Driven To Win

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Mike DeHaan was miserable for four and a half years as an engineer. One morning, driving to work in dead silence, he called his wife and said he needed to quit. She asked what he would do instead. He said he did not know.

He quit that same day.

Within three and a half years, his off-market real estate business had closed 400 deals. One every business day. No passive income strategy. No slow build. Just a decision, a lot of work, and a complete willingness to live on 25% of his former income until the business kicked.

That is the mindset this episode is built around.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Passive income is not a strategy. It is an excuse. Most people using their "financial freedom number" as a benchmark have no real plan to hit it. They are using it to justify staying comfortable.
2. It is easier to make $1,000,000 than to replace a $200,000 W-2 with passive income. Mike has had this exact conversation with hundreds of students. The math almost never works the way people think it does.
3. Your W-2 is not safe. Tech layoffs, restructuring, industry shifts. You do not control it. Mike's income dropped 75% when he left engineering, but he chose the risk. The W-2 employee thinks they are avoiding risk. They are not.
4. Build the war chest first. Most investors save every dollar, dump it into the next property, drain all liquidity, and repeat. Mike's students learn to build a pipeline first, generate income through wholesaling, then deploy capital strategically into assets they actually want to keep.
5. Real estate is the vehicle. Not the destination. The skills you build, marketing systems, sales processes, deal analysis, transfer to any business. Mike could apply what he built to an HVAC company, a franchise, or anything else.
6. The $40,000 check moment changes everything. Almost every student who comes into Mike's program says they just want rentals and passive income. About three months in, after their first assignment check, they stop talking about passive income entirely.

If you are a contractor business owner and you want to make more money, work less, and win at home, we built something for you.

Go to gatheringthekings.com and apply for a GTK Growth Audit. We will show you exactly where you are leaking time, profit, and opportunity, and what it would take to fix it.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Connect With Mike DeHaan (Guest):
 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@collectingkeys
 Instagram: @mike_invests
 Website + Scale Program: https://collectingkeys.com/scale

Resources Mentioned:
 The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss: Buy It Here

Collecting Keys Animated Adventures: Watch It Here

GTK Full Resource Library: Get It Here
 

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80% of video on social media is watched without sound.

If you are not captioning your videos, you are invisible to 8 out of 10 people scrolling past your content right now. That is not a social media tip. That is a revenue problem.

Cam Beaudoin spent years as an IBM developer before realizing he was always the one who wanted to present at demo day. He turned that into two businesses: one helping professional speakers build real speaking businesses, and one helping companies make their content accessible to more people.

The message he brings contractors is simple. You already have the most important thing video content needs. You have a face, a job site, and a phone. Start pressing record.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Video is the fastest trust builder you have. 91% of consumers want more video from brands. A 30-second video of you introducing the technician coming to their home does more for customer trust than any marketing piece you could pay for.
2. 80% of video is watched without sound. Facebook's own research showed it. Captions are not optional. They are the difference between someone watching your content and scrolling past it.
3. The record button is the hardest button to push. Once you hit it, it gets easier every time. You do not need a camera crew. You need your phone and a reason to talk.
4. Reusable content compounds over time. Videos that get 2 likes today become a course next year. A collection of short how-to videos becomes a paid subscription product. Start building the library now.
5. Accessibility is usability. If your content is hard to read, hard to hear, or hard to see, you are removing people from your audience. Fix your colors, caption your videos, and check your contrast.
6. Starting a business with kids is different, and that is okay. The mental load is higher. The time is tighter. The key is not balance. It is deciding what you are building and committing to the next small step, not the full mountain.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• Increase profit
• Install real systems
• Build a team that runs the business
• Get your time back

Go to gatheringthekings.com and apply for a GTK Growth Audit. We will show you exactly where you are leaking time, profit, and opportunity.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Connect with Cam Beaudoin:

• Instagram: @thefrequentspeaker
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cambeaudoin
• YouTube: youtube.com/@AcceleratedAccessibility

Resources Mentioned:

• YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Instagram Live for practice
• Accelerated Accessibility: youtube.com/@AcceleratedAccessibility

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Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

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At 29, Sean Martin was making 6 figures in medical sales, had the gift of persuasion, and was doing 2 years in federal prison.

Not because he couldn't succeed. Because he was afraid he actually could.

Sean grew up in the Bronx, the son of a Dominican immigrant who raised him alone. He got the college degree. He got the sales job. He built the income. And still, the programming from the streets kept pulling him back. Until he had no choice but to sit with it for 2 years and rewrite everything.

He filled composition notebooks with the next 10 years of his life. He hit almost every target.

This episode is about what it actually takes to change the temperature you were set at.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The subconscious thermostat is the real problem. Like a thermostat set to a fixed temperature, your mind will pull you back to whatever standard you were raised at, no matter how far you push. You have to consciously reset the temperature or you will always return to it.
2. Fear of success is more common than fear of failure. Sean scored off the charts for fear of success on personality assessments. Many ambitious people self-sabotage because they don't know who they will be when they actually achieve what they say they want.
3. Prison was the pause that made everything possible. Two years of sobriety, 200 books, and composition notebooks full of goals. Sean did not kill time in prison. He designed his future. Almost all of it came true.
4. 10x is easier than 2x. To double your income, you grind harder at what you already know. To 10x, you have to completely abandon what you know and find who has already done what you want to do. The goal itself forces you out of broken programming.
5. You cannot bring everyone with you. Your growth is a threat to people who are not growing. That includes people you love. The ones who truly support you will do it from a distance. The ones pulling you down are not evil. They are just a mirror of where you used to be.
6. What you stop doing matters more than what you start doing. Getting sober 18 months ago was not about adding a habit. It was about removing the thing Sean used to numb himself from his own potential. Stop the numbing first.
   
   

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• Increase profit
• Install real systems
• Build a team that runs the business
• Get your time back

Go to gatheringthekings.com and apply for a GTK Growth Audit. We will show you exactly where you are leaking time, profit, and opportunity.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Support the show

Like what you heard?

Share this episode with a friend and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

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What does financial discipline look like when it grows from desperation instead of discipline?

Janine Jennings didn't learn about net worth from a finance professor. She learned it in an ICU, watching her infant daughter fight for her life, while still working hair clients to keep the lights on. When her daughter passed, she had nothing. She restarted with one appointment and a $40 tip.

Today, she runs a full tax and accounting firm, speaks the language of the self-employed, and has a formula she calls your "quintillionaire number." The number every contractor should know but almost none actually do.

This episode is about money, but it's really about what it takes to stop drifting.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Track your money daily or you are drifting. Most people know what they earn. Few know what they spend. Janine says treat your finances like your phone: check it every day.
2. Your "quintillionaire number" is your retirement target. Take your income, subtract expenses, add side income, add 3% for inflation, multiply by 2.5. That is your freedom price. The formula is on her website.
3. Retirement is not optional just because you own a business. Self-employed people have no employer plan. Janine's entry-level tools: Acorns for a Roth IRA, Vanguard for the S&P 500. You can start with $10 a week.
4. Resilience is the decision to keep making money move. When Janine lost her daughter, she forced herself to take one more appointment. Then one more. That is not a metaphor. That is the actual mechanism of recovery.
5. Net worth is your number one financial metric. Income minus expenses equals net worth. If you are not tracking it, you cannot improve it.
6. Starting over does not require a head start. Janine rebuilt twice: after her daughter's passing and again after her divorce. Both times she started with one client, one service, one next step.

If you're a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• Increase profit
• Install real systems
• Build a team that runs the business
• Get your time back

Go to gatheringthekings.com and apply for a GTK Growth Audit. We'll show you exactly where you're leaking time, profit, and opportunity.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Connect with Janine Jennings (Guest):

• Website: jptaxservice.com
• Instagram: @jenningspeytontaxservice
• Facebook: @JPTaxServices
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/janinejennings9999
• TikTok: @jptaxservice
• YouTube: JP Tax Service and Accounting

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Like what you heard?

Share this episode with a friend and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

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Rick Jordan's IPO deal fell apart eight times in the five days leading up to it going through. Every time there was an impasse in the contracts or the terms, his response was not to choose between two bad options. It was to find the third option that nobody had thought of yet. Every time it almost broke, it came back together. It went through. That is not luck. That is a twenty-year mindset built around refusing to accept binary choices as final.

Rick is a serial entrepreneur with 78 employees, runs his own podcast, builds and acquires companies, and has been through enough hard seasons to know the difference between difficulty and forcing. In this conversation with Chaz Wolfe, Rick breaks down how to know when to press and when to pivot, the neuroscience behind why self-limiting beliefs persist, his rule of thirds financial framework for running a profitable service-based business, and what he has learned from his kids about what proximity actually does in a family.

Key Takeaways:

• Difficulty and forcing feel different in the body. Difficulty is felt in the gut. Forcing feels like constriction in the chest. Learn to tell the difference before you quit something that just needed another thirty seconds.
• If you are bumping into difficulty, the question is how, not why. If you are ignoring obvious signs that say stop, that is different. The discernment between those two takes either experience or honest self-reflection.
• Most entrepreneurs fall short right before the breakthrough. Rick's IPO deal fell apart eight times in five days. Every impasse had a third option that made the deal work. Binary thinking is almost always the problem.
• Fear pisses Rick off. In a good way. When he feels scared, he uses it as a signal to act. The only way to solve fear is action. You do not need to know step seven. You just need to take step one.
• Neural pathways strengthen with repetition. Every time you return to a limiting thought, you reinforce the neural connection. Every time you challenge it and choose a different narrative, you weaken it. This is neuroscience, not woo.
• Fix the broken child in you so you do not break the child that comes from you. Your unresolved emotional issues show up in your parenting, in your leadership, and in how safe your kids feel around you.
• Proximity is the number one parenting strategy. From the time Rick's twins were two months old, if he needed to run any errand, he would grab one of them and bring them along. That pattern created the relationship where his sixteen-year-old still cries in his arms after a performance and asks if she can come along to the store.
• The rule of thirds: cost of goods sold should be a third of top-line revenue. Overhead and SGA should be another third. Net operating income should be the remaining third. If you can structure a service business this way and still pay yourself as an owner inside that overhead, you have a real business.
• From net operating income, reinvest half back into the business. New assets, new services, a salesperson, something directly tied to more top-line revenue. That is how growth is funded without burning the business.
• You cannot do any of this if you are running a 10 percent net operating income. Structure the rule of thirds first, then scale.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• increase profit
• install real systems
• build a team that runs the business
• get your time back

Visit www.gatheringthekings.com for information on how to apply.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Support the show

Like what you heard?

Share this episode with a friend and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

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Dan Rawitch started his career at nineteen years old by getting rejected from twelve interviews before someone finally gave him a shot. He went on to build the fourth largest mortgage credit reporting firm in the nation, trade bonds on Wall Street for Bear Stearns, and develop a trading indicator called Flight Station with an 87.5 percent win rate. Now he runs the University of Options with his daughters, teaching live trading classes and operating AI-powered trading bots that execute on his system automatically.

In this conversation with Chaz Wolfe, Dan covers how he landed Jim Rohn as a mentor in college by simply taking his advice and asking him to lunch, why slow is fast when it comes to trading, how AI trading bots actually work and what makes them trustworthy or not, and why understanding money as energy is the mindset shift that unlocks everything else.

Key Takeaways:

• Jim Rohn told a college audience that poor people should take rich people to lunch. Dan walked up after the speech and asked Jim to lunch. Jim said in all his years of giving that speech, no one had ever done that. Dan worked for him for nearly a year and learned more from him than from anyone else.
• Rohn told Dan to read for 30 minutes every night until he reached the highest pinnacle. He started with Think and Grow Rich and Psycho-Cybernetics, which led him to Silva Mind Control, which Dan says gave him a massive competitive advantage.
• For the first time in history, more options are traded than actual shares of stock. The learning curve is steep but short. Slow is fast. Paper trade first. Show your results before you trade real money.
• University of Options guarantees a 70 percent win rate or you do not pay. The system internally runs at an 87.5 percent win rate. Refunds are rare because failures are almost always about application, not the system.
• AI trading bots are built on years of data. The distinction that matters is between algorithm-based bots and neural networks that actually learn from their mistakes. Dan's bots do the latter.
• Every time Dan has hit a bottom in his career, he has catapulted. Tony Robbins says the bottom is a great springboard. You are not going to spring from the middle.
• Money is energy. Everything is built on energy and vibration. The people Dan has watched succeed were not always the most righteous people. They were the people 100 percent tuned in to what they wanted. That alignment is the real mechanism.
• Dan's dad lost the Cadillac, lost the big house, moved the family to a small town in Lancaster, and within three years was mayor, opened the first McDonald's, owned the biggest real estate firm, and owned the drive-in. He never seemed to care if he failed.
• You were put here to create. That is not a religious statement alone. It is a frequency alignment statement. When you stop waiting for permission and start creating, things come to you.
• Do not gear up your trading with your own capital until you are making enough to gear up with house money. The people who lose big are the ones who skipped the basics.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• increase profit
• install real systems
• build a team that runs the business
• get your time back

Visit www.gatheringthekings.com for information on how to apply.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Support the show

Like what you heard?

Share this episode with a friend and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

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Armando LeDuc lost close to $50,000 a month in retaining business in under five days. Clients were dropping. Bad reviews were coming in. Invoices were not getting paid. He was so confident in what he was doing that he had stopped actually paying attention to what his clients were experiencing. That humbling was the beginning of the client journey framework he now builds for businesses across the country.

Armando is an actor, singer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, business coach, and the director of LeDuc Entertainment. His approach to personal branding is built on a simple premise: if you are going to sell it, you better be living it. When he started creating daily content for his own business the same way he told clients to, he hit $30,000 a month in revenue within the first month.

In this conversation with Chaz Wolfe, Armando breaks down his three-step process for building a personal brand, how he mapped the complete client journey using the Domino's pizza tracker model and the five love languages, why he applies that same framework to referral partners and employees, and what happened when he finally stopped forcing his business forward and started living authentically.

Key Takeaways:

• If you are going to sell it, you better be doing it. Most marketing companies tell clients to create content and build a brand while doing none of it themselves. That disconnect erodes trust before a conversation even starts.
• Daily content from the first month produced $30,000 in monthly revenue. Not because of reach. Because the preselling was done. By the time prospects got on a call, the question was not whether Armando could help them. It was whether they believed he could.
• Armando lost $50,000 in monthly retainers in under five days because there was no mapped client journey. Everybody goes on a journey whether you map it out or not. If you do not map it, the experience is inconsistent and eventually costs you.
• The Domino's pizza tracker model: clients know where they are in the process at all times. Who owns each touchpoint. What the KPIs are. What comes next. Clarity during fulfillment builds trust and eliminates invoice fights.
• The five love languages for clients: compliment their posts, leave them a Google review, refer them business, send a gift, or spend quality time with them. Armando built an automated pipeline that does all five on a rotating basis.
• The referral partner journey: most businesses only manage client obligations and completely ignore their referral partners. Armando built a separate pipeline for referral partners with the same love language touchpoints. Referrals went up significantly.
• The employee journey: the same intentionality that businesses apply to clients and referral partners should apply to the team. If you are treating everyone else like they matter and neglecting your own people, the team feels it.
• Planning heart touches is not inauthentic. Intentionality is the point. If you do not write it down, it will not happen. Preplanned giving is still giving.
• Living in shame is the lowest level of consciousness. Armando spent years dimming his energy because people around him could not handle it. The threshold he crossed at a mastermind conference was the moment he committed to stop wearing the mask.
• Authentic content attracts. Forced content repels. When you get clear on the one thing you are most passionate about and run all of your content through that lens, you stop guessing and start resonating.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• increase profit
• install real systems
• build a team that runs the business
• get your time back

Visit www.gatheringthekings.com for information on how to apply.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTub

Support the show

Like what you heard?

Share this episode with a friend and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

Connect With Chaz

Neb Aynu was the top producer at his corporate bonding firm when he was let go. He had planned to start Kingdom Bonding in five years, at 35. Instead, he started it the same month. He moved in with his sister. He put his apartment on Airbnb. He put his car in a rental program. He walked places in the rain. His budget was under $100 a month. He worked 70 to 80 hours a week.

In year one, Kingdom Bonding became one of the few minority-owned bonding-only agencies in the country. And Neb's contractors became something closer to family.

In this conversation with Chaz Wolfe, Neb breaks down what bonding actually is and why it is the key to contractor success with government and large commercial contracts, how he built courage through David Goggins, forgiveness, and faith to turn the worst moment of his career into his biggest opportunity, and why he believes the real cause of America's wealth gap is not what most people think.

Key Takeaways:

• Bonding is an insurance product for contractors doing work with federal, state, local, or general contractors. Without it, you cannot get the contract. Most contractors in the minority construction community do not know how to get bonded. That is the gap Neb is closing.
• Getting fired as the top producer taught Neb one thing: it was not about his work or his clients. It was about the box. Some people are not built for the box. Going all in on your own business becomes obvious when every other door closes.
• Neb prayed one prayer: close every single door so it is obvious I have to start Kingdom. God answered it. Every recruiter offered him insults. He incorporated May 13th.
• You cannot suppress pain as a man. You have to feel it, and then do something with it. Every time Neb felt bad, he worked harder. He channeled the frustration into the business until forgiveness replaced bitterness in November.
• Never Finished by David Goggins changed his headset from victim to victor. He listened to it the same month he incorporated. The timing was not a coincidence.
• Bitterness eats the person holding it. Forgiveness is not for the other person. It is for you. Neb had to go through a full forgiveness chapter to get his health and sanity back after the intensity of year one.
• The one decision that drove early success: give without expecting anything back. Neb creates weekly newsletters, weekly content, and weekly posts. He connects contractors who cannot benefit him personally. He educates the community for free. The relationships came back as clients and as brothers.
• The wealth gap is a mindset problem first and a knowledge gap second. Communities stuck in a scarcity mindset do not know what they do not know. Neb's mission is to teach minority contractors exactly how to get bonded, win federal contracts, and build real wealth, then watch them go back and teach the next person.
• Entrepreneurship is not an ethnicity thing. It is a mindset thing. But the stats show that the scarcity mindset is disproportionately concentrated in certain communities. Fixing that requires specific knowledge being delivered to specific people consistently.
• Serve people and connect them to each other, even when you get nothing out of it. Business is people to people to people. That is how growth happens.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• increase profit
• install real systems
• build a team that runs the business
• get your time back

Visit www.gatheringthekings.com for information on how to apply.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Support the show

Like what you heard?

Share this episode with a friend and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

Connect With Chaz

Rylee Meek gave his life to entrepreneurship at fifteen. He started in network marketing, moved to personal training, discovered dinner seminar marketing at 26, made his first million dollar year selling insulation without knowing what the R value stood for, and has since built a nine-figure sales and client acquisition empire across industries including insurance, regenerative medicine, and home remodeling. He also co-founded The King's Council, a ministry and mastermind for faith-driven entrepreneurs.

In this conversation with Chaz Wolfe, Rylee breaks down the dinner seminar model that changed his entire trajectory, why following your passion is the worst advice ever given, the predictable-sustainable-scalable selling system he builds into every business, and the seven-day creation template from Genesis that he now runs every business and life decision through.

Key Takeaways:

• If you build it, they will not come. Unless you have a consistent, predictable flow of leads and sales, you do not have a business. You have a very expensive hobby.
• The number one enemy of every vision is lack of provision. You can have the greatest vision in the world, but if you cannot create enough value in the marketplace that someone will pay for, you have nothing.
• Do not follow your passion. Follow opportunity. But always bring your passion with you. Passion without opportunity is just a broke person with a great attitude.
• The dinner seminar breakthrough: delivering one presentation to 20 qualified prospects versus 20 individual presentations is leverage. Once Rylee discovered it in 2011 at age 26, he never went back. That year became his first million-dollar year.
• You cannot manage what you do not measure. If you do not know where in the funnel your leads are dropping off, you cannot fix it. Every advertising dollar is a seed. Know where it is landing.
• Build a predictable, sustainable, and scalable selling system. If you cannot dial it up or slow it down on command, you do not have a system. You have a hustle.
• Every product and service is a commodity unless you can articulate why a buyer should pay a premium for yours. If you cannot, you are competing on price. That is a race to the bottom.
• The seven-day Genesis blueprint applied to business: Day 1 is vision, Day 2 is culture and atmosphere, Day 3 is structure and playbook, Day 4 is order and implementation, Day 5 is momentum, Day 6 is dominion and fruitfulness, Day 7 is rest and reflection. Most entrepreneurs skip days 2 through 4 and wonder why the momentum fades.
• Rest is not weakness. The Sabbath was created for man. One day of rest and reflection allows you to pour gas on what is working and stop doing what is not. Entrepreneurs who never stop never know which is which.
• You were created to create. Whatever your faith background, the template of vision, atmosphere, structure, order, momentum, dominion, and rest is a framework that works in business and in life.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• increase profit
• install real systems
• build a team that runs the business
• get your time back

Visit www.gatheringthekings.com for information on how to apply.

Connect with Chaz Wolfe (Host):

Website

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

YouTube

Support the show

Like what you heard?

Share this episode with a friend and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Join the conversation by visiting GatheringTheKings.com and apply to connect with other high-performing entrepreneurs and their families.

Connect With Chaz

Clifton Muckenfuss co-founded a residential construction company in 2010 knowing nothing about construction. By the time he exited in 2021, 60 to 62 percent of his business was repeat and referral. He spent less than 1 percent of top-line revenue on direct response marketing. His Google reviews went from 3 in the first six years to over 100. None of that happened because of a marketing agency. It happened because Clifton built a system for expressing gratitude that turned satisfied clients into raving fans.

In this conversation with Chaz Wolfe, Clifton breaks down the raving fan framework he now teaches business owners across the country, why a satisfied customer is actually a liability not an asset, the four-letter word that should alarm any contractor, and why the most expensive mistake most business owners make is stopping the relationship the moment the job is done.

Clifton also shares the personal story behind why he built this in the first place. Multiple arrests. Aggravated assault charges. Drug sales and consumption. And a wife who looked him in the eye before the company existed and said: I don't know, but I believe in you. That one sentence changed everything.

Key Takeaways:

• A raving fan is not just a happy customer. It is someone so obsessive about your people, your culture, your product, and your experience that they cannot wait to tell anyone who will listen.
• A satisfied customer is a liability. Fine is the four-letter word that should alarm you. Fine means something is wrong and they do not trust you enough to say what it is.
• It is not your customer's job to remember you. It is your job to make sure they cannot forget you. Most contractors complete the job and go find the next one. That is the gap.
• The biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make: they are too focused on the next opportunity and not focused enough on the key relationships that already exist. Your past customers know you, like you, and trust you. They are the easiest sale you will ever make.
• Clifton called a past client to thank them for a referral and casually asked about the windows. The client said do you do windows? Clifton had replaced their roof, deck, and siding. The client had no idea. That moment became the entire company philosophy.
• Referrals close at a higher rate. They buy at a higher price. They have fewer objections. And they lower your marketing costs. The gap between what you are currently spending on digital marketing and what you could spend by activating your existing relationships is almost entirely profit.
• Post-fulfillment follow-up is where most businesses fall apart. Right after a job is completed, when the client is at peak satisfaction, is the exact right moment to ask for a review, a video testimonial, and two or three referrals. Most business owners are too scared to ask because they are afraid something went wrong.
• If something went wrong, you want to know. A broken process that you cannot see cannot be fixed. The client who says fine and never calls again is more dangerous than the one who tells you exactly what went wrong.
• Express gratitude consistently and systematically. Relationship marketing is not a tactic. It is a philosophy that has to be built into every touch point before, during, and after the transaction.
• Internal raving fans matter just as much as external ones. Your employees and team members need to feel the same love and appreciation as your clients. The same gratitude framework applies to both.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

• increase profit
• install real systems
• build a team that runs the business
• get your time back

Visit www.gatheringthekings.com for information on how to apply.

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