How to Create a Business That Is Capable of Funding Your Dreams + Why Making More Money Will Not Fix Your Life, But It Will Fund It + Celebrating 5 Clay Clark Business Coaching Clients Including WindowNinjas.com

Audio Transcription

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one of our accountants had said, you’ve got to meet this guy, Clay. So we ended up meeting with Clay. And he’s helped us go from right before we opened the third location now to six locations. And so we’ve more than doubled our revenue and these are ground up build gyms. And so it’s not, the barrier for entry is pretty high. It’s 20 plus staff at each location.

So yeah, it’s been a lot as far as running systems, checklists, workflows, who does what, when and how, training us on that. Clay’s helped a ton. We would not be where we’re at without him. So huge win. Charles, from an ROI perspective, if someone’s going to look at it and go, return on investment, I pay you $1 ,700 a month. Will I make more money than I’m paying you?

How would you maybe tackle or how would you respond to what kind of return on investment have you seen for the $1 ,700 a month you’re paying? Well, for example, Clay has got, there’s no better business coach in the world that has the way he works, the way his mind works. But he’s also got a team of other business coaches that have worked in lots of different industries. So he’s worked in every industry. His staff has worked in every industry. He’s got videographers, web designers.

I mean, just for the fact of like, just the website alone is worth the $1 ,700. Just the ability to take any of their proven systems, whether that’s a marketing thing, or whether that’s a staffing thing, like one thing done in the month, it pays for itself. And then to understand this, there’s a part of where, you know, some maybe some week, you may be like, well, you know what, I’m not getting a whole lot out of this call. But the bottom line is, it’s like when you read the Bible, there’s times you’re just reading it, and then you’re like, You know what I really and then you read it that one time and it’s like God really speaks to your heart. And the whole truth is it’s like there’s no way that you can get that kind of value for $1 ,700 to have a whole team of coaches, graphic designers, web developers, anybody that has that type of knowledge, you know, in your back pocket. And then in the whole thing is run your business with being somewhat conservative.

Make sure you don’t run it to the edge. all the time. But by doing that, you have that that skill set, you have that you have those. It’s tools on your tool belt. And I just think it’s just like, it’s just like the cost of doing business. Like just, just understand it.

That’s a, that’s what I think. There’s a, there’s a, sometimes the payment we make, I feel like is peace of mind even because there have been multiple times throughout the years that we will, we will either be butting heads on something. Um, we’re super confused about something. We’re fearful about something, something in the markets changed and it’s a quick call to clay. In October of 1936, a man wrote a book about personal communication and persuasion that became an international bestseller. And that book is called How to Win Friends and Influence People.

The guy who wrote the book is often called Dale Carnegie, but really his name is pronounced Dale Carnegie. And on today’s show, we have a Thriver who reached out to us and asked, I love the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, but how do you actually apply the book? How do you apply How to Win Friends and Influence People when managing your team? How do you apply How to Win Friends and Influence People when you’re managing your relationships with customers? And how do you apply How to Win Friends and Influence People when you’re dealing with customer complaints? All this and more on today’s very practical edition of the Thrive Time Show.

Well, Clay, I appreciate you letting me be in the studio here with you, and I wanted to share something before we get into the show, if that’s all right. Well, Tollbooth Willie, I’m glad you got a chance to visit the studio today. Sure. What do you got? Well, now, Clay, if we do have time, I wanted to share about a manuscript and an accompanying song that I’ve been working on while being in the Tollbooth. It’s called How to Lose Friends and Uninspire Everyone.

Sounds really incredible. How did you ever get the idea? What inspired you to write this song in this manuscript? Well, I was working inside the, we call it the box and cars were coming by and people were like, Hey, I forgot my 85 cents and I forgot my change. Could I use a credit card? And I’m like, uh, No, you know.

And then another car would come by and they would say like, you know, nice lady in a minivan with kids and everything, you know, come back from a soccer tournament or something, you know. And they’d say, sir, we forgot our change. Could you take credit card? And I’m like, no. And so really what inspired the book and then the song was depression, quiet desperation as I watched my soul die. slowly over the last 20 years in that box.

Well, Willie, that’s pretty dark. I appreciate you for sharing. Feel free to go ahead and just sing us the first 30 seconds or so of your song. But make it quick, because we got to get into today’s interview and today’s show where we break down the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I appreciate that. I hope everybody can relate to my song.

Here we go. Everybody know I work. In an above -ground box It’s like a coffin Bulletproof glass And some locks Oh, it’s an above -ground coffin I ain’t dead yet I’d probably kill myself After my shift Because I work every day In an above -ground box Well, Clay, that’s all I got so far, but I just… listeners would need to hear it. Well, I think it checks all the boxes. It’s low energy.

It’s uninspirational. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s probably not going to win you over any friends. OK, well, that’s fine. And I just want to say one more thing before you start your fancy show. To everybody out there who’s ever driven on a turnpike and you didn’t bring change and you’re going, oh, Tall Booth Willie, you’re a good guy. I didn’t bring a change.

Could you let me go this time? Could you let me through? Well, first off, ignorance is no excuse. Two, no. And three, I love giving you a ticket. It inspires me because your pain is my gain.

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. What this show does, two men, eight kids co -created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. Yes and yes. Thrive Nation, I could not be more excited to be here with you today. And on today’s show, we are responding to a question from a listener who wanted to know, how do you apply how to win friends and influence people?

It’s a great book. Hey, I read the book. I like the book, Dale Carnegie. His name is actually pronounced Dale Carnegie. I read his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, but how do I actually apply it? And so on today’s show, we are joined with two experts, in my opinion, in the field of communication, because they’re business owners, and they’ve had to communicate to the

marketplace for years that co -law fitness is essentially like Planet Fitness meets Chick -fil -A. They’ve had explained over and over again. If you’re looking for like a planet fitness gym, but with the culture of a Chick -fil -A, come check, check out Cola Fitness, Charles Cola and Amber Cola. Welcome onto the show. How are you guys? Oh, yes.

We are proud to be here. Hey, I’m excited to have you guys here. And I want to ask this. Have you guys glanced at the book How to Win Friends and Influence People? Have you dove into that book? I have glanced.

I have not read it, but I have looked at some of the notes on it. So, well, I’m going to summarize the book for everybody out there real quick. You got basically five, five points in the book. And it’s a big book and there’s more points, but I’m just going to make it very simple, Cliff Notes version. Rapport, needs, benefits, close, isolate objection. Rapport, needs, benefits, close, isolate objection.

So basically, if you want to influence people, step one, build rapport with them. Dale Carnegie writes, you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. At Kola Fitness, people love the gym experience. That’s great. How do you get people to love the experience though, Charles? Because there’s a lot of gyms.

You come into the gym and you feel cold. You feel like nobody cares about you. You don’t build a relationship, and you don’t build any friendships, and you don’t come back. What things does Colaw Fitness do to actually build a rapport with your clients? Well, that’s a great question, Clay, because a lot of times you have the people that start working in the front desk, they have never had a lot of jobs, or they don’t have a lot of experience with that. So we try to script that and teach that.

And what it is, is showing people that you genuinely care. And I try to actually create, we created an acronym that we have used within our business called ACT. ACT. Acknowledge your presence. So you acknowledge your presence, close the gap, and then physically and that’s like in a healthy way.

And you do all of that by smiling with your eyes and teeth so that you’re genuine. And that allows people to see that you’re safe, you want to address their needs, and make a connection there. What does close the gap mean? If you’re at the desk and there’s a desk between you and another person, you at least take a step forward towards somebody. Acknowledge their presence, smiling with your eyes and teeth, and you generally have a script, and then you step forward towards them. Acknowledge that their presence is accepted and wanted.

And it’s intentional, intentional. So act as your program, which is again, a acknowledge, acknowledge their presence, got it. And then close the gap, close the gap. So if you can get around and actually walk around and shake their hand, or you kind of just do a pat on the shoulder, something that’s like, hey, I value you as a human. And you know, it’s like that, like, like a puppy, you got to scratch them behind the ears, you know, scratch people behind the ears and make them feel good. But you you’re intentional about this.

Yes. And so we have to train that. So if you have like these new, you know, Let’s say a lot of these new millennials are on their technical devices, and they don’t have a lot of social interaction. So they don’t pick up on that quick. And so we have to actually just expect them to not know it. And so we teach these not be annoyed by it, but you expect them not to know it, you teach it to them.

Correct. Now, I want to talk about this close the physical space. Amber, you’re a female, you’re married to a guy with large arms. Um, and you said act stands for again. A is acknowledge, acknowledge their presence. C is close the gap and T is touch touch.

Uh, talk to me cause you’ve, you’ve, you’ve seen your husband train people. Um, and when you’re training people in a gym, people might not know what is appropriate. And I’m sure there’s been times where somebody has done some weird stuff, uh, where you’re like, uh, that’s not happening. So I want to take us right into the lion’s den where we probably don’t want to talk about this, but let’s talk about the rules you have. as a female entrepreneur for that physical touch. What does that look like?

We think it’s good to talk about it. We have very much open communication in our marriage. We always try to communicate and we also try to set boundaries long before the problem comes. And so there is appropriate touch. Charles is a super friendly, loving guy and anybody who knows him knows you’re going to probably get a hug from him. You’re probably going to get a high five.

But he’ll never, he’s never inappropriate. He loves people and it just, it’s obvious in the way he carries himself. But we do have to set those boundaries, train our staff in what is and is not appropriate. Generally what we try to do is, you know, like give them a fist bump, a little pat on the shoulder, like, Hey, just touch their, like their elbow or their shoulder as they come in. And that’s generally like the very first time you meet someone, but you acknowledge your presence, smile, lean towards them. And then as time goes on, you’re like, you just say, Hey, great to see you.

And you start using their name. But that’s just the stuff that we teach when we do our hiring and our shadowing. And that way we see that they either get it or they’re, cause you know, some people are just kind of socially weird and they just are a little bit too forward. Like some guys, it’s like the guy’s motive is to, to, to touch every girl. Like this is not going to be, I honestly think, I don’t think it is. I’m not, I’m not speculating that. I think sometimes it’s not taught at home.

I say by default, almost every time I found it wasn’t taught at home. Right. And just as an example, we had in our office, one of our companies about a year ago, I won’t mention the specifics, but we had a member of the team who commented to a lady, man, you’re looking great today. And she didn’t want to hear it. And she’s definitely on the married side. And he is on the married side.

And he was like, I don’t know what the deal is. but she like looks at me all angry. And I’m going, it’s like when you lost your wallet, you know, where did you put it last? I’m like, what did you say to her last? I don’t know. I mean, I just, she, oh, I know she got a new hair hairstyle.

And I said, wow, you look beautiful. And I go, you didn’t say that, did you? And he goes, yeah, no, I did. I just said she looked beautiful and I thought she just wanted to just acknowledge, you know, and I’m like, OK, OK. And then what else did you say? And we start unpacking and he’s like, well, what’s wrong with that?

Now, he’s from a family where everyone’s like, oh, you’re beautiful. There’s a lot of hugging. There’s a lot of that’s kind of his family. I’m going, you can’t assume that’s the norm. Yeah. We worked through it, but again, I want everybody out there, homework number one, action item number one, you need to make a script for building rapport.

That consists of five specific lines that you want your team to say maximum. when creating new people. Five specific lines, five, maximum. Five specific lines, maximum. Now we go on to step two of the book here. Again, How to Win Friends and Influence People, the summary.

Needs. Once you build a rapport, you gotta find someone’s needs. You say, hey, what are your fitness goals? What do you want to do with your cabinets? What kind of pool do you want to install? You want to find the problem that you can solve.

And Dale Carnegie writes, when dealing with people, remember that you’re not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity. So when you meet with a human and they’re not in shape and you own a gym like Koala Fitness, you don’t walk up to them and say, so now that we’ve built rapport, it looks like you need to lose some weight. looks like you, but you see trainers that do that. I’ve seen it. I’ve been to gyms where it’s happened. I’ve seen people, boy, do you need to be here?

I, and I see trainers that literally make fun of how small a guy’s legs are as a sales technique. I’ve seen this before. Charles, you guys have an uplifting experience at co -op. .com. com. Tell us about this.

When dealing with people, you know that, yeah, you could point out, hey, look, you need to lose 47 pounds, but you don’t do that. Talk to me about the loving, kind way that you guys at Kola Fitness try to find the needs of your new members in a way that leaves them feeling good. We actually have a one sheet at the front and we say, this is what we offer. What are you guys interested in? We have like far as an free trainer instruction, they can tell you exactly what to do. As far as I’m losing weight and shape, we’ve got idiot proof templates, you can follow help you be a follow up program.

And then we have them like we have tanning massage, you can bring a friend for free, you get free trainer instruction, they can get free trainer instruction. And tell me what you’re wanting to accomplish. And they can literally look at this document, the reading through all these things that say free, free, free, free, free, and no up sales. And they’re looking at it. And they’re like, Wow, wow, wow. And like, well, I’m just looking to lose some weight, get shapes on.

They’re like, Oh, Well, if you want, you can look over here, right to your right, we have literally lists of people saying, I lost weight, I feel great, this is a great program. Proof statements, benefits. Yeah, all right at the front. Intentional. You took the idea and made it into a thing. Absolutely.

So they see that their needs are being met by satisfied customers on TVs all around them. So that then gives them that say, their mind is saying, oh wow, this is the place that’s perfect. Intentional be intentional be intentional everybody out there make a script today for rapport Make a script here for the needs. Now benefits kind of ties into the needs. But once you have a problem, once you’ve found the problem, you want to put, you want to make a one sheet, which Charles just spoke about. You make a one sheet.

The one sheet is an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper that states the facts, states the problems you can solve supported by facts. They use before and after photos, testimonials. They have the most reviews of any fitness company in the region. You look up Topeka gyms, Joplin gyms, Bartlesville gyms. They have the most reviews from real clients, real objective reviews.

And Dale Carnegie says, he says, actions speak louder than words. And a smile says, I like you. You make me happy. I’m glad to see you. So you want to be kind. You want to look kind.

You want to look happy. But then you also have to have facts. You can’t just have empty promises. You’ve got to have that proof that what you’re saying is true. Again, make a one sheet. Now step four.

the close, the call to action. It’s not mean to ask for somebody’s money in exchange for the problems you’re solving. And I’m sure Charles, you never ever were in a place where you undercharged. Amber, I’m sure he was never undercharging. But when you go for the close here, Dale Carnegie had to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie says, If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it.

Imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity. Again, he’s saying, you know, you got to go for the close, go for the call to action, make people feel the way they need to feel. Amber, did you ever catch your husband though, closing a bunch of deals and actually not being profitable back in the day? Yes. He was notorious for giving away the farm. Why?

As we would call it. Um, he is so generous. He loves helping people. Um, and so we had to give him price sheets. He had to follow. We had to give him forms.

He had to complete. Did you make him deposit his checks? I did. Oh yeah. We would find for years. Oh, I mentioned this because so many people listening right now, you have just read how to win friends and influence people.

You are having epiphanies. You’re going, oh my God. Oh my gosh, I now feel good. I am excited. That’s called entertainment. I’m excited, but I want to help you turn this into reality.

You need to do what Kola Fitness has done, what Amber and Charles have done. You need to distill proven systems into tangible action items. You need to script out those five rapport -building questions. Script out the five needs -finding questions. Script out your benefits. Make a one -year plan.

Script out a price sheet, like Amber said, that’s the call to action. And then you have to ask people, do you want this package or that package? Charles, if you don’t go for the close, what happens? Oh yeah, it’s a no -go. But what I try to do is make sure that the decision is already, like I put myself in the ideal likely buyer’s seat. And I look at, they just went through the, the value proposition of listing all the benefits and they see the price there it is.

And then I tried to give them only like two options because here’s the deal. Like humans get so caught up if they see like 10 or 12. It hurts the head. Yeah. And so I try to make it where each one of them makes that because anytime a human has to make a decision, it creates this mental fatigue and it creates a mental dissonance with the whole experience. And so I just wanted to eat.

There is some other membership options we have, but I only list two on our sheet. The most popular. Yeah, it’s like 95 % of everybody only buys like certain two options on a price, you should only target that. So the front is really trained on that. They’re really confident on that 90 % of their service that it’s very, very easy for the consumer to make a decision. So you again, we what is Dale Carnegie teach and how to win friends and influence people?

Okay, one rapport, you’ve got to script out those five report building questions to a Needs, you gotta script out those five needs finding questions. Three, benefits. Don’t say a problem that you can solve unless you can prove it. Don’t say you help people lose weight unless you have before and after photos. Don’t say you’re the best home builder in Oklahoma unless you can prove it with reviews and verifiable evidence. As an example of what happens when you script all this stuff out though, Shaw Homes, I just got a text message from Aaron Antus on Friday.

Last year, again, Shaw Homes, since I’ve coached them, they’ve grown from 37 million in gross revenue of 37 million of annual sales to 81 million in annual sales. Oh, yeah. Now, if you take 12 months a year, and you divide that by you say there’s 81 million, we divide that by So 81 divided by 12. That means they would have to do $6 .75 million of sales a month to keep up that pace. January is the slowest month of the year.

And last January we did just a little under $3 million of sales. So far in January, and we are not in February yet as of the time we’re recording this, they are now up to over 10 million of sales. Shaw homes is on pace to do $200 million of sales this year. And it’s over threefold increase. Yeah, it’s 368%. They’re up so far.

Yes. So a few more days. Why? Because I went into the company, I find out what works well. Aaron antis has sold has sold himself almost a billion dollars of homes. I say okay, that works.

This just in that works. Let’s get that out. Let’s let’s because again, let’s copy what works. Five report building questions. Five needs based questions. Let’s get benefits.

We’ve got a guy who used to teach tumbling six months ago, who has sold $7 million of houses this month. I mean, then you build the call to action that you build your five closing questions, six, Isolate objections. This might be called the FAQ sheet. Charles, you’re going to get asked every week, where are the bathrooms? Where are the bathrooms? How much is tanning?

Where are the bathrooms? Where are the showers? Can I park here? Can I park there? Can I bring my friend? Park wherever you want.

What if I want to cancel? Amber, why do you have to take the time to sit down and think about all of the questions that you get frequently asked? Why do you have to take the time out to script it out at colawfitness . com? Well, you want to help the customer and you want to make it a no -brainer. We’ve already gone through all of those questions for you.

We’ve provided answers. And we want to make your your signup process, your first visit, your whole time being a member as enjoyable as possible. One of the takeaways I have on this is just a thought that popped in my head. It’s like a lot of times you have front desk, it’s high time people are signing up and then people may stop by that say, hey, I need to cancel my membership. or something. And I don’t like it when both people, or one’s onboarding, one’s offboarding at the same time.

It’s just kind of like, for me, it’s just a weird deal. And so what I like is the fact that we have all of that information to say, absolutely, here’s your stuff. Call this, this is our customer service. They’ll pick up the phone right now and handle all that. And that can give that person, away from the desk if there’s an issue, and that way the sales acquisition isn’t also seen. Well, and usually this is why someone cancels at Kola Fitness, and I know this because I’ve worked at the gyms before.

They go, you know, I haven’t worked out ever. And I have all these amenities and I just want to know if I can get a refund real quick. Cause I paid and I know you’ve, you’ve paid a mortgage or a lease or for the light bill or for the staff. But I, I, I signed up, you know, and I have just not been there this year at all. And I just want a refund for the whole thing. And they slip it in and I just want a refund real quick for the whole thing.

Yeah. I just real quick, just be kind of, and then you’ll go, well, you know, the way it works, it’s month to month, it’s like a cable bill. You don’t get a refund if you don’t use your phone a lot or your TV a lot, but we can just cancel you out right now. It’s all good. You know, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I’m going to have to get a refund over here.

And obviously they get loud. Cause that’s the move they’ve been taught. That’s how you, the squeaky wheel gets the oil and then it kills. And then the person next to him is like. who’s thinking about signing up, they’re going, Oh no, is this how all your members are? And it’s just weird.

So you’ve thought through that again, be intentional, be intentional, script out your FAQs. Now Dale Carnegie says a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. So what you want to do is script out how to convey it, how to communicate it. So our listener asks the question, Nathan asks, so how do you apply how to win friends and influence people to employee relationships? Well, what you do is you make a script for rapport, needs, benefits, close and isolating objections for employees.

Yep. Well, then how do you do? How do you apply? How do you friends and influence people to customer complaints? Well, you build a script with report needs, benefits, close and isolated objections.

Well, you say, Well, how do I then use this book for dealing with potential customers? Well, you build a script for report needs, benefits, close, isolate objections. You got to have a script for all these things. Once you have a script, once you nail it, you can scale it. Now we have another question from a thriver. And I wanted the co laws to speak to this.

They’re kind of in a little bit of a tighter budget. How many people work with you guys at Coalaud? Do you have seven people, 70 people, 45? We have a corporate team of five and we have about 90 or more employees. So getting close to 100 people -ish, about 95. And so you have people on your team you can now pay to write search engine content for.

Right. But there was a time when we first started working with you where we wrote content for you and then we taught your team and now your team does it. This listener is wanting to know, well, you know, should I keep spending all my money on AdWords? Or should I invest money in Google optimization? Now, I personally am a huge fan of Google optimization, because if you Google Joplin gyms right now, you guys are top and you’re going to stay top as long as you’re adding content. But AdWords is like fool’s gold.

You’re top for like the weekend. And then after you get to the end of your budget, you spend those $300 for those pay -per -click ads, you’re at the bottom of Google again. What advice would you have, objectively, you’re not a coach, you’re not a consultant, you’re a business owner, what advice would you have for somebody who’s a little bit leery about investing, paying his team to write content ongoing? Well, I’d say what you’re doing is you’re investing in things that are going to last longer than just a paid ad. So it’s, it’s basically investing into training your staff on how to get objective, good reviews, making sure that your staff’s really doing that. Um, that’s going to help you populate more on the site map, get a better presence for your website, making sure that a company like clay that fully understands how to make sure that you’re, you’re hitting all the little key indicators.

your website being built and then making sure that all these articles that you’re writing about are have good relevant content. Clay’s got a great acronym for that. He’ll go over that with you. But these are things you’ve got to be constantly doing within your company if you want to have a top presence on social media, or sorry, on search engine optimization. And the dollars you spend in there, I would believe are going to last 10 to 20 times longer than just buying Google ads and things like that. So what I’ve done is if you go to thebestseobook .

com, thebestseobook . com, everybody out there can download my new book, Search Engine Domination, for free. You download the book, open it up to chapter two, and on there you will see a checklist. And everything on that checklist is what you need to do. All right, so there’s four variables that get you to the top of the Google search engine rank. One is it’s the most mobile compliance.

Does it work well on mobile phones? If you go to my book, there’s a test you can take right there. You can check it for compliance. It’s free. Boom, there it is. Okay, mobile compliance.

Two is canonical compliance. Does your website adhere to all of Google’s rules? You not adhering to all the rules is analogous to writing a book and refusing to get an ISBN number so no one can find it or sort it at Barnes and Noble. If you have a book and you don’t get an ISBN number, nobody can find the book and the bookshelves. You have to just, it’s weird. It’s the equivalent of going to the bank and depositing money, but you don’t have an account.

It’s just weird. And so you’ve got to have your canonically compliant website. And then you’ve got to have the most reviews and the most content. So a little thing I’ve taught my team to remember is VISM. Every day, get a video review from a happy customer. Every day, add an image that is optimized to your website.

We can teach you how to do that in other shows. Three, write search engine content, at least 1 ,000 words of content per page. And four, get those Google reviews. Video reviews, images optimized, search engine optimization content, and more. Google reviews. Now, if you do that consistently, you’re going to see this cool thing called the search results you see when you search for Joplin gyms.

Everybody do a search right now for Joplin gyms. And if you live in Joplin, sign up already. But do a search for Joplin gyms, and you’re going to find Koloff Fitness with 4 ,139 reviews. Planet Fitness batting number two with 261 reviews. What? I mean, that’s like an NBA game where the one team scores 1 ,000 points and your team scores 20.

I mean, you’re killing them. 4 ,139 reviews to 261. Your video reviews, you can’t fake those. Those aren’t holograms, homies. Those are real people. But you’ve got to be consistent if you want to win.

I’m going to give Amber the mic for the final take home point here. Consistency is king. We all get motivated. We all listen to podcasts or read books or go to seminars or we all get fired up for a moment. But you’ve been fired up for how many years have you guys been fired up about Kola Fitness? 15 years.

Help somebody out there that’s struggling with consistency. What feedback would you have for them about the consistency if they have a coach about showing up and doing their action items? And if they don’t about just being accountable to themselves, talk to them about consistency. You just have to determine what your goal is, and then you need to break it down into items that are doable. And you just do one a day. And it’s not what you can do in a day.

It’s not what you can do in a week or even in a month. But it’s what you can do over a long period of time. So just being consistent at the small things and the small habits and putting those in place on your calendar. They’re scheduled. You protect those items. Yeah, you do.

Like we have a lot of friends that struggle with this, just to show up at a small group every week, same time, same place. The group’s getting smaller. People can’t make it. The group’s getting smaller. Because other things come up. So they’re not truly committed to it.

it Whatever comes across their plate. So you really have to protect your calendar and your time. Yep. Yeah, that’s good Amber I was gonna also add that yeah with The, the thrive group and their business coaching. What I love is they break it down into one to three easy action items every week. And the goal is, is like, if you just freaking stick with them for like three years or two, I mean, I’m not trying to sound crazy, but you’re only going to get one to three items really done.

Because most of you guys are working in your business on the day -to -day, and you don’t have a lot of time to work on the business. So you’ll say, I can do everything in the first meeting. Just give me all of it. But if you just say, I’m going to budget to stay consistent with the program, do one to three action items, be realistic with my coach, three years later, that’s like 150 action items. And you will transform your whole company. Currington told me this.

He said, you know, Clay, we’ve been getting 2 % better. every week for five and a half years. He tapped me on the shoulder, he said, I gotta hop on the show, I gotta be on the show, I gotta tell you something. I said, what? He goes, when you started coaching me, I was a startup, and I did no mortgages that year, because I was a startup. I did $251 million of mortgage sales last year.

And that is, wow. And then Shaw Homes, they’re sending me text messages going, we’re on pace. Remember, they started at $37 million of revenue. They’re on pace right now. If they if they just keep the pace what they did so far. They’re I mean, right now this is crazy.

They ended last year at $81 million at their current pace you month over month sales the last two months. They’re on pace to do $265 million of sales. That’s awesome. And again, they just do their accidents and we’re getting 2 % better every week. And Clay has helped us really document create create really good checklists and and and in each department with quantitative scorecards. So everything every week is getting done and

we’re not trying to do everything at once, but we just slowly add more and more and more. Every department gets all their action items done every week. Now we’ve got a duplicable, a scalable prototype, like a franchise prototype that we can hand to any other person. If somebody’s gone, somebody can grab that, make sure that all the marketing stuff’s getting done, making sure all the call center, making sure the customer service stuff’s taken care of. But all of this to say, We’re on track to possibly triple our company in the next nine months. And this is where we’ve worked for over 15 years.

And our proposed gross sales, if we hit what we think we’re going to hit based upon our history, we should hit maybe three times, at least two times for sure, our revenue of what we did the previous year. All I ask for in return is Lamborghini rides. That’s all I’m looking for is Lamborghini rides. Oh, yes. Now, if you’re out there today and you feel stuck, don’t be. Go to Thrivetimeshow .

com and book your tickets to our next in -person Thrivetimeshow workshop. It’s a money back guaranteed. It is the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshop. My name is Clay Clark. That is Amber Colaw and Charles Colaw. We like to end each and every show with a boom.

So now without any further ado, three, two, one, boom. One of our accountants had said, you’ve got to meet this guy, Clay. So we ended up meeting with Clay. He’s helped us go from right before we opened the third location now to six locations. And so we’ve more than doubled our revenue. And these are ground up build gyms.

And so it’s not the barrier for entry is pretty high. It’s 20 plus staff at each location. So yeah, it’s been a lot as far as running systems, checklists, workflows, who does what, when and how, training us on that. Clay’s helped a ton. We would not be where we’re at without him. So huge win.

Charles, from an ROI perspective, if someone’s going to look at it and go, return on investment, I pay you $1 ,700 a month. Will I make more money than I’m paying you? How would you maybe tackle or how would you respond to what kind of return on investment? have you seen for the $1 ,700 a month you’re paying? Well, for example, Clay has got, there’s no better business coach in the world that has the way he works, the way his mind works. But he’s also got a team of other business coaches that have worked in lots of different industries.

So he’s worked in every industry. His staff has worked in every industry. He’s got videographers, web designers. I mean, just for the fact of like, just the website alone is worth the $1 ,700. Just the ability to take any of their proven systems, whether that’s a marketing thing, or whether that’s a staffing thing, like one thing done in the month, it pays for itself. And then to understand this, there’s a part of where, you know, some maybe some week, you may be like, well, you know what, I’m not getting a whole lot out of this call.

But the bottom line is, it’s like when you read the Bible, there’s times you’re just reading it, and then you’re like, You know what I really and then you read it that one time and it’s like God really speaks to your heart and the whole truth is it’s like there’s no way that you can get that kind of value for $1 ,700 to have a whole team of coaches. Graphic designers, web developers, anybody that has that type of knowledge, you know, in your back pocket. And then in the whole thing is run your business with being somewhat conservative. Make sure you don’t run it to the edge all the time. But by doing that, you have that that skill set. You have that you have those.

It’s tools on your tool belt. And I just think it’s just like, it’s just like the cost of doing business. Like, just, just understand it. That’s a, that’s what I think. There’s a, there’s a, sometimes the payment we make, I feel like is peace of mind, even because there have been multiple times throughout the years that we will, we will either be butting heads on something. Um, we’re super confused about something.

We’re fearful about something, something in the markets changed and it’s a quick call to clay. Well, Thrive Nation, it’s a very… occasion because a lot of times on The Thrive Time Show, I get to interview people that I am friendly with or have an acquaintance with, that kind of thing, and I enjoy that. But it’s really an honor whenever I get to interview someone who I consider to be a friend or people that I consider to be friends of our family. And it’s awesome when we can celebrate a success story because it’s a life -giving thing. And for somebody watching today’s show, if you feel you need like a checkup from the neck up, if you feel stuck, if you feel like you don’t have the resources to get started but you You have the resourcefulness.

Maybe today’s show is the show you need to hear, because this is a couple. They started this business together out of their house, and they’ve now grown it into a multimillion -dollar, super -successful company. And I’ve had the opportunity to work with them in a consulting or coaching capacity over these past five or six years, and I am so excited to have them on today’s show. With that being said, Amber and Charles Cola, welcome onto the Thrive Time Show. Amber, how are you? Great.

Thanks, Clay. It’s awesome to be on here with you. Yes, we are excited. Okay, so I got to ask this real quick, because people think you’re a hologram. How long have we had the opportunity to work with you? Or how long have we worked with you guys together from a kind of a coaching relationship?

We probably started back in 2017. So yeah, we’re looking at seven, eight years. It’s coming up on eight probably, a little over seven. And from that time, I mean, you guys have experienced tremendous personal growth and business growth. I mean, could you, Charles, maybe talk about, I’m not looking for your specific financials, but could you maybe talk about maybe the size you guys have grown over these past seven or eight years at colawfitness . com?

Absolutely. We started off, we were getting ready to open our third location. And one of our accountants had said, you’ve got to meet this guy, Clay. So we ended up meeting with Clay. And he’s helped us go from, you know, right before we open the third location now to six locations. And so we’ve more than doubled our revenue.

And these are ground up build gyms. And so it’s not the barrier for entry is pretty high. It’s 20 plus staff at each location. So yeah, it’s been a lot as far as running systems, checklists, workflows, who does what, when and how, training us on that. Clay’s helped a ton. We would not be where we’re at without him.

So huge win. Now, I’m going to ask you guys this story, because I want you to be able to encourage somebody. I’m not sure who’s going to watch this show, but I view every show as kind of a message in a bottle. So somebody’s watching this show, and they’re going to relate to this story. I’m going to let Amber go first, because I think she’ll maybe have a less rosy view of how it was. But you guys started colawfitness .

com doing personal training to individual clients in your actual home. So like your living room was where the squat rack was, or the bench press was in the kitchen. Amber, what was that like when you started colawfitness . com? Well, I think when you’re starting something like that, you don’t see a bigger picture. You’re not thinking that far ahead.

You’re just kind of thinking, you have to work, you have to survive, you’ve got to make money, and you’re doing what you love. And so with that, it was just it was kind of more of a survival. And also, we couldn’t afford furniture to go in our formal living room, a formal dining room. And so. So, um, we were kind of stuck in a situation where Charles needed a place to train and he had a full clientele. And so we just were, why don’t we find like a big universal piece, stick it in the living room that cause it’s just an empty room.

And, um, the dining room became more of the office. And so we bought a big universal piece and threw down some rubber flooring, ripped up the carpet and put some big mirrors on the wall. And we just started doing what we needed to do at the time with no, I mean I definitely not think it was going to be in my house for a couple of years for sure. But yeah, a lot of it was fear of failure. I was like, I want to make sure that you know, I can provide for my family.

And we were trying to just I was every lead I had and follow up with every client I trained want to make sure that it gave me good results. And yeah, next thing you know, we have about 160 clients coming in and out of the door a week. And it’s me and about four or five of the trainers training out of there, out of our living room. And so it became a revolving door of fitness. And then Amber also did some hair. So she had a hair salon in the back of the house.

So it’s like a training studio in the front of the house and then a hair salon in the back of the house. So yeah. The win. Now, I want to share this story because I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this story with you, but I think our listeners need to hear this because your story is better than mine. But let me just show this to the listeners real quick here. If we go to 111th and Memorial in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my wife and I, we were 20 years old -ish, and I remember I was so excited to be able to build our house.

I remember telling my wife, honey, We can afford to build a house. We are going to build a house, a brand new house. She was so excited. I remember we were driving down Riverside. She was like, we’re going to buy a house? I go, yeah.

She’s like, we’re going to build a house? I’m going, yeah, because we’re a young couple. We’ve just been married a couple of years. Right here at 111th and Memorial. I found a builder named Rob Brewer, who did a phenomenal job. I would hire him again.

And this is a true story. So I built this house from scratch. And so my neighbor comes by, Wendy, God bless her. I’m not going to mention her last name. Wendy comes by, and she’s like, hey, what are you doing? I go, what do you mean?

Because I’m having like 40 couples a week that are walking up to my front door, hanging a right at my office. And there’s, not kidding, there’s probably eight DJ vans in my backyard. And she’s like, what are you doing? And I’m going, well, what do you mean what I do? She’s like, this is a residential neighborhood. What are you doing?

I said, well, I’m running a business. She said, you can’t run a business here. So I head back here in the backyard. No kidding. I had eight different vans back there. And then neighbors kept asking me if I was running drugs.

I mean, people were concerned because the first DJ would come to load up gear at 4 in the morning, and our last guy would come home at 3 in the morning. And it was just a wild thing. I got to ask you, with the gym, Amber, how early were people coming to work out, to do squats, and bench press, and cardio? What time were they showing up? How many people were showing up? Oh yeah.

So Charles is, he’s relentless and he’ll fill any hour he can. And so he would start as early as 5 a . m. with his first client. And you know, sometimes it would last until about 10 o ‘clock at night. And so it was, it was, it was just a revolving door.

And we always blocked out the middle of the afternoon at two o ‘clock every afternoon and him and I, and as we added staff, we would all work out together. So it became this big, you know, workout session together. It was awesome. And this is a real thing. Now, Amber, I’m not looking for anything super salacious. But I mean, did you ever have awkward situations?

I mean, because you’re sleeping there. You’re living there. Do you guys ever have just like, I remember with the DJ business, my wife, about once a week there for a while, she would come downstairs. One of my DJs would, Clay, where’s the bathroom? I’d say, right there. And they would walk into our master bedroom.

And I’m like, get out of there. That’s my bathroom, you sicko. I mean, did you ever have just weird client interactions? Oh, yeah. Totally from, you know, our kitchen became like the staff break room. And so all of a sudden I’ve got everybody’s lunches in my fridge.

And I remember one day a guy had went to get the barbecue sauce out of the fridge and just drops it. And it just shatters all over the kitchen floor that his client was here. So he, he looks at me kind of like, uh, and I was like, just, just go. I got like. some cleaning up barbecue sauce out of the kitchen. One morning I had gotten out of the shower and I come out of the bathroom, which is at the top of the stairs, and I’m just making that short little jagged over to my bedroom door.

And so I had my hair in a towel and a robe on, and I opened the door and right there at the bottom of the stairs, Charles has one of the clients doing calf raises. And they just good morning. And I thought get this out of my trainers napping on the couch between clients and our middle son was in pre K at the time. And so he’d come home half the day. And he’d sit on the couch, he was just so little, his feet would just stick straight off the couch and he’d try and watch cartoons. And there would be someone on like a ab mat on the floor, right in front of the TV doing crunches.

And so he’s just watching his little cartoons and someone’s doing crunches in front of him. And so, oh yeah, the whole family was in on it. I just remember when I was building DJConnection . com, I would train my DJs out of my house. So we would practice announcements, like, ladies and gentlemen, coming up in just a moment, we’re going to introduce the bride and the groom. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, get ready for the intro.

And we would practice, ladies and gentlemen, coming up next, we’re going to be cutting the cake. Once again, we got the bride, we got the groom, we got a knife. It should be exciting. And I’m practicing, and they have a script, and I’m practicing. So adult males are in my house, and we’re practicing introducing. Because we grew DJ Connection to do 4 ,000 weddings a year, so I’m training 30 disc jockey every week.

So Havana, my oldest, who’s now 20, she starts running around in the office going, ladies and gentlemen, coming up next, the cutting of the cake. Because she had heard it so much. She’s like, ladies and gentlemen, coming up next, the Soul Train line. She knew. Because it was like, and I don’t think if you’re watching today’s show and these stories, you can’t relate to it. That’s OK.

But I’m just trying to make sure we’re getting this idea. This is a real couple that I have classify as a super success story, but they had to start somewhere. And it’s not about resourcefulness. It’s not about resources. It’s about resourcefulness.

Again, it’s not about resources. It’s about resourcefulness. Look at the backyard. I turned half my backyard into a concrete slab so that we could park all the vans back here. I mean, look at all the trees I planted to block the view. So now you look at Colaw Fitness and you go, Wow, this is a super successful company.

Wow, I want to be the next Koloff Fitness. Wow, these guys are really doing it. I want to be a kolofffitness . com. I’ll get the website to pull up in just a second. And people always come to me and they say, Clay, what do I need to do?

What’s the most important thing? I just had a guy today, huge ministry, huge ministry, multimillion dollar massive ministry called me and said, what’s the one thing I can do to grow my ministry? And I said, buddy, I’m going to send you today’s show. There are 14 things that we need to do and a lot of details on those 14. So we’re going to go step -by -step on today’s show. I’ll go back and forth between Charles and Amber.

And for sake of time, we’ll just go back and forth rapid fire. So here we go. And Charles, by the way, you get 60 seconds on the clock for each answer. So here we go. Box number one, you have to figure out your revenue goals. You just have to know your revenue goals.

You have to know how you’re going your revenue goals. What are your gross revenue goals? What are your weekly revenue goals? What are your annual revenue goals? You have to know your revenue goals. Charles, why do you have to know your revenue goals?

Yes, you have to know your revenue goals so you know if they’re going to be making money or not. And for us, we want to make sure that we’re staying bankable, that we can open more locations. Our gyms are a ministry for us. We want to make sure that we continue to expand and making sure we got at least a 20 % profit margin off of all of our expenses to income over expenses. And we know how many memberships we have to sell. We know how many clients that we have to service to hit those goals for our set overhead costs.

And yeah, you got to know how many units of items you have to sell every week, every day. And so we track that stuff. And for us, we have a lot of it’s really. recurring revenue. But the whole point is that we want to make sure that we have enough of the payable viable buyers in the system to continue to grow. And you you track this stuff.

And so we’ve got wonderful members of our team. We’ve got a young member of our team named Natalie who’s learning all of this because she’s developing into a coach. And when you work with a new client a lot of times the client’s going to have a bias to focus on just marketing just branding. But you have to know these numbers. Amber, anything else you want to talk about as far as the numbers? Because I know your husband is passionate about fitness, and you are as well.

But why do you have to focus on the numbers and not just marketing, or not just branding, or not just social media? Why do you have to focus on those numbers? Well, I think the numbers, it’s like the steering wheel that steers the ship. I mean, if you don’t understand the numbers, you have no idea where you’re going. And so I think that’s probably the biggest thing. It leads the whole way.

And I think a lot of people tend to do, I’m going to do the marketing, or I just want to perform the service. I think a lot of it because people are scared of numbers. I think they feel like numbers are overwhelming, and they try to make numbers way too difficult. So I think that’s the biggest thing. This is such wisdom, folks. I’m telling you, if you’re not familiar with colawfitness .

com, go to their website. These guys give away a Bible every time they sell a new membership. They set aside a portion of the funds to give away a Bible to first -time members at their gym. It’s an incredible, it’s a ministry, it’s a business. It checks all those boxes. Let’s move on to box number three.

Define the number of hours you’re willing to work. Now, Amber, you happen to be married to a man who’s willing to work every hour of the day if need be. I will say this, though. Most of my clients, if I had to think about my 160 clients I work with, And I had to think about the average client. 90 % of them are not willing to work as hard as you guys. Most of my clients are willing to work 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week.

Some will work 60 hours a week. But nobody is willing to go sprint from 4 AM to 8 PM, 10 PM every day if need be. Your husband is willing to do that. Why is it important for you guys, Charles, to define the hours that you’re going to work? The hours that you’re not going to work, block out time for the family cruise, for the family trip. Why is that an important box there, Charles?

That way, my wife will stay married to me. Well, I’m like you, I like to just go, go, go. And then we do definitely, we take off and we go to church on Sunday. It’s important for us to hold the Sunday as a Sabbath, as a day off. Other than that, I like to work. You talked about vacation, to vacate or to leave something.

I love to work. I love to build the systems and build the documents and train staff, build the systems and so on. But we do have to make sure that once a quarter we try to look at taking time off, go ahead. Well, I would say the biggest thing that we always talk about in marriage, family, and work, expectations and boundaries. Those two things have to be very clear all the time. So as long as he understands what my expectations are, and I need him to fulfill a husband role in addition to working, as long as he understands that these are my expectations, and then these are my boundaries, and as long as we communicate that, then we’re good.

I’ll say one more thing is that for us we’ve kind of at the spot to where you know we just work on the business not in the business so we don’t actually do the day -to -day stuff but we work on the business systems, checklists, workflows, training, coaching people remotely because we do live in Florida. Our clubs are in the Midwest, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Kansas and so running remotely and running all that stuff we’ve got to kind of say, how do we want to live our lives? Like you’d say, Charles, how do you really want to live it? You got to kind of map out and clearly define that. For us, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, those days are just all in on Zoom calls, training, coaching, working with staff.

And so those days are really, really full days. And then the rest of the time, like on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, those are all lighter days that we don’t block in a lot of meetings. It’s like no meetings that we plan, but we are still I’m still working on things that I want to work on, but I’m not leveraged to having to. So I’ve kind of created my three day. Work week that’s like super long. And then the rest of the time I don’t have meetings, I don’t get held hostage on a lot of stuff.

And people have to kind of have a gatekeeper to get to me. But other than that, that’s how I’ve tried to map that out so that I can continue to mastermind and kind of grow the brand and have some meta perspective on how I want to continue to grow. So there’s just So much, again, for folks, if you want to learn entrepreneurship, this is real people. If you’re in the Florida area and you’re looking for a job, if you’re in the Joplin, Missouri area and you’re looking for a career, not just a job, Koloff Fitness is a company that’s going places. I’m not prophetic. I’m not claiming to have some view of the future.

I just see patterns. And I work with clients, and I help them implement patterns that work. And I also know of the clients that’ll work. Nothing works unless you work, right? So nothing will work unless you work. And I look at the Colaw family, and I look at the fuel that you put into the business and the diligence that you bring.

And I’m telling you, folks, this is a brand that’s going somewhere. If you’re looking for a career, check it out, colawfitness . com. Box number four and five, these kind of fit in together. Box number four is you have to determine your unique value proposition. That’s a unique thing.

But what is it that makes you unique? you unique? What is it that separates you from the competition? If you’re watching today’s show, let’s think about your website, your print piece, your auto wraps, your business cards. Let’s think about everything about your business. Let’s think about the site.

the sounds, the smell, the ambiance, the employees you have. What is it that makes you different from the competition? What is it that makes Chick -fil -A successful when there are many other fast food chicken restaurants? What is it that makes Quick Trip super successful when there are so many gross, nasty, Uh, dirty, uh, convenience stores. What is it that makes Chick -fil -A successful? What is it that makes QuickTrip successful?

What is it, what is the secret sauce? that allows Brad Stevens, the coach of the Boston Celtics, to bring out a winning lineup year after year. Brad Stevens took a dysfunctional Butler College basketball team and turned them into a top -four basketball team. Think about this. He took a college called Butler, the size of Oral Roberts University, and took them to the Final Four multiple times, and then he takes that same recipe and goes to the NBA, and they win a championship, and he’s putting out a winner year after year. What is the secret sauce that allowed Phil Jackson to win year after year?

Michael Jordan couldn’t win a championship without Phil Jackson? He played a lot of seasons without Phil Jackson. He only won his championships with Phil. Kobe Bryant never won a championship without Phil Jackson. By the way, Kobe Bryant played a lot of seasons without Phil Jackson. What is that magic formula?

A big part of it is you have to understand your unique value proposition. So Amber, what is it that makes Kola Fitness unique versus other fitness companies? For us, it’s culture, hands down. It’s culture all day long. And we worked really hard at our first location to set the culture and make it what we wanted it to be. We wanted a fitness center that everybody could come be a part of.

And I mean, not everybody, not everybody likes it, but It’s definitely our culture and that was something we knew we had to be able to duplicate when opening other locations. And so that is probably the number one piece that we we train, develop, encourage that we’re the biggest part of the company that we are still a part of is the culture part. Yep. And that’s the big part. I’m going to just kind of jump on a little bit more.

We’re unapologetic in our Christian component to that. I think if, if Planet Fitness is the McDonald’s of gyms, Cola Fitness is the Chick -fil -A. And what I mean by that is, We are a strong Christian culture. We hire and we look for people that match that. They don’t have to be a Christian, but they do have to align with those values. All of Christianity summed up in one word is the word agape.

That’s an unconditional love. We want to make sure that we actually hire people that are into customer service, likes people. Who’d have thought customer service, we’re going to find people that actually like to serve people. And so we really vet that pretty heavily on the front side, on the onboarding with our, you know, like our Christian culture. We play a video, we talk about who we are. We talk about the Christian faith.

values, devotion to God, discipline in living, denial of self, dream great dreams for God’s glory, determination to stay the course. So the Christian side of it is kind of strong. So either people lean in or lean and lean back. And so when we do group interviews, this is where you’ve taught us a lot of great systems, you see people lean in and see people lean back. So when everybody’s on the boat rowing in the same direction, and they really match that value set, the culture is just it’s just better. And when you hire people to actually like people, like hire people that like people.

They want to acknowledge your presence, close the gap, give them a fist bump, a high five, make somebody feel like the highest, like the highlight of the day when they walk through that door. So we train people on those systems. So we took the culture that we did when we first opened the club, and we defined it into actual ways that we can role play and script it with our staff so that you have not a purple hair, McDonald’s, perpetually distracted, crayon mark tattoo person, You have a person in a post it like a McDonald’s something that runs up to your car like a Chick -fil -a. That’s you got their polo on and stuff. my pleasure. So that’s where we have to be very, very, very specific on how we do culture differently than the competition who’s just, you know, scaling out like crazy.

But people like the greatest currency in life is how you make somebody else feel. We want to make other people feel like the highlight of the day and hire people that are sincere. They’re just genuine, that truly like people. If you do that well, you have to lock the doors to keep people out. This is, I’m telling you folks, this is so important. I talked to a guy the other day who applied to work for your business, true story.

And he’s kind of a gremlin. I know him because he didn’t get hired by a friend of mine. And so a friend of mine’s like, hey, I didn’t hire this guy. He’s kind of a gremlin. I said, what do you mean, gremlin? He’s like, yeah, he’s just kind of a curmudgeon, kind of a negative guy, Debbie Downer.

And he’s got a big background in fitness, though. And he’s into fitness. And he played sports at a high level. And he’d love to come work for you, Clay. And I go, OK. And he’s like, yeah, I guess he applied for the Colaw guys a couple years ago, didn’t get the job.

And I’m going, OK. Interesting. And I knew that you, and I met the guy, I’m like, this guy, I understand why you didn’t hire him. And I didn’t hire him either. And I’m just telling you have certain standards. And if people aren’t up to those standards, they can come back and reapply later after they turn that frown upside down.

But you have a certain standard there. Now, box number six, the three -legged marketing stool. At Colaf Fitness, with every business we work with, every business that I work with, what we do is we develop a three -legged marketing stool. Now, I’ll give you a moment, Charles and Amber, to reflect on this. And maybe this is true for you, maybe not. But a lot of my clients that come into my life, I think about Stacey Purcell, longtime client, great lady.

I think about Shaw Homes, shawhomes . com. We helped Shaw Homes grow from $14 million a year to $150 million a year. I think about Satellite Phones, Tina, her company, SAT123. We’ve helped them grow to $100 million a year of sales. I think about Oxifresh, oxifresh .

com. We’ve helped them grow now to 500 -plus locations. And every single time I sit down with a business owner. they have not a three -legged marketing stool. No, no, no. They have a variety of things that might work.

And through tracking, we start to figure out what doesn’t work. And so with Stacey Purcell, with her wonderful business, we found out that LinkedIn didn’t work 100 % of the time, thus saving her $8 ,000 a month by turning it off. I just had a client this week. True story, we found he was spending $4 ,000 a week on YouTube ads, Instagram ads, and TikTok ads. Got a lot of clicks, got a lot of views. No leads.

Another client, I’m using a stream of consciousness, another client of mine, they were doing mailers, getting zero response. Another client of mine was doing billboards to the tune of $6 ,000 a month between all their locations. And as you look at the different businesses and you track, you can really, really become much more profitable by nailing down a three -legged marketing stool. Could you talk about that, Amber? Maybe the impact it’s had or hasn’t had, tracking the results. getting rid of what doesn’t work and focusing on what does work?

Yeah, well, I would say, none of that is my part of the business. And I’m so thankful. I hate marketing. But I would, what I would say to that is that has everything to do with like, we were talking about your numbers, and the tracking. So you’re talking about tracking these things. That’s my side, the financial side.

And I want to know that when the money’s going out, that that return is coming back. Right. And so I do that side of it with we talk about a marketing budget and watching that and holding true to that and watching those numbers and watching, you know, The revenue that comes back from that marketing and so you may be able to talk more on the marketing. That’s your Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, we’ve tracked where they come from. Sometimes you do get clicks or you have like sometimes Facebook shows you make it’s really

not getting people to walk through the door and convert people into members and convert people into higher ticket items. And so you really want to make sure that what you’re spending money on is actually quantifying out into dollars. And so Clay’s really been good with us to track that. We’ve done that for years. And so we can really kind of see in our industry We market in a five -mile radius, really heavy. That’s kind of our ideal and likely buyers within that five -mile radius or a 12 -minute drive time.

We target those. We see what marketing works best. And a lot of times, it’s the same proven stuff that Clay teaches with a lot of his clients is really seeing to making sure that you’re dominating on certain platforms. And I can go into that. But the whole point is Clay has done it in every industry. And when we follow the system, track it correctly, we can monetize our marketing dollars a whole lot better.

And so there’s ways you want to get in front of your ideal likely buyer. We make sure we got the right product offering in front of the right ideal likely buyer. And the things that Clay’s been doing with his clients over the last seven years with us, it doesn’t change much. There’s a few little things that adjust, but it’s a proven system and that’s what works. And we’ve just, we’ve done that. We’ve gone from three locations to six and we’ve more than doubled our revenue.

So it’s been a huge win. Well, I think sometimes people want to market in a certain way because that’s the cool thing to do. Like I want to be on TikTok, right? If TikTok doesn’t pay me, if TikTok is not, if it’s not paying my bills, I could care less. I mean, I can watch TikTok on my off time, but I’m not going to put my marketing dollars into it just because that’s what everybody else is doing. And, um, I think another part of that is everybody has marketing advice for you.

Everybody, everybody thinks there’s a marketing guru, you know, because they see ads. And I don’t think that’s true either. Now, I’m going to ask you this, Charles, and I’m not ready for your answer yet. I got to mentally prepare myself for this, but you do not have the ability to not be honest here. Okay. So, um, a guy called

me here today and I thought, man, I’m going to send this to him right away. Okay. Guy reaches out to me. He’s in the construction space. Okay. And he goes, what would it, this happens every day, by the way, but he says, what would it, what would a relationship look like if I hired you guys as, as my coach?

If I hired you, Clay, and your team, what does that look like? And I said, well, we charge you $1 ,700 a month. So it’s less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. That’s what it is. We have a weekly meeting. And we follow a proven system.

And anyway, and I said, there’s accountability. So there’s kind of three parts to it. One is we have a team that helps you get your photography, your video, your web, your search engine done for you, all those things. The second is we provide coaching down a proven path. And then the third is we have workshops every couple months so you can kind of get a tune up. And I said, Mr. Client, Mr. Potential Client, who I’ve known forever, I said, Clay Stairs describes me as the ass man.

And he’s like, the ass man? And I said, yeah, Clay Stairs, longtime client of mine. He’s been a client of mine for like 15 years. He literally tells people that I’m his ass man. And they go, what? He goes, Clay has helped me grow my company, claystairs .

com. He’s helped me get into political office. But he kind of is like an irritant who follows up on the same things every week until they get done. So I wanted to ask you, Charles, how would you describe what the coaching relationship looks like for somebody out there that’s saying, what is it like to work with specifically me and my team? Well, to shoot you straight, I mean, Clay’s highest desire isn’t always your comfort in that coaching. His highest desire is your continued development that you do hit your goals for financial.

And a good coach, think of a good coach. A good coach tells you what you need to hear because he doesn’t just care about the comfort in the room or the comfort of the conversation. He cares about your character development, your personal development to becoming the better leader. And if you want to run a great company, you have to be a great leader. You have to be the avatar. You have to be the guy

And Clay has really pushed that in me. And for me, I thought I’ve always needed that. And I was just like, okay, Charles, stay humble, stay coachable. And that’s the biggest thing is most business owners, they don’t have the ability to stay, keep a humble, coachable heart and be willing to grow. When you work with somebody that has a proven system, they’ve worked in every industry. They’ve got a team of videographers, graphic designers, web developers, people that will help you grow your business.

build the back end of your business correctly, the proven systems of continuous hiring of staff team, like group hiring that you always have staff ready to go. Somebody in the bullpen, so I’ll take it. You always have continuous training staff. You’ve never held hostages because there’s somebody that doesn’t know a skill set. You can always replace somebody because if you don’t create a system, you’re going to be a limited resource. And Clay creates the systems, helps you with document creation, file organization, and make sure you’ve got that stuff.

So you have a proven template. It’s really more like a franchisable prototype that you can handle the lowest skill set. So great people are great, but Clay’s been really good at shooting me straight. If you have a humble, coachable heart and you’re willing to grow and you take two or three action items every week, next thing you know, 50 weeks, 52 weeks in the year, you’ve got a bunch of systems, you got a way better website, you got checklist workflows, you got staff following systems, you got backup for each position, because if you don’t have people in the bullpen, you’re going to be held hostage. And so you want to make sure that you got the right systems, checklist and personnel ready to go. And to run six different businesses in four different states, From Florida, in the Midwest, we have to have good systems, checklists, workflows, and so on, and making sure people are holding to that.

Clay’s been really great for helping set up those systems. But it’s it’s to be honest, it’s not always the conversations are definitely sometimes challenging. But understanding that both parties, me as the client, him as the coach, is really help trying to have the highest desire to make you grow as into a better person and to help your company grow and be better. And for me, that’s a good coach. And that’s why I like working with with Thrive and Clay. So yeah, Amber, I wanted to tap into your wisdom on this, you know, there was a statement that was

made years ago by Robert Kiyosaki. It really resonated with me. I heard this about 20 years ago. But he said, amateurs don’t have a coach. Professionals do have a coach. And at the time, I thought, you know what? From a legal perspective, I probably need a coach.

or mentor to help me. So I hired wintersking . com, and I’ve used that company for, what, 10 plus years? And it’s really helped me. And I thought to myself, from an accounting perspective, I need probably to have her a coach. So I hired CCK.

And so in the areas where I want to improve, I really do firmly believe in having a coach. When I wanted to become a better speaker, I hired Carlton Pearson. And I worked with Carlton for as long as he would work with me, because at the time, he was the top televangelist in America. And he was a phenomenal verbal communicator. It wouldn’t have worked if I wasn’t coachable. and if he wasn’t willing to coach.

And you guys have done such a great job over these years implementing, and I just see the future is so bright here. So when we look at your website now, could you talk about just that weekly meeting and making those little iterations and every week making it a little better? Because I think some people want to get rich quick. They want to become successful in 10 minutes. They want to ready, set, let’s go. But you guys, every week we go to coloffitness .

com. Every week we enhance the website. Every week we enhance the scripts. week we enhance the value proposition. Every week we’re doing little tweaks that are improving the brand. Could you talk about that mindset of that weekly improvement?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, your numbers, you have to have good feedback tools, some key performance KPIs, or key performance things you look at for sales over cancellations, and how much dollars you’re spending in marketing. When we track that on a regular basis, we can see that we’re doing well or not doing well, we make pivots, we get coaching feedback from you on best practices. And one thing is, is that you’ve not just worked in our industry, but lots of industries, and having a team of people, a team of coaches that say, hey, this is what’s working, this isn’t what’s working, It’s super valuable. And so like, I mean, I got an MBA in school, but I’m telling you like, it’s real life is so much more important and having good people that have good feelers.

It’s like, you’re only as good as your team. And Clay brings the whole team to your team. And anyways, we have a weekly meeting. Our weekly meeting, we look at like, what are the key things that, impact us, it’s going to be sign -ups, sign -ups over cancels, what are those sign -ups, which ones upgraded to higher tier options, whether that’s membership, higher tier membership options, or whether that’s tearing up into higher services like fitness coaching, like one -on -one coaching, or fitness training, or nutrition coaching, or group training. But getting people into those things and understanding the scripts How to roleplay that over and over again, making sure your staff understands how to communicate effectively with the customer, roleplay, roleplay until that socially awkward, you know, young person can totally get it and they understand how to do it until the cognitive, the critical thinking face has gone away. They know how to do it.

Now you’ve got staff that knows how to communicate well, how to show the product offering benefits over cost, and then show them that, hey, if you don’t do it, this is what won’t happen. And you want to show them that you’re going to really change their lives and save their life, add years to the life quality to your years by changing new habits. And when people see that value, you’ve got the right staff articulating that, you close a lot of deals, you upgrade things, and you change a lot of lives. Well, one thing, Clay, I think with the coaching is it’s been beneficial. It’s kind of like you’re our blind side, blind spot coach. We, this is what we’ve created.

There’s a lot of emotions attached to it. It’s what we love. It’s what feeds our family. And so we can become very emotionally charged. And I think you’re super helpful to kind of bring us back in and go, Hey, like, so you kind of keep us focused, separating the emotions from it.

And I’ve heard a lot of people say to you or, you know, we’re in conversations we’ll have and they’ll say, yeah, but you don’t understand landscaping. It’s not about understanding landscaping. We don’t talk fitness every week when we meet, but it’s about. It’s about business and it’s about where we’re going and you really help keep us on track. There’s that accountability like you talked about. Your set of eyes is super valuable.

I’ll just say this. I mean, Colawfitness . com, if you’re looking for a career, folks, I’m telling you, check out Colawfitness . com. Now, point number seven, sales conversion. We have to have scripts, recorded calls, one sheets, lead trackers.

What? We need to have sales scripts, recorded calls, all the visuals in the store. We call that internal marketing. There’s external marketing, marketing to your ideal and likely buyers. But internal marketing, letting your current gym members know that you offer personal training or group fitness. Box number eight, you have to have a sustainable customer acquisition cost.

What? You have to know what does it cost you to land a new customer. Box number nine, you’ve got to create repeatable systems. When you clean the bathrooms, every day. When you clean the showers, every day. When you clean the locker rooms, every day.

When you clean the equipment, every day. When you clean all these things, multiple times a day. When you change the light bulbs, every day. When you have to maintain the fitness equipment, every day. When you have to hire people, every day. You have to build repeatable systems or your head will explode.

You’ve got to have checklists and processes. Box number 11, you have to manage people. Manage people, what? This just in, we have to manage people. We’ve got to hire people, manage people. How do you hire, inspire, train, retain?

We have to do it. Box number 11, you have to be able sustainable schedule. What is the schedule that your company will keep? What hours will you be open? What kind of shifts do you have? What kind of org chart?

Who’s in charge? Who isn’t? How do you deal with somebody that doesn’t want to follow the systems? Because this just in, a customer will fire you if you won’t fire your bad employees. In box number 12, you’ve got to have a high standard with the A players, the B players. You’ve got to coach up the B players.

to become A players. You’ve got to coach those A players to become future leaders. You’ve got to coach the C players out into another job or to the local bus station. You’ve got to get them out of your life or they will ruin your business. And then box number 13, you’ve got to make sure you’re making money. It’s not about how much money you make.

It’s about how much money you keep. Box number 14, you have to sit down every day and say, What does God want me to do if every day is a gift? What does God want me to do if every day is a gift from God? What does God want me to do with my faith, my family, my finances, my fitness, my friendship, my fun, my focused time? What does God want me to do with this day? That’s all these things we have to think about there.

And I’m telling you, folks, everything we’re talking about on today’s show, it wouldn’t matter if Kola Fitness was not obsessed with wowing the customers. Charles Kola and Amber Kola are obsessed with helping you take your fitness to the next level. If you’re out there today and you are in doubt, You’re in Joplin, Missouri. You’re in Texas. You are in all the different markets they’re in. Go to colawfitness .

com. You can see the markets they’re in. I’m telling you, these guys are obsessed with wowing customers. So I’ll go to you, Amber. Then I’ll go to you, Charles. Everything we talked about doesn’t work if you scam your customers.

Everything we talked about doesn’t matter if you don’t wow your customers. Can you talk about why at the core, even though we’re going over all this business stuff, all these details, at the end of the day, you guys at Colaw Fitness have to wow the customers. Why is that so important, Amber? Well, I think for us it’s important because we love people and everybody needs a belonging and worth. And they need to feel, um, important and they need to feel cared for. And like, that’s our passion.

We just love loving on people. That’s where, that’s what made Charles such a phenomenal trainer when that was the initial, uh, start of the whole company. It was just his desire to help people and his love for them. And that was the same reason, uh, you know, a million years ago that I did hair. Um, so I think for us, that’s our passion. we’re passionate about.

We’re passionate about people feeling like they are loved and they have value. And if we can pass that on through all of our front desk staff, if we can open more locations and bring in that many more people in these communities to feel loved, excuse me, and also spread the gospel at the same time, you know, let them know God loves you, you know, and so that that’s really what drives our passion in the coaching and development even of our staff. I’m Charles Cole. I got two final questions for you. And your wife can one up you. So here we go.

Two final questions. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. There’s somebody out there right now. They’re thinking about coming to one of our in -person workshops. They know Tim Tebow is going to be there.

They know Eric Trump will be there. They know that you might be there. But maybe if they haven’t been to a workshop in the past, how would you describe the in -person, two -day interactive workshops? How would you describe them, sir? It’s just, it’s raw and real. I mean, if you really want to try to get, if you really, really, really want to build a company, not just get like a, like if you go to school, you get a business degree, you, you know, they would say Clay’s program is, you know, business, business without the BS.

There’s no bull crap. He tells you the proven system, real proven systems, that have grown and scaled hundreds, if not thousands of companies, add millions, like we are millions of dollars more in revenue because of these systems that we’ve implemented. And we’ve been able to scale and not have to actually work in the business. We work on the business, just the business system. So we can live in Florida. We’re definitely engaged with our staff that runs these locations and they’re great lieutenants, but we have the systems, we have the checklist, we’ve got the workflows, and we have the systems that we can hold people to.

We’ve retained the right talent. We’ve got really people in the bullpen for every position. So they were held hostage to have to do that. But all that to say, it’s going, it’s funny. He’s very, very, I mean, Clay’s pretty much like a comedian. It’s hilarious to listen to.

If you’re willing to be coachable, if you’re willing to have a humble and coachable heart, that’s willing to grow, he’ll show you proven processes. There’s going to be a pathway that you can be successful. And if you’re a diligent doer and you just do one or two action items every week with your coach, the whole thing is this, it’s just, being more of a marathoner than a sprinter when you’re working with a coach, just do your two or three action items. And that two or three, if you times that by 52 weeks, that’s 150. Next thing you got a way better website, you got a way better lead funnel, you’ve got way better staff hired, you’ve got systems, checklists, workflows, all document created into mindfree templates, sales flows, training and development of staff, all that. So you got people in the bullpen for each position, and you’re no longer being held hostage.

as an owner and you’ve got a proven system. So that’s Clay and his team. I’ll one -up you. I will one -up him this one time. Like there’s truly nothing more exciting than to come to the conference. And we’ve been to almost every conference you’ve had for the last seven to eight years.

And it is completely refreshing. I always get something new out of it. It’s very practical. You’re not sitting in this huge ballroom with want, want, want speakers that you feel like are trying to sell you something and you’re trying to stay awake. That’s not the case at all. It’s a circus.

There’s a whole lot to take home. Even if you go to the conference and you decide, hey, this is not for me right now, or coaching is not for me, Hands down, you will leave with practical business application items. Final question I have for you guys. just like Kola Fitness, I mean, you put your name right there on the brand, Kola Fitness. You can’t really go to thrivetimeshow . com without seeing my cranium.

And so I take a lot of pride in what I do and wowing our customers. But for somebody out there, in particular, this guy today who’s in the construction space, who’s like, hey, what would coaching look like for me or is coaching for me? He’s reaching out. Charles, what do you say? What kind of impact has the coaching that we’ve had with you guys over these past seven or eight years made on the impact or the success? What kind of impact has the coaching made on colawfitness .

com? Well, I would say first off, personally, I’ve developed a great friendship with some really great people. And I thought that’s been huge for me. That’s personally, and to know people that are in the same type of pressure that you have is running a company running a business to have people that have that are intelligent, and they care. As a friend, that is huge. That’s number one, personally, and then professionally, to have a whole bullpen of a whole a whole data set of lots of different industries, best practices, whether that’s, you know, generally, it’s either a sales issue, like you don’t have enough sales, or then it’s a staffing issue, you don’t have the right staff, whether it’s a scaling it, how do I, you know, build this into a franchisable prototype, it’s all stuff that they’ve done over and over and over again.

And to where you have like a cognitive dissonance, like a mental disease with understanding it, they don’t. And when you have somebody that gives you peace, because it is something they’ve done before, that’s it’s priceless. So yeah, yeah. Oh, I would say that You were talking about it hasn’t just affected us in our business, but it has affected us in our personal life, too, because all of these things that you learn can be rolled over into your personal life. So that’s been huge. And like Charles was talking about the connections that we’ve made with other business owners.

You know, Clay, you said at the very first conference we went to your network is your net worth. I mean, that is hands down. have unsuccessful businesses and you’re hanging out with the old people who are complaining about having to work an eight hour day. You know, if you’re spending your time with them and you know, it’s just going to break the bank to go to Chili’s for dinner, that you’re going to stay there. You’re going to stay in that influence of people. And every conference we meet new people and we’ve got some of the most awesome friends that own businesses across the country.

from the cheesecake store to a pizza shop, right, to dog training, to, I mean, we’ve got some of our friends that live in cities that we have gyms and they’re members at our clubs. And it’s just, it’s so powerful. It gives us a whole community to bounce ideas off of and get encouragement from. Charles, from an ROI perspective, if someone’s going to look at it and go, return on investment, I pay you $1 ,700 a month. Will I make more money than I’m paying you? How would you maybe tackle or how would you respond to what kind of return on investment have you seen for the $1 ,700 a month you’re paying?

Well, for example, Clay has got, there’s no better business coach in the world that has the way he works, the way his mind works. But he’s also got a team of other business coaches that have worked in lots of different industries. So he’s worked in every industry. His staff has worked in every industry. He’s got videographers, web designers. I mean, just for the fact of like, just the website alone is worth the $1 ,700.

Just the ability to take any of their proven systems, whether that’s a marketing thing, or whether that’s a staffing thing, like one thing done in the month, it pays for itself. And then to understand this, there’s a part of where, you know, some maybe some week you may be like, well, you know what, I’m not getting a whole lot out of this call. But the bottom line is, it’s like when you read the Bible, there’s times you’re just reading it. and then you’re like, you know what I really and then you read it that one time and it’s like God really speaks to your heart. And the whole truth is, is like there’s no way that you can get that kind of value for $1 ,700 to have a whole team of coaches. Graphic designers, web developers, anybody that has that type of knowledge, you know, in your back pocket.

And then in the whole thing is run your business with being somewhat conservative. Make sure you don’t run it to the edge all the time. But by doing that, you have that that skill set. You have that you have those. It’s tools on your tool belt. And I just think it’s just like, it’s just like the cost of doing business.

Like, just, just understand it. That’s a, that’s what I think there’s a, there’s a, sometimes the payment we make, I feel like is peace of mind, even because there have been multiple times throughout the years that we will, we will either be butting heads on something. Um, we’re super confused about something. We’re fearful about something, something in the markets changed and it’s a quick call to clay. And so that quick call to Clay, and he’s outside the situation, and he has other data points. I mean, we’ve had times that, Clay, you’ve got a quick response, and you can tell us and direct us real quickly, and we’re right off the phone.

And there’s other times you’ll go, I’ll call you right back. And Clay will jump in, and he’ll call his other contacts and get back with us. Sometimes it takes longer. But there are times when you feel that way, when you’re like, Is this worth it? You know, I don’t feel like we’re doing much right now or we’re not growing. Um, inevitably something like that’ll come up and like, that’s our peace of mind.

Like he’s, you’re like, um, a crucial team player, you know? Well, you know, I, I, it’s an honor to serve you guys and everybody’s watching right now. I encourage you if you’re looking for a career. Now, if you’re looking for a job, don’t fill out the form, but if you’re looking for a career, go to Colaw fitness . .com. com.

Because if you live in, what, Joplin, Missouri, Charles, Dallas, Texas, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Amber, we live in Topeka, Kansas. If you’re out there, Arlington, if you’re out there, go to colawfitness . com if you’re looking for a career and not just a job. Thank you, too, for carving out time with your busy schedule. Oh, yeah. And I’m so glad to have you here today.

Thanks, Clay. Awesome. Thank you, Clay. Awesome. Take care, guys. Bye -bye.

I’m yelling something like this is a Lamborghini call. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi -million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves? Like Clark, man, he is one character. That’s a good word for him, character. Yeah, that is it.

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

Clay Clark starts his days at 5 o ‘clock in the morning. Oh, it’s incredible. Yeah. He’s he’s like he’s he’s a machine. He’s a machine. But his you know, I could I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock.

Yes. Hundreds of people showing up at five a . m. in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Man, he’s a leader of a leader. He’s fantastic.

Yeah, man. No, 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 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, 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. 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.

One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me.

It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic, and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the 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 Klay 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 Klay and his team.

I guarantee you’re not going 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 difficult for me was the business side of things. The processes and the advertising and marketing, I knew that I did not have what I needed to be successful. make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent. Everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us.

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

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

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

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

He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development. and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web.

With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards, and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. Clay, my honor, my honor to be on your show, and thank you for all you do. I hear the ripple effects from you are good ripple effects, you know what I mean? People rave about what they learn from you, so congratulations.

From expecting maybe 250 ,000 this year to we’re at 400 ,000. Hi, I’m Kelsey with K &D’s Woodruff Finishing. I’m a business owner at 23. So I’ve been working this K &E’s company for about five years now and we started working with Thrive not too long ago this year. So we’re pretty excited about that. Just listening to what they have to say, their hiring process has just really been incredible as far as finding good quality help and the just the accountability of meeting up with them weekly and such good insight, the resources they have for specific business questions.

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

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

So in four months, my leads have tripled. I was getting probably like two leads a week. Now I’m getting more in the like 10 to 15 leads a week. I have doubled my number of employees. I’m now hitting the highest revenue weeks in the history of the company, week to week it seems like. We went from about six appointments today as our highest in February to now 14 to 15 appointments a day.

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

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

If it seems like a good fit, just go for it. do what they say even if you think it’s stupid or ridiculous, just do what they say because it’ll work. You know, people, when they look at my business, you know, people in my town, they think I’m lucky. They think I’m just, you know, things just happen for me. And you know, maybe I am lucky, but it has a lot to do with hard work and, you know, perseverance and, you know, working 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’s the best thing ever, and I would suggest to anybody to work with them. So sorry for the long -winded reply, but I just had so much to say, and I could go on for hours probably about how amazing they are. But thank you to Clay and Luke and the entire team there, everything you guys have done for me. And I am so excited to continue to work with you for years to come. Thanks so much for watching. My saying is, if it’s important to you, hire a coach.

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

And as my rich dad always said, you know, amateurs don’t have a coach, but professionals always have coaches. So I’ve always had coaches for whatever was important. My rich dad was one of those persons. I wanted to learn how to play Monopoly in real life. So he was my coach. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell.

At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big, get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying. And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room.

Look at Robert, Zellner, and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever, and we’ll even give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it.

Transcribed with Cockatoo