Entrepreneur | Part 1 – Coaching Clients Questions and Wins of The Week

Audio Transcription

Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s where I’mma dive. Hello Thrivers and welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. My name is Clay Clark, the former SBA Entrepreneur of the Year, sent here to help you make your wallet expand. And I’m joined here with the man, the myth, the guy who’s been putting Z’s all over Tulsa like his name was Zorro. It is Dr. Robert Zellner. Sir, how are you? I would just like to say I am fantastic. Thank you, Clay. But I would just like to say happy Valentine’s Day to everybody out there. Just the big heart. We love every one of our Thrivers. We thank you for listening and we hope that you have a wonderful day, a Valentine’s Day. And this just in too, Prince is now available on Spotify. And I’m not sure what songs are wholesome, nice love songs for the context of marriage, but I would say I Would Die For You would be a great song you could dedicate to a loved one here on this very special Valentine’s Day. Yes, that would be a very passionate, very passionate song. That could be a move. That could be a move, yeah. I’m going to kind of get us to pick it up here. There we go, Thrivers. This song, this goes out to all the Thrivers out there. We love you. We appreciate you. And we sincerely hope that you love and appreciate the Prince’s greatest hits now on Spotify the way that we do. Absolutely. But the problem with that move is you can only do it once for somebody. I mean, you know, and then it’s kind of over. I use that move, yeah. Now, we have a ray of hope inside the Box That Rocks. The place is well lit. We have a lot of lighting. We have Edison bulbs inside the Box That Rocks. We’re burning pinon wood in the Box That Rocks. But the ambiance just got better. We have Pastor Ray Owens of the Metropolitan Baptist Church inside the Box That Rocks. Tulsa’s pastor. Sir, how are you doing? Hey, great today. Happy Valentine’s Day to all our listeners. Much love to each of you. You know, let me ask you this. At church, for the Valentine’s, you know, sermon, the Valentine’s, you know, you’re going to be doing obviously a sermon this week. Do you try to get in your Valentine’s sermon before Valentine’s Day or after Valentine’s Day? What’s kind of your move? I’ve done it both ways, but I always ask the question, where is the love? Show me the love! Are you the kind of guy that gets your wife, there, Pastor, the mixed chocolate where you not really, it’s kind of a gamble, it’s almost like a risk where if you give her the box and she opens it up, there’s a chance she might not like the chocolates, or are you, do you have kind of a move? No, I don’t like taking chances. My wife loves chocolate-covered strawberries. Always a home run. So if somebody’s listening right now, and they go to your church or not, and they’re going to look, I’m looking for the pastor to give me marital advice. I forgot to get something. I’ve got just a few hours to get my wife something. I’m going to ask Zee, I’m going to ask you the same question, so don’t make fun of Pastor Ray if he has an answer that’s not too hot. What is the move? I have four or five hours until I get home from work. What should I be getting my wife? Well, flowers and candy is always, I mean, those are the two standards. And then also too, if you, you know, it depends on, on what she likes. If she doesn’t like candy, I probably wouldn’t get her candy. And just like Pastor Ray said, if you know what kind she particularly likes and get that for goodness sakes. I mean, if he comes home with anything other than chocolate covered strawberries, he’s going to be like, Oh yeah. Well, I tell you what, on behalf of the newly married thrivers out there, I’ve screwed that up before. I got my wife a bunch of items that have utilitarian purposes, you know, like a blender for Valentine’s or pots and pans. Oh, that’s very romantic. Yeah, it was too utilitarian. So Pastor Owens, what would be the ultimate gift you’d recommend if someone’s in a bind? Valentine’s Day is not the day to be utilitarian. Let’s start there. But the ultimate gift is something sweet, something personal. You need to know what your wife wants, and it’s all right to ask. Oh, all right. We don’t have to read brains. Now, here’s the deal, Thrivers. You’ve been asking some questions this week. You’ve been asking a lot of questions. What we’re going to start doing on the show more and more often is we’re going to be answering the real questions from real business owners like you, and everyday success stories. And so I’m going into our mailbag here, Zee. And the first mailbag question we have today, and this is from a Thriver in Connecticut, and this is the question they ask. Wait a second. Hold on one second. Don’t I have like a mailbag like button? Don’t I have one that like tee up mailbag Tuesday, Valentine’s, you know? Don’t I have one? Zee, where’s my button? I feel like you do have one there. There’s a mailbag question that’s available at any time. Here we go, Zee. I’m ready for it. It’s on soundboard A. Here we go, Zee. Here we go. Mailbag! Mailbag! Yeah, there we go. I knew we had a mailbag button. Makes it so official now. This is the sound I prefer, though. In the news. This just in. I like this sound better with the mailbag. We’ll have to talk to the Thrivers, but here we go. A Thriver in Connecticut asked this question. How do we solve cash flow issues? How do I do it, Z? Cash flow issues, how do we solve them? Well, what you need to do, one of the best ways to solve cash flow problems, obviously, is make sure you’re budgeted and make sure that you’re using your money wisely. Apart from that, let’s say you are, and you have some AR, you have some billing, and you gotta pay out before you get paid in, so you have a- You said AR? For anyone who’s new to this. I’m sorry. I can’t, you have accounts receivable. In other words, you’re billing somebody and they have a length of time to pay you, but you’ve got to pay out on that process before that. So you have a lag in collecting your money. One of the best moves to do is, is wherever you’re listening from, uh, if you’re from Northeast Oklahoma, Tulsa region, you can go right over to Regent bank. They have locations in Newata, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City. And what you can do is you can go in and get what we call in the business a line of credit. Now what is a line of credit? What is a line of credit, Z? What is a line of credit? A line of credit is when you go in and you take your, say, your account’s receivable, okay? And you know, hey, I have this much money coming on these particular days in the future, alright? And you can verify that and show that. And what the bank will do on the strength of that, they will give you a line of credit. In other words, it’s a loan, but you don’t pay back the loan until you draw off of it. In other words, you have a stash of cash waiting for you that you can dip into when you need to to help you with your cash flow situation. So let’s say you have $100,000 in accounts receivable, Clay. And you take that into the bank, and you take in your financials and you go in with a bank that is business friendly and they’re looking for this kind of business, i.e. Regent Bank is here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then they say, okay, well, we’ll give you 70% or 80% of a line of credit on your AR, your accounts receivable. So you may have 70 or 80,000 now in an account that you can draw off of, you can get to when you need it. And if you don’t draw off of it, if you don’t, you don’t pay me, you don’t pay any interest on it. So you, it’s a, it’s kind of like a little bank of cash that you have access to. Does that make sense? Now, I would say this. I would say the Regent Bank move is a move that you and I 100% endorse, the credit line move. Yes. And I think it’s also kind of a midterm move, because it requires some proactivity. True that. So you’ve got to sit down with the bank, set up an appointment, go over to Oklahoma Joe’s, get yourself some baked beans, bring those over to Regent and say, hey, guys, you want to talk about a credit line? You know, kind of sweeten them up a little bit. Absolutely. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to the Thrive Time Show. But it requires some proactivity. And for those of you who are in kind of a reactive, like oh my gosh, what do I do? I’m going to get into that. I’m going to help you with that. But that is definitely the move. You’re listening right now, and you can be proactive, and you say, what can I do to feel less stressed in 2017? That is the move. So again, we can only answer the questions that we get, so we don’t know the whole context. So I would just say that’s the way to improve your cash flow. I want to ask Pastor Ray, I want to ask your feedback on this, because you manage a church, and this could be very applicable if anybody owns a non-profit, runs a non-profit, or any kind of organization. What would be the moves that you would recommend for somebody to maintain positive cash flow? So I like the line of credit option. We’ve used that in our organization. But what also has helped us is really knowing what our priorities are. In the nonprofit world, we have to be really careful about how we manage the resources that come into our organization. So when we have found ourselves in cash flow challenge spaces, we’ve actually had to ask ourselves so what are the things that have to be done in order for our organization to continue to thrive? So we know very clearly what are our priorities and we keep the priorities going. And so guess what? Some people won’t get lunch at some meetings and we’ll have to kind of… No lunch? No lunch? I thought there was such a thing as a free lunch. It’s the non-profit world. Chocolate covered strawberries for everybody, every day. Now Thrivers, I have the five moves I want to walk you through here, and I want to go back and forth with Z a little bit, and Z, you can add a little bit of detail to this here. But move number one is you need to make a line item list of all of your income. You need to know where all your income is coming from, and you’ve got to be conservative, right? When you’re looking at your income, you’re trying to figure out where you’re at. I mean, you got to add that up. You got to know what’s coming in. Yeah, you have to know because then it can lead to the other steps that you’re going to, you’re going to go over here in a second. But, and you have to be realistic with that too. You have to be like, I’m going to sell a million smokers this month. That may not be the case. That may, then again, unless you’re Oklahoma Joe’s, you probably haven’t sold 2 million smokers. Yeah. Now for him though, once he got his sales up, he might say, I’m going to sell 50,000 this month or whatever, but you want to be realistic. I think you’d want to do that with giving at the church, right Pastor? You want to be sort of conservative in your estimates? Absolutely. We’re always conservative in our estimates. Now the second move is you want to have a list of your line item expenses. I find that in the detail, that’s where the devil is. You mentioned that Pastor, but you said that making sure you know what your priorities are. And I think when you go through the line item list of expenses, you can kind of go, whoa, we’re spending that much money on bagels? You know, I mean, that’s a lot of bagels. That’s a lot of donuts. So, Z, I want to ask you, with the optometry, when you look at your expenses, do you set like hard guard rails where you say, team, you have a certain budget and you can’t spend more than this after you’ve approved that budget? Yes, and what I basically do is I break it down to percentages. In other words, I tell my manager payroll can’t be over 14%. Okay, now that includes doctors, that includes everything, but some of the hourly people, I give her percentages. And so then you say, well, percentages? Yeah, because every month, and you know, once you’ve been in business for over a year, you can get those comp or comparative numbers from last year as you’re looking at your numbers. You’re not flying in the dark so much and most businesses have a cyclic portion to them like an optometry for instance we have two peak times one is first quarter with income tax return money seems to stimulate our business and then back to school is another stimulated time and so you know those months you’re going to have more in payroll so if I said hey you can only spend so much in payroll then those busier months it doesn’t make sense so I break it down more to percentages and once you’ve been open for more than a year, you can see those trends in your business. And hopefully, one of the things that I, Clay, one of the things that I notice that when people get into cash flow issues is because their business is not growing. And that’s why this show is so important. You know, a horrible statistic, eight out of 10 businesses shut down. They don’t make it. And cash flow is, you know, is one of the big reasons why they don’t. In other words, they don’t have enough money, they didn’t raise enough capital, they don’t have enough money to weather that bad season, that bad storm that comes along. And this is a very pertinent, I’m glad you’re breaking this down today. I feel like what you’re doing here is you’re being realistic, which could kind of seem negative. I’m trying to celebrate my Valentines and you’re going, hey, if you’re not growing, that’s why you’re probably having some cash flow issues. So I’m going to refute what I believe to be just complete negativity, aka being truthful. I’m going to refute that with a win of the week, Z. Are you ready for this win of the week? I love wins of the week. Now, we have a Thriver in Florida. They have a pizzeria, and this is their win of the week. It’s coming in hot and fresh. They’re located in Gateway, Florida, near Fort Myers. They said in the past four weeks, they’re having massive success with their Dream 100. Their Dream 100. They have new customers coming in. They made a list of businesses to market to. There you go. And now they are growing. And so the thing is, yes, you’ve got to watch those expenses, but you also have to focus on the marketing. And I have a notable quote. I’m going to read this to you. Oh, please do. This is from Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the skullet. It’s a modified mullet. He says here, beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship. Oh, he had a lot of party in the back, I’ll tell you what. He had a lot of lettuce in the back. He was business up front, but he was a lot of party in the back. But you know what the Dream 100 success and that other company makes me want to do? What does it make you want to do? Well, when we come back from break, I’ll tell you. It gives me a certain feeling that I want to share with the thrivers. I don’t know if it’s just because of our sponsorship, but everything makes me want to go to Oklahoma Joe’s. No matter what happens, it always causes me to feel that way. Stay tuned. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation on the Thrive Time Show, business coaching radio show, where we break down the proven strategies, systems, and processes of millionaires, billionaires, and everyday success stories. And today we’re getting into the mailbag. Great people like you from all over the country. Specifically, we have a very, very good question that came to us via Connecticut. This is from a Thriver in Connecticut who says, how do we solve cash flow issues? So we talked about, Z was talking about encouraging this person to really make sure you’re growing your business. Make sure you’re growing it and you’re not just sitting there looking at it and it’s kind of going, these are my expenses but we’re not growing. Pastor Owens was talking about making sure you know your priorities, making sure you’re not just spending on things you don’t need. And I’m breaking down kind of the five, kind of the wrap-up of the five moves you need to do. One is you need to look at those line item income sources. You want to make sure you know where all your income is coming from. Type it up, add it up in a spreadsheet, look at it, know where it’s coming, be aware of it, eyes wide open, don’t be shocked. Move number two, line item those expenses. Know what things cost, know where your money’s going. Okay a budget is telling your money where to go Not having a budget to asking you asking yourself. Hey, where did my money go? So that’s that’s a budget Okay. Now the third is you have to collect You have to collect now Z mentioned it this a little bit here But I’m gonna I’m gonna really get get kind of spiritual on this Z. Here we go Back in the day. There’s a young man at a chamber event He walks up to me and he says, a Chamber of Commerce luncheon. He says, man, my video company, it’s growing, but the more it grows, the more poor I get. I go, what do you mean? He goes, I’m running out of cash. Well, he’s given his clients terms. I’m going, hey, listen, you’re a wedding videographer. Just charge the client half down to book the date and the other half down when you deliver the video. He goes, man, I have a lot of brides and grooms I’ve been chasing down for six months to get the video. I’m going, bro, you can’t be doing that. Well then over time as I began coaching clients all around the world, I started realizing that contractors have this problem, drywall people have this problem, swimming pool installers have this problem, doctors have this problem. Z, talk to me about collecting and one, how do I do it, but then also kind of the emotional thing where I’m like, I feel kind of bad that I’m having people pay me what they owe me. What’s the process of collecting and how do I deal with feeling bad if people owe me? I’ve got to get a taser. A taser? I’ve got to get a taser. Okay, yeah, sure. Well, because I was teasing earlier before the break about a real good feeling that I had. Ow! Ow! And then we come out of the break and you don’t even… Ow! Ow! Turn it off! Pastor Ray, he didn’t get that taser. Turn it off! If you’re watching Facebook Live, you can… So I’m going to cover collecting here in just a minute, but first of all, it’s Valentine’s Day. It is Valentine’s Day. That’s why you’re looking so lovely. And if you’re wondering where to take your loved one, well, Oklahoma Joe’s has what we call meat candy. Oh, wow. It’s technically not candy, it’s meat, but it’s so good it’s like meat candy. And they’ll engrave your name on it. You can put like, I love you, like this little sweetheart. They’ll engrave it on. We’ve never asked them to do it, but I’m sure they would. Followed that with some baked beans, and I mean, your sweetheart is going to love you forever. Trust me. Now, you did a victory before the break. Yeah, we had a big win. You did a victory, and what they’ve done, they’ve gotten on their Dream 100. You may be saying, what’s the Dream 100? That’s right now, if you own a business, you’re managing a business, you want to grow your business, if I asked you, what are your top 10, and then that would lead to what your top 100 clients you want to go after or businesses you want to try to sell to or your top 100. In other words, your target. And you said that they had great success because they made their top 100 and then they were purposeful in going and trying to get them. They’re doing it. You know what? That makes me want to play this song. Oh wow. Because any time you’re focused on your dream 100. George Michael. On Valentine’s Day. St. Valentine’s Day. St. Valentine’s Day. It’s a beautiful thing. I love it. It is a beautiful thing. Go dream. Go get those 100. Okay, now collecting. Now collecting. Yeah, I want to celebrate them for a second, though. Henry Ford says, it’s hard to build a reputation based off of what you’re going to do. Oh, yes. That’s right. Yes. Now let me tell you one thing that Pastor Owens does over here with the Metropolitan Baptist Church, at the end of every service, you remind us of the church’s vision. You bet. Can you kind of explain to the Thrivers out there what your church’s vision is? Because you have a vision, and it does involve people inviting people out to the church. So we have what we call a path. The path includes prayer, attendance, tithes and offerings, and hospitable invitations. Every Sunday when we gather, I remind every member of the church that it’s your responsibility to grow our church by bringing your friends, bringing your relatives, bringing your associates, and so that is our strategy for growth. And Thrivers, if you’re listening right now, the Dream 100 system, if you want to learn how to implement that, on February 24th and February 25th, we have our next in-person Thrive Time workshop. I’m telling you what, Thrivers, if you’ve not been to one of these before, we get into the specifics. It starts at 7 a.m. It goes until 3 p.m. You can ask any business question you’ve ever had, and we will teach you specifically how to implement the Dream 100 system that our good friends are doing right out there in Florida and Thrivers all around the world are doing. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to the Thrive Time Show. So now we get back into the boring stuff. You people want to talk about marketing. I’m a marketing guy, but then it gets into, you know, expenses. So anyway, so you’ve got to collect, Z. How do I collect, man? One, how do I do it? Two, what if I feel bad? Well, let me tell you a story. Everybody likes a good story, don’t they? Oh, yes, so a young man that I mentor approached me less than a month ago and said hey Man, I need I’m my business is growing so fast. I need I need more money. I’m like okay. We’ll break this down You’re making money Yeah, making money, but I need some more money. Well. How how what’s your what’s your counter receivable? How quickly are people paying you oh? Yeah, I mean let me look at that. Oh wait a second this guy hadn’t paid me in six months. Oh wait, here’s another one hadn’t paid me in. So anyway, Calculate by the numbers is accounts receivable, AR, as we talked about earlier. He had like $48,000 out there in accounts receivable. I know it seems unethical, but I was actually recording you during that conversation. Oh no. And I have audio of what you said to the young man. Oh no. Shirley, you can’t be serious. I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley. No, but so you were going, you’re not collecting money? And it was just like a shock. It was like, oh my gosh. And I said, well, first move is you got to be purposeful about getting your money. Well, what do I do? Well, you’ve got a hammer on them. You can put a worker’s lien or a lien on the properties because you’re doing these appraisals on them. So you can actually put a lien on those properties and they don’t want that. They don’t want it. They don’t want the whammy. So he sends out this letter, you know, and all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, checks start coming in. Oh, wow. But the idea was, is that the thing he was doing, he was paying out of his pocket day one, right? And then he would collect the money for 30, 60, 90, and in one case, up to six months later. What? He didn’t really, he kind of sneaks up on you. So when you’re collecting, number one, you have to be purposeful in that. You have to know exactly every day what your accounts receivable are, how much money is out there on the street, your money that somebody else is holding on to. A lot of times they’ll stretch you out as long as you’ll let them. A lot of people will do that to you. You may say, well Bill, I’m sure they’re going to get around to paying me one of these days. They said that they’re going to pay me soon. I have a move that I would encourage 90% of the listeners to do. It works 90% of the time. For those of you that it doesn’t apply, we’ll have some other strategies for you. But I would recommend that you no longer invoice people and that you just charge them and send them a receipt. So example, hey, sir, I want you to do drywall on my home. Great. Absolutely. So it’ll be 3000 down to get started and the remaining balance is done when I finished the wall. As opposed to you doing the work, mailing them an invoice, them saying, I didn’t get it in the mail. Then you resend it. They resend it. They activated it and it becomes a circular thing of you going, what was your email again? Well, my email is this. What’s your mailing address? And it’s just over and over. And occasionally that happens where they send it to the wrong address or something. But really, you just want to kill that whole invoice game if at all possible. Just ask directly for the money. Try to get it up front. Now, Thrivers, when we come back, we’re going to get more into cash flow and how to fix cash flow problems. Stay tuned. Thrivetimeshow.com. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back into the Inspiration Conversation. Today we’re talking about getting you in the know with the cash flow. We’re answering your questions from the Thrivers just like you all around the world have submitted. They’ve emailed us, info at thrive15.com. By the way, you can too. Email info at thrive15.com. Real questions, we’ve got real answers. This is what they asked. How do we solve cash flow issues? This is from a Thriver in Connecticut. If you missed the earlier steps, go check it out, Thrivetimeshow.com. We’re moving on to move number five here. You have to ask. And we talked about it a little bit, but Pastor, there’s that old Bible verse that says, what is it, that you have not because you ask not. And I’m probably taking that out of context and I’m probably screwing it up, but I want to start with you, my friend. Why do you just have to eventually ask? Right, because I think some people depend on us to be intimidated by the ask. In the nonprofit world, you have to be able to ask, because the expectation is you will not receive until you call it out and ask people. In our case, we’re asking people for the pledges that they’ve already promised. They say they are going to give $10,000 to the building fund over five years. Year three comes along and we’re only at about $2,500. It’s my job to make the phone call and say, hey, Joe, we really need your pledge in. So you’ve got to ask. You seem like such a cheerful and nice guy. I always see you being a nice and cheerful guy. Do you ever have to go into that like, so what, Joe, this is a pastor, I’ll let pipe hear, I was going, I mean, do you ever have to get into a little bit intense? Yeah, we do. We do because, you know, the church is also a business and people, not only have people made pledges, but actually there are some cases where people owe us money. We have property that the church owns and we have tenants and guess what? Tenants feel like, oh, it’s the church. I don’t have to pay them. They’re not depending on this. And the pastor would never come down on me, absolutely not. I got to ask you this. I have to tell you, you could totally not answer to it. You can plead the fifth there. Do you ever have people pull the whole God card as a reason to not pay you? Does that ever happen? You bet. It happens? They ask for grace. Oh, they ask for grace. Right, yeah. That’s what they call it. They frame it as grace. Well, grace doesn’t mean we don’t have to pay. You have a grace period. And after the grace period, what? There’s a penalty added, usually, right? Yeah. There’s a cost for grace sometimes. You know, it’s not the personal, it’s just business. It’s not cheap grace. Yeah, exactly. Now, Z, I want to ask you this because we’re moving on to our fifth move, and this is one that I know you can speak to. And Pastor hit on it earlier, but he’s talking about priorities and I laugh all the time because anytime the government realizes that because what happens if you if we are a business this is what happens we have a budget all right go well this much is coming in okay and this much is coming out and we can’t have the amount going out be more than coming in okay we got to balance the budget oh that’s crazy there okay now this is not a political show or a Norwegian political show but here’s the thing is, is that occasionally in the government what happens is they can’t agree on what they’re going to cut. So they’re like, yeah, we’ll just go ahead, since we can’t agree, let’s go ahead and do both plans. And so they spend money, they spend money they don’t have, now they’re printing money. Eventually, though, the government has to do this thing called, you know, A, they go, we’re going to defund the government or someone refuses to print more money. The ethics of the whole, government shutdown. And here’s the press release. You see it all the time. It says this. The government has now decided to lay off or to pause the payments of non-essential employees. What does that mean? What is a non-essential employee? I mean, because in business, who’s a non-essential employee? I mean, are you… Most of them, I don’t know. I mean… I just want to ask you something, because you mentioned, Pastor, you mentioned the priorities and making sure you’re spending money where you should spend it. But see, I see a lot of business owners who are hiring people who don’t need to work there. They don’t serve any core purpose. Well, and that’s why you have to sit there and say to yourself, what you have to, a job description, and is that job description important for you to produce your product, for you to make your service, for you to run your business? And a lot of people, you come into, a lot of business consultants will go into a business, And really, it’s a fancy term for, I’m going to show you who you can get rid of. Because employee cost is what usually runs up in a business because you let your management say, hey, well, I need, I need, you know, I need, Billy’s not getting it done. I need another Billy. I need seven more guys to help Billy with the S.E.U. Billy needs an assistant. He needs an assistant. Because every one of my employees, I don’t care what they do, they’re all, every one of them needs an assistant. Well, Billy has a problem with his sciatic nerve, and he’s also got some anxiety. He can’t, uh… You know, so he needs a psychologist. Eddie needs a service pet, too. Probably a dog or maybe a cat. You can totally see, but he still needs a dog. He needs, well, I’ll just say he needs a comfort dog. I mean, he gets stressed sometimes. He just needs to have an assistant. Z, you went in, you, we, you know, what happens is you get asked all the time, they say, Z, can you business coach me? And then you go, hey, listen, we have these in-person workshops that you can come to. We have one on February 24th and 25th. You can learn all about it at Thrivers at Thrivetimeshow.com. We still have about 35 tickets left for you. What happened is recently you were not able to go in to this business in Connecticut. You could not go. So we had to send in Belichick. We had to send him in. We have audio of Belichick talking to the employees. We have audio of Belichick. He was talking to the front desk guy and the front desk guy wasn’t answering the phone. And he’s like, Hey, listen, I need you to answer the phone. And the guy says, Well, I need someone to remind me. And so this is what Belichick said to him. He says, Do your job. I don’t try to make too much of it. Just do your job. And so that was I mean, it’s amazing that we have the audio, but it’s also I mean, that’s at the end of the day, if someone’s not doing their job, you got to move on, right? You got you got to move on. And what happens is, is you get a lot of business owners that they don’t want to fire because they just don’t. I mean, they have their reasons and their reasons may be honorable, but they’re not putting their business first. They’re not putting themselves first, and that’s a problem in and of itself. But what happens is they just keep hiring because that person isn’t getting the job done. And then what they do is they say, well, I’m too busy. I’ve got too much to do. I need help. And pretty soon you have three people doing the work of one person. Let me give you a fact. You want a fact? This just in from our home office. You take a bucket of water. This is an analogy I use all the time. You take a bucket of water and you pour it into a room. You’re going to have water in all four corners. If the floor is level, that is. I mean, obviously if the floor is not level, it’s not. And what does that mean? That means if you give someone a job, they will figure out a way to look busy, to act busy. This sounds like a challenge for the Thrivers. Get out a bucket of water. Get a bucket of water. H2O. I’m getting it. One second. Don’t pressure me. I’m filling it up now. Fill it up. Hydrogen 1 part oxygen. Is this a gallon or a 5 gallon? How big of a bucket do I need? How big a boy are you? How big a bucket do you have? Alright, so it’s a 6 by 6 room and I’ve got a bucket. It’s like a closet. I’ve got a bucket. You need a big bucket. 5 gallon. You may say to yourself, there’s no way I can cover the floor with this bucket of water. No way! I’m going to do it! I’m going to try! I can do it! I can get it done! And what you do is you start pouring and you’re like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it’s going to all fours, covering the entire floor! What? He said it! What happened? It’s like a magician! It’s a water magic trick! I’ve never heard this story before. I love this story! Yeah, it’s true. And so what happens then is that you hand that person and they say, oh, I’m busy. I’m real busy. I mean, I’ve got these ten things to do all week and I need an assistant because I can’t – I mean, I’ve got them done in blocks. I can probably get two of them. I mean, quality of quantity. I can get two done with the quality, but the quantity, I can probably get down to just two items basically. You know what I’m saying? It’s amazing when you challenge that person, hey, listen, here’s the deal. However you want to incentivize that person and say, listen, to do your job, it’s crazy anymore. It’s kind of like, hey, wait a second, I did my job, I showed up on time, aren’t I worth a whole lot more than just, you know, to not? And you’re like, listen, I’m paying to do it, here’s a challenge for you, get it done. And instead of saying, you know what, okay, if you can’t get it done, and it’s something reasonable to do, I eat, water, cover the floor, then what you need to say to yourself, is this really a long-term person for me? Or you can just keep hiring them assistants to help them get the job done, and guess what, by the end of the day, you look down, your payroll’s exploded, and now you’re kind of going, I’m not making any money. I would definitely recommend queuing up some James Bond music and challenging them. Give them a big challenge. Say, this is 007. This is your task. You’ve got to get it done. You’ve got to challenge them, Z. And then once you’re established with their seal and once you’re established with their high watermark is, you can do 10 of those a week. You can. You did it. And here’s that thing I gave you for challenging them to do it. And now, obviously, you set the bar that you know they can get 10, fill in the blanks done for the week now thrivers may come back pastor Ray Owens and dr Z are gonna answer another question from a thriver just like you stay tuned drive time show all right thrive nation Green country our good friends out there in Tennessee Welcome back to the thrive time show on your radio the show where we break down the best practice systems Tech did the tactics the strategies of millionaires billionaires and everyday entrepreneurial success stories. And we’re talking about today the answers to the questions that you have. We have Thrivers all around the world emailing us questions. Now we have a Thriver right here in Oklahoma that has this question for us. They say, what is the best way to mystery shop? Well, first off, let me frame it real quick here. So a mystery shopper, the concept of a mystery shopper is somebody who you hire to go into the business, you’re paying them by the way, to go into your business and act like a customer to see if they can catch your team either A, taking days off, or B, doing their job correctly. But you have kind of an independent look, a third-party look from somebody who cares about the success or failure of your systems. Z, first off, why is it so important to have a mystery shopper in your business if you’ve never done it before? Well, this may sound crazy. And I don’t often enjoy sounding crazy. This may sound crazy. And pastor, I’d like you to dovetail on this. But when I’m around, when my employees see me physically in the building around, in the same space that they’re in, occupying, walking around, they act differently than when I’m not around. Well, first off, when you walk in, this music is always queued up and it always makes it kind of weird when this song is queued up. So let me get your music that you walk into. It’s sort of you walk in and the Braveheart theme is queued up. People start to go, this must be, I think he’s here, where is he? And so I think if you would stop queuing up your own theme music when you walked in that would be. Yeah, but I didn’t get dressed up for nothing. You know when Pastor Owens walks into the church, you know the song that’s always played? I mean, if you hear him, it’s not actually played through speakers. They can just feel it. But this is the song. Yeah, they sit. What is love? Oh, yeah. He walks in, and it must be Pastor Owens. He’s so good. They know I’m coming. Yeah, don’t hurt me. So Pastor Owens, break that down. Why do people act a little bit different when the pastor’s on the scene, when the boss is on the scene, when the owner’s on the scene? Yeah, authority is very powerful. And when the authority is president. We all line up and we’re working hard to impress And so believe it or not even in a nonprofit organization like the church mystery shoppers can be very helpful people who experience the church whether they’re Contacting to set up an appointment or just coming for a Sunday morning worship worship need to have a certain kind of experience. And so every now and then I have friends, usually when they’re from out of town, I’ll say come to the church and I want you to make notes of everything that you experienced, where you touched three times. So we have a rule, when you come into that building you ought to have three people speak to you in some way. And that does happen by the way, the Metropolitan Baptist. And by the way, for people who aren’t familiar with your church, where can they find more about the Metropolitan Baptist? www.metropolitainbc.org is where you’ll find us on the World Wide Web. Check us out on our Facebook page, Metropolitan Baptist Church. We’d love to hear from you through that social media platform as well. Now, for anybody like myself who doesn’t trust the Internet, can we drive out there? Or do we have to be on the World Wide Web because I don’t want to get a virus. No, come on and see us out at 1228 West Apache or give us a call, 918-425-5402. And guess what? If you don’t have a good experience with that call, then you can call me directly, 918-991-6809 and I’ll get that call. All right. Now here’s the deal, Thrivers. Now I’m going to have Z kind of break this down like fractions. Here’s the deal. I see a business without a mystery shopper, a business without a third-party audit going on as a business where people are taking days off. People begin to take, so they’re coming to work, but they’re not doing their job. And so what happens, I got a chance at the Super Bowl, just the Patriots. It’s been a while since the victory, but there’s an afterglow that will carry until approximately March of 2018. It’s an afterglow. He’s still talking about this. I went over there to Belichick’s office and I said, Sir, I said, Sir, you know, what advice would you have for the thrivers who are saying, you know, I don’t see the value. Why? Why? The thrivers who are saying, why do I need a mystery shopper? And this is Bill Belichick. audio of him from the Patriots Super Bowl victory parade. He’s chanting, the crowd is at the parade. He could be chanting anything in the world. He could say, go Pats or go Boston or thank you. They give him the mic and he chants, no days off. And everyone around him is like, there’s like three million people gathered who are like, I don’t know if we want to chant this. This is like a communist pep rally. No days off. Well, I just hope you give us a day off of the Pats. You follow that because every day we’ve got to have a little bit of Pat love on him. Did I tell you about the Thrive Nation, the benevolence? They sent me this towel here, right here. This is a Patriots gift, the Super Bowl towel. Then they sent me a Tom Brady pin. Then they sent me this little thing here, this little towel. They just sent me a Patriots chair that’s now in the conference room. It’s a Patriots, it’s an embroidered chair. It’s super nice, Z. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to the Thrive Time Show. The benevolence of our Bostonians is unbelievable, the patination. Now I want to ask you this, Z. We’re getting into the mystery shopping. How do I go about doing it? Now I know why I need to do it, but how do I do it, my friend? Z, what do I do? Well, you steal. You see, in life, you expect what you expect. Oh, nice, nice. Man, when you talk about people’s, they’re trying to do the things that they’re supposed to do. You gotta send someone in to check on them. You want me to put them in the river? Well no, not necessarily. They may not have to throw it to fishers if they’re doing the right thing. Put them in concrete shoes, concrete shoes, at the bottom of the river. Well if they’re not doing their thing, then yeah. I just want to put them in there anyway. It’s just something I do. It’s my default move. If you own a business, I promise you this. If you own a business and you walk up to any one of your employees today, right now, right now, just walk out of your office and you’re listening to me right now and you’re like, okay, I gotta hold on. I can’t, I gotta still listen to you. I said, can’t walk out yet, but hold on. Walk up to them and say, Hey, um, did you do your job today? Are you doing it with excellence? Are you doing, are you following your checklist? Are you doing a great job? How many of them you think are going to look up and say, no, actually I’ve been on Facebook all day and I’m texting my brother about where we’re going to eat pizza tonight and I’ve stole a bunch of pens and posted notes from the office supply room. We have a Thriver who apparently writes the text for teleprompters. That’s his job. He writes the text. He called in and I’ve got audio from what happened at the newscast. He took a day off. Here we go. That’s going to do it for all of us here at Channel 4 News. You stay classy, San Diego. I’m Ron Burgundy. He put a question mark at the end of it. He messed it up there. He took a day off. Yeah, and the thing about it is that we get patient complaints. If you own a business, you’re going to get that. And they always say your employee did X, Y, and Z. And you approach that employee and you say, Billy, did you do X, Y, and Z? Overall, I tried really hard. Every time across the board they look at you, they say, no. I didn’t know. I didn’t do X, Y, and Z. I would not do that. Then you think back, well, maybe that patient, maybe that client. I got to be honest. I got to be honest, though. I actually did. Yeah, all at the one time. Yeah. Oh, just this one time. So, you know, that comes into your mind, and then you’re going, oh man, Billy was so passionate about saying he didn’t do X, Y, and Z. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t even do it. And then you’re sitting there thinking, well, maybe that client that came in was upset about something, someone cut him off on the highway on the way here, and they’re taking it out on poor little Billy. So then you’re kind of going, who do you believe and what’s going on? Of course you believe that Billy did it, and you coach Billy up, and you try not to have Billy do it. I only did it because most people in the office do it that way, too But what a mystery shopper gives you it gives you someone one that you trust Okay, and and then what when they come in they say hey Billy did X Y & Z Now, you know Billy did X Y & Z You see what I’m saying? So if they said hey Billy was rude Billy was this Billy said this Then all of a sudden you can now you have a source that you can believe and then you can start managing off of that instead of kind of going well, okay, who do I believe here? This and this person I don’t know that I don’t know what their motives are and or Billy here Who can you can sometimes be a little bit? You know squirrely and whether you’re fixing your cash flow or setting up your mystery shopping or doing anything writing a sermon No matter what you have to do as part of your job You’re going to have to learn to time block and coming up next year. We have a thriver in Nashville, Tennessee, Raven, who emails us and says, how do I block out time when so many sales-related burning fires come up every day? How do I time block when so many sales-related burning fires come up every day? But really that could be, how do I block out time for anything when so many burning fires come up every day? And so I’m excited to pick the brain of Pastor Ray, because how many people go out to your church these days, Pastor Ray? We have 2,500 members. We see about 1,000 of them each Sunday. I’m sincerely very interested about this, because as a pastor, there’s got to be always somebody who’s sick, somebody who’s dying, someone who’s getting married, someone who needs counseling, somebody who can’t find a parking space. There’s got to be a lot of burning fires. And Dr. Z, with hundreds of employees, there’s got to always be a burning fire and I think the real question is you know how do you find time to get stuff done when you have beyond just your job to do when you got to manage an organization I mean that’s a big question Z. Oh it’s a big question I’ve got some secret sauce I’ve got it I’m so I’m just bursting with this information I can’t when you say the secret sauce is that the Oklahoma Joe’s barbecue sauce is that what that is? It’s a component of it. But you want to stay tuned for this question. Thrivetimeshow.com. All right, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Oklahomies. Welcome back to the Thrivetimeshow on your radio. I’m super excited. I’ve lost the ability to talk. I’m just so excited. Thrivers, we are so excited to tell you how much we love and appreciate you. It’s so fun being able to connect with you, being able to converse with you on a daily basis, receiving your questions, and we just want to show you some love. And so inside the box that rocks today, we have two incredible guys here with us. We have Pastor Ray Owens. He’s the senior pastor over there at the Metropolitan Baptist Church. It is an unbelievable, growing, thriving church, a great place if you’re looking for a family church, a place where they really love families, kids, unbelievable praise and worship great teaching and preaching it’s an unbelievable place to go that’s the Metropolitan Baptist Church and we have the man with the plan the co-host with the most the optometrist turned tycoon it is dr. Robert Zellner sir how are you I’m fantastic hey drivers happy Valentine’s Day clay you know if you if you love someone you do something special for them right especially on this day st. Valentine’s Day. I’d buy my grandma some baked beans, so I’d give her some beans. That’s kind of how I show I love her. Give her some meat candy over at Oklahoma Joe’s. No, I tell you what, though, if you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, it’s Valentine’s Day, where do I get my left one? What do I do? Well, I’ve got a suggestion for you. Of course, there’s always a candy and flowers move and there’s those moves, little teddy bears. Those are kind of nice, little bears you can cuddle up with. But if you really love someone, what you do is you go on thrivetimeshow.com, that’s thrivetimeshow.com, and you’d get on there and you would buy them. You would buy them one of our in-person workshops where they could come out a ticket so they could come out on February 24th in 10 days. 10 days. February 24th and 25th. And we’re going to teach them those two days, everything they need to know. We have 13 points that we go over. We go over time management, we go over hiring, firing, we go over advertising, branding. I mean, it’s endless. And then we have, they’re hands-on. You leave your templates. We actually let you put your little fingers on stuff and do stuff, and it’s limited. I think we only have like 35 more tickets for the next one. Yeah, and I’m going to go over the line item list of what we’re going to teach you there. Well, why not? We’re going to teach you how to achieve your financial revenue goals, how to set those goals. Two, we’re going to talk about determining how to do your personal finances, determining your break-even point, how to save money for a rainy day, those kind of things. Move number three, we’re going to teach you about how to time block, how to block out time to get things done. We’re going to talk to you about how to build a unique value proposition, improving your branding, how to market, how to do sales conversion, internet advertising, management, leadership, I mean, human resources, anything you want to know, if you ever wanted to know about how to start and grow a business, we’re going to teach you these things in person. And so we start at 7 a.m. on each day, and we teach for 45 minutes, and then we break for 15 minutes. You can ask any question you want. That’s why we have the break, because you can get up and stretch, grab a coffee, but you can also ask any question you want. We keep doing that until lunch. We give you an hour break for lunch. Then we come back until three. We do it two days in a row. It’s on a Friday and Saturday. And I’m just telling you what, if you Google Thrive 15 conferences or Thrive 15 reviews, you can see great companies like Chevron, Maytag, O’Reilly’s Auto Parts, never heard of them. Hewlett-Packard, never heard of them. All those companies, they are all companies that have hired me to come out and speak over the years. And I’m just telling you what, we’re bringing it right here to Tulsa, and it’s a game changer. You need to book a ticket. And because we have a scholarship program available, if you couldn’t previously afford it for whatever reason, I am going to guarantee you that not a single person will be denied due to lack of financial resources. We’ve made this available for you. We’re passionate. We just want to show our lovesy Okay, so I send out my loved one. She wants to start up this thing you see and you’re probably gonna watch scammer upseller I mean you’re gonna you know so I mean you get her there And then you what you can’t leave till she writes a check or two or credit card. I mean what’s the deal? What’s what’s the hook? Well? Here’s the interesting thing about it is when you buy a ticket We actually give you one year’s access to the world’s best online business school. That’s an extra bonus, then we don’t have anything else to sell you. When you get out of here, we give you all the templates, all the tools, everything you need and if somebody else needs one-on-one business coaching, we have that too. So really, it’s all about changing your life, show yourself some love and show your loved one some love. Increase your income, your capacity because I’m telling you, once you knock out the financial part of so little of life is about money. Money is just something you need. It’s like this, see. It’s like putting gas in my car. I can’t tell you that I’m super passionate. I don’t know, Pastor Ray, I don’t know if when you put unleaded gas into that super sweet car you have, do you ever get really passionate about the purchasing of the fossil fuels? I mean, are you into that? Nothing passionate about that. I don’t ever recall having done any cartwheels behind. Let me ask you this. It always says when you’re pumping gas, it always says don’t make cell phone calls while pumping the gas. Have you ever done that just to kind of feel guilty, just to be kind of risky? Yeah, I have. For adrenaline? Yeah, I really have. Well, Z just went skiing and I’m afraid of heights, speed, travel, and I will never ski while, I would never ski on a black diamond, but I would pump gas with my cell phone on. Just the thought I could blow up that gives me that adrenaline that you probably get while going down the slopes there. Oh yeah, yeah. Winter Park, shout out to Winter Park. I was just there over the weekend for my son and there was eight of us guys there and just had a blast. You know, it’s funny, now the new move is they have these little bicycles. People are actually sitting on like a bike-like thing and they have instead of wheels they have the ski, you know, skis on them and they’re riding and they’re going down the slopes on these bikes. Are you being serious? Are you making this up? I am not making this up. And one lady actually had hers where she was kind of standing on it. It looked like the old kind of sea dudes where you stood on them, you know, and they’re going down the mountains. I’m just going, oh, my gosh, that just seems like a cheat. Well, thrivers here. Here’s what here’s the here’s the point I’m getting at working on this. When you go down the slope, that’s what life is all about. When you get to your destination, that’s what life is all about. But you’re not passionate about buying fossil fuels, and you’re probably not passionate about riding in a chairlift, okay? And to me, and to you, Z, that’s kind of what a business is like. The business is the vehicle to get us where we want to go. It’s not the destination. I mean, building a business isn’t the end-all, be-all. The goal is to build a business that can serve you, Z. Right. And then you can do the things that you’re passionate about doing. You can help the people you need to help, that you’re called to. You can spend the money wherever you want to spend it. You can help your family. You can do the things that you say, hey, if I gave you X number of dollars, what would you do with it? And that’s, you fill in the blank. And that’s what a business is all about. And that’s why we’re here. That’s our heart, is it’s not about seeing how much money you can get. We want financial freedom for you. We want, like Forrest Gump said in the movie, he said, you know when he hit that, we invested in the Apple and he made all that money. He goes, oh money, that’s one less thing I have to worry about now. That’s exactly, let’s hurry up and get, let’s build that successful company and get on to live in life. Let’s get it done. Now Thrivers, here’s a question from a great Thriver just like you from Nashville, Tennessee. You Raven Robinson writes, how do I block out time Z when there’s many burning fires every day, no matter what kind of business I’m involved in? Well, I’m gonna go a little bit different route. Okay. I’m gonna go a little bit different route because this topic makes me crazy. What is twice now? On Valentine’s Day, I threw out the cray cray term twice. Wow, is there a connection there? See, right, is there a connection there? I don’t know. Probably not. Love is in the air. Well, there you go, okay. Well, here’s what happens is is that I see people all the time that, um, when I asked them, I said, what’s the single most important thing in your business? And they, they, they can’t answer it. So if you own a business right now, you’re managing a business. I’m going to ask you, what’s the single most important thing. For example, back when I was seeing patients, when I first started and I was seeing all the patients that came in the door, I didn’t have any other doctors that worked for me. The most important thing I could do is when that patient was ready for me to be seen is that I was available and in that room seeing them. Okay? And why was that the most important thing? Because that’s where I made my money. Okay. Okay. Let’s break it down. So I could have somebody on the phone talking about their contact lenses are not seen clearly. I could have somebody on the phone fussing about Billy at the front desk not being appropriate. I could have all kinds of things going on. I could have the radio station calling me saying, hey, you need to re-up your radio ad. You need to, Hey, is it okay if we’d run it this Saturday instead of the Saturday after that? Z, this is your cousin, Carl. I wanted to see, just so you can call me back here. I wanted to see if you were going to bring the bacon for the breakfast thing, or if I was going to bring the bacon. Just call me back. That’s my fourth time calling today. Yeah, you’re not being very receptive. And here’s the thing about it is, is that I can time block. I can do all my things. I can set up all the gateways. I can make it tough to get to me because I’ve got to do this thing over here. But when it’s the most important thing, that burning fire is that patient in the exam room, everything else goes to the back burner. Everything else goes to the back burner. And I see so many people that the thing that’s most important, they’re not giving it their full attention. It makes me want to say this, first things first. So the young, the young man that wrote in from Nashville and she said, well, I’m time blocking these burning fires and sales. Is sales the most important thing? Is it? I don’t know. I’m asking you. And if sales is the most important thing, and you’ve got a fire over here that’s keeping that sale from happening, guess what? I don’t care if you’ve time blocked to add to your biography. You know, it’s kind of, well, I always walk out 30 minutes to write a mental journal. It’s more of a blogography. It’s more of a, it’s, people want to know, so I have to let them know, you know, or Facebook. I, uh, 15 minutes of every hour I block out for Facebook, you know, and so, no, the point is, is that whatever is the most important thing and that’s the burning fire, then, then it doesn’t matter whether you, I’m going to, I’m going to, I have, I have some questions. Raven has some questions and I’m sure Pastor, Pastor Owens has some questions. I’m going to kind of tee it up here. Okay. Pastor Owens, you pile on if I’m, if I’m not hitting them with the hard questions. Most Thrivers all around the world continue to ask this though. They say, one, how do I deal with HR issues? If someone has a human resource, an employee of mine, a teammate is having a personal breakdown, a meltdown, whatever. Two, is just social media, man. Social media, people writing bad things, I’ve got to respond to them all. The third is just these dramatic situations in the office. I want to ask you, Pastor, I mean, what are the things that would eat away your time if you’re not careful, or where do you see your time going? Yeah, phone calls, my cousin seeing if I’m bringing the beans, that would be one. But that’s not the biggest issue. I mean, I have 2,500 members, and they have lots of needs. And I’m really, you know, listening very closely to Dr. Z, because you are helping me to focus. My number one priority is my Sunday morning sermon. And do you know I get calls all week? I get people who are sick. I get calls about somebody who was having marital problems and they want me now. But if I don’t deliver an effective Sunday morning sermon, then the whole thing begins to come apart. Pastor, I have a question. Sorry, I’m getting your voicemail here again. I might have missed your call. I don’t know. That’s my reality. That’s your deal, right? Yeah, it is. And it’s usually someone who formulates the go, Pastor, I sent you an email and it looks like I already found my answer. Never mind. Pastor, I just sent you an email. It’s an endless barrage. And all I’m saying, Thrivers, is take Z’s advice to heart. Figure out what is the main thing. Find out what’s your job that’s going to help you get to where you want to go. And do your job. You just got to do the main thing. And Bill Belichick wants to encourage the thrivers. He wants to encourage them. Do your job! Sorry guys, we’re in the afterglow of it. Do your job! The foul key’s in one. You know, we’d just be like a little bird right here. Nothing about the patriots, but now we’ve got to do what it does. Can I explain something to you real quick? Biblically speaking, no point in the Bible does it reference, you know, it’s kind of like if the Falcons won, certain parts of the heaven and Hades equation would have to freeze over, and it’s not referenced in the Bible. That’s even, the thing, is that biblical? I don’t even know. I mean, we have a theologian in here, but I don’t think it’s biblically possible for the Falcons to have won the game. Pastor, is that correct? Oh, he’s not going to give us a break at all. No, we get zero break on Valentine’s Day. A lot of love for the paper. No love. He’s got a lot of love. Is it a sign of the end times that the Falcons won? Oh no. Sorry, Z. I digress. It might be, but I’m going to dovetail off Pastor Ray just for a second, okay? And he said something very important. Hey, my number one thing is to bring excellence in my sermon on Sunday. And so I have to time block time in there and these burning fires pop up in there. And I’m going to I’m going to empower everybody out there listening. Also Pastor Ray, a powerful person knows when to say no. Well, a powerful person knows when to say what? No, because I’ve got to do first things first. I’m going to marinate on that. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to go to Oklahoma Joe’s. I’m going to get myself some burnt ends, some baked beans. I’m going to head on over to the Metropolitan Baptist Church, kind of eat that in the parking lot while I marinate on what you just said. Now Thrivers, stay tuned. More great questions coming up next. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back into the conversation. Today it’s a mixed bag. It’s a lot of fun because we’re answering questions from Thrivers just like you. People all over the country are owning businesses, starting businesses, and in fact 57% of the listening audience, according to Forbes, 57% of Americans want to start a business. And many of you have discovered this crazy thing called the email, where you email us info at thrive15.com. I think almost reluctantly, like they’ll never read it. Like you’re emailing a congressman almost, where it’s like, oh, I’ll write an email. But you know they’re probably just going to get you a form response like that’s a good idea. But no, we’re actually, that’s what every single show is about. But today we’re changing it up a little bit because we’re mentioning what specific Thriver has asked the question. So we just talked about it, but Raven Robinson right there in Nashville, Tennessee had a question about time blocking. And before we move on, Z, I want to marinate on that because I have three questions related to time management. And I would like for Coach Calvert of Score Basketball, our incredible guest today on the show, I’d like for him to be able to ask you any time management questions as well. Because you’re sort of like the time management Yoda. You know a lot of things well, but time management is your move. So here are the three questions I’m getting from a lot of Thrivers who are emailing in. Okay? This one is, how do I say no and not feel bad? Me? Yes. I mean, how do I say no without feeling bad? How do I say no without feeling bad? Well, that’s a very good question. And you know, the thing about it is that the first few times you do, you’re going to feel bad. You’re going to feel bad. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s okay. But here’s what you’ve got to understand is that you are in control of your time. It’s your time. It’s your day. And for the business owner, you have to understand something. And this is one of the things that we teach you here at Thrive, and it’s going to sound crazy, might even sound a little mean, but you come first. Who comes first? The business owner has to come first. You have to be the big pig at the trough. What does that mean? A lot of pig analogies here. What does that mean? Coming hot. You know, it’s my move. It’s my… Wee-ha! I call it my farm logic. Man. You see down there on the farm, when we’re feeding the pigs, I put that slop out there in the trough. I love that slop. Ah, it’s so good. And you know what those pigs do? They all stand back, because they know the big pig eats first. Oh. He picks a spot where he wants to go to the other pig to kind of fill in, and you may say to yourself, that sounds mean, I don’t know, no, the customers come first, no, my employees come first, no, everybody else comes first, no, if you own the business, you have to come first. But there’s somebody who’s been working here a long time and they’re not doing their job and I like them so much as a person and… Ninja, ninja, block, block, block. And by doing that, by you owning your day, by you scheduling yourself, by you blocking time off, by you being proactive with your time, if someone comes to you and they want to control what you’re doing in a particular time of the day that you don’t want to do it, don’t be a powerless person and say something like, well, I’ll let you know, or I can’t because of Billy, or that’s okay. No, be a powerful person, look at them and say no. I had someone come up to me the other day and they said, hey, do you want to watch this cat video? I looked at him and said, absolutely not. Don’t play that. Oh, really? I’m punching the jejunum. It’s a small intestine, by the way. Well, I want to ask you this, because now, OK, so someone’s writing this down. Because I was doing something right then. I didn’t want to have them eat up. Somebody’s OK with saying no now, OK? But here’s the deal. Here’s the deal, OK? Then the second, kind of a two and three, a quick move here, is now we have these digital boundaries, OK? So email is a big one. OK. And then texting. Email, texting, calling, those kind of, I guess two and three would be the email and then the text call. What do you do? How do you time block? I mean, when do you check your emails? When do you check your text messages, your voicemails? How do I do it? Well, the thing about it is, is that I do my email moves throughout the day. That’s me. And I have it on my personal phone, which is like a computer nowadays. I mean, I remember back in the day, Clay, I’m old enough to remember back in the day when a cell phone was like, that’s personal. Now it’s like there’s nothing personal about it. If they give you a cell phone number, they’re going to hammer down on that cell phone, okay? Couple moves I do here. One, I check emails and I do a lot of delete. Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. You delete without responding? Without responding? Correct. You don’t feel bad about that at all? Not at all. Number two, I never answer a call that I don’t know who it’s from. Ever? Ever. If you want to reach me and I don’t know your number, leave a message. If you don’t leave a message, you’re not going to get a call back. I don’t do that thing where you’ve accidentally called someone’s wrong number and you don’t say anything because all of a sudden you realize from what their voice message says, you’re like, oh, that’s the wrong number. You hang up. And then probably 15 minutes later, you get that, uh, hi there, I missed a call from this number. I’m like, how desperate are you to talk to somebody? I’m like, that’s just, don’t do that. That’s not a move? It’s not a move. You don’t return random calls that came out. And then, of course, the text messaging. Now, that’s not that you, I almost prefer text messaging because someone can send you a text, and then at your convenience, you can text them back or you can ignore it. And you know what? Ignoring a text or an email is like answering it. What did I just say? What? Repeat. I’m just trying to focus. I’m just eating all these fake beans that are all over my desk. I’m eating burnt ends. It’s hard to fit it all in my lunch here. I just got a box of chocolates for my sweetheart. I’m trying to order them on Sherry’s Berries right now. I went and made sure she didn’t get a bad one in the box so I’m taking a bite of each one. That was a good one. I was like, I should have saved that one for her. That wasn’t a good one, but I’ll just go ahead and finish it. She’ll love me. I’ll give her some more of those. Here’s the thing about it. If you don’t answer an email, if you don’t answer a text message, you’ve answered it. In a way. Does that make sense? It does. It does. Now, we have a real business owner here, Coach Calvert of Score Basketball, the number one basketball camp in Oklahoma. It’s growing. He’s out there doing business. Coach, you’re doing business. What questions do you have for Zee about time blocking? You can ask the guy any. You’re out there doing the adventure of entrepreneurship. What questions do you have? The big thing is how do you not get caught up in all the little things you have to do every day and make sure you focus on the big things. Very good question. You see there’s a beast in Africa called the lion. Are you familiar with the lion? Big mane. I’ve read about him. Roar. Doesn’t like hyenas found a yet absolutely okay you’re you’re you’re tracking me with a track track it now if the lion said to himself i am i think i’m gonna live on a diet of uh… chipmunk chipmunks makes it so you know it’s a checkbook and it’s a delicious i’m a liar now just eat chipmunk house to be what i want to be happy what i want i’m top of the food chain. You may be saying to yourself, chipmunks and lions, where’s he going? Hang in there, I’ll get there. Now here’s the deal, if the lion spent all his energy every single day chasing chipmunks to eat, to live on, he would die. And you know why that is, coach? Not enough food. Bingo. The resources he’s expanding to chase that little chipmunk, when he catches one and eats it, it doesn’t replace as much calories as it took for him to go out there and get it. And as a business owner, when you said about this, you said, hey, how do I keep from doing all the little chipmunks in my life? How do I keep from chasing them? You keep your focus on the zebras. You keep your focus on the, what else is there, like the big antelopes. Basically the only things that are on the endangered species list that are being protected by PETA. That’s all they like. That’s all they like. And you may say to yourself, well then how do I get that little stuff done? Time block it and knock some of that stuff out. I mean some of that stuff is, you know, that’s why you have employees. Delegate. Get that stuff off your plate. Hey, here, if you have employees, make them go chase the chipmunks. That’s what you’re paying them for. Now I’m going to get into it when we come back. Coach Calvert and I are going to ambush you with some questions. Because what happens is, in a lot of businesses right now all across Tulsa, all across America, all across the planet, employers are delegating to people and the people somehow, they volley it back to their boss. Like you’re playing volleyball with the employee. Oh, that move. You go ahead and serve them the ball. You give them the to-do list item and they somehow volley it back to you. Oh, yeah. That’s a move. With a question like, I don’t know what to do, or could you help me, or I didn’t have time, or, so we’re gonna talk about how to go ahead and keep things on somebody else’s list you’ve delegated to when we come back, Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio, and today we’re answering the questions from real Thrivers just like you, and specifically we had a Thriver in Nashville, Tennessee, Raven Robinson, that writes, How do I block out time when so many sales-related burning fires come up every day? And Z spoke about that. But now we’re just talking about how do you get stuff done when you’re an actual business owner? You run a real business and there’s all these distractions and all these things. And so what you do is you go, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to hire somebody and I’m going to begin delegating things to them. And so you go ahead and hit the ball to them and you tell them what to do. You get this done and you pass the ball to them. And then somehow they hit it back to you going, I didn’t understand what to do. Or could you remind me to do this? Or I ran out of time. So coach, I want to ask you. You’ve been self-employed for years, my friend. You’ve been coaching basketball for 20 plus years. Talk to me about what goes on in small business. And maybe ask me any questions you might have about this whole time management delegating game here. I used to do it all. I mean everything. Bathrooms, floors, all that kind of stuff. I had to start delegating because what I found was I wasn’t handling the most important things, which was my sales. I had to get my calls made every day and I found out that if I didn’t, I was going to wear myself out. So quality of business was first, I had to start delegating. So let me ask you this. Have you ever delegated? I’m listening right now and I’ve delegated to somebody on my team who is not doing their job. So let’s just say I just hired them last week and I said, hey, I need you to make sure that you get the printer fixed. That’s just an example. I’m making up one here. Get the printer fixed, okay? And then the next week comes along and I sit down to hit print. I hit print and the printer’s not printing and it says the little air, the little red thing, and I walk over and I say, hey, did you call the printer person? What’s going on? They go, oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. How would you handle that? Well, other than mentally, no, what you do is you say, okay, okay, well let’s do this then. We’re going to have to, what’s the best way for you to remember, Billy? Now I’m going to do a, let’s do a post-it note. You want me to write a magic marker on your left hand, a title string to your pinky, connected to the printer that you can’t leave until you’ve actually severed that. So here’s what you do, and here’s the reality of life, Clay, is that all those things happen all the time when you’re a business owner. Now you try to minimize them, and then you try to say to yourself, okay, how can I remind them, inspire them, and have them do this oh wait a second that’s their job so you don’t operate in an alternative universe this happens in your universe it happens and here’s here’s the key I tell every every entrepreneur oh boy and that’s this is gonna sound mean mean you see you’re gonna put up with those shenanigans as long as you wanna put up with those shenanigans I mean you may like the person a lot, you may say, okay, you know what, that was unrealistic for me to think you were going to get the printer fixed. It was my bad. I put too much on. So what do you do on week two if the same kind of thing happens? I want to hear what are the words that you would say and you have said, and again this is a family show, but what are the words that you would say or have said, I mean seriously if somebody says they forgot the second time, what does that look like in your world? How do you say it? Well, at some point, with the second time maybe, maybe third time, at some point you’ve got to say to yourself, okay, people change seldom, and this person, for whatever reason, doesn’t understand that I’m paying them to do particular things to make my life easier. By them not doing it, now they’re making my life more difficult because I would have already done it. Yeah, I would have taken time, that’s why I hired you to take these things off my plate. As the analogy we gave earlier, to chase the chipmunks, that the busy stuff, as Coach was saying earlier, okay? And at some point you’ve gotta say to yourself, this isn’t a good fit for you, because you’re making my life more miserable. You’re costing me my time, my joy, my energy, and costing me money and embarrassment in front of my client. So you know what? Things just aren’t working out. Which rabbit trails into my next question. If I say that I’m ready to say that, where do you find all your good people, my man? That could be a separate show, but where do you find all your good people? Where do you do it? I mean, do you go to people, great people dot com, or do you just go to a church and hire exclusively from there? Are you hiring all the Chick-fil-A employees away from them? What do you do? How do you find good people? They’re everywhere out there. You just got to, what you’re going to do is you got to open your eyes to them. You may say, what is that? When I’m at a restaurant and there’s a waiter or waitress that is just on top of their game and you know what I’m talking about. We’ve all had a bad waiter or waitress experience. You may say to yourself, you know what, I think I can coach them up. I’m going to hire them because I’m going to mentor them up. I’m going to be a life coach. You have somebody that is just on top of their game, they remember things, they’re point on. I mean your glass number gets empty and you’re like, wow, that was great service. That is, and they have some high character to them and you can tell that just by meeting them and reading people and there’s that gut feeling you get about somebody. You could be wrong and if you’re wrong, you fire fast, okay? But you find good people out there working and you steal them. I’m telling you, when you’re at the restaurant, next time you’re out there and you get excellent service and it’s someone’s… The best move is you go to the mall. Because malls are open late hours. Malls are also open through the weekend. So my optometrist clinic, that was always a challenge because I was open seven days a week, still am. And so a lot of people out there, I don’t want to work seven days a week. So one of my moves I used to do back in the day was go to the mall. And I’d work the stores. You know, you do the old kind of shop… Is that why you’re banned from the buckle? You can’t go in the buckle anymore? Oh, you know, I mean, it was a thing. It was that one thing. I mean, you know, I mean, pfft, you know. Sir, are you going to buy anything? Yeah, I’m just looking for employees. I mean, jeans. I’m faux shoppy. Yeah, I’m just not going to buy some jeans. I’m going to hire Billy here away from you. So you go, so what I would do is I would find an organization that had worse hours than I did, and I’d think, okay, if they’re willing to work there, then that at least eliminates that off the plate. So then you just kind of do that window shopping, that kind of faux shopping where you’re kind of picking things up and looking around and you see if people are greeting you, how enthusiastic they are, you know. And then that way what you can do is you can just kind of slip them on your business card and say, hey, if you want a real job, give me a call. You’ve got the right stuff. Grass is greener at Dr. Zellner’s. Yeah, the guys is always… All right, now Thrivers, here’s a notable quotable I want to put into your head, okay? This is a notable quotable that blows my mind every time I read it. This is from Jim Rohn, the bestselling author, motivational speaker. He said this, you don’t get paid for the hour, you get paid for the value that you bring to the hour. That is huge. That’s huge. It’s very good. And that is A plus employees mentality. And you may say, A plus B, why are you grading people? Is that mean you’re just you’re judging? You’re mean. How is that? No, no, no. It’s just the reality of life. You know, we’ve got a great employee. Take good care of them because somebody else will if you don’t. And you know, when you have an average employee and you know, when you have a horrible employee, horrible ones are actually easier than average. Yeah. Don’t take care of your bad employees. That way someone else will take care of them. Yeah, things just aren’t working out, buddy. You need to move on down the road. Now, Thrivers, we have another question that came in from a Thriver just like you in Dallas, Texas. He writes this. Oh, indeed. He says, what is your process for evaluating pricing and structure? I want to ask this, Coach Calvert. If I’m listening right now and I want to get involved in your basketball camp, if I want to send my kid to your basketball camp, what’s your website and how much does it charge to send my kid to basketball camp? How I talk to people, how we did our pricing. I mean, how do you do it? What does it cost? At this point, what does it cost right now if I want to sign up my kid right now? My kid needs to improve their left hand. It’s $99 a package for young kids and $169 for older. $99? Now, Z, if I’m looking for a one eye exam and a one pair of stylish glasses, how much is it at Dr. Robert’s Elmer’s? It starts at $99 and that includes a free frame warranty and the guarantee that we put behind it that you will be extremely happy with. So the question that I have and a lot of the Thrivers have is how did you two arrive at that price? I mean how did you get to where that was your price that you’re charging? And if I’m listening right now and I want to set the prices for my let’s say organic drive-thru smoothies, how am I going to determine the prices? How can I possibly do it? Oh, I know. I know. No can tell you. Please tell me now. I don’t think I have enough time. We have very little time before the break. Tell me now. Come back from the break. Will you let me? Will you let me answer? Give it to me now. Will you let me answer right after the break? We have only three seconds before the break. I want the answer. I. Fine, I’ll stay tuned. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. This is your number one business coaching program. If you’ve ever wanted to start or grow a business, that’s what we do. We’re kind of like, you know, you’ve heard about Yoda. We’re more of like your Barodas. We’re here to help you learn the specific. There’s a lot of theory out there. There’s a lot of great TED talks. There’s a lot of theory. There’s a lot of great books you could read. But how do you actually do it? And I would encourage you to talk to real business owners that have really had some success in the world of business. And that’s what Dr. Z and I do. It’s Business School Without the BS, and we always answer questions from Thrivers like you, but just recently in the last few months, hundreds and hundreds of you continue to email info at thrive15.com, and typically we just kind of weave your questions into the show, but it’s gotten to a point where there are so many questions coming in, we wanted to devote an entire show just to answering your specific questions. And so we have a Thriver in Dallas who writes, what is your process for evaluating pricing structure? So I asked you guys before the break, what do you charge? And Z, you said it’s $99, starting at $99 for an eye exam and a pair of stylish glasses. And Coach Calvert, you said $99 to attend your basketball camp. And so I want to know, okay, I’m on scorebball.com. I see your prices are $99, but then I go back to my website. I own a muffler shop. How do I determine my prices, and how did you determine your prices? So Coach, I want to start with you. How did you determine your prices? What’s the best way for me if I’m struggling to figure out what I should be charging? Well, the first thing you have to look at is what your costs are. What can you do it for? Don’t undercut yourself. I did that for years. So determine your costs. And Z, this is one thing, and you obviously have invested in a bank and you’ve been a part of working on a bank board where you see people coming in for small business loans. I always advise entrepreneurs to try to operate your business at about a 30% profit. I mean, you can operate it more or a little bit less, but I encourage you to not be operating your business at a deficit or a 2% profit rate. Z, if you know all your costs and you did add them all up, what’s the profit margin that you would encourage every thriver to operate their business at? Oh, I think that 25 at the minimum, probably 35. You get much over 35, you are now becoming what we call affectionately a hog. So step one of my number one, my top 10 rules of business is be the pig and not the hog. Pigs get fat, hogs get butchered. What does that mean? You can’t be too greedy. The day that you’re too greedy and you’re trying to make too much money on your on your service or your product is the Day you get undercut by competition and that’s what you see in life all the time things like that going on And that business is doing so good and yet now they’re not and because they’re being greedy. They’re charging too much So coach had absolutely step one in the process and the process is know what your costs are Know what your how much profits you can make know what your hard cost is What hard cost is is that your actual out-of-pocket, your cost, okay? So, you have, you know, you may say to yourself, well, you know, this cost me this. Yeah, but are you counting in the employee that has to open that and put it on the shelf and how much time does that take? Are you counting, you know, it got shipped to you and you had to pay the shipping on that. You know, you have a lot of different little costs in there that if you’re not careful, that can eat into your profit margins, okay? Now, here’s the next step, two and three of determining your pricing. Step two, you want to make sure that, one, you know your costs. That’s right. Two, though, you want to make sure that you solve the problem. See, a lot of business owners, you have a product that’s not really solving the problem. So you want to go ahead and add in all the costs of, not only the costs of being in business, but make sure that you are solving their problem. I’ll give you an example. I’ve seen many restaurants that they do this move. This is such a tacky, terrible move. If you’re doing this, don’t do this move. It’s where you’re like, well, I don’t want to raise prices, but if anyone wants ranch dressing, I’ll charge them 75 cents. Yeah, exactly. I don’t want to raise prices, but I do want to charge per ketchup packet. I’ve literally seen a place in New York City that did that kind of thing. I’m like, do you want a ketchup packet? Yeah. It’s like 90 cents more because I got nine ketchup packets for my family. It’s like, are you kidding me? So you want to figure out what does it cost, coach, to solve the problem? Well, my wife and I quit going to a restaurant because they upcharged everything. We were like, that’s ridiculous. We felt like we were being cheated. And I’ll tell you why they’re upcharging. It’s probably because they didn’t charge enough to solve the problem. They probably had to find a way to do it and they felt bad. They’re like, well, I’m just going to keep, or they’re just nickel and diamond, or they’re being a hog and not a pig. Either way, it doesn’t work well. So one, determine your hard costs. Two, make sure you are solving the problem and know what it actually costs to it. And then this third move, and this is what Z, our two-day in-person workshops are all about. Determine what it costs to wow. Wow. To wow. So here’s the deal, when you come out to a two-day in-person workshop, I’m gonna walk you through the visual splendor that you can see on Facebook Live, okay? One is we have a desk that you’ll be seated at. You won’t be crammed in there with a bunch of randos that you don’t know. You’re not sitting next to a guy next to you going, wow, I’m packed in here like in a big hotel conference. You have your own desk. That costs some money. No, an airplane seat with the big guy next to you. That’s right. You’re not on the airplane seat. That’s a dreaded one. Two, is you have a copy of the Boom Book. Now what’s the Boom Book? This is our 13 plays. This is like a playbook for business. You get the Boom Book if you attend the workshop. Three, you get access to the world’s best business school with over 250 downloadable PDFs and over 3,000 video tutorial videos you can watch. So it’s like, literally, it’s like the Harvard Business School of Small Business is available for you. And that’s all included. O and Z, we have a coffee bar. O and the beautiful smell of pinon wood, which is kind of priceless But the idea is you get so much more than what you paid for and you and I had to sit down and think about all of those Details and we have to have a night or a 20,000 square foot facility where we host today. We walk in It’s like the Disneyland of entrepreneurship It is it’s like those dot-com places out in California that you know, we don’t have a slide I don’t think we could put a slide in we probably we probably could be probably more like a video games and that kind of thing to be totally so so Cal. Yeah, absolutely. But the great thing about is you’re going to thrive time show since you were talking about our in person conference where you come in and you learn the 13 super moves that we’re going to teach you in those two days until we go to thrive time show dot com. You can get on there and since it’s Valentine’s Day, you can give it to a loved one. You might say to yourself, I can’t afford it. You know what? We have scholarship programs that nobody’s going to be turned down because they can’t afford it. You might be turned down because we sold out of tickets because we’re not going to cram a bunch of people in here and make it awkward. So I think we have 35 slots left for this February. So in 10 days, you have to write 10 days, get on there, there’s going to be no upselling and we guarantee that with our scholarships, you can afford it. Now while you were talking there, one thing I was doing is I’m going, I’m on the site right now and I’m looking here at Forbes. Forbes actually said this about us. Forbes magazine said this. They said, with tools like thrive15.com, people of any age can learn to start or take their business to the next level. That’s from Forbes! I don’t know. So I’d have to see some reviews. It’s kind of a big deal. I would have to see some reviews. So if I’m on Google and I type in Thrive 15 reviews, there you’re gonna find hundreds of reviews from people just like you. And oh, by the way, we’ve been asked to speak at companies like Chevron and Hewlett-Packard and O’Reilly Auto Parts. But we say, hey, we’ve done it. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. We are very appreciative. But now you’ve got to come to the dojo of Mojo if you want to learn to start and grow a business. It all happens here. Yes, sir. Can I ask you a question? If I was listening to you and Dr. Z, I’d be a little overwhelmed, thinking these guys got five businesses. They handle what sounds to me like millions of dollars. How can the average guy really make it? Well I would say this. The first thing you have to do is you have to find a problem that the world has. In your case, a lot of kids want more playing time. They want to play basketball at the next level. I think you realized, hey, you know what? I can help kids do that. You’ve helped I think four guys play in the NBA now. Is that right? Four? And dozens and dozens play at the Division I level, actually over 50 play at the Division I level, but you first saw a problem and you said, I think I can solve that. And I think that’s where it starts, Z, is if you have, you got to look around, be aware of problems that the world has and ask yourself, what problems can I solve with my skills, my resources, my tools? Yeah, and to dovetail also on the question of how to price, we’ve talked about making sure that your product wows, you know, ultimately it makes it, make it a wow-a-ful. Can I say wow-a-ful? Wow-a-ful. That sounds technical. It’s wow-a-ful. It’s a new word. But then also, one of the super moves that I always do and I teach people to do is that is shop your competitors. What does that mean? In other words, you find out who’s doing what you’re doing in your community and you go and you price shop them. In other words, you find out what they’re charging for, the same thing you want to sell. Because odds are what you’re bringing to the market, somebody else out there is doing it. Kind of like you started Elephant in the Room, a men’s grooming lounge. Guys were getting their hair cut in Tulsa. They were getting their hair cut in Tulsa. I thought, I didn’t know other guys were getting their hair cut before we started. I thought we brought haircuts to Tulsa. No, no. You have to walk around just shaggy-headed. Oh, sure, we’ve got a haircut place. You just said he needs a haircut place. Yeah. Kind of like when I opened up Optometry. There was plenty of optometrists in Tulsa, Oklahoma, right? And so what you do is you price shop them maniacally, and now you know, okay, here’s what they’re charging, here’s what my cost is, now here’s where my profit margin wants to be, can I beat them? And if so, then I can be a value, this can be a value-driven product. You know what, Z, we have shopped the competition. I’m going to read them off here to you, so you can kind of see how we stack up here. If you go to Tony Robbins, you’re going to spend about $1,000 to $2,000 for a ticket, between $1,000 and $3,000. If you go to Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you’ll probably spend $500 or more of them. You get upsold a lot. If you go to the Maui Mastermind, it’s $30,000. How much are your seminars? How much are the Thrive Time workshops? Let me tell you this. We have a scholarship program set up so it doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you can’t afford it, you don’t owe us anything, there’s no student debt, just get here. Take the first step, go to thrivetimeshow.com, go on there, learn about it, and I’m telling you what, you will not be disappointed. It will absolutely change your life. And Z, if someone wants one-on-one business coaching, we have that available at thrivetimeshow.com. If they want to hear today’s podcast, radio show archive, go to thrivetimeshow.com. If you want to sign up for the world’s best business school, go to thrive15.com. And also, if you want to improve your kids’ basketball skills for the love of all that is holy, go to scorebball.com. That’s scorebball.com. Coach, thanks for being on the show today. And as always, Thrivers, hey, happy Valentine’s Day. Three, two, one, boom! All right, JT, so hypothetically, in your mind, what is the purpose of having a business? To get you to your goals. So it’s a vehicle to get you to your destination. And would you need profits to get there? I mean, when you have a business that’s successful, in your expert opinion, would you need profits to get you to your goals? Yeah, because if you have a $15 million business, but you have $15 million in expenses, it’s kind of pointless. Holy crap! Alright, so the question I would have here for you, if you could take like 10 minutes or less and see if you could save $3,000 a year by reducing your credit card fees, would you do it? Yes, absolutely. Holy crap. Why would somebody out there who’s listening right now who has a sane mind, why would they not go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card, Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card to schedule a 10 minute consultation to see if they can reduce their credit card fees by at least 3,000 bucks a year. Why would they not do it? Yeah, why would they not do it? Maybe because they don’t understand how you set the website. This tree is a symbol of the spirit of the Griswold family Christmas. That’s clear. Okay, so that could be true. So I would encourage everybody to check out thrive timeshow.com forward slash credit dash cards right time show dot com forward slash credit dash card what would be another reason why someone would not be willing to take 10 minutes to compare rates to see if they can save $3,000 or more on credit card fees maybe they think it is a waste of time and then it won’t it’s not possible there’s somebody out there that’s make it more than $3,000 every 10 minutes and they’re like nah that’s not worth my time We gettin’ that rap money. We gettin’ that rap money. There’s probably some, someone out there. Okay. They would think that. Well, I’ll just tell you folks, if you’re out there today, and you’re making less than $3,000 per 10 minutes, I would highly recommend that you go to throttletimeshow.com forward slash credit dash hard. It, because you can compare rates, you can save money, and, you know, the big, the big goal, in my opinion, of building a business is to create time, freedom and financial freedom. And in order to do that, you have to maximize your profits. Holy crap. Now, one way to maximize your profits is to increase your revenue. Another way to do it is to decrease your expenses. It’s a profit deal. Takes the pressure off JT’s or any other reason why somebody would not be willing to take 10 minutes to compare rates to see if they could save a total of $3,000 a year on average I Am at a loss. I cannot even Shampoo is better. I go on first and clean the hair Good. Yes, it’s better. I need to hair silky and smooth. Oh really fool, really. Stop looking at me, swan. Well let me tell you a good story here real quick. I actually years ago compared rates with this company here. It’s called IPS. It’s Integrated Payment Services. And I scheduled a consultation. I don’t know if I was skeptical. I just thought whatever. I’ll take ten minutes. I’ll compare rates. I can’t tell you can tell me I’m a doctor no I mean I’m just not sure or can’t you take a guess well not for another two hours you can’t take a guess for another two hours. And in my case in my in my case my particular case I save over $20,000 a year. Holy crap! Wow which is uh you know like groceries when my wife goes to the organic stores. Find everything you need today? Yeah. Great. Oh God. Everything okay ma’am? It’s just that you’ve only scanned a few items and it’s already 60 bucks. I’m so scared. Okay, I’m a trained professional ma’am. I’ve scanned a lot of groceries. I need you to stay with me. It’s just that my in-laws are in town and they want a charcuterie board. This isn’t gonna be easy so I need you to be brave, all right? What’s your name? Patricia. Patricia, all right. I need you to take a deep breath. We’re about to do the cheese. You know, that’s the difference between eating organic and not organic. So because my wife eats organic, I had to take the 10 minutes needed to compare rates to save the $20,000 a year on credit card fees just for one of my companies. One question, what’s the brand name of the clock. The brand name of the clock, Rod. The brand name of the clock. It’s an elegant from Ridgway. It’s from Ridgway. Let’s buy the clock and sell the fireplace. I encourage everybody out there, go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card. You schedule a free consultation, request information. A member of our team will call you. They’ll schedule a free consultation. It should take you 10 minutes or less. And they’re going to compare rates and see if they can’t save you more than $3,000 a year off of your credit card processing. You were hoping what? I wouldn’t owe you money at the end of the day. No, you don’t owe us money. Because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the goal of the business is to create time, freedom, and financial freedom. And in order to do that, you need to create additional profits. The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now, okay? I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminix, they’re both $1.3 billion companies. They both have 2,000 to 3,000 pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually nonexistent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has. By being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, you know, asking our customers for reviews. And now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pest and Lawn Company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay. So 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now, our closing rate is about 85%. And that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten, people really see that our customers are happy, but also, we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. We, it was a system that we, that we followed with Thrive and in the refining process. And that has obviously, um, the 411% shows that that, that that system works. Yeah. So here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months, or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year, from before we worked with Thrive. So, again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. And it’s incredible. But the reason why we have that success is by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews. That way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists that way everything gets done and it gets done right. It creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really really contributed to our success, but that, like I said, the diligence and consistency in doing those, and that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives, and also, you know, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know. Okay, the last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah and so we didn’t we didn’t really know where to go what to do how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. You know that they implemented those systems that they taught us those systems they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind absolutely it’s been a grind this last year. But we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s going to take in order to really succeed. So we just want to give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatrician. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42% increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proof-and-turn-key marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklist, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crockerill, head of Disney, with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So, think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly he’s running 160 companies. Every 6-8 weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every 6-8 weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. I’ve seen guys from start-ups go from start-up to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system of critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. Coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. And Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressive thing was when I was shadowing him one time, we went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it, I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. Anyways, just an amazing man. Anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s, I remember, we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns. 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. This is where we used to live. Here’s the old neighborhood. See? Nice, 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 4 to 14. 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 Thrive Time Show, two-day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can scape 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 gonna 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, but 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 We go back eight years ago. Think about the number of clients you had back then versus the number of clients you have now. As a percentage, what has been the growth over the past eight years, do you think? We’ve got to inspire somebody out there who just well have the time to listen. Okay, so clay it’s it’s it’s like I would go up and down from about $10,000 a month up to about 40,000 was up and down roller coaster. And so now we we’ve got it to where we’re in excess of 100 clients. That’s awesome. And so I would have anywhere from five clients to 20 clients on my own with networking, but I had no control over it. I didn’t. Without the systems, you’re going to be victimized by your own business. For somebody out there who struggles with math, if you would say that your average number of clients was 30 and you go to 100, as a percentage, what is that? I have doubled every year since working with you. So I’ve doubled in clients, I’ve doubled in revenue every year. That’s a hundred percent growth every year I’ve worked with you. Now so I’m looking, we’ve been good friends seven, eight years and I’ve got doubled five times. Which is just incredible. I mean the first time you do it, that’s one thing, but when you do it repeatedly, I mean that’s unbelievable. We’re working our blessed assurance off this year to double. We’re planning on doubling again. We’re incorporating some new things in there to really help us do it, but we are going to double again this year. I started coaching, but it would go up and down, Clay. That’s when I came to you, as I was going up and down, and I wanted to go up and up instead of up and down. And so that’s when it needed a system. So creating a system is you have nailed down specific steps that you’re going to take no matter how you feel, no matter the results, you lean into them and you do them regardless of what’s happening. You lean into them and it will give you X number of leads. You follow up with those leads, it turns into sales. I tell you, if you don’t have a script and you don’t have a system, then every day is a whole new creation. You’re creating a lot of energy just to figure out what are you going to do. The best executives, Peter Drucker is a father of modern management, he said, the most effective executives make one decision a year. What you do is you make a decision, what is your system, and then you work like the Dickens to make sure you follow that system. That’s really what it’s all about. With a script here, we have a brand new gal that just came in working for us. She nailed down the script, and she’s been nailing down appointments. Usually we try to get one appointment for every 100 calls. We make 200 to 300 calls a day per rep. Right. And she’s been nailing down five and eight appointments a day. Somebody out there is having a hard time. On that script. So she’s making how many calls a day? She’s making between two and three hundred calls a day. And our relationship is weird in that we do, if someone were to buy an Apple computer today, or let’s say you buy a personal computer, a PC, the computer is made by, let’s say, Dell. But then the software in the computer would be Microsoft, let’s say, or Adobe, or whatever that is. So I basically make the systems. And you’re like the computer, and I’m like the software. It’s kind of how I would describe our relationship. Tim, I want to ask you this. You and I reconnected, I think it was in the year 2000 and What was it, maybe 2010? Is that right? 2011 maybe? Or maybe further down the road. Maybe 2013? 2012. Okay, so 2012. And at that time, I was five years removed from the DJ business. And you were how many years removed from tax and accounting software? It was about 10, 11 years. We met… How did we meet? What was the first interaction? There was some interaction where you and I first connected. I just remember that somehow you and I went to Hideaway Pizza. But do you remember when we first reconnected? Yeah. Well, we had that speaking thing that, uh, Oh, there it was. So it’s Victory Christian Center. I was speaking there. My name is Robert Redman. I actually first met Clay almost three years ago to the day. I don’t know if he remembers it or not, but I wasn’t working with him at the time. I asked to see him and just ask him some questions to help, you know, direct my life to get some mentorship, but I’ve been working with Clay for now just over a year. The role I play here is a business coach, business consultant. I work with different businesses implementing best practice processes and systems that I have learned here by working with Clay. And the experience working here has, to put it real plainly, has been just life-changing. I have not only learned new things and have gained new knowledge, but I have gained a whole new mindset that I believe wherever I end up will serve me well throughout the rest of my life. Since working with Clay, I have learned so much. I mean, I would like to say it was everything about business in terms of the different categories. I haven’t learned it all, but I’ve learned all about marketing. I’ve learned about advertising. I’ve learned about branding. I’ve learned how to create a sales process for organizations in any industry. I’ve learned how to sell. I’ve learned how to create repeatable systems and processes and hold people accountable. You know, how to hire people. It’s almost like every aspect of a business you can learn. I have learned a lot in those different categories. And then, again, the mindset that I’ve gained here has been huge. Working here, you can’t be a mediocre person. You are a call to a higher standard of excellence, and then as you’re called to that standard here, you begin to see those outcomes in every area of your life, that standard of excellence that you want to implement, no matter what you’re involved in. I would like to describe the other people that work with Clay are people that are going somewhere with their life. Marshall, in the group interview, talks about how the best fits for this organization are the people that are goal-oriented. So they’re on their own trajectory, and we’re on our own trajectory, and the best fits are those people where there can be a mutually beneficial relationship that as we pursue our goals, and we help the business pursue those goals, the business helps us pursue our goals as well. And so I’d say people that are driven, people that want to make something of their lives, people that are goal-oriented, they’re focused, and they’re committed to overcoming any adversity that may come their way. Clay’s passion for helping business owners grow their businesses is, it’s unique in that I don’t know if there’s anyone else’s that can be as passionate. You know whenever a business starts working with Clay it’s almost as like Clay is running that business in the sense that he has something at stake. You know he’s just serving them they’re they’re one of his clients but it’s as if he is actively involved in the business whenever they have a win He’s posting it all over his social media. He’s shouting it across The the room here here at thrive You know he’s sending people encouraging messages he can kind of be that that life coach and business coach in terms of being that a Motivator and that champion for people’s businesses. It’s again unique because there’s no one else I’ve seen get so excited about and passionate about other people’s businesses. The kind of people that wouldn’t like working with Clay are people that are satisfied with mediocrity, people that wanna get through life by just doing enough, by just getting by, people who are not looking to develop themselves, people who are not coachable, people who think that they know it all and they’re unwilling to change. I would say those are the type of people and in short anyone that’s content with mediocrity would not like working with Clay. So if you’re meeting Clay for the first time the advice I’d give you is definitely come ready to take tons of notes. Every time Clay speaks, he gives you a wealth of knowledge that you don’t want to miss. I remember the first time that I met Clay. I literally carried a notebook with me all around. I was looking at this notebook the other day, actually. I carried a notebook with me all around, and I just took tons of notes. I filled the entire notebook in about three or four months just from being around Clay, following him and learning from him. And then I would say come coachable. Be open to learning something new. Be open to challenging yourself. Be open to learning learning something new. Be open to challenging yourself. Be open to learning and adjusting parts about you that need to be adjusted.