How I Built It | The DJConnection.com (Story Part 2) + 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

252. Five hours and 38 minutes until game time, baby. Oh yeah. Now, Chup, we’re going to read a little excerpt from my book, Make Your Life Epic, where I describe this particular time and place in the growing of DJ Connection. Once we moved into our new place, life began to change immediately. Almost instantly, we started to notice a lot of respect being issued to us from peers in the wedding industry who had previously written our team off as a bunch of happy -go -lucky, glass -half -full DJ jokesters, which we were.

Right. And in addition to the love fest that we were receiving in the way of congratulatory cards, encouraging emails and voicemails from our past clients, vendor friends and business associates, we also started to receive yet another round of animosity steered toward us from our DJ competition. who competed with us in the way that the Kansas City Royals compete with the New York Yankees. It was hilarious. We would run into bitter DJs at bridal shows, and they would just look at us with hatred in their DJ eyes. Our DJs would come back from shows saying, such and such really hates us.

Man, what did we do to those guys? Or, Yeah, I ran into DJ so -and -so at church, and that guy is really pissed at us. It seemed like virtually every disgruntled band member and struggling DJ service felt the need to blame us for their lack of success, which I was okay with. My theory was that as long as they blamed us, they would never fix their systems that were producing crappy results. And let’s pause right there for a second. I just want to make sure that everyone’s getting this idea.

The other DJ companies, when we started DJ Connection, there was like 20 companies in Tulsa. Maybe more. I mean, it was a lot. Yellow Pages were filled with our competition. And Andrew, over time, I started getting more and more bookings. I started getting bigger and bigger yellow page ads.

I started buying the entire page of the phone book. Now, Andrew, do you think that that makes the competition happy when you’re getting that much growth? Not at all, because you’re taking business away from them. Most of these guys, I had never even met these people. And they were irate. And I’m just telling you, if you’re out there running a business and you don’t think that the competition is going to hate you, You’re missing out on something.

This is the same thing Dr. Zellner went through, right? Yes. When he started his optometry clinic. Right. He got himself out there, got a good no -brainer, started marketing, and all the other guys hated him. Yes.

And so now we go back to this excerpt from the book Make Your Life Epic with Eric Chopp doing the reading. And thus, I sort of liked being viewed as the Yankees of the DJ industry, because as long as the customers loved us, the world was well. Every once in a while, I would run into a hotel director, a photographer, or a previous client who would comment something to the effect of, man, You all have really grown. I wish I would have gotten into DJing. These kinds of comments and attitudes just kept rolling in. Amidst the praise from our peers and the hate from our competition, I started to notice that something else was changing dramatically as well.

All of the relationships that Jerry Jones, Josh, and I, and all of the DJ Connection DJs had been developing over the years were now growing to fruition. Almost as if the purchase of this DJ Megaplex had stamped us with a big approval sticker that read, yep folks, these guys are real. Bank of America, Bank of Commerce, Arkansas Valley Bank, Bama Pi, Grand Bank, Nordam, Broken Arrow, one of the largest high schools in the country, Bixby Schools, St. Pius, the vintage on Yale, luxury apartments, the Holiday Inn Select, and Quick Trip were all booking or rebooking us with conviction for all of their events. We were also booking. I mean, we booked Boeing. We booked Southwest Airlines.

Never heard of them. IBM. But it was crazy. that I had, when I was at a home -based business, I still did well. But once we moved to the 91st and Lynn Lane, the 8900 South Lynn Lane house, it was like people wanted to book with us. Right.

It was weird. I didn’t realize how much a piece of real estate can change people’s perception of you. People went from saying, You’re a crazy DJ, what’s your plan? People I went to college with would say, what do you do for a living now? Because I was like, you know, 24 now. And I’d say, well, I run DJ Connection still.

And they’d go… Really? You’re a DJ? What are you going to fall back on? I mean, what if it doesn’t work? And I think that’s a very valid question to ask anybody who wants to become a DJ, because most DJs live with their mom and are obsessed with trying to beat match songs.

They’re thinking about, like, what song will beat match perfectly with a shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, culo! And you’re going, Daryl, stop it. You’re 47. Go to bed. I mean, it’s a weird vibe. And, Chuck, you’ve met a lot of DJs.

Typically, a guy who wants to be a disc jockey over the age of 40 is typically what kind of individual? He likes to party, maybe? He likes to party a lot. It’s like similar with concrete finishers. But usually there’s not a lot of money there. Right.

So anyway, back to your reading, Mr. Chupp. Okay. Josh and Jerry Jones were now giving more confident sales presentations. It seemed as though this positive pressure that we had created for ourselves by building a foundation based on a solid reputation has now backed us. Many people in Tulsa were finally starting to talk about DJ Connection as if we were something nearing a legitimate, real deal company. This recognition meant that we were now a company to be taken seriously.

DJ Connection was no longer just a dream on a piece of paper and a statement of faith on my five -year goal. It was a reality. During this time, we received recognition in Modern Bride Magazine as Tulsa’s number one disc jockey service. That helped a lot. And from the American Wedding Association as Tulsa’s best wedding vendor. Yeah.

The point was being hammered home to our potential customers. DJ Connection was the real deal. Our hard work was finally paying off, and more and more quality people were hearing about us and wanting to become part of our team or use us for their upcoming event. Finally, after five years of toiling in the never -ending sea of mediocrity, we were rising to the top. and we were now being pushed by our own momentum. To quote the entertainment mogul and entrepreneur P. Diddy, Sean Combs, we won’t stop because we can’t stop.

With momentum, a business can do anything except overcome a lack of quality leadership. Which was my problem there for a while. As I said, I did not know. I just did not know how to lead a meeting. I did not know how to recruit good people. I didn’t know these things.

I had to figure them out as I was going, and once I started reading the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, I started to learn a lot about what I wasn’t doing. I didn’t even know that there was things I was doing wrong. I just knew that the result wasn’t good, and I didn’t know what was causing my results to be terrible. It’s easy to get in that cycle as an entrepreneur, too, because you know you’re working hard. Right. It’s not like you were just loafing off.

There it is. You’re busting it. You’re putting it all in, but when you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s hard to overcome it. Chuck, back to you. My old micromanagement philosophy of, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, was now proving to be ineffective when tested against the might of 30 disorganized DJs. Up to this point in time, I would assign a list of tasks for guys to do on a daily basis, and then I would relentlessly follow up on them to make sure that they were done.

Upon discovering that it had been done 80 % of the way, I would then put the remaining 20 % of their work on my plate, and I would do it myself. For example, I would tell our guys to call through the entire bridal list by 5 p . m. on Tuesday. And on Tuesday at 5 p . m.

, I would discover that it would only be 80 % of the way through the list. Then I would begin making cold calls from 5 p . m. to 9 p . m. by myself, neglecting my wife and compensating for a lack of sleep.

of others’ performance with my own efforts. I would ask a certain DJ to take out the trash, and he would take out 40 % of it. And then at night, after I had finished making my cold calls until 9pm, I would then take out all of the office trash until 10 .30pm. I would ask the DJs to arrive at 12pm for their 12 .30 Sunday appointment, and when I would return from church at 12 .30 to discover that no one had shown up to cover the appointment, I would do it myself. And so on. I pretty much did 20 % of everyone’s job in addition to my own.

already overwhelming responsibilities while paying them as if they had actually completed 100 % of the work on their own. Each week, I was becoming more and more familiar with the employee code talk phrases and their translations, such as, hey, I will probably be there right at 9 a . m. Translation into employee code talk. I will definitely not be there on time tomorrow, but I do not want to be confrontational or honest by telling you in advance. Right.

Next. Man, I had a family emergency come up so I can’t make it in today. Cough, cough into the phone. Honey, I just talked to Clay to let him know about the last minute birthday party we’ve been invited to and he said that it is okay if I have someone else DJ the wedding for me. Number three here. Clavis, I feel like I am just not working out in this position because it is too stressful.

That equals, I really think that although I cannot manage myself personally, I feel as though I could do a good job working in a role of manager. Oh man, I heard that so much. So much. Hey man, I can’t do my job, but I think I could help them do their jobs. Right. I was completely unaware of the importance of creating a system that rewards positive behavior through quality pay.

and one that penalizes lack of performance by withholding pay. Thus, those first few months in our new place were a little interesting, and I’m convinced that the time we spent at the Lynn Lane house would have resulted in my premature stress -induced death if it was not for the insight that I gained from reading and applying the principles found within the pages of John Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership while on our second sea cruise vacation. The irony about my reading this book was that I would never The irony about my reading this book was that I would have never stopped to read a book on leadership had my attempt to go on one week vacation not so blatantly exposed my lack of leadership skills. Havana was around one month old and Vanessa and I were in desperate need of some quality one -on -one time. I was working seven days a week.

I literally was working until 9 p . m. every night and then I was going to bed at 10 30 p . m. and waking up to work at 4 a . m.

or 5 a . m. each day. I had no time to work. I had to work out. Vanessa and I had no time to talk about anything.

I was DJing every Sunday, so I wasn’t going to church, which didn’t bother me too much, since, at the time, I wasn’t too sure how I felt about God anyway. I never had downtime to see my daughter, and I had no time to sit and plan our business’s future. So after I bought the tickets from Karen Wheelock, our Tulsa travel planner of choice, I found it to be nearly impossible to carve out the seven -day window of time needed to even go on vacation. Thus, I was resorting to giving each member of our team a huge laundry list of things to do that I knew in the back of my mind they were not going to get done. I knew that they would show up to work every day at 10 a . m.

or 11 a . m. while I was gone, and I knew that they were not going to return voicemails promptly. I just knew that they were going to crash the DJ mother ship into the side of Bridal Mountain while I was gone and thus I even booked our cruise during the smallest projected wedding weekend of the year to limit the potential for disaster. As we finished packing our bags and loading Havana into her car seat for the long journey down to the port, Houston, where our cruise was set to depart, I was having a panic attack.

Thus, I just kept calling the office guys, telling them things like, hey, there is one more thing that I need you to do. Or seriously, if you do not remember anything else, make sure you check the voicemails or Josh, brother. I am trusting you with the Millennium Falcon here. Don’t wreck it, baby. I trust you, but I don’t trust you. Please tell me you won’t crash the mothership.

Josh, are you there? Meanwhile, my wife was coming to the conclusion that I was going to be running the office remotely via my cell phone during the entirety of our vacation. As we boarded the cruise ship, I am sure that she was delighted when I was informed by one of the crew members that it was only possible to contact land in case of an emergency via the ship’s satellite phone at an astronomical fee. Thus, my cheapness would prevent me from calling the office once the ship departed. ” Now, Chep, can you relate to that? Because you remember running a business.

Yes. As I was reading it, I was literally just playing it through my mind every time either my parents would take a trip or I would take a trip. And I just knew the three weeks before the trip were going to be hell weeks, and the four weeks after the trip were going to be even worse. So it makes you not even want to go. It makes you not even want to go, because is it worth it? And ultimately, I’m glad I did when we did.

But yeah, that’s exactly right. OK, Chep, back to you. And once the ship departed, I was forced to come to grips with the fact that I was not going to be able to call home again. And thus, I attempted to have a good time in a distracted, mentally not present kind of way for the first day or so. Somewhere around day three of our seven day cruise, I started to calm down a little to the point where I was no longer focused on what apocalyptic scenarios might be unfolding at the DJ Connection office. And then I allowed myself to have a good time.

During the evenings after Vanessa and Havana had gone to bed, I would religiously go out on the deck and listen to the sound of the ocean, to consume a large $8 raspberry -flavored adult beverage, and to take in the fresh smells of the sea. I read John Maxwell’s Leadership Bible. As I read his book, I started seeing myself through the perspective of the various leadership examples which his book so richly provided. I started realizing his theory on the law of the lid directly applied to me. His law states, Quote, leadership ability is the lid that determines a person’s level of effectiveness. The lower an individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid of his or her potential.

The higher the leadership, the greater the effectiveness. To give you an example, if your leadership rate is at an 8, then your effectiveness can never be greater than a 7. If your leadership is only a 4, then your effectiveness will be no higher than a 3. Your leadership ability, for better or worse, always determines your effectiveness and the potential impact of your organization. To reach the highest level of effectiveness, you have to raise the lid of leadership ability. Essentially, John Maxwell’s leadership book called me out and said, hey, Clavis, you have a leadership rating of three.

You can inspire people, but you can’t provide continued direction without having to micromanage them. And you are only attracting people that like to be micromanaged because you are a micromanager. Oh, this truth was tough to take from my lawn chair amidst the princess cruise boat, but because I was half drunk, I think I was able to take the harsh criticism that this moment of self -analysis was forcing me to endure. And thus, I encourage you to do the same thing right now. Ask yourself, self, how high is my leadership ability? Honestly, how would I rate myself?

Would I enjoy working for me? That’s a big question. What is my leadership number? With 10 being Abraham Lincoln or Vince Lombardi and a 1 being that dude who can’t manage his own snow cone stand, where do I stand? What is my leadership number? Long story short, our sea cruise vacation was everything it was supposed to be and more.

Our cruise director was awesome. The entertainment was great. The food was legendary. I learned leadership while out at sea. Thus, I returned home, re -energized, fired up, and with a renewed focus on the next important step that DJ Connection had to take if it was going to grow to the next level. This step involved a need for dramatically improved leadership from me.

Listed below is a list of the leadership qualities that I determined to develop within myself and our team as a direct result of reading John Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and revisiting Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich while on the cruise. Review this list of leadership qualities and then candidly grade yourself on how well your leadership style exemplifies these leadership qualities. One, unwavering courage. That right there, I want to make sure we break that down. Unwavering courage. It is really, really hard to be courageous when you’re worried about being able to pay the bills.

Right. Now, I got to myself to a place with the DJ business where I never worried about that anymore. But those first three or four years where I literally was working at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. And Andrew, you’ll find this, and Chep, you’ll find this. And you’ve already seen this, Chep, with your businesses that you’ve been a part of in the past. But Andrew, you’ll see this.

When you grow a business, and you have to pay, let’s say you have just two employees. And by the way, I’d never start a business with one employee because they get depressed and lonely, especially if they’re remote. Seriously, if you guys open up a full package media, let’s say in Oklahoma City, and you’ve got one remote guy, he’ll get depressed and quit. And everyone will just keep getting depressed and quitting if you don’t have any leadership. Or entitled. Yeah, but you’re going to pay them anyway.

Right. So when you have a payroll, let’s just say you have two full -time people. So at a minimum, you’re out $1 ,400 a week, let’s say, after taxes and insurance. and you have no money coming in, it’s really, really hard to be a courageous leader. Now, when you have more money in the bank, it gives you more courage, in my opinion. So this is easier done theoretically than just said.

So I would just say my action step for you as a listener, if you want to become a more courageous person, live below your means. Have the courage to cut your expenses. Live below your means and save up some cushion. And once you have $50 ,000 in the bank, I promise you, you’ll be less stressed out when bad things happen. Unbelievable difference. But there was a time in the business where I had almost no money in the bank account, and it was very hard to be a courageous leader.

Chuck, back to you. Okay, so self -assessment letter grade from A to F. Rate yourself on a letter grade from A to F, and then answer the following question. What will you do today to begin practically improving your leadership abilities in this area? Number two, self -control. Self -assessment grade, letter grade from A to F. Rate yourself And then answer, what will you do today to begin practically improving your leadership abilities in this area? Right.

Number three, a keen sense of justice. Again, rate yourself from A to F and answer the question, what will you do today to begin practically improving your leadership abilities in this area? Number four, definiteness of decision. Rate yourself from A to F. Answer, what will you do today to begin practically improving your leadership abilities in this area? Five, definiteness of plans. Letter grade from A to F. What will you do today to begin practically improving your leadership abilities in this area?

Shep, why do you think it’s important that everyone takes a moment to reflect and actually give themselves a letter grade on how well they’re doing? It can be very easy to just go from day to day to day for years without improving if you don’t self -reflect. It’s one of the most important things I think you can do as a leader is get better. And also, it’s a perfect time for you stock in, are you practicing what you’re preaching? Because if you’re not, nobody cares what you’re saying, right?

If you’re telling people to do all of these things, you make the link between like a fat personal trainer, right? Like if you’re overweight personal trainer, people probably aren’t gonna pay you for very long to personally train them. It is so important that we all take a moment to self -reflect. And I say a moment, a daily moment. It’s called meta -time. And every single day, I take an hour of power every day to think about my day, think about my life, where I’m going, and am I happy with where my life is going.

And if you don’t schedule time to reflect on a daily basis, I promise you’re going to drift and end up finding yourself in a place where you say, how did I get here? Where did I do with all of my time that you can’t get back? Chuck, back to you. OK, for the next few, again, we’re going to do a letter grade from A to F and then answer the question, what will you do today to begin practically improving your leadership abilities in the areas of number six, the habit of doing more than what’s paid for? Number seven, a pleasing personality. Rate yourself on A to F. What can you do to begin improving that?

Number eight, sympathy and understanding. Number nine, this is big, mastery of detail. Mastery of detail. Mastery of details. You begin to scale. This is just me.

This isn’t on the page here, but as you begin to scale and hire other people to do these jobs, if you don’t have those details mastered, guess what? The results are going to be different every single time. Dude, I had to micromanage people. I had to literally call DJs and say, when they were loading up their gear, do you have a mic stand? Yep. Do you have two speakers?

Do you have to speak on cables? Yep. Because I didn’t have a checklist. It was all in your head. For years. You did have one, but it was just all in your head, right?

For years. I don’t even think it was in my head, Chubb, because people would ask me, and they would say, is there anything else? Because I’m driving to Kansas City. Is there any other gear I need to bring? And I’m going, did you bring an amp? No, I didn’t.

OK, good for you. Hey, did you bring your CDs? Do you have the car? I’m serious. That kind of crap would happen a lot. I didn’t have any checklists or systems, and I didn’t have the intelligence to know what I didn’t know.

I didn’t even have the curiosity to know what I didn’t know until somebody gave me the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I read that book while on a cruise ship and realized, I don’t know what I’m doing. All right, back to you, John. Number 10, willingness to assume full responsibility. And number 11, cooperation. When I returned home, I discovered that non -DJ Garrett was now working in the office nearly 15 hours per day to compensate for the fact that several key people did virtually nothing while I was gone.

40 % of the guys who were supposed to chip in to do the office work bailed out. I found out that Curtis was a workhorse and that Josh did a much better job than I thought he would do. I returned home to find a sort of organized chaos, although Garrett was super mad because he felt that he had been carrying DJ Connection on his ill -equipped shoulders for the entire week while I was gone. Which was true. Around this time, Jerry Jones was also discovering that he had ambition and dreams that did not parallel themselves with DJ Connections anymore. And thus, he was looking to move on.

After I returned, my mind was still racing with the stories about how Winston Churchill had boldly stood up to the Nazi regime in a final stand for the free world against a brutal dictatorship. I was inspired from reading how coach John Wooden had turned UCLA into a legendary basketball powerhouse. And with this new inspiration fueling my passion, I was determined to turn DJ Connection into the most dominant wedding entertainment company in Tulsa. I was inspired like never before, and I was determined to ride out this wave of inspiration while I was still feeling the positive passion chi. As part of my new leadership initiative, I immediately set up a required Monday morning meeting to build a system. of candor coherency and planning I want to make sure that everyone gets this There’s we’ve all worked for a boss or we’ve maybe been a boss who has new initiatives of the week The key is you’ve got to follow through and you got to follow up Chup I’m sure you’ve had this happen to you or maybe you’ve even done it yourself But as a leader we can all what we do is if you’re not careful you say starting Monday anybody Anybody who is late at all will be fined.

And we’re going to take this company to the next level. And if a speaker ever has a nick on it, we’re going to paint it that night. And the CD cases will be organized. All the CDs will be in alphabetical order, hence forth. And then week two, it’s like, what happened to the initiative? Don’t talk about it.

If anybody’s late, and then you were late the next day. Right. That’s typically what happens. So again, it’s so important that if you’re listening to this, that you try to ask yourself these questions and reflect on, gosh, am I doing some of these dumb things. The reason why I’m sharing this story is I did so many things incorrectly in route to building something correctly. The idea of this is that you can learn at my expense as opposed to learning from a mentor instead of learning from my mistakes.

Back to you, Mr. Chupp. I began writing and posting tangible, ambitious, yet attainable company goals everywhere that our employees worked. I was now working 90 hours per week, and I’m not exaggerating here, but we were becoming very profitable. Oh, this two -year stretch at the Lynn Lane property was stressful, but it also came with moments of extreme joy like a good epic movie. Only our movie never seemed to end. During the next two years, as we continued to relentlessly implement John Maxwell’s proven leadership principles, we started to realize unprecedented growth.

And the secret was that we had successfully grown the organization from me to we. As Magic Johnson would say, reported to say in Maxwell’s book. We were waging war on mediocrity, and we were beginning to see victory in our sights. During this time, we set records for overselling by booking 31 events in the same day and DJing over 75 events on the same weekend. We tripled the number of DJ systems we had from 11 to over 35, all during this time period.

DJ Curtis came and went, and DJ Jason Bailey successfully found us. We were assembling our dream team, and I was beginning to realize that the only limit on our company’s growth potential and our speed of growth was our ability to find good quality humans who were looking to be part of the dream team. We DJed for Aaron and Tina Smith’s wedding. And through the process, Aaron decided to join the team. Yeah. We DJ for Andy Simmons’ sister at the mysterious Scottish Rite building, and he was inspired to join the DJ party.

nation after seeing DJ Jerry Jones perform and entertain at the wedding, and after his mom told him over the phone how fun our company sounded. There it is. We just kept finding more and more quality people. And as we added new people, each individual added a new skill and a new passion to the company. We were like a bunch of batteries that, when connected to each other, actually doubled each other’s combined output. This time of expansion was fun.

However, at the same time, this exponential growth posed new problems. With eight guys working out of our house, we were again finding ourselves surrounded by DJs whose expansion was unintentionally encroaching upon our personal space. With so many people to manage, I was finding that perpetual lateness was becoming the norm. with eight type A personalities all working in close proximity. I was finding that NHL style fights were beginning to break out on occasion. And I was also beginning to notice that everyone was starting to gang up with their combined dislike for DJ Achilles.

Yes, personally, I like him. And real quick, I’ve changed the name to Achilles, and I’ve changed the name to Jerry Jones. That way, I protect the identity of these people. I thought you were DJing with Achilles and Jerry Jones. No, no. Anyway, continue.

Personally, I liked Achilles a lot when he first came on board. He professed to attend Rhema Church, and he always wore a suit. He looked like a young Orlando Bloom, and he was a quick learner and hard worker in the sales department. However, from the other guy’s perspectives, he was a lead hog. He was divisive, and he was argumentative. He was unapproachable, and above all, he was insincere.

He was superficially religious, he was a suck -up, and he was stealing commissions through his less -than -ethical sales techniques. Ooh, because I had not yet read former GE CEO Jack Welsh and Susie Welsh’s management book called Winning, I had no idea how to manage various personalities that could not coexist without extreme management skill. And so to fix the problems caused by the personality clashes as well as simple work -related problems, I, right or wrong, did the following. One, I implemented a $20 late fee. If you were late to work by one minute, I got your late fee. Over time, this rule had to be further clarified with disclaimers stating that if you were not in the office on time, you were late.

Dudes like to say that they were around the corner. Oh man, people would say they’re around the corner. I was right around the corner. Meeting starts at 8, a guy would call me at 8 .10 and say he’s around the corner when he was just leaving his house. Right. Unbelievable.

Later, I had to again clarify with a disclaimer that if you are stopped by a cop or if you are sick, you are still late. It was unbelievable. Two, I implemented an inbound phone time sharing policy. Basically, everyone got equal time on inbound sales calls so that no one could be accused of hogging the phone by making no outbound calls and always lingering around waiting for those easy inbound sales calls. Number three, I implemented the shut the hell up and get back to work policy, which consisted of me yelling shut the hell up and get back to work numerous times per day when I spotted DJs interacting with each other via instant messaging and myspace . com instead of working.

I would simply yell, shut the hell up and get back to work. That was a great policy I developed. It really did work well. I like that policy. Maybe people should implement it. Seriously, I used to say that all the time.

I got to a point where I forgot how rough that statement was. A new employee would be at work and they’d be on the phone and all of a sudden they’d maybe take a coffee break and whoever their manager was would yell, hey, shut the hell up and get back on the phone. Nice. You know, no big deal, but I looked over at the new employee and they were like crying in the corner. Yeah, but that was what we said all the time. Yeah, it’s so funny.

All right. Thank you. I implemented the stop being weak sauce policy. This policy officially classified anyone who ever called in sick for any reason as weak sauce. Thus, they were openly out of my favor. 5. I had our guys build dividers and cubicles everywhere so that people wouldn’t intrude on each other’s conversations.

6. I arranged for weekly one -on -one meetings with the guys. This was a horrible idea. I have since determined that everything must always be out in the open all the time. 7. I implemented the, no potheads are allowed in the office policy. This resulted in the replacement of a few key people and took care of claims that I was only enforcing this policy on people that I wanted to get rid of. However, the truth be known, I did not want to know who was smoking pot, I sincerely felt as though about 80 % of our staff was smoking pot, and I later found my suspicions to be correct.

8. I implemented the, no pellet guns in the office policy. I kid you not, the guys actually brought pellet guns to work. 9. I implemented the no personal emails policy. At this point, I was starting to feel like I was becoming yet another corporate America style business that I used to detest. And so, with these new policies in place, we marched forward over the occasional background noise created by Eric, Aaron, Jason, and Andy, Achilles, Nate, Moseley, Garrett, Sean, Josh Smith, Jason Bailey, and Raj Mahal duking it out.

Eventually the yelling on the bus got too loud And I had to replace multiple people for things ranging from theft to pot smoking to drinking on the job to driving on a Suspended license to using the DJ connection business credit card by the way all the names we’ve mentioned none of those people did those things But there were people on the team that literally would do this kind of stuff I didn’t real I didn’t start trying to grow a DJ company. I didn’t realize that people would Steal each other’s coats or would fight in the hallways or I mean these things really did happen I’m not kidding a guy literally brought a pellet gun to work because he was so mad at another guy Whenever the guy would say something he’d shoot with a pellet gun The other guy brought a gun the next day they’re start shooting each other and I got hit one day because I was like Bystander bystander, I’m just walking by and it’s like And then I realized they’re bringing these guns to work I remember one guy one day this is a crazy story he got mad at One of our employees got mad at another employee. So what he did is he logged into his Facebook account and And he wrote the following post, an incredible post, by the way. This is the post he wrote. He wrote, dear family and friends, I think it’s time for you to know something that I’ve been struggling with for years. Oh, no.

And I have a I am a homosexual and I have a relationship of, you know, a decade with and he mentions a guy’s name and tags him. And this guy, the guy who wrote it, he logged into a man’s account who was a married guy. Well, this guy’s wife saw it. and literally thought that her husband was announcing on Facebook that he was gay and not only did it not go over well and get a laugh, it ended in like a really, really, really bad way. Another thing that happened, we had another employee at the time, true story, we had some celebration.

We were celebrating like an achievement of, I think it was like the best year we’ve had or the most, every year we grew by 20 or 30%. We went to a big celebration event at the Holiday Inn Select, and one of the employees, had the hots for another employee’s wife. chew a lot. I have a red cup here on my desk. I know where this is going. And this guy would always spit into the coffee cup.

I knew he chewed, but I guess I didn’t observe it that much. And I always drink coffee in my cup here, my red Solo cup. And so I go to pick up my coffee, and I take a swig, and I drink all of his spit. No! Yeah! Oh, my gosh.

It was the worst. No, it was terrible. I have to go. I have to go. I can’t continue. These kinds of abominations would happen all the time.

I remember we had one DJ who the phone rang, and he was using the restroom. We had a restroom upstairs. So he booked the entire wedding while going to the bathroom. That’s impressive. Echo in the back. And then the customer was like, are you on the phone?

Are you in the pot or something? I mean, there’s so many abominations. I had another employee, check this out. Another employee, he checked into the Omni Hotel using my name because we had a trade out with the hotel. I’d done a lot of work with them and so they made a deal where we could stay there for really inexpensively. And one of the DJs checked into the Omni Hotel and he traveled, for whatever reason, with loaded assault rifles.

Gotta be ready. And so he went to go to the pool or go get breakfast or whatever he did and housekeeping comes in. Oh my God. And they see like ARs on the bed. And that happened. I had a DJ who let, we had big speakers called TR -225s.

They are basically a six foot tall speaker. Not six foot, they’re four foot tall speaker. And he had an open bed truck. Yeah. And he’s driving down the highway. And he forgot to put the back of it up, the back of the truck up or something?

Uh -oh. And the speakers fell off on the back, on the highway. He’s driving like 70 miles an hour. Did these weigh like 100, 120 pounds? Yeah, probably 60 pounds. They’re big, maybe 70 pounds.

But a woman had to try to avoid it. Evasive maneuvers. Spun out on the highway, could have killed somebody. I mean, there was just so many abominations on a daily basis at this time. I cannot explain to you how much of humanity I saw that I didn’t want to see. I mean, I had a guy use my company credit card to go to night trips during the middle of the day, and this was a guy who was a youth pastor who DJed for us on the weekends.

No way. Wow. And he asked me to borrow my card to do something, and he goes there. So now, I don’t know, I mean, I just remember looking at the bill going, what? I mean, there are so many abominations that happen on the daily at this particular point, and it’s all because once I had finally figured out how to become a good leader, I hadn’t yet figured out, I knew how to lead myself, and I knew the procedures of running a meeting and an agenda and how to be prepared, but I didn’t know the importance of hiring A -character people. I would just hire whoever was available.

So we had guys like Jason who were great people, but we had other people that were just complete disasters. I mean, it was bad, very bad. It was like a nuclear winter there on a daily basis. I got to a place where I really did hate that place. Back to you, Jep. Eventually, Keith, DJ Hugo Chavez, and DJ Mike E were brought on board

certain people. And then more people were brought on to replace more people. And the more serious I got about quality, the more people I had to replace. Essentially, I discovered firsthand that Sam Walton was correct when he once famously said, there is only one boss, the customer, and he can fire everyone from the CEO on down. I was learning that allowing mediocre people to exist in my organization was demotivating our top performers, killing our profits, and killing off our loyal customers. Thus, on January 1st of 2005, I fired about 10 weak sauce DJs as their Happy New Year’s gift.

I had started out wanting to fire about two of them, but once I got the firing flamethrower out, it just seemed appropriate to go ahead and kill the remaining discontented underperformers. were still smoldering, our top performers began rejoicing. Jason Bailey was scared out of his mind because he later said that he thought that I was going to fire everyone because I had that back to the future Doc Brown crazy look in my eyes. I really did. I had determined that anybody who was late for their New Year’s Eve show would be fired because you don’t need a lot of DJs in January anyway. You need them for the wedding show, but you don’t need them for bridal shows, trade shows, but you don’t need them to DJ on a daily basis because there’s just not a whole lot of weddings in January.

And so I determined, anyone who’s late, I’m going to fire them. I told the guys, if you’re late, I’m serious, don’t be late. I’m so tired of you guys being late. Do not be late, because if you’re late, you’ll be fired. And they all thought I was kidding. And I fired so many people that day.

It had to have been more than 10, too. But I remember Jason was watching it happen, and he was looking at me like, oh. And so when you get a lot of money in the bank, and you don’t really need to put up with stuff anymore, I think people start to get a little bit more scared about you, scared of you. And I think that’s the kind of healthy fear that you need to run a successful company. Absolutely.

It says in the Bible you’re supposed to fear the Lord. Yeah. It’s not that you’re supposed to be running around going, I’m afraid that God’s going to end my life right now. It’s not that, it’s respect. Reverence, yeah. With your parents, weren’t you just a little bit afraid of your dad growing up?

Yeah, I was more afraid of my mom. Your mom? Yeah. What about you, Andrew? Are you afraid of your dad or your mom? Same boat as Chet’s in.

Yeah, you don’t want to mess with those people. My mom gets that crazy look in her eye. Hey, get dad. Let dad beat me. Mom beatings are crazy. You remember those metal fly swatters?

Yes. The handles were metal. My mom would turn them backwards and come after my calves. Mine are heart wheels of a racetrack. Let me tell you about mom crazy. This is what makes mom crazy tough.

Mom crazy. Mom’s like, hey, kids, do you guys want to do this? go out to Brahms and you’re like sure and mom could be driving and a kid in the back could go quit touching me and mom will say stop and they’ll say quit touching me and then mom might say stop and you never know because mom’s at this great patience level so mom could be like hey guys please stop but then one day At one moment, a little switch will occur. And all of a sudden, mom goes into beast mode. It’s like, I will pull over right now. They pull over.

You’re now on the shoulder. You’re going into the shoulder of the highway there. You’re there. And you’re kind of like in the ditch ravine area. And all of a sudden, mom’s getting the fly swatter. Give me a fly swatter.

She’s climbing over the seats. Give me a fly swatter. You’re like, what do we need a fly swatter for? Because I’m going to give you an attitude adjustment. I am. No.

I mean, mom crazy. Mom’s an unpredictable kind of crazy. You never know. You don’t want to mess with mom. That’s the kind of crazy you need to be an effective boss. Back to you, Chip.

Eventually, he came around to see that the removal of the negative people was freeing up more energy and resources to invest in our quality people. True. Next, we have an unbiased voice of sanity. Jared Hogue. Is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, Jared Hogue.

What I did is I interviewed guys who used to work with us. And this is an actual transcript. of what they said about their time working at DJ Connection during this particular time. He says, every week we had our Monday morning meetings. It would typically last about an hour or two. This one meeting was going a little rough, but we made it through.

As soon as the meeting was over, we hopped on the phones. However, we weren’t getting anywhere, making no progress. That coupled with the rough meeting made for a real crappy morning. Morale was low, so Clay hollers and makes everyone get up out of their chairs to do a trust fall. All of us lined up almost like a Soul Train line. and one at a time got up on a chair and fell backward into the arms of our peers.

Morale shot up quickly. We hopped back on the phones and sales were quickly on the climb. Clay is a mover, which is a good thing. He gets things done. He doesn’t like to wait. He moves very quickly.

It is a good thing and a bad thing all in one. When he got excited about something, there was no stopping him, even when it meant waking your employees up in the middle of the night to fill them in on a new idea that could have waited until morning. To his credit, He didn’t build a DJ empire by doing nothing. I don’t remember at all. Uh, I don’t remember that at all. I don’t, I don’t recall the trust falls at all.

No, I don’t. I’d say I wasn’t there. Um, but that’s why I asked those guys because there was, it was so much stuff was happening so quickly. And I just found, if you let the fire burn uncontrolled, Chuck, what, what happens with the whole office? If you let one bad person, personality, bad issue, just fester, what happens? It just spreads.

It spreads. Everybody becomes demotivated, demoralized. You know, why isn’t that person being held accountable? When I did this last year and I was helped, boom, boom. And it just it just snowballs. I’m just telling you that that time in my career, man, there was a fire every day because I made such poor hiring decisions.

I had so many psychos working for me at that time. I don’t know what was wrong with me. It was just a terrible, terrible time in my life. Back to you, Chuck. During those two years, we had our struggles, but the attitude and culture of the office generally remained constant.

It was always high energy, fast -paced, work with haste, dial and smile, DJ Phantasmagoria. After we experienced our New Year’s firing spree, everyone seemed to understand that I was serious about quality and I was serious about DJ Connection. During this time of rapid expansion, we painted DJ vans and trailers. This was a horrible idea. When people see our company vehicles, they think, hey, I could sue these guys. We purchased six unlimited calling plan cricket trademark cell phones.

We installed three landlines and we experienced DJ Derek’s ability to overheat and destroy the engines of two old school vans in a period of less than one month. Now, again, I’ve changed the names in this story in this audio book so as to not incriminate certain people. But we had a DJ on our team who I’m giving the code name Derek right now. But this guy, I’m not kidding, he would take We had minivans that we used. I used to make the DJs. The equipment you see today is a lot smaller.

So it’s a lot easier to scale a business now than it was then, because then the equipment was so bulky. Now, I mean, the TR -225s were four foot long speakers. It definitely couldn’t fit in your car you drove today. Oh, no. So for good guys like you, I would have to get them a vehicle. So we had so many vans, and they’re all enclosed vans, so the gear wouldn’t get wet.

And this guy would leave late for shows and would drive over 100 miles an hour down the highway. And on two consecutive weekends, he blew up Two vans. That’s crazy. He did like $15 ,000 of damage in two weeks. Craziness. Back to you, Chubb.

He drove them as though he was racing these 150 ,000 plus mile vans on the NASCAR circuit. We turned the garage into Havana’s playroom because the DJs had moved into our living room to accommodate our nonstop expansion. We threw a ridiculously large Super Bowl party of epic proportions that my wife made sure she was conveniently out of town for in appreciation of our customers. This is how we did it. numerous visits by the city of Broken Arrow who was appalled by my blatant disregard for the zoning laws governing our five acre DJ house. True.

DJ Hugo Chavez dumped trash into someone’s storage units that they thought were dumpsters. Again, names have been changed to protect the people. But I mean, this is a situation. You didn’t hire Hugo Chavez. No, I didn’t hire Hugo Chavez. But I’m telling you, there was an actual person who I asked them, is it possible?

Could you go dump the trash at the city dump? And they said, sure. And they took it to a construction worksite where there was a like a container, like a shipping container filled with new carpet that was going to be installed in somebody’s home. And they dumped our trash on that. Wow. So pizza, Skull spitters energy drinks energy drinks doughnuts whatever all being poured on this while the owners sitting there watching are you freaking kidding me?

So he follows the DJ back to my house Because he’s in a car that’s painted and it says DJ Connection. Right there. Un -freaking -believable. Unbelievable. Back to you. This act of idiocy resulted in thousands of dollars of damage being done to the new carpet that had been stored in these units and was supposed to be installed in a local apartment complex.

The carpet was apparently ruined by the Skoll brand chew spit that spewed out of the trash containers. An unbiased voice of sanity, Eric Cooper. When you have eight men of nearly adulthood semi -living and working out of a residential area such as the Clark Estate, you accumulate a lot of trash. To dispose of four foot bags of trash a day, we had to load up a few of these bags in a company van and take them to the nearest dumpster. One spring day, we had created about six trash bags full of Red Bull cans, soda cans, bottles full of Skoll, residue, and other items Normally, the lowest man on the totem pole would have to be the trash man till they made it up the ladder or a newer dude came into the company.

Well, this fine day, a fellow DJ, Hugo Chavez, decided to combine the task of trash duty and lunch retrieval into one. DJ Hugo made his way to a certain area and threw the trash into a, quote, receptacle. Yes. A few hours later, with no more trash and lunch in tow, DJ Hugo had completed his task. I remember sitting next to the man, Keith Banks, who. fielded the call.

Apparently, a construction owner at a hotel in the area was mad because he went into his quote -unquote receptacle to field what was not trash but brand new rolls of carpet and other equipment to finish his work. When he opened the storage container, he found bags of trash, leaking soda, and dip spit onto his very expensive rolls of unused carpet. To say the least, he was not happy when he opened the bag to investigate who had done this and found DJ Connection cards, envelopes sent to DJC and other DJC items. He called the company and was enraged at our stupidity. We sent Keith out to investigate the damage and he took footage of the unit, which not even Helen Keller could have mistaken for a dumpster. Unbelievable.

To say the least, Clay paid nearly $1 ,000 in damages. Fast forward two years into the future, and while reminiscing about stories such as these, Clay became enraged when we unveiled the video of where DJ Hugo Chavez dumped the trash. I would even say he was angrier when he saw the video than he was when it originally happened. True. We have witnessed countless crimes against humanity from DJs who have bailed out on shows one hour before someone’s wedding, which we were narrowly able to cover. I have fired more people than many shooting squads due to the complete lack of decency that many American workers now seem to have.

True. It has always amazed me that people get intense and nearly violently angry because you fire them for no reason. on the job. They can’t seem to understand why they would be fired for smoking pot. They always say exciting things like, hey, that was never in the company manual. To compensate for DJs oversleeping and for DJs forgetting to write down their show dates, Andy, Jason, Josh, Eric, Keith, and Nate all had to pull extensive all -nighters where they would literally DJ a wedding that went from 3 a .

m. , went until 3 a . m. , only to discover when they arrived to unload the equipment, they had to fill in for a DJ who called in sick. This happened all the time. I mean, myself or Jason Bailey constantly would have to do two days in a row without sleep because somebody would call in and say they couldn’t do their shift.

This was a constant thing. Back to you. And their show had a 6 a . m. setup schedule. Without Red Bull, I don’t think we would have made it.

True. Notable quotable. Knowledge without application is meaningless. Thomas Edison. Please do not allow this chapter to be less meaningful and useful to your daily life than that incredibly expensive set of knives you bought after watching some super compelling infomercial on how those stainless steel babies could cut through your shoes and a hammer. Thus, ask yourself the following self -exploring questions.

One, how would I rate my overall leadership abilities on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest? Two, what are my strengths and weaknesses? 3. What can I do to improve my weaknesses? 4. Can I deal with the reality that business growth will force me to become everyone’s boss and not everyone’s friend? 5. Do I have it in me to fire people that will not perform according to the standards promised to our customers, even if they are my friends? And

6. Treat yourself, to extra $1 million of lifetime income and go out and buy John Maxwell’s 21, the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership book. Apply the principles found in his book and watch your team grow. And then, Chuck, this is kind of where it comes full circle. Full circle. We actually had John Maxwell on the podcast just about a month ago. And so if you go to Thrivetimeshow .

com today, you can search for John Maxwell and you can hear my interview with John Maxwell. And a lot of these people that I’ve talked about, we talked about in an earlier chapter about applying the principles from the book called Nuts about Southwest Airlines. And I just interviewed the author of that book, the authors of that book, Jackie and Kevin Freiberg. We just interviewed those two on the show. So again, if you’re out there today and you’re listening to this and you’re saying, I’m in a place right now where I feel like the abominations that you just described in your book are happening in my business. I would encourage you to make the tough call, fire the idiots as soon as possible, but immediately start interviewing people.

Do a group interview every single week, every single week, every single week. Just don’t stop posting those ads for now hiring. And you do the group interview. And Shep, just give us kind of a quick overview of how to do a group interview. How does the group interview work? So the main thing about the group interview is to understand that you’re going to be holding one interview for all candidates for all positions at one time.

And we do it right now at our office at what time every week? Wednesdays at 5 p . m. , every single week. So Wednesdays at 5 o ‘clock, no matter who applies for a job, we reply via email. Correct.

Your resume looks great. We’d like to interview you this Wednesday at? 5 o ‘clock. 5 o ‘clock. OK, so we never read resumes. No matter who applies, we always say, sounds great.

We’ll see you this Wednesday at? 5 o ‘clock at this location. And then at that interview, what percentage of the people that say they’re going to be there actually show up? So if 100 people sent in their application, maybe 50 people will reply their RSVP to our reply email, and then maybe 15 will show up. Last week, do you know how many people showed up for the group interview? Yeah, we had probably 23 people show up.

How many people said they were going to be there? Do you know? I believe Marshall told me about 150 people said they applied for the job. And we had how many show up again? 23 -ish. OK.

So that lets you know that those 80 -some -odd people aren’t a good fit. because they couldn’t show up. And of those 23 that showed up, how many could show up on time? Let’s see, we probably had about 20 of them on time. So now you’ve got 20 out of 100 that you’re hireable. And of that 20 out of 100, how many of them were hireable based on the fact that they were mentally present?

Two. Two. And of those two, how many did you schedule to shadow last week? We’re going to schedule actually two of them to come in this week. Really? Yep.

Okay. So that was a pretty good week though. Yeah. Two candidates out of a hundred. That’s 2 % of the people. Now imagine if we were interviewing people one -on -one.

Yeah. How long would that take? Well, you would block out a minimum of what? 30 minutes. Per one. Per one.

So like 50 hours. That’s 50 hours of your time. 50 hours. Get out of here. Now this is, check it out. When I was growing the DJ business, I didn’t know these moves yet.

I didn’t either. So I was interviewing people one -on -one. And then once I found these people, I thought, well, It took a long time to find this idiot. It’s going to take me forever to find another idiot. Might as well keep this idiot. And I might as well stop looking.

Right, right. So again, that is what happens when you’re being impacted by the law of the lid and you don’t know it. When you hire people that are the wrong fit and you find yourself herding cats. Chapter 8. Meeting with Darth Brent and seeing his moron destroyer. The life lesson.

The entrepreneur builds an enterprise. The technician builds a job. Michael Gerber, the best -selling author of E -Myth, revisited. And so yet again, I found myself having another nervous breakdown. Key employees were showing up late nearly every day. Achilles and Aaron were on the verge of killing each other.

Lloyd was running around Tulsa ripping people off and telling them that I was working with him in order to get business while the czar of the chewspitters kept leaving his red solo cups filled with his chewspit on my desk and yet again I accidentally drank some of his chewspit mistaking it for coffee. A young man nearly blew up one of my lawnmowers in the backyard when he decided to try to bevel off the side of the concrete patio while mowing. And money was coming in and out of DJ Connection at record levels. And then something non -specific and probably trivial happened that sent me into a nervous breakdown that left me literally lying alone in the dark with a pounding migraine headache in our walk -in closet, completely unable to deal with the pressures associated with running a medium -sized business without duplicatable processes in place. I was going crazy.

I was ready to quit. I was ready to sell DJ Connection to the lowest bidder. I was willing to put my head in a blender if it had the potential to kill me. In all sincerity, I had never been suicidal and I never would commit suicide because I think it is weak sauce. But I felt like Michael Douglas’ character in the movie falling down. I felt as though at any moment I might just involuntarily haul off and punch the culprit of the biggest current abomination.

The next guy who I found smoking weed was going to find a mic stand in his butt. I was going crazy. Anyway, after spending literally 12 hours alone in our dark closet, thank you for filling in for me that day, team. I emerged well -rested. I was able to come to grips with the fact that something had to be done. And so I scheduled an appointment with Brent Lawless, a highly successful entrepreneur who started a web development company called Triad.

He was the one who also developed the nice website that the customers at the time knew. And I determined that I was going to talk to Brent about selling my business to get his feedback on the whole thing. When I arrived at Brent’s office, I had no idea that I would leave with yet another book that would change my business life. I went to the meeting in the same way that Luke Skywalker went into his first encounter with Yoda. I was eager to meet the green little dude, but I was kind of freaked out by his Jedi power. I knew that Brent had the full use of the force, and I wanted to get some good nuggets from him.

After Brent and I talked, and after I unloaded my trail of tears on him, he surprisingly gave me the E -Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. The book seemed simple and pretty readable because it was so small, so I read it. excited to read it later that night. And as I read the book, I immediately related to the main character. The main character in the book is a cake maker who makes great cakes and thus she feels as though she will also be able to make a great company, which is the entrepreneur’s myth. Over time, she developed a loyal following and a business that controlled her.

She merely created a job for herself that no one else would want. And the job was certainly not duplicatable and it wasn’t repeatable. And she didn’t create time freedom or financial freedom. She just created herself a job and a job that nobody would want. A job that required her to work 80 to 90 hours a week because she was the only one in the world who could make the product that everyone wanted. And people would come in and want to order more cakes.

And then she would say yes. And she kept saying yes to more and more cakes and more and more cakes that only she could make. And then she had all these obligations and she wanted to uphold her reputation. and so she struggled to ever say no when people asked for a custom cake, and she struggled to ever teach anyone to do what she was doing, and she didn’t have any systems or checklists or processes, and her brain almost exploded. And because of her unique talents, she created this job that was 100 % dependent upon her. The more her business grew, the more she began to break down mentally and physically due to the workload.

She had employees, but no one else could help her because they did not know what to do. Michael Gerber’s book, The E -Myth, goes on to talk about how he taught her how to make a standardized and duplicatable business so that she could grow exponentially while decreasing exponentially the amount of hours that she was personally working in the business. Throughout the book, Michael shows her how to tap into her knowledge base to create these systems. He shows her how to work on the systems found within her business, rather than actually working in her business making cakes and delivering cakes. This book really freaked me out, fired me up, and set me straight. Reading this book really questioned the way I thought about business.

This book asked me why I had started the business to begin with. This book asked me about what my exit strategy was for the business. This book made me realize that the DJ Connection business was just my vehicle to help me achieve my goals. It was not my life goal, unless I wanted to die early and alone after my wife and kids left me. As you can imagine, reading a book like this produced quite a to -do list for a Type A personality such as myself. And to help save you the time that you would normally spend reading this book and various other books about workflows, I have put together a checklist and questionnaire that reading the book spawned in my mind at the time.

If you take the time to sincerely answer the questions listed below, I know that your organization will greatly benefit from your application of the insights that you gain. Question number one, what is the purpose of your business? Question number two, is your business merely in business to make a lot of money? Question three, What is the purpose of accumulating large amounts of money if you don’t have the time to spend it on the things that you want to? Question number four. Why are you willing to exchange 40 to 60 hours per week minimum during the best portions of your life?

Why are you willing to invest the youth of your life into creating a business in the pursuit of money that you won’t be able to enjoy spending because you’ll be working in a business? Step five, question five. With a precision focus and intensity, write down the purpose of why you are earning money, and make sure that your business never deviates from this purpose. Now here’s an example of what not to do. When I started DJ Connection, I started it because I wanted to become a millionaire by age 30, with everything else, you know, aside. It was like, I would be willing to do anything it took to become a millionaire before the age of 30.

My goal was to become a millionaire before the age of 30 and to hire my dad. I did both of those things, but at what point cost, at what trade -off. If I could do it all over again, there’d be a lot of things I would do differently. I was willing to exchange all my time, all my money, all my health, all my relationships, and everything for the achievement of that goal. But after I thought about it, five years plus into the process, I determined that the reason why I wanted to earn a million dollars is so that I would not be poor, and so that I could enjoy living life to the fullest with my wife, my friends, and my family. As DJ Connection kept growing and growing, I kept realizing that I was having less and less free time to spend with my wife, my kids, and the people that I cared about.

As the business grew and the results continued to cause more events to happen, to occur. It’s like when you do one great event, then someone tells somebody else and then you have more referrals and more events and to keep up with the events and to not tell people no, I started buying more equipment and then to not tell people no, I started buying more equipment and hiring more people and then eventually, I recognized that I never really wanted to grow a massive team like it is today. If I could have done it all over again, what I would have done is I would have grown DJ Connection to a point where it would have been me and probably four dudes. And that’s all I would have done is just grown the business because I could have hit all my financial freedom goals and still kept DJing and would have just kept it that size. Because to me, the reason why I started the DJ business is because I love DJing and I wanted to create time, freedom and financial freedom. And looking back on it, I had already achieved that goal when I was like 22.

But I couldn’t stop there. I couldn’t, I felt bad about saying no to people who wanted me to book them, who wanted to book us for their wedding. I felt bad when people would call about an event in June and I was booked out. I felt bad that I couldn’t do it. I felt bad like, God, that person’s wedding is going to be crappy if we can’t DJ for them. Because I’ve been to a lot of weddings and I’ve seen a lot of weddings.

DJs. And so I kept just saying yes. And then I had to buy more equipment and train more guys. And the cycle just kept happening. And the more we were wowing customers, the more they would tell their friends. And it was this cycle of growth that I didn’t want.

As the business grew, I kept winning awards. And then more referrals came in. I began noticing that I didn’t have time to celebrate New Year’s Eve with my wife because I was DJing somebody else’s New Year’s Eve party. I began noticing that I hadn’t looked up and seen a full moon since 1999 until my three -year -old daughter, Havana, pointed up at the sky and told me that her imaginary friend, Mooney, was out tonight. It took me six years of super intense business operations to understand that the purpose, my purpose, for running a business was not to create 50 jobs for local Tulsans. It was not to enrich the community.

It was not to create a culture. It was to create time and financial freedom for myself. And I wish I would have figured that out sooner. My purpose for running that business was to enjoy a high standard of living with the people that I love so that I could afford to do things that I couldn’t do as a kid. The purpose of the business was for me to build a business that would create time, freedom and financial freedom for myself. And somehow I was creating time, freedom and financial freedom for my employees, but not for myself.

Question number six, what does your business do in a great way? If you can’t be the best at what your business is doing, I recommend not doing it. Nothing stinks more than finishing fourth place at every basketball tournament and 18th place in your industry every year. Question number seven, where do your current customers and your target customers live? What town, what country, what city? If your customers live in a particular area of town, it does not make sense to buy advertisements that are targeted to the wrong area of town.

You need to advertise to your ideal and likely buyers. In the wedding business, it’s just brides. Grooms never book weddings. Fathers of the bride never book weddings. It’s just brides. Brides and brides -to -be, that’s all.

you should be focusing on. If you’re running ads to promote your DJ company, all you need to do is run ads targeted at, you guessed it, brides and brides -to -be. Find out the age of the average bride and bride -to -be and run ads to them. Find out where they live. Find out where the people with the income live. There’s a certain amount of income you need in order to afford to hire a DJ.

On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, hiring a DJ is not very It’s more of a want than a need. And the kind of people that can afford to hire a DJ live in nicer homes. So only run ads in parts of town that are focused on women who live in the parts of town where the money is. Question number eight, what forms of literature do your customers read? If you’re marketing to an affluent crowd who’s fond of reading only Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily type literature, then all the advertising you’re spending on bottom tier local newspapers is wasted money. Thus, I would highly encourage you to only advertise in the forms of literature that your customers read, regardless of what propaganda and information the local magazine sales force shows up and tells you.

Question number nine, what television programs do your customers watch? What YouTube channels do they watch? Where do they spend their time? What social media are they on? Are they on Pinterest? Are they on Instagram?

Are they on Facebook? Where are your ideal and likely buyers spending their time and advertise there? Question number 10, where do your customers shop? Think about that. Specifically, what stores do they go to? If you’re starting a wedding business, it’s very important that you market to the bridal stores and the stores that sell engagement rings.

Don’t market your business and your products and services to places where your ideal and likely buyers don’t shop. Question number 11. Where do your customers go to look for your products or services? Do they go to Google? YouTube? Where do they go to search and make sure that you are there?

Question number 12. Do you have a system in place for tracking where your business comes from? And do you use it on every customer every time? Just to clarify here, if you only ask your customers how they heard about you 10 % of the time, then you do not have a systematic approach in place or in your mind. You must ask every customer how he or she heard about your business every time. This gives you the power over your marketing dollars and will allow you to increase your spending on the advertising that actually works while cutting the advertising that drains money from you like that one guy at work who’s always trying to borrow a $5 bill, right?

Question number 13, do you have a system in place for documenting how your employees are supposed to answer the business phone? My friend, I used to run DJ Connection without sales scripts. That was crazy. When I sold the company, the whole thing was scripted. I mean, you could be an idiot and answer the phone and as long as you just follow the script, you could set appointments. And that’s what kind of business you want to build.

You want to build a business that’s so good that an idiot could run it because eventually someday an idiot will run it, right? And you want to record those calls. Currently, as of the time of this recording in 2019, I recommend Clarity Voice. C -L -A -R -I -T -Y. Clarity Voice. Clarity Voice is an awesome program because it allows you to record the phone calls of your customers engaging with your employees.

That way you know whether your team is actually following the script or not. Question number 14, when someone calls you to ask you the proverbial, how much do you charge for your service? Do you have a plan in place to deal with that question? Because people always ask you on the first call. Thank you for calling DJ Connection, how can I help you? They say, how much do you guys charge?

Thank you for calling DJ Connection, how can I help you? I was just curious, how much do you guys charge? Thank you for calling DJ Connection, how can I help make your day great? Yeah, I was curious, how much do you guys charge? They ask it every day. every single time.

It’s almost every time. So you have to have a plan in place to deal with that question. Question number 15 in honor of Tim Tebow. Have you incorporated humor into the script? Anecdotes, descriptions, humor, and nuances to your sales presentation? Because if you don’t do that, you seem like a robot.

And that humor and those nuances and those pauses, those intentional stutters, they make it seem like the other person on the phone is not reading. I’ve done it the wrong way, and I’ve done it the right way, and I will tell you, if you’re going to make a systematic business, you’ve got to have scripts in place, but they also need to sound like you’re not reading a script. In Steve Martin’s book, Steve Martin, by the way, the legendary comedian, actor, book writer, the film writer, Steve Martin, the comedian, he writes, in his legendary autobiography entitled Born Standing Up. He writes in great detail about how he took the better part of a decade to create a comedy routine that was consistently funny each time he delivered it. He then goes on to explain how he would ad -lib little nuances to adjust to the unique crowd and the atmosphere of each venue. But the point is he never deviated from his core routine because he was disciplined enough to track people’s reactions to its delivery early on in his career.

This built his confidence and the overall quality and the humor of his routine was refined into a place where it became a masterpiece over time. My friends, the reality is that your people will never be more committed to your business than you are. And thus you are going to deal with more rejections to your initial presentations than they ever will. So take the time out now to create a sales presentation that you’ve tested on your customers so that your sales people can deliver your presentation with faith and conviction, knowing that it works every time because you’ve tested it. Question number 16. After you’ve revised your sales presentation again, add a call to action.

To the end of your sales presentation, because if you don’t add a call to action to the end of your sales presentation, people are going to end the call by saying, okay, I’ll think about it, I’ll call you back. So I’m asking you today, at the end of your sales presentation, at the end of your first call, do you have a call to action? You must always call the customer to action. You want to call them to set an appointment. So you answer the phone, DJ Connection, how can I help you?

And then you want to ask the customer five rapport building questions, right? You want to script that out. Then script out five needs based questions. Then after you do that, you want to deliver the benefits. And then after you do that, you want to move in for the close or the call to action. My friend, once you have a sales script in place, it’s amazing how much you can grow your company.

You’ve got to have sales systems in place. Question number 17. Question number 17. Have you created and implemented a quality on hold music recording? Most people hate being put on hold. You hate being put on hold.

I hate being put on hold. So for the love of all that is holy, if you put someone on hold, at least get some high quality, interesting, sales generating, humorous, informative, and enjoyable on hold music to make the on hold time bearable. Question number 18. Have you systematically created a daily checklist that will ensure that your office smells good, looks good, feels good, sounds good, and creates the overall first impression that you want your customers to experience when they first encounter your business on the internet via the fax, via your mailers, via your business cards, via email marketing, via anything. You want to make sure that people, when they encounter your business, that the entire process has been thought through and regulated and that is truly turnkey and systematic. My friend, a checklist ensures that anyone can obtain it.

results needed and not just you. And that is the beauty of building systems. I’ll never forget that moment in 2005 when I came back from a refreshing one -week vacation with my wife, Bird, I call her Bird, and my daughter, Havana, my daughter, only to discover that one of our DJs had spilled his spitter, which is code language for a plastic McDonald’s cup filled with chewing tobacco spit, on our super plush, super nice upstairs office carpeting. Oh, this made me mad. And thus I went to clean it up, which is a lot like trying to brush a grown man’s teeth while he’s currently chewing. As I proceeded to go…

To the trash, to grab a trash bag, I opened the trash container, only to discover a swarm of fruit flies was waiting for me. As soon as I opened the container, they came out with reckless abandon, like a biblical plague of locusts. They were furiously buzzing everywhere. Oh, I was super mad. So I went down to the garage to get all the cleaning supplies I needed. And once I entered the garage, I found that the trash had not been taken out for an entire week, and that it was filled with fast food containers, chewing tobacco, half -eaten fruit, and funk.

Man, I was irate. I would have killed one of those dirty trash creating DJs if it were legal. But luckily I chose instead to use a new calming method. cursing and yelling at no one in particular to calm myself down. After I finished the one hour process of cleaning up their funk, I hopped into the DJ van only to discover that the van was being used as a mobile trash container and it was literally filled with Red Bull, cans of beer, cans of everything, fast food containers, spitters, magazines, wrappers, napkins, and a small landfill of crap. Just riding this is irritating me.

But the point was, everything was dirty all the time because I had never taken the time to write down a daily checklist. of what my expectations were, and who was supposed to make these expectations reality. I just thought that out of a basic basic sense of decency, that they would take out the trash. during their entire week while I was gone. I just figured that with eight guys, one of them would have the initiative to take out the trash. But when I asked them about it, everyone just said, oh, we weren’t sure who was supposed to do that.

And although I was mad, I have since determined that most employees in good economic times will only do what they have to do. Thus, you cannot expect your people to do anything without putting it on a checklist that is followed up on on a daily basis. You have to have a clear outline of what you expect them to do, and then whoever their manager is has to inspect what he expects. If you expect somebody to do something, you have to inspect it. Whatever you inspect, you’re going to find that you can expect. But if you do not inspect it, if you don’t follow up, nothing gets done.

Question number 19. Have you sat down and created the pre -written emails needed to deal with every conceivable customer service related sales scenario? Doing this will save your sales team, your business, and your brain countless amounts of time and frustration. I’m telling you, you have to do this now. if not sooner. To improve the accuracy of the information that you are sending out about your products or services and to save your salespeople countless hours of time, this must be a priority to you.

You should have pre -written emails to clarify the following and more. Directions to your office, a customer expectation list, a customer service guarantee, a review of your products, benefits, and unique qualities, a follow -up email, a receipt email, A frequently asked questions email. All of those things must be pre -written. Question 20. Are you thinking like a Walgreens? My friend, you must think like a Walgreens because Walgreens actually puts promotions and discounts on their receipts.

Whenever you get a receipt from Walgreens, they’re giving you a coupon or a discount, or at least at the time of this recording they are. So when you get a receipt from Walgreens on it, it says, hey, come back tomorrow and save 10 % off on towels or something. And what happens is when you have a receipt that now serves as a discount as a as a coupon, there’s an incentive to come back and want to do business with that business. Again, ask yourself, what would Walgreens do? What would Victoria’s Secret do here?

What would Bed Bath & Beyond do? These companies are geniuses with with generating repeat customers and referral business. And Mentally marinate on what you can do today to drive repeat business via the vehicle of sales receipts and contracts. Question number 21. Have you created a database software that your salespeople and office staff use to keep track of every customer every time? My friend, if you’re like most small business owners, you know all of your customers personally.

You are the lord of your sales dominion and you take pride in knowing everything about every one of your customers. And this is not cool because if you get hit by a bus and find yourself in a coma, nobody who’s running the business will know what to do. No one will know the customer’s names. No one will know their phone numbers. No one will know their email addresses. No one will know how they heard about you.

Nobody’s going to know what they want. Nobody’s going to know. And if your surviving spouse is having to run a company where there’s no data collected, it’s brutal. Or let’s say you don’t get hit by a bus. Let’s just say you have a sick day and you can’t come into work because you’re sick. Well, no one’s going to know what to do.

Or let’s say you have a new employee and they get a call from a customer and they say, thank you for calling DJ Connection. And if you don’t have a system or a database in place, you won’t be able to find the information to answer the question of your current customer. You’ve got to have a unified database. Now don’t over spiritualize it. I’ve had companies where I’ve just used spreadsheets at first. I’ve had companies where I’ve used a Um, Microsoft paint, as I mentioned earlier, that’s the database I used.

I just would save the file based upon the bride or groom’s name. And that’s how we did it. Question number 22. Do you have. a product or service delivery checklist to ensure high quality every time? You basically have to create a checklist that documents everything that you expect your people to deliver to your customer every time and how it is to be done and delivered every time with specific detail every time.

If you do not document your expectations for your product and service delivery, your people will only be able to hit this ambiguous and murky target occasionally. and you will find yourself making previous customers disloyal through the randomness of your inconsistency. People on family vacations generally do not pull off on the interstate highway to experiment with their lunch dollars by spending them at some oddball shabby -looking diner. People look for brands they know, brands that they can expect to be consistent. Even if they’re consistently known for not being the best, as long as they’re consistent, Buyers prefer that. Think about it.

People like to pull over on road trips to go to Subway, McDonald’s. They go to brands that they recognize. People would rather have a consistent B -level hamburger than a local diner that could be great or terrible. People don’t want a dynamic range in the quality from great to terrible. People want consistency. Question 23, do you have a merit -based pay system in place?

When I was building DJ Connection, it took me about a year to determine that some of the best… people in my life, the people I liked the most, the people who interviewed the best, the people that had the most talent, would occasionally mail it in. So we would DJ someone’s wedding, and the disc jockey would not do his best job. And so I had to figure out, how can I make it so that every show is like opening night? So at the time that I ran djconnection . com, what I did was I created a merit -based pay system. And that system kind of went like this.

Essentially if you DJ to show I don’t know. I don’t remember these specific numbers It’s been so long since I put this in play, but I’ll just give you an example Let’s say that the show was $600. So if you DJ for me, I promised you I’d pay you to 25 % a 25 % commission So if the show is $600, you knew you could make at least $150 to DJ that show. However, if you did a great job I would pay you 33%, which meant that instead of making $150 on a $600 show, instead of making $150 on a $600 show, you could make approximately $200. So it was merit -based pay. Now if I found out that you did a bad job, And again, all this was based on surveying the brides and grooms after the wedding.

If I found out you had done a bad job, I would pay you the least amount possible. I think it got down to as low as $8 an hour was the least I would pay you if you did a bad job. So you could go from making $50 a night on the low end to a maximum of $200 on the high end. And over time, I got a little less polarized with my merit -based pay system. But looking back at it, I wish I would have kept it more punitive. I wish I would have kept it so that that way, if you did a bad job, you’d only make eight bucks an hour.

And if you did a great job, you’d make that full 33%. I wish I would have done it that way, but I did not. Over time, I listened to people who were working there at the time who said, man, that guy, he did a bad job, but now he can barely pay his bills. Well, for some reason, I cared. Now with my current businesses, I don’t and I have much more more polarized, merit based pay. I make sure that people make the least amount possible if they put forth the least effort possible the least amount that is still legal, but as low as possible.

Question 24. Do you have money rewards, and penalties in place for every aspect of your job? In order for the system to work, you must mercilessly penalize lateness and religiously praise promptness. If people can’t be on time, they should not be in your organization. Anybody who’s listening to this right now who knows me, you know what I’m talking about.

If you are late for meetings, I don’t even just hate the act. I go as far as hating you. because everybody has to wait on you. And I get it if we’re all late maybe one time or one thing happens. I get it. Nobody’s perfect.

But there are certain people that are chronically late. We had one gentleman that every single morning he would show up to the meeting 10 to 15 minutes late. Every morning. Every morning I’d have to find the guy. Every morning he would do it. Unbelievable, unbelievable.

It is truly unbelievable what happens when you put up with poor performers. You must celebrate quality like it’s the best thing in the world. And you have to make a big dramatic example out of the people who intentionally and consistently deliver poor performances. It’s called a public hanging, as Jack Welch would call it, the former CEO of GE. Telling people that they should try harder because it is the right thing to do is about as bogus as telling a sophomore in high school that they have to sit in their timeout chair if they don’t behave. If you want your team to see what you value, reward and penalize all behaviors financially.

I believe that one -third, if not more, of all pay should be merit -based pay in any business. If your bookkeeper is saving your company thousands, show him appreciation by offering him a pay raise or a bonus. Not a continual raise, not like you’re saying, hey, you did a good job this week, now I’m raising your wages forever. No, but give him a bonus based on performance. If your HR guy is phenomenal, Give him a bonus every time he finds a new recruit. If your HR guy is underperforming, penalize the crap out of him until he gets better or quits.

Pay everyone with merit -based pay, and you’re covered. will scale the right kind of culture. If you take away merit -based pay, you start having some idiots on board, and that’s some of the mistakes that I made. You start having idiots there, people that are bottom feeders, just showing up to work, doing the least amount possible. If you start guaranteeing everybody high wages, you’re going to find yourself yelling and pleading with lifelong underperformers, who have no intention of changing, they just want to say they do to look good in the meeting. Praise your top people and fire your bottom people.

Repeat as needed with a sense of urgency. Warning, your bottom feeders will get mad, which is good. Question number 25. Do you have an operations manual in place for every aspect of your business? If there is any aspect of your business that only you know how to do, you must make an operations manual to document how you do what you do. and how others need to do this process as well.

Build an entire operations manual detailing how to hire, how to fire, how to train, how to recruit, how to market, how to sell, how to deliver your product, and how to do your favorite moves. I’m telling you, if you don’t document your processes and systems, nobody will do them. Question number 26. Question number 26. Do you have a linear workflow chart that clearly shows from the beginning to end what you want your customers to be treated like and how the overall experience should be choreographed. It’s amazing how there’s certain expectations that we have for our businesses, but we don’t document them.

So let me explain to you how it should have worked at DJ Connection when I was running it at 8900 South Linn Lane. The phone would ring, and someone would answer the phone with enthusiasm, and they would read the script. They’d say something to the effect of, thank you for calling the amazing DJ Connection. This is your super humble disc jockey, Clay Clark. How can I make your day great? That’s what they should be saying when they answer the phone at DJ Connection.

Then they would follow the script. Then they would set an appointment to meet with the potential bride -to -be and her mother, typically, within three days of that call. You want to meet somebody within 72 hours of that first call. Then as soon as we got off the phone, we would send them an email confirmation with a pre -written email with directions to our facility. So we just got off the phone, then we just sent them emailed directions while also giving them verbal directions. Then we would put it in the calendar.

Then on the day of the appointment, we would get ourselves ready. We wanted to have the office pristine and clean. It was a nice executive desk. It was a nice ornate executive desk. It kind of looked like you were, it just was a fancy table, a fancy desk. It was the 8900 South Linn Lane.

Just go on Google and search 8900 South Linn Lane. You’ll see it. That property the bride would pull up to the facility and there was a sign that said welcome to the dj world headquarters When you pulled up a member of my team should greet you at the door. Hey, how’s it going? Come on in when they come on in we offer them a coffee or a cappuccino or some sort of A nice beverage and we’d have them be seated And they’d be seated on nice, ornate wood chairs, and a nice desk would be there. And they would be surrounded by images of weddings and brides, and the 1955 chrome -plated Elvis microphone with a great sales book.

And the ambiance smelled nice. There was always a nice smell of coffee in the air. We had the music playing, the Frank Sinatra, the Nat King Cole. That was the atmosphere. Then when we’d meet with the bride, we’d go through. our 100 -point wedding planning checklist.

We’d go through, you know, what time are your guests going to get there, and what kind of music do you want, and how interactive do you want us to be, and what do you do in your first dance, your father -the -bride dance, the bouquet toss, the garter toss, all those things. They’re all on a checklist. We’d go through all that. We’d go through systemically to figure out what kind of music they liked and didn’t like. How do I their names.

We’d get it all bundled up there. And then we’d show them the packages, clearly define the pricing, go over that again, even though they’d already heard it on the phone. And then we’d ask them which package they wanted to go with. And then after they chose the package, we’d charge them, I think it was $150 for a deposit to reserve the date. And then we would email them a confirmation the following morning before nine in the morning. Then on the week of their wedding, we would call them.

We told the bride, we will call you on the Monday of your wedding. If for some reason you don’t get a call, call us, but we’re gonna be for sure calling you. And we would call them to confirm that their wedding was still happening and to go over all the songs that they wanted to have played at the wedding and to verify they were 100 % crystal clear on what songs they wanted played for their first dance, their father bride dance, their bouquet, their garter toss, those kind of things. And to see what updates had been made to the timeline. Then we would confirm the amount of money owed on the account, and then we would assign it on the schedule so that the disc jockey was assigned to go out to the show. And on the week of the wedding, we’d call the DJ to confirm that he had the wedding on the books, and he should have had it because we already emailed him a confirmation on the day they booked the wedding six months ago, but we’d call him to confirm.

And in the event they couldn’t do the event, or they were out of town, or they moved, or no longer worked for us, we would schedule somebody else. And then we would gather all the songs, license all the songs for their wedding. And then we would assign the DJ a loadout time, a specific time to load up and pick up the gear. So the DJ would be assigned, let’s say, 6 .15 in the morning on Saturday to load up the gear at a specific time. And there was a very detailed checklist we used to load out the DJs to go to the show. And this is how it happened.

I mean, there was systems for everything. There was systems for how to make announcements. There were systems for the scripts. There were systems for the email. There was a system for everything. And that is what I’m talking about.

Step 27, do you have a linear chart called a workflow in your office? Do you have one? Well, if you don’t, you need to get one. And a workflow is nothing but a diagram of your company from left to right, kind of like a timeline that shows how you generate leads. how you call those leads, how you deliver service to those leads, how you follow up to make sure the quality control is good for those leads, how you recruit, how you do your accounting. It’s all on a workflow, on a map.

And if you don’t have that in place, you really need to get one because once you have your workflow documented, you can look at your workflow and identify your biggest limiting factors, your biggest limiting factors. And it is absolutely so important that you identify your biggest limiting factors on a weekly basis to figure out What is the thing that’s holding us back right now? What’s keeping us stuck? And when it’s out of your head and onto a linear workflow, you can have educated, non -emotional conversations about figuring out what you need to do to blow up and to fix those biggest limiting factors. Question 28. Do you have a system that is designed to hold everyone accountable for his or her daily action items and deeds?

For an incredible example of what not to do, we can look at the DJ Connection of 2004. During this time, one of our sales guys racked up a ton of fake commissions that I paid him on because there was a loophole in the system where the guy who was tallying up the commissions to determine what we paid everybody each week was also the guy allowed to put in his own commissions. So a guy would say he sold a lot of stuff that he didn’t actually sell and we would never catch him. because there was no process in place. So I changed it to be where the person who booked the wedding would turn in their commissions to accounting and then accounting would verify that they were in fact correct. And that stopped all of that jackassery.

But before that, I mean, people used to abuse that all the time. Now question 29, do you have a hierarchy chart created that clearly outlines who is in charge of who and what their responsibilities are? For me, writing this hierarchy chart seemed a little tedious and ridiculous at first. We only had 50 DJs at the time, and I had kept wondering what the point of building a management chart was in a small organization. But as I went through it, I noticed that there was no system in place, and through default, everyone felt as though they needed to directly report to me.

And this was frustrating. But as I was making the chart, I started realizing that it would frustrate me if I worked for me. Without someone to report back to, How are my people supposed to know if they were doing a good job or not? Question number 30. Make a place for everything, including the scissors. In 2006, there was one day in particular when I felt a meltdown coming.

Maintenance had not been finished on time, fixing all the karaoke systems from the previous week’s repair list. And thus, four out of the eight of the karaoke systems malfunctioned on the same freaking weekend. Customers were calling in to complain and to talk to the owner, which was not fun. One by one, they were ripping me a new one, and I knew it was 100 % my fault because I was not being hard enough on our underperforming maintenance guy. After being chewed out and verbally assaulted by four consecutive customers who were right, and finding out my email was not working properly either, as luck would have it, the last straw was I couldn’t find my scissors. I don’t remember why I needed the scissors, probably to kill myself, but I do remember that I couldn’t find my freaking scissors, and I was so mad.

I started yelling. I wish I had a more descriptive vocabulary at the time, but I just started screaming. yelling things that I, holy S! What the H is going on with those karaoke systems? And what the H is so freaking hard about repairing some effing karaoke system? Are those guys idiots?

And where the F are my scissors? And for some reason, as soon as I went nuts about not being able to find my scissors, it occurred to me that there was not a place for anything. That night, I stayed up all night reorganizing and labeling everything. I was riding a wave of anger and frustration and I did not want to miss out on this ambitious surge. The next morning when everyone arrived at work they found a neatly organized office and a delirious yet oddly cheerful eccentric boss waiting for them with the good news that everything is now organized.

My friend, your time to label and organize everything is now. Go get some coffee and start tonight. Question 31. Do you have a company culture checklist? You must have mechanisms in place to keep the continuity of your office culture in place as you transition from one employee to the next. Over time, your people will change, but the consistency of your product and service cannot if you want to maintain viability in the marketplace.

At DJConnection . com, our number one export was and is humorous enthusiasm, adaptability, and over -deliverance. That is what we were known for, and that is what people want. If Mr. Sombers shows up, to your wedding and decides to mail it in, people aren’t going to want to hire the company again. Your people must know your company mission statement and they must live it every day. It doesn’t matter whether they know the slogan or not, it matters whether they live it or not.

At DJ Connection, our goal was to make every event something more than just ordinary. We wanted to make every event extraordinary. At your company, you must figure out what you are and you must relentlessly talk about it, celebrate it, and encourage it every day in every way. If your current culture is falling apart or falling short of your mission statement and your ideals, you must work tirelessly to force your reality to conform to your ideal. Question 32. Do you have a previous customer follow -up system?

I repeat, do you have a previous customer follow -up system? Although it might seem obvious for most people, I didn’t have that in place for a while there. So what should happen is after we DJ’d your wedding, we should follow up and thank you. for allowing us to entertain you and to survey you and to make sure you were happy. And I always did that. That part I always did.

But then the next level was, did I follow up with the customer in three months and tell them thank you for their business and to just touch base with them? No. Did I have an email that I sent out to previous customers every three months to thank them or to give them an update or a newsletter of some kind? No. So what happened was I had to work very, very hard for bookings from people that were just clients last weekend. But then over time, clients would forget about us because we did nothing to stay top of mind.

Now what you wanna do with your customer database, according to the book called the, it’s written by the Harvard Business Review, and the book is called The Service Profit Chain. It’s called The Service Profit Chain. And according to that book, You need to break up all your customers into five categories. Five categories. Category number one, and this is the highest category, the highest level a customer can reach, is an apostle. An apostle is the kind of man that followed Jesus Christ around without compensation.

Think about that. What kind of sick freak would follow around somebody with no compensation for years? Right? That’s an apostle. What kind of person would refer you to people just out of the goodness of their heart? No incentive.

They just like referring you. That is an apostle. Now the next level, the second level, this is all in the service profit chain book, by the way. The second level is the loyalist. Now a loyalist is somebody who is very loyal to the brand. They’ll use you over and over again, but they won’t refer you.

And that should be about 80 % of your customers, by the way. It’s just somebody who really likes you, but no matter what you do, they’re not going to recommend your company. They’re not going to recommend their kind of coffee. They’re not going to recommend their favorite movie. They just don’t recommend things. They don’t go out of their way to put their neck out there to recommend a company.

They just recommend you. it. They’ve been burned too many times. They just don’t want to recommend people. All right. Now the third category, this should be no more than about 5 % of your customers, but it is a niche.

That would be people that are mercenaries. These are people that are price focused. All they care about is who has the best deal. They’re going to use your company this week because you have a lower deal, and then the other guy’s company next week because they have a lower deal, and then somebody else’s company the next week because they have a lower deal. They’re not loyal to anybody. They’re just focused on price.

The next category, again, these should not be more than about 5%, these final three categories. You might say, well, that’s 105%. Calm down. It’s going to be different for every company. But the next category is what we would call a You guessed it, hostage. Well, hostage is somebody who has to do business with you, but they don’t want to.

They feel like you’re the only game in town. You’re the only option they have. And even though they don’t like you, they have to use you. And then the final category is a terrorist. This is the kind of person that hates their husband, hates their wife, hates their kids, hates the economy, just hates. And they just hate you too.

And they call to complain a lot. They go off on tangents a lot at businesses. And unfortunately, you have made the decision to provide them service. And now it is going to be hell for you. So after you provide service for somebody, you should sort them in your database in those five categories. And that way, when they call in, you know what kind of person they are, what kind of service you’ve delivered to them in the past, you can know more about it, there’s no reason you should be inviting your terrorists to a VIP customer appreciation event, you should only invite your apostles.

and your loyalists to that event. See, but if you don’t know who loves you and who doesn’t, it’s hard to know who to invite and who not to invite. Now question 33. Do you have a marketing calendar based on the seasonal aspects of your business in place? Do you have that? Do you have a marketing calendar based on the American culture?

I mean, do you send people, are you doing a promotion for Valentine’s Day? Are you doing a promotion for New Year’s Eve? Are you doing a promotion for Christmas? Are you doing a promotion for Thanksgiving? Are you doing a spring special? Are you doing a summer special?

Are you doing a St. Patrick’s Day special? Most large companies do, and most small companies don’t. I would encourage you to have a marketing calendar that makes sense and make sure that you stick with it after you take the time to actually create it. Now, idea number 34, question number 34. Do you have an Armageddon checklist? If you get hit by a bus, who’s in charge?

If they get hit by a bus, who’s in charge? If somebody gets hit by a bus, who’s going to run everything? I mean, how’s your spouse going to handle things? I realize it’s not a fun topic, but I mean, if you die, do you have life insurance? Do you have a plan? Or is everybody who’s surviving effed while you are resting in heavenly peace?

Do you have an Armageddon checklist? Question number 35. Do you have an employee review calendar? It’s so important that you meet your employees like once a month. I recommend them. In my businesses, I pretty much meet everybody once a week.

But if somebody has a problem, an emotional problem, which by the way, a lot of people do, according to the U . S. Chamber of Commerce, a whopping 75 % of employees, according to the U . S. Chamber of Commerce and CBS News, now steal from the workplace, and most do so repeatedly. I mean, according to Inc.

Magazine, over 80 % of employees lie on their resumes. According to the Washington Post, 78 % of men admit to cheating on their partner or spouse. My friend, I mean, you got to have a weekly review. People make poor life decisions and you’ve got to bring them back in. You’ve got to pull the weeds from the garden every week. You’ve got to tend to that garden every week.

Every week. You not me. an employee follow -up review checklist or an employee review time in your calendar would be like driving a car and not looking at the road occasionally. Just hitting the old gas pedal, getting into a conversation and see how it works out. It’s not going to work for you. It’d be like planting a garden and not pulling the weeds.

It’s just not going to work. Now question number 36, do you have a web optimization and web presence calendar? My friend, if you want to be top in Google, you have to have the most reviews and the most content. The most reviews from real clients and the most content. There are four variables that will determine who gets to be top in Google. There are four.

4 ,000. There’s four main ideas. We cover this all in the book Search Engine for Dummies that Bruce Clay wrote. You can read that book. This is all covered. All the things we’re teaching here, that’s all covered in Search Engine for Dummies.

Get that book. Or you can get the book that I wrote called The Start Here Book. It’s an Amazon bestseller. You can download it. And in that book, there’s a chapter called The SEO Manifesto. And in The SEO Manifesto, it explains to you the four variables that control your Google search engine rank.

Variable number one, is your website canonically compliant? When I owned DJ Connection, it was. I don’t know if it is today, because I’m not in charge, but it was. Two, is it mobile compliant? Is your website compliant for mobile devices? Does it load quickly?

Does it load properly? And again, the canonical rules are established by Google, not by me. And they’re documented in Search Engine for Dummies, a nearly 600 -page book. Or you can download the Start Here book and read the about 20 -page SEO, Search Engine Optimization Manifesto. So step number one is what? Your website has to be what?

Google -y. Google -y? What? Has to be Google canonical compliant. Has to be canonically compliant for Google. Move number two.

It has to have what? The most reviews. How do you get reviews? Do a Google search. job. How do you get reviews then?

Ask your happy clients for reviews. You’re gonna get bad reviews by default, but you’ve gotta ask for reviews. Three, move number three. You gotta make sure your site is mobile compliant. And four, whoever has the most content gets to rank the top, gets to be ranked at the top of the Google search engine results. So I’d highly recommend that you take the time to produce content on a daily basis so that your website ranks top in Google.

Now for Google to index a page of content, you really need to have more than 350 words of content per page. That’s what Google declares. I recommend you have a thousand words of content per page because I do search engine optimization for all my companies and it really matters to me and I want to be top in Google and you should be top in Google too. So again, you’ve got to schedule time every day to get a review. Every day to write that content. How many words?

A thousand words of content. You’ve got to have a web optimization calendar in place so that you do the things needed to make your company grow. Now, move number 37. Move number 37. Question number 37 is do you have a company budget? You see, individuals and businesses that operate on a budget spend less.

Bottom line, take the time to determine your annual company budget and cut as needed. Unlike the federal government, who’s fond of simply printing more money whenever they exceed their budget constraints. Big shout outs, by the way, to all the members of the elected office who’ve made that possible. That’s a horrible idea, but I’m glad you guys were able to balance the budget by printing money. How awesome would that be if you had a small business? And every time you ran out of money, you could just print money.

Incredible. And by the way, you can just print money if you’re in government, and then your customers, aka the taxpayers, have to pay back the debt. That just makes zero sense to me. But someday you will have to explain to your spouse, or yourself, or a banker, where all your money is. and you got to have a budget. So make a set budget of your fixed costs.

That’s like your costs that don’t change. Make sure you have your set budget for your fixed costs, right? Your, your rent, your phone bill, your fixed costs. And then you want to have a budget for your variable costs. Maybe that’s labor. Maybe that’s your advertisement spend based on the time of the year.

And you want to make sure you stick within that budget on a consistent basis. It’s so important you do that. Now question number 38. Do you have a customer differentiation program in place? I talked about it earlier. But you just simply have to break down your customers into those five categories.

And those five categories being what an apostle that’s your top 10 % right then you’ve got your loyalists that should be about 80 % of your customers then you’ve got those mercenaries who are focused on low prices that’s all they want is low prices and then those what what what what what it is the Hostages people that have to do business with you, but they don’t want to and then there’s one more category What is it see if you can remember it it is? Terrorists people that hate you and hate their spouse hate America and they want to make the world switch over to this new green deal Where we can’t drive cars or have airplanes and they’re in favor of socialism. That is the kind of people that are terrorists in businesses avoid those people question 39 question 39 Have you created a family time and family vacation calendar? As a small business owner, you oftentimes find yourself working all the time, which is great for business, but bad for business time if your family ends up leaving you, right? So you’ve got to schedule time for what matters. If you don’t schedule time for what matters, then you’re not going to do it.

I mean, you’re going to skip your kids’ games. You’re not going to watch the movie with the kids. You’re not going to have a family night. Like today, I’m recording this today. now I’m recording this but we have family time scheduled tonight at 6 o ‘clock well why is it scheduled because according to Lee Cockrell the man who used to manage Walt Disney World Resorts what gets scheduled gets done that’s right what gets scheduled gets done it is so important to keep that in your mind what gets scheduled gets Gets done. So i’m asking you what’s scheduled in your calendar right now.

Are you scheduling time for your your faith? your family finances fitness Your friendship and your fun. Are you doing that? Are you scheduling time for your faith your family your finances your fitness your friendship and your fun? Because if you don’t do it, I promise by default You will end up skipping something missing something and that very well be could very well could be the lives of your kids. I mean, you could you could just skip you could miss out on all of your kids childhood if you’re not careful as a business owner, because there’s so many demands on you.

There’s so many last minute burning fires, urgent requests. There’s so many things pulling at you. If you’re not intentional with your time, you will lose by default. Chapter nine, the Monday morning meetings. Well, at DJ Connection, the one thing that I’ve heard most of our former employees praise me the most about or celebrate the most was our Monday morning meetings. Because these meetings happened every single Monday morning, and they were a time where we would talk about the best things that happened that week and the worst things that happened that week.

So we’d start off with the good stuff. This is the part of the Monday morning meeting where we spend our time discussing the positive things that were happening at DJ Connection at the time and what practical steps we needed to take to seize the opportunities at the time. As an example, DJ Josh would say, this weekend I worked with Kitty Dishman over at Golf Club of Oklahoma and she told me that she loves us. She also told me that they are having a membership appreciation party in the spring, and we really need to jump on this thing like Apache. And so then we would put it on the to -do list, and we would call her and book the event for the low, low price of free, thus cementing our relationship with Kitty Dishman and the Golf Club of Oklahoma. The second thing we covered on the agenda was the abominations.

We would cover the abominations. Now, the abominations, this was the part of the Monday morning meeting where we devoted this time to an in -depth exploration into what went wrong during the previous week, who was to blame for it, and how we could fix it with practical, applicable steps. This part of our meeting was nearly always devoted to chastising the same people for being late each week. to chewing out the same production people for screwing up yet again. Much of this portion of our agenda was also spent exploring who stole someone else’s leads and what we could do to fix it. Generic and weak general comments like, hey, I am not wanting to call anyone out here, but someone has been taking my leads were always available in abundance at these meetings.

Then someone would inevitably respond with, I will freaking kick your… Don’t accuse me of stealing your leads, you… At this point in time, I completely was oblivious to the fact that the key to reducing this portion of our weekly agenda had nothing to do with increasing my intensity or increasing the volume at which I chastise people who were perpetually late. The key to reducing our weekly abominations was only going to come through reducing the number of underperforming, excuse -making morons that we had present at our meeting each week. For whatever reason, I just could not figure it out that I needed to fire the idiots. I don’t understand why it took me so long.

Now I’m 38. I look back at it and go what the crap was I thinking now the next part of our weekly Monday morning meeting was the motivational topic each week I would spend hours and hours reading motivational and business -related management books in an attempt to motivate our underperformers and each week the motivational topic would always inspire one underperformer for a week for a week before they would be up to their traditional, underperforming, habitual ways. It was frustrating as crap for me to see grown men desperately searching and yearning for something to inspire and motivate them each week. I would often read a motivational quote from somebody like Zig Ziglar, where he would say, people often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.

And thus, I prepared my weekly motivational topics with a sense of religious duty. I felt then, And I still feel now that a leader’s number one job is to set the vision and to relentlessly make sure that the organization is always working toward the goals associated with the vision. Essentially working each week to make sure that the organization was getting closer to the goal instead of further away. At the time, DJ Connection was averaging around $17 ,000 to $21 ,000 per week in sales, which was good. However, this $21 ,000 per week in sales was divided by Aaron, Nate, Josh, Achilles, Jason, Keith, and myself, which was not good. To put this in perspective, each sales guy was averaging a super week sauce $3 ,000 per week in sales.

Thus, we were each averaging merely $300 per week in commission payouts. Basically, they were coming to work to have fun, but they were not coming to work to get paid. And because one half of our sales team was making an additional $600 per week just DJing on the weekends, some of them were actually content with their underperformance. At the time, the only three guys who were consistently performing at a high level were people I shall not name, but let’s just say three people. were performing.

Everybody else just wanted to hang out. So in my attempt to improve our sales totals and to compensate for everyone else’s lack of performance, I just kept hiring additional quasi competent people, instead of just rewarding top people and removing all the bottom people. And with each new hire I brought on, I further demotivated the top performers, because their pie of inbound sales calls was being continually divided into smaller and smaller pieces. I had not yet read Jack Welch’s philosophy on differentiation. The concept of hiring A -player and B -player employees was completely foreign to me at the time, so I just kept trying to fill the gaping holes by hiring mediocre employees by bringing on additional mediocre employees. It was horrible!

But to save you the headache, let me briefly explain the belief system behind Jack Welch and his system of differentiation. Step 1. Review your employees and determine your top 20%. Your middle 70%. and your bottom 10 % in terms of their actual performance. Not based upon their personalities and how funny they are, but their actual performance.

Not how much you like them or who you’re related to, but their actual performance. Step two, reward your top 20 % by publicly praising your A players with bonuses, love, and various rewards. Step three, manage your middle 70 % with extreme caution, and care as you will quickly find that most of your organization is comprised of this middle 70 % of employees which Jack Welch calls B players. Work tirelessly to be candid with your B players about where they can stand in your company, where they are in your company, where they stand overall in your company, and how they can improve to become a players. Step four, the hard part, you must remove the bottom 10 % of your staff, your C players annually, and if not, at least every six months.

Essentially, this system will allow you to reward your top people and to remove your bottom people. It works great as long as you are candid with people about where they stand in your company. And this is the hard part. You see, nobody likes firing anyone unless you are a real sick freak. However, you owe it to yourself, to your organization, and to your customers to mercilessly, mercilessly, it’s easy for me to say, mercilessly, mercilessly, remove the bottom 10 % of your team who consistently and knowingly underperform. But if it is any consolation to you, if you decide that you simply do not have it in you to fire anyone, you just wait a few months and your customers will fire you, thus making it easier for you.

And now an unbiased voice of reason from one of our former DJs at the time, Mr. David Reese, who I just ran into recently at a local supplement store. David DJed for us for years, and he was a great, great member of the team. And this is what David described his experience working with DJ Connection as like. He said, Ingenuity. Clay is and has always been quick to create solutions where no solution is apparent. If a necessary piece of equipment were missing from his setup at a wedding reception, he would never, even for a moment, be heard saying the show must be delayed or downscaled.

He would fashion a light trussing rod with his bare hands using only a roll of aluminum foil and a stick of spearmint chewing gum, and he probably has, if that was required to keep the party rocking. I’ve been in the passenger seat of a great painted Chevy Astrovan to witness Clay drive seven hours from Tulsa to Texas to host an Arbonne International Mercedes presentation. Afterward, we drove nonstop back to Tulsa overnight on a strict diet of bananas, strawberry yogurt, and KC and JoJo audio listening pleasure. Three hours later, he was arriving at the bridal fair to wow the brides -to -be for another eight hours straight. That’s how I remember him.

A whirlwind of incredible, unmatched, unyielding, unbridled determination, ingenuity, and funk. My friend, as I look back on it, I think that the time of growth at DJ Connection was the most frustrating for me. I got so tired of dealing with the same weak alibi generating mama’s boy, over coddled, I need a day off because today’s my birthday, and I have carpal tunnel syndrome, and I have anxiety, excuses, and the same bearers of these alibis each week. It really irritated me knowing that certain people would show up late every day, literally every day, with a new excuse for being late, while certain people would show up 15 minutes early every day because it was the right thing to do. It made me mad that certain people with often biblical biblical biblical from the Bible, biblical sounding names and self -proclaimed biblical beliefs, thought that there was nothing wrong with smoking pot on a consistent basis. And it really irritated me that only a few people on our team ever showed any signs of productivity. Here I had worked tirelessly for eight years to build a large company.

And now the company was at its peak of its power. its profitability, and its size, and I was finding myself hating my job. Each week, I grew more and more jaded by the abominations of the underperformers. And if I weren’t such a management novice at the time, I would have been firing people left and right. Instead, I was just growing more and more frustrated while carefully and diligently developing more idiots. Eventually, when the accumulative incompetence had reached an intolerable level, I would generally go off on the worst offenders.

I would usually list their abominations in a caustic way before firing them. I was known to say things like, hey, John, I appreciate you showing up late for the ninth consecutive day. I appreciate you being a slacker and I appreciate you ruining someone’s event because you were too lazy to do your job. But hey, congratulations, you’re fired, you freaking idiot. I used to like firing people that way, and I actually do like firing people that way today. I mean, if somebody is consistently not hitting their deadlines, and they don’t show up to work on time, and they are doing weird stuff, I don’t understand how somebody thinks that they’re in my good graces.

I don’t understand how somebody could somehow think that it’s not going to end that way. And so sometimes I have to do a public hanging, where I fire somebody in a public way so that way everybody knows who was fired and why they were fired. So all in less than six months time, our family vehicle, a green Ford Explorer, had been completely destroyed by a moron DJ with the last name of North, who was fond of breaking the handles to both the driver’s side and the passenger side doors when he was not ripping knobs off of the radio. breaking the windshield, stealing coworkers’ jackets, or taking my credit cards. And you out there listening, if your last name is North, and you know who you are, I don’t know how you deal with yourself. But think about that.

There’s certain people that just do stupid stuff. I drove the vehicle every single weekend and never broke it, never had a problem with it, but this moron broke both doors to our car. We’d driven that car for a long time. I let him borrow it one time and he breaks the handle. What a freaking idiot. I had to fine one employee $20 per day.

due to his lateness for over 60 % of his scheduled work days. One guy, I had to find one guy, think about that, I had to find one guy. $20 per day due to his own lateness for over 60 % of his scheduled work days. Our new riding lawn mowers that we had purchased to mow our five acre property at 8900 South Lim Lane had been ruined by disc jockeys who we’d hired to mow our lawn on the weekends. And apparently they were unaware that a mower can’t run over tree stumps. Freaking idiots.

DJ Connection was routinely averaging over 60 events per week. And there were certain people on my team that just, for whatever reason, couldn’t keep up with it. In fact, my brother -in -law at one point referred me to a guy, we’ll call him Lloyd, who had entirely destroyed my relationship with five wedding vendors because he used my reputation and his association with me to start a web development company. And he used my name and my reputation to get deposits from people. And then once those people paid him deposits to help them with their website, he would go from wedding vendor to wedding vendor, simply charging them a fee and then not delivering on what he promised. Unbelievable how he was hurting my reputation, but for him, it’s okay.

And if you go on Facebook, he’s divorced twice. Why? Because he’s an idiot. And if you’re out there listening, and you’re saying, well, Clay, I don’t know why you would judge people. Or if you’re listening right now, and you used to work for me, and you said, I only had one affair with a married woman. Listen, I guard my reputation with my life.

All right? So if you are a member of my team, and you are failing to hit the expectations, and you are hurting my reputation, I view it as though you’re killing my golden goose. I don’t forgive people. somebody who hurts my reputation. I mean, in a spiritual sense, I say, I forgive you, but I won’t forget. No, no, I won’t forget.

Um, Robert Green, the bestselling author of the 48 laws of power once wrote, do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip. It is your life’s artwork and you must craft it, hone it and display it with the care of an artist. And I would even go, um, deeper than that. I would even say that I would go deeper about your reputation. I would go deeper. And if you haven’t read 48 Laws of Power, I would encourage you to read it because it is so important for you to understand how people go out there and try to manipulate you and take advantage of you.

And that book will help you to vaccinate yourself against that manipulation that’s out there. Robert Green. wrote, he said in the book 48 Laws of Power. He says, Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone, you can intimidate and win. Once it slips, however, you are vulnerable and will be attacked on all sides.

Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. It really, really hurt the reputation of our business for that moron who worked for me to go out there and screw up people’s websites. But that’s what he did. And at this time in our business, we also had a large female, like a linebacker -sized female, who pretended to fall down in front of our 8900 Southland Lane office while picking up her custom -made CDs for a presentation at an Arbonne event. It was a multi -level at the time.

And then she fell down. Oh, I hurt myself. And she tried to sue me because She said that she was injured. She hurt herself while falling in front of my house. Incredible. At this time, I also found out that a family member referred me to hire a disc jockey who he knew to be a full -time drug dealer.

What in the world? At this time, I was also named as Oklahoma’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year by the United States Small Business Administration. At this time, we had one of our former DJs attempt to break into our DJ office and family home. And thus, I went to the DJ gun store and bought myself a DJ handgun and enrolled in a DJ gun class to protect myself from exciting individuals such as this idiot. At this time, our aerobic septic system that kept the crap out of our drinking water stopped functioning.

Thus, I had the privilege of spending thousands of dollars repairing it. At this time, the daily dramas in the office related to DJs oversleeping, over drinking, over pot smoking, and just being overly moronic grew to Jerry Springer -esque proportions. At this time, I was also named by the Oklahoma Magazine as one of the top 40 under 40 entrepreneurs. As the awards kept rolling in and the frustrations mounted, Vanessa was now outwardly stating that she hated many of our disc jockeys. and she couldn’t stand to see them taking their smoke breaks outside of our house anymore. She was tired of their constant dip spitting, their constant lateness, and my constant need to compensate for their lack of effort with additional effort on my part.

You see, DJ Connection at this time was being run by idiots. We had so many idiots. I didn’t know the under, I didn’t understand the importance that people change seldom. I should not have hired B and C level character people. Vanessa knew that a leader was supposed to always do more than than he expected from his people. Yet she also knew that a leader had to be tough and willing to fire those that knowingly and consistently underperformed.

That was hard for me. I mean, I knew that I needed to fire people that knowingly and consistently underperformed, but I felt bad for them. I wanted to fix them. I wanted to help them. Vanessa was frustrated with the DJs, but I think inside she was honestly more frustrated with me because I was too much of a weak boss to reward our top people and remove our bottom people with ruthless, pragmatism. In fact, I was ashamed to say that I did not literally even know what being pragmatic meant at the time.

I didn’t know what it meant to be pragmatic. All I knew was that I was working every night of the week, during every anniversary, during nearly every holiday, except for Christmas Day, and that my life was being held hostage by a bunch of 20 -year -old men who desperately needed a drill sergeant boss instead of a boss who was overly concerned with not wanting to offend anyone. I was seriously one of the weakest bosses in the world. Guys would call in sick, guys would show up late, and no matter what they did, I would forgive them for it because I didn’t want to offend anyone, and I would just try to talk to them about it. Thus, to solve the problems associated with the underperformers, I launched Operation Krispy Kreme. My logic behind undertaking this big, hairy, audacious goal was to keep our guys occupied in a campaign that would bring them increased revenue.

They were now all making $1 ,000 per week at the average age of 24 years old. I mean, guys are making $50 ,000 a year, but they were complaining. They were being dysfunctional. They were having issues. So basically, the plan called for our top people to bring donuts to the offices of all of our major company referrals, all of our referral sources, all the wedding venues, all the ring stores, all the jewelry stores, any bridal store, any place that referred us business. I wanted our top DJs out there talking to those top vendors all the time, so they had no time to sit around and complain.

And it worked. Each day, DJ Connection would spend nearly $50 on donuts, and the bookings just kept pouring in. The faster the calls came in, the more our systems or lack of systems was tested. You see, at this point, every call that came in to our phone number, 918 -481 -2010. Every call that came in to DJConnection . com.

Every call that came in requesting a top DJ. Every call that came in looking for the best DJ in town. Every call coming in looking for the best wedding DJ came into our single landline, and the phone number was 918 -481 -2010. And we called that line the Moneyline. And thus, when the Moneyline rang, we knew bookings were waiting for us. During this time, the Moneyline never quit ringing, which kept our DJs engaged.

And this temporarily improved the overall morale and level of productivity from our salespeople. The only problem with this system was that every booking and every appointment was set had to be manually entered into a day timer. And then after that, after the actual deposit was paid, we had to manually enter in a confirmation into the system. Thus, I was now working at 4 a . m. every day.

I was getting to work at 4 a . m. every day and ending every workday at 7 p . m. Literally every day. I was killing myself through poor eating habits and sleep deprivation while simultaneously working tirelessly at killing my marriage through neglect.

Luckily, Vanessa is the most tolerant and supportive wife ever. DJ Connection was now at a breaking point because I was at my breaking point. We needed systems that worked without my direct supervision. We needed to break down the DJ Connection workflow into easily duplicatable processes that were assigned to render an incredible customer service experience. and DJ experience every time. The only problem was that I did not know what a workflow was, and I did not know that I needed one.

My friend Thomas Edison once wrote, knowledge without application is meaningless. Think about this. Don’t allow this chapter to become more meaningless and empty than any parenting advice offered by Britney Spears. Thus, answer the following self -analyzing questions to make good use out of this chapter. Who is the weakest manager that you have worked for in your life, and why? Question two, what makes this manager so weak?

Three, Who is the strongest manager that you’ve ever worked with? why? 4. What makes this manager such a strong manager? 5. Are you a weak manager or leader? I know I was. 6. Make a list of the A, B, and C players in your organization, business, or family.

Whatever is the most applicable. Your top 20 % of performers? Your middle 70 % of performers? Your bottom 10 % of performers? Are you willing to reward your top people and get rid of your bottom people to improve your organization? Question number seven.

Are you willing to reward your top people and to get rid of your bottom people to improve your organization? Question number eight. If you were going to implement the differentiation system or management system tomorrow, what would be your first step? Question number nine. Question number nine. Do you have a product or service that you would offer or that you will offer in the future reduced down to a system that is an easily duplicatable process?

Let me rephrase the question a little differently or better. Is the service or product that you’re offering to the world, is it repeatable? Is it duplicatable? Because if not, you can’t create time freedom. If you make custom handmade swords for a living, you can’t make time or financial freedom. You can make a lot of swords and you could create financial freedom, but you couldn’t create time freedom.

So I’d ask you again, is the product or service that you’re creating, is it possible in that industry to even create time and financial freedom? And maybe your goal is to not create time and financial freedom, time freedom. Maybe you just want to create financial freedom. That’s great. But if you want to create time and financial freedom, you must create a business model that is completely independent upon you and your unique skills. Chapter 10 The Exodus

The stress on us. Disclosure statements. My son goes blind. And fun times with employees who have biblical names. Again, fun times with employees who have biblical names. Life lesson.

When it rains, it pours. And then a huge chasm in the earth might just open up and swallow you whole. But God is in control. To say that 2007 was a tough year would be similar to someone saying that Roseanne Barr was slightly obnoxious. The year was horrible. As we rolled into 2007, I was still legally tied to a person that we’ll call, it was a partner, let’s call him Beelzebub.

Beelzebub. And thus, every day seemed to bring another profit -eating incident caused by Beelzebub. Whether it was the party company’s van blowing up because the manager of the company did not check the van’s oil for 11 ,000 miles, or the evil former partner’s refusal to get the tags on the van registered, which sent me to court, something bad was always happening. Difficulty also ensued because Jason Bailey had now been promoted to manager, aka zookeeper of DJ Connection, without being given the ability to discipline the meanest monkeys. This was a dumb move on my part, and Jason, I’m sorry, which ultimately resulted in disciplining people from afar. Somehow, my partnership with Beelzebub had forced me to become the lethal enforcer of all of our policies at DJ Connection because I always had to leave for meetings.

I never got a chance to celebrate the successes that the guys were having in the office. Jason became the good cop and I became the bad cop. Meanwhile, our son Aubrey was diagnosed with blindness, which we will get to in a moment. And our top sales guy went from acting like a choir boy to acting like he was a male performer. or a pimp. This guy used to wear a suit every day, although our dress code only required everyone to wear a tie.

Also used to show up to work early to get a head start and to stay late all the time to help. Now he was smoking pot, he was crying at work, he was having people pull guns on him at his house. He was fighting with employees. He was accidentally knocking over co -workers’ beverages and then yelling at them for putting their drinks on their own desks. He was meeting girls on MySpace, proposing to them, and then flying out to New Mexico to spend three days with them to evaluate their sexual compatibility. Then he spent his first three days back at the office demotivating, uninspiring, and distracting his fellow co -workers with his stories of sexual excess.

He was accusing everyone of stealing his leads. He was causing Jason all sorts of grief, and he needed to be fired, which would again test our system’s strength. Meanwhile, the choir boy was busy transforming into a demon. The photography brand I created with, we’ll call him Beelzebub, was generating considerable amounts of revenue and bookings. However, it was headed for a full speed collision course disaster because of the lack of leadership provided by Beelzebub, my former satanic LLC partner. The photography sales team was fired up and they were selling the heck out of wedding packages.

However, they did not have the skills needed to successfully deliver on the promises that they were making because Beelzebub was an experienced photographer who had promised to create a revolutionary training system and workflow as his part of his contribution to the LLC. Apparently, this revolutionary training system and workflow involved groping, fondling, division causing, shirking from all personal responsibilities and wagering on the likelihood of sexual encounters taking place. If this type of behavior is what he meant when he said revolutionary training, it was certainly an understatement. Every day I learned of another party foul that he committed, or another commitment to train, photographer, pay, or somebody he hadn’t paid, or a commitment he had broken, or a promise he had broken. His promises were breaking with the intensity of a New Orleans levy. during the Great Hurricane.

My brain was on the verge of exploding before I found out that our three -and -a -half -month -old son was diagnosed as being completely blind. At a certain point, it started to become comical. I felt like the character from the movie Pure Luck, who has this incredible knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And yet, onward I marched because I was up to my eyeballs and obligations, and quitting was not an option. Jason Bailey and a few members of our team were the only bright spots of the seemingly bleak future. The harder things got, the more these people seemed to become solid people.

Jason and a few other people whose names I shall not mention. Physically, I was getting out of shape. I was emotionally losing my faith in humanity. Mentally, I was overwhelmed. And financially, I was making tremendous amounts of money, but I was hemorrhaging cash to pay the partnership’s ongoing losses. And I was completely spiritually empty.

Now, here is an unbiased voice of sanity from Jason Bailey, who I ultimately sold DJ Connection to. who’s gone on to become a great owner of the company. And he was a very, very good member of the team, an integral part of our success. Jason Bailey writes, I was taking my family to the zoo on my day off, and I needed to go into the office to get to get some things from my desk. So I headed that way. When I arrived, I saw clay on the phone, which wasn’t anything new, because he was always on the phone.

Only this time, he had a different tone with the person on the other end. It turns out he was talking to the phone service agent about our bill. They were supposed to turn on the phone system the day we moved, but they didn’t get it on until two weeks after. So we couldn’t receive phone calls from customers for two weeks. Then when we got the bill, they had billed us for the month before we even moved in. So when I walked in, I hear Clavis yelling, I’m going to come out there and beat your ass in the parking lot unless you get this fixed.

I don’t know how effective it was, but I, I, can say that it worked out. They did get it done with renewed sense of urgency. However, I’m pretty sure that Clay can’t get closer than 500 feet to any of the customer services offices. Well, that was true. I did freak out at that customer service rep, and I did get it done, and that’s usually what happens in my life. I feel like I have to always yell at people to get things done.

It’s amazing to me how often it is that somebody says, I’m going to get something done, but they don’t do it because you don’t do it. yell at them. It’s that follow -up. It’s when someone says, I’ll write the content for your website. Pastor, I’ll update the bios on the website. Boss, I will go ahead and write the content on the website.

I will call the leads. I will do what I’m supposed to do. Hey, boss, don’t worry about it. I will call the leads. But more often than not, they don’t do it. And as most people who know me can attest, I have never been a very religious person.

In fact, I would not have ever gone to church if it was not for my sensational wife, Vanessa. Oh, sure, I’ve gone to church physically, but mentally and spiritually, I’ve never gone to church up to this point until my wife, you know, pushed me to go. Our son, Aubrey Napoleon Hill Clark, was born on April 23rd, 2007. The logic that went into his name is as follows. We named him Aubrey after my wife’s wonderful and inspirational step -grandfather, who is a wonderful human, and we chose Napoleon Hill after the author that changed the course of my life with his practical and applicable book titled Think and Grow Rich.

I was really pushing to name him Marvelous Aubrey Napoleon Hill Clark, but my wife wouldn’t let me get away with it for the same reasons she has not let me decorate our home. When we brought Aubrey home from the hospital, Vanessa and I were immediately excited about this new addition, and we still are. I, as his dad, was very excited about his potential as a professional athlete. After thoroughly inspecting his small man body, I was convinced that he would definitely be playing in the NFL or the NBA within the next 20 years. I was so pumped. When Aubrey was about three months old, the choir boy, employee turned spawn of Satan, started calling Aubrey Scanner.

He called him Scanner because his eyes would dart back and forth. quickly as if scanning a room without ever stopping to focus on anything in particular. He had always checked out perfectly at the doctor’s office, and we just assumed that he was looking at everything. Around the time that Aubrey was about four months old, Vanessa, Havana, and Aubrey flew to Utah to attend a family wedding for her brother, Adam, who was marrying a fun -loving young lady by the name of Sarah. This event was yet another wedding that I could not attend because of my previous commitment to do a wedding for another couple in Dallas at the Castle Hills Country Club. So I was actually in the middle of entertaining a hearty crowd of reception goers and kicking it solo like Han when Vanessa called me on the DJ emergency line.

Just like I answer any other call, ultra -pragmatically and enthusiastically, I said, Vanessa, what’s going on? She said, honey, something is wrong with Aubrey’s eyes. I glanced down at the counter on my CD player to verify how much time I had until I had to switch songs. And then I repeated the question, thinking that I had misunderstood what she said, which I normally do. I said, what, Bert? What did you say?

Vanessa repeated tearfully and urgently. Aunt Catherine, who is a pediatrician, says there is something wrong with Aubrey’s eyes. She says they shouldn’t be moving so much. We need to take him to a doctor right away when I get back. I don’t remember what I said next, but I remember thinking, holy crap, this is not good. Oh, man, I’m going to cry.

Yep, I’m starting to cry. What song am I going to play next? I frantically told Bird, aka my wife, Bird, I know that this is super important, but I will call you right back. I just have to play this next song. I’ll call you right back. Aubrey could not see and Aunt Catherine knew it.

My wife was attending a wedding in Utah with two kids and without me. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be helping this couple celebrate the biggest day of their life. I was missing my brother -in -law’s wedding at the time with his wife. I had to make this show epic. I had to quit crying. I had to get my crap together and get on the microphone to get those people jamming.

And I knew that if we jammed just hard enough, I’d be able to forget about my son’s potential problems for two more hours. And thus, I got on the microphone and got those people on the dance floor with unparalleled conviction, enthusiasm, and yet I still cried between songs. But at DJ Connection, my friend, the show must go on. And so after telling my wife I would call her back, and after really wanting to call her back, I proceeded to DJ the crap out of this event. I made this wedding reception epic. Jam after jam, I kept thinking, what could be wrong?

What song am I going to play next? How could none of the doctors have noticed anything? And then I would step to the mic and say, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ridiculous. Can he see? That’s what I was asking myself. I would say to the audience, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get this conga line going.

To myself, I would say, my son’s blind. I can’t have a blind son. What about the NFL? Does the NBA have any blind players? Maybe coaches? No, there are definitely no blind coaches in the NBA.

Then I would say on the microphone, folks, we’ve got some Stevie Wonder via request coming up next. And then to myself, I would say, if my son is blind, will he be the next Stevie Wonder? Long story short, I won over the crowd, kept people dancing, and the audience loved on the newly married couple. After taking down the equipment, I drove home to Tulsa with the long -haired former pothead DJing and training, who was shadowing me in his Chevy old school blue Tahoe, all the while averaging 12 miles per gallon, which allowed us to appreciate the true splendor of the $3 per gallon gasoline at the time. I apologized to anyone whose ice cap melted as a direct result of the poor gas mileage we were averaging. When my wife returned from Utah, we immediately hit the doctor’s office, the doctor’s circuit.

We first took Aubrey to see his pediatrician, who was stung, and he referred us to another pediatric ophthalmologist. We were then referred to the Dean McGee Eye Institute. Both doctors pragmatically said, your son is blind. Our doctor in South Tulsa just kept repeating, baby is not seeing. As Vanessa and I wept as he said it. I had known in the back of my mind that this might happen, but this was the last response Vanessa had expected.

We had never discussed the possibility of him being unable to see permanently. Vanessa later told me she thought he was just having trouble with the movement of his eyes. She was completely taken off guard. I personally could not get my crap together at this point. Hearing that your son will never see is pretty devastating. At the time, I was operating pretty close to the edge emotionally anyway.

The doctor said, but there are great programs for blind kids. In fact, Sooner Start has a great program. Despite the appeal of working closely with the government bureaucrats on a daily basis, we enrolled in the Sooner Start program and then we cried. When I finished, she started again. We made sure to rotate so that at least one of us was crying at all times. In all sincerity, crying is what we did.

Then I had to return to the office immediately, emotionally beaten down. When Eric asked me what was going on, I told him that I collapsed on my hands and knees and my dad’s accounting office. I could not get my crap together. I cried during the day that I would coach myself out of crying before I began crying again. My wife cried at home while I cried at work. Bawling is what we did.

We did more bawling than I had ever done before for added measure. During our breakdown, I cried so well that I even got my somewhat stoic father to cry because. My life was pretty stressful at the time. I started to develop a sense of urgency about getting things done and about eliminating sources of my repeated frustration immediately because I no longer had the buffer of patience needed to keep me from taking the actions that I should have taken long ago. People on my team who were doing a crappy job, I dealt with immediately because I was so tired of being sick and tired. Because my life was pretty stressful at the time, I started to develop a sense of urgency about getting everything done.

I told my dad and Jason that I had to fire DJ Choir Boy turned Satanic Demon Boy with a Biblical sounding name as soon as possible. I also let my feelings be known 100 % candidly to the manager who was fond of creating 3 -4 days off per week. I called Beelzebub and encouraged him to go to hell. And then the religious people started calling saying that you should go to hell. religious things. Clay, God has a purpose.

We will pray for you. Our thoughts are with you. You can make it through this. And as my doubt mounted with each call, I have always felt that someone was saying that they will pray for you is about the equivalent of, you know, me saying, you know, I know you’re in a rough spot, but I’m going to be thinking about you. Because what that typically means is that. No one’s going to do anything for you.

I mean, honestly, last time you told somebody, I’m going to pray for you. How often did you pray for them? The last time you saw somebody and you said, I’ll be praying for you. How often did you do it? Did you do it every day? If you did, that’s awesome.

And you get a mega point. That’s awesome. You get a mega point. But how often have you told somebody I’ll be praying for you and you didn’t do it? You forgot to do it. Well, when people called me and said they said that they would be praying for me, it did not encourage me.

Now here’s an unbiased voice of sanity from my wife, Vanessa Clark. She said, looking back on the time that Aubrey was diagnosed as blind is surreal. I never quite accepted the diagnosis. Somehow I think that relates to his healing. I’m not quite sure how. I know there is power in words.

I would never say the doctor says he is blind. I chose to say they said he is having trouble seeing. I spoke constantly to Clay about Aubrey being healed and my husband didn’t believe in healings. I think he thought I was crazy. We were both so upset. He chose not to battle me on my beliefs.

I know that I needed that hope. I could not live with the current circumstances, and I refused to. So instead, I went on day by day, taking care of the kids and randomly breaking down, at which point I would have candid conversations with God about healing Aubrey. I constantly proclaimed God’s promises. of healing my son. I read in the Bible when Jesus’s disciples asked him, why was this man born blind?

And Jesus answered from John chapter 9, verses 6 through 7. He was born blind so the power of God could be seen in him. Jesus then proceeded to heal the man. I reminded God what he had said and done, and that he was no respecter of persons. What he had done for that man, he would do for my son. I continued to build my faith that it would happen. Now it was just a matter of time.

My friends, the more they paid for me, the more insincere their prayers felt for me. The more positive emails I got from members of my team, the more I didn’t believe them. And I got an email from a member of our team, DJ Nate Mosley, who sent me an email during his honeymoon that said, your son will see. That made me look up. Who is he to email that? What a jackass.

Was he going to surgically repair my son’s eyes despite the doctor’s irrefutable evidence that nothing could be done? Was he going to use some Christian ninja Jedi moves to heal my little former NBA prospect? No! Nate was not going to heal my son, and I knew that God was not going to heal Aubrey either. If everyone could just leave me alone, I would go on to… I’d be fine.

I could just move on. But no! Because my wife is a genius, Vanessa had an undying belief that Aubrey would see. Maybe she was too upset to deal with what I thought was reality. But she always was talking about how great it was going to be when Aubrey started singing, and what he would think to just start singing out of the blue one day. Initially, I told her about the email I’d received from Nate because it was so offensive to me.

However, one day spurred on from listening to wife talk about Aubrey’s future vision, I told her about Nate’s email. She was on fire. Vanessa immediately grilled me on everything related to the email. When did he send it? How does he know?

Unable to answer any of the questions, I simply told her to call Nate. She did, and this is what she found out. Nate was on his honeymoon, a cruise with his wife, and he had been sleeping in every day until noon. He woke up on a Thursday at 7 a . m. and felt that he needed to pray in tongues, which I know freaked me out and probably freaks out some of our listeners.

When he finished, he felt that Aubrey was going to be healed and that he was supposed to email and tell me. Nate was unable to go back to sleep until he sent the email. My wife was ecstatic. I, on the other hand, was in a state of despair. So I decided that it was time for a stress -free vacation. But before we could go on our road trip to Florida, we had to go to Sam’s Club for food therapy.

You know, where you buy everything in bulk. As most Sam’s Club members can attest, the best day to go to Sam’s Club for inexpensive food therapy is Sunday, a . k . a. Sample Day. Thus, on Sunday, we went, like most Sam’s Club members do.

We walked up and down the aisle scoping for samples. Honey, look, crepes. Oh, yeah, I love crepes. I’ve never had one, but let’s sample three of them. Oh, look, macaroni and little smokies. Let’s sample that, too.

And as we continued sampling, I continued self -medicating with food therapy. In between sampling, I stumbled across a book that yelled out to me, buy me! However, there was a problem. This book was a Christian book, and I disliked Christian books. I attended Oral Roberts University, and so I had seen irrefutable evidence that Richard Roberts and Lindsay Roberts were often insincere, prayer -towel -hawking, hope -selling, phony—I can’t say that word on this show. Thus, I didn’t like the book.

I didn’t like the idea of the book. I didn’t want to read a religious book, but the book that caught my eye was George Foreman’s autobiography called God in My Corner. I stopped for a second and said cautiously and suspiciously, Bert, wait a minute, I want to look at this book. Then I placed the book down and kept walking. Almost immediately, George Foreman’s book taunted me some more. It was now almost screaming at me, buy me, sucka, or I will punch you in the face.

And so I bought the book. Needless to say, the book was compelling to me. I knew about George’s extremely rough early childhood and his life history of being a mean, talented, and intense boxer. Because I am a sports fan, I knew that George Foreman had previously been considered to be one of the meanest fighters on earth. And then once he became a Christian, his reputation changed to become the lovable endorsement character that we all associate with a lean, mean grill machine. I knew this from the beginning. much about George’s story, but I had no idea that he was an outspoken Christian.

A few days later, as my wife Havana, Aubrey, and I drove eastbound in our silver Jeep en route to Florida, I had Vanessa read George’s book out loud to me. And man, did it speak to me. I was astounded to hear about George’s miraculous encounters with God and how it had changed his life. I was amazed to learn that George Foreman had a nephew that had a serious medical condition that had left him in a prolonged coma before he was miraculously healed by God after George had prayed for him. I was completely wowed when I learned that George had quit cold turkey, living his self -admitted terrible lifestyle after God revealed himself to him minutes after he lost a major boxing match. And I almost swerved into oncoming traffic with astonishment when I learned that George is now an active pastor of his own church called the Church of God. Jesus Christ in Houston, Texas.

Who knew the king of the grill machine was a pastor to 100 impoverished inner -city people in Houston? Who knew that the two -time heavyweight champion of the world is an outspoken Christian who is willing to pray for, to witness to, and to love on the poorest of the poor amongst us? I had no idea. I had no idea. I had no idea. And so with some newfound faith, I decided to pray for little Avri.

Shortly after we arrived in Destin, Florida, I started to see what my wife was seeing. This little dude was seeing. Little Aubrey was seeing. I could not believe it. I doubted my belief, but I could not doubt what I was seeing. I was convinced that God would never heal my son, and I wanted to be the guy who goes to church for the coffee.

I wanted to be the guy who goes to church not believing in God. I wanted to be the guy that pointed out that church is just a routine, that God doesn’t actually heal. I wanted to be the person who despised God. church, but, you know, would go every Sunday. I wanted to be a hypocrite, and if God were to heal my son, that would just be too weird. If Aubrey were healed, I’d have to believe.

I’d have to quit pretending to believe in God and his miraculous powers of healing. If Aubrey were healed, I’d have to acknowledge that Richard and Lindsay Roberts, although corrupt, were actually maybe right in their theology. Maybe Lindsay and Richard Roberts weren’t right, but maybe God was right. Maybe Jesus Christ, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, maybe that was correct, but maybe Lindsay and Richard Roberts weren’t correct as maybe they made mistakes like I made mistakes. Maybe they made flaws like I made flaws. Maybe they had issues like I had issues.

Once we returned home, Vanessa called me after meeting with the doctor who had previously declared that our son was blind. And I was sure that he would say that we were just drinking too much Christian Kool -Aid. as a result of reading this book. I knew he would tell us that we were ultimately wanting Aubrey to see so much that we were now unwilling to deal with the harsh realities. We were actually making up stories subconsciously about his seeing. I knew that the doctor was going to tell us politely that we were both making up a bunch of crap and that we were backing this crap up with convenient evidence.

And this is exactly what the doctor did not say. The doctor validated what my wife had believed all along. Our son, Aubrey, had been healed without medical intervention, a . k . a. we had just benefited from the hand of God, also known as we had experienced a miracle.

Ladies and gentlemen, customers, friends, readers, neighbors, family, people that hate me, good natured people of importance. Our son had been unmistakably healed by someone other than a doctor. God did what medicine could not. And I no longer have a blind son. our son, Aubrey Napoleon Hill, can see. For me, this seeing equaled my believing.

And I began seeing that all of the tough situations I was going through were really not that tough when compared to the circumstances being faced by those fathers living in America right now with blind sons, with handicapped sons, people dealing with bigger situations than me, fathers dealing with trying to feed their family, people living in Africa who can’t find fresh water. I realized that my issues were not that big of an issue. when in comparison to what other people were dealing with. I began to realize that the stresses of dealing with managing weak employees, corrupt partners, dishonest salespeople, and potential financial ruin were not even challenging in comparison to what other people were dealing with. I decided right then that I was going to begin living my best life now. On the very second that I first noticed Aubrey could see, I was

from being an impatient and disgruntled person who was frustrated with the jackassery demonstrated on a daily basis from my employees to being a person who was thankful and content. It took my son going blind for me to see who God is and what he is truly capable of. And as I write this, I can tell you that my current life and the early chapters are filled with countless examples of what a Christian should not do. But I can tell you that God is real. Aubrey’s healing is real. And both of these revelations have changed my entire outlook on life.

Although I still believe Lindsay Roberts and Richard Roberts are not awesome. Maybe they can turn it around. Maybe they can change. But I’m not a big fan. I know I went to Oral Roberts University and you might say, why do you dislike them so much? I can just say that I don’t believe that they were at the time sincere.

Maybe they are sincere now. Maybe they are great people. I don’t know. Now, I don’t know if you can relate to this or not, but in my life, I’ve prayed for a lot of things that have not come to fruition, and I have never seen a miracle happen up until then. When my best friend Mark DePetris was killed in a car accident, I sincerely prayed for his resurrection in a Lazarus kind of way. However, unfortunately, Mark did not rise from the grave.

When I lived in Minnesota, I prayed for the ability to pass algebra tests after I spent three years taking the same freaking class over and over due to my lack of natural math test -taking abilities. And for whatever reason, my prayers were not met with the results and responses that I wanted. But my son was healed, and thus, I feel the need to bless you with this story. Our son began seeing in September of 2007, but I did not want to tell anyone until I had medical confirmation that he was indeed seeing. The healing of our son had me feeling euphoric. vivacious, and humbled.

And now the healing of Aubrey has me feeling beveled emotionally, 15 % more empathetic for most people. And now I have a sincere belief in God. I’m full of faith and grateful for every day of good health that my family and I are blessed with. You could take away our nice house, but I would still have faith in God. You could take away our businesses, but I would still have faith in God. You could screw me over.

like countless people have done, and yet I still believe in God. You could have an affair with my personal assistant while her husband still works in my office, but I would still believe in God. You could smoke pot and skip somebody’s wedding, which somebody has done, but I would still believe in God. You could screw me over in every possible way, but I would still believe in God. My friend, my faith in Jesus Christ and his amazing healing power will never go away as a result of this miracle. because it was the healing of my son that forever changed my life.

” I think a sound person, a skeptical person, a person who has a mind that functions might ask, well, is he seeing now? Yes, Aubrey is now seeing, and he’s 11 years old. And I’m still believing. Each weekday morning when he wakes up and looks up at me with his incredible seeing eyes, my faith is again renewed. I need that daily confirmation because I am a person of weak faith in a religious sense, but it is compounding with stunning consistency and unrelenting vigor, like our national debt. I don’t know why God chose to heal Aubrey 3000, the name I call him most often, after so many of my earlier prayers have not been granted.

And I do not know why God chose not to restore my best friend Mark when he was killed in a car accident. But I do know that Aubrey was healed. My son was healed. I do know that I am not smart enough to fully grasp the concept of infinity. And so I am trying to not get caught up in the Jack Handy style deep thoughts about my theology at this point. I’m just grateful.

I am grateful that God healed my son. I am grateful that George Foreman shared his testimony with me through his book. I’m grateful that George Foreman was willing to meet with me when I insisted on meeting him and shaking his hand and telling him, thank you for writing his book. I’m grateful that Nate Mosley took a risk, went out on a limb, and shared his faith with me. I’m grateful that my wife is smarter than me and has more faith than I have, and I’m just thankful. So on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving 2007, Vanessa and I went to George’s church. We went to George Foreman’s church.

And at the church, I don’t know what I was expecting to experience or to see, But I went to his church because I wanted to thank him for his faith building testimony and for boldly and unapologetically writing his book, God in My Corner. We were hoping that we might just get lucky enough to spend 10 seconds with the king of the grill machine to express our gratitude. However, after navigating for close to an hour to his hard to find before Google Maps inner city neighborhood church, we received much more than that. When we pulled into the parking lot of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, about a half hour late for service, it was raining with monsoon -like ferocity. And thus, when I opened the driver’s side door of the Jeep to exit, I promptly stepped into four inches of water, thus completely soaking my dress shoes, my socks, my right foot. However, armed with my divinely inspired sense of tenacity, I somehow was not upset by this debacle.

And Vanessa was not fazed by the weather -influenced hairstyle that she was now wearing. on her dome. We walked up to the church stairs. I think both of us were just thinking the same thing. We’re terrible. We’re half an hour late to meet with George.

Probably just not going to happen. However, when we walked into his small sanctuary, we were amazed. There he was, George Foreman, the guy who’s on TV almost as much as Seinfeld reruns. He was there preaching from the pulpit to 20 inner city Houston neighborhood people. without any fanfare, homeless people, people that could barely afford to get there. The most downtrodden our society has produced were all there in his service.

My friend, it was so humbling that I almost felt guilty for attending his church. It was incredible. I mean, as he shared his faith with the congregation, his incredible humbleness was obvious. I sincerely could not believe it. He was literally walking around in between the pews and from person to person asking individuals if they had prayer requests. And then one by one, he prayed for them without any TV cameras, without any glitzy lights or glamorous staging.

He was not praying for these people so that he could make himself look good or that he was not making some large corporate donations so that he would look good. He was praying for the people who are in need because he believed that they needed a friend, hope and encouragement. In my opinion, watching him preach was almost more inspiring than his book. And I think if I look at it objectively, I think that his watching him preach was more inspiring than his book. I mean, here was a guy going from person to person, asking people if they needed prayer or help. And that’s what he provided.

As Big George went around asking for prayer requests, my always bold wife put her hand up and said, well, hello, what can we pray for you? said. And Vanessa told him while fighting back a few grateful tears of joy about the story of Aubrey and how he was healed of blindness. And then Big George asked if he could hold Aubrey as he prayed for him. And then he anointed Aubrey with oil and began to pray for him with sincerity. Again, it’s worth repeating here.

He prayed for him with sincerity. He prayed for him with enthusiasm. And he prayed a simple prayer with conviction. As he held Aubrey, I kept thinking, this dude is huge. His hands are huge. Thus, I am glad that I agree with him and what he’s saying and what he’s praying about.

Because if I didn’t, he could dislocate my head. When George finished praying, he thanked us for attending his church and smiled with the most contagious smile that the world has ever known. I was wowed. We had connected with a sports legend, a Hall of Fame athlete, an iconic TV personality, and with God at the same time. After George concluded the service, he introduced me to Natalie. He introduced my wife to Natalie.

He introduced us both to his family, Natalie, Monk, Red, and his nephew, who had been miraculously healed as described in his book. It was surreal. The characters in his book were in front of me. Just meeting the real -life characters from his book really solidified the book’s meaning to me. I liken meeting George’s family to meeting Mr. Spock at Walmart. In the electronics section, you know, hey, Mr. Spock, how are you doing? Are you picking up some batteries, Mr. Spock?

Yeah, I’m picking up some batteries. They were running a special, you know, no big deal. Live long and prosper, Holmes. And I’m sure for Natalie Red Monk, the nephew, and for George, it wasn’t that big of a deal. But for me, it was. writing about.

George taking 15 minutes, for me, has really taken my Christian Kool -Aid intake level to an all -time high. George shared with us how the story of Aubrey’s healing was encouraging to him, and that made my Wednesday epic. Thank you, George Foreman, and thank you, Foreman family. My friend, if you’re out there listening to today’s show, listening to today’s chapter, And you’re saying, well, how can I apply this? Because Thomas Edison once wrote, knowledge without application is meaningless. Well, please help support the don’t make reading this or listening to this chapter less meaningless than the plot of Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder by answering the following questions.

Question number one, how many times are you willing to deal with temporary defeat problems and stress en route to achieving your business goals? Question number two, if you knew that you were going to die one year from now, what changes? would you make in your work schedule to allow you to spend more time to pursue your goals? Question number three, determine and write down a date that you are willing to make those changes. Question number four, what are your beliefs on God and how do they impact your daily life? And question number five, what action steps could you take tomorrow and every day after that to better demonstrate God’s love in your life as it pertains to dealing with people?

Question number six, Do you have any former choir boys turned spawns of Satan currently working in your office today? 7. Why have you not fired the person who is making you not like the very person you are? you have created? Question number eight. Describe how you would deal with a bleak financial outlook and failed partnership.

Question number nine. I would like for you to take the time to write out what specifically are you doing to make sure that you avoid partnering with somebody who is terrible? What steps can you take preemptively to keep yourself out of a failed financial partnership. What values are you looking for out of your future partner? And question number 10, have you gone to biggeorge . com?

And if you haven’t gone to biggeorge . com, I encourage you to check it out because George Foreman’s ministry helped to change my life. Check out his website today. It’s biggeorge . com, biggeorge . com.

Chapter 11, the breakfast with Chet Kadjo that changed my life. Life lesson. 30 minutes spent learning from a guru is more important than spending eight years listening to the random opinions of everybody else. My friend, at this time, the year was 2007, and the year went by fast because we had a lot of things that we were dealing with. But to give you an inaccurate look into what it was like to work with me at DJ Connection at the time, I interviewed a guy by the name of Eric Cooper. who at the time was our human resources director and our production director.

His job was to go out there and to make sure that all of the files were finalized properly so that we didn’t play the wrong songs for the wrong bride on the wrong day. He made sure that all the songs were confirmed, all the details were confirmed, and that every wedding was confirmed to the best of his ability previous to us fulfilling those events with our dj services and eric writes in the business world this several phrases that may come up when a difficult task is at hand, get it done, make it happen, all nighters. And the definition of an all nighter is the act of staying up all night to study or finish a task. In 2007, we moved into the much awaited corporate place building from the once luxurious Clark estate, once too big, but now too crowded. When we moved to a new location, any normal business would close up shop for one or two days and hire movers to take all the supplies and equipment to the new destination.

However, if you know Clay Clark, you would say hiring movers is ridiculous. Closing BJ Connection on a normal business day would never and will never happen. We did not close the time Clay was covered in third degree burns from his vacation. We did not close when 50 % of the city was victim to the largest ice storm on record. We didn’t even close when the machines we built turned on us during Judgment Day. Sorry, a little Terminator flashback.

Anyway, we as a company started moving office equipment out of the estate at 5 .01 p . m. on a Tuesday. We all were moving except for Josh Smith, who at this point was doing phone appointments. I told you we don’t skip a beat. To make the story even better, while driving to our new offices, it started snowing in March.

So then, Clay had a tangible reason to make us work harder and faster. Around 2 a . m. that morning when all the equipment was moved in and was out of our sight, Clay asked us to get the office ready for the next workday. So for the next four hours, Jason Bailey and I sat in our IT room carving Cat5 cable. If you have no idea what this means, then I would say it was similar to sewing eight buttons on 30 different shirts after a 20 -hour workday.

After all was said and done, we made the move overnight. And the only loss we had was Clay’s wallet, which he later found on top of our soda machine four months later. At this point, DJ Connection had truly grown from me to we. As Magic Johnson had encouraged me to do through his story in John Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, we had grown from me to we. And because we had built a great team who was truly committed to offering a quality product, I felt a renewed sense of urgency about improving our service to distance ourselves from the competition.

And I knew just how we were going to do it. This was my plan. I knew that Quick Trip was the best gas station chain in the country, and I knew that Southwest Airlines was the best air travel service in the country. Thus, I believed that if I studied these two companies with tenacity and intensity, I could mine their histories and best practice processes for applicable action steps and ideas that could be immediately used at DJConnection . com to improve our product and service. I had long revered Quick Trip and Southwest with the kind of devotion that most adult men only reserve for their favorite college sports team.

My friends, I’m obsessed with the quality and customer service of Southwest Airlines and Quick Trip. I love these two companies. So I went out and purchased Nuts, the Southwest Airlines crazy recipe for business and personal success by Jackie and Kevin Freiberg, who we’ve just had on the Thrive Time Show podcast. When I read this book, I just finished reading Straight from the Gut from Jack Welch, which details Jack Welch’s ultra intense journey to the top of GE. It was amazing how he had grown from the very bottom to the very top of the GE mountain and the amazing successes that were achieved by GE as a result of his management and leadership. So I was mentally prepared to grind out the reading of yet another business case study style book.

And as I read Nuts, I could not help but to be inspired by the stories found on the pages from the book. Many business people have told me that a book or conference is worth reading or attending if they get just one nugget of knowledge from it. Well, in this case, then, NUTS was worth millions to me. As I read from page to page, I could not help but to feel as though God had divinely put this book in front of me to read at this very moment. I read how Southwest Airlines only flew 737 Boeing airplanes to maximize efficiency versus American Airlines, who was losing money consistently. It blew my mind.

Here Southwest Airlines was making profit every quarter and here American Airlines was losing money every quarter. And I thought maybe I could learn something from reading the Nutz case study. I immediately saw how it related to DJ Connection. Over the years as I was growing this business at a lightning speed to keep up with the size of my ambition, I never took time out to think about our niche. As we continually bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, I never took time out to think if the gear we were buying fit our niche or not. I never stopped to think about whether the people I was hiring fit our niche or not.

I had never even taken the time to define our niche. And so for the first time, I did. I determined that DJ Connection was going to specialize in providing entertainment for weddings for 300 people or less. I determined that we were not going to grow into a huge concert sound and lighting company as we had been dabbling in. I then wrote down what standardized gear we were going to buy for each system. And I came to the realization that the only sincere people with a good sense of humor and ambition could work for us and be successful.

Again, I wrote down that only sincere people with a good sense of humor and ambition could work for us and be truly successful. After defining our niche for the first time, I pressed on to discover Southwest’s incredibly simple philosophy of only promoting from within as detailed and nuts. This reaffirmed my belief in not bringing in outside talent to manage company insiders and longtime people. I was fired up to know that Southwest Airlines believed as I did, in the importance of starting everyone at the bottom so they can grow with the company and motivate those around them who witnessed firsthand the work that they had to do to get to the top. The portion of the Southwest book that blew my mind the most, the portion of the book where the founder of Southwest recounted its beginning by stating that the company began as an idea to do lots of flights for a small amount of money per ticket instead of charging a lot of money for a few flights like the other airlines were doing at the time.

This inspired me even more. I started realizing that unintentionally, DJ Connection had clawed its way into the market by, think about this, DJ Connection had clawed its way into the market by charging very little. Therefore, we had actually created a niche for ourselves as being the Southwest Airlines of the DJ industry. While our competition was holding out for high -dollar shows, we were profiting while charging nearly half as much. Plus, our customers loved it, and our competition hated it. Many airlines still hate Southwest Airlines because they ruin the industry with their low fare rates.

However, customers love being able to afford flights for business, vacation, and to see family. DJ Connection customers love the affordability that we provided and our competition hated us too. In fact, most of them still hate us today, which is good because I really wouldn’t want to hang out with them either if given the chance. I mean, we were absolutely destroying these people. We were bringing in 10 times the revenue of the average local DJ company, 20 times the average revenue of the local DJ company because we had the philosophy that we would charge less and do more. As I powered through Southwest’s book, The Book Called Nuts, by Jackie and Kevin Freiburg, highlighting, notating, and questioning everything that DJ Connection was doing in light of Southwest, I stumbled across this little Southwest belief.

employees are the company’s most important assets. Southwest doesn’t avoid firing underperformers, but they try to avoid hiring underperformers using their rigorous employee interviewing process. Southwest believes that you can essentially train almost anyone with a skill, but you can never train somebody without character. Again, Southwest Airlines, you can essentially train almost anybody to learn a skill, but you can’t train somebody without character. Once someone with a great attitude actually gets through the screening and exhaustive training process, they are then welcomed into a company that systematically shares its profits with its employees and celebrates the business successes and the individual achievements of its people like they just won the Super Bowl. Reading this book inspired me to take DJ Connection to a whole new level.

I preached to our guys about the continuing need to hire the best people. Studying Southwest changed my brain and reaffirmed a few core beliefs that I believed, but I had been reluctant to implement with the full faith that comes with knowing that these ideas have actually worked somewhere else previously. And as luck would have it, after we implemented the nuggets found within the Southwest Airlines book to the fullest capacity of our abilities, I got a response from Quick Trip. For years, I had mailed them letters requesting a moment or two with the founders to pick their brains and to learn from them, to learn from the founding fathers of QuickTrip about the convenience store juggernaut and how they did it. And finally, they had responded with an invitation for me to meet with the founder’s son and the current president of QuickTrip, Mr. Chet Kadjo. To say that I was excited about meeting Chet was an understatement.

I felt like an early 1990s teenage girl getting a chance to meet the members of NSYNC backstage before their Madison Square Garden concert. And like any other good Star Wars nut would do, when going to see a Star Wars film for the first time, I showed up early. In fact, I showed up crazy early. I showed up like two hours early. I was so excited about meeting with him that my brain could not possibly deal with it. I was just fired up.

My brain could have probably been audibly heard humming with the electric energy being generated as my mind was building with anticipation. I sat in my 1984 Stalker -class brown van that I bought for $1 ,000, and I wrote down questions I would ask him. I knew that he was the explorer who had found gold. He had found the lost city of Business Atlantis. Business Atlantis. Atlantis.

And I knew he knew how I could get there, too. I just had to get the information out of him without coming across like a spy for his competition or some stalker who drives a 1984 brown van. Strike one. Anyway, eventually at 7 .45, I approached the front of the Quick Trip World headquarters. The place was everything that I dreamed it would be. It was like the Church of Capitalism.

It had vaulted ceilings, high -quality Quick Trip logos, nice furniture, but not unprofitably nice, a reception desk that was being manned by an incredibly friendly lady who encouraged me to sign in because Chep will be right with you. Holy crap! I was going to meet the Obi -Wan Kenobi of the convenience store capitalism. I was going to meet the man with the plan, the dude with the right attitude, the boss who had paid the cost. I was going to meet the head of Quick Trip. And as he approached me, I couldn’t help but not being able to recognize him at first.

He walked briskly and was wearing the standard Quick Trip polo shirt that all of his store employees are expected to wear. I expected him to wear a suit or to come in on a golden maybe a solid gold hovercraft, but he just briskly walked in dressed like every other employee. And that was my first sign that this dude was not like other CEOs. You see, at QuickTrip, they also hire for personality and attitude, and they train for skill. Like Southwest, they also promote from within. And thus, Chet, the president, the son of the founder, had actually worked in QuickTrip gas stations himself.

He actually worked the night shifts, not night shifts, like everyone else. He worked on holidays like everyone else. And because of that, he had earned the respect of those working underneath him like no one else. As Chet talked, I tried my best not to ask for an autograph, and I interrogated him with as much tact as possible while I feverishly took notes. Here’s a copy of the notes that I took that day. Chet Kadjo meeting notes.

Title, President of Quick Trip. Notes. Chet works hard at achieving balance. He reads three books per week, and he always reads really cheesy crap. He sleeps six hours per night on average. He’s an insomniac.

He’s very accessible to his staff. To free up his time to work on business projects, Chet empowers people by making it okay to make a mistake, as long as people show that they are learning from their mistakes. Chet says, don’t ask for something if you already know the answer. If you need someone to partner with you so that you are confident that you are making the right decision, that is okay. He says, the best people you can. Get the best people you can.

He says, get the best people you can. Spend money on people and not marketing. Your people must deliver. Get solid people. Your people are marketing. Don’t care what people think.

Make right versus wrong decisions based on whether you would be proud to tell your mother. He went on to explain that you can’t base your decisions on whether your father would be proud because fathers can justify things that your mother will not. Mothers are the moral authority. Love on your people, and they will love on the customer. Business growth tips. Crew trip employees can buy businesses

in the company. They can continue to own it after they leave QuickTrip, but they can only buy it if they work there. The company is 15 to 20 % owned by employees. Investing tips. Invest in your people. Reinvest in your company.

Own one half of your land and lease the other half. Fun factoids. Each year, every year, QuickTrip has an employee focused New Year’s party that celebrates their year’s end, not the actual year’s end. QuickTrip benchmarks itself against Southwest Airlines, aka believes that Southwest Airlines is their biggest competitor. Recommended books. The One Hour Manager by Kenneth Blanchard, Ph .

D. and Spencer Johnson, M . D. The Service Profit Chain by James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard A. Schlesinger. The Value Profit Chain by James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard A. Schlesinger. Retirement plan.

Chet will retire when he finds someone better at doing his job. And he owns tons of QTB stock. Employee ownership is key. As you can probably imagine by now, meeting with Chet sent me on yet another three month tangent to improve DJ connection with each and every business tip that he gave me. When we parted ways, I wanted to hug him because meeting with him was everything that I had built it up to be and everything that I needed it to be. When he sent me home with an employee copy of the 40th anniversary of Quick Trip, I was pumped up.

The 40th anniversary of a limited edition book was mine. I was pumped. I had my memorabilia. I could now hop into my 1984 Brown Chevy Stuckerclass van feeling satisfied and content. When I got back to the office, I immediately ordered the books he recommended. I told the office dudes how cool he was.

And again, I think Jason, Eric, and Josh were inspired. And everyone else was pissed knowing that we were going to become great, which meant that they too were going to have to become great through the process. Because achieving greatness requires a lot of work. This just in, achieving greatness requires a lot of work. My friend, when the books arrived, I read them as quickly and with as much focus as I could possibly muster. I got so many good nuggets out of these books that I felt as though I had doubled my intelligence when I finished reading them.

Without exaggeration, reading these books made the employee management issues that I used to deal with seem easy if I was just willing to follow the steps outlined in the books. The books were case studies of Outback, UPS, GEICO, and various other industry leaders. With each case study, I felt like I was gaining more knowledge than I had learned in my first 10 years of experience running DJ Connection. As I read the service profit chain and the value profit chain, I almost began to feel overwhelmed by the excitement and the ambition that these two books I bought for $10 used off of Amazon were causing to stir within me. For the first time in my business career, I felt as though every small detail of my business to deliver was laid out in front of me with amazing clarity. I can now gaze into the future and see what DJ Connection was going to become.

I knew it was going to become multi -state, multi -city, multi – I don’t know how big Jason Bailey’s grown it, but I knew it was going to be big. I knew where we were going and how we were going to get there. These books were so rich with knowledge in actual practical business case studies that they had an example that I could relate to for just about everything. How do I market my business with precision? They had a case study, an example for it. How do I build a customer database that adds value to our customers?

They had a case study to provide an example for it. These books really helped me expand upon and pursue the systems that Brent and E -Myth had encouraged me to build. These three books, recommended to me by Chet, instructed me on how I was going to build a workflow that would not require me personally to work 90 hours per week. How is it possible? I just bought a book for $10.

It taught me how to scale my business. These books had action steps, charts, and statistics designed to show me how others had done it, and how I could do it, too. How I was going to develop team loyalty and systematically nurture employee relationships. They had a case study for everything. This book absolutely changed my life. And I go back to this notable quotable by Sir Isaac Newton, one of the leading scientists of his time.

He writes, if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulder of giants. I shall repeat. He says, if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Well, at that point in the business, things were going well. We were growing. But to give you a historically accurate perspective of the business at the time, I decided to interview an employee who worked with us during that time and whose name I shall not mention.

But he writes, going anywhere on the road with two or more DJs was almost always guaranteed something strange was going to happen, or at least something hilarious. Every year there was a certain amount of bridal shows that happened in the Dallas -Fort Worth area, roughly four to five hours away, that required group travel. And because we wanted to be as profitable as possible, group sleeping arrangements, as in the cheapest hotel to be found in the area, would be booked. usually with a two -person limit, and we would regularly fit four to six people in the hotel and multiple people in the same bed, on the couch, on the reclining chair, on the floor, in the bathtub, etc. a la Sam Walton during the early Walmart years. One such situation found me sleeping in a same bed as Clay.

And at one point in the night while sleeping, I got punched in the ear. When I awoke to see what was going on, Clay had taken my pillow. I was so tired that I thought I was slightly delusional. I just laid back down and went to sleep. Another time in Dallas during a two -day bridal fair, Clay got violently sick, and Eric Cooper, Sean Taco, and I were busy talking to brides -to -be. So for the first hour or so, Clay just lay on the concrete floor behind our table in our booth so no one else could see him.

But he began to throw up inside of the bins, inside of the equipment bins. And I was giving sales presentations less than a foot away from a semi -conscious Clay lying on the floor, and the brides never knew he was there. which I found to be pretty funny. At the end of the event, Clay was too sick to travel and Sean and I decided to stay back for support. Clay was stiff and his muscles were so achy that he was writhing in one of the hotel beds while Sean and I watched television. He kept asking for someone to rub his neck and head because how bad it was killing him, but neither Sean and I would do it.

for fear of the whole thing being a way to make a fun of us later for a gay moment. Apparently he was not faking anything because later that night we rushed him to the emergency room and during the highlight of the night, he had to get a spinal tap, but fainted first when he saw the needle. What’s the moral of this story? I’m not sure, but I felt like the story should be told. Thus to keep this chapter from having about as much practical application as the old wives tale, the eating chocolate causes acne. Get down to business and answer these questions.

Question number one, most millionaires spend one hour per day reading information related to their industry, business or service. Why aren’t you reading one hour per day? Question number two, how long will it take you to order the service profit chain and the value that in the value profit chain books on Amazon? How long will it take you to buy and purchase the service profit chain? and the value profit chain books on Amazon? Question number three, what is your current business’s niche?

Describe this business’s niche in great detail. Make sure to define the business’s niche in terms of the products or services that you can provide. Question number four, write down three action steps for how you will recruit employees who will be able to fit successfully into your business’s niche. And question number five, Write out two detailed examples of how great people whom your company has hired for their personality and their attitude, rather than just their skills, have helped to grow your company tremendously. Chapter 12. The DJ Connection founding principles.

The founding principles. At DJ Connection, at the time I was running the company, when I started the company, when I built the company, these were the founding principles. Now, does the company, DJConnection . com, still believe in these principles? I don’t know, but I’m going to go through the seven principles that I ran the company by when I ran the company. I think a lot of people want to assume that when you sell a company that the new owner will honor, value, continue to uphold the principles that you believe in.

I would say that Jason Bailey, the owner of DJConnection . com, is a great person. He’s a nice guy. He’s a great person. Honorable person, a guy you would like and trust, a guy that worked with me faithfully for years. And I’m glad that I sold the company to him.

But I can’t say that he either believes in or doesn’t believe in the founding principles that I use to grow DJ Connection because we don’t talk. I don’t talk to him about it. When I sold the business, again, it was like breaking up with a girl. and now somebody else is dating that girl, and I’m just not that into staying in touch with the girl that I used to be dating. But the founding principles that I had when I started DJ Connection were as follows. At DJ Connection, we believe in delivering more service than for which we are paid.

By delivering more service than for which we are paid, we will always truly be in demand. We will consistently deliver more service than for which we are paid, and as a result, We will exponentially grow our company and our reputations alike. Think about that. We will exponentially grow our reputations and our company alike. And if you do not believe that, if you don’t believe in that philosophy, you can’t work at DJ Connection. Founding principle number one, our philosophy on the DJ business.

We are a commercial and professional DJ service, a commercial and professional disc jockey service, which means that our clients, for the most part, are not interested in our artistic ability. They’re interested in our ability to coordinate and facilitate the implementation of all the events, which they have planned for a specific evening. We are hired to be the master of ceremonies, paid to get the guests involved in the show, as well as to get them to dance. We always deliver more service than for which we are paid. Founding principle number two, the proper DJ mindset. To get those guests to dance, it is important that we do not let our own biases or preferences get in the way of our ability to make sure that all guests go home happy, and specifically the guest who’s paying us to DJ their event.

Sell yourself first and let the equipment do its job. If you are tired, you just broke your leg and your head hurts, the client doesn’t care. Not everyone who comes to a show is happy, but it is your job that 80 % of the people should leave that way. Every show is opening night. YMCA is always a good song, Shout is the most profound song ever written, and the electric slide never loses its electricity. You must always be happy when at a show.

Founding principle number three. We are an elite club, not a family where everything is allowed and unconditional love is provided. At DJ Connection, DJ Connection is an elite club. Again, DJ Connection is an elite club. that you are allowed to enter into, much like the professional basketball, or professional baseball, or professional football Hall of Fame. At DJConnection .

com, we recognize that Sam Walton was correct when he first wrote, there is only one boss, the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. Sam Walton, the co -founder of Walmart. Founding principle number four, DJ integrity and ethics. Because we are a Christian -owned business, we should act and dress like it, a . k .

a. look professional. If ever a song is requested that may be offensive or objectionable to our discernment, it is always best to ask the party’s host, a chaperone, or the people paying us if they feel that the song would be appropriate for the event. If no one is around, don’t play it. Prospective clients, a . k .

a. connections, may be sitting at every table and every chair. Offensive music and off -color music may be funny to a handful of guests, but if it offends the other 70%, that makes a foot -in -the -mouth DJ connection. Founding principle number 5. We are the best. There are 20 -some -odd DJ services in Tulsa and we are the best.

We are not average. We are not second. We are not third. The other ones are adequate at best. However, it is important that we never use negativity to sell our services over other companies. Principle number six, our mission statement.

At DJ Connection, it is our goal that every client goes home with a smile on their face and a welcomed memory in their minds. Each client has unique needs and it is our goal that we provide the services and expertise that will meet those needs to the fullest extent possible. We will go, I repeat, we will go that extra mile to make sure that our client’s next party reception or banquet is an overwhelming success by catering our music, lighting packages, and show itineraries to fit their needs. We believe that genuinely satisfying customers make the best references. Principle number seven, at DJ Connection, we create the momentum. Again, founding principle number seven, we create the momentum.

At DJ Connection, our DJs create the momentum. and the energy. We do not wait for the audience to get the party started. Chapter 13, the right time to sell. Um, I can say this because I’ve had enough time to sit back and reflect on it. I mean, it’s been now, what?

10 years since I sold the company. So I think I can look at it objectively and unemotionally and explain what I’m going to share here, knowing that many current DJ Connection customers are going to hear this and many current DJ Connection employees are going to hear this. But there is Ecclesiastes 3 .3 from the Bible. Ecclesiastes, it’s a book in the Bible. And in the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3 .3 reads, well, let me read Ecclesiastes 3 .1. It says,

to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal and a time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh and a time to mourn and a time to dance. a time to cast away stones and time to gather stones together, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to get and a time to lose, a time to keep and time to cast away.

Well, this particular time, Jason Bailey, who was a great member of our team, expressed an interest in wanting to grow the company and to take the company to a different level. And I didn’t want to do it. Jason was a loyal, faithful member of the team, and he wanted to take the company to another level, and I didn’t want to do it. Well, why? I don’t know. I’ve been screwed a lot.

Financially, I was beginning to make money from a variety of other sources that weren’t related to my DJ Connection income, and Jason was passionate about it. He wanted to take the company to the next level. He wanted to expand DJConnection . com. He had a vision to take the company to another place. And so before I sold the company, we did events in Texas.

We did events in Oklahoma. We did events in Colorado. We did events in Missouri. But Jason wanted to open up the business and put it all over the planet. He wanted to put it in Atlanta. He wanted to put the company in Nashville.

He wanted to put the company in Kansas City. He wanted to put the company Chicago. He wanted to put the company everywhere. He wanted to put the company in Indianapolis. He wanted to put the company in Cincinnati.

He wanted to put the company in Louisville. But I didn’t. I was frankly tired of Louisville. managing people. I no longer cared about coaching up DJs to become the best DJ possible. And so it was the right time to sell the company.

I’d already DJed for the Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders. I’d already opened up Kevin Garnett’s store when I DJed at KG’s grand opening of his store. I’d already DJed, my company had already DJed for Chuck Norris. We’d already DJed for, um, we’d already achieved all the awards on The Knot . com. We’d been featured on MTV.

We, You know, Lady Gaga had a certain connection to our business. The Wall Street Journal had a certain connection to our business. We were featured on TLC, The Learning Channel, on the show. We’d already done all those things. And I just wasn’t interested in doing that thing anymore. I wanted to go on to do something else.

And so if you go to Thrivetimeshow . com, you can see what I’m up to now. But I think Jason Bailey was the right guy at the right time to take over DJ Connection and to take it to another level. So to Jason Bailey, I salute you. To the new DJ Connection DJs, I salute you too. And to everybody out there whose event has been taken from ordinary to extraordinary as a result of what I built and what Jason has taken to the next level, I appreciate you because without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.

Wake up, pray, and I’m on my grind today. Ain’t got no time to waste, every breath’s a pain. yeah, yeah Wake up pray, and I’m on my grind today And I’m on my, and I’m on my grind today, day, day Wake up every morning at 3 a .m. m. Cause that’s when I start my grindin’ And I got no time for stumblin’ And chit -chat, talk with the fake friends I know where I’m goin’, I’m on a mission Limited reality, not fiction Get it done, get it done, that’s how you win It’s self -discipline, big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. A lot of silly bulls, yet I fit them.

Gotta put in the work if you want to. Gotta build that religion, move, overcome that friction. Gotta sell stuff while you build those systems. Oh, and it’s tough enough. Before you get backstabbed, you should build that trust. Take time off, and things will rust.

Magnify the wrong, got dangerous. And there ain’t no just us, there is just us, like Matthew 510 did promise us. Entrepreneurship, and that’s what’s up. That’s what’s up, that’s what’s up If you wanna go, a new flow Wanna achieve something big, something remarkable You gotta work for it, you gotta see through it We all got obstacles, we gotta run through it Ooh, I’m on my grind, yeah Waste no time, wake up prayin’, I’m on my grind Waste no time, gotta put it in drive, I’m on my grind If I got a mission, can’t waste time If I got a vision, line by line Write it down, then go to town Get it done, then send it out Reach the world and change it Make sure while you’re working, stay patient When it’s tough times, just face them When the stuff rhymes, don’t erase them Competition fast -paced in the rearview Don’t look back, eyes front, keep a clear view Stay diligent and they won’t get near you Keep it moving and you’re gonna outpace them Race them, run when it’s fun Collaboration is a blessing when you can do Keep that muscle working and they can’t strongman you Fear God, don’t need man to understand you You speak intelligent and they can’t strawman you. You got a plan, remember God’s got a plan too. Sink his voice before you make the next move.

And it’s gonna go well with you. Keep your cool, there’s gonna be tests. You guys will trust him with it. rest Ain’t no tellin’ what’s gonna come with it Fear God, trust God and have fun with it I’m on my grind, yeah I’m on my grind, yeah Can’t waste no time Wake up playin’, I’m on my grind I’m on my grind, yeah Can’t waste no time Gotta put it in drive, I’m on my grind I’m on my grind I’m on my grind I’m on my grind ♪ Yeah, can’t waste no time, gotta put it in drive ♪ ♪ I’m on my grind, grind ♪ So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. Clay Clark, man.

He is one character. It’s a good word for character. Yeah, that is it. Good driven, smart. And, uh, 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, 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 got 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 a fantastic young man. No, he is. He is. He also 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 in a 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 as a part of your team and your own company is huge and super valuable. So I would definitely encourage people to use him. But one thing is you’ve got to be coachable. You’ve got to be wanting to get feedback. You’ve got to be wanting to really grow your company.

You’ve got to 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. Hi, I’m Aaron Antus with Shaw Foods. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them, and I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. 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, wonderful. 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 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 1800 % 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? 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 it like I once did. My 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, but one thing that was really special

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 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.

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. pretty much just listening to what they have to say. Their hiring process has just really been incredible as far as finding good quality help and just the accountability of meeting up with them weekly and 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 would 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 been amazing. completely transformed my business in pretty much every facet.

So I’m gonna 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. And hiring quality employees has become much simpler and less stressful by using their systems for hiring. Um, 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. Um, 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 and hire, Interviewing every single week. It’s just been great and such a lot.

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’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 till 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 everyone 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 I used my code.

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 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 loan it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it.

Transcribed with Cockatoo