How I Built It | The DJConnection.com (Story Part 1) + With DJConnection.com Founder, Clay Clark) + The Proven Principles & Systems That You Need to Learn & Apply to Transform Your Dreams Into Reality

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

The reason why I’m putting together the DJ Connection story and sharing for the first time in an audiobook how I built it is so that you will have the encouragement needed to believe that you too can build something great. During this audio, you’re going to hear about a lot of the mistakes that I made and a lot of the successes that I achieved, but you’re going to hear it all. It’s all raw. It’s all in audio. It’s me sharing with you specifically how I went from the dorm room to the boardroom. And now with any further ado, let’s get into the DJ Connection story.

I’m often asked by people, young entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, they’ll say, how did you build DJConnection . com? How did you build what many consider to be the largest wedding entertainment company on the planet? How did you start? What was the starting point? How did you get the money?

How did you get the capital? How did you know what to do? Well, my friend, DJConnection . com was my magnificent obsession. And just like your own child, I just thought about it. I cared about it.

I’m obsessed on growing the business each and every day. And to quote Andrew Carnegie, one of America’s richest men who earned tremendous amounts of wealth in the early 20th century. gave it all away. I put all of my eggs in one basket and I watched that basket. The dust finally settled. And after spending two frantic nonstop days moving all of my belongings out of my dorm room, the reality finally occurred to me. I was no longer in college.

I was no longer really employed by anybody other than my internship with an accounting software company called Tax and Accounting Software. I had no structure. I had no commitments, no customers. I had no money. Oh, yes. It finally hit me.

And if you’re reading this book and you’re ever ambitious, crazy enough to start a business from scratch, this feeling will hit you at some point as well. Being your own boss is great. You get to choose whatever 80 hours per week you want to work. Think about that for a second. Being your boss. I mean, it is great, right?

I mean, you can choose your own hours, just whatever 80 hours a week you want to work because whenever you are sick and you don’t show up, the business show up either because you are the business. In fact, You’re not really, you don’t own a business. When you start a company, you just own a job. And you own a job that nobody else wants because it’s tough. You get to choose those 80 hours you get to work per week because you have to do all the jobs. You have to wear all the hats.

And when the going gets rough, you get to lay yourself off. And so alone, except with help from my wife, Vanessa, my wife -to -be, Vanessa, my magnificent obsession, as Napoleon Hill calls it, began. And basically everything I did during this time revolved around djconnection . com. I stayed up late at night creating invoices and customer lead sheets using the incredibly sophisticated Microsoft Windows Accessory Program, now known as Paint. Yep, I used Microsoft Paint to database my customers.

Why? Because I didn’t have anybody to help me. I couldn’t afford a new database. I couldn’t afford… I didn’t know anybody who knew what to do. Even if I did know them, I couldn’t pay them. So I went to Kinkoast and had my very own business cards made.

And I carried them around in the backpack that I wore in college so that I could always be ready to pass out my cards to anyone who came within a foot or more of me. Because I was… only getting three to five calls per month for my Yellow Page advertisement, I was really hustling. I mean, when you’re spending $2 ,500 a month on a Yellow Page ad and you don’t even make $2 ,500 a month or barely make $2 ,500 a month, trust me, I was hustling. Well, how’d I do it? I had a job working at Target. I had a job working at Applebee’s.

And I had a job working at DirecTV all at the same time. So you might say, well, it takes a team to make the dream. People say it takes teamwork to make the dream work. Well, If that was true, my team consisted of me, myself, and I. And maybe you’re out there listening, and maybe you have a team that can help you achieve your dream. But I’m going to say this to you. Maybe you’re alone.

Maybe you’re alone. And you have to recognize that you are alone, just like I was alone, and that no one is going to come and help you. So I bought that Yellow Page ad from Sally Lewis, and I was hustling to grow djconnection . com. And I don’t know if I’m quite conveying with the words the amount of hustling that I was doing, So I’ll give you an analogy. Every day, a gazelle wakes up in Africa, knowing that if it does not outrun and escape the hunting attempts of the lion, it will die and be eaten in a painful death.

Every day in Africa, the lion wakes up and knows that if it does not catch the gazelle, it will starve to death. Every day, my friend, I woke up, every day, my friend, I woke up in my one -bedroom, fountain -crest apartment complex in Tulsa, Oklahoma, knowing that if I don’t get a booking that day for DJConnection .com, com, that I couldn’t afford to make my Yellow Page payment from DJConnection . com, my storage payment from DJConnection . com, or my rent payment from DJConnection .

com. So, my friends, when I say I was hustling, I was hustling. And who was there to help me? Nobody. Nobody helped me. just like as I grew the company. Some people came, some people left, but I did it all by myself.

Oh, people showed up once the company grew and they wanted to ride my coattails and talk about the sacrifice they put into it. But at the end of the day, I was the catalyst. I started my company just like you’re going to have to start your company all by yourself. And as I was hustling with previously unseen speed, passion and hidden desperation. I was meeting all types of people and working all types of jobs to pay the bills. Like I said I worked at Target in the electronics section where I was reprimanded daily by my rather large boss who always was on me about working at an unrealistically fast pace.

I’ll never forget being laid off from that Target at 71st Street Memorial in Tulsa after being a seasonal worker. And for anyone planning a vacation to visit this tourist attraction, that Target has moved and is now occupied by some other large retail store. I believe a furniture store. Sorry to disappoint you. My friend, I was actually pumped up that I got laid off. It set me free.

But I did not get laid off before I ran into a guy by the name of Todd Starkey. You see, Todd came into Target to buy a video camera for his wife. Her name was Allison. And when he came up to the counter, he had this look on his face as though he was overwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong. Todd is a wonderful guy, but he did not look very excited about being at Target.

Thus, I made my move. I said, hello, sir. How are you doing? Is there anything that I can do to help you? that an employee in the electronics section actually greeted a bewildered customer with enthusiasm. He said, yeah, um, I’m looking for a video camera for my wife.

Do you know anything about these things? Well, I did, because I had read all the instruction manuals, because I was trying to get promoted out of Target. I was trying to take my life to the next level. I was mentally participating in that job at the time. I was trying to be the best I could possibly be at that particular moment. When I started at Target, I honestly ate most of the pretzels during my shift.

I wasn’t mentally alert, but somehow, someway, I stumbled upon a book called The New Imperialists, an incredible book that explained how Steve Jobs and how he made his empire. It explained how these huge Silicon Valley tycoons started their businesses and grew them into massive organizations. It explained the Cisco story. And I was fired up. I was beginning to stumble onto the Napoleon Hill content. And I just decided I was going to over -deliver.

And so this was just the kind of open -ended question that I was waiting for. So I proceeded to build rapport with Todd by asking him what he was looking for in a camera. What features he needed. and what he was not looking for. After talking with Todd, I determined that he needed a high -quality camera that was about 30 % less than the one he was originally planning on buying to meet his needs. Todd was sincerely appreciative that I had saved him some money, and so he asked, so, Clay, what do you do here?

My name was on my name tag. I responded with even more passion. Basically, I work here in the electronics section. However, it is my job to make sure that all of the lady’s underwear, deodorant, batteries, car accessories, and assorted whatnots Don’t migrate into the electronics section. I go to ORU and I hadn’t been officially de -enrolled yet. What do you do, Todd?

I asked. Well, Todd went on to explain to me how he worked at a place called Tax and Accounting Software Company, a company that specialized in selling and servicing tax and accounting software, oddly enough, for accountants and professional bookkeepers throughout the country. He told me that the guy who started Tax and Accounting Corporation was an ORU graduate and that they were currently hiring interns, if my schedule would allow for it. He said that I should come on by for an interview. So I asked for his card. I put his card in my wallet, and I was overwhelmed with joy to know that I would be getting the heck out of Target as soon as my interview with Tax and Accounting Software was done.

I knew that I was going to get that job if I could just get the interview. And I did get that interview. And I rolled up to Tax and Accounting Software looking and smelling like a million bucks in my 19 -year -old way. I drove my Mazda hand -painted DJ van. I tell you what, that van was sweet. I hand -painted that van myself.

When I bought that van, that van had hundreds of thousands of miles on it, but it was the only van that I could afford. And I bought that van myself because nobody was there to help me. I parked my car over there at the CityPlex Towers located at 81st and Lewis in Tulsa. And I thought to myself, I’m going to get this job. I am going to get this job. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to get this job. I wore some tan, super sexy corduroy dress pants, a blue shirt and a yellow tie.

The same kind of blue shirt that I wore every single day as I grew DJConnection . com. I was feeling good about life when they finally called me from the lobby to the interview room. And I was interviewed by Steve Heck, a former professional baseball player and San Francisco giant. He played for the San Francisco Giants, my favorite team growing up. And another lady with dark hair and…

beautiful yet trusting and interrogative eyes. Her job was to break me down. I think she would have probably used like a waterboarding technique if it was available. I mean, this lady was intense, but she was an attractive lady, but it was something about, she was intense yet attractive. She freaked me out. I’m not really even sure how to describe it.

I’ll move on. And she asked me all these tough, character -revealing questions. The interview started out well. They threw me some softball questions like, well, tell me about yourself. And so what was the most difficult situation that you’ve been in? How did you overcome this situation to get the job done?

And I could answer questions like that all day. Then they started asking me tough questions. So Clay, how long have you been attending ORU? When do you plan on graduating? They kept going after me with stuff like, so what made you interested in ORU’s accounting internship program? and I knew that I had to totally BS each and every answer or I was going to be screwed with a passion.

Like your average screw would be by Bob Bila after he just got himself some new Sears power tools. Oh man, I was screwed. So I had to go for it. And you might have to go for it. You got to fake it until you make it. You know you do.

You know you do. You know that you have a product and you know right now that there’s like 10 people in the world buying that product. And you know that you got to fake it until you make it. You’ve got to take that sort of approach to branding that Elon Musk would take. You might be saying to yourself, what kind of approach to branding would Elon Musk take? You know, Elon Musk, the guy behind PayPal, the guy behind Tesla, the guy behind Neuralink, the guy behind SolarCity, the guy behind SpaceX.

I mean, come on. Elon Musk. This is what Elon Musk says. Elon Musk says, brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead. Other times it will be behind, but brand is simple.

a collective impression some have about a product. My friend, when I started DJ Connection, I had nothing. I mean, brand is just a perception. People perceived that I had nothing because it was just me in a hand -painted van. And so people wouldn’t pay me. So I had to buy the biggest yellow page ad that I could afford so that way people would perceive and maybe believe that I was, in fact, a brand.

the real deal. Do you know how hard it is? Do you know how hard it is to hire a 40 -year -old man to come work for you when you’re 19 years old? Think about that. Now, Elon Musk said, sometimes it’ll be ahead, other times it will be behind. Well, at that time, my branding was way behind me. I was a very, I was becoming a very good DJ, but I had to book the DJ shows for very low rates because my branding was so terrible.

But brand, my friend, is simply a collective impression some have about a product. So I would ask you this today. On a scale of 1 to 10, how highly would you rank your branding? Is your branding holding you back? Are you like me, where I had a horrible hand -painted van, a non -existent website, business cards that look terrible? Or are you somebody who’s over -branding?

Maybe we need to take the product quality up to the next level. So, as I was being interrogated, I said something to the effect of, you know, I actually met Todd Starkey when he was shopping at Target, where I head up the electronics department. And honestly, I don’t really see myself wanting to work with Target for the rest of my life. The more I talked with Todd, the more your company sounded like a great place to work at after college. And I’m just really looking for a company that will appreciate an employee who’s an ultra -hard worker and who is ultra -passionate about getting things done. I have a small mobile entertainment business that I’ve been using to pay my way through college, and I think that this internship opportunity would look better on my resume than having to say that I interned for myself.

And they’re like, kind of makes sense. I could hit a home run. but I kept going because, you know, the one lady, she was kind of hard to convince. But the other guy, he was into it, you know, and Steve was into it. And so I kept going on. That’s when Steve that’s when I said, so Steve, I understand that you played baseball for the San Francisco Giants.

Did you ever play with with Will Clark or Matt Williams? I mean, that must have been great. And then Steve responded with a few baseball stories. And I just had to keep going. playing that card hard. Man, that’s awesome.

So what brought you to tax and accounting software? What did you most like about it here? What do you most like about it here, Steve? Tell me more about it. The thing is, if you want to win friends and influence people, you have to become interested in people. You see, people are most interested in themselves.

People’s favorite topic is themselves. And so I had to get Steve engaged in the topic of Steve because Steve is a great guy, but Steve likes to talk about Steve. So I had to ask Steve about Steve. So if you’re out there today thinking about doing a sales presentation or selling a product or a service, you’ve got to take an interest in the other person that even works on dates, my friends. So it was going to be awesome. My strategy of interviewing the interviewer was working.

And as the interview was winding down, I gave them my resume, knowing that if they called ORU to verify that I was actively enrolled there as a student, I was screwed because I had just been kicked out of Oral Roberts University. But I just gave it to them with confidence, knowing that they were hiring many interns and that most people do not call references. So true. You see, when you dress up nice, I found that most businesses do not call references. But if you get referred to somebody for a job, you’re almost good to go. Getting laid off from Target was incredible.

And I was honestly happy to get the news when Tara, the big boss, actually a very small lady, but the big boss and manager had to let me go. Now, shortly after beginning work at tax and accounting software, for a while, rumors started flying in that Taxon Accounting Software Corporation was going to be purchased by Intuit. Being that I did not know Why that mattered, I did not see this as a bad thing. I was just fired up to be making $10 per hour. I was fired up that they serve Subway sandwiches every day.

I was fired up to be working in an office. And I love that scan card keychain, you know, the one they gave me to get into the building. Life was sweet, baby. By the way, they also brought pizzas on a consistent basis, and I did enjoy those pizzas. Then, unexpectedly one day, I got called into the office by a guy named Randy, who said that we needed to talk. And I don’t care if your mom says it, your wife says it, your principal says it, or anyone says it.

The phrase, we need to do it, is never good. And so I got nervous. But I knew that I was working hard and was doing a good job at this point on the phones. And so I knew that it could not have been work -related. And I knew that I couldn’t really get fired for personal -related stuff outside of work. And thus, I felt nervous but good.

I mean, they couldn’t kick me out for getting kicked out of Oral Roberts University, could they? Well, when I sat down in Randy’s office, the dark haired lady again from the initial interview, the beautiful lady with those interrogating, distrusting eyes was there too. And she’s looking at me and oh crap, I knew it. She called O . R . U.

didn’t she? The rat. How could she? They proceeded to tell me in a serious talk that they’d heard I was being kicked out of O . R . U.

for recording the infamous O . R . U. Slim Shady Song. And they were both O . R .

U. alumni. So they wanted to know what was going on. And if in fact, I was the one who wrote the song or produced the song, they wanted to know if it was true. Were the rumors true? I told them the story with conviction and passion.

And I explained to them how Adam and I spent Adam, and I spent 12 hours recording the song to vent our personal frustrations with the school’s hypocrisy. I explained how our friends had put it online without our permission. I explained to them how I got kicked out, and then they kind of cracked a smile. They couldn’t believe it. They had to know more.

When I left that meeting, something had changed. The dynamic I had shared with them and the rest of my co -workers was now different. Everyone loved me. Belinda, the Hispanic lady, started talking to me. Todd, the white guy, would say, what’s up, DJ, in the hall. Other employees started telling their personal O .

R . U. stories. A former O . R . U.

basketball player told me how O . R . U. paid for his S . U . V.

to get him to attend college there. Everyone at work started telling me more and more dirt on O . R . U. I felt like I had enough info and inside scoop on the squirrely Richard Roberts to write 10 songs, but I did not because I’m classy. Or at least I like to tell people I’m classy.

I think I’m more humble than I am classy. Okay. I’m both super humble. I’m probably the world’s most humble and classy man. Moving on. I don’t remember the exact series of events at this point, but I do, I do remember, I do recall that, that Todd gave me the number of this evangelical, it’s evangelical, we’ll call it evangelical.

It was, it was an outreach with ORU Connections. It was a media outreach. It was a, it was a, Evangelistic, there we go, an evangelistic outreach designed to reach churches all across the nation with ORU connections that he had heard was hiring. I lasted about two weeks working at a different fast food restaurant because the environment there just wasn’t for me. And I really needed another opportunity. And I’ve always been of the belief that, you know, whether you want the job or not, if you need a job, you have to take that job, right?

job? Don’t you? I mean, whether you want the job or not, if you need to pay the bills, you kind of have to take the job. I know there’s a lot of people, I’ve met a lot of people, a lot of college graduates who will tell me, you know, I’m holding out for management. And I’m like, okay, well, what do you do now? Well, I live with my parents.

You see, I can’t handle the idea. I couldn’t handle the concept of living with my parents, ever. We’re asking for money, ever. I’m not that kind of guy. I’d rather live in the van and take showers at the gym, All -American, than to go live with my parents or to live on the couch of somebody else. I want to be an independent person.

And so for a time, not a big period of time, but for a week or so, I did that. I lived in a van. I took showers at All -American Fitness. And that’s what I did. But at the end of the day, DJ Connection was always in my mind. DJ Connection was my magnificent obsession.

DJConnection . com was what I dreamed about. I knew that I could grow it into something that could create time and financial freedom for me and I didn’t give up on it because I emotionally connected to my dream and I emotionally disconnected from all of the frustrations, the tribulations, all of the manifestations of negativity that was in my way, all the setbacks. I viewed them as set ups for my future success. I viewed failure as a prerequisite to success because I was reading Napoleon Hill over and over and over again. So I went to work at a company called Faith Highway.

At the time, it was called Impact Ministries. And just for simplicity, I’m going to refer to it as Impact Ministries from this point forward. I did a moderate amount of pre -interview interrogations of people who knew people who had allegedly worked there, so I could get a vibe for the company. Through doing this, I learned that Impact was actually a ministry and not actually a company built to provide services. The owners of Impact sincerely believed that they were doing an outreach to the lost by producing TV commercials that could be aired in local markets all across the country. And they weren’t really striving to make a profit to do so.

What they were doing was they were trying to share the gospel on cable television. Now, the problem for me was I was not a Christian at the time. And before I applied at Impact, I had discovered that the ministry itself actually came as a result of a ministry called the Toymaker’s Dream. And the Toymaker’s Dream was this traveling evangelism production that successfully helped to win an estimated 10 ,000 plus people to Christ. And as the Toymaker’s Dream performances started winding down, the idea was tossed out. that they could use the infrastructure used to promote and market and grow the toy maker’s dream, they could use that to promote the message of the gospel through producing television commercials.

And the average church in America essentially couldn’t afford to make high quality commercials, and so they thought, what if we use the infrastructure, the cameras, the systems we have, what if we use that to produce high quality commercials, and then people would like the commercials so much, we could call up local pastors and see if they would like to lease the rights to air the commercials in their designated market areas. So picture it this way. You’re a pastor of a local small church. and you want to run commercials in your local city, maybe on ESPN or Fox or CNN or whatever, you want to reach people to advertise the church. But you don’t have the money to produce awesome commercials. And so you get a cold call from us, and then we mail you demo videos.

And if you like them, you could license the commercials from us. And at the bottom of the commercials, we would put a tagline or a message that would say, come join us this Sunday at First Baptist Church. We put the phone number of your church and the website and that kind of thing. And that’s what we did. So my job was to cold call churches. Now these commercials were produced on very high quality, 35 millimeter film.

And the pastors, churches, and the viewers loved them. And at one point, they even won the prestigious Addy Award for their quality work and creativity. What we at Impact sold all day was the exclusive rights for the local church to get to use the Got Jesus commercial or the What If It Were True commercial series in their designated market area. My job was to cold call. I’m talking about cold calling churches that I’ve never spoken to before, churches that I’ve never talked to, churches I don’t even want to call because remember I wasn’t a Christian at this time. So I would literally call alphabetically through a list of churches, and I would just call them all.

And there was a whole call center of people calling them all. Call them all until they cry, buy, or die. This company was an anomaly, my friend. And Impact Ministries, the only thing I could liken it to would be like the Boiler Room movie. Maybe you’ve seen a movie called The Boiler Room. It just was this high -energy atmosphere.

Everyone was on the phone. And through the creative vision of Shane Harwell, our super intense and highly motivational sales manager, and our visionary founder, Tom Newman, and the sales guru and marketing guru, Kyle Thompson, Impact successfully sold the crap out of these commercials in nearly every designated market area in the United States. Eventually, the company sold such a high volume of commercials that we had to create our own media buying department to assist pastors with more purchasing so they can get a better deal. They could buy in bulk. We were buying on behalf of hundreds of churches throughout the country so we could buy the airtime in bulk. Essentially, just like anything, the more you buy, the better of a deal you get, typically, when you negotiate.

We were selling commercials to these small individual churches, and we were selling commercials to huge churches, and we were selling thousands of them because the scripts were so good. I wasn’t even a Christian at the time, but yet I was able to pick up the phone and to cold call a pastor and to convince him that these commercials were so good, they were so good, that they should run them in their market, and these pastors would do it. It was crazy, but I had to learn how to cold call. I had to learn that making 100 outbound calls a day and setting three appointments a day was considered to be a success. I had never thought about that before, but that’s how it was.

I called, and I called, and I called, and I eventually began to generate commissions. They weren’t great commissions, but they were enough commissions to make $3 ,000 a month, to make $4 ,000 a month. And what I would do is I’d make calls all day, and then at the end of the day, or at lunch, typically at lunch, and at the end of the day, I would go out to my car, and I would check those voicemails from the DJConnection . com voicemail. and I would get the voicemail and I would call the person back. But the problem was I had a singular voicemail system, a singular phone, a singular wireless phone.

That meant I had limited minutes. So what I had to do was I had to cold call, I guess not cold call, warm call. I had to call back the bride. And so I’d call, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Hey, is this the amazing Amanda? And she’d say, yeah.

And I’d say, Amanda, this is Clay with DJ Connection. How are you? Great. Hey, what day are you looking at at getting married? And she’d say, well, June 7th. I’d say, that’s incredible.

Could you tell me more about that day? And then I would hang up on her. I would hang up on her. Why would I hang up on her? Think about it. I had limited minutes.

Think about it. Well, it’s because if they called me back, right, then I wasn’t charged. You were only charged for the outbound minutes. And so that’s how I would do it. That’s how I could afford my call time. And so that’s how I did it.

And I would book my weddings during lunch. I’d book my weddings on the way home. I’d book them in the car. And I had a big list of things that I needed to buy to turn DJ Connection into a full -time business. Because at the time, I was working part -time for a guy named Rob Biggins. And his company was called All Access Mobile Music.

And the deal was for Rob, I had to book my own gigs And then I got to use his equipment. So I’d book a gig for $300. I’d rent his gear for like $150, you know, $150. And then I got to keep the profit, you know. And that’s how I did it. Well, at the time, I couldn’t afford my own equipment.

I couldn’t do it. And so I tried working. I literally applied for every single DJ company in Tulsa. I applied for Infinity. I applied for Powerhouse. I applied for all those companies and everybody rejected me.

And so I had to go work for Rob. And after I’d worked for Rob for a while, I realized, man, I am not probably ever going to get ahead working for Rob. And so I talked to Rob, and I asked Rob if it was OK if I could start my own business in the future. I just want to tell him that was my goal. And Rob said, yeah, absolutely. That’s totally fine.

And the only thing is he said, please don’t call my current customers. Just promise me you won’t call my current customers, and we’ll be fine. And so I said, sure, that’s what we’ll do. And so I saved up all the money that I made working at Faith Highway and Applebee’s and Target and DirecTV. I saved up all that money. And the summer before I got the internship working at Tax and Accounting Software, I saved up all that money too.

I saved up a lot of money working concrete. I worked construction. No exaggeration, guys. I was working at least every single day, 15 hours a day, every day. Seven days a week I had a job. And you know why?

Because nobody was going to help me. And no one’s going to come and help you. It’s not going to happen if you’re waiting for the reinforcements to come. It’s not going to happen. And I think that the acceptance of that, that no one is going to help, that is so powerful. Once you get to a place where you can accept that, Once you can get to a place where you can realize that nobody is going to come and pick you up and no one’s going to come and give you direction on a daily basis, once you realize that that mentor you’ve been looking for isn’t going to find you, but that you’re going to have to find them, that’s a great place to be.

And I want to quote Robert Greene, the bestselling author of the book Mastery here. He once said, no one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you. But no matter what job that you’re working at, I encourage you to learn something from that job. Working at Target, I learned the importance of organizing everything. That store would have been chaos if Tara, my boss, wasn’t fastidious about making sure that all of the products and services were aligned in the proper location, that the labels were facing out, that everything was clean and in the right place.

And I brought that skill into building DJ Connection when I was organizing the warehouse and the equipment. That’s how I did it. And I realized the resourcefulness needed when I was at Faith Highway, realizing that at Faith Highway, they didn’t have anybody calling them. No one was calling Faith Highway to buy those commercials. So we had to call them. I learned the power of making a call script from Faith Highway, a call script so good.

I remember thinking that, man, they have a script that’s so good at Impact Ministries and Faith Highway that they can have a heathen like me booking commercials, selling commercials to pastors. That right there is repeatability. Wow, that’s a system. Wow, that’s a process. I mean, here I am a night dog. 20 -year -old guy.

I know nothing. I know nothing about taxes. And I’m answering the phone and I’m answering accounting questions from certified public accountants while working at tax and accounting software. That’s some good systems right there. If you can get a 19 -year -old with no accounting background to answer the phone and then to be able to answer the questions of accountants, that’s an incredible system. Tim Redmond, who I work with today, Tim Redmond of Redmond Growth.

He and Tim Kluwer built this unbelievable system up there at Tax and Accounting Software. Do you know before they sold Tax and Accounting Software, they had 450 employees up there? Crazy! And how crazy was it that a 19 -year -old like me could hop into the business and run it? That was powerful for me. I remember writing that stuff down in my journal going, gosh, I’ve got to build systems that are so easy that an idiot could run them. I have to build these kind of systems that are so easy that an idiot could run them because at the time I was an idiot.

I didn’t even know, I wasn’t even aware of the Warren Buffett quote where he said, I try to invest in businesses so wonderful that an idiot can run them because sooner or later one will. And that is so true. Think about that again. He says, I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them because sooner or later one will. That right there is powerful, powerful. so important that we embrace that idea.

It took me a little bit longer than I would have hoped to learn these concepts, but while working at Faith Highway, I polished my sales skills. While working there at Faith Highway and Impact Ministries, every day I began honing my sales skills. I began to get to a place where I recognized that I needed to make a certain number of phone calls per day. I needed to get a certain number of rejections per day in order to get a certain number of yeses. So I realized if I made 100 outbound calls a day, I would get probably three people to call me back.

And of those three, I could probably book two. And I decided I wanted to recreate this atmosphere at DJ Connection. Because I love that atmosphere, the magic, the energy of a buzzing call center. Nothing’s more sad than a quiet sales room working in a small business where it’s so quiet and the phone never rings. It’s sad. So on the sales floor at Impact Ministries in the call center, at any given time, there were 20 plus reps selling, pleading, and encouraging pastors to buy these tools to reach the lost.

And it was here amidst the hysteria and the frantic pace of this highly competitive sales room that I realized what it meant to sell something versus just to take an order, like I had always done at my previous jobs. Here we were breaking the sales process down to five scientific and choreographed steps. We would step one, establish and build rapport. Step two, we would find the needs of the pastors. Step three, we would deliver benefits supported by facts. Think about that.

Wow. Step four, we would shamelessly name drop. And step five, we would call the pastors to action. In case I messed that up here, I’ll repeat. Step one, we would establish and build rapport. Step two, we would discover the pastor’s needs.

Step three, we would deliver the benefits and the solutions supported by facts. And step four, we would shamelessly name drop other churches that we were working with. And step five, we would do the call to action. It was at this job that I learned about the deal wheel, the process of taking a hard no and turning it into a yes by playing the wounded dog trick and acting as though I was emotionally scarred before sheepishly acting, asking what their main need was before I once again pounced right back on the bell and solutions. Then back on track to the next step.

The shameless name drop and finally the call to action. I learned how to drop the EOL, the estimation of loss, essentially letting the buyer know that if they did not act today, the commercials might not be available tomorrow. I learned about matching expectations to the actual product and the dangers of buyer’s remorse. Think about that. The dangers of buyer’s remorse. You don’t want to sell something to somebody unless they are thoroughly convinced and they have bought in.

So if you ever have somebody that’s on the verge and you’re kind of like, well, I could probably push them to buy something. I don’t do that. To this day, I don’t do that. To this day, when I deliver benefits, I support them by fax. To this day, I don’t do that. push people to buy things that they can’t afford to buy because one, I feel bad.

Two, you’re not getting any testimonials or references from people who are upset. Three, there’s this buyer’s remorse. It’s when somebody wants to buy, but they’re not thoroughly convinced that they should buy. They emotionally want to, but they haven’t resolved in their mind that what you’re saying is in fact supported by facts. They emotionally like you, but they don’t necessarily believe or buy into you. That’s a bad place to be.

You always want your ideal and likely buyers to buy as a result of you building rapport with them, finding their needs, delivering benefits supported by facts, and then calling them to take action. But then, oh yes, my friend, I learned about buying emotion. I learned that buying emotion is the number one reason people buy or don’t buy. I learned the importance of not ever ruining a relationship with a customer over a small dollar amount so as to not crap on your own campground, as my boss Shane would put it. In this office, I learned how to sell with benefits, supported by facts. I learned the importance of finding everyone’s hot button.

I learned the ancient art of the name drop and how to bring passion to the phone. I learned that most purchases are motivated by emotion. not price. And I learned in the absence of value, price is the only consideration. I learned how to become emotionally numb to rejection when making sales calls. My friend, I learned that failure is a prerequisite to success at this job.

And I learned to succeed. And I brought all of that into the founding of DJConnection . com. You ask yourself, where do the scripts come from? A customer called me the other day and said, I think they’re still using the same scripts that you built. Probably.

Somebody called me the other day and said, hey, I think your on hold music is the same and they haven’t changed it. I said, probably. The logo you built is still being used. Absolutely. They said, well, how come you don’t go back there anymore? The thing is, whenever you sell a company, it’s kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend.

I mean, maybe you had a great relationship with a girl, and maybe at one point you were in love with that girl, and you wanted to be with that girl. You could picture yourself being with that girl for the foreseeable future. But now you’ve broken up. Really, there’s nothing left, because now your girl is dating some other dude. And I suppose you could go hang out with your girlfriend and some other dude. Maybe they’re married now.

But that would get weird real fast, right? Right? Just the thought of it’s even weird. So, you know, even just checking on DJ Connection, they do things differently now. The guy I sold the company to, Jason Bailey, is a good man. And he does things differently from the way that I would do it.

He does things, many things probably better than I would have done it or differently than I would have done it. But I can’t go back because there’s too much pain. Do I regret selling the business? No. But, you know, lost a part of me there, lost a relationship when I sold that company. Am I glad I moved on to other things?

Yes. But why don’t I check on it? It’s because it’s really not mine anymore. It’s somebody else’s. I sold that car and broke up from that girl and now she’s dating somebody else. My friend, when I started working at Faith Highway, I thought you’d go to your job and make calls on the days where I felt good.

But at Faith Highway, I learned that in a largely commission -based job, if you don’t make calls in the days you’re feeling sick, or you have the sniffles, or you probably need some more day quill, then you really won’t do well. I also learned at Faith Highway about jackassery. When I worked at Impact Ministries, I learned about jackassery, too. I remember working on the sales floor next to a man who would pray all the time. He’d pray, he’d say, Lord Jesus, help me to close deals. Just help me to close deals.

And no exaggeration, guys, this is real talk. he’d make like 40 outbound calls a day. 40, four, zero. Then I met another guy who he confided in me. We were working out one day at this local gym and he says, I want you to know, I’m actually not a Christian either. And I think we can kind of get fired if we’re not Christians because it’s a Christian business, Christian ministry.

But here’s how I make all my money. What you got to do is you got to make 200 outbound calls a day. And when you’re on the phone, you have to understand that it’s an act, right? It’s showtime. It’s an act. It’s a game.

When you’re on the phone, that character, that personality needs to be a person who’s enthusiastic, who’s excited, who’s tenacious, who cares. It’s like the best of all virtues. When you’re on the phone, it’s a showtime thing. You can be happy, right? You can be funny, but you can’t be sad. You can be honest and funny, but you can’t be honest and sad.

You can have a highlight of the week, but you can’t have a low of one. My friend, you are just, it’s all about ups. You got to bring the motion up and the sales will go up. So meanwhile, my homie next to you is praying all the time. Watch his numbers because his numbers aren’t good. And I’m sure that God could help him, but for whatever reason, God’s choosing not to.

Meanwhile, I’m going to show you my Jedi sales techniques. And so day by day, week after week, he began showing me the importance of reading the freaking script. His Jedi move was following the script. Except instead of making the minimum required 100 calls a day, this guy was focused on making 200 calls a day. And he said, I’m going to call all my leads. I’m going to open my book, turn to the pages left to right.

We called it a book. It’s a book of sales leads. And he said, I’m going to call my leads from left to right. And when I finish, I’m going to call my leads from right to left. But I’m never going to be off the phone unless I’m going to the restroom. And I thought, Wow, that right there is a thought process.

That’s a move. And to this day, that’s what I do. I never take a lunch break. I haven’t taken a lunch break in a long time. I don’t do it. Why?

I don’t understand why I would want to come to work and then take a lunch break. I don’t get why I would want to be away from my family sitting there eating my meal. I’d rather just keep working, you know, maybe just slam a protein shake or something. But bottom line, I learned so many things at Impact Ministries and Faith Highway. And all of that DNA, all that culture, all those experiences went into the building of DJ Connection. And yet over time, I lost my zeal for selling those evangelism commercials because I wasn’t a Christian.

And I actually believed opposite of what I was selling. It’s called cognitive dissonance. It’s when your values don’t align to your actions. And so over time, I quickly discovered that I didn’t like working with pastors and their boards. And I’m a firm believer in GE’s former CEO Jack Welch’s philosophy that committees are not effective.

I found it very hard to deal with the reality that most of these churches of 120 or less people couldn’t make a decision in 60 days or less. I just didn’t understand about the idea that a man would pray about advertising. I mean, every company in America advertises if they’re going to be successful. And I’d have somebody praying about whether they should advertise or not. I just, I didn’t get it. And so looking back on it, it was just frustrating everybody around me to stick around.

And so I ultimately asked my boss, Jeremy Thorne, if I could move on to do something else. And that something else was full -time DJ connection. Why? because I decided in my mind that I was going to eventually quit and do DJ Connection full time as soon as I could book four weddings a week for four weeks in a row. So let me explain this to you. I would get usually, every time a lead came in from the yellow pages, I would pretty much book two out of three leads, maybe three out of four leads.

So if I had four leads a week that came in from the yellow page advertisement, I’d usually book two or three of those four. Then when I went out and DJed a wedding, typically two to three people at the wedding would come up and ask me, if they could get a card because they wanted me to DJ their wedding. And eventually it occurred to me that everyone I passed out a card to never actually followed up and called me. And so I started saying to people at the shows, they would come up to me and say, hey, can I get a card? And I’d say, yeah, are you guys getting married? And they’d say, yes.

And I’d say, well, if you give me your phone number, I can check my availability to see if I’m open. And then magically, I started booking all those shows. And so I started booking all those shows, started getting referrals, started doing the yellow page ads. And then on the weekends, I’d set up shop at these local bridal shops. There’s these local bridal stores where brides go in to find the perfect gown, the perfect dress.

And I would set up my equipment there and I would do a drawing for a chance to win a free DJ for your wedding. And brides would register and I’d call all the leads and give every bride a 15 % discount if they registered. One week I booked four weddings. I thought, three weeks from now, baby, I’m quitting this place. And then the next week, I can’t remember how many bookings I had, but I had like zero bookings or one or something. Well, then the next week I booked four, and then the next weekend I would book zero.

And this kept happening, four and zero, four and one, four and three, four and four. I booked four weddings one week, and then four weddings the next week, and then one the next week. And I kept having to reset, because I’d set myself this goal that I’m not going to quit until I can book four weddings every week for four weddings in a row. And that right there is a big teaching moment for somebody out there. That’s some of the things you can learn from this official DJ Connection history, as told by the founder myself, is that you have to know when your jumping point is. You have to know when are you going to take the jump and to get into self -employment.

And I recommend that that jump is not an emotional decision. I recommend that when you make that jump, you’re making that jump because you have the money to do it. Imagine it’s like a pool, right? And the pool can be filled with money. You’d rather jump into a pool with money so that you have some cushion. But if you’re just jumping off the diving board onto concrete, you’re going to die.

I mean, cash is the lifeblood of your business. Blood is the, it’s the life, you know, your blood gives you life, right? The water, sunshine provides life for plants. So, you know, if you starve a plant of light and water too long, it’s going to die. If you starve a person of their blood system, that would be gross and they would die. If you starve a business of cash, it dies.

That’s what bankruptcy is. That’s when you’re out of business. So I made that decision that I’m not going to stop until I had four weddings booked four weeks in a row. And so each week I kept having to sit by this guy named Ron. And in the Impact sales room, I had gotten to a place where I was annoyed with being there. I didn’t want to sell commercials.

They had required praise and worship. We had to go upstairs and sing praise and worship twice a week. And there’d be a guy up there singing, be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. And I was going, no, no, no. I didn’t believe in it.

There was a song. Our God is an awesome God. He reigns from heaven above. I just didn’t want to, I couldn’t, I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t want to be a part of it. I felt like I was a hypocrite because I was a hypocrite.

So I thought, well, at least if I’m stuck here until I can put four weddings, four weeks in a row, I’m going to at least try to soak up as much knowledge as possible. So I’m sitting next to this guy named Ron Hood. Now in the Impact Ministries sales room, this huge room filled with sales representatives, we’re all surrounding the perimeter of the room. And Ron Hood worked in the corner. And we all just called him Hood. And he worked at this momentum generating and procrastination killing pace that I now work at today all the time.

I never worked like that before. Yeah, I skipped lunches, but I never worked like that before. This guy would pound out numbers on the phone and he would do everything with a sense of urgency. He would leave voicemails with a passion. He would write with a passion. He would take notes with a passion.

He was pretty much set up. He would set the pace for the whole call center every single day. And because he was so good, he often intimidated people. And because he was 100 % focused on his job, people often thought that he was not a nice guy. But the reality was, the reality of the situation, was that he just came to work to do the work. And that was the only reason for being there for him.

He did not come to work to have in -depth conversations and political discussions with the employees and co -workers about the weather, the economy, the various collegiate sports teams or religious differences. And I learned that from Ron. I learned that the key to becoming poor is to talk about religion, politics, and divisive issues during your workday. If you want to slow down your workday and make your day ineffective, get into a debate with somebody about abortion. Or get into a debate with somebody about building a wall. Should we build a wall to protect us from Mexico?

Should we not? Get into a debate about one world currency. Talk to them about the weather. Tell them you like hot weather. See how they react. This is the kind of crap I see today still.

In companies I work with, companies I own, people come to work to debate divisive issues. And people come to work to do everything but to work. But Ron taught me to work. He taught me this verse, he said, and I wasn’t a Christian at the time, but I kind of liked the verse. I mean, do you have to be a Christian to like the verse? I mean, I don’t know.

Do you have to be a pagan to like pagan music? I don’t know. So, um, but he had this verse and that verse, I thought, man, that, that verse, that verse is good. And I remember writing it down and thinking, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta do that. That’s huge. It’s from Colossians 3 23 from the Bible, where it reads, whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.

Again, Colossians 3 .23 from the Bible, it says, “…whatever you do, work at it with all of your heart, as working for the Lord himself, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It It is the Lord Jesus Christ you’re serving. ” Wow, that was powerful for me. “…whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Jesus Christ you are serving. ” are serving.

That helped me so much. Ron was always focused on what he could control, and he created his own daily momentum. He was a sales institution in and of himself. He simply outworked everyone in the room at all times. He was on fire. To him, cold calling was just a numbers game, and he knew that the more people he called, the more deals he would make, plain and simple.

He did not care if that meant he’d be hung up on more often than not. He was a cold calling machine. He would work through the breaks. At least I don’t recall him ever taking a break. I mean, so nowadays I don’t ever take lunch breaks either, just like Ron, but instead I just work through them. I grind through them.

I picked up those habits from working with Ron Hood those last few months. He was hungry like the wolf for sales. And I think he was also literally hungry. I mean, maybe it’s just because he hadn’t eaten anything. Maybe there’s no correlation between this physical hunger and this figurative hunger for deals, but it works for me and I operate best even today when I am hungry. Ron thrived on competition.

He was fueled by a passionate fiery, it was this ardor and drive to succeed. He brought the alacrity, this cheerful readiness to the phone. This conviction behind the words, his conviction behind his words that he was saying was incredible. At impact, not many people knew too much about Hood because he never spoke with anyone other than pastors. Literally, this guy would roll into work right on time and he’d immediately fire up the phone. phone.

Yes, no, yes, no, dial, smile, call them all until they cry, buy, or die. Yes, no, yes, no, dial, and smile, call them all until they cry, buy, or die. He was not affected by the responses. He knew that we had an incredible product, and he just wanted to find out who the buyers were. If you weren’t a buyer, he wanted you off of his phone. If you were a buyer, he wanted to find out your hot button, something that you were passionate about.

so he could quickly find the right commercial package to communicate the church’s message to the community. Ron would bring the fire to every call. He would adapt this presentation over time to accommodate the unique dialects, personalities, and conversational styles of each customer. Just listening to him speak fired me up. Just thinking about the passion behind his cold calls and the way he left compelling voicemails makes me want to go make some cold calls right now. Because of Ron, I now love cold calls, and I sincerely do.

I remember when I first tried speaking to Ron, he always acted as though I did not know that I was standing in his area. It was like he was kind of confused as to, why are you interrupting me? And so I, you know, kept harassing him and kept asking him to meet. And finally he said, fine, I will meet you, but you will have to, you know, we’ll meet at Grady’s because I used to be a waiter there and you need to figure out what’s wrong with your stinking thinking. I remember him saying that to me. He’s like, I will take you to Grady’s, but you have to figure out what’s wrong with your stinking thinking.

And I was totally oblivious to the idea. of what that meant. So I thought, OK, I’m kind of insulted, but I suck at my job or I’m not as good as he is. I mean, I think he was doing like 10 times as much commission as I was making. So I agreed to go. And there he pointed out to me, he says, Clay, you have earrings on. Why are you wearing pirate earrings?

And I thought, I don’t know. Awesome. I wasn’t I wasn’t sure. I mean, I I guess I was into rap culture and I had those earrings. He said, well, now we’re talking. see those earrings, does that inspire credibility or does that, what does that do for you?

When people see your earrings, do they want to do business with you or not? My friend, you have to dress to impress. You have to dress to impress. My friend, if you’re gonna have success, you have to dress to impress. And you gotta wipe that scowl off your face. You gotta sound happy on the phone.

You gotta wipe that scowl off your face. And thus the phrase that I said at DJ Connection every day, dial and smile, was born. Dial and smile. Dialing and smiling. When you smile on the phone, it’s amazing how it impacts. He said, Clay, you have to work as unto the Lord with all of your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, man, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward.

It is the Lord Christ you are serving. And so, I said, well, what does that mean? He said, listen, don’t worry about your manager, man. They’re making a call quota for you having to make 100 outbound calls a day, a minimum of 100 calls a day. Why don’t you shoot for the maximum? Why don’t you try to set a record?

Why don’t you try to beat me there, buddy? Why don’t you try to beat me? And why don’t you make some goals? Why don’t you write down some specific goals that you want to go after? And I started thinking, well, I have a goal. I want to start my own DJ company.

” He said, yeah, but what about all the equipment you need, man? Don’t you need to write that down? And so here’s the list of what I wrote down. I wrote down, I need to buy a $35 a month phone service. That’s what I need to buy. It’s like an extra service where they would record your calls.

I needed to pay an extra $40 a month for my cell phone service. I needed an extra $100 a month for the car insurance I needed. I needed this extra DJ gear. And I made a list of all the equipment I needed. Then I began to have this new passion knowing that I wasn’t working For my boss! I was working as unto the Lord.

I was just working as unto the Lord. And so passionately, I began to change my mindset and I began to work as unto the Lord. And over time, I eventually booked four weddings, four weeks in a row, and I quit all my jobs. I took that money and I bought more cars. Advertisements, bigger yellow page ads. I bought a bigger yellow page ad.

This was before the internet, before the websites, before all the search engine optimization. I bought a bigger phone book ad. Then I hired a guy, I hired a guy to help me work at more bridal stores. So we have more people in the bridal store. So I was already in the bridal stores and it worked, but I had to have another guy do it too. So I would have more yellow page ads and more people working in the bridal stores.

And I had a two -legged marketing stool, two things working for me. And then I committed that I was going to work as hard for myself as I ever did while working at Faith Highway. I would personally make 200 outbound calls a day. And that was my three -legged marketing stool. That was my system, was that I was going to make 200 outbound calls a day. I’d be working all the bridal shows, all the bridal stores.

I couldn’t get into bridal shows at this time. It was bridal stores. And then I would do yellow page ads. And that was my three ways I got the marketing going on. And I wrote down a list of all the things I wanted to fix over time. I wanted to have a website that was respectable.

I wanted to have a logo that I liked. I wanted to have name tags for the guys. I wanted to have better quality speakers. And I wrote down that list of that equipment. And day by day, week by week, I worked at it. My wife worked at Office Depot and Oral Roberts University, and I was able to then focus on just one job, and that was DJ connection.

And I worked at that job. I DJ’d every wedding to the best of my ability. I always got there early. I always stayed late. I decided to over -deliver.

After each and every wedding, I didn’t have to, and it turns out it was illegal, but I did it, I would send the brides a CD with all of the songs that we had played at their wedding to them in an Outback gift certificate. And then I would write them a handwritten note thanking them for the opportunity to work with them. A couple weeks after the wedding, after they’d returned from their honeymoon, I would send it to them. I would call and follow up and I’d say, hey, you know, is this the amazing bride? Yeah, hey, how was the wedding? They’d say, great.

I’d say, well, hey, what could I have done to improve? They’d say, nothing, no, Clay, it was great. I’d say, no, but seriously, I’d like to know what could I do to make it better, you know? And I learned that at Faith Highway, because we’d run commercials for pastors and we’d ask them, what could we do to improve this experience? What could we do to improve these commercials here at Impact Ministries? And I started asking the brides, you know, what could I do to improve?

And they’d always say on the first pass, oh, it was great. But on the second pass, they’d say something like, well, I mean, you know, your presentation, the music was great, the announcements were great, but you talked a little too fast. So maybe you could slow it down. But other than that, we were really appreciative. And what can we do to help? And I said, well, if you could refer me to a friend, it would mean the world.

And I just kept doing that. And I grew the company. And in 2000, the year 2002, I was named as the Tulsa Metro Chamber of Commerce Young Entrepreneur of the Year for DJ Connection. And I just kept growing it and kept hiring people. And the crazy thing about the hiring process was I would hire people, people that I believed in, and I would train them up. And I always thought that it would be like this band where we’re together for years.

You know, like you two. one of the rare bands that has stayed together for a long time. I thought it’d be like U2. But I found that running my company wasn’t like running U2. It was more like running New Edition. the the R &B group.

It was like I had Bobby Brown on my group you know in my group and Bobby wanted to go solo and Ralph Tresvant wanted to go and do his own thing and then one by one over the the course of a decade I noticed that all my former DJs became my competitors and all of the people that I’d hired that I knew from college had bailed out on a wedding on me or always did what was best for them. They never would honor their commitments. They would say, yeah, I’ll DJ for that wedding on June 5th. But then, you know, the week of June 5th would come up and they would say, you know, I’m going to go on a trip. I’m going to go rafting or I’m going to go work at a church camp or whatever they had committed to me to do. They always bailed out.

And I was always stuck, left holding the bag. I was left holding the responsibility and thankfully holding all the money. I, over time, realized that over time, really nobody is going to stick around. And I started reading more and more books. I read books about Apple and books about the founding of Microsoft. And I started realizing when I read books about Rockefeller that these people too, very few of the people that they started their companies with were with them over time, stayed with them.

And I started to realize that a business ultimately has to exist to serve me because no matter how much time and energy I poured into them, they would ultimately start their own business to compete directly with me. Every time! Unbelievable! And they’d always have their own justifications. I’d have people tell me, well, God told me to start my own business. That’s always a fun one when someone says, God told me.

to start your own business, to compete directly with your current boss. That’s always fun. Um, there was always people that would say, well, hey, I just want you to know, I don’t, I don’t agree with your policies. Um, there was always someone that had a harsh, um, opinion or somebody who hated the, the structure, somebody who hated sticking within the playlists I made or sticking within the regulations or the systems we had created. There was always people that hated being on time. And so you’d have to create a system for what do you do?

How do you handle a DJ who’s late? So I created a system where you have to find people who are late. It’s called merit based pay. Sticks and carrots. I read about this in Jack Welch’s book, Straight from the Gut. I realized if the DJs do a great job, we should survey the bride after the wedding.

And if the bride, we should ask the bride on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy were you with the DJ’s performance? And if the DJ, you know, scores like a 9 or a 10, we should give the DJ a bonus. And if the DJ scores like a, I don’t know, anything less than a 7, we should pay the DJ as low as possible. And that merit -based pay system really was polarizing. It pushed out the terrible disc jockeys. And it attracted people that were focused on results.

And the company grew some more. And then that wave of people left and started their own company. And it just kept happening. And as each person who used to work for me started their own company, one by one, they all failed. Because they weren’t working as under the Lord. You see, those people only worked hard on the days where they felt like it.

Those people were, you know, they only sowed seeds on the days where they felt healthy. And so I found that it didn’t even bother me if people, it was almost a good thing for my DJs to leave and start their own company because every time they did it, their businesses would fail and it would furthermore prove the, it would further prove to the marketplace that my DJs company was the true market leader. My name’s Clay Clark and that is how I started DJ Connection. Chapter three, life after the jump. One definite chief aim, no office space, no budget, no problem.

Jason, think about the clients that you’re working with and the clients that you’ve coached. How often do you find yourself talking to somebody who is running out of money? running out of time, running out of some resource. How often do you find that to be the case? Very often. And so this particular chapter is meant to, one, tell you the DJ Connection story, share with you the story, but also meant to help you because as my wife and I decided to start the DJ business full -time, I shared with you in the previous chapter, I had to book, I made a commitment to myself, I’m not going to go full -time starting DJ Connection until I could book four weddings a week for four consecutive weeks.

So Jason, why do you think that Vanessa and I had talked about that, that I had committed that, even though I worked at Faith Highway, or it was called Impact Ministries, and even though she worked at Office Depot and Oral Roberts University, why do you think that we committed as a couple that I’m not gonna jump and quit my jobs, plural, to go full -time until I can book four weddings each week, four weeks in a row? To me, it sounds like you guys found, OK, well, if we’re going to go full time, you’re going to need X amount of jobs per week in order to sustain. And you guys weren’t there yet. So you decided you’re going to still work your butts off, save up, and then to the point where you had enough of your nest egg, let’s call it, to be able to transition without having the pain of, dear God, we’re running out of money. And this took about two years, this process. I’d like to ask you, how often have you found yourself talking to somebody?

I don’t want to give any other details, but talking to an entrepreneur. who it’s abundantly clear that they quit their job, and this is another full -time gig, but they don’t have any leads? Oh, at least a few. And so I just want to make sure that if you’re out there today and that’s you, I hope you learn from this. And so my wife and I started from a very tiny condo, a condominium at 67th and Lewis, which I once considered to be a luxury resort because it was because it was behind a gate. Jason, I didn’t know that it was behind a gate because that was not a safe part of town, but I thought it was a luxury resort because there was a gate.

I mean, why not? And I owned it. Yeah. And so I worked every holiday. I worked every Thanksgiving. I worked every Christmas Eve.

I worked every New Year’s Eve. I worked every Valentine’s. And I even had to fly home from Thanksgiving to put out DJ fires on an annual basis from Houston. I trained all my DJs from here. I bought all my equipment. I bought the equipment from Guitar Center, but then I would bring it upstairs.

And Jason, did you know we used to not have a Guitar Center in Tulsa? Um, I think it’s been around since as long as I can remember, but that does make sense. Yeah, dude. So I had to drive down to Dallas to buy my DJ gear. So I brought, I buy the DJ gear that I would bring the DJ gear upstairs, carry it all upstairs. And I would teach the DJs how to become a great DJ within our living room.

Wow. And do you know what neighbors typically thought about this exercise of training the DJs on a microphone, how to become a DJ, when I am in fact their neighbor in a condominium complex? I bet they loved it. No. And so I ended up having to rent a mini storage facility. I already had one that I was paying about $80 a month for, but I expanded it up to about $500, $600 a month.

So this big old warehouse where it was no heat, no air conditioning, and I say big warehouse, it might be as big as this room. And I kept all the DJ gear, and that’s where I taught all the DJs. But for the listeners out there who are officing right now in your house, Tony Hsieh was Zappos when he took over the company he was officing out of his house for a while there so you can make it happen but it was during this time living at the condominium that we bought the DJ trailer at that point in time we really needed a trailer and for some reason I got caught up with this romantic and fairytale idea of buying a trailer while we were visiting Vanessa’s parents on our family vacation to Kentucky This idea soon mutated into a crazy plan to buy the trailer from this Amish aluminum trailer builder that lived in Napanee, Indiana, which is located within a few hours of my wife’s parents. Looking back at it, I would never buy a new trailer unless it was in foreclosure or something again, but I did it at the time. So I spent way too much money on this beautiful trailer that quickly got dented and banged.

Then I overpaid for artists to paint one of the vehicles. And these guys took forever, and they could never really figure it out. I had them paint it so it could become a rolling, beautiful billboard. So let me start right there. Jason, why would you not want to buy a new car ever or a new trailer ever, like a brand new? Why would you never, ever, ever as an entrepreneur ever want to buy a new trailer and or a new van or a new vehicle of any kind?

Well, they’re super expensive for one. So how would you advise to do it? What do you think I did? You’re a smart man. I bet you went to either any and all car dealerships around you or anybody who sold automotive vehicles and you knew the exact model of the vehicle you wanted. And you also probably know that a lot of commercial businesses who have vehicles will sell them to anyone in the automotive industry so you can get it for much cheaper and it’s the exact same vehicle.

Nope. Nope. Didn’t do any of that. I was dumb. And so dumb means you just don’t have the education needed to win. So I went out there and paid brand new.

I paid I think I paid seven grand for this trailer. And I spent like a ton of money on this newer van. It was like as new as I could possibly afford thinking it would be great. Well I used that van I want to say for like I used the trailer for like one show yeah and then it got dented and I’m like oh man so I thought I’ll just pop the dent out of it because and then I got another show another dent pretty soon I’m going this thing’s gonna get dented all the time right then this is where it gets even crazier I paid those dudes to paint the billboard I drew out what I wanted it to look like. There it is. I drew it out what I wanted it to look like. Nice.

And I sketched it out. I paid somebody to do a 3D rendering of it. And do you know how the painter guy, by the way, who showed me examples of what he could do, because I was contemplating auto wrapping the trailer for like five grand or paying this dude to paint it. Auto -wrapping at the time was $5 ,000. I couldn’t afford that. The dude said he’d paint it for $1 ,000.

Do you know what he ended up doing with the paint job? What his overall strategy ended up being? No. Because he showed me pictures of his work where it was with brushes and stuff. Yeah. Guess what he did?

Did he do airbrush? He painted it with … Don’t say acrylic paint. Keep going. Yes. Oh nice.

He spray painted it so it looked like it was a moving ode to hip hop. It was a graffiti. People used to laugh all the time because it looked like it was like I was part of a gang or something. That’s that’s kind of awesome. It’s kind of a purple cow. Except for when you’re selling to mothers of brides.

That’s true. Forty four. They’re 50s in South Tulsa. So however after having already paid them for the majority of the money up front which I by the way you shouldn’t do Jason why should you not pay an artist up front to paint your vehicle. Well one you want to make sure that they’re going to get it done in time. so a deposit’s awesome, but if you give them all the money, then they’re just like, well, I’ll get it done whenever I want to.

So finally, these guys returned it to me two days after they’d promised what was supposed to be a white trailer with blue logo and blue text. became a ghetto -rific trailer with a puke green, the base color was puke green, dark -colored mobile piece of urban half -assed graffiti that screamed figuratively, do not book me because I am homeless and a drug -addicted DJ. This van and trailer combo was not commercially viable in any way. It was the worst possible marketing and PR that DJConnection . com could have. It was terrible, it was terrible.

I would pull into Panera Bread and people would look at me like, Dear God, where did he get that vehicle? It was horrible at best. It was nauseating, to say the least. That trailer looked artistically gross and commercially out of place. Man! And think about it.

I spent seven grand on this trailer to buy it new, and then I had it painted by this dude who looked like he threw up on my van. It was gross. And I really, really needed to get over that, but I didn’t. So you know what I decided to do with this guy who painted my vehicle? What’d you do? Call him all the time and harass him about coming back to paint it properly.

What did he say? He said, sure, I’ll call you back. Did he call you back? No, but I wouldn’t let it go. Right. Why didn’t I let it go?

Because it was important to you. It was also important to the business. You wanted to, one, you wanted what you paid for, but it’s also good to be tenacious. But why did that behavior, though, also lead to my poverty, do you think? Why did buying a brand new van and then obsessing about it staying, buying a brand new trailer and obsessing about it staying dent free and then paying someone to paint it, hand paint it, who I found out later had some drug issues and I could have picked up on that. But then after they screwed it up, why was it my bad to continue to follow up over and over to have them make it right?

Why do you think it was my bad? Well, you were spending time focusing on something other than the business. It was important to you, but at the same time, it’s not something that was going to be scalable, like there were other fires you’re going to put out while trying to deal with the whole van situation. Right. Oh, no, but Jason, it gets better. Oh.

Because they’d screwed up my trailer, I thought, okay, I’ll let you guys make it right with my beautiful 1998 Astro Van. Now, the year was like 2000, bro. This was a hot van, OK? Right. So I said, can you guys paint it? They said, absolutely.

I said, will you stick with the designs? They said, sure, man. Those last time, I think, I think last time, bro, bro, I think last time we were just a little bit off. We were making a miscommunication. But this time, bro, we’re going to make it right. Now, these are the guys who never had gone back and painted the trailer properly yet.

Yeah. I’m going, OK, I’ll give you a shot. I seriously, it was unbelievable. I paid these guys to paint the van. When I got this thing back, it looked crazy. Crazy awesome?

No, terrible. The van was even worse. It was even more like aggressive graffiti. It made you not want to book me. Oh no. Yeah, but it was all that I had.

And so there I was driving around with a vehicle that scared people away and a trailer that scared people away and a condo where I was DJing and training people to DJ upstairs against the rules of the HOA. And that’s how we started, but it’s from there that we broke the $100 ,000 sales mark. Nice. And it was during this incredible time of growth that I met every client at Panera Bread, formerly known as St. Louis Bread on 71st and Lewis. True. Why do you think I had my wife drop me off at Panera Bread every day in the morning?

And why do you think she picked me up every day at night? Did you guys only have one vehicle? Yes. And I didn’t have office space. That’s true. So I would meet people at Panera Bread.

Now, the rule was you had to buy somebody something or you were loitering. Now, the manager at the time, her name was Shelly. And Shelly was the manager of this beautiful restaurant. And Fareed Hussain was the Panera Bread employee that always went out of his way. to make me feel appreciated. He was great to me.

He’d always hop on the mic. He’d hop on the Panera mic when I’d walk in, he’d go, ladies and gentlemen, DJ Connection in the house. Every single time I’d walk in or, ladies and gentlemen, he’d say, ladies and gentlemen, DJ Clay is in the house. He would do that all the time. And so I’d walk in and customers are like, who’s this guy? I’d walk in there, had my shirt tucked in.

I had a nice dress shirt, blue shirt, had a tie. had khaki pants, and he’d say, Clavis, what’s going on, man? How’s the business? The whole Panera staff went out of their way to treat me with respect. And I seriously was there six out of seven nights per week for three years. Jason, three years.

Six out of seven nights for three years. Do you understand how long that is? That’s a very long time. Do you know how crazy that is when you go there every single day and it starts to become a thing where everybody who goes to Panera once a week will see you? That’s nuts. Everybody who goes to Panera every day for their coffee Every employee is like, this guy’s here more than us.

Most employees work there five days a week. You put in more hours than their manager. Right. And I seriously was there six out of seven nights per week, every week for three years. And I always bought something so that my relationship would be mutually beneficial. And I always had a good reason for meeting customers there, as opposed to meeting at my office.

Because customers would say, hey, where’s your office? And I’d say, could you meet me halfway? Where are you coming from? It didn’t matter, Jason, where they were coming from. They could be like, well, I live at 71st and Lewis, which is where my condo was. And I would go, let’s meet halfway at Panera Bread.

They’d say, I am living in Sepulpa. Let’s meet halfway at 71st and Lewis, Panera Bread. I live in Broken Arrow. Let’s go halfway. Let’s meet at 71st and Panera. And I had this move, they’d always ask, well, where’s your office?

And I’d say, well, they have a temporary, we’re officing out of a condo right now, temporary because we’re in the process of building our new office. It’s kind of under wraps. because it’s game changing. I used that line for three years. And it worked every time. It did work because I had to make it happen.

Now here’s the deal. Farid Hussain, I’m going to pass this note to you so you can read this real quick. Yeah. Farid Hussain was the manager at the time and I thought, I’m going to interview Farid Hussain and ask him about these years, these times. And so what you see in front of you is actually the typed out testimonial from Farid Hussain at the time about his recollections of me working at DJ Connection every single day for three consecutive years. Back to you, Jason.

All right, so Farid says, I was a dishwasher and would see the same guy come in every day around the same time and sit at the same spot. He always had the same suit on and he would get the same thing to eat every day. A cinnamon roll and chocolate milk. I mean, that sounds awesome. I started to become friends with Clay and would have his spot saved and his food ready. He would meet potential clients.

Now quick, quick time out. Yeah. He might have believed I had a cinnamon roll every day. I honestly, at that time, I didn’t. I did have a chocolate milk. Yeah.

But I did not have a cinnamon roll. I think I would buy them for clients sometimes. Oh, nice. So I think that was the thing. We can continue. Okay.

Okay. Um, let’s see here. He would meet potential clients who wanted to get married, and he offered his DJ service. He drove his old, white, spray -painted van. Ayo. There it is.

That’s true. DJ connection on the side of it. You could see him coming a mile away with a spray -painted van. Then you would see this nice -looking guy in a suit jump out. Oxymoron. Seriously, people would look at me dressed up in a suit, and they’re like, What are you driving?

It was the craziest thing. Every single time. It would be like watching a man come out of the anus of a horse. Like Ace Ventura and the Rhino. Right. That’s what it’s like.

It just didn’t make any sense. That’s awesome. Okay, continue. Clay did not care what anyone thought. He was on a mission to become a successful DJ. Panera Bread was the stomping ground for Clay.

Clark. Most of the staff liked Klay, except for my manager. She thought he was annoying and hated how I would have Klay’s whole setup ready for him when he came in at night. Everybody has a Darth hater. I have known Klay since 2002. I saw someone who believed he could do anything and never let anyone tell him differently.

Oh, see, that’s the deal. Now, here’s where it gets crazy. The real reason I didn’t want people to meet at my office was because I didn’t have one. So I was trying to save up the money to afford one, but I just went with the code of, you know, we’re building a new office. It’s going to be an incredible new office space. And finally, when it was time during this time to hire my first DJs, I started interviewing people at Panera Bread.

So I’m interviewing employees at Panera Bread. Josh Smith, Willie Kopp, Now check this out, DJ Willie Copp had heard of me as a result of an article written by Debbie Blossom for the Tulsa World. And Josh heard about me through his friend Chris Montag, who he, Josh was working at Golf USA and Willie was a, was an engineer. And he was like in his forties and I’m like 22. And I just remember interviewing this guy and him looking at me going, why am I being interviewed by a 22 year old? I was probably 21 at the time maybe.

And so more than, than any material, uh, material gain that I was getting at the time, I was really learning how to be confident. Because when you have no office, and you’ve got, you’re officing at Panera Bread, and you’re 21, 22 years old, man, it requires a lot of faith. And again, I go back to this djconnection . com was my magnificent obsession. It was where I learned to communicate effectively. I had to convince people that I was going somewhere and that they should join me. I became emboldened.

I was like, I could do this. If I could recruit someone to work for me while working at Panera Bread, I could do anything. I remember talking one time to a guy. and Willie says, here’s the deal. We’re at Panera Bread. This is after the whole interview.

Here’s the deal. I love your passion. We’re at Panera Bread, and I’ve met you twice, and I still haven’t been to an office. Do we have an office? And I said, we have a condominium. And he goes, when you say it’s under construction, does that mean you haven’t started and you don’t have the money?

And I’m like, yep. And he goes, I’m in. Nice. So I ended up getting this kind of crazy band of people. So DJ Willie worked part time. Josh worked part -time, and I was working beyond full -time.

Did you know how I made my brochures at the time? No. Using Photoshop. Do you know how Photoshop used to work back in the day? No idea. What you would do is you would bring an image in, just like today, and you’d render it.

You’d put an image, like a name, or a text, or a logo, or a picture, and it’s in layers, and you can manipulate it and move it around. Well, step one is I didn’t know how to use Photoshop. So that’s a problem, right. So how do you think I learned Photoshop? Because I dropped out of college at Oklahoma State University and Oral Roberts University after studying there and I had classes on Photoshop and I actually got B’s and A’s on my classes, but how do you think I actually learned Photoshop? Well, it’s one of two options.

Option one was you bought Photoshop for dummies, or option two is you just sat down with it and doinked around until you figured it out. So here’s what I did. I bought Photoshop, you’re correct, but then I hired a guy who was awesome at it to sit there with me. Even better. And just answer my questions real time. Okay, how do I do this?

Okay, I’m doing this. How do I do that? Okay, and Photoshop back in the day when you’d move in an audio file or move in a picture file it would go and It would just load forever it was it was a painful process, but that’s how I learned that’s how I learned and so it during this time This is what I really started reading books, and I’m gonna read to you all the books that I read during that time Yeah, that really were transformative for me. I read in the words of great business leaders by Julie M Finster I read, again, I read In the Words of Great Business Leaders by Julie M. Finster. I read Guerrilla Marketing by J. Conrad Livingston. I read Hip Hop in America by Nelson George, which explains how Russell Simmons started hip hop.

I read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I read Made in America, Sam Walton, Made in America, Sam Walton with John Huey. I read The No Spin Zone by Bill O ‘Reilly. I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I read The Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki. I read The Greatest Salesman in the World, a book about just being relentless on the phones, man. I read that book.

That was powerful. And you say, well, Clay, what’d you learn from these books? Well, when I read The No -Spend Zone from Bill O ‘Reilly, it was a political book, but I realized, man, politics, there’s a lot of spend there. There’s a lot of truthiness. There’s a lot of half -truths. And when employees call in and say they’re sick, There’s a lot of truthiness there.

There’s a lot of half -truth there. Usually they’re sick as a result of poor life choices. Right. But they are sick. Right. So reading that book, somehow this political book helped me.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I learned about the cash flow quadrant and basically how you become an employee, but before you can become self -employed, you’ve got to save a ton of money. That’s why my wife and I didn’t have air conditioning on. Think about that, dude. How hot does it get in Tulsa in July? It gets wicked hot.

Like 100 degrees. And then inside it also gets stuffy, so I’d say anywhere probably close. I remember when my AC unit went out, it was only about 90 degrees outside. It was like 96 in my apartment. How unbearable is that? It’s the worst, especially if you’ve got a dog.

So for my early clients that booked with me, I don’t want you to visualize this, but I would sit around in my boxers, and I had a fan on, and I was just dripping sweat all day, every day. I was literally working with just my boxers on. Rich Dad Poor Dad was powerful for me. Hip Hop America taught me that I had nothing to lose. When Russell Simmons started Def Jam, he had nothing.

He was a guy with a speech impediment trying to promote his brother’s rap group, Run DMC. He had nothing to lose. Do you know how hip hop, by the way, got played on the radio? Do you know how hip hop, there’s a song called These Are The Breaks, the first Def Jam song to hit the radio. Do you know how that song got on the radio? I have no idea.

This is true, man. Russell Simmons, in the book Hip Hop America Explains This, he had a bunch of people, he paid a bunch of people to call the radio stations and to request the song. And no DJs had heard the song. Now, once the DJs got enough calls from enough people over a consistent amount of time, what do you think they did? They probably started to consider playing the music. And then they played it one time, and they had even more people call and say, dude, you gotta play that song again.

And that’s how it happened. That’s how he created like an army of about 50 people that would call all the time and ask for the same songs to be played. It’s like at the beginning of that Wu -Tang song. Now you’re getting into my spiritual zone. So if you’re out there today and you are saying, listen, I don’t know what to do. I condensed all these books into a book that you can download for free right now called The Start Here Book.

If you go to thrivetimeshow . com, you can download The Start Here Book absolutely positively for free. You can download the book for free, and if you want to buy a physical copy, you can buy it on Amazon . com today. I read The Greatest Salesman in the World. I read The $100 ,000 Club.

Oh, I love that book. How to Make $100 ,000. This is a $100 ,000 club. How to Make a Six -Figure Income by D . A. Benton.

That book was huge! You know why that book was huge, Jason? I’ve never even heard of it. I probably should have. Well, it was huge because the book is about getting to work early, staying to work late, staying to work late, over -delivering, and living below your means.

I should read that book. It’s getting to work early, staying at work late, over -delivering, and living below your means. It’s just so powerful because typically when you make a little bit of extra money, Jason, what do most people do when they make a little extra money? Oh, they spend it, baby. Right. Then I read this book called The Creature from Jekyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin, and that book I don’t recommend anybody out there reads that book, but it explains to you that the Federal Reserve is not federal and there is no reserve.

It explains that the Federal Reserve is not federal and there is no reserve. And how did that help me? Well, it helped me because when I learned that banks actually don’t have any money, that was pretty cool. Because I was trying to get over the idea of growing my business. There’s this phrase that I recommend that you believe that you buy into as an entrepreneur. It’s fake it until you make it.

Oh yeah. Fake it until you make it. Let me read this Elon Musk quote to you again here. Elon Musk says, he says, Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But the brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

Well, dude, my brandy could not have been worse. The trailers were terrible. My first DJConnection . com trailers were terrible. My first van was terrible. So what kind of perception do you think people had of me?

Probably a low one. Right? So I thought, man, I’m an idiot. I’m trying to fake it until I make it driving the nastiest vehicle of all time. The one thing I had to get right, I wanted that thing to look like it was a sweet commercial thing, like part of a fleet. Yeah.

Like a Cox cable truck. And it looked terrible. And so it really killed my confidence, but when I read a book Jason think about this for a second when you deposit money at the bank, right? Do you ever deposit cash or do you deposit just checks? I?

Have or is it electronic? I do like all direct deposit but before Working previous jobs. I would always be paid a check and before I had like a big boy checking account set up I would just go and or before I had a direct deposit stuff. I would just go and deposit the check I want to blow your mind for a second. Yeah, think about this When you go to the bank today, however much money is in your bank account, they don’t have that money. It’s so scary.

Isn’t it? It’s just numbers. I look at it on my phone. I’m like, oh, that’s awesome. And I realize there’s an empty room somewhere. Right.

Right. And they put that little sign up that says insured by the FDIC. Back in the day, it was up to 100 ,000. Now, when the economy fell apart, the Great Recession, do you know how they fixed that problem? They did a stimulus. They did a bailout.

The Federal Reserve got involved. But they changed the sign to say now, insured up to $250 ,000. But it’s called the Federal Reserve and it is not federal. It’s not owned by the federal government. I’m not sure people are aware of this. It’s not federal and there is no reserve.

Think about that for a second. I also read The Laws of Success in 16 Lessons by Napoleon Hill. The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley. Now, why do you think the Millionaire Next Door book was powerful? Why do you think about it? That book shares that 88 % of America’s millionaires our first generation millionaires.

But in your mind, why do you think that was helpful for me? Honestly, I don’t know. But given the title… Come on, you know. Think deep. Think deep.

Why do you think that being poor as crap, reading a book that explains about the average millionaire in America, why was that powerful for me? Because you know. Oh, I mean, it gave you an understanding that you could do this. There we go. See, 88 % of Americans, millionaires, 88 % listening out there, listen, 88 % of Americans who are millionaires are first generation.

That’s a wicked awesome stat, because a lot of people think it’s harder. And most grew up poor. And most grew up poor. Yeah. So I was thinking like, well, if you don’t play in the NBA or print on a wrapper, you probably can’t do it. But that was so powerful for me.

And it taught me about living below my means. Then I read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which I talk about constantly on this show. I named my son Aubrey Napoleon Hill after Napoleon Hill, and that book changed my life. And through my super intense self -directed entrepreneurship course, yes, I failed many, many, many times, but I’m still standing, right? I’m still standing. But however, when I was going through this time where I’m reading all these things, I was reading all these books, and I felt like I was on this apprenticeship being taught all these skills by all these greats.

And according to Napoleon Hill, I was reading this quote from Napoleon Hill, and he said that 95 % of us will never find our life’s passion because we’re told at a young age to pursue the path of least resistance. This path is filled with the lure of guaranteed benefits and a struggle -free work environment. And if you take this path, you’ll end up where 95 % of people end up. When you were a kid, you dreamed about being a singer, a fireman, a baseball player, an army guy, whatever. I mean, Jason, what did you want to be, a ninja? I wanted to be a knight, first and foremost.

A knight! And then somehow that turned into meteorologist, and I have done none of those things. But think about it, though. You dreamed to be a knight. Right. Or a meteorologist.

You see, very few of us grew up dreaming about, well, what I want to have is a job with security and benefits. Absolutely not. I want to fight dragons. I want to joust. Let me tell you what happened. How old are you right now?

26. See, you’re in this interesting time right now where you’re learning a lot and it’s coming to you. Yeah. I call this the three phases, okay? Learn, earn, return. A very wide range.

man taught me this. He said, Clay, the first 25 to 30 years of your life, you just want to focus on learning. Earning really doesn’t matter that much. You just need to learn. Soak it all up. Age 30 through 60, man, you need to be buying a franchise, licensing a business, buying a business, you need to get into that, but you can’t really do that until you’re a master of management, until you’re a master of sales, until you learn those things.

Jason, what happens when you own, because you’re a very effective manager now, what happens, because if you own a business, and you’re out there listening right now, and you own a business, and you can’t manage like you can now, because you’ve learned that skill over the last couple years, what happens if you can’t manage personality types effectively? What’s going to happen? You’re going to have people that are volatile. You’re going to have people quit. Your brand is going to fail because you don’t know how to effectively manage people’s emotions, but also work ethic. It’ll just be a bad look.

How mind -blowing is it for you? the emotional outbursts that you’ve had to deal with on a daily basis since you’ve become a manager? Now, not so much. But in the beginning, I just thought, how is this every day? Right? Because most people are controlled by their amygdala, the almond -sized part of their brain that’s the emotional processing center.

And I never considered that. And when the amygdala is on, this is hard neuroscience. This is not my opinion. When the amygdala is being fired, they can’t think critically. So let me just give you an example. Yesterday, Jason, I got a text message from somebody who I haven’t seen in years.

And I block people that I don’t want to talk to anymore. Good move. But he sent it from a different phone number. And Jason, I got that text message at like 4 o ‘clock in the afternoon. And I was totally happy, dude. I was happy.

Yeah. I was taking the kids to Atwoods. And I was just, it was great. Actually, it was 530. I was going to Atwoods with my kids. Taking them to Atwoods to get chicken feed.

Atwoods is kind of an outdoorsy farm store. I go there to get that chicken feed. And I got that text message that came through from that person I haven’t seen in years. Right. And this person, by the way, who was terminated. let go, because they kept making bad life choices like showing up to work late, like sleeping with other people’s wives, like, you know, if you show up to work late because you’re sleeping with somebody’s wife, that’s weird.

But when the employee works for you, when the employee, when the person, think about how weird this is, Jason, when the person who works for me is sleeping with another employee who they’re not married to, that gets weird. True. Because the husband and wife both work for me. That’s weird. And when I get a text message from somebody saying, hey, how come you don’t ever call me and talk to me? I worked with you for years.

Could you please explain to me, Jason, why you might not want to stay in touch with anybody you fired? Well, just, I mean, if I fired them, then they obviously, I don’t need any communication with them, so it’s better to just cease all communication, both previous and future. What if you did stay in touch with anybody you’ve ever fired, or anybody who’s ever worked with you, period? Think about it right now. If you stayed in daily contact, or weekly contact with everyone you’ve ever managed, or everyone you’ve ever fired, how many people would that be? It would be a ton of people, and I would lose, and it all goes back to that quote that I always hear around you, is your net worth is your, sorry, your net, worth is your net work.

And so if you’re surrounding yourself by people who have either stabbed you in the back or horrible employees or just overall negative people, you are going to become that person. And that’s not what I want to do. Think about this out there. A lot of us are going to lose our dreams. No, you the listener, you’re not going to lose your dream. But a lot of people lose their dreams because they start to say, I just want a job with benefits.

Imagine what it would be like if we went to a first grade school, Jason, and then the teacher turns to a young kid named Larry and they say, Larry, what do you want to be when you grow up? And Larry says, Well, when I grow up, I want to make around the national average. I’d like to be able to make my car payment. I’d really like to be able to pay off my mortgage. before it dies, and I’d like to live in an average house. I’d like to have a job that I’m not passionate about, but it has benefits, and then I’m really excited about exchanging the majority of my waking hours, five -sevenths of my week, for a paycheck, because I just think that sounds like the job for me.

My friends, resistance builds strength. Resistance training with weights builds muscles. Resistance training in business builds tenacity, focus, and great business plans. You must decide today that you will not pursue the path of least resistance. You must pursue your passions. Thank you, Napoleon Hill, for teaching me this.

And from time to time, I would doubt occasionally, you know, for five minutes or 10 minutes. I doubted as long as maybe a half hour one day. But from the time I made the commitment to become self -employed, It has been a wild roller coaster road. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve earned a lot. Sure, I’ve had my share of upsets and near death and near financial death moments, enormous stress, frustration, but I’ve always felt that thrill of achievement from the very few, for the very first days. I remember going to bed thinking, I wish the days were longer because I have so much I want to do.

I’m excited about life and the unbelievable opportunities that our existence on earth and in this country of the United States presents with me. I mean, presents me. I remember each morning that I woke up, I put on my blue shirt. Anyone who knows me knows that I always was wearing blue shirts at the time, my tie, and some khaki pants in preparation to assume the dial and smile position. I would then spend the better part of my pre -work day frantically updating training manuals, typing confirmations from the previous night’s bookings, using the Microsoft Paint program as my database of choice. Jason, why do you think I had to use the Microsoft Paint program? Do you know what Microsoft Paint is? is?

I used to love Microsoft Paint. It’s like a drawing program. Yeah. Why do you think I had to use Microsoft Paint as my database system? Because you didn’t have a database system. Right!

And it’s not about resources, it’s about resourcefulness. Right. So I don’t want to hear, if you’re out there listening today, I don’t want to hear, well, what’s the best CRM that you’d recommend, you know, if you’re not making your cold calls. We gotta focus on making the cold calls. We gotta focus on the dialing and smiling. I don’t wanna hear that you can’t, that you need a database when you can’t do your Dream 100 every week.

Every week! The Dream 100. Jason, can you preach to me the good, preach to me, what is the good news of the, what is the Dream 100? The Dream 100 is basically your 100 dream clients that you would like to either work with or be referred by. So influencers for your company. So I’m gonna help myself and then your fiance self.

What places in Tulsa do most brides go to to have their wedding reception what kinds of places think about um? Let’s see they go to Give me one of them come on now like my name. Yeah, you gotta give me one. Yeah sure post oak lodges post oak lodge It’s a nice event center right it’s like a retreat. Yeah, that’s one place. Yeah, come on.

Give me another one We got the Mayo the Mayo Hotel yet. You are on you aren’t two mega points We give you one more mega point all right. Give me one more Five Oaks Lodge. Good. Make a point for me. Give me another one.

Another venue in Tulsa. No Googling. Living Arts. It’s an art gallery. That’s where Robert had his. It was awesome.

Okay. Make a point for you. One deduction for me. Okay. I would not have thought of that. So the point is, I made a list of the top 100 venues in Tulsa on a huge, huge cork board kind of thing.

Yeah. What’s the thing for papers and reports in college or high school? you’re presenting and you can fold it in three parts? Oh, a tri -fold board. Yeah, a tri -fold board. There we go.

Because you can fold it in three parts. Wow. So I bought that, and it said, The Road to a Million. And on it, I put the name of every venue in Tulsa. So you can imagine a big spreadsheet. I put all the venues across the left column, the name of the venue.

Column number one was all the venues. Now column two was drop -off number one, Jason. Column number two was drop -off number two. Column number three was drop -off number three. And you know what my rule was? What was your rule?

I would, just like when I worked at Impact Ministries, I would call on them all until they cry, buy, or die. And in this case, I meant actually showing up. So Jason, week number one, I show up at the venue, I knock on the door. Hi, how’s it going? Fine, what do you want? My name’s Clay Clark, and I am the founder of DJConnection .

com. We know. Well, I’m here to drop off some donuts for you on this glorious Monday. How are you? Great. Well, hey, I appreciate you guys so much.

If you ever need a bride that’s needing a DJ, we would really appreciate a referral. Yeah, you and every other DJ. Here’s the deal, though. If you refer me, listen to this, listen to this, event planner. That’s what I would say. Listen to this.

If you refer me to a bride, the first show you refer me to, I won’t even charge the bride. You’re going to be like the hero. I’m going to say we’re doing it for free on behalf of my good friend, over there. Linda used to manage Cedar Ridge. I said, Linda, on behalf of my good friend Linda, we’ll do your wedding for free. Think about that.

Linda, you’re talking to a bride today about booking their wedding, and you say, by the way, if you book with us, you get a free DJ. Come on, Linda. Use that card, baby. She says, get out of my office. So I would go back over and over and over to all of them, Jason, to all of them. Always dropping off donuts every week.

Step one, I annoyed them all. Oh, yes. Step two, they kind of started going disbelief. Kind of like, are you really still coming back? Week three, week four, they start to be curious.

Like, really? You always come here. What is your deal? What is your motive? Because people want to know, what’s your motive? People don’t want to know your motif.

Oh, your motif is what? What’s your motif? What does the word motif mean? It’s art related. I should know this. It’s okay.

It’s like a facade. It’s like a fake. It’s a veneer. But your motive is like, what’s at your core? How many people do you know? I mean, think about this.

How many people do we all know who’ve become like an insurance salesman for like a month or a real estate agent for two months or a fitness nut for a month or a week? I mean, so people want to know what’s your real motive because they have nothing to gain by referring me. So I was starting djconnection . com. I had to be tenacious. Yep.

And I kept going by every single day and I kept viewing it like the Ogmandino book, the richest Man, let me find the book title again. Is it not pronounced OG Mandino? It’s Og Mandino, but he could have been an OG. Right. Og Mandino, the greatest salesman in the world. Og Mandino.

He talks about in the book, you have to view the sales process as like you’re hitting an oak tree with an axe. And you’re an idiot if you get super emotional that you’ve hit an oak tree with an axe once and it doesn’t fall down. You’re an idiot if you hit it 10 times and it doesn’t fall down. You’re an idiot if you hit it 20 times and it doesn’t fall down. And you get emotional. If you’re getting emotional because the tree didn’t fall down, the problem is with the Dream 100 Jason is you can’t see it visually.

You don’t see the progress being made. And I just stayed consistent, stayed consistent, and then I landed the Holiday Inn Select. And the Holiday Inn Select used to refer me every single wedding. Nanette and Juanita referred me every single wedding. It was Nanette, Juanita, and Rochelle. Those three referred me every single wedding.

every week. And then I got Tarp Chapel to refer me. And then I got the Renaissance Hotel, and I got a lady by the name of Dawn, or Dawn Leet, to refer me. I got Fascianos, the bridal store, to refer me. That was a tough egg to crack because she wouldn’t refer me. And so I said, here’s the deal. I will DJ one party for you for free to show you.

humble and awesome I am. ” And she said, okay. So I DJ’d her husband’s 40th birthday party, and that’s when I started getting those referrals. But that’s how the Dream 100 works. You can’t stop until you get there. My friends, as I was saying, the resistance builds strength.

But each morning I’d wake up, and I’d put on that blue shirt, I’d get in that dial and smile position. I would cold call. I would type up my confirmations using Microsoft Paint. I know it sounds disturbing, but it was effective. That’s all I had. And then precisely at 10 a .

m. , I would hop on the phone. Now, in those days, it was a little odd because hopping on the phone meant calling people who had no reason to want to hear from me. I pretty much cold called as many people as I could every day to pay the bills, frantically searching for my next paycheck. I loved it and I hated it. The stress and the thrill combined to make a fabulous blend, like ordering a sugar -free drink at Starbucks, then adding a creamy topping to it, and chocolate syrup and chocolate chunks. By the way, that’s not a move.

No. I see a lot of people ordering a sugar -free beverage and then adding sugary things to it. I was excited about the business, but I was also scared, because if I didn’t sell anything, I would lose. And honestly, during this time, I would call everybody. My philosophy was, it’s just a numbers game. I had a great service, and I just needed to connect with the right person.

Every no I received was just getting me one step closer to my yes. If there was a bridal trade show opportunity, I was in it. If there was a company in the phone book, I called it. I actually called every single apartment complex in Tulsa because I knew that one of them was going to need some entertainment from me. next resident appreciation event. And sure enough, I landed a deal with the Wimbledon Apartments to DJ for $225.

And this came after I heard at least 50 no’s. And I put Napoleon Hill’s philosophy of over -delivery to the test every day. If you called me, you were in for an experience. If making the DJ connection viable meant making my voice hoarse in the process, I did it. I would bring so much alacrity and power to the phone that many people couldn’t resist booking me. Seriously, I was bringing the fire that was required like a T .

D. Jake sermon on every single call. Every day, I stayed focused on staying active and making 100 calls. Over the years, I have seen so many businesses fail because their owner was not willing to hit the phones. I’ve seen so many businesses fail because the owner was not willing to hit the phones, hit the pavement, hit the streets, and get the word out. My friends, the cruel reality is that as a young entrepreneur, No one is going to help you.

You have got to bring that kind of enthusiasm. So I brought this humor, this passion, and this determination to the phone. And we joked in the office, the first guy who hired me, he called it the passion of the clay. He was like, dude, it’s on fire. If I could just put that in a bottle, you’re amazing. Because I would bring it.

It was like watching the Kings of Comedy tour. I was in a zone. You like comedy. I love comedy. I was in a zone, I was in a flow, I was in my flow state, and then every time the phone would ring, the phone was called the money line. Now do you know what we would do when the money line rang?

What would you do? I would say, we would get the phone on the first ring or second ring, and I had one, the phones weren’t connected into a system by the way, I had one phone I would call from, and then I had the money line where the phones would ring to. So the number I would leave on the voicemail, back when people left voicemails, I’d leave a voicemail and say call me back at 918 -481 -2010 where the phone begins to ring. 918 -481 -2010, where the fun begins. And if that phone rang, baby, I don’t care if I was in the bathroom, which I was, if I was eating, which I sometimes was, if I had food in my mouth, I’d spit it out, I’d be like, fuck, go get the phone. And that’s if I had to book every single deal.

Now, Jason, if I missed somebody, if they called me and I missed the call, how many times do you think I would call that lead before the call? I gave up. You would call them until they answered. Why? Because you’re calling them until they cry, buy, or die. If you have a lead, you don’t want to let your lead go dead.

If you call and you’re just like, oh, they didn’t answer. How much would it help your clients if we could transmute that kind of enthusiasm and energy that I had at DJConnection . com to white hot, obsessively call the lead? If you could bring that kind of machine gun attitude to every one of your clients, how much would that help their businesses if they could be that passionate about calling their leads? 100 % it would help their businesses. By default, most people are kind of casual.

Right. I called them once. Or non -combative. Like, I called them once. They probably don’t want to see this number pop up. That doesn’t stop telemarketers.

I get 800 number scam -likely phone calls every day. They don’t stop. They’re going to call me until I answer. That right there is a knowledge bomb. My friend at this time, DJ Connection, offered three different packages, and I named them myself. The solid gold package.

The platinum package. There you go. And the double platinum package. Oh. Each package had a masculine name, although I was selling my products to women. I gave my products a masculine name because I was not smart enough to market my products to my customers who were nearly all women.

I was designing products that could be marketed to myself. If I could have, I probably, I mean, seriously, I thought about for a while naming my first package like the lightsaber, or like second package like the dude. I’d buy both. And so it just, it was ridiculous and it didn’t work. But that’s why my disc jockeys lose, is because they’re dressed like morons, they have tattoos on their necks that they’re showcasing, and they’re oddly casual, and the bride is considering trying to hire you for her wedding.

And if you have a tattoo on your neck and you’re successful, that’s great. But think about that, Jason. If someone’s first impression of you is you getting out of a van that’s spray painted, and you’ve got a tattoo on your neck, and you’re oddly casual, What is the bride thinking? Does this scream trustworthiness? No, unless you’re going to an all -tattooed wedding. There we go.

So I ended up parking my… I told my wife, just drop me off. Drop me off at Panera. Don’t park. And drop me off like a block away, because I don’t want people to see me get into that. Or drop me off early.

She dropped me off early so no one ever would see that vehicle, because when people saw that vehicle, it just screamed, run away from me. I mean, think about it. Think about that, my friends. If you’re out there today, and you’re trying to grow that business, there’s probably a fear you have. Right. And fear stands for false evidence appearing real. You probably have a fear of making cold calls.

Jason, why do you think somebody has a fear of making cold calls? They’re afraid they don’t have enough time in the day. They’re afraid they’re not going to know what to say. They’re afraid that they’re going to get rejected. So here’s what I came up with. And this is not a system that anyone should use.

But this is my system. So I decided that I would start getting on the phones at 10 a . m. 7 a . m. I’d get up, do all the paperwork, and 10 a .

m. I’d get on the phone. And I dreaded getting on that phone. Yeah. But I did it, but I had to have a game. I think the listeners need to know, I had a game.

And this was my game. And I had certain days of the week that were cold calling days. So my wife would drop me off at Panera six days a week. But there were certain hours of the day where I had blocked off just for cold calling. And here was my game. My wife would leave, and I would go down to the gas station.

Or I would go to the gas station previously, and I would load up my fridge with a ton of beer. And my move was this. I would cold call, and then every time I got a rejection, like a hard one, not like a, oh, we’re not interested, but I got like a, screw off, buddy, I’d slam a beer. Now, I haven’t eaten anything yet, okay? So it’s like 10 in the morning. So I’m starting off like, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, hey, who’s in charge of this year’s holiday party?

Oh, it’s Karen, okay, can I talk to Karen? Sure. Karen, hey, this is Clay Clark with DJ Connection, how are you, ma ‘am? Great, Clay, what do you want? Well, Karen, I was going to ask you, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy were you with last year’s DJ? Karen would go, well, 9.

I’m like, well, Karen, what can I do to take that event to the next level? Get off my phone. And I’m like, Karen, let me ask you this here. If I were willing to DJ this year’s party for free, would you be interested in at least talking to me for free or a dollar? I’d just love to meet you. I promise you we could do it.

I’m not interested. Get off my phone. And if I got that little extra like, get off my phone, or screw off, I’m like, screw off. pop myself a beer. Now, after about three beers every morning, three beers before I had lunch, three beers before I had breakfast, how was I feeling, Jason? Did I have a lot of fear, you think, probably?

Probably not. Why? Because you had already faced the rejection and you had a slight buzz going. And why at weddings do you see guys always grab a beer before a toast? They’re nervous. Right?

Yeah. And I don’t recommend that as a strategy, but I’m just saying that’s what I did. That’s what I did. That was my move. Don’t do that move. But here’s the reward I gave myself.

Because that was the penalty. The penalty was like a beer for a rejection. Right. But what was the reward you think I gave myself? Um, what? There was a show called The Buzz.

Yeah. On 1430 Sports Talk Radio. Okay. Have you ever listened to Sports Talk Radio ever, just like one time while driving? Um, no, but one of the podcasts I listen to, they reference Mike Francesca’s radio show all the time, so I’m familiar with it. Okay, well this is what happens.

There’s Sports Talk Radio. radio. Yeah. And Mark Waddell was a fine host. He did a great job. And he would have a call -in show.

So he would say, all right, we’re going through the sports last night. Lakers beat the Bulls 89 -87. The Celtics beat the Yachty Yachty, this much to this much. The Mavericks beat the Yachty Yachty, that kind of thing. Yeah. And there we go.

And now we’re going to get into a hot take, okay? OSU, Oklahoma State University. This just in, and then they would have some, it’d always be some controversial thing. They’ve recruited the best running back out of high school in the country. This kid, I’m telling you, this kid is a pedigree. This kid is gonna be the next coming.

He’s going to be the next Barry Sanders. When this kid gets on the field, it’s going to change the history of Oklahoma State University. I would say this, guys. When this kid retires, when he goes on to the NFL, they’ll probably change the stadium to name it after this kid. That’s how good this kid is. People would say something like that.

They’d say, well, go ahead. We’re taking calls. Call in. I want to get your take. So this is how it goes. We’re in Oklahoma, and there’s Oklahoma State University, and there’s Oklahoma University.

The people who go to Oklahoma State have a problem with people who like Oklahoma State. Why do the two fan groups dislike each other so much? It is a rivalry that’s just been instilled because of the sport. I don’t really get it. I don’t really get into it. It makes no sense.

So I thought what I’m going to do is I’m going to call in whenever I book a deal and say something crazy. So I would dial 460 -1430. I’d dial 460 -1430 to Buzz. What’s your take? And there’s a call screener. They would screen the call.

They’d say, what’s your take? And I’d say, well, I’ll tell you what, I got inside information about this new recruitment class. And I’m going to tell you what, when this news gets out, I’m telling you what, man, I’m just the first of the whistleblowers. The whole program is going to ignite. It’s going to blow up. It’s like, well, yeah, go ahead.

Where do you get your information? I don’t want to divulge my sources. So I’d get through. And now I’m on the radio, live radio, OK? And they’d say, well, go ahead and call her. What’s your take?

And I’d say, now, I’ll tell you what. I’ve been here at OSU Steelwater for a long time, run a business out there in this area. And I’ll tell you, there’s some dirt being dug up right now. And some of the people you’re talking about, some of them, it’s going to come out. And we’re talking about a major, Major scandal like the likes you’ve never seen man. You talk about unethical recruiting.

I’ll tell you what The whole whole school’s going down. It’s gonna be burning down. I’ll tell you what. You’re lucky You better talk about that OSU all you want because this is the last year that’s gonna be around though after the penalties the minute NCAA penalties It will be you talk about sanctions and penalties and I call her. Where’d you get your sources? You think I’m gonna divulge my sources my my life is at risk for even hopping on this show I mean, I luckily I’ve disguised my voice so that no one knows who I am.

Thank you. That is all And I would leave. That is awesome. And then people would start calling in, like, who the crap is that guy? You can’t just say that. And they would argue all day.

Seriously, they would argue. And these people would get crazy. Yeah. And then, like, you know, a week or two later, they’d be debating, like, you know, Drew Bledsoe. Yeah. And why the Patriots were so terrible at the time.

They didn’t have Bill Belichick yet. And why they were so terrible and how they would never win, how the Cowboys were awesome. And I would call in and boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, 4 -6 -0, 14 -30. Go ahead, caller. What’s your take? And I would say something like, I swear, I’m tired of you guys sitting there just ripping on patriots, and I got a hot take.

It is hot! Hot! Let me through! And they love when people call who are divisive because it leads to more listeners. So they love it. So they like the controversy.

And that was just a game for me. Go ahead, caller, what’s your take? I tell you this, the Dallas Cowboys, they have an unbelievably bad situation that’s about ready to be, it’s like a cinder blocks. gonna the scams and the scandals and I’ve just go off in this rant and then they would and I do this often I’d always had I different takes talking about how the Cowboys were scams and scandals and how the Patriots they have a new philosophy Like I had just totally crazy things that were no point true. I think the Patriots are embracing a new philosophy It’s called teamwork makes the dream work. It’s gonna be awesome the T stands for can’t tell you gotta go and they would like talk about it and it would just stir up the audience and it was it was a thing I did but if you’re out there and I’m sure Jason you’ve been coaching long enough to work with people that refuse to make cold calls yeah if you refuse to make cold calls what’s gonna happen?

You’re not going to get any leads. You’re going to wait for leads to come in as opposed to being proactive. And then you’re going to resent yourself or anybody else because you don’t have any growth in your business. So my hope is that this chapter won’t be more meaningless than most political debates. So I encourage you to write, write, write, write this down, write, write this down, write down. Are you afraid of calling people?

Are you afraid of rejection? And if so, why? Step two, I want you to write down what are the daily revenue producing activities that you need to be doing? What are the daily revenue producing activities that you need to be doing? Three, what is the regimented schedule that you need to be sticking to? Write down your daily regimented schedule.

What is that schedule? What does it look like? What is the schedule that you need to be adhering to? And I’m going to say this to you because I care. When you start off as a self -employed person, you’re going to be working alone. And so you’ve got to be okay with that until you have enough money to hire a team.

And when you’re finally making a decent amount of money, you have to take a major pay cut to be able to afford to hire somebody who won’t know what they’re doing. So now you have to work more than ever because you have to take extra time out of your schedule. Jason, just on a practical level, think about it. If you’re a very good plumber or an electrician, and you finally get the business to a place where you’re bringing in $100 ,000 a year of labor charges, and it’s just you, how much of that goes to you? Quite a bit. Now, what if you hire a guy?

What just happened to your $100 ,000 of labor charges? It became smaller because you’re paying labor on somebody else doing the job. And now you’ve got to teach that guy how to do the job while also doing the job. while also handling the accounting and the sales. And then you’ve got to go further backwards. You’ve got to take one step forward, start the business.

Step two, you step two of those backwards. You step, you take one step backwards. Think about this. You take one step forward to start the company, but then you take one giant step back to hire your first guy, another step back to hire your second guy, because someone has to help you with your accounting or your phone calls or whatever. Then you get to leapfrog up six steps, if you do a good job of training those people. But if not, you go backwards.

And that, my friend, is chapter two of the DJConnection . com story. Chapter three, Montag the Mentor, the Tulsa Bridal Association, and the Power of the Mastermind. Napoleon Hill, the bestselling author of Think and Grow Rich, once wrote, a quote, Jason, I want you to break down. He says, ally yourself with a group of as many people as you need for the creation of carrying out your plan or plans for the accumulation of money. What does that mean to you?

To me, it sounds like you want to be associated with enough people, not too many, but enough people that are going to help you establish your goal, work towards your goal, and finally achieve your goal. So I would ask you right now today listening, who is more successful than you? Make a list of somebody who knows more than you do and try to find a way to get in the room. Try to find a way to learn from that person because throughout you’re going to pick up these skills, these traits, it’s gonna happen. But don’t hang around idiots, because just being clear, you’ll pick up on those habits too.

And that was one of the dangers for me when I was growing DJ Connection, is I started hiring a lot of people, many of which were idiots. And if you’re not careful, you start to think like them. They have a poverty mindset. I remember when the economy fell apart, and so many of the guys were like, what are we gonna do? I just said, I’m not going to participate in recessions. Let’s just go make more calls, make more sales calls.

And we did just fine. But people panic. People are controlled by the news and the headlines. Well, I reached out to a lady by the name of Lori Montag. And I don’t remember when I actually first met Lori. And I don’t even remember the approximate season.

I just remember that when I was a young kid, I was probably first grade or second grade. And I got a chance to spend the night at my friend’s house, go to my friend’s house, Chris Montag and his mom. was Lori Montag. And I found out that they owned a photography studio at 71st and Mingo. At the time, she’d worked for a lady by the name of Francine, and she went on later to start her own business called Montag’s Photography at 71st and Mingo. And Lori had always been my mentor since that kind of, you know, first, second grade.

I mean, I remember just asking her questions. Third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade. Then I moved to Minnesota in sixth grade, and I came back to attend college. And when I came back, I had never really lost touch with Lori because I would fly back in the summers, when my parents moved from Oklahoma to Minnesota, I would fly back to Oklahoma every single summer using my own money to stay at the Montag’s house all summer. And I would stay there and I would pick her brain. And she had this photography studio called Montag Photography at 71st and Mingo, kind of by the mall.

And Lori had always been my mentor since that summer that I first moved to Minnesota. I would just tap into her knowledge every summer when I’d come back to Oklahoma. And I’d just listen to her. I’d talk with her, I’d pick her brain. I was always inspired by her because she always had her very detailed information about how to market to ladies, how to create a service that’s profitable, how to be memorable, how to be the best in town. So when I sat down to meet with Lori, I informed her of my new full -time status as the owner of DJ Connection.

And then I just started bombarding her with questions. Oh man, and I got the answers. Lori explained to me the ins and outs of the wedding industry. She explained to me that I was not marketing to men. She told me 98 % of the people booking their weddings are going to be women. For some reason that was like new information for me.

What? Really? I was trying to market to men, Jason. Weddings. Dumb. Seriously, I was marketing to men aggressively.

It didn’t work. Lori told me how to build rapport with clients before selling. She brought the knowledge to me, and I was listening. I honestly believe that this meeting with her was one of those turning points in my business career. Because before meeting with Lori, my packages sounded like the offerings of a wholesale precious metals dealer. I mean, it sounded like I was selling wholesale metal.

The solid gold, the platinum. The double platinum. The double platinum. After meeting with her, my DJ packages sounded more like they were made for brides to be. Our first package was called Simple Elegance. Our next package was called True Romance.

Our third package was called Cherished Love. Our fourth package was called Fairytale Moments. And our fifth package was called Cinderella’s Bomb. I have no idea why I remembered that, but I did. So I renamed all my packages. I also was only closing about 50 % of my inbound leads at this point, because people would call and ask for the price.

All the time, people say, how much do you guys charge? And I used to tell them, and then they would say, thank you, I’ll call you back. And Lori said, I don’t know what you got to do. is you got to script out your five rapport -building questions. So when they call you and say, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, thank you for calling DJ Connection, how can I help you? And the bride says, how much do you charge?

You’re going to say, well, that’s a great question. And we have a lot of different packages. Let me ask you, what date are you looking at? And she said, great. And she said, compliment them. So June, wow, that’s awesome.

And then she said, ask them how they first got engaged. So I’m like, well, how did you guys first get engaged? I’m always curious. How did you get engaged? Yeah. And the brides would talk about it.

And then she said, ask them what venue they chose. So I’d tell them the venue. And I’d say, what venue? And they’d say, the Renaissance Hotel. And Lori said, compliment. Whatever venue they have, compliment it.

Compliment it. And then she’d say, ask them how many guests they’re having. And no matter how many guests it is, say, wow, you’re kind of a big deal. So how many guests are you? So this is how the call went, Jason. We’ll roleplay, okay?

Here we go. You’d be like the one DJ dude. Let’s pretend that you are the groom -to -be and you’re actually calling me. Yeah. And this is how my script used to go, okay? So you’re going to call me and you’re going to ask me about how much I charge, and this is how my script used to be.

Here we go. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Thank you for calling DJ Connection. This is Clay. How can I help you? Hey, Clay.

I was shopping around and I just wanted to know how much does your DJ business charge for an event? Well, we start as low as $450. Okay. Well, thank you so much. That was our call every time. Seriously.

That’s terrible. Now, this is my new call. This is the new one. Okay, here we go. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Thank you for calling DJ Connection.

How can I make your day great? Well, you can start by telling me, how much do you guys charge for an event? Absolutely. My name is Clay Clark. What is your name, sir? My name is Jason.

Jason, okay. Well, let me ask you this. We have all different packages to accommodate a variety of needs. What date have you decided upon? August 31st. Wow!

How did you guys choose that date? Well, it’s an ideal time because that time, friends and family are all going to be either free or in the area. So it’s not gonna be like a huge travel expense for anybody now. You sound like a big deal I mean, how many people are gonna be attending this this this gathering? 60 to 80 at the most so you’re kind of a big deal. I mean people know you I mean, it’s Maybe so you got the venue What venue have you chosen what place?

So it’s this place called the Zeigen house. I’ve never been to the Zeigen house. What’s the Zeigen house? It’s like the I like this big mansion -like cabin. They got goats, lots of lands. Super pretty.

I’ve never had a goat. I’ve never had a goat either, but they’re fun. Have you ever thought about getting a goat? I have, but they’d be a nightmare indoors. Let me ask you this. How did you and your fiancee first meet?

She was my photographer for my senior pictures. Ooh, hitting on the photographer. I’ve heard that move before. Now, do you have a pen available, Jason? I do. Okay, well, I want to encourage you to just take brief notes here.

Basically, we have five different packages that we offer at DJ Connection, but every single package that we offer includes these five variables. Variable number one, we have unlimited time, which means that from the time that your reception starts, what time is your reception going to start? It’s looking like it’s going to start around seven, maybe eight. Do you need sound for your ceremony too, or just the reception? Just the reception. So if your reception starts at what time again now?

Let’s go with 7. That means I’m going to be there at 4 .30 to set up. We get there at 4 .30 and we stay until you leave. If grandma’s dancing until 3 in the morning, we are going to stay until you leave. Move number two, brides love this. We will get you any song that you want.

Now, by the way, back in the day you had to license music and it was very hard to get you to buy CDs. So this is a big thing for brides. But we’ll get you any song you want. Any music at all. What kind of music are you guys into? Oh man, all sorts.

Basically anything but, like, deep country. So anything but deep country. We’re gonna sit down with you and figure out what songs you like, what songs you don’t like, because no matter how much money you spend on the ceremony… the reception, people don’t stick around if the DJ’s not very good. So we’re going to help you on this. We’re going to work with you on this and we’re going to help you create this unbelievable atmosphere.

And we’ll get you any music you want except for Michael Bolton, just for ethical concerns. We’re just worried. Now I might say R. Kelly or something, but back in the day I said Michael Bolton just because everyone didn’t like Michael Bolton at the time. Now third, our DJ would serve as the MC and the host to lead the event, to let people know when the cutting of the cake is happening, when the first dance is happening, the grand exit, the grand intro, the toast, all that. We facilitate. It’s almost like having a quarterback at the wedding.

So let me ask you, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most enthusiastic and one being the least, how interactive of a DJ are you looking for on a scale of one to ten? Looking for nothing less than a nine. Nothing less than a nine. Oh, yeah. OK, so nothing less than a nine. And OK, so you want a lot of energy, a lot of energy.

Fourth thing we do is we have customized sound systems based upon the size of venue. Oh, and because you’re having 100 people or less. I would recommend a certain package for you. And then the fifth thing, we have lights. So like when the bride’s dancing, for the first dance, you and the bride are dancing, it’s kind of a slow romantic kind of a, you know, it’s just a beautiful white light there. And then during the party’s really getting going, the lights dance to the beat, you know, as opposed to like one of my uncles who looks like he’s kind of swatting at bees as the music’s going on.

We got the whole thing for you. Now, as far as packages go, I would recommend for you our first package or our second package. Our first package is called the Simple Elegance Package. Our second package is called the True Romance Package. Now our first package, the Simple Elegance Package, is designed for people with 100 guests or less. Great system.

Nothing changes other than it’s smaller speakers. So you’re not going to overwhelm people. The second package is just bigger speakers. That’s it. There’s no other difference there. I would recommend, probably the first or second,

And as far as pricing goes, our packages are normally $600 for the first package, and it’s normally $700 for the second. And you go up in increments of $100. But right now we have a special going today being March 30th. We have a special going actually right now, and it’s until next Saturday. So not until tomorrow, but the next Saturday. So, and if you book between now and then, you get $100 off.

Oh. And if you decide to book with us, we have, it’s a $150 deposit you have to pay. Okay. Towards the date. Yeah. But we don’t want you to decide anything until you’ve met us there.

So I’m going to go ahead and email you a ton of references. What email address, obviously you’ll give me a fake one right now, but what email address should I send the references to? Because I’ve got the cell phone numbers and the names of like 150 brides we just DJed for. What address should I send it to? If you’ll forward that to bigpimpin187 at gmail. So I send it to you.

Now Jason, most people want to meet with a fiance and the DJ. Looking at your schedule, what would be the best time for you two to meet with us at what we call the Shire of Inspire. It’s a 6 ,500 square foot facility at 89th and Lynn Lane where we have all the DJs where we work at. It’s pretty awesome. If you guys have Monday around 5? Can I put you on hold just for one second?

I’m going to check real quick. Yeah. And I also want to make sure we have your date available. Gotcha. We might be booked out. That’s what the person’s thinking, because I’ve already gone through all this, right?

Yeah. Then I come back. I let you know, hey, we have at least two availabilities open. Let me go and book that time. Bada bing, bada boom. I sent them an email confirmation of the time to meet, what we’re going to go over.

And that’s how I did it. Jason, 4 ,000 times a year. That’s pretty nuts. Our team would do this over and over and over. But I don’t think I ever, ever, ever would have unlocked how to book a book. without having sat down with her or some kind of mentor who knew what they were doing.

Right. Because I just beat my head against a wall quoting different prices. They’d say, how much do you charge? And the logical thing to do, the logical thing to say when someone says how much do you charge would be to do what? Just tell them the amount. And then when you do that, what happens?

They decide, I could probably find that cheaper. But it seems logical to quote the price. Right. But I would have just died on that hill forever. But Lori helped me. She helped me so much.

And she explained to me how to build a sales book. So when you’re meeting with the bride, that it looks sharp. She taught me how to decorate my facility. So I had pictures of Harry Connick Jr. and Sinatra, and photos from the big poster from when Harry met Sally, that kind of thing. And brides loved it. They’re like, oh, it’s so romantic.

And when you came in to meet with us about scheduling your wedding, the music playing overhead was designed to appeal to women. The smell of the room was designed to appeal to women. And I went from like a 50 % closing rate up to a 90%. It was awesome. Nice. I would encourage you that if you’re listening out there today and you’re stuck, ask yourself, who’s a mentor, who’s a coach that you can reach out to that can help you?

That would have never occurred to me if I hadn’t met Lori. What happened is, over time, I kept meeting with Lori, and meeting with Lori, and picking her brain, and Lori owns her own business, Jason. She owned her own company called Montag Photography. So why did Lori not want to meet me on a weekly basis, do you think? She was probably working. Right!

So here’s kind of my pro tip for you. Typically mentors don’t want to coach you. So you have to be willing to pay. And so Lori would give me these tips and notes and I was taking notes in my man book at a feverish pace, but I didn’t want to slow her down from her own business because she had her own business to run. But I offered to pay. I offered to pay her and anybody else who ever mentored me. I said, Hey, I’ll be willing to pay you.

pay a $500 for like an hour. And if you don’t value wisdom, you’re going to lose. I have found that the wisest people value wisdom and the dumbest people don’t true. I mean, if you have a business and it’s stuck and you’re, if you have a DJ entertainment company and it’s stuck and there’s a photographer in town, that’s killing it. Wouldn’t it be wise to pay somebody 500 bucks to pick their brain? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. Now, here’s the deal. Lori refused to take payment because she’s just a super nice lady, kind of almost like a mother figure to me at that time in my life. And she wrote this little narrative. I want you to read it, Jason, real quick here. This is what Lori said about the time I spent working with her and her picking her, allowing me to pick her brain at the time.

So it’s the text in the black italics. He’s working his way around the drum set. He’s going back to the mic. He’s putting back on the headphones. Can Jason do it? And we’re back.

I’m here. Okay. All right. So Lori says, one of the things I tried to teach Clay when he was starting out in the business is that every challenge creates an opportunity if you will only look for it. It was fun to watch him experience it firsthand. As a newcomer to the bridal industry, Clay wanted to very much be in what was then the biggest bridal show in Oklahoma.

He was told he could not participate because there were too many DJs already in the show and that it could be years before one dropped out. He was quite upset and I told him, let’s just think of a way around it. We decided to host our own wedding show and the Tulsa Bridal Association was basically created right there at that moment. We worked so hard because we knew we were up against a longstanding show. We selected the beautiful new Renaissance Hotel and immediately started promoting the show like we were experts. When it was all said and done, we had the largest attendance of any bridal show in Tulsa.

True. They even had to call out the fire department because the crowd was so tremendous. I remember when the show was over that night, we both looked at one another and said, well, we did it. I’ve since seen that same lesson played out for me. times in Clay’s business. I hope he always looks at every challenge that same way and always finds the hidden opportunity in it.

That’s Lori Montag. Now, Lori Montag, if you Google search her name, she went on to launch, and Jason, you can keep that paper, she went on to launch ZanyBands, she launched Slapwatch, she launched, that’s her. Oh, that’s Lori, okay. Yeah, that’s her. That’s awesome. So here’s what happened is, we I couldn’t buy a booth at the bridal show.

The current bridal show wouldn’t sell me a booth in the bridal show. Now if you’re not familiar with what a bridal show is, a bridal show is like a trade show for brides. Why would you want a booth at a bridal show first off? Well, if you’re a DJ company, because you’re getting right in front of your target audience and you’re meeting with potential people that you could use for your Dream 100. So there’s a commercial that would run in Tulsa. Plan your day in a day at the Tulsa wedding show.

I haven’t heard that in so long. Plan your day in a day at the Tulsa wedding show. Plan your day in a day at the Tulsa wedding show. In my mind, I heard it like this. Freakin’ plan your freakin’ day, and the freakin’ day at the Tulsa Wedding Show, sponsored by Satan. Plan your freakin’ day, and the freakin’ day at the Tulsa Wedding Show, sponsored by Satan.

Plan your freakin’ day, and I was so pissed, because I wanted to get in the show, and I couldn’t get in the show because the other DJs were blacklisting me. They said, you can’t let DJ connection in, because they’re unethical. They’re better than us. Why do you think that they said, why do you think all the other DJs told the lady who ran the show that I was unethical? She was a great lady, by the way. Turns out the founder of that show is a great lady.

But why did they say I was unethical? Why do you think? I would assume because… All of them, by the way. All the competitors teaming up. You were taking avenues that were, one, making you more successful, so you were a threat.

There we go. But two, you had systems in place that they couldn’t duplicate. Well, one, it was wrong. Right. I mean, these guys, on chapter one, I talked about this, but I applied for a job at all of these places. Yeah.

And all of them turned me down. One guy, I remember this clever guy, freaking idiot, this guy says to me, he goes, hey, you know what, buddy? We don’t just hire Spartans that are right off the boat. Should you go back up there to Minnesota and you tell that to the Spartans? What? What kind of 45 -year -old DJ, well, first off, Michigan, is home of the mascot, the Spartans.

Right, okay. Minnesota’s the Golden Gophers. But the point is.. . I thought he was trying to make some, like, Greco -Roman reference. No!

I don’t think Spartans left Sparta, really. Unbelievable! I mean, I had one guy who said, if you work as a roadie for two years… Yeah. …you’ll learn the systems. It’s like making sushi.

This guy had hair like Hulk Hogan. Ooh. Bleach blonde hair. Did he say brother a lot? Oh, yeah. Earrings all the way…

Everyone, he’s like, brother, if you shadow me for two years, I’ll teach you the systems. I only had one guy in town, as I talked about on Chapter One, Rob Biggins. who would allow me to work for him. And it was a deal where I had to rent my own gear. So I’m like, are you kidding me? So I talked it over with Lori, talked to her with Vanessa, called up the Renaissance Hotel.

I talked to my feet, my contact there, Don Leet and Talisa Samuels. I said, ladies, I want to rent the grand ballroom to have the biggest wedding show Tulsa’s ever seen on the same day of the other person’s show. She was the same day, same day. She goes, well, we can’t that day because it’s already booked out. And I said, well, what about Sunday? She goes, we could do it the day after.

I said, okay, I’m going to do it. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no and $600, but I’d take anything. So this was my pitch. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Hey, is this Jason?

Yes. Jason, man, I wanted to invite you to be in our new bridal show. It’s the first annual Tulsa Bridal Association Bridal Show, and we know that your floral company is awesome. I wanted to see if you wanted to be in it. What’s it cost to rent a booth? Are you already in the other wedding show, by the way?

The Tulsa Wedding Show? Because that’s a big show. It’s a great show. Yeah, no, I’m not. Well, let me tell you why we’re going to do this show. This show’s neat.

We found that very few people work on Sundays. Not everybody, but there’s less people that work on Sundays than Saturdays. Yeah. So more people can attend. It’s going to be at the newest hotel in Tulsa. Not the old convention center.

No, no. Not the old Doubletree. This is the new Renaissance Hotel. Gotcha. And guess who we’ve got in the booth? Guess who we’ve got in the show already?

Who’s that? We’ve got Lori Montag, Montag Photography, the largest photographer in Tulsa. The nicest hotel in Tulsa. And we just booked DJ Connection, the largest entertainment company in Tulsa. Sounds pretty impressive. Now by the way, when I was making these calls, I was saying that I owned DJ Connection.

So they’d go, okay, well how much is it? I said, well this is how we do it. Our show’s different. We just require a $250 deposit. I know the other show’s $750. It’s $250 deposit, and then on the day of the event, we charge you the other $250.

You wanna do debit card or credit card? And Jason, I made so many calls, dude. I got so much rejection, but I sold out that show. Nice. Here’s what’s cool. Guess who else booked booths at my show?

People from the other show. The other DJs. Oh. So those guys ended up paying for my marketing. Yes. That’s awesome.

And you know where I put their booths? At the back. Right. That’s awesome. In a horrible spot. You know where I put my booth?

Right up front. Prime Real Estate. I gave myself multiple booths. Ooh. Oh, yeah. Nice.

And I crushed it. And the whole day, they got to watch me kill it. And I went from booking 20 weddings a weekend to like 40 weddings a weekend. That is nuts. And then I got that database of all the brides who registered because I was the founder of the Tulsa Bridal Association. Right.

And you know what I did to that list? Called them all. I promised all the vendors I will give you a list on Tuesday morning. Yeah. And you know what I did? You gave them the list.

On Tuesday morning. Wow. You know what I did? What’d you do? I left every single bride on that list a voicemail by Monday at noon. Ooh.

And sent them all an email. Nice. So I got the first at bat, baby, and I hit a home run. Yeah. And that show ended up surpassing the other show in size for a while there. Later on, we ended up merging the show, but that’s how I did it.

Yeah. That’s what I did. And I started a wedding show because I was told no. So if you’re out there today, I would encourage you to not make this a wedding. chapter as meaningless as watching We Are The World, the video with Michael Jackson back in the day. Watching that all day and then going back to sleep.

You know, I encourage you to make this actionable. So I encourage you to ask yourself today, who’s the guru that you know that you must ask these questions to? Who’s the guru who has the answers that you seek? Who is that guru? Question number two is, when will you call this guru And what will you offer them in exchange for their time? Because you can make more money, but you can’t make more…

Time. Right. You can make more money, but you can’t make more… Time. And especially if you’re a rich person, that means you’ve sacrificed a lot of your… Time.

To make that money. So now you want to enjoy your… Time. Right. So you need to offer… What am I going to offer this person to meet with that person?

To meet with me? And then you’ve got to make a list of… You’ve got to make a list, my friend. of the 10 mentors you want to meet because if you call 10 you’re probably going to get a yes from one. I like to make a list of 100 mentors I want to meet. You know we’re going to have the

guy who founded Behance on the podcast soon. No. Yes. We’re going to have him on the show. Nice. This guy now is like very high up with Adobe.

Oh, yes. OK. Adobe. You know, we’re going to have Ross Golan on the show. I’m super pumped for that. One of the top songwriters of the past decade is going to be on the show.

You know, we’ve had Ritz Carlton, the founder of Ritz Carlton, Horst Schultz on the show. Right. You know why we’ve been able to have those big names? Why is that? Because I’ve been rejected by everybody. There you go.

I just got rejected by Bill Belichick again on Friday. Did you know about that? No, but it’s coming. He’s going to come. Every year I invite him and I got rejected. Just once a year?

But you know what happened on Friday? What happened? I can’t use her name yet because I don’t have a contract yet. The number one literary agent in the world said yes to take on my book. Yes. And now it’s in my schedule every Friday.

I shall be talking to her as we build the book. That is awesome. Her books are currently, if you go to Target, And there’s a book that’s been selling really well with an orange cover for the past three years. And there’s a book with a big yellow cover. Those books and other books like them, that’s her. And she’s agreed to represent my newest book.

And you know how I got that deal, Chase? Well, I bet you called her every day for about, what was it, five years? Yeah. Well, not every day, but I did call her for five years, yes. Right. And did you see the drone video I sent her?

Yeah, I was the tip of the A in her name. See? I’m hoping we can fly her to Tulsa so you guys can meet her. That would be awesome. But she’s the unicorn. Yeah.

And we got that deal through persistence. So if you’re out there today and you’re feeling like, God, gosh, there’s no mentor coming to help me. There’s nobody coming to help. I just felt like alone. You are alone. You signed up for this, man.

You decided to become self -employed. That means you work for yourself. So quit taking selfies and get out there and start that business. And if you need a mentor, reach out to someone who can help you. The only reason I started this coaching program was to provide somebody the ability to have access to a mentor who could actually help you execute. Because a lot of times you meet with these mentors.

I remember meeting with Lori and she said, Clay, you need to make a list of all the products and services that brides want that are related to DJing, and you can double the price. You can double your revenue per bride. And I’m like, what? She goes, yeah, I don’t know. I think brides want to rent up lights. Don’t they want to rent dance floors?

Don’t they want to rent margarita machines? Don’t they want to rent chocolate fountains? Why don’t you just ask them what they want, what they’re still looking for? Ask them, what’s still on your list? When you meet the bride, after they’ve signed the contract, you say, what are you still looking for? And then what they say, I’m looking for a photographer, a florist, a limo company, any of those.

She goes, you refer them to other businesses. And then call them and tell them, say, Mr. Limo Company, Mr. Galaxy Limo, I just referred you a bride. She’ll be calling you today. And she said, you know what? Unless he’s a bad person, he’ll refer you back. And then you refer the top florist.

And when you refer that florist, you call them up. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Hey, is this the incredible florist? Yeah. Hey, I just referred you a deal. And her name is Brittany.

His name is Tom. They’re calling you right now. Here’s her number. Well, Jason, when I started referring all these other vendors, what started happening? Well, I would assume that they grew their business. Yep.

And then they referred you right back. That’s right. Law of reciprocity. Yep. That’s how it works. And then when I sat down with brides and I said, hey, what else are you still looking for?

Do you still need a dance floor? Are you still looking for a margarita machine? A chocolate fountain? Uplights? What do you think they said? Well, absolutely.

We need all that. Who do we go to? Did I know how to get the financing needed to buy the stuff? Do you think that I knew how to do that? No. Was Lori going to sit there and hold my hand through the process to do that?

No. When Lori pointed out, Clay, your website looks like you made it yourself. And I said, I did make it myself. Do you think that Lori sat down and helped you? develop it all day? Nope.

Do you think when Lori said, hey, you need a better video for your website, do you think that she sat down and helped me do it? No. Right. Why? Why do you think she didn’t sit down and take all of her time to help me build my brand? Well, because she had other things to focus on, but she was also imbuing you with the knowledge of where to go.

That’s right. So if you’re out there today wanting to get up to the top of Success Mountain, find a tour guide who’s already been up to the top. and they’re willing to show you the path. But if you want somebody to guide you all the way up that path for days, that’s a service. Yeah. Have you ever been hiking, Jason, where you pay a guide to take you or maybe been on a river whitewater rafting or something?

I have gone on hikes but never with a guide. Have you ever done whitewater rafting? I have not. I’ve always wanted to. You and your lady friend would love this. But for whitewater rafting, you pay a guide.

Why do you pay a guide to take you down the rapids? And why does he not just do it for free? Well, it’s dangerous. It’s also a job. And you pay the guy because if not, you’re going to get turned over on one of those rapids and probably, you know, that’s what he’s doing. His service is helping you navigate the way with the rapids.

Right now, if you want to figure out where the rapids are, you can ask a townie. True. And they’ll point you. They’ll say that’s that over there. Those are the best rapids. That’s where you should go.

That’s the name of the company that can take you down there. That’s where you go. Which is cool, because back before Google, You didn’t know. So you’re driving around the wilderness trying to find the rapids. A townie, a local person from the town will show you where the rapids are, but they’re not going to guide you down there all day and serve you lunch. That’s a service.

So if you feel stuck today, find a mentor. Find a mentor. And if you have a team big enough to help you execute, then do it. And if not, you just go to Thrivetimeshow . com and schedule your free consultation. Because I believe, I know that you have the power to succeed.

Chapter four, building my dream team one inexperienced DJ at a time. Learning to go from me to we. Around this time, things were starting to get busy, maybe a little too busy. I was the salesman, the bookkeeper, the trainer, the maintenance guy, the marketing director, the song editor, the HR person, a husband and a business owner. Everything revolved around me. Napoleon Hill once wrote in his book, Think and Grow Rich, he wrote, one of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness upon the leader to do more than he requires of his followers.

You see, the Hall of Fame basketball player and successful entrepreneur Magic Johnson has said that to ever truly become a leader or to build a great organization, you have to go from me to we. I agreed with him on that. However, I was just now bringing in $100 ,000 of gross revenue for the first time. After this wedding show, I was starting to bring in $300 ,000 and $400 ,000 of revenue. I just didn’t know what to do. I had no idea how to hire people, how to inspire people.

I had no idea about the process. I didn’t know how to hire, inspire, train, and retain people. Jason, I did not have any checklists in place. So I’d like for you to explain, as we’re talking about the DJConnection . com story, I’d like for you to share about elephant in the room and the importance of checklists and written down processes as it relates to managing the stores. Because you manage all three stores, what would happen if we did not have checklists and processes for everything?

I would lose my mind, because one store alone, there’s a lot that goes into it. How many customers do you think we saw yesterday on a Friday? Yesterday on a Friday, even having a smaller workforce, we still saw about 75 clients. And we were packed out. Oh yeah, like booked back to back. Back to back.

Craziness. And so if you have checklists, what would happen? Well, you’d have a bunch of angry customers, you’d have a bunch of angry employees, you’d be pulling your hair out because there’d be 10 ,000 fires and no structure on what to handle first. So this is what was happening. I would find a guy, I would recruit a guy.

Typically I’d find my employees at restaurants. Yeah. By the way, I couldn’t afford ads for now hiring. So I would find all my people at the mall or restaurants. Why do you think I went to the mall or restaurants to find potential employees? Well, you wanted to find somebody who wanted a better opportunity.

And somebody who’s used to working those hours. True. Because people, if you work in a restaurant, you have to work nights and weekends. Yep. I didn’t want to debate with somebody about their, I want to work -life balance. I can’t stand talking to people that want to make a lot of money who say, what about work -life balance?

There’s work -life trade -offs. Right. There’s no work -life balance. You’re not balanced in all areas. No one can be balanced in every area. So here was my problem.

I didn’t understand the need for taking breaks, ever, other than to use the restroom. So during my time spent working construction, I learned not to stop to take breaks until the job was done. And being that the job was never done, I never took breaks. Today, I don’t take lunch breaks. I don’t take time off for personal reasons. Jason, have you noticed that I don’t take time off for personal reasons?

I’ve never even seen you get sick. Well, I guess you’ve probably seen the Dayquil days. Yeah, but I’m sorry, I’ve never seen you call out. Have you noticed I don’t call, I never take off for personal reasons? Right. Ever.

Do you think it’s possible that I’ve ever irritated my wife? Do you think that’s ever possible? I would say it’s probably possible. Every 60 days. Because I’m a deeply flawed person and my wife is great. And so sometimes she’ll have to point out to me that I need to improve in certain areas.

Yeah. And my friends, I mean, my best friend Mark DePetris, died. He was the first guy who was working with me. He’s my roommate in college. I was friends of his since I was like a little baby attending Christian Chapel. His name was Mark DePetris.

And when Mark died, I still had to DJ a wedding like the day after. Wow. So since that time, I’ve really viewed life as fleeting. I mean, we only have so much time, and I just, it’s hard for me to take time away. This is flawed thinking, but I thought, it’s hard to take time away from selling and from DJing to train these people.

Right. And what happens if you get stuck in that doom loop too long, Jason? Well, stuck in the doom loop of, sorry, rephrase the question. I found it hard. to take time away from my schedule. I find it hard to stop making sales calls myself or DJing myself and to take time to train people.

Okay, I got you. So if you get stuck there, then you’re going to have a team of either uninspired employees or let’s say something does happen and it is a catastrophic life event and you have to not be in the business, you’ve got nobody else who can do your job. You nailed it. I created a job and not a business. So I finally determined that I could hire someone else on a commission only basis. pay structure.

And then I would pay them $50 per booking when they booked the show and 33 % of the total package price when they DJ’d. Plus the guys could keep their tips. I approached one of our disc jockeys by the name of Josh with this opportunity and he liked the idea but he had questions. We set up a time to meet at his apartment located two miles away from my condominium at his condo. near the ORU campus. Josh was a basketball player at Oral Roberts University, and Kristen, his wife, was too.

However, they decided to take a year off to get married. And like many newlyweds, Josh was highly motivated to make some good money to support his new bride. Historically, I have almost always found that people who are working to support their families work at least 50 % harder than those who have no dependence upon them. There’s rare cases, but Jason, have you noticed that at all? Have you noticed that people that have to provide for their family tend to work with a little bit more grind. than the person who’s single and has no cares in the world?

Oh, absolutely. Just like a quick example, my mom was single mom, three boys, and her and her friend worked in the same department doing the exact same job, but my mom would put in like 80 hour weeks So twice as much as anybody there. And everyone’s like, well, you know, we’re all doing the same thing. Yeah, but I need to do it better because I’ve got stuff to provide for. So if you’re out there today, I’d encourage you as a little hiring tip. I would encourage you to hire people to have something to lose.

Yeah, I worry about the man or woman who has nothing to lose. When I arrived at their apartment, I knocked on the door and I was quickly greeted by Kristen, who was cooking some spaghetti and she was rocking some ORU basketball shorts. Josh came in a second later and invited me to sit down. I discussed with him and laid out the pay arrangements. My concept was that I would set up the appointments and Josh would meet the clients so I would have more time to set up more appointments. When the customer paid the deposit, he would be paid.

If the customer did not pay the deposit, he would not get paid. And for every show that he worked as a DJ, he would make 33 % of an average of a $525 event. After discussing the numbers for a while, eventually we agreed that Josh would get paid 10 % of the total sales price for each package. Thus, if he booked bigger packages, he might make more money. Josh came up with the idea and I felt it was right. So he shook hands and the business started booming almost immediately by at least 15 to 20 percent because Josh and I were both driven and motivated to succeed.

Josh was one of those odd people who actually believed that he could book every deal. And he was driven by this inner motivation to succeed at an employer, at a level that most employers can’t teach. He was a Division I basketball player. He played at ORU. And I mean, this guy was very competitive. And it was just great.

And so every day, I would rarely leave my condo, because I’d be out there making calls. I would just leave to work out. I would leave my condo to work out. And I was within walking distance of All -American Fitness. So I’d leave to work out. But other than that, I would just be there all day.

Now Josh was at Panera Bread. While I was dialing and smiling, Josh was at Panera Bread meeting all the brides as fast as I could book him. And Josh would fill up his schedule, I’d fill up Josh’s schedule, he’d book him. I’d fill up his schedule, he’d book him. I’d set the appointments, he’d book him, he’d bring back the deposits. I’d set the appointments, he’d book him, I’d bring back the deposits.

He’d bring back the deposits. It was awesome. And things were flowing very, very smoothly. Now in terms of hiring the disc jockeys, this was a different story because I wanted to build a great team of DJs. My search first took me to the local radio stations where I figured that the quality of the talent that I could find by hiring on -air personalities would be much greater than if I were to train people who knew nothing about DJing. So nearly every one of my first DJs was an FM disc jockey.

I met them, I interviewed them, I trained them. I thought that these guys, well if these guys were FM DJs, surely these guys would be God’s gift to my audience. And these guys actually believed that they were like an underpaid celebrity. And they would go out to the show and the bride would request for them to play their songs. What do you think that those DJs would do, those FM DJs, when a bride had a playlist that we clearly agreed upon. And we had a timeline that we clearly agreed upon.

What do you think that the DJ would do? The FM personality. I’m betting they went off book and played their own set. Right! These C -level celebrities who are making $19 ,000 a year talking on a microphone in an empty box called a studio. These guys, it was unbelievable, these guys thought that they knew better than the bride what songs would work.

And so, one by one, these DJs just jacked up weddings. It was bad. And thank the Lord there wasn’t Google reviews back then. But I was tired of looking at their oddities, their weird behaviors, their idiosyncrasies, their divinists. That strange voice. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome the bride.

Every time! Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome now to the first dance. We have the beautiful bride dancing with the groom. Well, I thank everybody for being here. I normally work at K -Hits. You might recognize me from K -Hits.

And everyone’s like, we don’t know who you are. All the time. They would name drop all the time. Ladies and gentlemen, up next we’re going to get the dance party started. You know, two years ago when Flo Rida was in town, I played this song and everyone was going crazy. Let’s see if we can reenact that today.

You know, just stop. So the bride and the groom are cutting the cake. But the DJ’s like talking over these moments going, ladies and gentlemen, up next, the bride and the groom are going to be cutting the cake. Put your hands in the air. Put your motherfucking hands in the air. And I’m going, oh my gosh, they’re actually saying, put your motherfucking hands in the air.

Seriously, this happened. It was like, no. Where the bride would put on the playlist, do not play the conga line. And the DJ’s like, well, I wonder what will happen if I do. I mean, it’s just that personality type. Those DJs were just a disaster.

So over time, I found that I was never going to find high -quality, experienced disc jockeys. So I remember reading this quote from John D. Rockefeller, where John D. Rockefeller said, I’d rather hire a man with enthusiasm than a man who knows everything. Again, I repeat, John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest man in the history of the world. Right now, Jeff Bezos is just now approaching the level of wealth that John D. Rockefeller had during his lifetime. It’s crazy. John D. Rockefeller said, I’d rather hire a man with enthusiasm than a man who knows everything.

Jason, why is that? Well, because the person who knows quote -unquote everything, you can’t teach them anything. But somebody who’s enthusiastic, you can still help them grow. So I needed to find people that were the kind of personalities you could find at Quick Trip. The kind of people you could find at Chick -fil -A. High -quality, hard -working people.

I needed to find people that had a great attitude and then train them the skill. And once I figured that out, it unlocked everything. Once I discovered that I was just after quality people, once I began to realize that I couldn’t change people, Jason, before this, I would try to hire people and train them. I’d try to hire people I knew who were going through life issues and trying to train them how to become better people. And you’ve been an elephant in the room long enough running that company. Why is it true that people change seldom?

It’s one of the hardest practices to try to change somebody, because one, I think we can get a general understanding of who people are, but at their core, you can’t change that because that’s something they’ve decided on. They have to decide for themselves, and a lot of people don’t. They can improve on it, but I think at the end of the day, people change seldom because they’re already set in who they think they are. Right. Well, at this moment, I started seeing potential DJs everywhere. I started sincerely becoming passionate that Anybody out there who was an inspired person I could hire them So I ran around looking just for honest hard -working people And and so I would learn I would I found out that once I once I found an honest hard -working person I would say I didn’t I didn’t ask him Jason.

Do you want to become a DJ? I said hey, would you like the ability to be able to make $700 a week? working only four days a week?” And the people said, yes. And I said, would you like to learn how to become a better public speaker and learn communication skills? And they’d say, yes.

And I’m like, well, show up for our first interview here at DJ Connection. I’d love to interview you. And it was awesome because over time, I started recruiting this army of enthusiastic people. When I was out to eat with Vanessa, I’d offer every great waiter a job. When I was making bank deposits, I’d offer the tellers a job. a job, which I probably should not have done.

That’s why the bank probably didn’t like me. At this point, I was telling nearly everyone that had a pulse about the job. I was excited about the opportunity, and I believe that many people were attracted to the business because of this exciting and enthusiasm that I had for it and for their lives. After a few months, new recruits just started pouring in. Everyone knew that I didn’t care if they knew anything about sound or music.

So my new recruits were not limited to those people who are obsessed with music. Basically, I was not just hiring Guitar Center staff. The new recruits knew that I was passionate about helping people to achieve their goals. And they knew that I was passionate about achieving my goals. And as I began recruiting more and more quality humans, I started to see some patterns emerging in those that turned into great DJs and those that turned out to be bad, needy, whiny, weak, frequently late, and otherwise useless DJs. You see, the new guys who turned out well, they were always on time and they had big goals.

If they were ever late, it was like they felt bad about it. But the good DJs always wanted to be on time, and they had goals. But the guys that turned out to be bad DJs, they were always chronically late. They would be late to the interview, late to the sales meeting, late to someone’s wedding, and they’re also the same kind of people that wouldn’t follow the playlist. Can you talk to me about that personality type? Because you’ve seen it.

There are certain people that want to get the checklist done and take joy in it, and certain people that don’t want to get the checklist done. and give you pushback. Talk to me about those two different personality types. Yes, you have the people who are super gung -ho about it. Like, just a case in point, we’ve got our hourly checklist. So we’ve got to clean the shampoo room.

There is about 18 items on there to make sure that it’s completely sanitized. You can do them all in a rhythmic fashion from the second you step in to the second you step out. Grab a broom, you’re done. But you’ll have the people that say, oh, hey, 2 o ‘clock we have to get this done. I’m going to go ahead and jump on it at 1 .30 because I know that we don’t have any customers in there. So we’re not going to get in their space and it’ll set us up that way come 2 o ‘clock when we have all these back to back appointments.

we have this done, everything’s clean, and we can focus on the business. And then you have the people that you say, hey, we’re super slammed, would you mind doing that checklist? Or you know it’s time to do the checklist, have those gotten done yet? No, I didn’t really feel like it. Or, I mean, I kind of did it, but I did it my own way. I didn’t sign off on it.

So here’s how I did it. Every week, I would try to recruit. Every time I was anywhere, I was trying to recruit. But I would recruit everybody to two trainings a week. And on my driveway there at 91st and Lynn Lane, I would set up the gear, and we would have six different DJ systems set up. I’d have six guys there usually.

I said, guys, what we’re going to do today, training number one, is we’re going to practice announcements. Because if you can’t make announcements, you can’t DJ. So I printed out the announcements that they were supposed to read, like the cutting of the cake, or the first dance, or the grand intro. And they would practice. Guy number one, go, boom. Guy number two, go, boom.

Guy number three, go, boom. Roger, go, pff. Derek, go, pff. Josh, go, pff. Joel, go, pff. Derek, go, pff.

Josh, go, pff. Roger, go, pff. Curtis, go, pff. And they would practice the announcements over and over until we couldn’t get them wrong. Then I’d say, now we’re going to focus on learning how to take down the system and set it up. Take it down and set it up.

So we’d practice that, and I would time it. Then I would say, now I’m going to unplug one part of your system, and you have to be able to troubleshoot to fix it. Then I would say, OK, your amp just went out. How do you switch out an amplifier? Your amp just went out. It blew up.

How do you trade out for the backup? And we’d practice these things, so it became automatic. It was almost like a military operation. Practicing, practicing, practicing, till the people could not get it wrong. And over time, I found, Jason, that whether you were black, white, Asian, rich, or poor, the people that had the goals and the self -control always turned out to be the best. But the people that had no self -discipline and who were chronically late always turned out to be disasters.

And the more that I’ve been around people, the more it has become abundantly clear to me that people change the world. And so a lot of the people that were C players that I coached up to be B players, the C players in terms of character, they would just show up late, they couldn’t stay clean, couldn’t stay sober, those people, when I trained those people up, you know what they always did, the C players, once I trained them how to become good at their job, you know what they always did, the low character people? Every time. What’d they do? Start their own DJ company. So they’d be at a wedding, and a bride would say, I love your company, you guys are great, how do I get a hold of you?

And they’d make their own business cards and pass them out. Now that they have the know -how. Right. And I think all of them except for one went out of business. Like dozens of them. Now I have a notable quotable from a DJ who worked with me during the time.

His name is Joey Odom, and I’m gonna have you read this off. Now Joey had never DJ’d in his life. He knew nothing about DJing. He was a college student. Very, very funny person. Still a very funny guy.

He reminded me of Vince Vaughn. Had that very quick wit. Honest guy. Hardworking guy. And I want you to read the notable quotable that he wrote for me about his experience working at DJConnection . com.

One time I asked DJ Clay what separates him from his competition and he gave me one of the greatest answers I have ever heard. He said, the reason they can’t keep up with me is that they require sleep and I don’t. DJ Klay’s work ethic always shines through. Time out. I say that still today. You do.

You can’t compete if you need sleep. Yep. Back to you. Because you get up at what time? Three. A great example is from the very first wedding that I worked by myself.

We had gone through the training and I was ready to go. As I was setting up all the equipment, I had a terrifying moment when I realized that somehow the previous DJ had not loaded the CD players with the rest of the equipment. So there I was, totally by myself, with an hour until the reception started without the ability to play music. I called Clay, who was all the way across town working at another wedding, one of 30 we had going on that night, and he calmly said that he would take care of it. No more than 30 minutes later, DJ Klay walked in with two CD players that he had just purchased from Walmart. These were quite substandard to the kind of equipment that he typically used, but he set them up and walked me through how to use them and how to adjust my approach that night.

After making sure I was ready to go, he went back to the wedding he was coordinating, Three hours later, I was finishing up a perfectly coordinated reception with a happy bride and a happy groom that was typical, resourceful, hardworking DJ Clay. So I left a wedding that I was at before the bride and groom got there, drove as fast as possible to Walmart, bought the CD players, installed them, plugged them in, and I carried in my van, a lot of guys didn’t know this, but I carried in my van backup CD players, backup cords, cables, whatever, so that way when I got called, I could usually put out the fires. I wasn’t smart enough yet to understand the idea of having a floater, but I was close. But here are some questions I would encourage you to ask yourself today if you’re stuck in this phase where you’re at me and you’re trying to grow to we. Are you prepared to go from me to we in your business? I mean, it’s now a good time to do it.

Are you prepared to do that? Two, what kind of character traits are you looking for? Because if you want those kind of character traits from your employees, you have to be those. So if you want your employees to be on time, you have to be on time. If you want your employees to care, you have to care. If you want your employees to bring passion, you have to bring passion.

My friend, you want to write down these character traits so that way it’s easy to look for them. Next is if you’re looking to recruit people and you’re not super wealthy yet, you really need to dress to impress. You need to dress to impress. You need to dress like you are in charge. And the next step here for you is you want to work to become the best business owner you could possibly be. because nothing’s worse than being an A player employee and working for a C plus boss.

We’ve all had that happen where you’re working for a boss. boss, a last minute boss, a always stressed out boss, a boss whose head’s gonna explode boss, a boss who clearly has not written anything down boss, a boss who’s frustrated boss, a boss who’s screaming all the time boss, a boss who, you know, I remember working at one job and I had a boss who kept dating some of the guys that worked there. And it’s just so weird when you have a boss and she’s dating the employees. It just, to be a boss, You have to pay the costs, okay? That’s what it means. You have to pay the costs to be the boss.

To hire people today, you have to inspire them. Management is mentorship. It’s more than just hiring somebody for a job. People don’t come to work for a paycheck. They come to work for mentorship. Management today is mentorship.

And management back in the day was mentorship. But beware, when you mentor people, you will get screwed. hope, and a half gallon of whoop -ass, tenacity, and love. Chapter five. My friend, what I found was, as I was growing DJ Connection, on a daily basis, I almost had to become MacGyver. And if you don’t know who MacGyver was, or MacGyver is, MacGyver was a 1980s TV era TV star, who, no matter what the problem was, or how difficult it was, he always seemed to be able to solve the problem by being resourceful.

The show was about this guy, he was fighting against the bad guys, But he always found a way to hotwire a car or to make an engine run. And it seemed like he could do it with like a battery and duct tape and a pair of coconuts. He could just always seem to figure out the plausible way to get out of every situation. And this is what running a small business is like until it’s big enough to where you can afford to hire people who have specialties. And so I was working out of a office at the time.

It was a 91st and Lynn Lane. If you Google it, it’s 8900 South Lynn Lane. That’s the that’s the office there. And in that garage, I had all the DJ systems. And I had to find a way to get the DJs to load in faster and more efficiently because I needed to get the DJs to load up every 15 minutes. Because we had so many shows we were booking.

My first DJ, we’d put in the schedule, he’s going to load out his gear Friday at noon. The next DJ at 12 .15. The next DJ at 12 .30. The next DJ at 12 .45. The next DJ at 1. The next DJ at 1 .15.

And I was running out of time slots because Saturday with 30 disc jockeys going out to weddings or 40 DJs going out, we just ran out of time during the day. We just did not have the time needed to load out the guys. And so I had to find a way to reorganize the garage to make it very efficient. Now I couldn’t afford to hire somebody to sit there and come out and draw a plan for me. I couldn’t afford to hire a contractor to build it out. And so I went out there and I literally built my shelves using twine and mini rope I bought from Walmart. So I bought this shelving system used from some guy I met on Craigslist.

And the system, if you could picture it, it was like shelves that went up. There’s three shelves on the first level. I put the equipment and it was off the ground in case there was ever flooding. It was off about four inches off the ground. And then the next level, it was where the DJ systems would go. And then the next level is where the lighting would go.

And I built these systems. It was almost like a locker room for DJs. And even though the shelves didn’t look good, they worked and they never fell down. And practically speaking, I mean, it was the best that I could do at the time because I couldn’t afford to hire a professional shelf builder. And I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck. I think we think, well, I can’t build my shelves because I can’t afford to hire a professional shelf builder.

I built them myself. I literally got these shelves from Craigslist. And then when I used all of those, I bought myself a skill saw. I had never used a skill saw. Bought a skill saw, bought an extension cord, bought one of those horses where you put your, what is it, like an A -frame where you put the, this just shows my lack of skills with handyman work. But I set up the saw horse and I began to saw the boards with two -by -fours and I made my own shelves.

I used nails, though. I didn’t realize that screws were needed. And so once I found that out, I went back and added screws. But I did it myself. I didn’t wait for help from somebody else. And then when it came to loading in the DJs faster, I realized I was running out of time.

I mean, we were meeting, I mean, when you DJ a wedding, you have to be there before the ceremony, typically. So if the ceremony started at noon, you gotta get there to set up at 10 a . m. And so I would load up my first disc jockey at, you know, five in the morning, and the next disc jockey at 5 .30, and the next one at six, and the next one at 6 .30, the next one at seven, and I was running out of time. I had to find a way to get the DJs to load up within 15 minutes or less. And so I made this thing called a checklist.

Unbelievable. I don’t know why it took me so long to make a checklist. Why did it take me so long to make a checklist? Unbelievable. But I made a checklist of all the gear that the DJs needed to bring. The amplifiers, the speakers, all the gear they needed.

The amplifiers, the speakers, the mic stands. I made these lists. And then when the DJs would load up, I would go through the list to make sure they had it. And I probably saved 10 minutes per load up by just making that checklist. Then I gave every disc jockey a numbered system.

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure that out. But if you were, let’s say, Josh, your DJ system was DJ system number two. No, I’m sorry, Rich DePetris was number two. I think Josh was number three, and I was number one. So I was number one, Josh was number three, Rich was number three. Rich was number two.

I was number one. Rich was number two. Josh was number three. And each DJ had their own numbered system. And then when they loaded back in their gear, I would go through the checklist to see if anything was broken or missing. And just by adding that checklist in there, I found that a lot of my DJs were stealing speakers.

They would say stuff like, I forgot my speaker at the venue. And I would tell them, okay, well, if you forgot it and you can’t go get it, I’ll just charge you half of what it would cost me to go buy a new one. And I noticed that some people weren’t actually bothered by this. They were like, okay, fine, fine. And I noticed that, well, why would somebody be okay with paying half of the price of a speaker that they’ll never touch touch again? Why would they do that?

Well, over time, I found out that a lot of the DJs would steal gear from me. So then I got to a place where if you don’t bring back the physical gear that is quote unquote, broke or lost, I’m just going to charge you 100 % the cost of of replacing that gear. And that really did cut down on a lot of theft. But I had to get a checklist first because I didn’t even know what I was missing. Then I had to organize the garage. After I built the garage and built the shelves, I realized it could be done more efficiently.

So I created one part of the garage where I’d put all the mic stands, and one part of the garage where all the speaker stands were, and one part of the garage for all the patch cables. And I developed a system for maximum efficiency. And I got it to a place where we could load out a DJ, within 15 minutes. And I got to a place, though, around the 25 -minute mark where I was stuck. And so I didn’t know how to improve the speed of loading out the DJs. And so I started asking people who knew what they were talking about.

And I had an uncle who worked for Southwest Airlines, and his name was John Toone. And I asked John, I said, John, you’re a pilot for Southwest. How does Southwest work? turn an airplane in 10 minutes. Think about that. Southwest Airlines at the time would actually, a 737 Boeing plane would land and then they would totally repair it or refuel it and clean it, offload all the baggage and unload all the new baggage within 10 minutes.

And John was saying, well, if you want to know how to do it, there’s a book called Nuts that was written about Southwest by Jackie Freiberg, and Kevin Freiberg, who we’ve now had on the show. We’ve now had Jackie Freiberg and Kevin Freiberg on the show. And he said, if you want to know how to improve your efficiency, read that book, Nuts, Southwest Airlines, Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. So I read that book, and it totally changed everything. It introduced me to merit -based pay, where you pay people based upon their performance, not based upon what they say they’re going to do. It taught me about checklists and systems and efficiencies.

And if you’re out there today, I would encourage you to check out that book. It’s called Nuts, Southwest Airlines, The Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. But as a teaching moment for you today, I would encourage you to ask yourself, in what part of your life or business are you stuck because you’re out of resources? You know, maybe all you have is twine, mini rope, hope, and a half gallon can of whoop -ass. If that’s all you have, you gotta get started, man. You’ve gotta get started because Nobody is going to come and help you.

You have to do it. I built those shelves by myself. Nobody was in that garage with me. And people may say, oh, I helped build it. They did not. There were people that came to work with me for a season for a job.

But no, no, I was the one at 3 a . m. getting up. I was the one building the systems. I was the one building the processes. And Josh Smith went on to start his own very successful company to team up with some guys to build a very successful supplement company.

And many of the guys have gone on to build successful ventures. But I think it’s important for you as a listener. I’m assuming that you’re an entrepreneur listening here. Don’t give up equity. Don’t give up equity to people on your team who have not proven themselves to be diligent. And if you do give up equity, if you do partner with people, if you do set up golden handcuffs, make sure you do it in a way where it’s easy and simple and clean to buy people out.

Because people, they change over time. The guy who is your best employee today will become your worst employee tomorrow. And it’s because people are constantly changing around you. The world around you is constantly changing. People tend to change based on the emotions of the day. You see, to quote Robert Greene, the best -selling author of Mastery, people around you constantly under the pull of their emotions change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending upon their mood.

You must never assume that what people say or do any particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires. I remember I was DJing one time at the Golf Club of Oklahoma. I’m setting up there, and as I normally did, I would DJ probably 20 events a year there. And Kitty Dishman, who was the manager of the event facility at the time, she pulls me aside and says, Clay, are you aware that this guy over here, one of your DJs, is working for me as a meat carver on the weekends? And I said, no.

She says, yeah, he works here every Friday carving meat for me. And I know he worked for you on Saturdays. And he was telling me that he started his own DJ company, and he’s been passing out cards. Are you aware of it? He said it’s cool. He said he has your blessing.

He said that you knew about it. You know about it. Is that cool? Do you know about this? And I didn’t know about that. I didn’t.

There’s a guy named Raj. I remember Raj. Raj started his own company. Oh, yes, he did. And there’s a guy named Andy who started his own company. And there’s all these people who started their own things, their own video companies, their own DJ companies, their own photography companies.

Oh yes, there was the Spencers, and there was the Raj, and there was the Jasons. There’s all these different people, all these different personality types that came and went. There was the Joshes, and there were different personalities. There was the Ezekiel’s, and there was another Josh, and then there was another Jason, and there were people that came in, and they treated me like they were my friends. There was a Katez, and there was a Bobby. Yes, there was.

There was a Bobby, and there was a Willie, and there was a Carl, and there were people that came in and said, I would never, I would never compete with you. And there was a Jay, a guy by the name of Jay. There were all different people that came in. And then there was a Dan, there were multiple Dans that came in and out, and they would go on and they would start with me for a while, they would learn the systems, they had never DJ’d in their life, they had worked at restaurants, or maybe they were failed insurance salesmen, or they had a degree with no prospects, no hopes of earning income, and they would maybe be working at a job at Chick -fil -A making $20 ,000 a year, and then they would learn the skills that I would teach them, and I would pay them, you know, $50 ,000 a year to DJ. They made a lot of tips. They never had to worry about their bookings.

They never had to worry about. anything. But rather than wanting to help me, no, no, no, they would not help me. They would work against me starting their own companies. There was the Keith’s. There were the Bobby’s.

There were the Spencer’s. They all started their own businesses to compete directly with me. And am I bitter about it now? Am I bitter about it? Clay, you kind of sound bitter about it. Am I bitter about it?

That’s a great question. and one that I’d like to break down if we can, if we have some time. I think we have some time, so here we go. My friend, I’m gonna read an excerpt to you from the best -selling author Robert Greene and his book Mastery, which by the way, if you don’t own Mastery by Robert Greene, you’re missing out. That book, you gotta buy that book. And an audio book doesn’t do it justice.

You gotta have the book, highlight the book, read the book, that book is a game changer. But Robert Greene says this, he says, in the course of your life, you will be continually, continually encountering fools. There are simply too many to avoid. There were the Keiths, the Spencers, all these different personality types. We had a good Andy and a bad Andy, a good Dan and a bad Dan. I’ve had a good Spencer and a bad Spencer.

I’ve actually had a good Nathan and a bad Nathan. For some reason, I’ve had only bad Bobbies. We’ve had a good Billy and a bad Billy. I’ve had all different personality types. But again, in the course of your life, you and I will be continually encountering fools. There are simply too many to avoid.

We can classify people as fools by the following rubric. When it comes to practical life, what should matter is getting long -term results and getting the work done in as efficient and creative manner as possible. That should be the supreme value that guides people’s actions. But fools carry with them a different scale of value. They place more importance on short -term matters, grabbing immediate money, a . k .

a. competing with their boss, getting attention from the public or media, and looking good on social media. They are ruled by their ego and their insecurities. They tend to enjoy drama and political intrigue for their own sake. I’ve had some good courtesies that have worked for me, but I’ve had two courtesies that went on to compete with me while saying that they didn’t know it was a conflict of interest. Really?

You didn’t know? No, no. See, a fool wants to grab that immediate money. To read on here, Robert Greene says, they are ruled by their ego, their insecurities. They tend to enjoy drama and political intrigue for their own sake. When they criticize, they always emphasize matters that are irrelevant to the overall picture or argument.

They are more interested in their career and position than in the truth. You can distinguish them by how little they get done. or by how hard they make it for others to get results. They lack a certain common sense, getting worked up about little things that are really not important while ignoring the real problems that will spell doom in the long term. As an example, we had one guy who was always late to our team meeting and to weddings. And when I would bring it up to him, he’d freak out every time saying, are you kidding me?

I worked for you for five years and you’re going to call me out in front of my staff, in front of your staff, in front of the team? Really? We had one employee, unbelievable guy, this guy was a great DJ, but he would DJ, he would literally drink alcohol while DJing, all the time. I said, listen, you can’t do it, okay man, you can’t. You’re lucky I haven’t fired you yet. If you do it again, you’re fired.

And again, are you kidding me? Well, the guy goes out there and starts his own company and it fails. Of course it fails. They always do, because they don’t know. They always start their own business. They always just download.

Back in the day before we had Dropbox, they had a server. They’d download all the files, so proud of themselves. They’d go out there and start their own DJ company, and they’d fail. Why? Well, because Proverbs 10 .4, a biblical principle, is true whether they want to believe it or not. Proverbs 10 .4 is true whether they want to believe it or not.

What’s Proverbs 10 .4 say? Proverbs 10 .4 says, lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. Again, lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. And a lot of people, they just struggle with that idea. They feel like because they have a great idea, they’re going to be successful. But that’s not how that works.

That’s just not how it works. Proverbs goes on to explain, Proverbs 19, 15 through 25. Go ahead and be lazy, sleep on, but you will go hungry. Keep God’s laws, and you will live longer. If you ignore them, you will die. When you give to the poor, it is like lending to the Lord, and the Lord will pay you back.

Discipline your children while they are young enough to learn. If you don’t, you are helping them destroy themselves. If someone has a hot temper, let him take the consequences. If you get him out of trouble once, you’ll have to do it again. If you listen to advice and are willing to learn, one day you will be wise. It’s just there’s so much to learn.

wisdom in Proverbs. Whether you are a Christian or not, there is so much wisdom in Proverbs. Now, Robert Greene instructs us. He says, this is how you deal with fools. He says, in dealing with fools, you must adopt the following philosophy. They are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture.

All of us have foolish sides, moments in which lose our heads and think more of our ego or our short -term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence, as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them. It is all part of the human comedy, and it is nothing to get upset about or to lose sleep over.

This attitude, suffer fools gladly, should be forged in your apprenticeship phase, during which you are almost certainly going to encounter this type. If they are causing you trouble, you must neutralize the harm they do by keeping a steady eye on your goals and what’s important and ignoring them if you can. And that’s what I did for a decade. Chapter six, moving quickly when purchasing real estate and other outstanding tips I’ve discovered firsthand. to making prolifically terrible investment decisions. You see, the home that Vanessa and I operated our business out of, AD900 South Lynn Lane, from the outside looked like a beautiful home.

And it was a beautiful home. It was a great home. However, when you go inside upon a further, deeper look, one would discover that… Our complete septic system was a disaster. When we bought the house, we bought it and we had an appraiser come through and look at it. We had an inspector look at it and a realtor look at it.

Well, the inspector said the house was perfect. It was pristine. He hadn’t seen a home in this great of condition in a while. Wow. Great. Wow.

The realtor said, Wow, great. Wow. We found out later, and we had to go to a legal process to prove it, that the person who inspected our house was actually related to the person who was selling the house. And the person selling the house, the realtor, was related to the actual person who owned the house. And so there was a lot of cover up going on and it was a bad deal. And so we bought that house.

There was a lot of issues. We had this thing called an aerobic system. And it basically emits water into the lawn and kind of helps recycle your bathroom waste and somehow turns it into a lawn. It’s into water used to water the lawn. It’s just gross. So we lived in the house probably, I don’t know, maybe a month.

And I noticed there was a crack behind this mirror. It was like a huge mirror. When we bought the house, the realtor gave us this huge mirror as a gift. We thought, wow, that’s so nice. And then one day I noticed this big crack that was coming up from behind the mirror. And I obviously couldn’t see behind the mirror, but I could see it going above the mirror.

So I moved the mirror a little bit and bam, behind this like eight foot mirror, there was a huge crack. And I noticed that some of the doors wouldn’t shut. I thought, why this door just won’t shut. I just can’t shut the door. So I had a guy come out there and he kind of shaved off part of the door to make it shut. And then another door wouldn’t shut.

And then one day I opened up the safe room. It’s like an underground little basement room. And that thing was completely flooded with water. All of our in times food supplies were ruined because they were floating in this room. And then it occurred to me that, holy crap, this house has a lot of issues. So I called the realtor and they said, no, no, it could not possibly be that this house has a lot of issues.

This house is in pristine condition. I called the inspector. He said, no, no, it couldn’t possibly happen. Well, long story short, I sent out somebody who’s called a forensic appraiser or they might have been called a forensic inspector. Either way, they did this forensic, this deep dive into what was going on. Well, they found that the house was built.

It was built by one person who lived in the house. The owner of the house built it. house. There were a ton of issues in the house. They covered them up. They simply put marble tile over a deeply cracked concrete slab.

They actually put brick on top of the brick to cover exterior brick damages. They put a mirror over a big crack. They took the money we paid them and they moved to Ireland. And so even when I won the court case, I still couldn’t get my money back. And so that house, that whole process was a disaster. And the reason why I made that decision to live there and to buy that house was because I was going 90 miles an hour.

I was moving, I was shaking, I was selling, I was bobbing, I was weaving, I was doing things, I was selling things. And I wanted to make a decision quickly. And what I have found over time as an entrepreneur is that it’s okay to move at a fast pace. But you never want to rush because when you rush, you end up making bad decisions. It’s like any decision that you make when you’re emotional almost entirely is a bad decision. When you make a decision because you’re emotional, it’s almost always a bad decision.

So John Wooden, the best basketball coach of his generation, the NCAA multiple champion winning coach, John Wooden, this guy was ridiculous. He was so successful as a basketball coach. It is ridiculous. He said, be quick, but don’t hurry. And I was hurrying. I was rushing.

I was I was forcing the issue. I bought the house and I should have taken more time to look at it. And I should have had the conspiracy theory that I now have today. Back then, I mean, I had blind trust. I trusted everybody. I believed everybody.

If somebody told me something, I believed the best in people. I wasn’t aware of how the world is. I thought the world was the way I wanted it to be. I thought everybody would treat people the way that they wanted to be treated. However, during this time, when I bought a house quickly, when I probably shouldn’t have, I definitely should not have bought that house until I had at least three inspectors look at it. And if you’re thinking about buying a house today, I would encourage you to have three inspectors look at the property because you don’t want to make a poor decision when buying real estate. But I want to give you kind of a look into my life at that time and into my mindset.

So I’m going to read a notable quotable that was sent to me by a guy by the name of Sean Reese. And Sean Reese was a DJ Connection DJ at around the time we moved into the Lynn Lane office. And he said, when I first started as a DJ, I went to a show with Clay to observe before I could run my own show. It was an apartment complex in Tulsa that was hosting a holiday party for its tenants. It was in December, and while we were giving them the show of a lifetime, the weather outside took a turn for the worse, and the rain turned to sleet and snow. Not only did we have to load the equipment into the van with the parking lot all slick and iced over, but we didn’t have a scraper for the DJ van’s windows, and the defrost wasn’t cutting it.

Clay, being the guy who never gives up, just rolled down the driver’s side window, hung his head out so he could see, and drove us all the way back to the DJ headquarters. It was the funniest, craziest thing I’d seen him do. And that’s saying a lot for this guy. I knew then that my time at DJ Connection would be one of memories and inspiration. Thanks, Clay. You see, my friend, that that right there is the resourcefulness that you need to have to start a successful company.

However, I really would encourage you to think about this for a second. You never whenever you’re buying real estate, you never want to buy something under a sensor. of pressure that it’s not true. You don’t want to make a false deadline. You don’t want to feel this pressure to buy now because if you do that, you’re going to avoid observing the following rules that I’m going to teach you. So rule number one for not getting screwed when buying real estate.

Don’t ever get an arm loan. An arm loan is an adjustable rate mortgage. I’ve never done that kind of thing, but I know a lot of people have because they want to buy the house right now. And when you get an adjustable rate mortgage, that rate can and will go up. And when it does go up, you’re going to find yourself in a very, very bad spot. Move number two to not absolutely getting killed when buying real estate.

Don’t ever trust realtors. Trust trustworthy people. Because I feel as though I’m pretty transparent with you. I tend to expect all people to operate the same way. And thus, I’m sometimes not always a good judge of character. Thus, I have been royally screwed multiple times by realtors who are chasing that three to six percent commission, telling me that the property is going to be great when it’s not.

And so now I just I don’t trust anybody. Only the paranoid survive, according to Andy Grove, the founder of Intel. And I agree with that. Only the paranoid survive. Move number three for not getting screwed when buying real estate. Don’t trust anyone unless you are positive that they have your best interests at heart.

There are so many people that are chasing down big deposits, big commissions, big greed and they will tell you whatever they need to tell you to get to your wallet to have access to your wallet and if you’ve worked super hard to earn that lazy people began to crave what you have oh yes lazy people begin to crave what you have. No, no, no, no, not not. This is this is very, very powerful for you to understand this. The lazy person will look upon what you have and almost lust after it. They want what you they’re being a sloth.

They want what you have. In fact, Proverbs 13, four reads, A sluggard’s appetite is never filled, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied. So here I am, I’m being diligent, I’m getting up every day early. As of the time I’m recording this, this would be 7 .45 in the morning on March 30th, I still wake up at three in the morning. I’m 38, I wake up at three in the morning. So the guy who wakes up at eight in the morning can’t possibly handle the fact that you’re more successful than he is because you wake up five hours earlier than him.

And so what he does is he craves what you have. He wants to take what you have. So what you have to do is you have to make sure that the person who is representing you, the real estate agent who’s helping you, truly has your best interests at heart. Move number four for not getting screwed when investing in real estate. When it comes to investing, simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful. What am I saying?

Buy a property when somebody is in a bind. If somebody is in a bind, and they’re wanting to get a divorce and they just want to sell the property right away because it brings up bad memories. That’s the property you want to buy. But you don’t want to buy a property at the peak value. Always look for an undervalued, distressed property. Drive around neighborhoods looking for a property with long grass.

Just don’t ever get yourself into a bad situation where you’re buying a property at the peak price. Move number five. Don’t get emotionally attached to any piece of property. My friend, realtors are salespeople. And once they sense that you are emotionally attached to a property, they start saying things like, wow, wow, I wouldn’t offer any less than 300 ,000 because anything less than that would be insulting to the buyer. You know, I would just take that deal if I were you.

What the heck does that mean? And who cares if your offer insults the buyer? I personally think that I sleep just fine knowing that I offered a fair amount and it might’ve insulted a buyer. Offer a price that makes sense. Don’t offer an amount so you don’t insult the buyer. I think so many people think about that.

They think about, oh, my realtor said, my realtor suggested that I should just offer asking price. You understand that they make a commission based upon the total, the total price that is paid. I know realtors. I’ve met realtors that will hop on the phone with the other realtor and say, hey, you know, is your buyer willing to pay full price, you think? And they go, yeah. I think they are.

They say, well, here’s the deal. Let’s just both advise our people to stay firm at the full price, asking price, and we’ll team up together. Let’s just make sure we sell this thing for as much as possible. I’ve seen this happen. I know realtors. I’ve talked to realtors who do this, who brag about doing this.

My friend, don’t trust realtors unless you know they have your best interests at heart. Move number six, don’t ever get a mortgage for any term longer than 15 years, if possible. Why? Because you’re going to pay so much more in interest. It’s crazy. And you’re going to be paying on that house for 30 years.

You know, a 15 year mortgage might only cost you like, you know, a couple hundred dollars extra a month for most people, a couple hundred dollars extra a month. And your house is paid off in 15 years versus 30 years. I would encourage everybody out there. Do not get a 30 year mortgage if possible. Now to give you a even deeper look, an inside look into what it was like to be on the DJ team at the time. I asked one of our DJs by the name of Curtis Graham to share his experiences of working with me while at DJ Connection.

And this is what Curtis said. He said, I first heard about DJ Connection during my last year of college at Oklahoma State University. Josh Smith, a buddy of mine and a DJ Connection DJ, was asked to help us throw a party for my fiance. and he obliged. He came up early and walked me through the ropes, the equipment, and how the whole operation worked at DJ Connection. Once I got back to Tulsa, I was chomping at the bit looking for the first opportunity to make a decent living and to make a start for my fiance and me. I hit up a few dead -end jobs along the way until I ran into Josh while out one night.

We hung out that night and he told me that I should come by and talk to the owner of DJ Connection, Clay Clark. Josh said that they had just moved locations to a new house in Broken Arrow, my old stomping grounds. I took off early that day and went to talk to the man himself, or should I say the young man himself. I got to the interview only to find this David Letterman looking, overzealous, Red Bull driven dude my age, running a great company with about three offices and 11 DJs. Fast forward one year. It is the middle of the wedding season, and we have a wedding show the next afternoon, 34 shows that night, 12 shows Saturday, seven on Sunday, a chocolate fountain company to run, five yards to mow, and two weddings to videotape.

And that was just the start of it. Our lives were mayhem because Clay had harnessed every opportunity to expose us as a company and grasp every investment opportunity that knocked on the door. At the time, my fiance and I were skeptical, and that was until I asked her to marry me. At the time, I was rolling in a check averaging $1 ,200 a week, and they were looking pretty good. Clay Clark had established quite a rapport with all of the employees, including my wife and me.

The long and short of the experience is that still today, I think of Clay and the whole DJC office. I hear all the time from my wife that I am a different person as a result of working with Clay. If you ask her why, she will tell you that my drive, determination, ambition, communication, and ability to succeed and conquer any situation is out of this world. and you will never encounter a person who has graduated from Clay’s DJC University who does not blow your mind with enthusiasm and love for their career. I have since moved on to a career in fire protection design and installation, which is what I initially set out to do. I can say now with much conviction that I would never have had the courage to take on the world or to be so well set up financially had I had never taken the risk on the DJ business with Clay and his wife, Vanessa.

Thanks, Clay Clark, for changing my outlook on business, work, and life in general. I will never stop until I succeed. Thank you for the experience. ” My friends, that’s why I built the DJ Connection. I wanted to build a company that would allow me to achieve my goals while also helping other people to achieve their goals. That was my goal.

My goal was to create a win -win, almost like a utopia, where I could achieve my goals while helping my team to achieve their goals. In a few cases that happened. Guys like Curtis went on to have success. Guys like Josh went on to have success. But a lot of people screwed me. A lot.

Not some, not many, but most. Yeah, most. And I want to read you a quote from Ben Horowitz. Because Ben Horowitz was a guy who built a company that he sold to Hewlett Packard for over a billion dollars. The company was called Opsware. And he just has an incredible quote that when I read his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, it really resonated with me because at the time I thought, gosh, what am I doing wrong?

Everybody that I’m mentoring, or most people, 90 % of the people that I’m mentoring are screwing me. And that’s when I read this quote, and it was very cathartic for me at the time, very healing. It still is very helpful for me. This Ben Horowitz quote, he writes, every time I read a management or self -help book, I find myself saying, that’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation. The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the goal.

The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those great people develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organizational chart that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

Ben Horowitz, thank you so much for that notable quotable. And again, somebody out there says, what does Ben Horowitz know? Look him up. Just take the time to research Ben Horowitz. This guy has had massive success, but he writes about it honestly in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. But he did go through a lot of hard things in route to becoming one of the most successful venture capitalists of our generation.

But he sold Opsware to Hewlett -Packard for $1 .6 billion. And if you read his book, I promise you, you’re going to find how life is, not how life should be. Now, here’s another unbiased look into what life was like at that time in my life from a former DJ employee by the name of Nate Mosley, the former DJ of DJ Connection, the sales team. I mess with him all the time because he used to look like Rod Stewart. He looked just like Rod Stewart.

And so I used to call him Rod, and this is what he said. He said, every week brought a new type of drama, a new breakthrough, and a new lesson to be learned. Most companies struggle to figure out how to fill an hour of time every week with a meeting of recapping and goal setting. But I can’t think of a single week where that was the case. There are so many factors that go into an employee’s sense of value. I think the overall environment of DJ Connection was to have as much fun as possible and to work harder than you ever have.

This mentality gave us all a good sense of pride, and everyone could share. I remember when we used to work out of the Lynn Lane location, and we had around five cell phones for outbound calls, and the one landline that we called the money line, a . k . a. the money line, for inbound calls. The biggest issue we always ran into was we usually had seven people trying to sell with only five phones.

Not only did we share those five cell phones, but we only had one money line to share among seven type A personalities. We had to figure out how to make money even when we didn’t have a phone to call from. I specifically remember one Monday afternoon when it was surprisingly not that busy and someone came up with this brilliant idea to drink the old beer that I’m pretty sure came with the house when Clay bought it. And before I knew it, each person was hooked up with an expired beer and an afternoon of glorious selling. I have never I have never drunk mud, but the beer tasted like a combination of mud coupled with cashews and a hint of sour cream. Most of the people ended up taking a few courtesy sips and then setting it aside.

But for some reason, Aaron and I thought it was cool to drink the liquid dirt. So by the end of the day, we had polished off a few expired beers, which caused us to feel like we ate a raw calf, which surprisingly had a positive impact on our sales that day. I guess that was an epic day for me because it was when I realized how cool it was to work for a company that you could share such a stupid memory with. There were countless all -nighters, usually because of some last -minute change, but most of the nights ended with crazy stories and new lessons to be learned. I would definitely have to say that that the 10 most stressful moments of my life had to have all been derived from the few years I worked at DJ Connection. I’m not going to go into detail about each event because my psychologist advised me that it might send me into seizures again.

Just kidding, but seriously. Here’s another notable quotable from a guy who worked with me at the time. His name was Albert Bertini. He was always the devil’s advocate for every conversation, an Italian guy who I met at Oral Roberts University. He said, it’s true. I was driving back after a late night event and suddenly a white toaster oven leapt out of the darkness at my vehicle.

Well, you might ask, why didn’t you stop and pick up the hitchhiking appliance? Well, the answer is, DeLorean’s begins to set in around 2 a . m. and I was already punchy enough for brunch. What does that mean? Not to mention, I’d already passed up a refrigerator and a microwave and I just really wanted to get home.

I finally got back at an hour. when even the living dead have been fast asleep for some time? You must imagine it. You have been driving alone through the darkness and you see the DJ office is aglow like a lighthouse or possibly a bug zapper and suddenly you find yourself swirling with a surge of energy from our returning DJs. Is in this oasis of light away from the ticking of time that many comrade building conversations issue? Granted, religion and politics will forever remain the centerpiece of conversations you may bring out when Grandma comes to town, but after 4 a .

m. , these are the domains for the DJs. We had already discussed politics, law, and religion. so we naturally moved on to our meaning of life conversations. Add to the mix a DJ whose father had recently passed away, another who is struggling with post -traumatic stress, having served in the military, and a Michael Jackson concert of music in the background providing the ambiance for the background. On Clay’s behalf, I remember him listening intently and studying what was being said and occasionally moderating with his own brand of humor.

I recall this event because I think it highlights one of Clay’s strengths and concordantly one of the strengths in business. Clay listens carefully to others, even if he disagrees. Then he asks challenging questions to understand both parties and to see if he can learn from them. While Clay embodies a passionate doer for what he does, I see him learning insatiably. And I believe this is why he sizes up challenges the way he does and what helps invigorate his confidence. Well, the conversation that night didn’t wind down until nearly six or seven in the morning as we gathered to watch the grand finale of the Michael Jackson concert.

And we did come close to solving all of the world’s troubles. Albert Bertini. So, my friend, I would ask you this today as a learning opportunity for you. Are you willing to fix your financial future by committing to not buying a house when you’re emotional? Can you commit to that? I’m asking rhetorically.

Can you commit to Not buying a house for emotional reasons. Two, can you commit to getting three opinions next time you do buy a house? Three appraisals. Three, maybe realtors that you talk to. Can you commit to the rule of three? Talking to three options before you embrace one.

And then the final move is can you commit to buying only properties that are undervalued as opposed to buying properties at their peak value because you are emotional? And if you do that, my friend, you will keep yourself, you will prevent yourself from making terrible investment decisions, as I once did. Chapter seven, growth, the law of the lid, and various other reasons I found myself herding cats. Chup, at this point when I was growing DJ Connection, what happened was I wasn’t aware that as a leader, I needed to be a proactive person. And so I would come to work every day. We had a team meeting Monday morning.

I think the morning meetings had to start at 8 o ‘clock. And I would get to work at like 6. But I never did prepare for the meeting until about 10 minutes before the meeting started. So as people were coming in, I was still working on my outline. Right, what am I going to say? And could you explain, maybe for our listeners out there, why that is a bad move to be the kind of leader?

And I’m talking about me. I was doing this. I had started a business. The business had done well. I get to work, and there’s many, many people in the office. The meeting starts at 8, and at like 7 .56, I’m still trying to hack out an outline for the day. I’m not really prepared.

What kind of wrong message does that send to the troops, do you think? First of all, they can all tell. Everyone can tell whenever you’re just pulling stuff out of wherever. they will emulate that. So people will begin to be reactive and not proactive in their day -to -day job that you’re paying them to do, because that’s what they see you doing at the top. And so I read John Maxwell’s book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, and then it occurred to me, the law of the lid.

This is my problem. The company can’t grow beyond a certain point, because I’m not growing at a certain point. The leader determines the growth of the business. Yes. I’ve got to get my stuff together. Well, once I got my stuff together, and I figured out how to become a professor,

we started growing at a rapid pace. We started growing so quickly that we started hiring people, bringing on more people on a daily basis. It seemed like we were interviewing people every day, hiring somebody every week. We were just really growing. Getting after it. And Chuck, as we were growing, I was not careful about what kind of people I hired.

I tried to hire, early on, just happy -go -lucky, positive, upbeat people. But as we grew, I started just hiring whoever was available. Now, what do you think the problem with that was? Those people trick their way into the company by having a good interview, and then they, as I’ve heard you say, they become a weed in your garden of zen and begin to spread. And when you start to have the wrong people on the team, let me tell you how the Monday morning meeting started looking. It started being me coming into work, being very excited and enthusiastic and them not really wanting to be there.

And they would make that look on their face as though they didn’t want to be there. And it became a thing where I actually didn’t want to come to my own workplace. I’ve been there. You’ve been there? Yeah. Were you there with your concrete company?

Yeah. Where were you there? Yeah, with the concrete. It was the same way. Didn’t know how to recruit, didn’t know how to retrain. I wasn’t as proactive.

I thought I was being proactive, but I wasn’t preparing myself to lead. I was just preparing myself to get through my day. And there’s a huge difference when you are a leader. You can’t just get through your day. You got to make sure everybody else can get through their day too. So it was kind of that dark period for me there for a while where we started hiring so many people.

And I just wasn’t as intense as I should have been about hiring the right people. And so first, I was a, in my opinion, maybe a B level, maybe a C level leader with A players. But over time, it switched to where I became a A player boss. with C -level people. And Chup, I’m sure you’ve seen this before, coaching clients before. But what happens if a business owner is an A -level business owner and they have C players on the team?

Well, the C players begin to interact with the clients because as you scale, you can’t be the only point of contact for everybody. And then that then becomes the perception of your business to everyone that interacts with it. But once we got A players and A player leadership on the same page at the same time, things began to really grow. But Clay Clark, man, he is one character. It’s a good word for character. Yeah, that is it.

Good, driven, smart. And I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time. He’s doing so much good. And then I met his mother and she just says she just lets him be Clay Clark. I mean, so he’s endorsed by his mother. And he’s doing magnificent work.

So it was great meeting you out there and all the people that he surrounds himself with. His client Clark starts his days at five o ‘clock in the morning. Oh, it’s incredible. Yeah, he’s he’s like, he’s he’s a machine. He’s a machine. But his you know, I could I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock.

Yes. Hundreds of people showing up at 5am in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Man, he’s a leader of a leader. He’s fantastic. Yeah, man. No, he is.

He is. He also he has this wealth of knowledge. He’s worked with so many different companies and different businesses. He could take a concept that he’s used before in the past with somebody totally different industry and see how it would work perfectly for you in whatever niche market you’re in or whatever type of service you’re providing. And so his brain is just a wealth of knowledge. And just to have that type of perspective on, you know, as a part of your team.

and your own company is huge, super valuable. So I would definitely encourage people to use him. But one thing is you gotta be coachable. You gotta be wanting to get feedback. You gotta be wanting to really grow your company. You gotta want to put that extra 10 hours a week to working on your business and not just in your business.

And so, yes, I would recommend it to anybody who’s wanting to grow their company and provide great systems, checklists, workflows, great encouragement. and have accountability. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes. And then I met Clay, and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15 -year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes.

And I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us and it’s just been an incredible experience.

I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry.

But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the

the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town. And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs.

I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 -year history of Shaw Homes, This is probably the best thing that’s happened to us. And I know if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1 ,800 % increase in our internet leads, going from 10 a month to 180 a month. That would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot.

I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick, and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay -at -home mom for 12 years, and my three kids started school, and they were in school full -time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide, what do I want to do? do my degree and my background is in education But after being a mom and staying home and all of that I just didn’t have a passion for like I once did husband suggested real estate He’s a home builder.

So real estate and home building go hand in hand and we just rolled with it I love people. I love working with people. I love the building relationships and But one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things, the processes and the advertising and marketing. I knew that I did not have what I needed to be successful. make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent.

Everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage our real estate brokerage eight months ago. And in that time we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents. But I have to give credit where credit’s due.

And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way.

I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer to insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways.

I mean, I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63 ,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world.

He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business.

I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. Clay, my honor, my honor to be on your show and thank you for all you do. I hear the ripple effects from you are good ripple effects, you know what I mean? people rave about what they learn from you. So congratulations. Kelsey with K &D’s Wood Refinishing.

I’m a business owner at 23. So I’ve been working this K &D’s company for about five years now and we started working with Thrive ago. Expecting maybe this year to where I’m, so we’re pretty excited about that. Just listening to what they have to say, their hiring process has just really been incredible as far as finding good quality help. The, just the accountability of weekly. such good insight, the resources that they have for specific business questions.

It’s all been really incredible. It’s been a great experience. So I’d recommend it to anybody. What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system and it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around. They’re the ones that people can work with on a day to day basis. Hi there, my name is Stephanie Pipkin.

I am 24 years old and I own Black River Falls Cleaning Services. We opened in April of 2019 and it is now mid -June of 2020. So I wanted to talk today about the success and growth I have achieved by implementing the Proven Path with Clay Clark’s team and my business coach, Luke, from Thrive Time. It has been insane, to say the least. I started working with them in mid -February of this year, so we’re about four months in of working together, and it has completely transformed my business in pretty much every facet. So I’m going to check my notes here.

So in four months my leads have tripled. I was getting probably like two leads a week. Now I’m getting more in the like 10 to 15 leads a week. I have doubled my number of employees. I’m now hitting the highest revenue weeks in the history of the company, week to week it seems like.

We went from about six appointments today as our highest in February to now 14 to 15 appointments a day. Hiring quality employees has become much simpler and less stressful by using their systems for hiring. I typically only get maybe two complaints a month, if that, and everybody shows up to work. I just have really high quality employees now, especially in something people typically consider a high turnover type of work, you know, cleaning houses, cleaning businesses. I have amazing employees now, and I get rid of the ones who are not so amazing and bring on new ones because of, you know, group interviews, interviewing every single week. It’s just been great and I don’t waste as much time on low -quality candidates anymore.

And your coach will hold you accountable, which I love. Again, the tough love is really great. Luke’s like a stern father figure, but he’s also nice, but also stern when he needs to be when I’m being lazy and not doing the things that I know I need to do because I don’t want to do them. So that’s just great. Worth every penny. I mean, I’d pay him a million dollars a month if I can, and maybe someday I’ll be able to, but I would just say go for it.

If it seems like a good fit, just go for it. Do what they say, even if you think it’s stupid or ridiculous, just do what they say because it’ll work. You know, people, when they look at my business, you know, people in my town, they think I’m lucky. They think I’m just, you know, things just happen for me. And, you know, maybe I am lucky, but it has a lot to do with hard work and, you know, perseverance and, you know, working until you cry sometimes. That’s just being an entrepreneur, which if you’re a business owner, you understand that.

But it’s having these systems in place of, you know, of course I’m going to be successful. It’s an absolute because I have all this stuff in the background happening. And I have Luke and Clay and everybody on their team working really hard to make sure that I’m a success. And I can tell that they are just so excited every single week when I’m having all these wins and things like that. They’re so excited for me. So it just, it’s the best thing ever.

And I would suggest to anybody to work with them. So sorry for the long -winded reply, but I just had so much to say, and I could go on for hours probably about how amazing they are. But thank you to Clay and Luke and the entire team there, everything you guys have done for me. And I am so excited to continue to work with you for years to come. Thanks so much for watching. My saying is, if it’s important to you, hire a coach.

And I think that’s one of the reasons people are not successful is they You know, they eat a cheeseburger instead of hiring a coach. You know what I mean? And so my coach pushes me. They’re younger than me. They push harder. They’re trained.

And as my rich dad always said, you know, amateurs don’t have a coach, but professionals always have coaches. So I’ve always had coaches for whatever was important. My rich dad was one of those persons. I wanted to learn how to play Monopoly in real life. So he was my coach. 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 you’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. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying.

And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner, and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses? Or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business.

Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever. And we’ll even give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it.

Transcribed with Cockatoo