Clay Clark

Clay Clark Speaker Biography

My wife and I have been blessed with five amazing kids and numerous successful businesses, yet my path from where I started to where I am now has been filled with countless obstacles. As a kid when I was watching NB basketball games, and playing one on one basketball in the driveway with my friend Joe who loved to wear his David Robinson #50 SPURS jersey I never thought that I would have the pleasure of calling David my business partner. When I was listening to Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” album over and over again, and “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, I never thought that I would be working with Michael Jackson’s publicist or having phone calls with “Hall of Fame” bassist who recorded Rapper’s Delight. As a kid when I grew up stuttering and constantly being made fun of for not being able to speak without stammering I never thought that I would ever be paid to be a public speaker. My friend, I have had an Epic life to this point and you can too, but it all starts with having the belief that you can achieve something great. Once you have this delusional optimism, you then need to have the pig-headed determination to learn and implement the best-practice processes and proven systems that successful people have used to become successful.

Study Successful People. Apply Their Principles. Repeat. 

While attending Oral Roberts University it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to be able to afford the excellent lifestyle that I wanted if I earned a “normal” income. So I started a business out of my dorm room called DJ Connection. I went on to grow this company into the nation’s largest private wedding entertainment company, but it wasn’t without some bumps and bruises along the way.

How Did I Start and Build A Successful Business?

I earned the capital I needed to start by working in the glamorous field of construction for countless hours per week. Once I wrapped my construction career, I juggled three to four jobs simultaneously, working at a call center, at Target, Applebee’s and anywhere else that would hire me. But no matter where I was working I was investing my precious downtime into studying successful people and applying their success principles to my own life and situation.

I read books like, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. With each book I read I gained more knowledge and more power and better understanding of the world around me. I soon realized that I had been doing everything wrong and that I needed to make some big changes if I was ever going to get to where I wanted to go. Over a three year window of time I began changing everything about my life. I became very intentional about seeking about the wisdom, knowledge and coaching from millionaires and every day entrepreneurial success stories. I began saying no to the people and things were not getting me closer to my goals. I began waking up a 5:00 AM every morning to ordain my own destiny and to actually plan out my days. I began making to-do lists. I began surrounding myself with positive people, dressing to impress and living a purpose driven life.

Now some 15 years later, my life has been nothing short of epic. I was named the Tulsa Metro Chamber ofCommerce Entrepreneur of the Year at age 20, and the Small Business Administration “Oklahoma’s Entrepreneur of the Year” at the age of 27. I have started numerous successful businesses, written three books, consulted with companies in nearly every industry under the sun while making sure that I still have the “family time” necessary to create and raise five beautiful children with wife wonderful wife Vanessa. Today I get paid to educate, inspire and coach businesses on the specific action steps that are required to grow.

Over the years I have been the “Entertainer,” “Educator” or “Consultant” of choice for America’s leading companies including: Bama Companies, Boeing, Farmers Insurance, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Maytag University, Oral Roberts University, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Oxi Fresh, QuikTrip, Southwest Airlines, Valspar Paint, and countless other companies and organizations that were looking to grow.

EDUCATOR / BUSINESS COACH:

Over the years, I’ve worked a consultant in the following industries and more:

access control & ID card, advertising, apartment, appliance, auto parts, aviation, bakery, banking, bridal, camp, carpet cleaning, coffee, charity, college university, commercial real estate, construction, cosmetic surgery, dentistry, education, entertainment, event planning, fitness, furniture, gourmet desserts, government, haircare, insurance, leadership development, life coaching, limousine, lawn care, lighting, jewelry, mail order, medical care, ministry, mortgage, music lessons, non-profit, paint, photography, plumbing, public relations, retail, restaurant, security, sports products, staffing, supplementation, videography, web design & development, and more…

Over the years, countless business owners have reached out to me for coaching and guidance. Then as their companies have grown, they have referred me to their friends and their friends and eventually I thought we should come up with a name for this nameless high-powered business consulting juggernaut that was building itself. And the name I came up with was, Make Your Life Epic, because that is the entire point of starting a business in my mind.

An Entire Organization Based Upon One Founding Philosophy:

The Make Your Life Epic Success Institute was founded around the belief that:

If you study successful people and businesses, then do what they did to become successful while making slight adjustments to fit your lifestyle, your values, your business model and your goals, you will win.

As I consulted with countless clients I kept discovering that they often would be facing the same issues regardless of what industry they were in:

• They didn’t know what to do next to grow their business
• They were so busy working in their business that they rarely worked on improving their actual business
• They often looked at successful people and businesses with a sense of awe, instead of with a sense of curiosity about the specific step-by-step-super-granular-systems that these entrepreneurs used to achieve success.

Napoleon Hill was a success author who devoted his entire working career to studying the world’s most successful people and teaching their principles to others. In fact his book, Think and Grow absolutely changed my life. In his books he wrote:

“A Carnegie or a Rockefeller or a James J. Hill or a Marshall Field accumulates a fortune through the application of the same principles available to all of us, but we envy them and their wealth without ever thinking of studying their philosophy and applying it to ourselves. We look at a successful person in the hour of their triumph and wonder how they did it, but we overlook the importance of analyzing their methods and we forget the price they had to pay in the careful and well-organized preparation that had to be made before they could read the fruits of their efforts.” – Napoleon Hill 

This concept blew my mind because of how true it was and it has become my all consuming passion to mentor millions.

How Can We Mentor Millions?

Over time I discovered that I couldn’t mentor millions unless something massive changed. In fact, I soon realized that I could only mentor 15 businesses at the same time in a rich, meaningful and impactful way. However, this concept of mentoring millions has not left me.

As Make Your Life Epic has grown, we’ve received some media attention and hundreds upon hundreds of people have reached out to me to “pick my brain, to “hire me to speak to their group” or “to grab coffee sometime to discuss some business ideas with me.” And so we’ve tried to help as many people as possible, and we’ve even been able to help out hundreds, but we certainly could not mentor millions yet. And then it happened….

Technology + Passion + Access To Millionaire Mentors = Thrive15.com

Soon the calls and email inquiries poured in even more and I began finding myself overwhelmed with a strong desire to mentor millions in a non-get-rich-quick-scammy-sort-of-way. I don’t want to run around promising people hope without giving people actual direction and the specific action steps they need to take to get from where they are to where they want to be…in my mind this not helpful or constructive.

And by the grace of God in 2012, everything began to come together to launch Thrive15.com, the first online education website dedicated to providing practical business training and mentorship from millionaire, mentors and every day success stories. It has cost millions to develop, yet it has been worth every penny. Each day more and more people around the world are discovering Thrive15.com and the practical, affordable and specific business training it provides.

To book Clay Clark call Executive Speakers Bureau at 901-754-9404.