Tim Tebow | Daniel Pink, the 4x New York Times Best-Selling Author on Why Persistence Trumps Talent Every Time + Tim Tebow Joins June 27-28 2024 Thrivetime 2-Day Business Conference

Audio Transcription

Listen here, if you’re going to be introducing Daniel Peek, the four-time New York Times best-selling author, this intro, Clay, had better be hot. I don’t even know how to begin to introduce this guy. I mean, he graduated from Yale Law School in 91. He’s a speechwriter for Al Gore. I mean, he’s a four-time New York Times best-selling author. Don’t be overwhelmed by the fact that you got kicked out of Oral Roberts University or that you took algebra three times or that you took the ACT three times. Just focus on the fact that you have none of the skills or talents that he has and just uh, but we don’t want to overwhelm you, just get up there and do your thing. Ladies and gentlemen, on today’s show we are interviewing the four time New York Times best selling author, the man they pay to think, it’s thought leader, Daniel Pink. Once a speech writer for VP Al Gore. He knows how to write the speech to make the people applaud. You must grab a pen and pad, I implore. Dan Pink is talking strategy like the art of war. If you’re on the floor, but you want the score. Dan Pink’s gonna blow your mind and you’ll be wanting more. He says when language rhymes, it’s more sublime. I’m gonna tell you his name one more time. Daniel Pink! And if you don’t know, now you know. Big shout out to Yale Law School, class of 1991. Daniel Pink! And if you don’t know, now you know. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men. Eight kids, co-created by two different women. Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. Now, three, two, one, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Thrive Nation, on today’s show we have a very special guest. It’s none other than my brother from another mother, the four-time New York Times best-selling author, Dan Paik. Mr. Paik, how are you, sir? I’m very good. Thanks for having me on the show, Clay. I have to ask you, I don’t know that you keep track of this, but how many times have you been a New York Times best-selling author? Oh, I keep track of this, man. How many weeks or how many books? I don’t know how many weeks, but books, four. How many books have you written that have become New York Times bestsellers? Four. And with those four books, you now have this overwhelming success. You’re so eloquent. There’s so many great interviews you’ve done and so many presentations. Go back to the bottom. Take me to the bottom. The very beginning, at the genesis of the Daniel Pink career, where do you feel like your career first began to gain some traction? You know, I feel honestly like I’m still gaining traction. Okay. And I came to this career in writing, writing books, in sort of a weird way. I didn’t really figure out what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to be when I grew up until, I don’t know, in my early 30s. So I went down a very peculiar path. I went to college. I majored in linguistics of all things. I was very interested in social science and especially linguistics is a very mathematical kind of social science. I ended up working in Washington for a little bit, then I went to law school. I really didn’t like it, didn’t want to become a lawyer. I graduated from law school unemployed, have never practiced law, and started working in politics. I did that for a while, and decided that I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. And the insight as it came went with this. And I think it’s a lesson for particularly some of your younger listeners out there. There are a lot of people who tell you, you know, you got to find your passion. What’s your passion? And I hate that question. For me, it was a very different question. And it was this. What do you do? What do you actually do? And for me, from the time I was in college all the way to the time that I was working in politics and had some pretty demanding jobs, I was always quote-unquote writing on the side. I was writing newspaper articles and magazine articles and columns and things like that. I did it kind of as a hobby, as weird as that sounds, in the same way that people, you know, oh, I’ve got my bowling night. Oh, I’m going to go, you know, do whatever. Taxidermy. You know? And it wasn’t, I don’t know how I came up with bowling and taxidermy. Although it would be kind of cool if you had a sport where you actually rolled a ball down a lane and you knocked over little stuffed animals. That would be kind of cool. We just invented a new sport. Right. This is something we’ve done together. Our first ball and dermy opportunity. Coming up on ABC Sports. And so, and it wasn’t until I realized that this thing that I was doing on the side was kind of what I should be doing. And so that’s why I like the question, and I’m sorry for such a long-winded answer, but that’s why I like the question of, you know, asking, like, what do you do? What do you pay attention to? What do you care about when no one’s watching, when you have free time? What is it that you actually do? And I think that that, it’s usually not a super loud voice, it’s a quieter voice, you have to really listen for it. But I think if you follow that voice, you can have a better chance of finding your path. You, in the world of politics, if I, and again, if I am getting anything incorrect, feel free to correct me here. You were a speech writer when you started, am I correct there? Yeah, right, I worked on some campaigns and then in a completely convoluted way became a speech writer. How did you become a speech writer? Were you the master orator? And I believe you wrote some speeches for Mr. Alvin Gore. So I did for several years, so here’s the thing. Here’s how I became a speech writer, all right, and this is the, you know, it wasn’t like wow you are so articulate wow look at that sentence you wrote it gleams off the page that’s not how I became a speechwriter here’s how I became a speechwriter somewhere along the line someone said oh crap we need a speech and they looked around and they saw me and they knew I could type and they said pink can you write a speech and I said and this is a very good lesson for your younger listeners out there. I said, yeah, I can do that having basically no experience doing it. Yeah, I can do that. And I did it and it didn’t stink. And they said, hey, can you do it again? And I said, I can do that. Can you do it again? And that’s how I became a speechwriter. When did your first book come out? When did your first best selling book come out? My first book came out in 2001. It was a book called Free Agent Nation, and it was about the rise of people working for themselves. Like many of your listeners, people who left large organizations to go out on their own. Start a small business, become an independent entrepreneur. And it was really about, like, this is way before the gig economy. Why was this happening? Why were people choosing this path? And why were some people being forced onto it? But what was it all about, and how is it changing the way that we work? It’s interesting because, again, how old are you right now there, Daniel? I am 54 years old. Okay. I’m 38. I’m a father of five kids. Folks, how old are your kids? My oldest daughter, she’s 14. My son’s 11. I have a daughter that’s 9 and then twins that are 7. Okay. All right. Okay, alright. And I started my first company out of my dorm room at Oral Roberts University. Okay. Which is still around today. I sold the company, but it was the nation’s largest wedding entertainment company called djconnection.com. Nice. And I was in Minnesota, and I had a family member who was a family member of mine who was very, very successful who said, I need to read this book, Free Age and Economy. Oh, really? And I said, bah, bah, boo, because I knew about all the DJ music, I knew the top 40, I knew about these things, scaling a company, thinking about my career, free agents. Then I sold DJ Connection, kind of a 27 year old now retired, at 27 I didn’t have to work anymore, and I picked up the book. So it was like a message in a bottle that took me years. That’s how I first discovered your writing, and I just want to ask you this, because I write books and you write best-selling books, so I want to ask you this. What was the process like of finding an agent that finally understood you and could help you get a book deal that you felt like made sense? Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think it’s helpful for aspiring writers to have writers really talk about some of the mechanics, like what is it really like? I’ll tell you how what happened to me uh I for this first book I’d actually written a I’d left my job and was out on my own and I’d written a magazine story for a magazine called fast company about this phenomenon of people of what we call free agents and and I said wow this is so interesting there’s so much more to write about. I think I want to turn this into a book So what I did is I took that article I wrote a short and very bad book proposal and I sent it to I don’t know a Bunch of agents and I found those agents by Talking to friends of mine who were writers Another good way to find agent is to go into the acknowledgements of books Read the acknowledgements of books because a writer you usually thank his or her agent and I sent it to a bunch of agents and I don’t know maybe a dozen and that friends and whatever had recommended and some of them said No, thanks. Not interested in this. Oh, oh, yeah a lot of them. Yeah And some of us said this is great. I’ll represent you and let’s have another conversation. And there was one agent in particular who called me up and said, this is really interesting. Do you wanna have lunch and talk about it? And so I had lunch with him and talked about it. And he basically told me that this is a good idea, poorly executed, and I could do it a lot better. And he was so smart and so savvy, I said, this is the guy I want to go with. And this fellow, Rafe Stegallan, has been my agent for 20 years now. Really? So you guys have had that relationship for 20 plus years? Yeah, and the writer-agent relationship is extraordinarily important because a lot of times in publishing houses, editors come and go. And your agent can be a sounding board. Your agent certainly is your advocate, not only in getting the contract and negotiating a good deal, but also throughout the publishing process. Your agent is very good at understanding the broader contours of the market. My decision to pick this particular literary agent was one of the best business decisions I have ever made. Have you ever written a book from start to finish that was totally terrible and once you got to the end of it, you realized, what I have just done is I have invested 300 pages, 400 hours, I’d say 4,000 hours and 300 pages into writing peer dribble, this book must not be released. No, but the only reason for that is that I have a technique to avoid being in that predicament. Because what I do when I, so remember in this one instance that I told you, I wrote a pretty bad book proposal. I got better at writing book proposals thanks to the guidance of my agent. And so now for every book that I do, I will write a book proposal. And my book proposals tend to be 30, 40 pages long. Yeah, they have research, they have footnotes, it describes what the book is about, why nobody else has written it, why I’m the perfect person to write it, who’s the market for this thing, how I’m going to organize it. And here’s the thing, Clay, there have been several times when in the course of writing that proposal I said, holy smokes, this stinks or holy smokes, this is not interesting enough to spend the next several years of my life on and so I didn’t get to the point where I had written 300 pages I use that 30 to 40 page book proposal as a way to road test it. It’s a prototype of sorts it be like here’s the thing, I don’t know you were in college did you have a business plan for your business? It was interesting I had a plan, but it was a drawing. Okay, that’s actually really interesting. That’s super interesting. So in some sense, a book proposal is sort of like a business plan. You can write a business plan and say, oh my God, the numbers don’t add up. Oh my God, this market is a lot smaller than I thought. Oh my God, 18 other entities have already done this. And say, wow, that was a good exercise because it avoided me starting a business that would have been a mistake. It’s similar for me in book proposals. Now what I want to do is I want to take the listeners through sort of a highlight reel. As a DJ, a lot of times you buy a CD and it’s got like, back in the day you’d buy a CD and have like, the best of the Eagles. Sure. You know, like the best of the Doobie Brothers, the best of. Once you got to the part of your career where you were starting to book casino gigs, you know, Journey is now at a casino, the Doobie Brothers. Once you get to that casino phase… I like Journey, though. I actually am a Journey fan. Okay, so once you get to the casino phase of your career, you realize what we’ve got to do, let’s do a Best Of album. I mean, Garth Brooks from Oklahoma here, he’s been doing a Best Of every year at Walmart for I think about a decade. Now, so in your book, Drive, I want to go through the Best Of. This is interesting. It’s a Best Of with an author who’s still putting out current relevant stuff. In your book Drive, you write, grades become a reward for compliance, but don’t have to do, but don’t have much to do with learning. Meanwhile, students whose grades don’t measure up often see themselves as failures and give up trying to learn. I’m a person took algebra three times, I took my ACT three times, I used to stutter as a kid, and now I’ve been approached to syndicate our show we’ve been doing for six years. And so I think anybody out there who got beat up in school and started to see themselves as a failure can resonate with and can connect with what you just said. Break down why you wrote that and what that means to you. Yeah, so that book, A Drive, is about the science of motivation and what really motivates people. And one of the things that happens, especially in schools is that Well, here’s what we know about motivation in general one of the greatest motivators in in that people have these intrinsic motivator is Knowing why you’re doing something and making progress in doing it. And so in our schools Many schools are so incredibly great conscious that grades are about the grades are the point of the exercise. Grades ought to be feedback on your performance and some ways that you can get better. And so what happens is that the kids who are, you know, more or less good at school, which is, you know, a very peculiar ability, kids who are good at school are just totally compliant. They know what you need to do to get the grade. And kids who are less good at school, get bad grades and think that they don’t have the capacities. They don’t have what Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist, calls a growth mindset. And so for you in algebra, there is no doubt in my mind, having talked to you for 11 minutes, that you can master, that young you could have mastered algebra. It was just basically, you weren’t in a setting that was prizing learning. It was prizing performance. And let me actually make a simpler way to describe this. I’ll talk about me. I was actually a pretty good student in school because when I went to school, if you gave the authority figure what he or she wanted on time and neatly, you could do pretty well. And so let me give you an example of French. I took French for six years, four years in high school, two years in college. I got straight A’s in French. Every marking period, I got straight A’s in French. But here’s the thing, Clay. I can’t speak French. Why? Because I was going for the grade, not the learning. I could conjugate verbs, I could get the answers right on vocabulary quizzes, but that’s, I was doing the French for the grade. And one of the things that we know about the psychology of motivation is that performance goals, that is getting an A in French, don’t always and often do not lead to learning goals, mastering French. So I had a purely performance goal and that doesn’t lead to a learning goal. If I had been smarter and I wish that I had been, I would have focused on learning French, I would have learned French and probably would have done just fine on the test. There was a Napoleon Hill quote that set me free. I was probably 19 there, Dan, and it said that failure is a prerequisite to success. I was cold calling out of my Oral Roberts University dorm room, Boeing, UPS, huge companies trying to convince them to book me for their Christmas party. I’m going, failure is a prerequisite to success. Okay, so I have to fail and I’ll fix my script and then, you know, I had to see it as a prerequisite. And in your book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, the last career guide you’ll ever need, you wrote, it’s kind of like taking Napoleon Hill to the next level, you wrote, persistence trumps talent. Oh, wait, totally. What’s the most powerful force in the universe compound interest it builds on itself over time a small amount of money becomes a Large amount of money persistence is similar a little bit improves performance which encourages greater persistence which improves Persistence even more I ran out of highlighter juice right there. I ran out of Walk me through that quote it’s so good. I Think this is fundamental. It’s something that I wish someone had told me earlier in my life. It’s something that I discovered later in my life. That is, and it goes to, there’s some, you know, there’s some very, I’ll come back to the research on this, but let me tell you what the idea is. We have in some ways oversold the importance of great talent that, that in being a quote unquote natural. And the truth of the matter is talent still matters. And there is such a thing as innate talent and innate ability, but it matters far less, I believe, than we think that it does. And what really matters is showing up and being persistent and making that 103rd call and making that 104th call and making that 105th call. And what I have seen as a writer, and actually it’s interesting because I’m making a connection I might not have made earlier. Remember how I talked about I was writing on the side? And I think a reason for that, I haven’t thought a lot about this, really just occurring to me right now, I think a reason for that was that I didn’t consider myself a huge writing talent. What I discovered about writing, in basically every human endeavor, is that early in people’s working lives, it seems like, oh my gosh, that person is so talented, he or she’s gonna do really, really great, and I’m just a piker. But what I’ve seen is that many, many talented people go nowhere because they don’t persist. They don’t put in the time, they don’t endure the failure, they don’t show up every day, and people with less innate ability over time who have persistence will outperform them. And so if you gave me a choice, and in the book, the Johnny Vanka book, one of the characters, Diana, takes them to a casino where you can bet on people. And so you take two people early in their lives. One is very talented but not persistent. One is moderately talented but extremely persistent. I’m betting everything on the second person, everything on the second person because showing up persistence and enduring failure ends up being a better predictor of success than innate ability. You have so many knowledge bombs per capita. When I go through and edit this show, I’m going to have to just marinate on this rotisserie style for several days. I want to ask you this because, Andrew, you know this as you’re taking the show notes here, I never want to try to one-up a guest. Right. No, never. Never would want to do it. But this is what I thought of. I thought, you know, I have five kids and Daniel, I think you have three, right, Dan? Yes, I do. Okay. But Dan, though, he’s written four best-selling books and I have written zero, but I’m due. You know what I mean? I’m due. I built multiple multi-million dollar companies, six. I don’t know how many you’ve built, but you seem to be the wiser man. You have these notable quotables that are powerful and it seems like I’ll read a little line and it’s like three lines and it changes my year. So I’m going to read a notable quotable from the book Drive. Okay, talk to me. That changed my year. All right. And so I give you the mega points. You win. Here we go. It says, so get rid of the unnecessary obligations, the time-wasting distractions, and useless burdens that stand in your way. Here’s where I was when I read that. What year did that come out? Do you remember what year Drive came out? I think that was 2005. There we go. See, I sold DJ Connection in like 2000. No, no, no, no, 2008. I think I sold DJ Connection in 2008, nine. So it’s like right in that window. But I read this and I’m going, I am the head of the Tulsa Bridal Association. It was like a wedding show, you know, organization. I’m going, why? Like, how many leads do I get by networking with other wedding vendors? I mean, honestly, let’s look at this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m going, I would rather spend the time, one meeting a week, the 52 hours a year, I’d rather just buy a billboard or a mailer. I free myself. And there were so many things where I said, why? Why am I going to that networking group? Dan, why do we get all so caught up in these unnecessary obligations? And where do you see most entrepreneurs wasting their time? Well, okay So some of it is not a complete waste of time Okay, because because because I’ll tell you why because we do we do make mistakes in this round too, and it’s worth trying stuff Okay so you could have gone to this that association that whatever the club and Said hey, this is this might work out you get there and you realize oh my god This is a total waste the mistake that people make is that they keep going after something. They stick with something that they know isn’t working. Six years, Dan. Six years. Yeah. And so I think that the key is to try stuff, but get out earlier rather than late. And I see this in a number of different realms. Part of it is a flaw in the way we think. There is something called the sunk cost fallacy, where we feel like if we’ve invested in something, then, so let’s say we buy tickets to a basketball game and on the night of the game it’s raining and you feel terrible and don’t want to go, you say, well, I need to go if I spent money on the tickets. I spent money on the tickets. But the truth is, whether you go or not, you’re still going to have spent money on the tickets. That’s a sunk cost fallacy. And so what we do is we deepen our commitment to things that don’t really matter. What we need to be doing in many cases, and I see this in many realms of businesses, one boss that I saw, and your entrepreneurs and maybe you yourself, Clay, have had this experience, told me, he says, the biggest mistake I made in managing my business is that I always kept the pitcher in too long. That is, I didn’t fire people soon enough. I knew it was a mistake. I knew this pitcher was gonna keep getting hit, but I didn’t pull the pitcher early enough. And I think that we should have that kind of, it’s interesting, we wanna be able to experiment and test stuff, but we have to be able to say, you know what, that is a noble failure, and I’m gonna chalk it up to experience and information and feedback and move on. That right there is something that somebody needed to hear. If you’re headed down the path of certain defeat, there’s no need to continue going. Just pivot, make the change. In your book, you wrote, there’s so many books, but to sell is human. To sell is human. In that book, you wrote, if the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? Right. When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then you’re doing something wrong. Totally. Dan, what do you mean by this? Well, I mean, here’s the thing. I wrote that book to sell as human for a couple of reasons. Number one, and one of the big reasons was that I had, in writing about business, I had met a lot of people who were in sales. They were nothing like the stereotype. We have this view of sales as sleazy and dishonest and duplicitous and not that sharp. In fact, the people I met who were in sales were super sharp. They were very smart. They were very good at what they did. It got me thinking about how sales has changed over the last several years. Sales used to be a world where the seller always had more information than the buyer. That’s a world of buyer beware, right? Why do we have buyer beware? Because sellers had the edge in information, but now there’s so much information out there that they’re at an even playing field. We’re now in a world of seller beware. And so what sellers have to do more and more is take the high road. I think for long-term sales success, what you want is you want your client or customer to be better off because they bought from you. You’re not just trying to hit your numbers. They’re not just numbers on a wall. For you, let’s take your wedding business and the DJ business. What you want is you want, I think that you want, I think good entrepreneurs want this, hire you as a DJ at their wedding and have people in the briding room say, wow, that DJ was so good, he helped make this an unforgettable day. That is definitely what we wanted. I would say that my whole, I told everybody, all my DJs, our whole theme is we want to take every event and take it from ordinary to extraordinary. There you go. Because every wedding is somebody’s big day. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that having that kind of standard, it’s not saying, oh, wow, we got to do three more deals this month. You know, what can we, what can we, what can we hustle up? I think that taking that approach over the long run is better. It’s better morally, no question, but I actually think that it’s better business. It’s better business to have that kind of high road mentality. The other thing about it is that there’s a pragmatic reason for it because today in a world of TripAdvisor and Yelp and LinkedIn, if you take the low road, you’re going to get found out and people are going to talk about it. One of the things when we think about selling a product or service or idea or self or anything, we have to recognize we’re in a very new world in the last 10 years. 15 years ago, 20 years ago, the seller of anything had, you know, versus the buyer. The buyer had, the buyer of anything had less information than the seller, not many choices and no way to talk back. Today, buyers have lots of information as much as the sellers, lots of choices and all kinds of ways to talk back. And I think that changes the nature of what sales is and forces us much more to the high road, forces us in some ways to use your language, Clay, to go from ordinary to extraordinary. For the listeners out there that want proof of this, one of the brands that I talk about on the show a lot that I’m involved in, help work with, is called Oxifresh. And it’s the world’s greenest carpet cleaner, Dan. We have 396 locations now, franchises all over the country. And we hit, today, 147,000 Google reviews. So if somebody types in… Oh my gosh! Yeah, I think it’s the most reviewed company in the world, seriously. So if you type in carpet cleaning quotes on your computer, Dan, or on any computer out there, we come up top. And I can sit there and say that, but every show is transcribed, every show is downloaded by a lot of people. And people read the reviews they just do it doesn’t matter if you have to come clean your house or come clean your hotel you’re going to read those reviews and that wasn’t a thing back in 99 that wasn’t a thing in 2001 that’s why I think that this book that you wrote many years ago what year did you write to sell us human 2013 I’m looking this up right now I this is incredible you see that I see well two different things. I see 149,139 reviews. So I lied to you by 2,000 short. It grows all the time. We have a haircut chain called Elephant in the Room that I own. It’s a men’s grooming lounge, and if you type in Tulsa Men’s Haircuts, you’ll find us. And we have, like, I want to say 30 times more reviews than our nearest competitor, or 20 times. I mean, it just, you know, if you treat people right, people read those reviews. Your book is actually becoming, in my opinion, more relevant every year. In this book, you said, when both parties view their encounter as opportunities to learn, the desire to defeat the other side struggles to find the oxygen it needs. Oh! I’m not into tattoos. I know a lot of millennials are, a lot of listeners are. Would you be opposed to a millennial tattooing an entire arm sleeve with that quote? That’s a good quote, Dan. What does that quote mean? Hey, thanks. Thanks. But here’s the thing. You know, one of the things that I think we missed, I think good entrepreneurs know this. I think that a very narrow and kind of twisted view of business views business as zero sum. If I win, you have to lose. And the truth is that most encounters are not zero sum, they’re positive sum. And so this is one of the things about negotiation. Whenever I’m in a negotiation, I say, what does the other side want? How can I help the other side win? How can I help the other side get what it wants? And not thinking of it as, oh my God, one of us is gonna win and one of us is gonna lose. And it doesn’t have to say, negotiations of anything can be contentious. It’s not like you don’t want to be a pushover, but if you realize that there are many creative ways for encounters, and I think inherently in many business encounters, to be positive some rather than zero some. Unfortunately, there’s a certain strain of business thinking that says, this is war. We’re trying to defeat people. That’s the wrong way to do it. Crush them and then get a good Google review. Right, rip people up, fleece them and then you know send them an annoying anonymous, send them an annoying impersonal email asking for a review. Alright, now you have, I have two final questions for you, but you have two degrees. You got a degree from Yale Law School, which I believe, Dan, do they still just give those out to anybody? Is it just sort of like a participation thing? It’s pretty much, yeah. It’s like a vending machine. You put a quarter in. It’s like those old, I don’t know if you remember those, I don’t know if they still even have them, but I used to love them when I was a kid. You put a quarter into this vending machine and you get this little mini NFL helmet. That was when America was America. Really that’s the problem. That was the dream. That was the dream, to ask your mom or dad at the grocery store if they could give you a quarter for one of those. And when they said yes, you’re just thinking, oh, cowboys. That would surpass your desire for candy for at least a day. You’re like, I got the helmet, I don’t need to eat candy anymore. Totally. Because the helmet’s there the next day, the candy’s not. That was the deeper thinking I didn’t have available in my early 80s. So law school degree from Yale Law School, Northwestern University. So you’ve done some thinking. And so here is a Daniel Pink thought that makes us all think. Pitches that rhyme are more sublime. Oh, Dan, break it down. But here’s the thing. So this is based on some really interesting research. I’ll tell you about the research. Here’s what they did. They got their participants. They got a big group of people. They divided them into two groups. And they said, we’re going to give you some proverbs. And what we want you to do is tell us how accurate these proverbs are in describing the human condition. So one group, they said, they gave proverbs, I’m trying to think of what they might have been. Okay, woes unite enemies. Woes unite enemies. And the other group, they gave woes unite foes. All right? And so in one case, it’s the same idea, right? Woes unite enemies, woes unite foes. One of them was caution and measure will win you riches. The other one was caution and measure will win you treasure. All right? So they’re identical in their content. And what they were looking at is, did these groups think that these proverbs accurately describe the human condition? And it turned out that the proverbs that rhymed, people took more seriously. They thought they were more accurate. They thought that they were more insightful. And what’s going on here is that rhymes increase what linguists call processing fluency. The message goes down easier. And so, you know, rhyming pitches are and and rhymes in general are incredibly powerful in Getting people not only to remember something but also to believe it I want to give you a rap name if you’re okay with it pink pink panther think about that you yeah We might have a trademark, but we might our copywriter trademark problem there. Well. Here’s the deal I’ll just record a freestyle pink panther rap for you. I’ll send it to you if you want That’s great. I’ll send I commit to you. I will do that a former DJ. I’ll send that to the Pink Panther. Andrew, put in the show notes. I cannot tell a lie on this show. I will send it to you. Just hit delete immediately when you get it if you need to. I respect that. Now, final question I have for you. You’re a very intentional guy. You have a family. You’ve got kids. You’ve got a lot of people reaching out to you every day. You know, people wanting to book you for a speaking event. You’ve got a lot of social media. I’m sure if you ever take an opinion about anything, someone gets upset. People are happy. How do you stay intentional? How do you organize those first four hours of your day and what time do you wake up? Okay, I am more of a lark than an owl, but I don’t wake up insanely early. I usually wake up between 7 and 7.30. On writing days, I try to get to my office by 8.30. Fortunately, my office is the garage behind my house, so I have a 22-step commute. On writing days, I’m very, very intentional. What I do, Clay, is this. I come into my office by 8.30 and depending on where I am in a particular project, I give myself a word count. 600 words, 800 words, every once in a while 1,000 words, but usually less than that, maybe 600, 700 words. That is my job that day, that morning. I don’t bring my phone into the office. I don’t open up my email. I don’t do anything until I hit that number and so Sometimes I hit the number by 10 30 11 other times Not till noon other times one or two or on horrible days three But for me, that’s how I maintain the intentionality on writing days I have a quota that I have to hit I treat writing the way I would treat a job like bricklaying. What’s my job? I come in and I lay some fricking bricks. What do I do the next day? I come in and lay some more bricks. What do I do the next day? I come in, fix the bricks that are now out of line, and then lay some more bricks. And to me, that’s the discipline it takes to write. And it goes back to our idea of persistence and trumping talent. There are a lot of people who just aren’t willing to show up and aren’t willing to do the work. And if you show up and do the work in general, you’re going to be fine. Asking you to pick your favorite book is, I’m sure, like asking you to pick your favorite child. Right. So what is a book, though, one of your books that you would say, if all the listeners out there, a lot of entrepreneurs are saying, you know what, I’ve heard a lot about this guy, I like today’s interview, I’d like to check out one of his books. I’m just a click away on Amazon. What’s the book you’d say? That’s a good entry into the Dan Pink experience. Yeah, that sounds like an amusement park or like a Disney ride, the Dan Pink experience. I don’t know, actually. I think the latest one, a book called When, about the science of timing is pretty fresh. It’s really just out in paperback and I think that a lot of the ideas in there are really, really fresh. It’s stuff and research that a lot of people don’t know about and there’s all kinds of tools and tips and takeaways in there for business people. Dan, I appreciate you more than you know for coming on here. I know you’re rebounding from a cold. I know you’re an intentional guy. I know you’re a married guy, you’ve got a lot of things you could be doing, a lot of places you could be seeing, but thank you for believing in our listening audience enough to come on the show and share some words of wisdom. It has been a pleasure being with you, Clay. I actually really enjoyed it. You know, Jason, I think that Dan Pink actually enjoyed the interview. Did you think so? Did you feel like he enjoyed the interview, or is he just telling me what I need to hear today to make it through yet another tough day in the world of adversity called entrepreneurship. He seemed very genuine. I agree. He’s a great author, a great communicator, and a great dude. Now, Jason, I would ask you this. What was maybe one or two takeaways that you got from today’s show that you thought really were just solid points? I was literally typing, and then you started typing faster than me, but why persistence trumps talent? Because as soon as he said that, it was the biggest knowledge bomb for me, was persistence trumping talent. I 100% agree with you. And I also like as a little kind of a side note, I love he’s talking about how selling, where if you sell your product to consumers, they should be better off as a result of buying your product or service. Right. Or you shouldn’t be selling it. Yes. And that’s my entire philosophy. And that’s why I’ve never been attracted to selling drugs or things that would actually make somebody’s life worse. You know, I love the idea that you can sell something and make somebody’s life better. I love that. Yeah. I loved the idea that persistence trumps talent every time. I also love when he talked about how to rhyme is sublime. Oh, yeah. Because things do get stuck in your head when they rhyme. Oh, for sure. Unbelievable. This guy, you probably have to listen to this show two or three times, Thrive Nation, but I would encourage you today to ask yourself, in what areas of your business are you not being persistent enough? What areas of your life are you just not being persistent enough? Because Dan Pink talked about that. He says a lot of people start off their career with a lot of talent. People think they’re going to go dominate, but over time, over a 10-year, 20-year period, he’s discovered through his career, and I’ve seen it in my career that the people who are simply the most persistent always win. And as always, if you learned something today, if you liked anything, if you learned something, if you laughed, if you had a good time, I would encourage you to share today’s show with somebody in your family. Think about who do you know that you could share today’s show with via text, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or maybe you want to share via megaphone. Maybe you feel called to go out into the parking lot of a prominent retail environment and to yell the phrase, Thrive Time Show? In fact, I feel as though there’s somebody out there right now who wants to do this. Something inside you is making you want to drive to the center of a very busy, thriving intersection in the middle of a metropolitan area where there’s a lot of people congregated and you want to begin to chant the phrase, Thrive Time Show. Because in your mind you can picture this going so well. You can see the crowd getting behind you. But then in the distance, oh no, it looks as though you’re actually inciting an angry riot. And then all of a sudden you begin to feel as though you’re a pro U.S. southern border wall supporter, south of the border, south of where the would be wall would be and you’re dressed up like Donald Trump and you’re wearing the Trump wig and they start attacking you and you have a t-shirt on that says Mexico will pay for the wall and here comes an angry dog and you’re covered in bacon. Luckily you did not make that mistake and instead you shared today’s show via text, email or social media. My name is Clay Clark reminding you don’t incite a riot but share today’s show. Three, two, one, boom! All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we’re interviewing Tyler. He happens to be the credit card processing expert and guru that we use here for all of the businesses that I’m involved in. I’m involved in. I’m very happy to work with him. And what he does is he helps me spend a lot less money than I was spending on credit card fees. And so we’re going to be doing a kind of a deep dive into all things credit card here during this 10-minute segment of today’s show. So Tyler, welcome on to the Thrived Time Show. How are you, sir? Hey, I’m doing great, Clay. Thanks for having us. Hey, just logistically, so anybody can look you up to verify you’re a real person. What’s the website that you like to send people to or when you tell people, like, this is my website? Where is that website? Yeah, it’s www.integratedpaymentservices.com, but currently being revamped. So integratedpaymentservices.com. And what do you do at integratedpaymentservices.com? We set businesses up to accept credit card as a form of payment. But most part, it’s not necessarily new businesses, it’s current businesses and helping them get set up the way that they need to be with better rates, maybe a better product, things like that. So, what I have found, this might not always be true, but I found that most people that I send your way end up saving about $10,000 a year or more. Many times they save a lot more than that. How is that possible? How do you help business owners to reduce their expenses? So we’re not exclusive with any one processor. So meaning we can look at their accounts, see where they are, and then we can go to our providers and make sure that we can get them at the best possible rate. And then also be able to either integrate with what they already have, so nothing changes operationally, or maybe we, you know, maybe we add a product that will help their business run a little bit smoother. So what are the layers of fees that people pay when they use a credit card processor? What are the different layers? Kind of walk us through your expertise so our listeners out there who have a business can understand what you guys do. Absolutely. So there’s a couple of different ways you can be priced. Everybody seems to kind of understand the square or the stripe model of the flat rate where you’re paying maybe 2.6% in 10 cents if the card is present, and maybe 3.5% in 30 cents if the card isn’t. So what we do is we do straight cost plus pricing, which means you get the cost from And then we look at your account and figure out maybe a much less buy rate above that as well as a lower transaction fees. Where Square’s would be 10 cents, ours might be five. And why do you offer a less of a fee than a lot of your competitors? Why wouldn’t they just offer a lower fee as well? That’s a great question, Clay. With Square and some of those others, they just want to be flat rate. It is what it is. And then you can call if you get big enough and maybe negotiate a lower rate. For us, we don’t care how big you are, how small you are. We think you should be priced fairly and aggressively right out of the gate. We want to be able to succeed as you succeed and as you grow your business. Where some of these other processors, maybe they make the money they want to make in six months, so if you leave, they don’t care. That’s not the way that we do things. I can speak from firsthand experience that that is what you do. I think a lot of people are just maybe terrified, concerned, worried, not excited about the idea of sitting down with somebody like yourself to compare rates. I think that’s where a lot of people, they say, I know the drill. I’m going to fill out the form. Next thing you know, I’m going to be committing to a 10-hour process that’s going to take forever. I’m going to have a sales guy that I can’t kick out of my office.” Walk our listeners through the steps that they would actually need to take if they wanted to compare rates, and how long will it take? Sure. Like you said before, we work with quite a few people from your show that have called us, and it’s really quick. We either talk to them really quick on the phone, figure out how they’re priced. If not, they can send us a statement, one of their previous processing statements. We’ll put together an in-depth analysis. If they want to move forward, we can send them over an agreement that can be done in two minutes. Two minutes. So, they basically… I’m going to pull up the website right here. I’ve put together a landing page for our listeners, and I’ll pull it up here, folks. So, we’re going to go right now to Thrivetimeshow.com. Let me pull it up here. Give me just one second, folks. Pulling it up. Pulling it up. Fingers on the home row. Thrivetimeshow.com. And then we’re going to go here to forward slash credit dash card. So Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card. And if you go there, folks, and you fill out the form, again, how long are we talking about? How long will this take? A couple of minutes. A couple of minutes. And then when they fill out the form, Tyler Carson, you’re going to be giving these folks a call, is that correct? That’s absolutely right. Yeah, myself or it could possibly be Dave Miley in my office, but it’d be one of us too. And what’s your official title there at the Great Fee Reduction Credit Card Processing Center of the Universe? What’s your official title there? Managing Partner and Owner. Awesome, awesome. Well, I can tell you this, I’m very excited for our listeners to get to know you. So far, everybody that I’ve ever sent your way has been very happy with the services that you’ve provided over the years and years we’ve worked with you. But again, folks, that’s thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card. Tyler, I’m gonna give you the final word. What is the question that I should be asking you? That basically everybody asks you, everybody, as soon as you talk to them, you talk to business owners every day. What’s that question that everybody asks you when they first interact with you? They wanna know why, you know, what makes us different from the you know maybe from the bigger players or other people that do what we do and I’ll say we don’t have any contracts we always answer our phone and we stand by our word. And that’s what you do you’ve done a great job doing it I’m honored to have you on the show we’re gonna try to feature you on the show at least three to four times every single month so people can get updates from you maybe some success stories of clients I’m hoping in future weeks what we can cover is maybe not the name of the client, but maybe their industry and how much you were able to save them and these kinds of things so that people can see that you guys are the real deal and that’s why we have you on the show. Again, thank you for your time today, sir. I really do appreciate you. All right. Thank you, Clay. You guys have a blessed day. Take care, Tyler. Bye. See ya. JT, do you know what time it is? Um, 410. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Oklahoma baby! Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma June 27th and 28th. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old, but I’ve never had the two-time Heisman Award winning Tim Tebow come present. And a lot of people have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now, the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re going to have to come and find out, because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tim Tebow’s going to teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Also, this is the first Thrive Time Show event that we’ve had where we’re going to have a man who has built a $100 million net worth. Wow. Who’ll be presenting. Now, we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some real estate sort of things. Yeah. But this is the first time we’ve had a guy who’s built a service business and he’s built over a $100 million net worth in the service business. It’s the yacht driving, multi-state living guru of franchising, Peter Taunton will be in the house. This is the founder of Snap Fitness, the guy behind Nine Round Boxing. He’s gonna be here in Tulsa, Russel, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. JT, why should everybody want to hear what Peter Taunton has to say? Oh, because he’s incredible. He’s just a fountain of knowledge. He is awesome. He’s inspired me listening to him talk and not only that he also has, he practices what he teaches, so he’s a real teacher. He’s not a fake teacher like business school teachers, so you got to come learn from him. Also, let me tell you this folks, I don’t get this wrong because if I get it wrong, someone’s gonna say, you screwed that up buddy. So Michael Levine, this is Michael Levine. He’s going to be coming. You say, who’s Michael Levine? I don’t get this wrong. This is the PR consultant of choice for Michael Jackson, for Prince, for Nike, for Charlton Heston, for Nancy Kerrigan. 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestselling authors he’s represented, including pretty much everybody you know who’s been a super celebrity. This is Michael Levine, a good friend of mine. He’s going to come and talk to you about personal branding and the mindset needed to be super successful. The lineup will continue to grow. We have hit Christian reporting artist Colton Dixon in the house. Now people say, Colton Dixon’s in the house? Yes, Colton Dixon’s in the house. So if you like top 40 Christian music, Colton Dixon’s going to be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow each and every day. We’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? I don’t know what I do. How does it work? You just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to Thrivetimeshow.com. Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the Request Tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. You started out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it. And I am super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton. I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, when’s it going to be? June 27 and 28. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma. It says Tulsa, Russia. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russia, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. So when? June 27th to 28th. Who? You! You’re going to come! I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeShow.com. And again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets, which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies and I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now why would a man living in Hollywood California in the beautiful sunny weather of LA come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation, really life-changing and I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine. I’ll see you in Tulsa. James, did I tell you my good friend John Lee Dumas is also joining us at the in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. That Tim Tebow and that Michael Levine will be at the… Have I told you this? You have not told me that. He’s coming all the way from Puerto Rico, this is John Lee Dumas, the host of the chart-topping EOFire.com podcast. He’s absolutely a living legend. This guy started a podcast after wrapping up his service in the United States military, and he started recording this podcast daily in his home, to the point where he started interviewing big-time folks like Gary Vaynerchuk, like Tony Robbins, and he just kept interviewing bigger and bigger names, putting out shows day after day, and now he is the legendary host of the EO Fire podcast, and he’s traveled all the way from Pruitt Hill, Ricoh, to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop. If you’re out there today, folks, if you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast, a broadcast, you want to improve your marketing, if you’ve ever wanted to improve your marketing, your branding, if you’ve ever wanted to increase your sales, you want to come to the two-day interactive June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop featuring Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, John Lee Dumas, and countless big-time super successful entrepreneurs. It’s going to be life-changing. Get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com. James, what website is that? ThriveTimeshow.com. James, one more time for the four enthusiasts. ThriveTimeshow.com. Show dot com. One more time before it’s over. The Ride Time Show dot com. This moment, we are ready. Thrivetimes show two day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re gonna leave energized, motivated, but you’re also gonna leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the Edith Pick Chocolate Easter Bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner, and Associates. Look them up and say, And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money. So if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you’ve got to do is go to thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets and if you can’t afford $250 we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy at Kings Point in New York, acta non verba watch what a person does not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning Harvard Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And I have a special guest today. Definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric Trump. But we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man. And there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought, since you and Eric are close, Trump, what were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald, who’s my age, and I can say or cannot say? Well, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorne, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV, and he said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I said, no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books and I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner to the investor and I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success and I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just want to tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, Kings Point in New York, acta non verba, watch what a person does, not what they say. Whoa! Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey, I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business. And I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. Like we have workflows that are kind of all over the place. Having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Once I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to get here at the conference. This is probably the best conference or seminar I’ve ever been to in over 30 years of business. You’re not bored. You’re awake and alive the whole time. It’s not pushy. They don’t try to sell you a bunch of things. I was looking to learn how to just get control of my life, my schedule, and just get control of business. Planning your time, breaking it all down, making time for the F6 in your life and just really implementing it and sticking with the program. It’s really lively, they’re pretty friendly, helpful, and very welcoming. I attended a conference a couple months back and it was really the best business conference I’ve ever attended. At the workshop I learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. Biggest takeaways are, you know, you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business. Whether it’s marketing, you know, what are those three marketing tools that you want to use, to human resources. Some of the most successful people and successful businesses in this town, their owners were here today because they wanted to know more from Clay, and I found that to be kind of fascinating. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned is diligence. That businesses don’t change overnight. It takes time and effort, and you gotta go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you wanna go. He actually gives you the roadmap out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do, and he gave me the roadmap out step by step. We’ve set up systems in the business that make my life much easier, allow me some time freedom. Here you can ask any question you want, they guarantee it’ll be answered. This conference motivates me and also gives me a lot of knowledge and tools. It’s up to you to do it. Everybody can do these things. There’s stuff that everybody knows, but if you don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it for you. I can see the marketing working. It’s just an approach that makes sense. Probably the most notable thing is just the income increase that we’ve had. Everyone’s super fun, super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivates me. Your competition’s going to come eventually, or try to pick up these tactics. So you better, if you don’t, somebody else will. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right? This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing and this is our old team. And by team I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from four to 14. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past. And they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. So we really just wanna thank you, Clay, and thank you, Vanessa, for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. If you decide to not attend the Thrive Time workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The atmosphere of Clay’s office is very lively. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door. And it really got me and my team very excited. If you decide not to come, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your business. Bottom line. Love the environment. I love the way that Clay presents and teaches. It’s a way that not only allows me to comprehend what’s going on, but he explains it in a way to where it just makes sense. The SEO optimization, branding, marketing, I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have the entire four years of college. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow a business using Google reviews and then just how to optimize our name through our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google. The biggest thing I needed to learn was how to build my foundation, how to systemize everything and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to make sure that the business is a success. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is really there to serve me, as opposed to me constantly being there for the business. New ways of advertising my business, as well as recruiting new employees. Group interviews, number one. Before, we felt like we were held hostage by our employees. Group interviews has completely eliminated that, because you’re able to really find the people that would really be the best fit. Hands-on how to hire people, how to deal with human resources, a lot about marketing, and overall just how to structure the business, how it works for me, and also then how that can translate into working better for my clients. The most valuable thing I’ve learned here is time management. I like the one hour of doing your business is real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Play really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purposes for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real. you