How Clay Clark Helped Small Businesses Survive—and Thrive—During the Pandemic and Beyond

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Bob Healey was in his 60s battling terminal cancer with only a product prototype when he sought advice from business coach Clay Clark. Now, his company is booming.

It’s never too late to succeed, Clark says.

After building several multi-million dollar businesses, Clark developed a 14-step system to help budding entrepreneurs turbocharge their ideas.

During the pandemic, he helped his clients not just stay afloat but even thrive.

In this episode, we dive into how to grow a small business, what business schools fail to teach, and why America must rebuild its manufacturing and industrial capacity.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Clay Clark, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Clay Clark:

Thank you for being here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Mr. Jekielek:

This current administration is looking to revitalize the economy, to push it to the next level. And for me, small business has always been a centerpiece of this. Some people describe it as the engine of American innovation and growth. But during the COVID years, as we are emerging out of them as we speak, a lot of small businesses were frankly wiped out. You’re the guy who’s actually helping people build those small businesses. Please tell us about what you do.

Mr. Clark:

In America today, we have approximately 330 million Americans living here, and we have 9.2 million Americans that identify as being self-employed. And so what happens is somebody out there, a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, or a plumber says, I want to start my own business. And when they do, they don’t really know the proven processes to start and grow a company, and that’s what I do. So I basically take somebody with a dream and I align them with my team, and we help them scale. If you sell something to humans on planet Earth in exchange for a profit, that’s what we help people to scale.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’ve structured your business in such a way that it’s actually impossible for you to do well unless your client does well. And I thought to myself, what a brilliant way, what an ethical way to set up a business because you kind of have no choice.

Mr. Clark:

You know the word shalom.  I go to Sheridan Church, and Pastor Jackson talks about that word from time to time, shalom. But the shalom is like a win-win. It’s a win-win relationship—a mutually beneficial relationship. Napoleon Hill, the best-selling author of Think and Grow Rich, calls it the mutually beneficial relationship. 

When I coach a client or work with a client, I tell the client, hey look, I’m going to help you grow your business for the smallest monthly fee possible, and I just want to get a small percentage of the growth. Because if I’m getting one percentage point of the growth, theoretically you’re making 100 times more than I am. But if I can scale multiple companies, it turns out to be a great thing for me.

I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years. I’ll sit down with an electrician, and the electrician will have a business that’s stuck. It’s not thriving; it’s barely surviving. They go, I don’t know how to grow. I don’t know if it’s marketing. I don’t know if it’s human resources. I don’t know if it’s accounting. I don’t know if it’s pricing. I don’t know if it’s me. I don’t know if it’s the economy. 

How do I grow my company? And I sit down with them and I say, look, we’re going to go through a 14-step plan to rejuvenate, to revive, to bring life into your business. And I’m going to get a small percentage of the growth, and you’re going to be rich, and I’m going to be doing very well if this works.

Mr. Jekielek:

Please tell us about your background. During the COVID years, when a lot of small businesses were basically closed and many permanently, the companies you worked with actually all stayed open. How did that happen and where do you come from? 

Mr. Clark:

I apologize because I speak fast. I used to stutter as a kid. My synapses go really fast, so you might have to watch this in slow-mo. But I knew that the Constitution is not a suggestion, and a Constitution cannot be suspended because of a pandemic. That’s something I knew. I happen to be a Christian. In the Bible, Hebrews 10:25 tells us to not forsake the gathering, even as we draw closer to the end. Theoretically, as we’re getting closer to the end of time, God is the Alpha, the Omega, the beginning and the end. For all the Christians out there, we’re not supposed to stop gathering. So I knew that the pandemic couldn’t temporarily suspend the Constitution. I knew that the Bible tells us to not forsake the gathering. So to me, it was a no-brainer to stay open. 

Also, I have this controversial business theory I was telling you off camera a little bit, but it’s hard to be open if your business is closed. And so I really leaned into my clients and I said, clients, listen, doctors, dentists, pizzerias, home remodelers, look, the models that said 2.2 million people would die from COVID, those are false. Those are made by Neil Ferguson, and also the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute. Whether they were wrong intentionally or accidentally, they’re wrong. The PCR tests, the polymerase chain reaction tests, those can be misused, misconstrued to inflate cases. And COVID is 100% treatable with budesonide, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. 

A lot of my clients were asking, how do you know this? And I’m going, a third of my clients are in the medical field. So I’m working with doctors, and Dr. Rashid Buttar, may he rest in peace, was a client of mine. Dr. Zelenko was a friend of mine, may he rest in peace. They knew the models were false and the PCR tests were false. The treatments are real. 

However, the media, outside of One American News, The Epoch Times, and a handful of media outlets, were just telling everybody, we need a lockdown. We need to temporarily suspend the Constitution. And to me, that was analogous to laying on the train tracks to see if it was safe while the train’s approaching quickly and will certainly kill us if we don’t move. It’s like a case study of if we lay on the train tracks as the train runs over us, we’ll see if that’ll help. We’ll see if locking down, shutting down, quarantining will help. Will that stop the spread? 

I knew that it was going to start the spread of communism, because then people are going to be sitting around looking for government handouts. I told my clients, stay open, be the purple cow in the field of brown cows, to quote Seth Godin, the marketing guru. Stay open. You’ll be the only company that’s open in your market. Shaw Homes is a home building company we’ve worked with for years. We started with them when they were at $14 million in revenue, shawhomes.com. Before they sold the company, we got them up to $150 million in revenue. Not an overnight success kind of growth, but a tremendous amount of growth had to do with the fact they stayed open. 

Pizzerias that I worked with stayed open. Again, if you’re watching today’s show and you say, what can I do with this information? The next pandemic, the next scamdemic, the next plandemic, whatever that is, it cannot temporarily suspend the Constitution, and locking down won’t stop the spread of COVID or some other virus. What it will do is it will start the spread of communism.

Mr. Jekielek:

Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, also in Tulsa, said the thing that made him realize that there was something amiss with the closing of churches is that right across the street, a Home Depot and a strip club were open, and you had tons of people going in 24/7. He’s thinking to himself, and my church is supposed to be closed here, and I’m only doing this once a week?

Mr. Clark:

Within four or five miles of Sheridan Church, which is a Tulsa-based church, there is an adult club, as he mentioned, a strip club. There was a liquor store. These places are all—yeah, that’s right. It was a liquor store that was the other one. They were all open. Dr. Deborah Birx came out and actually said on camera that the models were false and that that number was off by 25 times. My wife is about 5’3″, and you guys have met her. That would be like me telling you my wife is 125 feet tall. Thus, you need to renovate your offices because she’s going to come visit. 

The jackassery of being off by 25 times—that should have stopped the pandemic to begin with. Kary Mullis, may he rest in peace, the inventor of the PCR tests, actually said on camera multiple times that a polymerase chain reaction test, a PCR test, should not be used to test something like COVID. And he explained how his tests could be misused and miscalibrated. And the Constitution is the law or it’s not. It’s not a suggestion, and it cannot be temporarily suspended because of a scamdemic. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You say pandemic, but really, we’re talking about the response, the way that we as a society dealt with a pandemic because there was a virus. 

Mr. Clark:

Right.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it did go around.

Mr. Clark:

Right.

Mr. Jekielek:

But how we dealt with it is the whole story. Let’s go back to small business. As you’re tracking the realities of small business as part of your work, how much of an impact did the whole COVID policy thing have on the small businesses, really?

Mr. Clark:

The average small business that I work with, when people come to me and they say, could you help me grow my company? We do what is called a 14-point analysis. Jan, if I was talking to you and you were a business owner, I would go over, okay, what are your goals? What do your finances look like? What does your marketing look like? What does your branding look like? And we go through that sort of business colonoscopy kind of thing. 

We discover that the average small business owner has about two and a half weeks of payroll on hand, or two and a half weeks of operating capital on hand, or maybe a little more than half a month of operating capital. This means that if you’re a pizzeria, a doctor, or a dentist, you could afford to be closed for a week and then another week before you would start to have some serious cash flow problems. Cash to a business is like blood to a human, oxygen to a human, water to a fish. It’s essential for survival. 

And so by doing two weeks to stop the spread, what you did was verify that every business would be dead. I’m not just saying that because it rhymes, but two weeks to stop the spread was like verifying that every business would be dead. My wife and I, along with a lot of my longtime clients, had built up fortification and cash flow fortification so we could withstand lean times. But most people that I knew couldn’t. Our podcast often has a million listeners a month. I was getting text messages from listeners saying, “I own a business. How am I supposed to feed my family if I’m closed for two weeks?”

Right now, if you go to usdebtclock.org and you look at it, we have approximately under 3 percent of the American population that is self-employed. According to Inc. Magazine, by default, 96 percent of businesses fail anyway. 96 percent, according to Inc. Magazine, fail within 10 years. So you’ve got a one in a thousand shots of achieving success as a small business owner by default anyway. Add to that lockdowns, quarantines, and curfews. Think about the emotional chaos that creates in a company. 

A small business is like a family. Half of my staff at my hair business wanted to stay open. Half of them were saying, let’s stay open. Let’s cut hair. The other staff was saying, let’s stay closed. I want to be safe. You transition to the remodeling company I’m involved in. Half of the employees wanted to stay open. The other half was saying, if we can basically not work for two weeks, I’ll call this a vacation. 

It created a division within companies too, where some employees wanted to stay open, and some wanted to stay closed. Some people were very concerned about the effectiveness of the treatments; some were not. It created dissension within organizations. It killed momentum. It killed rapport. It was really destructive for small business.

Mr. Jekielek:

Even if the businesses did survive, they had to go through this extra chaos.

Mr. Clark:

Yes, I would just say I have a very intimate knowledge of the workings of the business. I’m on the phone with dentists who are saying, my front desk lady will come to work, but my front desk guy won’t. Dentists are telling me, my anesthesiologist, let’s say, for the oral surgeons, he’ll come to work, but the actual oral surgeon won’t. So the anesthesiologist will, but the surgeon won’t. 

I work with doctors that do knee replacements, doctors that do cosmetic surgeries of all different kinds. They’re saying, I can’t find a hospital that will let my patient have the knee surgery, but I can find surgeons to work on it. It created this supply chain problem. The home builders I was working with could find framers to frame, but they couldn’t find tile guys to do the tile. It created all sorts of disruption within the marketplace because not only did you have to make a decision as an owner whether to keep your business open, but then you had to educate your employees from a position of weakness. 

These doctors, dentists, and lawyers don’t claim to be experts on pandemics; they claim to be experts in their given field. It was probably the most turbulent time to have a business, run a business, or own a business. However, because I have a close-knit relationship with my clients, we were able to keep it going.

To quote John Lee Dumas, a friend of mine, who has a podcast called eofire.com, he said to me, are you going to go ahead and have your business conference during the pandemic? I’m mangling the quote, but he said something to the effect of,  I don’t think you’ll have a lot of competition. Our business conference was booming. A literary agent who represents some of the biggest authors in the world told me she flew to our conference and was the only person on the plane.

Mr. Jekielek:

How do you figure out who you’re going to work with? Because with your particular model, it’s not that anybody who wants to work with you can, because you have to make your decisions about who you think has potential, since you’re going to be on the hook for it. 

Mr. Clark:

When you have a chance to shadow me a little bit off camera, I do a lot of the video editing myself. I do a lot of the web development myself. I do a lot of the accounting myself, so I’m very much hands-on. I like to keep a group of around 160 clients I work with, and I do these free assessments. The reason why I do a free 13-point assessment is I just want to see, are we going to have a shalom or a win-win relationship?

There are three things I’m looking for: Do you actually solve a problem, or do you provide a product or a service that the marketplace would benefit from? If somebody’s selling something that I think is ethically foul or against my Christian morals, I’m not going to work with them.Thing number one is, do you sell a product or service that I actually think is ethical and legal? You’d be surprised how many people are selling illegal things that won’t help. Step number two is, does the person actually identify with the worldviews that I have?

If I’m going to sit there and debate about the Constitution or capitalism, that’s probably not the thing. So, one is, do we have a product or service that we can actually help you scale? Two, is the person ideologically aligned with me? And then three, is it realistic? We want to be able to set these SMART goals. 

I call them SMART goals. They’re S-M-A-R-T. I’m quoting Brian Tracy, bestselling author, but a SMART goal is a specific goal. It’s a measurable goal. It’s something that’s actionable. You can actually take action and do it. It’s realistic and it’s time-sensitive. S-M-A-R-T. 

Is it specific? Is it measurable? Is it actionable? Is it realistic? Is it time-sensitive? If I can help somebody grow a company and I can see a clear path to get there, it is exciting, Jan, when you know, wow, this person’s business is struggling and I can help them scale. I think about Papagallo’s Pizza in Florida. We’ve helped this couple grow. They’ve opened three restaurants.Since I started working with them, we’ve opened up restaurant two and three. They’ve grown their business fivefold. 

I think about Shaw Homes going from 14 million to 150 million. I think about companies like Oxyfresh, where I’ve had a role in advising them, and they’re now up to 500 locations. Beverly Hills Precious Metals is my precious metals dealer that I’ve worked with for years. To watch him scale his company never gets old to me. It’s infinitely exciting to help someone achieve their goals. That’s really what gets me excited. Growing up poor or without money, I’m sure there’s somebody watching this who grew up poorer, but my dad was working at a gas station, working the night shift. My dad was delivering pizzas for Domino’s. May he rest in peace. 

In his late 30s, he’s delivering pizzas. He’s working at a gas station. He has a college degree from Oral Roberts University. That wasn’t a reverse shout-out to ORU, but that’s a fact. Yet he didn’t know how to financially help our family thrive. But he had the work ethic, and I appreciate him being willing to work those two jobs. Whenever I talk to that new potential client, I picture it as if I’m talking to a 37-year-old version of my dad. My dad’s no longer with us; he passed away from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

That’s how I look at it, and I can’t communicate it with enough sincerity or passion. Every person I talk to on the phone who wants to become a client or wants to come to a conference, I pretend in my mind—maybe it’s not healthy, maybe it is—that that’s the 37-year-old version of my father. That’s what I look for. But someone who wants a handout? No, I don’t want to do that. But if this person needs a hand up, that’s who I try to work with.

Mr. Jekielek:

You built your business to only have the people that want a hand up because it’s just not going to work with the other people. You’re not going to be successful. That’s a great alignment of incentives. 

Mr. Clark:

Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, is a book changed my life, and I encourage everyone to read it. There are three big principles I got out of that. One is the idea that we should only engage in mutually beneficial relationships. We should never leech off our fellow man. We should never be looking for a handout. We should never be looking to the government for help; we should try to have a win-win situation in the marketplace. 

The second is that we want to over-deliver. Can we exceed the expectations of our clients, of our buyers? Can we exceed the expectations of our customers? And then the third is that you want to surround yourself with people who have a similar goal and vision for their lives. 

Clients of mine also get to come to a workshop every couple of months. That’s where I get to meet people like Eric Trump. Eric Trump comes to our workshops. The average mechanic, doctor, dentist, lawyer, home remodeler, or plumber is in a room with 300 people, and one of them is Eric Trump. This is incredible. They’ll say, wow, there’s 300 people in this room, and one of them is an NBA coach. I’m in a room with 300 people, and Tim Tebow is one of them.

There’s something that happens when you’re in a small, intimate setting, and you’re surrounded by 300 entrepreneurs, some of whom are household names. There’s a whole different level of electricity and learning and interaction that happens. And that’s really the environment we try to create. We want to help people create their own virtual mastermind, their own community of people that have that energy. I’m not Amish, but as I study the Amish, I know they’re very intentional about their community. And I can just tell you, we are very intentional about the community that we’ve built here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Please tell us about your background. You did grow up in a humble situation, but you had some very interesting pivots along the way.

Mr. Clark:

This is what happened. I’m a kid who stuttered. My dad was working two jobs, working at the gas station, Quick Trip, and delivering pizzas. My mom was doing what she could do. And it occurred to me, and I don’t remember the exact moment, Jan, but I remember that kind of era of my life thinking to myself, we’re poor. Although we didn’t care about money, every decision was somehow impacted based on money. 

I thought to myself, my 12-year-old self, I’m going to find a way to make copious amounts of money so that I can focus on other things. Because for anybody who spends any amount of time with me, there are three things I’m always doing. I’m always writing songs. I’m always writing books, and I’m always writing business plans.

I get into that kind of stuff. But you can’t afford to write songs that very few people listen to unless you have the time to do it. So I set out on this quest to create time freedom and financial freedom. So out of my parents’ basement, I started a company called DJ Connection. Back in the day, it was called C&G DJ Service, and it was called G because the youth pastor who mentored me was old enough to drive a car. See, I couldn’t drive a car. And so the guy who drove me to my gigs was my youth pastor, and he lost a bet and shaved a G into his very hairy chest for some reason I don’t understand. So it was C&G DJ Service named after that. 

Then I basically started cold calling schools. I’m a 14-year-old kid, a 15-year-old kid, cold calling schools saying, hi, who DJs your school dance? Who’s in charge of organizing the school dance? And they would say, oh, that’s the PTA, or that’s the booster club, or that’s the parent sponsors. And I said, hey, I’d love to DJ your school dance, and I’ll do it for a dollar, and you can just pay me after the event what you think it’s worth. 

A lot of schools are infinitely disappointed in their disc jockeys, so I started getting some gigs. I started doing two gigs a month, three gigs a month. I needed equipment. I was selling the gigs, but I didn’t have any equipment. So I found a pothead by the name of Oswald, and I rented equipment from him. 

This is a true story, and I thought to myself, I probably don’t want to be renting equipment from potheads. I probably need to have a more viable option, This is my 14, 15-year-old mind. So I got a job pouring concrete, and I got a job working at the Norseman restaurant, and I got a job working as a home health aide. So I had three jobs simultaneously. That was my pro tip for getting rich quick. 

I took every dime I had, and I just kept buying more speakers, more sound, more lights. The speakers I bought were called JBL TR-225s, and these were like $500 a piece. And I tell you this because I was making $8 an hour. If you’re making $8 an hour, you’ve got to work 70 hours to buy a speaker before taxes. So you’ve got to work 80 hours per speaker. So I had three jobs. I’m working these three jobs. 

Eventually, I decided to go to college early because in Minnesota, if you have enough credits, you can go to college early. So I went to St. Cloud State, and I picked classes, you know, graphic design, language, accounting, things that I thought would help me in my career. And then I transferred to Oral Roberts University. 

At that point, I changed the name from C&G DJ Service to DJ Connection. And then over time, I started getting into weddings. And before I sold the company, we were doing 4,000 weddings a year, which is 80 weddings a weekend, by the way. So think about all the vans, the lights, the mic stands, the speaker stands, the lighting equipment, all the people training these people. 

Then I started this thing called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was a big bridal show. I started one of the region’s largest wedding photography companies called EpicPhotos.com. What happened was the fathers of the brides would pull me aside and they’d say, hey, I’m a dentist. Could you help me grow my business? Hey, I’m a doctor. Could you help me? Hey, I have a hardware store. Could you help me grow my business? Hey, I’m a doctor. Could you help me? Hey, I have a hardware store. Could you help me? 

I won this thing called the SBA Entrepreneur of the Year award, the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the state of Oklahoma. I also won the City of Tulsa Entrepreneur of the Year award from the Chamber of Commerce, and I was the State’s Entrepreneur of the Year when I was 27. I kept winning these awards, and every time I would win awards, people would say, can I pick your brain? 

Then my wife, who I credit, said, what if you said yes instead of saying no, and you just charged them a small percentage of the growth? And I’m going, I don’t know. I like DJing quite a bit. So I kind of put that idea on the back burner. And then one by one, more and more people kept being more and more persistent, asking if I could help them. 

I first started working with Maytag University, I worked with Hewlett-Packard, and then I worked with some bigger companies that were bringing me in to speak. I kept being asked and asked, and eventually, we found ourselves with 160 clients. And that was almost 20 years ago. So I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years, and I love it.

Mr. Jekielek:

They would actually bring you in to speak, but then somehow that would turn into some kind of business relationship as well. Because you were this budding entrepreneur, they wanted you as an inspirational speaker. 

Mr. Clark:

The way it would work is like Hewlett-Packard, as an example. There’s a lady by the name of Anitra, a great event planner, by the way. Anitra, if you’re watching, big shout-out to you. Anitra calls me and says, hey, I work with Maytag University, and they’d like a speaker to come in to teach time management and sales. I’ve watched some of your videos online, some of your samples, and I’d love to have you come speak. Could you do it? 

Most speakers charge per hour, Jan. They charge per hour. It’s like, $10,000 for 90 minutes. Again, from Napoleon Hill, I can hear in my head: over-deliver, over-deliver. So I would tell these event planners, for me, you get unlimited time for two days. So not just per hour, unlimited time for two days. Any subject that you want me to talk about, I’ll do it. And if anybody bails out, I’ll speak. So if you have a guest speaker that cancels, I’ll fill in. 

Well, I’m working for Maytag University. The United States Government Accountability Office brought me in to speak. And I’m at the Anatole Hotel speaking to that group. And I think two of the speakers canceled, so I had three gigs, three speaking slots at the same event. And I kept being known as, this is the guy who’s bringing comedy and entertainment to education. But I was a former disc jockey, which is one level lower than a carny in terms of the entertainment hierarchy. So I was this DJ, entertainer, who’s educating, and I call it edutainment. 

What happened was more and more of the attendees would say, hey, I own a Maytag local store, and I love what you talked about. Could you help me grow my business? And I said, well, you just pay me $1,000 a month and a small percentage of your growth, and we’ll do it. And they go, really? And I could usually help somebody double their revenue within 12 months. 

Then I’m speaking to Hewlett-Packard and I’m going, this is corporate America. I don’t know that this is my best place here. But the event planner who booked me would call me and say, hey, I love what you’re doing. Could you help me grow my event planning business? And so it just kept happening where I was bumping into caterers, event planners, photographers, farmers Insurance. I did a lot of work with their local agents. 

I’ve done a lot of work with State Farm agents, and not under the brand but with the local agents, the local entrepreneurs. Franchises started to bring me in. UPS brought me in. Somehow I found myself being the keynote speaker for UPS Canada, and it was just a lot of fun. But I’ve got five kids, so I figured I needed to create a scalable model where I could help people in a way that still allowed me to be a mentally and physically present father. That’s why I have the model I do now, and that’s why I don’t travel to do speaking events. I typically bring the events to me. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I sat in on a number of your consultations. Business coaching is basically what you do, and with actually doing some of the work as well. 

Mr. Clark:

Yes, you think about Bill Belichick, you think about Nick Saban, you think about Red Auerbach, you think about a great coach. What’s a coach doing? A coach is doing three things. They’re pushing someone to be their best. The second thing is a coach is giving you a plan. For the NFL, they don’t say to each player, hey, why don’t you come up with your own plan, and then when we say hike, everyone goes in 11 separate directions. We’ll see what happens. There’s a unified play. There’s a strategy. There’s a plan. And so a coach pushes you to be your best. A coach gives you the plan. 

The third thing a coach does, and this is probably an uncomfortable word for a lot of people. I know certainly it is for me. It’s accountability. And as a Christian, one of the biggest problems that I have with myself is hypocrisy. It’s where, you know, we read the Bible, we want to be a Christian, I call myself a Christian, the Bible says to do these things, and sometimes in my morning reflections, just this morning I was thinking, the Bible tells me I’m supposed to love my wife the way that Christ loved the church. And I don’t know that I did that yesterday. I probably was a C-level husband yesterday, I have to at least get to a B today. 

And so having a coach is a great way to have kind of a mirror or that accountability, that objective feedback, that accountability to make sure that your dreams turn into actions. And those actions turn into results. Because if not, you just have hope. And hope is sort of an opium that I think a lot of people in the American population have, where we just hope things are going to get better. 

We write songs about hoping things will get better. We watch movies about hoping, but looking for entropy or serendipity or some sort of luck for success to happen is not a valid strategy. Hope is not a valid strategy. You need somebody who can coach you down a proven plan, and that’s what I do.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell us about the BS in business school.

Mr. Clark:

I think that business school is primarily BS. I primarily find that business school involves talking about theories, thinking about concepts, theories, and things that don’t impact actually growing a company. But when you get out of business college or you start a business, you’ve got to learn the four steps to grow a company. 

Step one, find a problem. Step two, solve the problem. Step three, sell the solution. Step four, nail it and scale it. Because if you can’t sell, your business is going to go to hell, and your life will not go well. And so most people have a degree from business school, but they have no knowledge of how to actually start and grow a successful company. 

I call my Thrive Time show, the Thrive Time show business school without the BS. My father, may he rest in peace, was one of those people that went to school, was top of his class, graduated with great grades, but he had no concept of how to turn his goals to own a business into reality. One of the gentlemen came to our conference. He had terminal cancer. By the way, in the grace of God, he did not die. 

His name is Bob Healy, and all your listeners can go verify his story. It’s  grillblazer.com  He showed up at one of my conferences with a quasi-functional prototype, meaning it’s a prototype that wasn’t polished, for a thing called the grill gun, which is like a flamethrower for grilling. And he had never sold any. He had never had a team. He never employed people. He didn’t have a website, didn’t have a logo, didn’t have a brand, didn’t have a marketing plan, but he had a prototype. 

Bob came to me and said, help me. And grillblazer.com is now a massively successful company that’s becoming a household name in many American homes. He’s kind of like the grill master now. So, and that’s a guy named Bob who is battling health issues, marketing issues, branding issues, accounting issues, and Bob couldn’t find financing either. We actually helped Bob raise all the money to sell the product. 

Mr. Jekielek:

How do you view venture capital or people coming in from the outside to support you?

Mr. Clark:

In Bob’s case, we helped Bob do a crowdfunding campaign to help him raise money. In my case, I did the controversial strategy of working at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV, all while growing DJConnection.com. And whenever you get capital, there are three C’s that come with capital, three C’s. So whoever invests in your business, there are three C’s that come with it. Yes, you get the money, but three C’s come with it. 

One is counsel. The people who invest in you are going to want to steer the direction you go. It’s going to happen. Three, or number two, connections. When you take capital from, let’s say, Sequoia Capital or whatever the capital company is, the big venture capital fund, they’re going to have a certain political worldview, a way they view the world. 

Silicon Valley views the world a certain way. Middle America views the world a certain way. Some people are right of center. Some people are left of center. But the moment you start to take capital into your business, you start to lose some sovereignty. So you’re going to get the counsel. Okay. The two, you’re going to get the connections. And then the third is you’re going to get the money, obviously the capital. 

But I think a lot of times people think about capital in terms of, oh, I’ll just get the money, and then I can go along and grow my company. No, no, you get the money, but you now have the connection to people that you might or might not align with, and you now are going to get their counsel or their coaching, and it might not be what you want. 

I would encourage everybody out there, if possible, try to find a way to self-fund or fund from people you know. And the best book ever written on how to raise venture capital is called Pitching Hacks. It’s written by Naval Ravikant, and it is super small and super powerful. Pitching Hacks. You can download it for free. There are PDF versions available online.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that will help you figure out how to get money in a more independent way?

Mr. Clark:

He teaches the specific linear process to go through to raise money. But I would just tell you, before you try to raise money from people you don’t know, let’s say you needed to raise $50,000. It’s better to go to 10 people you know and get $5,000 from 10 people who could afford to lose it than it is to bring in an outside investor who you don’t know that well, who may or may not want to dramatically change the way in which you do business. And I’ll just give you a brief example. 

There was a franchise I worked with years ago, and the owner of the business was very conservative. And he took in outside capital, and the outside venture capitalists wanted him to take his business in a very DEI way, the diversity, the equity, the inclusion, the very woke agenda. And he really, really had a hard time because the investor wanted to dramatically alter the course of the business. 

And I’m not an advocate for the woke investor, but the woke investor is saying, hey, I gave you all this money, and without me, your business wouldn’t exist, so we’re going to go this way. And I had to help that business owner decouple the business from the financing. And it was a painful experience. So when possible, don’t secure outside financing from people that you don’t align with or people that you’re not equally yoked with.

Mr. Jekielek:

Bringing back manufacturing is a centrally important feature of America being successful. Some of that is going to be small business. How many of your businesses are small manufacturing, and how can that be done? 

Mr. Clark:

I believe that my client portfolio is very indicative of the American entrepreneurial portfolio as a country. About 10%, I would say, ish of our portfolio has to do with manufacturing. One of my clients is called Master Machine, mmm-usa.com. They make parts for Tesla. They make parts for the U.S. Army. That’s a company right here in Oklahoma that does manufacturing. 

I think of another brand I work with, Grid Down, Chow Down. They sell mRNA-free meat. I think about, as I mentioned, the case study of Shaw Homes, the home builder we work with, or Sky-House Home Builders. They’re building real things right here in America. I would tell people as a pro tip, you never want to outsource your core competency. Exporting jobs to China started under Nixon, but that’s just complete jackassery to outsource 95 percent of our essential medical supplies to countries that hate us.

We have these essential metals, these essential elements needed to make car batteries, to make cars. And we have outsourced that to the point where the majority of the countries that hate us are the ones who are procuring these essential elements needed to make manufacturing possible. I know you recently interviewed Eric Trump and Eric talked about this. We’ve got to bring manufacturing back to America. We’ve got to do it. 

So anybody out there that has that dream to make jeans in America, make a tie in America, make shirts in America, make shoes in America, make clothing in America, I encourage everybody to really seize this opportunity under the Trump administration and find a way to bring manufacturing back to these United States. We saw it happen a little bit under President Trump and Dr. Ben Carson. We saw an urban renewal. 

Dr. Carson was instrumental in bringing investments into urban development areas that basically the world had given up on. And they brought in great restaurants and nightlife and entertainment, and they rejuvenated. They put life and investment capital into these abandoned buildings and revitalized a lot of downtowns. I know we can do the same thing with manufacturing. 

So if you’re watching today’s show and you have the ability to reinvigorate manufacturing in America, I would encourage you to do so. And I don’t speak for the Trump administration, but I know they are really wanting to team up with and support and breathe life into entrepreneurs that want to breathe, to want to bring manufacturing back into these United States. There’s this idea that a country can’t be successful without it, this core element of manufacturing. There’s this philosophy, right? Do you subscribe to this, that the bulk of manufacturing has to be within a country for it to even be successful? Ultimately, it can’t be service-oriented. It can’t be. 

I’m working with a client in Wisconsin who has a home remodeling company, okay, and he actually does beautiful home remodeling. He does great work. Well, he’s not outsourcing the manufacturing and the remodeling of a house to somebody who can do the work because he can’t. He does the work himself. 

Therefore, when he talks to, in this fictitious example, he talks to the Thompsons, and the Thompsons say, you know what? I want the pool table to go here. I want the lighting to go here. I want to move this to create this ambiance. This client who I actually work with in Wisconsin, he’s able to get in there and get in the conversation with the client and rearrange the building plan to accommodate the client’s needs. He can do that. 

But if he were outsourcing that to a third-world country or a second-world country or some country not here, it would be very hard to make those real-time modifications. So my client, yes, he’s a home remodeler, but I would argue he’s almost a plumber. He’s almost an electrician. He’s almost a designer. He’s almost a sales guru. He’s almost a manager. He’s almost an accountant. He’s wearing a lot of hats. 

This is what you call a polymath. Okay. And a lot of the founding fathers were polymaths. I challenge anybody out there to look up the life of Benjamin Franklin and tell me what career he was in. Thomas Jefferson, what career? Look up George Washington. What career? What career were these people? Were they politicians? Were they military leaders? Were they entrepreneurs? I would say a lot of our founding fathers were all of these skill sets. And I think it’s a good idea to be resourceful. 

Now, what happens is when we outsource our core competency to countries that hate us, by the way, what does that even do? I mean, I don’t even understand how that’s a sustainable idea. To make some of the cutting-edge military technology that America’s military now uses, we have to import certain technology from countries that hate us to make military weapons to defend us. That doesn’t even make sense. 

Think about that. If you go, let’s go back to the time of kings and queens and castles. And imagine that you are a king trying to protect your castle, and you have to get behind your castle walls and yell out on your castle, you know, megaphone, excuse me, enemy, could you please ship us spears? We are trying to protect ourselves from you. And then the hostile enemy says, sure, how many spears do you need? I mean, just the jackassery, the duality, the mental gymnastics I have to go through to understand how outsourcing our core components, our core resources, our core manufacturing to countries that hate us, I just can’t do it. 

Also, the CCP, they are not a competition. They are an enemy. The Chinese Communist Party does forced organ harvesting. The Chinese Communist Party has no problem with sending people to reeducation camps. The Chinese Communist Party is not somebody that we should be working with. You do not want to be investing heavily in a country that has an ideological hatred towards your worldview and who has psychopathic tendencies. It’s just not a good idea. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re a big fan of repatriating the supply chains to America. 

Mr. Clark:

It’s just wisdom. America, we have the resources right now to desalinate unbelievable amounts of water. If there was a water shortage, if you believe that there’s a water shortage in California, we can desalinate. Think about Israel. How does Israel maintain a self-sufficient country? It’s the size of New Jersey. It’s surrounded by countries that hate it. I mean, if Israel can stand up for freedom and be able to be self-sustaining, think about Israel. They’ve turned, what, desolate land into rich, plentiful farmland. 

In America, we have the tools, the technology, the drive, the critical thinking. We have the population needed to become self-sufficient, and we should be. America should be a net exporter of oil. America should be a net exporter of automobiles. America should be a net exporter of technology. We should not be importing. And this idea of becoming an importing nation that provides services primarily, what that does is that sets the foundation for becoming a slave state of a Chinese communist totalitarian regime. There’s this term that’s often used, whole of society, right? And that can mean different things. 

Whole of society could mean, like in communist China, where the Communist Party, the supremacy of the party is complete, and the party dictates what happens on down, and the whole of society has to follow because that’s how it works. But whole of society could also mean something else. It could also mean bottom-up, which means people basically working together, getting inspired to start their small businesses, be entrepreneurial, come up with new ideas, come up with new manufacturing concepts, theories, and actually just get down and do the hard work of raising, what is it, the rising tide lifts all boats, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

As we finish up, let’s talk about that.

Mr. Clark:

Years ago, there was a gentleman who personified the American dream. His name’s Kevin Thomas. Everyone can look him up. His company’s called MultiClean. Everyone can look him up. It’s multicleanok.com. And Kevin made a profound statement. He said that if he could have just five employees, that would be success. 

You say, well, what does Kevin do? It’s a janitorial service. You’d say, well, what does a janitorial service do? He cleans commercial buildings. And Kevin made that profound statement. If I could just have five employees, that would be success. Kevin came and spoke at my last conference because we filled a conference full of success stories. I have at least 15 to 20 success stories with every client, real people. 

If you look at Kevin, he’s not the tallest guy in the room. He doesn’t come across like he’s some entrepreneurial pedigree. He doesn’t look like he’s been, you know, he doesn’t look like the Hollywood entrepreneur. He doesn’t look like he’s on some reality TV show. He doesn’t look like he’s a celebrity. He just looks like a very normal person, just like me, just like you. 

At the last conference, somebody put their hand up and they said, well, Kevin, you’re having a lot of success. How many employees do you have now? He says, just a hair over 350. Think about that for a second. So this guy, Kevin Thomas, had a goal to have just five employees. He thought entrepreneurship wasn’t quite for him, that maybe he didn’t have the education, he didn’t have the marketing background, he didn’t have the accounting, and he didn’t have the skills. 

But what he did is he went over to Thrivetimeshow.com, that’s where I live, and he went there and said, you know what, I’m going to fill out the form, and I’m going to schedule a call with this crazy guy, and we’ll just see what happens. He has 350 employees. He’s one of the most successful people in his town. 

I share that story because everybody out there, you can become successful. And when you are, money is a magnifier, good and bad, by the way. So money allows you to be more of who you are. So if you’re a generous person who loves to donate and celebrate and tithe to your local church or community or your outreach, you can give more. Money allows you to be more, to give more, to be. It allows you to just magnify who you are. 

If you’re watching this show and you’re kind of in the mind space where my 37-year-old father was, where he was delivering pizzas at Domino’s Pizza, which again, is a great company. We’re appreciative of that opportunity.  He was working at Quick Trip gas stations, and we appreciate that opportunity too. He was working the night shift, and I have not an ounce of resentment that my father was working the night shift during my years growing up. I respect him for doing it. 

But if you feel like, man, success has passed me by. Kevin was the guy in his early 40s who was having these thoughts, and now he’s profoundly successful. Clay Stairs, who’s now an Oklahoma state representative, started his entrepreneurial path when he was 47-years-old, and now he’s super successful. Bob Healy had terminal cancer and was in his early 60s, and now Grill Blazer is booming. I can list off examples all day, but everybody out there, you, if you have the mental capacity and tenacity to listen to today’s interview, I promise you, you have what it takes to do it as an entrepreneur.

Mr. Jekielek:

Clay Clark, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Clark:

Thank you.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.