four steps that you need to go through. We were talking about a four step path to financial freedom really having that empire state of mind needed to grow beyond just creating a job. Because one it feels so rewarding when you create your own business when you have this idea. When you see a niche when you see a need. I remember I met a lady years ago. She has a company called Sweet bottom cookies and yes this story does tie into a Patriots story but I like the story and I like the patriot so I’m going to tell it to you now. So what happened is I ran into her at a speaking event when I was in South Carolina was in Charleston South Carolina. And her name was Michel Louis and eat a chance to google search a sweet bottom cookies. And Michel Louis checked that out in your humble business coach clay Clark. You can find the story that was covered in the multiyear news by the way in o u l t e Aiyar multi-hour. And so she had this vision she had this idea that she wanted to grow her cookie company her cookie empire. She had this empire state of mind. She knew that she wanted to do this. And so at the end of the conference I was I was invited to speak by the local Chamber of Commerce.

She invited me to kind of connect with her during the lunch time or no no I’m sorry she asked my wife a question or somehow my wife connected with her the next thing you know my wife invited her to lunch. So we’re having lunch. My wife and I and this lady Michelle. Well Michelle has a great product. All right. So she has that choose phase one at this point. She had a great product in phase one is where you have a great product but you need to help. You need to get the branding tightened up and you need to get the selling going. You need to get the selling systems. And so I sat down with her and discovered she was at Phase One. We talked to her a lot about branding and the action steps she needed to take. And to her credit she’d already nailed down a lot of the aspects of branding she just needed some refinement. And then the next step as she began to execute her marketing systems and she is the dream 100. Internet marketing whatever. Long story short I’m at a Patriots game to watch the New England Patriots play versus the Washington Redskins. And this is for my birthday a couple of years back my wife bought me tickets so we’re in New England to watch the Redskins play versus Tom Brady. And it was it was epic. It was awesome. And I was loving it because that the Patriots fans are interesting people and that they have merged their patriotism and their love for America with their love of their football team. So they almost view it the fans.

They’re typically almost viewed as though you are not an American if you don’t recognize the Patriots as America’s team because their team is in fact named after our country it’s it’s a patriotic team the team is called the Patriots. And so at the game I mean when the when the offense on the Redskins gets out there I mean it’s just intense.

I mean the the crowd’s just yelling they yell such encouraging things as come out Redskins you guys freaking out terrible You have got to behave. And I’m talking about not just like a little bit of boo but like a massive boo like it’s almost like our defense was being carried by the power of those boos. There are tremendous boos it was like the the wind was at our backs and all the players needed to do was just go onto the field and the boos where they’re booing the other team are so loud that our team had had that momentum it was unbelievable.

What do we get we go to the game and things are going well with one guy on the team gets hurt. Dion Lewis got hurt during that game. He’s a really fast running back who can elude tacklers and he’s not yet another member of the Bill Belichick team. The make and model of a patriot because they built this they built a system by the way the Patriots have built a system where every year there’s new players the roster changes quite a bit every year but yet they just keep on winning. Newt noop you don’t even know who the players are every year every year just random players and all they do is they go after high character people that are coachable. They put them on the field and they win. So long story short Deion Lewis gets hurt and I’m saying man I’m I am thirsty. I would like to go get a beverage so I go upstairs. But I got me great seats were sitting right there I mean right near the field. It was awesome. But the 50 yard line maybe 45 yard line. So I go up to get to get my beverage and I get in line and this line is epic because it’s at a Patriots game and it’s just there’s you know 80000 people or whatever Gillette Stadium host holds 60000 people let me see here. Gillette Gillette Stadium by the way sits just outside outside of Boston in a town called Foxboro. And so it’s not actually in in Boston like a lot of people think it is. You have to drive.

It’s almost like you’re driving out to Bixby from Oklahoma City to watch a game it’s almost like there’s a big city like Oklahoma City or Tulsa and you have to drive out to a city like Bixby or maybe Lynard to go see the team because they they play outside. They’re based in that rural community called Foxboro. Yes there are sixty six thousand eight hundred and twenty nine people is the capacity. So I go up there to the concession stand and this was but I mean I met I met Michelle I think in 2013 and as a business coach I’ve coached so many businesses all over the world. I mean that’s what I do. And you said what he a MRL business coach. What do you do that the next day business coach I mean that’s what I do. Right that’s all I do. So I go up there and I go to order a beverage and guess who’s cookies are available to purchase at Gillette Stadium and many other stadiums all around the world. It’s sweet bottom cookies. That’s Michelle loise right there. So it was exciting it took a picture of it. Saved it for the archives. My wife put up on Facebook or I put it up on Facebook. We celebrated it. We are so pumped up for her. I called her and things are going great so if you’re in that first phase where you are just struggling to get clients really you need to get out to our next in person drivetime workshop and we’re going to help you with your branding and you’ve got to focus on getting those initial sales and generating those customers.

Now the next step though is where you now want to build those systems so that the company is built based upon systems and you can avoid that self-employment employment trap. And when I say systems I’m talking about pre-written emails call scripts checklists I’m talking about detailed operations manuals handbooks. The whole deal. And we have a big checklist that we can give you at our next in-person workshop at thrivetime show. Get your tickets tickets. Get your tickets. And then the next the next level phase three is this is where you want to become system reliant if you want to establish your core management team. So if you go up to thrive15.com or are you going to thrive time showed up and you kind of check out our team. You’ll notice that we are just like the Patriots We have some people that come and go. People that leave. But at the end of the day I’m not going anywhere right in the business is built upon the systems and we have great people that we hire to run and manage those systems. And so one of our key players is Jon. He executes the systems on a daily basis because he has the same values that I do. He believes that it’s a problem if something doesn’t start exactly on time. He is obsessed with naming files correctly. He is irritated with casualness. He wants excellence and why does he want excellence. Either he has OCD or he’s just obsessed with coaching businesses to be successful and he wants our business to be successful.

So he’s a guy whereas a business coach I don’t have to coach him about the details of file nomenclature of accuracy of saving. He is a guy who fits the make and model of a Clay Clark team mate. Thus he’s a guy who fits the squad who fits the make and model we’re looking for. And now when I’m out of town I can delegate the systems to him and things don’t fall apart. And again that’s because we are systems reliant and we have established a core management team. So if you’re struggling to establish a core management team what you need to do is you need to begin this process called the group interview. Now the group interview is a system that I came up with met with years ago. It was so great. He loves the group interview it’s a move because what happens is in every business you’re looking for talented people and there’s a lot of people out there that are not the right fit and the only way you can figure out who is the right fit and is not the right fit is by meeting these people. So what you do is you want to do a weekly job post on Craigslist. All good what you can write this down. Craigslist indeed and monster.com. Every week every week every week you post the job and when you post a job a certain number of candidates are going to respond to the job the job posts.

However according to the U.S. Chamber and the CBS news story that you can read seventy five percent of employees steal at work in over six out of 10 people lie on their resume so you don’t want to waste your time spending all of your time and energy reading every single resume what you want to do what you want to respond with. Hey I like your resume. I’d like to set up a time to meet with you this Tuesday at 5:00 and you like the resume because you received the resume don’t read the resume do not read the resume do not read the resume. And then when you what happens is when you set up the group interview the Who are the geniuses will show up on time. And so the last two weeks I’m just giving examples. We’ve been doing group interviews for 18 years but the last two weeks we did a group interview in one crop came to mind I’m thinking look at this to be a great crop somebody told me we have all our youth students coming some to new graduates coming and then we had a total of 25 people or 23 people who would RSVP and said they were going to come to the interview at 5 o’clock at the Thrive 15 .com world headquarters and of those 23 people how many would you guess that actually showed up. No. Don’t be cynical and super negative. But how many do you speculate showed up for a job interview on time. And by the way is it important to you as an owner if people show up on time or not. I don’t know. Maybe maybe you are the most casual man in the world and you have some business model that’s going to work on island time and maybe have a bar in a Caribbean town where being on time doesn’t matter too much.

But for America on the continental contiguous United States typically being on time being prompt is a valued attribute in virtue. So how many of these 23 do you speculate showed up on time. Yes is it a guess. OK. Three Three. Three people showed up on time for the interviews of these three people. How many of them do you think were attentive that actually paid attention and had the skills that we were looking for for that particular job. No they stated on their resume that they had the skills. Oh yes. But how many of them actually paid attention during the interview and actually could do what they said they could do on the resume.

I remember last year as I say last year a lot but it really was two years ago. I’m 36. I’m getting just old enough where everything seems like it was last year but it was really two years ago. We had a coder who applied for a job who had a master’s degree in computer science from a major major school in Pennsylvania from Penn. Penn State what it was. Yes it was Penn State. He had a degree in advanced computer science and he had like a masters and he was working on like you know just all these different I mean just every kind of degree you could have every kind of major and minor and all that he sends in his resume and and so he had a great phone interview with the guy and so we decided we’re going to fly him out to Tulsa to see if he can actually do what he says that he can do. You know we’re going to see if he actually can in fact code because he says he wants to be a coder for us and in one of the key things you have to do if you’re a coder at threat of income is it to build a code. We brought him out and he couldn’t code it. The guy could not code. But one thing he couldn’t do was code he could fly here. Oh yes. He could talk on the phone yes he could write a resume that was fictitious but he could not code. And why is that. Because most people learn by doing and not just by memorization.

And the whole school system is predicated on memorization. Look it’s really he can memorize everything. Let’s give him an A. Look here comes Karl. He struggles to memorize. Let’s give him a C. But the world of the of entrepreneurship but the real workplace. It’s about what you can do NOT based on what you say you can do. Now we come back we’re going to talk about how you assimilate new people onto your team and how you begin to prune the tree and develop a world class management team in our quest to help you become very successful and to potentially become a billionaire.

My name is Clay Clark and I’m heavily influenced by dayquill today. You know I asked the guys on my team. I woke up this morning feeling like the allergies the allergy plague had taken over my cranium you know when you have such a sinus congestion where if you if you look down or you begin to to bend over to pick something over to try to pick something up the pain begins to rush to your in the middle of your head is epic that there’s just that pain between the eyes that makes the man cry. It’s unbelievable and so I realized that you the listener need to have a quality broadcast today and I also realize that Dr. Robert Zoellner is geographically not with us here today. He’s out expanding his vast entrepreneurial empire. So I look to the left I look to the right and I realize that as your business coach I needed to do the only thing that I could do and that is to take as much dayquil as humanly possible. So you can’t you shouldn’t operate a motor vehicle when you’ve had this much dayquil you shouldn’t feed this much day to a goat because you would kill it. But if I take the dayquil it just increases my creativity by 2 percent. And here I am with you the Raging Bull of entrepreneurship. No amount of dayquil can hold me down and I am here. Today we are talking about before steps to building a successful business.

The four phases of building a successful business that first phase. Ah I hate the first phase somebody like the first phase but I hate the first phase the first phase is branding marketing trying to generate customers. I hate it when you see somebody out there trying to generate customers and they’ve been doing it for like a decade and they haven’t had any success yet. I hate that part. I love it when we help them have success. But I hate that when you meet somebody perhaps that to you. You’ve been working for years on your new idea. You have a great tasting product and all you want to do is sell it so that you can make copious amounts of money and you just are struggling. If that’s you get over to what thrive time workshop it’s drivetime show dotcom. It’s a game changing event. If you go on google and read the reviews don’t even listen to what I’m saying. Read the reviews. I’m trying to sell you something. Read the reviews. Come on. Read the reviews. Check it out it’s the drivetime show workshops. It’s going to change the game for you if you’ve struggled to sell. Step two you’ve got to build your core systems that once you start selling something you’ve got to build the systems that are going to allow other people to do the job. Because if you don’t do that you’re always going to be stuck in if you get that self-employment trap where you’re always stuck.

You can’t go on vacations you can’t go on holidays and no matter how much money that you have you’re not going to have time freedom and so I’m going to cue up a song for you in just a minute. I played a little bit of a cup of that earlier but it’s called billionaire by Bruno Mars. Bruno Mars is a man that I as a business coach. I study success stories and he is a guy who grew up homeless. If you don’t know that Bruno Mars actually grew up homeless and he has gone on to become a multimillionaire and a mega star he’s battled with his own demons and who hasn’t. But Bruno Mars is the guy who wrote a song called billionaire really I think if you listen to the song billionaire that we all say Oh I’d love to be a billionaire but I would ask you today why. Why would you want to become a billionaire. I mean what would be if you had all the money in the world and you had all the time freedom in the world what would you do with it. Wait a minute. See I screwed up that question because I just said to you if you had all the money in the world and all the time in the world you don’t realize once you have all the money in the world if you don’t have systems in place then you’re not going to have all the time in the world to even enjoy it. So even after you’ve earned the money you won’t have the time needed to do it. So let me ask you this. Is it possible that exceptionally good business owners know something that you don’t know.

Is it possible that people who have been able to build big brands that are very successful that are growing that they have multiple locations they have businesses that are thriving. Is it possible that people who are growing a successful company and who now have created time freedom that these people maybe know something that you don’t know. Because if that is true and it’s not just luck in the caste system and your your bloodline. If we really do believe that America is the world of opportunity and you truly have a choice as to where you’re going to go with your life and what you’re going to do and that you can determine the level of success that you’re going to have if you truly do believe that then you need to think deeply. I’m going to cue up the song billionaire by Bruno Mars. I’d like you to write down all of the things that you would be doing if you had all the financial freedom and the time freedom.

Why would you want to buy a bunch of things if you have the money. I wanna be on the Forbes magazine.

You want to do that is my next to Oprah and queen. Do you want to hang out with Oprah. Get what you want.

Every time I close my eyes what would you do if you had all the money you needed.

Same name and châtelaine. Why would you want your name in lights. It’s a sad day. At. Best. For. You.

Why would you want to become a billionaire. I mean the question I have for you is is it if you earned a lot of money because in America by default if you ask somebody what do you want to do. Most people that I’ve met say I want to become successful and I think that’s a noble goal. I’m not a communist I’m glad you want to become successful. But but why. I mean why would you actually want to become successful and what a successful look like. Well to me success means you have time freedom and financial freedom. That means that you have the time freedom to enjoy the money you’ve earned. Right because the money is just a unit of time. You could use the money to pay someone to mow the lawn for you you could use the money to pay someone to run the business for you. You could use the money to do a lot of things so that you could focus on doing what you want to do. So the idea of success without a focus on achieving both time freedom and financial freedom to me makes zero sense. I don’t understand why someone would just want to have financial success and not have time freedom. I’m going to walk you through Bruno Mars a song and what he’s talking about OK. So he says I want to be on the cover of Forbes magazine. Now I’ve been on Forbes magazine. Thrive15 has been featured in Forbes.

And if you google thrive15 Forbes you’ll learn more about our business coach program right there on Forbes has been in Forbes twice actually I’ve been in Fast Company I’ve been featured in Bloomberg. Well when you go to these media interviews one for Bloomberg they made me wear a bunch of makeup had makeup on my face I don’t ever mean people who meet me I don’t think anybody who’s ever met me has thought wow that guy looks like he’s wearing makeup. I mean I’m I’m I’m a man bear pig. I don’t wear makeup. But Bloomberg makes you wear makeup. Then you have to go to New York City. Then you’re not allowed to take photos with your kids inside. Bloomberg for security reasons and just on and on. I don’t know if you want to be on the cover of a magazine maybe you do. Right. And then you talk about you want to smile next to Oprah and The Queen. I mean maybe maybe you want to hang out with the real live rich rich and famous or maybe you just want to spend more time with your kids. You know maybe you just want to spend more time with your wife. You know maybe you have a limited time on the planet Earth. And maybe what you want to do is just spend more time with the people that you care about pursuing the lifestyle that you want to live. Maybe you want to become a lifestyle entrepreneur. And if that’s what you’re looking for if you’re looking to create both time freedom and financial freedom that’s what we’re talking about. That’s why this third level is so important.

You have to surround yourself with a team of people who could become your core management team if you don’t want to do that. You’re going to end up making a lot of money and having no financial freedom.

if you have started at the bottom and you have still found yourself at the bottom or maybe you started at the bottom but you’ve worked your way to the top. But you now feel like it’s the bottom. This is the show for you. And this next phase we’re talking today we’re talking about the Empire State Of Mind. The four step path to financial freedom. Step one you got to get that branding. You’ve got to get that selling though selling systems you’ve got to learn to sell something at a profit. Step two you’ve got to build your core system. You do not want to get locked into that self-employment trap. You want to build systems so that everything works off a pre-written checklist scripts. Everything is documented. I’m talking about proforma as detailed. If you want to know how to do it just get out to an in-person workshop Thrivetimeshow.com and we’ll teach you how to do it. Step three though is you have to establish a solid management team and this means that you need to be ruthless with firing idiots. You cannot have people in your system on your team who do not have the mental capacity and or the aspirational capacity to eventually someday become a manager. Let me repeat. You cannot have people on your team who do not have the mental capacity and or the aspirational capacity to want to someday take over your team because if you spend all of your time mentoring these people training these people coaching these people and they’re not willing to do what’s needed to do to grow the company.

They’re not willing to take over your position someday. They’re not willing to execute your proven systems than you are going to be miserable. And let me tell you an example from my own life of where this happened. I built d.j connection years ago and they’re awesome. We built it to be very large very successful we’re doing thousands of weddings per year and the one thing that I screwed up on and I was luckily able to fix it eventually was that I had a team of people that I could not stand. I just could not stand being around them. I don’t like them now. Didn’t like them then and there was a group of people I liked a lot of people may not like Josh Smith. Josh Smith was great. I liked Andy Mathurin. I mean that’s really great guys but there were some people that irritated the heck out of me. So let me give an example. We had one guy who worked for a work or a business who pretended to be a youth pastor. He pretended to be a youth pastor so he actually worked at my office and in the office. This is about you know 10 15 years ago but he’s working at my office and he’s doing a good job at the office. But he tells society he tells people that he is a youth pastor is a volunteer youth pastor so at night you know Wednesday night he’s going off to youth group leading the youth group you know lead in the music that kind of thing.

But in reality he was leaving every single day during the workday to go visit strip clubs during the lunch hour. So he would go to these houses of ill repute right here in Tulsa Oklahoma during the work day and he would go out and do this during the workday day then come home or then come back to the office keep working and then he would go to youth group and lead youth group. And I’m just going I didn’t know he was doing this. And so one day he left a receipt on his desk and I saw it and I’m going Are you kidding me. So I confront the guy privately about it I said hey you know such and such. Do you go to this location do you go to this business. And he says hey it’s none of your business and that’s an invasion of privacy. And so all of a sudden I felt like I was somehow in the wrong for holding him accountable. Then we had another employee at the same time another employee who was heavily involved in a local ministry and he is unbelievable. So he says I’m going to go out to I met this girl online I’m going to go out to meet her in Arizona and I’m going to go meet her. And we’ve been dating online for about six months. I want to meet her. They should be a great person a great great person to meet. He says all this stuff. Well then one day he’s unloading his equipment after a deejay show he’s explaining to the guys how he told the girl that he loved her so that she would engage in a parallel activity with him.

He said yeah I told her that I loved her you know so that we would be sleep together. He was openly saying this. So he’s saying that then we have another guy who is pretending to be a youth minister but is working at a strip club and then we have another guy another guy who is drunk as a skunk all day and during the workday. But we’re selling a lot of things. We’re making a lot of money. And so it was kind of one by one I saw these secrets and I was like you know what should I do. So as it related to driving and drinking I pulled the guy said hey you know you can’t drink and drive to shows. I’m going to make sure you have not had any beverages you cannot drink at the office you cannot drink on the way to the office. I drink on the way home. I would be legally responsible. I need you to get it together. Well then I found another guy who had like six kids from five different mothers all out of wedlock. Unbelievable. And he’s one of our sales guys. So I have a team of four guys who this is this is their thing to me or another guy who smokes so much pot and he’s constantly basically living with different women. But he but he’s a volunteer at this church. So I got these five different knuckleheads working in my office and there’s a team of you don’t 40 guys 50 guys. But I hated those people. And so every day that I came to work it was like a penalty almost I didn’t want to come to my own office.

I thought man this is just terrible. And so I actually started to resent my own success. I mean yes I had financial freedom but I didn’t have a lot of time time freedom. And I you see it with celebrities all the time a celebrity will achieve a massive amount of financial success but they don’t have any success in their life they don’t have any sincere relationships. They don’t get to enjoy their financial freedom with time freedom. They don’t get to choose the six life they want to live. You might be saying but what’s the ethics life. They don’t get to pursue their faith. They don’t get time with the family. They want to spend time with. They don’t get a time to invest in the relationships that leave the friendships. That’s number three friendships. They don’t get a chance to focus on their fitness. They don’t get a chance to focus on having any fun and they don’t get a chance to focus on their finances. And so what happens is is that they are living a life that they don’t want quickly they’re going fast making fast money spinning that fast money. And I realized in about 2006 season seven that I had built a very successful business but I didn’t have anybody who worked there that had the mental capacity or the aspirational capacity to someday take over the business. Nor did they have the values or that I wanted. And that’s why when I met Jason Bailey I was so excited about him because he had the values that I had. And he wanted to someday take over the business.

So if you do not establish a team you’re going to end up depressed although you’re going to end up making a lot of money financially and there is a song that was written this pastor that came out by an artist who I’ve actually met by the name of Mike Posner who is a business coach is kind of fun. I get a chance to meet celebrities from time to time and different people will Mike Posner wrote a song called cooler than me back in the day. And then he did a kind of disappeared. And he became depressed and he basically kind of musically was trying to find his voice trying to figure out what he was going to do with his career. His record label decided not to put out his album or he decided not to release it because he didn’t like the way it was going. Long story short he began kind of drifting around and he wrote a song recently called a Baeza. It’s called took a pill in Ibiza and that song expresses how he emotionally felt at the top of his business of his music career when he was actually hitting the bottom of his emotional life. So he felt the least satisfied at the time when society would think that he should be the most satisfied. So we come back we’re going to break down the lyrics to this song took a pill and a BS and I think it will really resonate with any of the entrepreneurs out there that are making a lot of money but are not enjoying their current lifestyle because you haven’t built a core management team.

My name is Clay Clark I’m a former SBA Entrepreneur of the year. I am heavily influenced by dayquil today. I woke up with some serious sinus unbelievable our edginess. I am pumped up on the dayquil but I am super duper maxim extra strength pumped up about you because this is your year. For financial abundance. You can do it. I know you could do it. My mind is not nearly as sound as yours. I don’t I don’t have a discernible skill. I’m not very good at baking cookies. I’m not great at cutting hair. I’m not a skilled optometrist. I’m not good at maintaining vehicles. I’m not a skilled photographer. I’m not a video lawyer but I have been very successful as an entrepreneur.

I was the Entrepreneur of the year for the state of Oklahoma. I’ve started you know helped upstart companies like epic photography elephant in the room men’s grooming lounge. Dr. Zealander’s built his big auto auction he’s built to Dr. Robert zone and Associates a dizzy med.. I mean I go on listing off the businesses that he’s been able to build and I’ve been able to build and I just say that because if we can do it I know that you have the mental capacity and the tenacity needed to become successful. But if you do that once you learn how to make money. We need to ask ourselves what is the purpose like what is the quest. Why are we trying to earn money. We’re not just trying to earn financial freedom are we. I mean are we is that we’re trying to do. No no no we’re trying to build financial freedom. And what time freedom that’s right we’re trying to build financial freedom and time freedom because once you have the financial freedom and the time freedom to enjoy your finances then you can have. For my from my experience when I call the EF 6 life where you get to dictate when and where you spend time with your faith your family your finances your fitness your friendship and your fun and it can all be achieved if you get that business that that foundational business success checked off the list. As soon as possible. So if you’re just tuning in for segments the four steps and the path to financial freedom we’ve covered today is one that in the early stage it’s all about getting your branding right.

Getting your sales. You gotta get your branding and your sales and you want to be profitably selling things that step one step two you want to build those core systems those checklists and processes that make your business depended upon systems and not individual people. Step three is you absolutely have to build a core management team and before the break I was telling you with d.j connection I had surrounded myself with a bunch of people that could sell well that could deliver great entertainment but I hated these people. There were some great deejays we had I mean we had Andy. He was a great deejay. Jason Bailey was a great guy.

Eric Herman was a great guy but there was a lot of those people I freakin hated. I hated what they stood for. I hated the strip clubs they went to. I hated them oversleeping. I hated their lack of ethics. We had a guy working for us doing sales that was volunteering as a youth pastor who then ended up with when we discovered that he went to strip clubs everyday for lunch and somehow he wanted me to feel bad and accused me of invading his privacy. When I brought it to his attention that that was not the level of integrity and the kind of person I wanted working in my office. I mean we had some people we had just screwed up people working in my office but we were producing a lot of profits. Now with the businesses I have I only surround myself with people that I want to work with. Tony Shea the CEO of Zappos the the shoe company based in Las Vegas he has said repeatedly you should fire people that you don’t like. I would I would argue you definitely should fire people that you don’t like and people that don’t have your core values. People that don’t get them out of your office otherwise you’re going to get to the top and you’re going to be depressed at the top are going to go from the bottom to the top and when you get to the top you would even like it up there. And so an artist that I’ve got a chance to meet years ago named Mike Posner went through this process where he’d actually built a big successful music career.

He wrote a song that came out that was on on the radio that I think a lot of people know called cooler than me.

You know every rock is cooler than me. He started writing songs for Justin Bieber and he wrote a song called Play friend for Justin Bieber doing a song with little Wayne and he’s having a lot of success but he just felt miserable. He wrote a song called took a pill in the BS and I want to play it for you and I want to kind of break it down with you. I’m going to take some notes on that because I want to make sure you don’t end up where he ended up finding himself at the top. That feeling alone and really at the bottom emotional.

I mean he he took drugs to show he was cool.

To fit in with the deejay the guy that felt 10 years old but insert bad word then he felt bad. So he he moved to Los Angeles I drive a sports car just to.

A big ball the guys made a million dollars in spending on girls but you never really know what goes on in. Business you don’t like.

And that is exactly where I found myself when I built d.j connection I found myself working in an environment where I was surrounded by morons. And then I realized that this next level step for this next phase the ability to sell the business to scale the business with a business coach or to own it passively was never going to be possible if I didn’t fire idiots. And if you’re listening right now and you’re not an idiot then this is not about you right. But if you are listening right now and you are an idiot and you’re offended you’re an idiot apologist and you feel like that the the workplace should be a church in which you give everyone unconditional love and you always forgive them and you never fire anybody and you have no standards than when you’re arguing with Steve Jobs. I mean Steve Jobs has said that most people are used to an environment where excellence is expected to encourage you to google that that quote there Steve Jobs says most people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. That’s a that’s a that’s a thought that flows in the flies in the face of what most people think about life and they think about business. Most people think that by virtue of being born somebody deserves a job. Not true. So the unemployment rate we always talk about the unemployment rate is all the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent. I did. Let me ask you this. Out of 100 people that you know what percentage of them would you hire of the people that you know you were going to.

Have you ever been to Wal-Mart at midnight or ever been at Wal-Mart at midnight. Have you ever been to Waffle House by the casino after midnight. Why are you there. Well have you ever done this before. I was a deejay. OK so I’ve been all these places. Have you ever been to insert the place any public gathering. I mean there’s certain people that don’t deserve a job because of the choices that they make on a daily basis. There are people out there I hate to say it. Actually I don’t hate to say I’m glad I’m saying it. There’s people out there who are idiots ignoramuses and they will suck your joy. We had somebody in my office the other day. You tell me drivers how you handle this. The ethics of this. This is a guy that we punted there in my office. I have a picture of Jesus and I have an American flag right. I’m an American flag posted and a picture of Jesus on the wall. I have a lot of other decor. A lot of other pageantry a lot of other accoutrements that surround myself and the the Thrive of teen experience. But he made a comment that he was offended by the picture of Jesus and the American flag he said that that offended him. That was that was very offensive. I and another employee years ago who I met at a Christmas party and he’s just oh he’s offended. Ah well how could you kick off a holiday party because it’s not a holiday party for me. It is Christ Musse It’s Christ to the max. That’s what it’s all about for me.

If it’s not for you that’s OK then go out there and open your own business called Starbucks where they say that they celebrate the holidays right. I mean think about this example every single day every single day. The founder of Hobby Lobby David Greene was fined every day every day. He was fined every day and why was he fined every day he was fined every day because he refused to abide by the new government mandated laws that said that his company Hobby Lobby needed to pay for the abortion of babies. He didn’t think it was right and so he said no. Every single day he paid $1.3 billion in fines every day. But he did it because he built Hobby Lobby not to serve the country not to serve everybody else but to serve God. It was his business it’s his vision. Now on the other end of the spectrum Howard Schultz the guy who’s founded you know Starbucks he actually it and founded he met these guys who sold coffee grinders and he encouraged them to open up locations. They wouldn’t do it. So he did it and basically assumed the leadership role but long story short he’s an extremely left liberal and everything that that he does stands for A the advancement of the progressive movement. And I’m just asking you today what is the point of your business. I want to help you get there Dr. zone and I can teach you specifically how to do it.

And our next in-person thrivetime show business coach workshop you get to thrive time showed up. You could learn specifically how to get the tickets for the next in person business coach workshop and we can teach you how to grow a business. I leave you with this final question. Why. Figure out that why and then pursue it relentlessly. We’ll see you next time.

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