Business Podcast | Best-Selling Author of Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business, Gino Wickman | How to Run the Perfect Staff Meeting + “Clay really helped us w/ his systems, doubling our size, double our incomes.” – Ryan Wimpey TipTopK9.com Founder

Audio Transcription

Hi, I’m Ryan Wimpey. And I’m Rachel Wimpey, and the name of our business is Kip Top Training. Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen. When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about internet marketing or advertising or anything at all. Just dog training. And that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team because they do it all for us. So that we can focus on our passion, and that’s training dogs. Clay and his team here, they’re so enthusiastic. Their energy is off the charts. Never a dull moment. Spirit thrives. We’ve been working with Clay and his team for the last five months, two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. Clay’s helped us make anything from brochures to stickers, new business cards, new logos, scripts for phones, scripts for e-mails, scripts for text messages, scripting for everything. How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome. They’re so effective. It’s worth every minute. Things get done. We’ll ask for things like different flyers, and they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective. If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out, or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and producing your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all the stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency and actually knows what they’re doing when you already have something that’s your core focus and you already know how to do it. You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay and his team. We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. So, and no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t, they can’t afford one, and their local web guy or local person that they know probably can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people, really, I mean really ride them to get stuff done and stuff is done so fast here and people, there’s a real sense of urgency to get it done. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place, so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards, it’s pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot, which, you know, we’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot, so the humor definitely helps, it breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts, and it’s very interactive, you can raise your hand, it’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak, you know. The wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions, so that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life. You’re definitely, it’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars. So you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started, like nine profitable businesses. So not only is it a lot of good information, but just getting in the thought process of Clay Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches, getting in that thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses, to me, just that is priceless, that’s money. Well, we’re definitely not getting upsold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference and I wanna like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like, it’s good information, but we’re like, oh my gosh, I want to strangle you. Shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for. And that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything. So that’s awesome. I hate that. It makes me angry. So glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business. And I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference. The information that you’re gonna get is just very very beneficial and the mindset that you’re gonna get Z have you ever found yourself in a meeting that you didn’t need to be in? Used to there’s this thing called death by meeting where you can have very ineffective meetings that waste everybody’s time Oh, yes, but on today’s show on today’s show We’re interviewing Gino Wichman for interview part two and he’s gonna teach you how to lead the perfect meeting. I love it! How to lead a meeting that is just as long as it needs to be. I’m going to cry. How to lead a meeting that engages everybody. How to lead a meeting that actually results in action items. That’s an actual tear right there. All this and more on today’s edition of the Thrivetime Show, as Gino Wickman teaches you how to lead the level 10 perfect meeting. You can’t miss this show. 3, 2, 1, and… Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show. 3, 2, 1, and… Get ready to enter the Brivetime Show. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good look as the father of five. That’s what I’m about So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi It’s C and Z up on your radio and now three two one Yes, yes, yes Yes, drive nation We are back for part two of our rendezvous with the man the myth the legend the best-selling author of the book, Traction, Geno Wickman. Welcome on to the Thrivetime Show. How are you, sir? I’m great. Excited to be back. Last time we had you on the show, it was so good, I blacked out. When I woke up, I was holding the book, Traction, in my hands. In that book, you taught how to lead this thing called the perfect meeting, the level 10 meeting. And I’m not exaggerating, no hyperbole here. Great companies like Oxifresh that has over 400 locations, great companies like Regent Bank that Dr. Zellner has invested in and owns, great companies. Use your level 10 meeting structure as almost like the spine of their business, the rock of their business, the foundation. Tell us about this Level 10 meeting, my friend. Hear, hear. So I created this 20 years ago, and so it’s music to my ears to hear that. And we now have almost 100,000 companies around the world running their weekly meetings, running their weekly Level 10 meetings. And so I created it kind of in a fit of rage, if you will, working with my clients early on in the first two years and them kind of stumbling along with their meetings. So I had a couple engage me to come in and run their weekly meetings for a period of time. And during that experience, I honed, refined, and figured out kind of the perfect weekly meeting. And so it’s called a level 10 meeting because we have all of our clients rate their meeting quality before they start the journey with us. The average rating is a four. The idea is to take that rating up to a 10. You’ll see as we get into this, at the end of each meeting, the team rates the meeting and you’re looking to get a 10 every single week. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to give the listeners a brief overview of the Level 10 meeting. I want to direct everybody to buy the book, Traction, so you can have a printed copy of that. I’ll put a link to it on the show notes, but we want to start the meeting on time. This is something, so step one, start the meeting on time. You have said this, and I’m just going to bring it up. Many people say, oh man, I love the level 10 meeting, but I just, it doesn’t really matter to start on time. Please explain, sir, why we have to start the meeting on time. Yeah, and I’ll give a little broader context on this. And so a great meeting, Paul, a great weekly meeting has five points. Same day, same time, same agenda, start on time, end on time. And so it’s all five that make it great. And so to start on time is vital. And so we subscribe to Vince Lombardi’s quote, early is on time, on time is late. And so the idea, let’s pretend in this conversation, your meeting starts Monday at 9 a.m. That means at 855, everyone is sitting in that conference room, small talking, and then the person that runs the meeting right at 9 o’clock starts the meeting. So you don’t have people dashing into the room at the last second. You don’t have people showing up late. It’s disruptive. It’s less effective, and it’s completely disrespectful. What I see a lot is the boss, he shows, you know, the meeting starts at 10 a.m. And it’s the same time every week and same location. We agree on all five variables are being, it’s going to be perfect. And he likes to roll in about nine oh six and hold court till about nine and 14 about various things that he finds to be interesting. And because he’s the one paying you, you’re like, oh, OK, OK. Can you help us with that dysfunction? Would you help us get into? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So sadly, that is a bit of a epidemic out there. And if you’re going to subscribe to EOS and follow the system, it means that you want to build a great company. And if you want to build a great company, you’ve got to play by certain rules. You’ve got to follow the system and the process. That’s what makes it great. And so with that, you have this precious 90 minutes every week as the fearless leader of the company with your leadership team, and that’s all you have. And the idea is to maximize those 90 minutes. And so the good news is, with leaders that operate like that, we’re able to convince them to break those old patterns. But truth be told, the ones that just want to do it their own way, in other words, they don’t want to do what’s best for the company, they just want to do what they want to do, we can help them and they just don’t move forward with us in the process, or we fire them pretty early in the process. Let’s make sure we get this, folks. Regent Bank, the bank that Dr. Zellner has invested in, the bank that Clay Stairs has invested in, the bank that Sean Copeland leads, uses the traction program. We all know about the epic growth of Regent Bank. We all know about the epic growth of Oxifresh. They all use the Level 10 meeting. Now, variable number two is you want to start off the first five minutes with good news. Why don’t you want to start off with bad news? Well, I think that that question answers itself. But the whole idea behind good news, the psychology is that it’s a segue, okay? And so you’re going from get your butts kicked all week, working hard, kicking ass, to then segue into working on the business with your leadership team. And so a great segue does two things. It helps create that transition. And then it also brings a human element to the team, which builds team health. And so the segue we recommend is good news. And it’s going around the table, like you said, five minutes or less, and each person sharing one piece of good news from their personal life, one piece of good news from their business life, and again, one time around the table, and it just starts things off and is a great segue into the meeting. Now, I’ve done consulting for years. I’ve bought your book for hundreds of people. Seriously, I’ve done that. And I’ll give it to them and I’ll talk about this. It seems like sarcasm is a great way to mask dysfunction. So a lot of times when you’re teaching someone about the Level 10 meeting, and the first time I implement it, we get to the good news part, and somebody, we’ll call him Carl, and Carl will go, oh, do you know what great news? Your mom. Ha ha ha ha ha. And you’re like, that wasn’t helpful. You know what I mean? There’s that sarcasm. You know what I’m saying, though? You see this a lot. A lot of the plumbers, doctors, dentists, they have this kind of locker room humor, where good news can’t devolve into sarcasm a mode Yeah, the other sarcastic one is I’m above ground, you know, I’m still alive surface not so when that happens the the leader of the organization is typically the Integrator of the organization and typically not the visionary that’s accountable for this But you just have to call it out and it’s something tangible Something good that happened in your personal life in the last seven days and something good that happened in your business life. You just got to hold them to task because absolutely you get the the superficial stuff that’s not healthy. Okay and then we get into the next mode now. We were for five minutes into the meeting. We started on time. Now we’re going into the reporting mode. So we’re going to do a different mode. Now we have in the reporting mode we have the scorecard, the ROC Review, and the Customer Employee Headlines. Again, in the reporting mode, we have the Scorecard, the ROC Review, and the Customer Employee Headlines. Let’s get into the Scorecard. What is the Scorecard portion of the reporting mode? What is the Scorecard? You bet. And I’m going to do a little contextual point here as we go into that. Because like you said, those three things are reporting. And so the psychology and the power of this is now the team is shifting into a mode where their job is to make sure that everything is on track. And there’s nothing more important for a leadership team than making sure your numbers are on track, your priorities are on track, and all of your customers and employees are happy. And so you have this 15-minute window to make that happen. And each one of these items is five minutes, as you’re going to share and you’ve said. And so with that, the idea is that you’re reporting at a high level. Are the numbers on track? Are the priorities on track? And are our customers and employees happy? And where they’re not, you drop it down as an issue and you avoid any discussion. So what’s vital here, and the reason I keep driving the point home about reporting, is what makes for terrible meetings in business are these ridiculous 90 minute long reporting meetings where everyone’s kind of reporting on stuff and discussing stuff And so it’s this very efficient focused opportunity to say is everything on track if it isn’t let’s drop it down to Ids which you and I are going to talk about just a bit and so scorecard is all about you as a team Defining what are the 5 to 15 most important activity based numbers that we want to look at on a weekly basis. There’s a goal for each one of those numbers, and what you’re doing there within five minutes or less is just confirming that we hit every goal for the week, and if we didn’t, we drop that down to IDS to solve later in the meeting. So scorecard, five minutes, five minutes or less right there, scorecard, get it, get all the information. Now, then we move on to the ROC review. What is the ROC review? So the ROC review is if we go back to the quarterly meeting, and so somewhere in the previous 90 days, that leadership team locked themselves in a room and set their ROCs for the quarter, which are the three to seven most important things that the company must get done, and then the three to seven most important things that each one of those leadership team members need to get done. And what’s happening here is those are being reviewed simply from a standpoint of on track or off track. No discussion whatsoever. And any of those ROCs that are off track get dropped down to discuss later in IDS. You’re just making sure that everything’s on track. And if it isn’t, we drop it down. Then we move on to the customer employee headlines. Again, after we’ve spent five minutes doing the Rock Review, now we have to get into the customer employee headlines. What is the customer employees headlines section of the Level 10 meeting? Yeah, so what this is, is it’s building a muscle for the leadership team and getting them good at talking about their people. Their people are, again, their employees and also their customers and clients. And so the discipline is to just quickly share rapid fire, one sentence headlines, all things good and bad with customers and employees. So you’re literally saying, you know, Sally had a birthday last week. Our greatest client is pissed off at us. And literally just one sentence. Anything that is just newsworthy or noteworthy, everybody takes it in, understands it, and now everyone’s in the loop on what’s going on with these people. But anything that is of concern, an issue, or someone has a question, once again, you just simply say, drop it down. Drop it down. And you discuss that customer or employee issue later in IDS in the agenda. Now, the to-do list is the next section. That’s five minutes long as well, where you review last week’s to-dos. And you have said, you have written that 90% of the to-dos need to get knocked out every week. Now, I just dealt with this last week with a gentleman on my team. He’s a great American. Great American. We own a lot of different companies, so he can’t tell. He won’t be able to guess who I’m talking about. But he had an agenda item that was not done, and he said something to the effect of, well, I ran out of time. And I said, not cool. We got to get it done because I know that you know quickman rule and I throw Gino Wickman under the bus I said listen if Gino Wickman were here. He would put you in a vice grip with a kung fu lock No, but seriously though because we’re gonna get 90% of our to-do items done You you preach the good news help us because some people have a to-do list that nothing didn’t where nothing gets done It just keeps getting bigger Yeah, you bet and let’s let’s back up to the context here because I created this to-do list and baked it into this agenda from experience. And so back again as I said I was helping clients run their weekly meetings. We would have these great productive meetings and we’d be solving lots of issues and people would commit to things but I never captured them or taught them to capture them as action items or to-do’s and so they’d commit to 10 things and we get to the next week and I realized they only got two or three out of 10 things done. All of a sudden we started capturing them as to-dos and then having them report on them the next week to make sure those to-dos got to-done and all of a sudden they went from like two or three out of ten to like eight or nine out of ten. And so you can just do the math on the execution, the accountability, the traction that that company’s gaining. And so if you understand that power, well then you have to bring accountability to that and there has to be a standard. And so the one and only standard is, like you said, 90% or better. And so with understanding that dynamic, if the team collectively as a whole is not accomplishing 90% of their to-dos, they have an accountability problem somewhere. And what that integrator needs to do for the team, rarely the visionary, always the integrator, needs to then hold that team accountable and call it out. And if it’s one individual that keeps doing it over and over, a lot of times it’s a side conversation outside of the level 10. You determine the level of health of your team, but you’ve got to confront that person. And I believe in a three-strike rule. And it’s typically that first conversation that changes. But if someone can’t get their to-dos done, it’s an issue. And something’s probably got to change. Now I’ve got two final questions for you about this level 10 meeting stuff because your book, it lays it out there but I wanted to get into it so the listeners can hear it from you. But then I have a guy who loves your book is joining me with the COVID-19. They’ve been letting a lot of people out of prison from coast to coast. And this guy, he’s been released, a prison I believe, for he’s been, he and I have both been out for about a week and a half. We were cellmates. Some have said, we don’t have proof of this. But anyway, he’s a high quality guest is what I’m saying. You’re going to love the questions from this guy. He loves your book. The next section of the meeting is the IDS, the identify, discuss, solve portion. This is where you’re suggesting in your book that you need to spend the vast majority of your meeting. You know, 60 minutes of your meeting should be spent identifying problems, discussing how to solve them, and then agreeing on a solution. Tell us about the IDS section of your level 10 meeting. You bet, and just so we’re communicating so that your listener understands, every other agenda item we’ve mentioned is a five-minute agenda item. Got it. IDS is 60 minutes. It’s where you’re spending a full hour with your leadership team, solving the most important issues for your company. This is where the magic happens. This is what makes for great meetings, solving stuff. And like we talked about earlier, during reporting, you drop down a bunch of stuff that was issues, as well as any issues that carried over from last week’s meeting. And then you just do one last round with the team and see if there are any other issues to add. And so all of a sudden, you build and set your issues list for this week’s meeting. And let’s hypothetically pretend there are 15 total issues on there. What you now do is IDS those issues. It’s an issue-solving track I created. It’s an acronym that stands for Identify, Discuss, and Solve. And so, what you do is you take the top three issues, and so you look at that list of 15, you decide what is the number one most important issue, the number two most important, and then the number three, and you take number one and you IDS it. You identify it, you discuss it, and then you solve it. Once it’s solved, one goes away, you go to number two. Each time you solve an issue, it typically becomes a to-do. There’s some sort of an action that somebody takes. And what you’re doing here is you’re working through as many issues as you can in one sitting. And so some meetings you’re only going to get through one issue because it’s a biggie. Other meetings you’ll get through all 15 issues, but the idea is to go at that list in priority order so that you’re taking them in priority, tackling the biggest stuff first. And so identify it says you first have to kind of rip the bandaid off and get to the real issue as fast as possible. So you know what you’re going to discuss, then discuss it, sharing all ideas and solutions. And then the S is the solve step where you all agree on the solution and somebody takes that action and forward you go. Any time that I can reference ripping a band-aid off, I love to do that, so thank you for going there with me. Now, concluding the meeting, we’ve got to conclude the meeting. A lot of times people, they run over the meeting. The meeting’s supposed to end at 10 a.m., and now it’s 10.17, and they’re still going. There’s the guy who likes to always end every meeting at 10.06 when it’s supposed to end at 10. There’s the oblivious of space and time guy. There’s the boss that likes to just sort of randomly end by walking out. That’s always fun There’s just all different ways to end the meeting that are the wrong way How should we conclude the meeting and why is why should we take five minutes to officially conclude the meeting? Yeah, so this is where you’re putting a tidy bow on the meeting and so using our hypothetical example We said the meeting is Monday at 9 while that meeting must end at 1030. It’s a 90-minute meeting. And so at 1025, whoever is running the meeting and we need to talk about the two roles in terms of running this meeting, but whoever is running the meeting at 1025, regardless of where you are on the issues list or the issue, if you haven’t completed the issue, it just simply rolls over to next week. They say, okay, time to conclude. And you’re going to do three things in the conclusion. Again, it’s so vital because you’re putting a tidy bow on the meeting. Number one, you recap all of the to-dos so that everyone knows what they’re committing to for the next seven days, so you can make sure you get that 90% completion rate. Number two, you discuss any cascading messages, which means, based on everything you discussed in the last almost hour and a half, is there anything you need to share with anyone outside of that meeting, either a customer or an employee? And if so, you quickly decide who’s going to tell them, how are we going to tell them, what are we going to tell them, and that becomes a to-do. And then you all quick rate your meeting. And so you all go around the table lightning fast, rate the meeting one to 10, 10 being the best, and you should always get at least an eight. If you’re not averaging at least an eight, you just have to ask so you can self-correct, but you really should be getting 10. That’s what makes it a level 10 meeting, but bare minimum is an eight. And then 1030 comes and everyone’s back to the real world. And the reason the meeting cannot run long is because then your meetings are collapsing on top of other meetings and other meetings are starting late because you’re late and it’s completely disrespectful to everyone else in the organization. Now it’s now time to bring on our guest, to join our guest. Here we go. This guy, he’s been out of prison now, out of the Illinois Correctional Facility for several days. He and I were cellmates there. This is Clay Stairs, he’s been a long time client of mine. He’s a former school teacher, turned millionaire investor, entrepreneur. He’s an investor in Regent Bank, the bank that Dr. Zellner and Sean Copeland own. He’s bought many copies of your book. He’s helped to make Geno Wickman ultra rich and successful. I think Geno makes about $2 per book, and so you’ve helped Geno make at least $200, I believe. Without any further ado, Clay Stares, meet Geno Wickman. Geno Wickman, it is such a pleasure to meet you today, sir. Pleasure to meet you as well. Yes. I, as Clay was saying, early on, I think 2012 was when I started the leadership initiative and it was not long after that that Clay introduced me to the book Traction. And it has been highly, highly influential in my company as well as I use it with all of our clients as well. And I’m really appreciating this conversation today on the Level 10 meeting. Well, Stairs, you ask away. Any questions you have for the WIC man? Okay, I do. I’ve got the first question is, in your book, when it comes to the meeting pulse and everything, we’ve got an annual meeting, we’ve got a quarterly meeting, we’ve got a weekly meeting. I’ve got a client that I’m working with, and they’ve got about 400 employees. They are on target right now to hit about $500 to $600 million, and they do a monthly meeting with the leadership team. Not weekly, they go monthly. There are some weekly meetings they have, but as the whole team, and they’re in three different states as well, but as a whole, they all get together and do a monthly meeting. And so, the question to you is, as their coach, do I continue to coach down this path with a monthly meeting? And if so, what does that monthly meeting look like? Or do I just say, yeah, we got to get out of the monthly meeting, go to the quarterly? Yeah, great question. So here’s what I would suggest. First thing to do is to picture their accountability chart. And so in EOS, we call it an accountability chart, otherwise known as an org chart, but the accountability chart is kind of an org chart on steroids. And so, if you picture that, what you will see at the top of that accountability chart is a clear illustration of who the visionary is for the organization and who the integrator is. And so, that’s typically the CEO and or president or COO, something like that. And then you will see illustrated the major functions that report up to that integrator, okay? And so to pause there for a second, those major functions, the people sitting in those major functions, are what we call the leadership team, and that’s typically three to seven people. And so what’s vital and what we teach and what is almost non-negotiable is that that leadership team needs to do a two-day annual, needs to do a one-day quarterly, and needs to do a 90-minute every week level 10 meeting. They need to do that every single week. From there, then you look to each one of those major functions. And let’s say marketing, sales, operations, finance are the functions. Well, then each one of those leaders with their teams need to then be doing a weekly level 10 meeting. And then you literally can carry that out to the entire organization. If you have 10 people in the company, well, it all stopped there, obviously. If you have 10,000 people in your company, obviously, this goes on for a few different layers. But it’s ultimately a small team of people based on that department. As you look down that org chart, as you look down that accountability chart, and they are each one of those teams are in a weekly meeting pulse. And the belief and the philosophy and the power of it is that each team is pulsing every single week. And if you understand the power of the agenda I just laid out, all of a sudden information is flowing top to bottom throughout that organization no less than every seven days. And so all that said, that’s what we’re prescribing. The only time I see a monthly meeting and value in a monthly meeting is when the mid-managers need to come together, because there’s a lot of value in bringing your mid-managers together for education, issue-solving, et cetera. And so that’s when I see, on occasion, 25% of the time, my clients, they’re bringing mid-managers together for a monthly meeting. Gina, I hate to ask this question, and it’s probably obvious to our listeners. I know our listeners, they would never do this, but some people who listen to other shows need to hear this. When should you not have a weekly meeting and should basically devolve into an organization that communicates strictly via emails, where you CC as many people as possible and you just fire off an endless stream? When do we need to cancel the weekly meeting and move into the reactive emails that we see everybody? When do we need to do that? I love how you ask loaded questions. They’re so easy because they answer themselves. What’s great about that question, though, is what you described is what most of our clients look like when they come to us. No. Then we get them in this weekly meeting pulse, and it solved that problem. So never is the answer to your question that somebody goes from this powerful weekly meeting pulse to sheer chaos. Now okay, now stairs, I’m going to give you the floor. Now here’s the rules. We have five minutes with the Wizard of Wickman. Okay? Geno Wickman. We have five minutes, five questions. You’ve got to come in hot. It’s a rapid fire. Rapid fire. Here we go, Claystairs. Get yourself ready. Here we go. I’m set. Question number one, who leads the meeting? Great question. So that gets to the two roles. So there are two roles to make this great. Number one, the person leading the meeting, like you’re saying, what you want is to never rotate the meeting runner, okay? And so the person that should be running the level 10 is the person who is genetically encoded to run meetings. These are people that secretly love cutting you off and they’re very organized and they’re great at holding people to task. That’s number one. Number two, there’s then the person that is managing all of the documents because the level 10 agenda is a dynamic document and that’s the person that’s entering the to-dos, updating the issues, and so you have the person running it and the person managing the document. And that really needs to be two separate people because it’s really hard to do both. Okay, question number two, looking at the people analyzer that you have. Let’s say that we’ve got a CEO, he’s looking at his team, we’ve got the people analyzer. Did you say people analyzer? People land-alizer. It’s a land-alizer. Land-alind? Yes, exactly. Okay, sorry. And the people analyzer? Is that once a year? Is that once every three years? Is that once a day? How often is he going to that? And I’ve got a follow-up, which will be number three, but go ahead. Yeah. And so, I’m going to give you two answers, because the first answer is let’s pretend the company is fully running on EOS and all the tools are in place. From there, the people analyzer is going to come up two times. First, it’s going to come up annually in any kind of a performance review. So at a minimum, it’s going to come up annually. Ideally, it’s going to come up every 90 days in a quarterly conversation that we urge our clients to have. And so again, worst case annually, ideally every quarter in that quarterly conversation, that’s number one. Number two is going to come up whenever there’s a people issue. And so if we go back to this Level 10 agenda and customer and employee headlines, when there’s an employee issue that comes up during the Level 10, that’s when the people analyzer comes out to run that person through the people analyzer, to make sure they have the core values, to make sure they get it, want it, have the capacity to do the job, and where something’s falling short, somebody has an action item to go correct that. We’re going to give one point to Gino Wigman, one deduction to Clay Stairs. Clay Stairs, back to you. Back to you, I have to move things. Okay. All right, I’m going to move to the next question I’ve got is on your accountability chart or the org chart. And I know just from reading your book, there’s the classic on the org chart. On one side of this thing, you’ve got the CEO at the top, and then on one side you’ve got how do we bring business into the company. So that’d be your sales and marketing. And then, like in the middle, the middle pillar that we have is now that we have business in, how are we going to service those clients and those customers? And so that’s all of your production and so on. And then over on the other side, we’ve got a third pillar. The third pillar. With the third pillar, which is pretty much how do we make sure that the other two pillars have all the resources. So that’s where your finance and your human resources and all that, you know, the admin and everything is going to be over there. What about a few things that I’ve hit a number of times with clients is when they want to make that next level highly complicated. They’ve got like 12 pillars. They want to make it complicated. There’s a lot going on. 18 pillars of growth. There’s a lot going on there. 47 principles we believe in. I love the way you’re saying you require people that are doing traction, you require them to fit into your model. Talk to me a little bit about that. What kind of language do you use to require, and when are some times when you have seen that it is important to have multiple pillars coming off of the top there? Yeah, perfect. We call those pillars you’re describing, we call them major functions. Again, the best way to think about it is picture an org chart, and you see those boxes on an org chart. Right. The major functions are what you’re describing. And rule of thumb, there’s typically three to seven major functions. It’s rarely as many as seven. And so what happens if they’re getting up to 12, they’re making the organization way too complex. But the other real secret truth that’s going on is they have an accountability problem. And so we always get them to start with three major functions, which you just described. Number one is sales and marketing. Number two is operations. Number three is finance and admin. And you start there. And from there, you customize it. And so sometimes finance and admin will split into HR, IT potentially. Operations can split into customer service, account management, things like that. Sales and marketing can split into two distinct functions, marketing and sales. Regardless, it’s never going to be more than seven on that line. And so from there, we’re always taking a simplified approach. We’re keeping accountability in mind. And so let’s pretend hypothetically, this example I’m walking through, they realize they have five major functions. Then those five major functions report up to the integrator, also known as COO or president. And then that reports up to the visionary, also known as the CEO, entrepreneur, founder, et cetera. What’s important to understand in this conversation is I created the EOS for a 10 to 250 person privately held entrepreneurial company. And so, you know, if you’re up to a thousand employees and you’ve become bureaucratic and you’ve now become matrixed and siloed, it’s very, very challenging. Our largest EOS client does 3 billion, has 6,000 employees. So it can work, but it can only work if you can stay agile and entrepreneurial and open-minded. So anyway, long story short, hopefully that indirectly answers your question. Now, real quick, I want to make sure we’re keeping score here. That’s a mega point for Gino Wickman. That’s why he came on the show. He wanted the mega points. Yes. That’s the deduction for you, Stairs. The question was too easy. I saw. It was too easy. Now, I want you to know, the Greece, the country of Greece, is not one of Gino Wickman’s clients. They’ve become bureaucratic. They’re not into accounting. They’ve done a lot of accountability. Whenever they have an accounting mistake, they just print money. So I want to get that out there. Some people are saying, is Greece, the country of Greece, one of Gino’s clients? No. And I give myself a mega point for pointing that out, because people wanted to know that. You’ve dug yourself quite a hole here. You have two final questions with the wizard. Do I still have time? Yeah, you do. Okay. See, I was thinking that the time was running out. We have the golden baby on the show for one final time. He made a poor life choice. He’s here. Okay, so here we go. Appreciate that, Gino. Okay, here we go. How about this? We’ve got, we’re doing the level 10 meeting. We’re coming to the to-dos. We’re doing, coming to the to-dos. And man, we really are pushing for that 90% of those to-dos getting done. But rather than 90%, we’re finding that we’re really tapping into a consistent 9% getting done. They’re just not happening. And what’s your move as a coach when you’re talking to somebody that’s paying you money and they are not doing the action steps on a consistent basis? I’m a little Padawan. I might even have a little ponytail or something like that thing going on. But if I’m your Padawan, teach me the language. What are the words to use to move somebody to action? Yeah, fantastic. I can honestly say I’ve never seen 9% completion. So I’m first of all terrified client that you’re dealing with. Um, but, uh, but here are the words. And so it’s first of all, reminding them that the standard is 90% and it is non negotiable to come in any less. And if they’re coming in any less, they have an accountability problem. And so when there’s an accountability problem, the integrator needs to call that out and I look right into the eyeballs of the integrator. Okay. to call that out, and I look right into the eyeballs of the integrator, okay, so that we’re pinning the tail on the donkey here. Oh, I like this. And so that integrator now knows that they are accountable, and then I say, and so let’s pretend it’s not the entire team that’s coming in short. If they’re doing 9%, it probably is. Again, I’ve never seen that, but it’s typically one or two culprits. And then I just simply say, and so if the team’s doing a great job, but you have one or two culprits that are not, then you need to have a conversation with them outside of the meeting and let them know that it’s the standard, it’s non-negotiable, and they need to hit 90%. Those one or two people sitting there get the message loud and clear. The integrator gets the message loud and clear. And 2,000 sessions, 20 years, 135 clients, that has solved the problem every single time. This right here is audio of a former Clay Stairs client, one of your early clients. He got 9% of his action items done. Let me give you the audio. And by the way, you get a point there, Mr. Gino Wickman. And Stairs, I hate to do this to you, but the question was too easy. You’re going down the wrong way. So far, he has four, you have zero. This is audio of one of Clay Stairs’ first clients who got 9% of his action items done. This is a dinner party that Clay Stairs was hosting for his client. Here we go. Let me get up real fast here. Here we go. What’s happening? I don’t know how you got this video. This is client sipping the soup. How did you catch it? I didn’t even know the camera was there. Hey Carl, what’s up? Nothing much Billy, I see you got all the sun today. Oh yeah, you think so? I fell asleep by the pool for a few hours. Did you fall asleep or did you pass out? Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Rickman, the golden baby. Yeah, talk to me a little bit, Gino, right at the very beginning. This is exciting. I just got a picture of you as the golden baby. I hope you’re okay with that. The respect is not left. Just so you know, I still highly respect you, even as a golden baby. It’s going to be the title of his new book. I love it. But, Gino, I love this part, always early on with a client, when we are tapping into goals, and purpose, and vision, and core values. For you as a coach and having been involved in so many different businesses, what value is there in having real clarity in your company with the core values and the goals and the vision and the mission? Is that really important or shouldn’t we just start selling something? I mean, come on, shouldn’t we just hop in and start doing things? Where do you answer that question? How do you approach that, just the value of the core values? Yeah, well, let me give a broader answer because you’re describing many aspects of the Vision Traction Organizer, VTO, a tool I created that helps an organization capture its vision. And the long and the short of it is it’s getting that three- to seven-person leadership team 100% on the same page with those core values, with that core focus, with that 10-year target, with that marketing strategy, 10-year, one year. So, with that, it’s getting them to all agree. And once they all agree and are in sync and are on the same page with the vision, the plan, where they’re going, how they’re going to get there, everything is better. Issues are solved faster. They’re much more focused. And then when you, like you said, get to selling, the selling is better. Resources are more aligned. They’re more efficient. They’re accomplishing a lot more in a lot less time because the opposite of that is they don’t have a vision. They don’t have a plan. They’re not in sync. The culture is not clear. The core values aren’t clear. fighting inefficient, very complex monster that they’re all trying to manage and move forward. Beautiful. Thrive Nation, I tell you what, this right here is an incredible interview, incredible guest here, Geno Wickman. Some people have suggested, some of the members of our production team have said, we should tell guests, tell our listeners, that their minds might not be functional if they don’t pick up a copy of Geno Wickman’s book, Traction. Some of our leadership team has said, I know I’m the leader, but some people have said, we need to attack the people that don’t buy his book, Traction. We need to question their intelligence. We’re not going to do that, though. I’m just saying that book is an incredible book. Very good. And some would say every entrepreneur needs to have it, and you need to keep it as a reference guide on your desktop or available on the bookshelf at all times. Gino Wickman, thank you for writing the book, Traction. Thank you for being on the show here now twice. We just cannot tell you thank you enough. My pleasure. I want to say again, like I said in the first interview, you guys are absolutely nuts. You keep me on my toes. I would urge your audience to also watch my YouTube video of me teaching the Level 10 meeting. It might be a great reinforcement. So if you just Google my name, effective meetings or level 10, it’ll come up there. I’ve got to be like 200 or 300 of those views on that YouTube video. I’m showing that with clients all the time. Great video. I appreciate that. I appreciate you, brother, and I hope you have a great rest of your night. Will do. You guys do the same. Thank you. And now, without any further ado, here’s the audio of Gino Wickman teaching you how to lead a level 10 meeting. So here’s how to have world-class meetings. At EOS Worldwide, we teach every client something called a level 10 meeting. We call it level 10 because every business owner we’ve interviewed, we ask them to rate the effectiveness of their meetings on a scale of 1 to 10. On average, they rate it a 4. So if you’re normal, the effectiveness of your meetings is somewhere around a 4. Here’s how to get it to a level 10. As I illustrate the level 10 meeting for you, a couple things I want to make note of. The reason it’s so effective and why it’s world-class is frankly it’s a time management tool. You and your leadership team coming together for the precious 90 minutes I’m about to show you is going to save you time. You’re literally going to save two to three times the amount of time you invest in a level 10 meeting as a result of avoiding train wrecks, the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing, miscommunications being avoided, and being more effective and accountable. With that said, a great meeting pulse has five points. A great meeting needs to be same day, same time, same agenda, start on time, and end on time. And so here we go. I’m now going to show you the psychology, the philosophy, and the flow of the perfect Level 10 meeting. So here’s the Level 10 meeting. First of all, the meeting starts on time. What a concept. As Vince Lombardi taught us, early is on time is late. So if your meeting is Monday at 9 a.m. you and your leadership team are there at 855 small talking ready to roll. Whoever runs the meeting at 9 o’clock on the button says okay everyone good news and so you’re going to start your meeting off with good news. And so what good news is is it’s a segue. It helps a leadership team transition from working in the business all week to on the business. It also brings a human element by sharing both personal and professional good news. And so when I talked about the psychology, the philosophy, and the flow of huge psychology, it’s just that human element that you bring. Good news takes about five minutes, so it’s pretty rapid fire around the table. After good news, you then go into reporting mode. And so the next three agenda items are all about reporting. And so the psychology here is, you’re now going into the mode where you’re making sure that everything that is important in your business is on track. You’re making sure that your numbers are on track, your priorities are on track, and all your people are happy. And so here’s what I mean. You’re going to first review your scorecard to make sure that all your scorecard numbers are on track, five quick minutes. You’re then going to do a ROC review. And you’re going to review to make sure that every ROC you set for the quarter is on track, all of your priorities, five quick minutes there. And then you’re going to share any customer or employee headlines. And what that is, is you’re sharing good and bad news about customers and employees, one sentence headline, so you’re all in the know on what’s going on with all of your people. With that said, again we’re in reporting mode, any number that’s off track, any rock that’s off track, or any customer employee headline that requires discussion, or it’s an issue that needs to be solved, you just simply drop it down, drop it down, drop it down. And during this reporting mode, the idea is no discussion. You’re not solving anything. You’re just reporting 15 quick minutes because five minutes on customer employee headlines and you’re just building the issues list, which I’m going to come back to for you in just a moment. Once you’re done reporting, you’ve extracted all the relevant issues, we then bring a little accountability into your life with a to-do list. Now watch this. Very important to know, the to-do list is baked right into the Level 10 agenda. The Level 10 meeting agenda is one document that you’re managing as a leadership team. It is a dynamic document where to-dos are going on, coming off, going on, coming off every week, and your issues are going on and coming off every week. So again, a very dynamic document. With that said, five quick minutes reviewing all of last week’s to-dos to make sure that they all got to done. Rule of thumb, 90% of your to-dos should be dropping off every week. If they’re not, there’s a problem somewhere, typically an accountability problem. But nonetheless, everything you committed to last week, 90% should be done. From there, after five quick minutes, we then go to the portion of the level 10 meeting called IDS. IDS is the issue solving track we teach every client. identify, discuss, and solve. When you go to your issues list, you populate that issues list for the week, you prioritize what is the number one, number two, and number three most important issues. Never start at the top and work your way down. Always focus on the most important issue. You take number one and you first identify what is the real issue here. Before you start solving anything, it’s vital you all agree, here’s the issue. And sometimes you have to dig, dig, dig, dig down to the root to get to that issue, but nonetheless you first identify. Once you’ve identified, you then move to discuss. And that’s where you and your team openly and honestly discuss that issue, every option, every solution, every idea. Then we push to solve. The only reason you’re talking in this portion is to solve issues and so you take number one, you IDS it. Once it’s solved, that issue comes off the issues list, dynamic document, typically a to-do or two is created that needs to get done in the next seven days. To-do’s are seven day action items. We then go to number two and we IDS it. When two is solved, becomes a to-do, we go to three IDS. Some weeks, you’re only going to get through one issue. Some weeks, you’ll get through 10. You never know, but as long as you’re taking them in order of priority, you’re doing the right thing. With that said, you have a full 60 minutes for IDSing. Once there are five minutes left in the meeting, you then conclude the meeting. And in the conclusion, wherever you are on IDSing, conclude the meeting at 1025. Five minutes left, you do three quick things. You recap the to-do list. You discuss if there are any cascading messages that need to be cascaded out to the rest of the organization. And you quick rate your meeting 1 to 10. How’d you do today, 10 being best. This is going to help you and your team start to self-correct. You should be getting an 8 minimum. 8 is the minimum standard. And so if it’s not an 8, you just simply get to ask why and start to self-correct. And then at 10.30 on the button, meeting ends on time. So your meetings aren’t collapsing on top of other meetings in the organization. Back to the real world. That’s how to have a world-class Level 10 90 minute weekly meeting with your leadership team and now without any further ado Why does this still keep happening to me? I don’t know whose prayer I’m breaking into somebody’s prayer saying, Lord, why do I keep going through the same things over and over again? And the Lord sent me here to tell you the problem is with your default. Until you change your default, you will always go back to being who you were before because you have never changed your mind. You change your friends, you change your address, you change your phone number, you change the songs you sing, you change everything else but you didn’t change your mind. There’s nothing as powerful as a change in mind. I’ma take my BOOM! Leave em where they got if they ain’t ready Used to have lotta homies, now they droppin’ like a steady I’m like BOOM! We takin’ over, it’s our time now BOOM! Oh you ain’t know, we bout to thrive now Big, overwhelming, optimistic, momentum A-Clay, hey, back, let me get em Go get em, Ed! Hurt all every obstacle, tryna do the impossible Turnt my whole life around, haters thought it was comical Had to make some moves, didn’t mean it, seen nothin’ Quarterback to play, man, I had to call an auto-pick Drop back, stop that, rearrange or switch it up Only got my life with it It’s better to go dip it up. There ain’t an option in a way that I can give it up Hey, now, let’s go pick it up. Nothing like your posse look poppy. You cannot top me They watch me and try to cop like Rocky you cannot stop me Oh, yeah, but we grinding off on the weather we shining because we better get with us We gotta set up. What’s up take my mind out trust me no going back coming for that top spot I’m feeling like they owe me that I feel like we been holding back Throw your hands up, say it with me, if you’re going down Boom! Nothing is powerful as a change line Boom! Better get your skills, I’m a take mine Boom! Leave them where they at if they ain’t ready Used to have a lot of homies, now they driving like a pedi I’m like boom! We taking over, it’s our time now Boom! Oh you ain’t know, we about to thrive now Big, overwhelming, optimistic, cold, gentle A. Clay, hey, let me kill em’ Came a long way from where I used to work You call me deceived like the way I used to swear I used to be a bad boy, but I’m a good boy now I used to be a bad boy, but I’m a good boy now I used to be a bad boy, but I’m a good boy now I used to be a bad boy, but I’m a good boy now I used to be a bad boy, but I’ma keep it real cause I want to Other women tryna holla, girl I want you And disrespecting white people is what I won’t do I’ma keep it real cause I want to Other women tryna holla, girl I want you And disrespecting white people is what I won’t do I’ma keep it real cause I want to Other women tryna holla, girl I want you And disrespecting white people is what I won’t do Don’t do your dance, don’t do your dance If you really wanna change, gotta have a plan Even when they sit down, I’ma take a stand Throw your hands up, say it with me, you be doin’ man But these become your thoughts, thoughts become your actions So be intentional about the way you passion It’s focused, there’s no hocus We only live once man, and you know this You can’t press the rewind, but you can make a beeline To the next level like you’re headed for the treeline I was born in Minnesota, moved to Oklahoma Incorporated, broken to my rhymes Now it’s time to show ya How a former stuttering student can turn out the raps With a lyrical miracle flow in the cash to match I’m imported, a Minnesota refugee But I’m consistent as can be As I rap on hip-hop beats earning rap on syntax Even though that I’m white I can play a folk in music but I ain’t vanilla ice Here we go, here we go, here we go, full steam 3, 2, 1, dynamite on the scene Boom! Nothing is powerful as a change mind Boom! Better get yours cause I’m a take mine Boom! Leave em where they at if they ain’t ready Used to have a lot of homies, now they droppin’ like a belly I’m like boom! We takin’ over, it’s our time now Boom! Oh you ain’t know, but we about to thrive now Big, overwhelming, optimistic, whole metal Boom! And the Lord sent me here to tell you, the problem is with your default. Until you change your default, you will always go back to being who you were before because you have never changed your mind. You change your friends, you change your address, you change your phone number, you change the songs you sing, you change everything else, but you didn’t change your mind. There is nothing as powerful as a changed mind. Hear the rest of T.D. Jakes incredible life changing and mind altering sermon. Nothing as powerful as a changed mind today. By looking up T.D. Jakes on YouTube and typing in nothing as powerful as a changed mind. That is a lyrical, lyrical rap. I am Ryan Wimpy. I’m Rachel Wimpy and the name of our business is Kip Topping. Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen. When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about internet marketing or advertising or anything at all. Just dog training. And that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team because they do it all for us. So that we can focus on our passion and us training dogs. Clay and his team here, they’re so enthusiastic. Their energy is off the charts. Never a dull moment. Very thriving. We’ve been working with Clay and his team for the last five months, two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. Clay’s helped us make anything from brochures to stickers, new business cards, new logos, scripts for phones, script for email, script for text message, scripting for everything. How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome. They’re so effective. It’s worth every minute. Things get done, we’ll ask for things like different flyers and they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective. If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and producing your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all the stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency and actually knows what they’re doing when you already have something that’s your core focus and you already know how to do it. You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay and his team. We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. And no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t. They can’t afford one. And their local web guy or local person that they know probably can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people, I mean, really ride them to get stuff done. And stuff is done so fast here. There’s a real sense of urgency to get it done. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us and getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. Um, like we have workflows that are kind of all over the place to the having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards. It’s pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me The atmosphere here is awesome I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place this place rocks It’s invigorating the walls are super It’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice It’s a pretty cool place to be very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot, which, you know, we’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot, and so the humor definitely helps. It breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts, and it’s very interactive. You can raise your hand. It’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak, you know. The wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions, so that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life. You’re definitely… It’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars, so you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started like nine profitable businesses. So not only is it a lot of good information, but just getting in the thought process of Clay Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches, getting in the thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses, to me, just that is priceless. That’s money. Well, we’re definitely not getting upsold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where they upsold, where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference. Now I want to like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like it’s good information but we’re like, oh my gosh, I want to strangle you. Shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for and that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything so that’s awesome. I hate that. Oh, it makes me angry. So, glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business. And I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference. It’s, the information that you’re going to get is just very, very beneficial. And the mindset that you’re going to get, that you’re going to leave with, is just absolutely worth the price of a little bit of money and a few days worth of your time. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing, and this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing, and this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen, and I took this beautiful photo. And this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen, and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. The Thrivetime Show, two-day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13-point business system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying. And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s gonna be the best business workshop ever, and we’ll even give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see you. Oh, look at this cute baby. What a great baby. Quality baby. That’s a healthy baby. Okay. Cripe Nation, on today’s show, I’m very excited for you to hear this success story about this wonderful couple that, Sean, I would describe them as they are killing the game in the most non-violent way possible. They’re killing the game in the most non-violent way possible. They are blowing up in a good way. Folks, I’m telling you, these folks are really growing their business, and what makes them great is they’re really kind, hardworking, diligent people, and we’re honored to serve them. We’ve got Jenny and Mike here joining us. Jenny and Mike, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you two? Hi, thank you, good. We’re doing well. Okay, now I’ll start with you, Jenny, because frankly, Sean likes you more, no, I’m just kidding. So how did you first discover us and the business coaching that we provide? So I was listening to different podcasts about business. I was starting up our business, and so you were the first one to pop up on our podcast, on Apple, I think Apple is what I was on. And so I started listening to you, I got on your website, and I was just a little girl starting a business and I said, I’m gonna ask this guy to be my coach and I don’t think I’m gonna get a shot. But sure enough, within a week, he called me. Now who is this cute, cute child here? But Micah, who is this cute kid here? It’s Lennon Rose, she is about to be 10 months old. I hate to do this to you, but can you kind of hold up the baby to the camera a little bit? This is probably, oh, look at this cute baby. What a great baby. Quality baby. That’s a healthy baby. So Mike, can you tell us what’s the name of your website there? I think people want to look you up and verify you’re real people that don’t just happen to have a cute baby. Yeah. Our website is newconcept.healthcare. Newconcept.healthcare. So newconcept.healthcare. I’m going to pull it up right now, folks, so we can all verify that they’re not just a couple who’s taking advantage of the cute baby they have to get a podcast here. This is a real couple, because I’m pulling it up here. So this is the website, it’s newconcept.healthcare. And can you tell our listeners, what services do you guys provide at newconcept.healthcare? So we offer more functional medicine. So we offer IV therapies, we offer hormone replacement therapies. We also do acute care. We do pretty much everything, but we’re very much alternative. So we believe in medical freedom, and that’s what we offer. And you guys, you reached out. Do you remember that initial consultation there? Do you remember, Mike, that initial consultation? Do you remember what that was like? Yeah, it was actually pretty overwhelming that when we started in this business with absolutely nothing, and we had the opportunity to work with a five-time check. Well, you know, the one thing I always try to do is, you know, my father, great guy, may he rest in peace, he worked his tail off like so many people do, and there was no real economic result that was achieved from it. There wasn’t any, you know, he had a college degree, he’s working two jobs. I remember he’s late 30s, he’s working at Domino’s, delivering pizzas, working at Quick Trip, he worked at furniture stores. And I always try to look at every new client we have as though I’m talking to my dad, you know, because like, what would my dad, you know, what could he have learned at the age of 37 that could have changed the financial trajectory of his life? You know, and I try to look at it that way. And so you guys, I paired you up with Sean, you’ve been working with Sean, I believe Sean since October of 2020, is that correct, Sean? I think that’s when they started their business. It wasn’t until about April of 2021. So April of 2021. And at that point, from that point to now, Sean, how much growth have you guys achieved from 2021 to now? Do you know that number? Yeah, I mean, we’re sitting at 2023 revenues were 821,000. And they’re in October of 2020. Like they only had a few months, they made about $95,000 by the end of 2020. And then we grew significantly that first year, about 375% to $588,000. And we continued to grow there ever since, all the way up to where we’re getting close to the million dollar mark at this point here, just like three years in. Jenny, how would you describe the growth? Would you say you’ve doubled or you’re five times larger? How would you describe that? Oh, no, I definitely feel the growth. There’s been some growing pains and you guys have helped us through that, too. So it’s been amazing. It’s been amazing to help people because that’s what I’m passionate about. And you guys have really helped us expand and tell people what we’re about. So step one here, we do this with all the clients. I’m going to walk people through the steps. We really needed to nail down your branding. And that’s a big thing because, you know, branding is to humans what clothing is. So as an example, you know, you wake up today, folks, if you run around and you’re streaking through life, you’re probably not going to get a lot of conversations started. So we all have to be intentional about, you know, what are we going to wear? Are we going to wear a tie? Are we going to wear a polo? Are we going to do makeup? Are we not? So people, they judge us based on our appearance. And so we really had to get a website built. We had to optimize the online brand. Jenny, we do it all included for our clients. So we don’t refer you to another vendor. We do it all. Can you talk about the impact that that has made on the business? Oh, for sure. Just the website itself, it looks so great. We would have never been able to make it look that great. The way y’all optimize everything and keep us with Google, just where people search us, and we’re the first people that come up. And that’s actually how we’ve established our business and started offering some of the things that we offer is because of the tags that we have. I didn’t originally start off as doing IV therapy, but due to people Googling healthcare functional medicine. I had three phone calls in a week that said, hey, do you offer IV therapy? And it was very interesting. And I was like, well, no, but I can. And so it was because of you guys that that kind of snowballed and took effect. So yeah, there’s a lot that you guys have done for us. Now, Sean, we’re working with these wonderful clients here. I’ll pick on Mike here. You know, you always say great things about Mike and Jenny. What makes them good to work with? Because I want to make sure for anybody out there, if you go to Thrivetimeshow.com, I consistently offer a free 13-point assessment. I’ve been doing that since 2005. I do it without reservation. There’s no obligation. But there’s usually about one to two knuckleheads a week that will fill out the form and probably 20 really great people that fill out the form. And then we only take on 160 clients. And so I don’t want anyone to waste their time. What makes Mike so great to work with? Well, Clay, I mean, you, when I first started coaching, you taught me about these, you know, these two types of business owners. There’s the happy hopers out there, and then there’s the diligent doers. And I think these guys are a great example of the diligent doer. They continually apply effort to work on their business, not just in their business. They consistently show up to their meetings. They track all of the critical numbers of their business, and they are aware of what’s going on with all of their employees. They’re paying attention to all the little things going on. They’re keeping all the plates spinning, and they ask great questions. They actually really do make a great effort consistently to apply our systems and help their business grow. It’s been working. So step one, we get the branding nailed down. That’s the website, the print pieces, the logos, the business cards. But then you have to develop that online reputation. Now that can be a tough thing to do, Jenny, and I’m not, this isn’t a backhanded compliment, I’m just saying, but for people that are humble and very kind, of which I would put Jenny in that category, sometimes asking for reviews is more difficult because you almost feel like you’re self-promoting. I’ve never had this conversation with you, but when you, has that been difficult for you to ask people to give you video reviews and Google reviews after you provided the service, or was that easy for you to do? It’s not easy. It still isn’t easy. It is. It’s difficult because you feel like you’re begging for something even though you know you did the right thing. So it is. It’s difficult for me. It’s just my personality type, but we get it done anyways. I’ll find this for the diligent, kind customers we work with, it’s very difficult sometimes to ask for those objective reviews from real customers. And I find that from my clients I’ve worked with that are sort of like self-described barbarians. I had a guy years ago I worked with, he’s a, I won’t mention his name or his industry, but I’ll just say he’s obsessed with physical fitness. And he told me, he says, I’m kind of a business barbarian. You tell me what to do and I will slay the dragons. And I’m like, okay, you need to get Google reviews from everybody you’ve ever worked with. And he’s like, oh, I’m on it. And this guy’s just shamelessly calling through his phone and just lighting people up going, give me a review. Come on, give me a review. Why would you not give me a review? I’m like, go ahead, dial it down a little bit. You know, so again, you guys are humble, diligent doers. You’re the ideal person here. So I appreciate you sharing that. The next thing we had to do is we had to create a no brainer. Now, a no brainer is an offer so good, so amazing that people simply cannot say no to it. Now, I won’t mention the name of the company, but I worked years ago, and I still work with this company, they’re a medical company, they’re doing well now. And for whatever reason, they put on their website, first initial consult, 497. And he went to one of these like borderline spiritual motivational conference things where Jesus isn’t described, but they kind of talk about metaphysical alignment and getting your woosaw, getting in your groove, alignment, no friction. And he came back and he’s like, Clay, I believe in the seventh number of completion. I go, I agree. He says, four is the number that’s urgent. I’m like, okay. And I go, what? I don’t want tire kickers. So I’m going to do 497 for my first consult. That way I don’t deal with the tire kickers. I’m like, Doc, I love you so much. You’re a doctor. I love it. You don’t have any customers. That’s why you came to me. You don’t have any customers. So why don’t you do a first free consult? I’m not going to do it. I’m going to kick out Sean the tire kicker. I’m sure you’ve never seen this with a client. Oh, never. And so, now what makes it worse is his wife also went to the Metaphysical Alignment Motivational Jackassery Festival, and she was like, 497 is the number. I had a dream about it. I’m like, yeah, you probably talked about it all weekend. You probably are subconsciously thinking about it. You’re probably creating a neural pathway related to 497. And so, anyway, after about a year, he finally says, okay, I came to your conference, and I saw a person that did the first consult for a dollar. I’m going to go with that. And now his business is blowing up. Could you talk about your no-brainer, your first consult for a dollar? How has that helped you having that no-brainer offer? Yeah, so it gets people in. And so when we get people in, we know that we’re doing a good job and we know that we’re trustworthy and our healthcare is superior to most. So just getting people in for that dollar, because a lot of people are, you know, they’re nervous about going to the doctor or they don’t trust healthcare system. And so they know that they can come in, they’re only going to spend a dollar, they can figure out whether or not they trust us, figure out whether or not we’re the place for them. And we know 100% of the time we will be. So it’s really helped us just get people in and get people to trust us more. Now, once somebody fills out the form, folks, again, there’s a linear pathway here. I’m trying to give you a visual here. So you establish your revenue goals, you figure out your numbers to break even, you figure out how many hours a week you’re willing to work. Even though you have a cute baby, you gotta figure out how you’re gonna get it done. And step number four is you define your unique value proposition. What makes you unique? And that’s something you and Sean have worked on together. You improve your branding. Now you’re coming in contact with humans. Business is a contact sport. I love this part. That’s when you start marketing. You launch your marketing. You have your online ads. You optimize your website. You begin to come up top in the search results. You start to get leads. Do you remember what it was like, Jenny, when you first got your first online lead? Do you remember the first one where you’re like, it’s working. Do you remember that moment? Yeah, it was almost like we wanted to, well, we did celebrate because it finally had happened. And then as soon as the first one came in, the second one came in. And like I said, it was almost a growing pain experience. We had so many leads so fast. So it was great. And we still celebrate every lead that we get. Now, Mike, the next step is you have to make sales scripts. We recommend to every client that the calls are recorded for quality assurance. You have a sales script, the calls are recorded for quality assurance. You have a one sheet that tracks your pricing. You have pre-written emails. You begin tracking. Sean’s always bragging about you guys with tracking. Mike, how has it helped to have tracking in place where you can see, you know, how does that help you? Well, it’s really a good benefit because, you know, at the end of the week, you know what your income was, you know what your leads was. So wherever we’re lacking in, we can quickly adjust and make that adjustment to make it work for the next week. Now when you, if you don’t have tracking, uh, folks, this is a true story. It’s kind of a sad story. So I’ll, I’ll speak in generality. Sean, I talked to a guy the other day and just share a terrible story. Longtime client and he got motivated. He said he set up a trade show. He didn’t tell me he’s doing that. It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me, but he set up a trade show. I think he was going to try to surprise me with the fruit of the trade show. So he set up the trade show and he gets on the call. His energy is kind of off. And I’m like, are you okay? Yeah, dude, fine. What’s wrong? Hi, just, I don’t know. I’m like, your lead sheet, we’re getting, you know, 10 to 15 leads a week. It’s very consistent. Revenue looks good. He’s like, yeah, I’m in a tight spot. We are in a tight spot. Why are you in a tight spot? He says, I did a trade show. You did a trade show. I got roped into four. I did a thing where you get the billboard, you get the trade show, you get the magazine ad. And I did the trade show and we got no leads. And I go, what kind of trade show did you do? And he says, well, I went to the whatever trade show and Sean, what I find is that there’s the emotional excitement about being on the billboard, being on the magazine cover, be, you know, and he got called probably by one of these kind of scam, I call it a scam-och-ery or jackassery. They call you and they go, hey, is this Sean? Yeah, this is Sean. Sean, yeah, I noticed that you have an incredible health care company and we want to honor you by giving you the yada yada of the region award. It’s the yada yada, it’s a regional, it’s a prestigious award. We’d like to meet with you. Can we meet with you? Yeah. So now I meet here. Now, Sean, again, I’m not on the phone, but I still like the phone voice here. Now, Sean, because we’re so honored, we’re inviting you to a plated dinner to honor your honor, your honoredness, your greatness, your humbleness. It’s going to be $1,000 a plate for you and your wife. Did you want four seats or eight? Most people do eight. Oh, I guess just four. Four would be good. And that does include a glossy magazine feature in, we’ll just call it like, Missouri local top doctor Jack Assery. It’s a great magazine. And you’re also on the, you’ll be on a billboard. We’ve teamed up with the billboard. It rotates through your, hey, don’t get too excited. And just because we’re honored. We’re not, you know, again, we’re just honored. Now, the way it works is it’s going to be four payments of $4,000 for a total of $16,000. And that’s—no, I’m serious! And now they’re in the trade shows! And he’s going to the trade show, and there ain’t nobody there. There is nobody there! To be technical, nobody was at this trade show. I mean, everybody was not at the trade show. He’s got photos of him and his wife and his team in an empty booth, and he’s got a magazine and no leads are coming and he was so excited to tell me. I’m sure you’ve never encountered this sort of thing, Virginia. Have you, you know, Jenny, have you ever seen a situation where that sort of shamockery advertising has been entered into your world in some capacity? I’ve been there. I’ve been exactly where, what you’re talking about and I’ve set up everything and paid employees and I felt like I was nothing more than a free pin show. The only people that were there were people looking for free pens. Oh, I know. And it feels terrible. And then you kind of have to sell it to yourself all day. Guys, we’re getting our name out there. Sean, can you pass the megaphone back there? Yeah, because I would tell people to get your name out there. What you do is you just run outside and say, all right, come visit No Pants Up Healthcare. And people go, why are you yelling at me? I’m trying to shop for my groceries. No Pants Up Healthcare. Is this effective? Of course it’s effective, I’m getting my name out there. That leads to buying Frisbees, branded Frisbees, Goozies, you know what I’m saying, branded pens. Yes. All of a sudden you buy these things. Sean, you know what I’m talking about. Oh yeah. Okay. So now we have to do, and I’m going to show you, this is kind of the back end of one of my companies, it’s called Elephant in the Room. And you do a search for eitrlounge.com. And then you go to forward slash staff. I’m not going to give you the password, folks, but you log in. And these are all the systems needed to run the haircut chain. Now, one thing I thought was very interesting is Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform. The other day, they were disclosing, Newsweek was disclosing the revenue of it. And I just want people to know this because I think, and I just full disclosure, I’m a very conservative person, but I just want people to see this. This is just something to look at. Truth Social, they declared in their filing that they did $3.3 million of revenue and had $49 million of losses, which by the way, that’s very normal for a tech startup company. And their users are going up and they’re having an app. There’s like a reaction in the marketplace. People are actually putting more money in, they’re investing, the stock price is going up. But I don’t know anybody that I’ve met in my life, I’ve never met a client that can afford to bring in 3.3 million and lose 49 million, you know? So like for my haircut chain, we have five locations, we bring in more than 3.3 million, and this just in, we don’t spend 49 million, you know? So we have to, we call it a lean startup. You got to keep that thing lean. And so when you go to eitrlounge.com forward slash staff, every document needed to manage the business is here. So the opening checklist for the manager, you click here, boom, this is what the manager has to do to start the day. Everything is documented. And that’s kind of where we’re at right now with Ginny and Mike’s business. We’re in the process of building all those checklists. Sean, what kind of checklists have you built so far? Oh, man, we have a whole page. Their staff page is pretty built out. We’re really getting there. I think more right now it’s getting, correct me if I’m wrong, we need some managers in there so we can free you guys up from the business. And so we have a lot of the worker level systems. We’re just now working on more of how do we get those manager level systems and find those high quality managers. Now, let me give Jenny a little mentor moment here. This will be helpful for you. I’m going to hop on a flight in about 2 and 1⁄2 hours, 3 hours to go to Denver, all right? And I got to go to Denver to meet with the founder of Oxifresh.com. This is a brand we’ve worked with and helped them to grow to 550 locations now. 550 locations, OK? And if you type in carpet cleaning floats, we’re the world’s highest rated and most reviewed company in the world. In the world. OK, 274000 reviews. We’ve been holding this idea in our mind for 15 consecutive years. I’ve been working on this, John, before I met you. We just were to grind in. OK, yeah. And the biggest challenge that the locations have is managers. Finding a good manager. And I tell people this. It never goes over well, but hopefully eventually it will. I keep refining it, refining the idea. The kind of person that enjoys conflict but also likes people is a good manager. Let me try that again. The kind of person that enjoys conflict but also likes people is a good manager. And I have found it’s not so much trainable as it’s findable. So as an example, where we’re getting ready to head out to Denver, Sean, you know my personality type. You know that I have to pack all this stuff to get ready to go, you saw my suitcase out there? Yep. How many times do you think I’ve followed up with the people involved in the trip so far before leaving? Oh man, it’s probably on your to-do list and you’ve checked it off like probably at least five times today I would think. And what kind of things do you think I might have put on my checklist to travel to Denver? First off, just making sure that the timing is working, making sure that you have all the stuff that you need, making sure that you have double of the stuff that you need in case something gets broken, making sure that the people who are there know you’re coming and when you’re going to be there. Do you think I’m checking a bag? Oh, yeah, you’re probably not checking a bag. There it is. You’re going to get lost. Right. No. And am I, do you think I’m catching a flight a lot earlier than I need to be there? Way earlier. Yeah, if I’m having a meeting tomorrow, which I am, I’m leaving today at 1230. That’s the sort of paranoia that makes management possible. So I have literally called, I said, all right, I’m getting on the 1230 flight. We’re meeting tomorrow. I should be in by like four o’clock Denver time. Our meeting’s tomorrow. If that flight gets delayed and the next one gets delayed and the next one I’ll still be there. I’ve got backup phone chargers. I have a rule, everybody going with me, you cannot check a bag. I want to check a bag. Can’t check a bag. Why? Because it could get lost. This is real. I’m not, every, I am completely paranoid. And that is the paranoia is what makes the businesses run. Yeah. And I asked my staff every day, guys, elephant in the room. Did you guys get a review? And they say, yeah, we got a review. You asked me 10 minutes ago. Okay, I’ll talk to you in four minutes. You hear me say that. I’ll say, I’ll talk to you in five minutes. Yeah. And I’ll do it. And it’s a follow-up of, because I have to make sure that the checklists are being followed, the reviews are being followed. We’re a licensed business. People don’t know that. Haircare, you’re licensed by the state, so we have certain cleanliness standards. We could have random people from the state show up. So we got checklists. And I follow up, and it doesn’t bother me to follow up with the same adult who’s in their 40s six times within a 50-minute span of time. It doesn’t bother me. But most people, that bothers them. And so, have you found that, Jenny, that a lot of people don’t like to follow up? Have you found that or is that just something unique to me? I found that they don’t like to follow up. No people don’t like to follow up. It’s a almost like an awkward communication thing That people will try to avoid. Yeah, and and it’s not necessarily that you’re being mean or any type of way But that’s I feel like that’s probably the way that we feel when we continuously follow up like we’re having to step on people’s toes, but really we’re not, we’re just getting the job done. My mentorship moment for you is it’s probably the same feeling you have when you ask for reviews. Yeah. It’s probably the same. So, and I’m just saying, and then, and if Mike, did you ever play football or a sport of some kind? Yeah, I used to play soccer. Okay, soccer. So like when you, what position did you play? Goalkeeper. Goalkeeper, okay. So is a goal, this is a great example, I didn’t know you were a goalkeeper, but when you’re a goalkeeper and someone’s kicking that ball at you fast, I mean, just the ball’s coming in there, I mean, people can really kick a soccer ball fast. There are certain people that want to be a goalkeeper, but they kind of avoid the ball, they try to hide from it, they flinch, you know what I’m talking about? But you actually would lunge into it, am I correct? Right. I mean, you’re aggressive, right? I mean, you’re like, you had, for some reason, you enjoyed it. Yeah. Right? I’m getting 100 miles an hour fastball. Have you ever seen somebody who tried to be a goalie? I’m not looking for a name here, but somebody who would kind of hide from the ball? Yeah. This is the same thing for management. Like, as a manager, you have to want, like, you have to sort of seek out conflict, but like people. So I’ll say things like, okay, it’s 8 o’clock. I need to make sure you put out the flags in front of the elephant in the room store today, Mr. Manager. Put out the flags that draw the attention by the road, put out the flags, and I’m going to call you in 10 minutes to follow up. Call him in 10 minutes. Are the flags up? Can you send me a picture? They’re like, do you not trust me? Absolutely not. I trust nobody. Go ahead and send him. And then I’ll call him back 30 minutes later. Hey, did you get Google reviews? Yeah, we got one Google review. You know, the quote is 10. Yeah, I’ll call you back in two minutes. You know, call him back. Hey, did you get a review? It’s been two minutes. I know. Oh, yeah, I’ll tell you what. I’ll call you back in an hour. My whole day is just following up. And then over time, the culture happens where people go, he’s gonna follow up. And now the people that like the follow-up like to work there and it’s become a great thing. And that’s where we’re kind of at right now, I think, is we’re getting into the follow-up phase. Do you have call recording in place there, Mike? Do you have the call recording for quality assurance installed yet? Yes, we do. And are you learning some things? Yes, it is very hard to train people on recording. It’s serious. Yeah. Okay. That’s something we got to do. Now we’re just going through the workflow. And then the wowing the customers. What Sean is saying is that your patients are consistently wowed. Now, I don’t know if that’s because Sean is your hype man or if that’s a real thing, but it seems like people are actually wowing. They’re being wowed right now. People when they come in, this is, if you look at the workflow, they buy something. Right here, we have to wow them. You’ve got to create that wow moment and again if you want to download this diagram folks Just go to thrive time show.com Forward slash millionaire thrive time show.com forward slash millionaire You can download it for my newest book called a millionaires guide to become sick becoming sustainably rich You got to create that Wow moment I mean you in amidst the checklists and the tracking at some point here You’ve got to create a moment that wows people where they go Wow So I’m trying to get everybody’s creative juices flowing here. So if you have a restaurant, I work with a restaurant in Florida right now, a great restaurant. They say, welcome in, is it your first time? They say, yeah, it’s my first time. Oh, well, hey, you get free appetizers on us today and one free adult beverage. Welcome in. And every time it’s that, wow! And then when you come back later and ask for a review or, hey, what entree do you want? Guess what? People become generous with how they buy. Another example, I work with an auto auction. The auto auction says your first time that you buy from the auto auction, you only have to pay a dollar more than the actual cost of the vehicle just to wow people, to get that going. I happen to work with a carpet cleaning business, carpet cleaning business, and what they do is they say, hey, the first time we clean your carpet, we’ll be any competitor’s price and it will be at least half off of our normal price. And they go, okay, great. You’ve got to have that wow moment. What are you guys doing, Jenny, to wow your customers there? Well, there are things that we do. We will oftentimes give samples of certain things because we know they work. We have a lot of supplement sales that we do. Again, the dollar console is a wow moment because we will spend some 10 to 15 minutes explaining how we’re different. And I feel like they’re wowed because of that. Also, our services are so much different. We spend time in the room with our patients. We listen to them. They’re not just a number. And a lot of times people have never experienced that. So there’s a lot of wow moments, I think, for all of our patients. I understand that 59% of your customers are now from word of mouth. Is that accurate? Yeah. That’s huge. Yeah, well, and with the customer acquisitions cost, too, I’ve heard you say this before, Clay, that if you’re advertising and you’re doing a good job wowing at the same time, they compound each other and you’ll end up having two to three word-of-mouth referrals from those patients that are wowed for every one lead you have from advertising. We measured and tracked that they had this last year. For every dollar they spent on advertising, they were able to bring back in $4.61. So that’s a 461% return on their marketing investment. It’s incredible stuff. And the great news is as we build these systems, if you guys ever wanted to franchise or license or open up multiple locations, if done properly, you should be able to scale it. It should be very repeatable, very duplicatable. Other things you guys have done, you’ve implemented a database to keep track of your customers, you’re gathering objective video reviews. You guys are really checking all the boxes. I’d like for you, if you can, Jenny, here, to give a word of encouragement for any of our listeners out there that are a little bit on the fence right now and they’re going, you know, I have thought about scheduling a free consultation, but I don’t know. I hear it’s $1,700 a month. Can you maybe explain your thoughts, what you’d say to anybody who’s a friend of yours or family that asks you about the value about the business consulting? Oh, well, I would say that the $1,700 a month is an excuse not to have someone to mentor you. It’s kind of like being in a gym when you need a trainer. We’re not always perfect and business owning is not easy and you need a mentor. I’ve never missed the $1,700 a month, even when I was only six months in when we started with you guys. I’ve never even considered it a loss. It was scary at first to make that, but that wasn’t an excuse. I knew I needed someone to guide me through this. And you guys have guided us through this, through the entire thing, through employees, through income, through spending, through all of it. And we come through so many problems. There are a lot of problems that are established when you have a business. I mean, you become very overwhelmed very fast, and you need somebody that you can call who’s successful, who’s been there, that says, you’re not crazy. This happens to all of us. Here’s what you do about it. It’s been the best decision that we’ve made. Final question I have here for you as far as, um, having a turn, like a one-stop shop. Years ago, I hired a business consultant who was great. And he would say things like, and I’m not ripping him. I’m just telling you what would happen. He would say, Clay, you got to work on your business and not in it. I’m going, that’s true. He goes, you got to delegate to elevate. That’s true. Clay, your website is not optimized. And I’m going, this is great. Fresh perspective. I go, Bruce, could you help me optimize? No, I don’t optimize. Could you help me work on it? No. Could you help me make a checklist? No. Do you make, do you help me with the print pieces that I need to make? No. Can you make a video? No. Do you help me with my online ads? No. Clay, and he would use that. He was kind of an Eastern, he’s an Eastern, Northeastern American guy. And he used to say, Clay, baby, let me tell you what, I don’t make print pieces. What am I, a print piece guy? I’m not a web guy. We know what I am, I’m a work on the business guy. You gotta find a good web guy. So every meeting we would have would result in me having to find another vendor to pay another $8,000 to build the website, 4,000 to make the video, 5,000 to do it. So every time you give a recommendation, it would lead to another cost. Can you maybe explain the value of having a flat monthly fee? Yeah, I don’t have to ever worry about it. Like I know if I need the website updated, it’s a text away. I know if I’m having trouble with an employee, it’s a text away. I know if I need financial advice, it’s a text away. And again, we meet every single week and all our questions are answered and we’re held accountable to what we need to be held accountable for. So it really works for us. Jenny and Mike, thank you guys for your time so much. I really do value your time. I appreciate you guys being here today. And on part two of today’s show, we’re going to tee up another success story because we want people to know it is possible, despite the financial jackassery plaguing our nation right now, it is possible to become successful and you guys are a living example of it. Thank you guys for bringing your baby on the show. We’ll talk to you soon. All right, Sean, so we’ve got three people in a very small space here in the studio. Sean, introduce us to today’s guest there, sir. Okay, so this is Kandra Sipansky, and it’s quite a last name, folks. Yep, you play hockey? Okay. That’s a hockey name, sure. So we were going over some of the stats before, and she owns an eyelash extension salon. What’s the web address where I can go pull it up here? It is, there’s, yeah, so there’s two. Which one are we going to? She has the extensionist, which is T-H-E, and then X, tensionist. Tensionist. Yep, got it. Okay, that’s right. There we are. Okay, got it. Okay, so, and what are the services, Kandee, that you all provide here? Mainly just eyelash extensions. Eyelash extensions. We do other stuff, but that’s been the main thing for years, and then we started adding things like permanent makeup, brow stuff. And how long have we worked with you? How long have we had the opportunity to work with you? Since 2019. So tell us, what kind of growth have you had from 2019 versus now we’re in 2022? So 2019, it was 880. Yeah, it was like 880,000 is what the tax returns. That’s great, yeah, okay. And then what’d you get to this year or 2021 I guess? 2021, 1.4. Oh, 1.4. Yeah. 1.4. 1.4. Okay. And when we work with a lot of clients, you know, a lot of clients, if you’re out there listening today, what we want to do is we want to help you grow your company. And so I want to walk you through the process of how to grow a company because a lot of people watching go, I want to grow my company. It’s kind of a big, vague idea, but I want to dial into the specifics of what we’ve had to do to grow the business and what we’re doing moving forward here. So first off, when we started working with you, you’ve always had a product that people love. I mean, is that an accurate statement? People love it, I think. So what we’ve had to do is build the online reputation so that people that don’t know about your business, who haven’t been in the business, they can hear about it before they, they can go online and build an online opinion about your business before they come in. How have you been doing on gathering objective Google reviews? Has that been something you guys have been hammering on there, Kendra? How have you been doing on that? Every stinking week she hits the key performance indicator at each one of her locations. We have nailed that. Like, they just do it now. It’s awesome. Okay, so step one, we’re going to put the online reputation. There’s a lot of detail on that. Have you guys gotten into video reviews yet? Yeah. Oh, they have an ungodly amount of them. It’s ridiculous. Yeah, if you go to the testimonials page on theextensionist918.com, you’ll find them. Now, when people go to the website, then you want to create some sort of a no-brainer, some sort of a hot deal, so that way people that don’t know who you are don’t hesitate to do business with you. Now, again, you guys have, in my opinion, you’re branded as one of the top, aka premier brands, in Oklahoma right now for what you do. What’s the no-brainer offer that you now offer first-time customers? So we’ve just been doing a discounted classic full set, but Sean and I were just talking about doing a $1 full set and trying that. So $1 for a full set, maybe. Yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah, I’ve always been afraid to do that, but I think we’re going to. Well, and too, we’ve got the memberships going now, too. You didn’t have a membership model. Now we have membership packages we’ve developed that make it make a little more sense to get somebody in for a dollar. Because just like with Elephant in the Room, Clay, if you can convert the majority of them to a membership, it makes a lot of sense to give away $25 or $40 on the first service. And for people that don’t know, Elephant in the Room is a haircut chain that I own and founded. But again, regardless of whether you have a business that’s a eyelash extension business or a haircut business or a dog training company or a home building company, the step one, we got to do is we got to improve that online reputation. Now, step two, we got to get those video reviews. Step three, we got to enhance the website. Step four, we got to enhance a no-brainer. Come up with a no-brainer that gets people excited and often it’s so hot, people will not reject you. And then step five, if we can make a membership model for certain services, you can do that. Has a membership model helped you with the sustainability of your finances? So far, no, just because I feel like we weren’t offering a good enough no-brainer. It’s only been a couple of months. Oh, so it’s kind of a new thing. Yeah. Kind of a newer thing. Yeah. Now, the hiring and process, next thing is you want to create a hiring process. Now, one of the things that’s tough about your business or my business or any company out there. It’s finding good people. Now, if you have a system in place to find good people, that’s not so challenging. Have you guys started the group interview process? How’s that going? It’s good. Has it helped you? It’s a lot of fun, actually. Yeah. OK. We went from in 2019, you had 14 employees and now you have 40. Wow. OK. So you went from 40 from 14 employees, OK, from 14 employees to 40 employees. Now, people who work with me, it’s very interesting. I was just talking to a guy literally probably 39 minutes ago. Who I’ve worked with for years. And the one thing that he mentioned to me, it’s interesting, he goes, you know, Clay, I’ve worked with you now for almost a decade. And he’s like, my business is now 10 times what it was 10 years ago. And he’s like, it’s just a consistent application of effort. I just go down that boom book, I follow it, and every week we just get 2%. And he’s like, I’ve tried to explain that to people, and they don’t often get that it’s not like a one big idea. All these things are big ideas, but it’s the implementation. Can you talk about what it’s like working with our team and Sean on a weekly basis now since 2019? Well, I feel like talking to him every week. I have someone who can help me with ideas and stay on my ass about things. And like you said, the consistency. So that’s, I feel like, the biggest thing that Sean helps me with. Just the consistency. Right. And the tracking. Because before, I didn’t do any kind of tracking at all. And that’s been probably the biggest thing for me. Now, tracking, what it does is it takes the feelings out of things. Let me just give you an example. This is kind of a funny thing. One of these clients I’ve worked with for years, I was talking to him on Monday, and it’s really funny because on the tracking sheet it shows how many outbound calls did you make? How many appointments did you set? So again, in his particular business, it’s a different industry, but it’s how many calls did you make, how many appointments did you set, how many leads did you get? We just try, how many Google reviews did you get? How many dollars a week did you spend on your Facebook ads? And we just track every week. And that tracking allows us to see obvious patterns. So we get to the part where the calls, it shows the number of calls being made. And I know his caller. Like I know the caller, cause I’ve been around the guy and the owner brought the caller to the meeting. And so I’m going, so you made that many calls? Cause I don’t think he did. And he’s like, no, no, I didn’t do it. So sometimes people, even with a tracking sheet, they’ll put in information that’s kind of bogus. Has the tracking sheet, I’m not looking for specific names, but has it allowed you, Kendra, to expose bogusness in your business, like gaps? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, someone that was just copy and pasting. She does the appointments booked, weekly, par, and- Yeah. She tracks a lot of the lead sources. She’s also tracking whether or not the people are, in fact, getting the reviews to put onto the sheet, which we can go and verify ourselves. Right. But still, this person is supposed to be supplying. We just got this in the last week or two. Because when you delegate a lot of stuff, you’ve got to follow up on it regularly. This person went two weeks or so just copying and pasting the same amount of leads. Wow. So now installing a quality control loop, I’m not sure if we’re there yet in the system, but for the elephant in the room, as an example, it’s a haircut chain. And we have mystery shoppers that we pay to come in and they get a free haircut to come in and get a haircut. And then what we do is we try to get feedback from them. And they have a checklist. It’s very simple that they go over, but it’s sights, sounds, smells, experiences, just so that we know. And they text me how it’s going. Well, you know, it’s interesting because when you have mystery shoppers, you pick up on things you wouldn’t pick up on. So like recently, this past week, we found out that there were smudges on one of the windows that had been not addressed since the last mystery shopper. Or we’ll find out, we have five stores, so we found out that the bathrooms at one of the stores were dirty. Have you guys started putting in the mystery shop yet? Has it started yet? No, okay, so we’re still kind of, now, where do you, like right now, how many locations do you have open now? Five. Okay, so now as you’re scaling the systems, that’s kind of the next process, the systems and the checklists? Yeah. How are you doing on that process, Kendra? How are you on implementing, building scripts and checklists for everything? We’ve made a lot of scripts within the past couple of months. Okay. Just for every little thing. Mainly on the phone. So where do you see the vision going now? How many locations? Do you have five? Five. Where do you see the vision going? What’s the plan? Are you looking to license now? Are you looking to franchise? What do you see as the future? I would like to license. License it, okay. Yeah, so no more stores that I open. Yeah, there’s still room. We can fit about 14 more stylists in the space that we have, which will bring in a minimum of a half a million dollars more just with the space that we have. But it’s important to mention that we are maintaining a very healthy 20% profit margin in this business as well. Well, let’s talk about that for a second, because a lot of times people forget that part. You know, you got to get the accounting done. And I kind of view this as part of the tracking process. But when you start tracking and you start to go, well, this is how much money came in and this is how much money went out. And you go, wow! You know, you discover real quick, wow, there’s maybe not enough there. Yeah. Tracking, did you end up having to maybe raise prices or cut any expenses or did that help you kind of seeing where the income in and the expenses were going? I think for me, it was a lot of the just not knowing. Like being a business owner and waking up every day and not knowing if you’re going to have enough money for payroll or if you’re going to have enough money to pay the bills. And so doing that just gave me the mental picture, the physical manifestation of how we’re actually doing. And that was not as bad as I thought. Now, everybody’s got their own flow, you know, so what I do with my businesses is you know, I know how big I want to get. I’m very happy with where we’re at. So it’s good. And people all the time, they go to Thrive Time Show and they’ll schedule a consultation. I just talked to a guy today and he was like, I don’t understand why you have 160 clients. Why not take on 400? And I just know, because our business is very involved. Like every business owner we work with, it’s like, we have to really get to know you. Where the haircut business, I don’t have that. You know, it’s like, I don’t know most of the customers and we scale it out. But you ultimately, no matter what kind of business you’re in, if you’re in a high touch business, like a dentist or a cosmetic surgeon, I mean, Dr. Whitlock, one of my clients, it’s very high touch. We eventually have to get to a place and space where we figure out our ideal schedule, a schedule that works for our family and one that’s kind of, where do you, are you happy currently with your schedule? Have you optimized it? I’m not saying it has to be, check all the boxes that the world approves, but I mean, do you like your schedule now? That was also another thing that I started doing because of Sean was my calendar and I’ve sucked at it for a long time, but now I, she has every minute of her day blocked out every day. And so you feel good about where you’re headed now? Yeah, I do. I pretty much don’t have to do anything with this business anymore. So I just opened a daylight donuts. Really? I’ve been spending time doing that. Last Monday. Bam. Yeah. Awesome. Is it a little crazy? Yeah. Just because the person that was supposed to work in open. Yeah, bailed. Bailed, so I’ve been having to do it. Yeah, now for entrepreneur, if you’re out there today and you are, let me just pull this up real quick here. If you’re out there today and you’re in the Northeast Oklahoma, Tulsa area, one, you can visit the business here. The extension is 918.com. You can check it out. You can learn more about it. I encourage you to do so. Also, you know, we have workshops that we do, and the workshops, why I like the workshops is that we’re able to work in kind of a shop-like environment on somebody’s businesses, on their business for a window of time. So people will come to the workshop, we start at seven, we go till three, and they’ll go, I learned more in a day than I’ve learned in years. And we hear that all the time. How would you describe the actual business workshop experience? It’s pretty much everything that’s in coaching just like packed in two days. Got it. And so is that helpful for you? Is that kind of a reinforcement thing for you? Yeah, I sometimes when I’m getting up super early, I’m like, Why am I going? I already got a coaching. But every time that I go, it like, gets me going again. By the way, I have a question for you. This is not dogging any of our attendees. But we have one guy who attended the past workshop and he is brand new to business. And he asked a ton of questions that I would have asked when I was 20 years old. And to me, it was great to hear it because I’m like, ha ha, I remember when I had those questions. And it almost reaffirms what you’ve learned. Do you learn stuff from other people that have questions? Yeah. Do you kind of learn stuff from their questions? Yeah, yeah. So Sean, people like Kandra are not a dime a dozen. I really do believe, you know, we look for diligent doers to help people that show up, people that knock out the homework, people that are not super high emotional. It doesn’t mean you can’t have emotion, it doesn’t mean you can’t be excited, but you know, people that can just knock it out. What makes Kandra a great client to work with? Just for anybody out there that’s thinking about reaching out to us. She’s just very stoic in that if something is going wrong or is just like, it doesn’t matter if it’s a small thing or a large thing, she comes in very even keel and goes, we gotta like fix this thing. And it’s just a very unemotional process. She’s also very realistic about timelines. She blocks her action items into her calendar, which is a big deal. She actually does that. So she gets stuff done. And she’s also a client that, you know, she can operate very consistently with this business and build another business and still not be emotional and freaked out. So that’s just, it’s very rare. And that’s what we would look for in a great client. Cause you never know in business, like what emotional turmoil is headed your way. It’s more about your mindset towards when things come up and she’s really mastered that. Now, now Kendra, you know, according to Inc magazine, I’m going to pull this up for a second. You know, Inc Magazine reports that 96% of businesses fail. And it blows my mind, but I talked to a guy at the last conference and he was like, you know, I love the idea of coaching, but the thing is, and he said, Clay, I’ve tried other coaching programs in the past. And the issue is I’m not gonna meet with somebody every week at the same time. That’s just not, I’m not, and I’m not a guy who uses a to-do list, okay, and I’m not a big calendar guy. And that’s the problem with other coaching programs. And I kind of like your program because I think I go, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not us. That would not be a good fit. So if you were out there telling people who would be a good fit to become a client, because we get our clients grow by default, 96% of businesses fail according to Inc magazine. So by default, we know most businesses fail, but we don’t want to take on every single client. Who would be a good fit for us and who wouldn’t, kind of from an outsider’s perspective? Someone who knows that they have to put in the work to do it, because that’s what it takes. I feel like a big reason that that 96% is 96% is because they don’t do anything to grow or take responsibility, because it is your responsibility and no one else’s. I love it. And again, I’m not gonna get into your personal life, but I do wanna point out something. Everybody likes to say that I can’t become successful because I have this going on in my life. And I see people that are newly married. They say, I wanna grow my business, but I just got married, just had a kid, just had a kid. I see people that, one of our clients this year, her husband passed away and she had her best year of all time. And I asked her why. And she said, because we worked so hard as a couple to build a business. And when he passed, I recognized that, you know, it didn’t help to pout about it. I was just gonna focus on growing the business to kind of honor what we had built together. I think of another client that recently they’re growing their business and a weather situation attacked their business in a way that, you know, if you live on the coasts, weather can hit you. And their business was ravaged years ago by disastrous hurricane weather. And they went on to have their best year of all time. And I’m talking to the owner and he’s going, man, now the challenge for him with his particular business is staffing because more and more people are harder to find to work in his particular industry. But again, we can all make excuses or we can all step up and make it happen. So I encourage everybody out there, if you’re looking to grow your company, you can go to thrivetimeshow.com, thrivetimeshow.com, and you can click on the little consulting button here. Let me see here. You can schedule a free 13-point assessment. Let me go there right now. Feeling the flow. Working it. Going to Thrivetimeshow. If I spell it right, it helps. Go in here. Awesome. And I click here. Boom. And you can schedule a free 13-point consultation with myself and I’ll teach you all the systems that I have in place to help you grow your company. Or if you’re looking for eyelash extensions, and I know that I’m not, but if you are, you can go to theextensionist918.com. Kandra, thank you so much for joining us. I really do appreciate you. Thank you. Take care. Now, Sean, a lot of people reach out. They go to Thrivetimeshow.com and they always ask me, they say, Clay, what do you do? And so I’ve tried to explain it in as succinct of a way as possible. But first thing we do, you know, Sean, a lot of people go to Thrivetimeshow.com, or I’ll see people at a tour, I’ll see them at an event, people will reach out to us and they’ll say, what exactly do you guys do? And if I had to explain it to you succinctly, we essentially grow businesses seven times faster than the average business that doesn’t fail. Although Inc. Magazine does show that 96% of businesses fail by default, so if you go to Inc. Magazine, you see that 96% of businesses fail by default. So I guess one benefit is our clients don’t fail. But the next thing they do is they grow seven times faster. So what we do here is we help you reduce the working hours that you’re working and decrease your costs while increasing your sales and your profitability. And then since 2006, we’ve got a team now that does graphic design, photography, branding, print media, photography, videography, digital marketing, systems creation, public speaking, coaching, booking, workflow mapping, search engine enhancement, PR, marketing. We do a lot of PR, a lot of monetizing. We help people to grow their business, their podcast, their dentistry, their law firm. But what we do is we document those success stories over here at Thrivetimeshow.com. If you click on the testimonials. And since 2006, I have over 2,000 success stories. So if you’re out there today and you want to become the next success story, what you have to do is you go to thrive timeshow.com and you click right here on growth consulting and you schedule a free 13 point assessment. And that free 13 point assessment, what that does is that schedules you a time to meet with me so that you and I can go over where you’re at versus where you want to be. And then if you want to work with us, I charge $1,700 a month. It’s a flat rate of 1,700 per month to help you grow your company. And again, folks, if you want to learn more about that, we’ve got the in-person workshops, we’ve got the one-on-one coaching. Sean, how long have you worked here as a consultant? How long have you worked here? Doing consulting, it was about 18 months after I came on board, so it’s coming up on five years. Five years, and just think of a few clients off the top of your head that have had massive growth. I mean, I think about what, Levi Gables? Oh yeah, Levi, he’s working on company number three and four right now. What’s his company called? His original company, he came to us, called GEI-USA.com. GEI-USA.com. That’s a client you’ve worked with, he’s had tremendous growth. We just did an interview with Kandra, the attorney James, we’ve worked with him. Who else can you think of? Nick Holman, we grew his business by fivefold and we decreased his workload. That’s a cabinet company. Yeah, the cabinet guy. Yeah, so again, if you’re out there and you’re saying, I need to see the success, I need to see the documentation, I need to see the proven plan, all you got to do right now is go to Thrivetimeshow.com, Thrivetimeshow.com, and you click on testimonials and bam, you can see what we do. My name is Clay Clark, I’m the former USSBA Entrepreneur of the Year. I built all the systems, built all the processes, and I’ve been, since 2006, coaching clients. And along the way, I’ve started to discover great people like Clay Stairs or Sean Loman or Andrew or different members of our team. And we teach them the processes so that they can help you grow your business for less money than it would cost you to hire one minimum wage employee. If you hired one minimum wage employee out there full-time, it’s going to cost you about two grand a month after taxes, insurance, et cetera. It turns out we’re less. It turns out. This just in. So schedule that consultation today by going to Thrivetimeshow.com. Click on the business consulting button right there. Click on the red button that says schedule your free 13-point assessment with me. And you can schedule that today. Sean, I appreciate you. And I want to remind everybody out there, Sean, you smell terrific. Hi, I’m Ryan Wimpey. And I’m Rachel Wimpey. And the name of our business is Kip Talk Tonight. Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen. When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about internet marketing or advertising or anything at all. Just dog training. And that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team because they do it all for us. So that we can focus on our passion and that’s training dogs. Clay and his team here, they’re so enthusiastic. Their energy is off the charts. Never a dull moment. Spirit thrive. We’ve been working with Clay and his team for the last five months, two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. Clay’s helped us make anything from brochures to stickers, new business cards, new logos, scripts for phones, scripts for emails, scripts for text messages, scripting for everything. How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome. They’re so effective. It’s worth every minute. Things get done. We’ll ask for things, like different flyers. And they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective. If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out. Or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and produce your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all the stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency and actually knows what they’re doing when you already have something that’s your core focus that you already know how to do. You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay and his team. We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. So no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t. They can’t afford one. And their local web guy or local person that they know probably can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people, I mean, really ride them to get stuff done. And stuff is done so fast here. People, there’s a real sense of urgency to get it done. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. Like we have workflows that are kind of all over the place. Having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot and so the humor definitely definitely helps it breaks it up but the content is awesome off the charts and it’s very interactive you can raise your hand it’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak you know the wizard teaches but the wizard interacts and he takes questions so that’s awesome if you’re not attending the conference you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life you’re definitely It’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars. So, you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started like nine profitable businesses. So, not only is it a lot of good information, but just getting in the thought process of Clay Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches. Getting in the thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses, to me, just that is priceless. That’s money. Well, we’re definitely not getting upsold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where they upsold, where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference and I don’t want to like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like it’s good information but we’re like oh my gosh I want to strangle you shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for and that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything so that’s awesome. I hate that. It makes me angry. So, glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference. It’s the information that you’re going to get is just very very conference. It’s the information that you’re going to get is just very very beneficial and the mindset that you’re going to get.