Transcript for:
Lecture on Potential Recession and Business Strategies

[Music] 10x is easier than 2x is the brand new book by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy discover a mindset shift most entrepreneurs are completely missing unlimited growth without working harder available now wherever you buy your books [Music] Hawk questions concern about a potential upcoming recession and I wanted to talk to you about that and get your take so what are your thoughts on what's happening in the world I mean I love how you peruse a kajillion sites here I'm very up to date on the news I'd love to get your insight into is there going to be one and if so what what can people do about it well yes there's going to be one because it's a natural phase of economic commercial technological growth and there's a phase where something brand new is being created and it's more valuable than what presently exists and not only that but it creates all sorts of new value and therefore there's a jump in productivity and when you have that you have a growth Market which is the opposite of a recessionary market and a recessionary market happens when it becomes measurable that too many people are being overpaid for what's being created interesting okay so what happens first of all is that things which were really worth allowed in the marketplace are worth less and people aren't willing to pay so there's fewer people willing to pay for something and so the sales are not made so there's not revenues and profitability goes down but the other thing is that when things look really hot and they look like they have real growth potential then a lot of people are hired now even though they don't have capabilities because then they'll be trained and be ready for even higher levels of economic growth and that happens and then after a while their pay outpaces the value of what's being contributed and so there's a correction A recession is a correction okay and what it forces immediately is that something things just aren't going to make it in the future some businesses some products some services and especially some jobs just aren't going to make it in the market they were good for a while they were extremely valuable during a period of time and they were valuable and then they were okay and then they reached where they're not okay and so they get shedded yep they get pruned they get pruned even since I've started my business I think there's been five or six of them you know some of them more extreme than others okay the most extreme one was the 0809 Prime real estate triggered recession the 70s were really weird from inflation and it was strictly mostly energy geared that the cost of energy went through the roof because it was being controlled by countries in the Middle East loans got up to 18 in Toronto where I live you know you were paying 18 for loans and everything yeah and recessions usually loans become more expensive and they tighten up who's credit worthy you know so it's harder to get loans and then you're paying more for loans but I think that this one's a big one because I think the conditions of covid where you had lockdowns I take it permanently undermines the global supply chain networks okay and I think that like it's a 50-year correction I don't think it's just uh us four or five year I think this is a 50-yard correction I think it's we're going to be in recessionary and inflationary conditions for a decade at least personal or if it's just happening at the same time but the sort of dismantling of globalization that Peter Zion talks about yeah very much so that the problem with globalization where you had Supply chains that were providing almost everything just in time on a global basis is that there's no slack in the system there's no Surplus there's no backup to it and the reason is it keeps getting strained to produce more and more results with less and less backup what I noticed over about the last five or ten years that the Venture Capital Market in the technology markets was starting to resemble Las Vegas what was going in on Las Vegas casinos and that is you were making your money off the bat you weren't making your money off the thing to be created okay and I remember one of our clients has a massively unique and different way of creating conferencing on a worldwide basis where there's an AI program connected to it and the AI actually will sense out what some people's Minds that they want to be talking about and then actually creates the agenda and creates the actual marketing that goes out to a worldwide community and establishes dates and everything else and then as the conference takes place and people are talking is capturing what they're talking about and creating all the topics for the next conference okay we had it up and working for about two years and I said do you have IP protection for this and he hadn't and I said you better get IP protection for this you know and we have a great great IP lawyer in Silicon Valley they set up a meeting and they had about 12 people at the meeting the Venture Capital partners and they said to him they said so how far are you away from prototype stage you know where you can kind of communicate with the market what you're doing and he said oh no it's up and working it's been working for two years and the IP partner said well that's going to be hard to sell something that actually works oh no so more and more the money's being made on the betting right of something that might work in the future and you're heading for trouble here because large amounts of money are being created that have no possible payoff in terms of something that's actually increasingly productive yeah so it's like there's no the recent thing that we had with the crypto exchange the FTX I think it was they were taking in real dollars and you were given a token to play with in the game but Las Vegas does the same thing they just called chips and guess what outside of the casino the chips are worthless yeah and when you win a game and you get way more chips you haven't won until those chips are translated into dollars on the way out that's such a great Point Dan so major headwinds are coming and they're probably not going to go away anytime soon so what's the best strategy how do people need to be thinking about this and how can they take action because it's a very different world than it was for the past what 40 years yeah well I want to take a step backwards before I answer that question I want to step back the number one cause of the recession are the Institutes of higher education the colleges and the universities and the reason is that they're being paid to educate people in worthless skills okay so they've started training people in very Advanced abstract theories but what the marketplace in the real world actually wants is people who can actually have a trade have a skill but the universities are so far away in terms of their faculty and their administrators from the actual Marketplace they just see it as a very foreign world yeah 100 the other thing is they see the marketplace as a world of the past and their theories are creating the world of the future and people are betting on these theories but they're like chips in a casino they're like the tokens in a crypto exchange you can't translate them into actual dollars so the students can get these Advanced degrees and they started their educational Journey when they were four years old and they're now 28 and they've got a couple graduate degrees and they've accumulated all these credentials to our casino chips but when they tried to translate them and go out into the actual world they're worthless totally and the people who actually are good at the Practical tangible concrete are despised are despised and because I'm just finishing reading this phenomenal book by Temple Grandin whom I've been reading for 20 plus years called visual thinking and she articulates this problem she goes they get screened up because of algebra which is an abstraction of numbers which are also abstractions so it just makes it the whole world depends upon arithmetic and geometry and it's interesting because I just know a lot of people who actually operate much better in the visual world and they struggle in school they struggle in high school they barely make it through and yet they're Geniuses with their hands and to see how things can be fixed and if you haven't read Temple Grandin highly recommend it because she just gives you a great insight into how people think differently but that's actually what we need in our school system higher education doesn't support it at all so and what I'm reading completely so what I would say is that people with real skills are now getting more and more highly paid and I give you I just checked it out in Toronto and Chicago that if you're uh graduating from high school this year and you take a six-week welding course which is actually provided by the welding industry okay at the end of 12 months I mean if you're do what they say and you learn what they're teaching at the end of 12 months you'll be making sixty thousand dollars a year nice sixty thousand dollars for the first 12 months and then take a high school graduate who is going into four years of college one is that person is going to make minimum income if any income during four years and likelihood will run up a debt so that they'll actually be in negative territory four years from now and by that time the welder is making a hundred thousand dollars a year okay and what's true of welding is true of carpentry is true of being an electrician a plumber a mechanic and the reason is that the world doesn't need University theories they don't need University abstractions what they need is people who actually know how to do something that actually creates value and my sense is why there's a big recession coming is that we've produced over the last 20 or 30 years a university graduates and graduate school graduates who in the job market might be able to say welcome to Walmart oh that's hard unfortunately I have to agree with you 100 percent of men are chocolate on top of your latte and they're so frustrating we have nothing against Walmart or braces yeah the Baristas I have nothing against them at all they at least can do something valuable so many graduates coming out of University are worthless and they actually feel like they've been sold to Billy Goods because it used to be an education would guarantee you a job now it does not yeah and I know actually someone that we both know ones are very successful PR agency in in Toronto and at least before kovid it was great to have a four years of education because it does teach you critical thinking but then she also wanted one year in Canada it's called college so they would actually know how to do something which is kind of wild because University graduates don't actually know how to do anything which is kind of a shame a lot of what I read and anecdotal evidence as well completely backs up what you're saying Dan and people who do Graduate University are really frustrated because they thought it was going to be different and there's so much in debt I know people in their mid-30s are still paying off their student loans which is just a shame because they're under this huge burden is getting them the extra income no it's not I went to four-year College started in 1967 and I graduated in 1971 and I had been in the Army before so the ji bill which I was eligible for paid for all my living expenses during four years and I borrowed the money for tuition you know I borrowed and I got out and I got a really great job in an advertising agency and I paid off the loan and also started my first business but I was able to pay off the loan in about three or four years yep it was a sizable loan I mean when I graduated it was sixteen thousand dollars but this is 50 years ago so it's equivalent to at least 150 000 now somewhere around there you know I graduated on Sunday moved to Toronto on a Monday and I wrote my first ad as a member of a big Global advertising agency and I have done all the preparation to have a job waiting for me the moment I got out of college you know and it was great but you could do it in those days you can't do that in these days no no exactly well that's interesting I hadn't put it together quite like that and it actually ties back to what you were saying about growth earlier there are so many jobs open and that expansion actually can't happen because there aren't the people yeah and that's what will happen and I would say this that I think that the ones who are going to take the greatest advantage of the recession and do skills training are going to be immigrants more than native born people the immigrants see everything as an opportunity okay they don't expect to have opportunity created for them I mean the reason why they're immigrants is because they were willing to risk leaving behind everything they had to come to hear because in their mind their chances were much better Canada the United States Australia you know the big immigrant countries is that they knew that they would find a way of being valuable but it wouldn't come over and go through four years of college to do it they go out and start being useful right off the bat and so my sense is that the end of the recession will be when a significant number of young people between 20 and 40 right redesign themselves to be more useful and then the opportunities for growth are already there the skills for growth aren't there right and the moment that the skills for growth collaborate with the opportunity then you get another growth period but I suspect that a lot of people with the most higher education are going to be left behind the Train's going to leave the station and they won't get on the train right so find something practical to do yeah that's super great context Dan thank you and it totally is validated by the people experience that I know and some of whom are just graduating high school and they feel very lost at College oh I think I was going to say about immigrants they don't have the same biases that we do about you need to have four-year University education well first of all they have no social status anyway so they're not risking their social steps because they don't have a need to begin with yeah the other aspect about it is any Improvement is great yeah they just have a sense that any kind of improvement any kind of growth is great and but there's going to be a couple of generations of people who are just going to be casualties of an over investment in abstractions and theories ooh well said I like that over investment in abstractions and theories yes all right so let's go back to my previous question so if we are facing these headwinds which we are both in terms of the recession and inflation so how can a company or somebody owns a company really be strategic and set themselves up for success I mean my first thought is let's train people to do the things that we want them to do but how can we set ourselves up to be just really successful in this upcoming challenge Dan stay in really really close contact with your existing customers ask them you know three questions what are the biggest dangers you have right now that a year from now you have to eliminate these dangers what are the biggest opportunities you have right now that a year from now you have to have captured these opportunities and what are the biggest strengths you have right now that a year from now they have to get stronger they have to be maximized and we call this the Dos analysis and just asking them the question and giving them unified attention for an hour over breakfast lunch or dinner will create for you as the entrepreneur will trade for you enormous amount of business over the next year because it's not that your existing customers don't have the money they've lost the future to actually put the money out for it so they've got lots of money they've got lots of money but they've lost their future so by asking your customers about their dangers their opportunities and strengths you give them a new future and you're the only person who did so you get first dibs on their money that's so powerful Dan and here's the thing I went through September October November and I'm now in December with about 350. very very successful entrepreneurs and not once was there any mention of the outside economic circumstances it was not brought up as a topic even the news is just filled with it and everything and the reason is because by being in touch with their own customers and providing their customers with a much bigger future simply by asking questions they have created their own economy that's oblivious to the outside economy and that's how you never go into a recession in the first place and you don't have to come out of a recession because it doesn't apply to you how to be recession-proof I love it had to be recession oblivious well that's way better how to be recession oblivious oh that's fantastic and it's great Dan because all of that is completely within your own control and the idea of having your own personal economic system you called it is so energizing for me yeah love that awesome I really like Dan that you haven't talked about you know have lots of powder to burn like make sure that you're doing this with your hiring or that um I mean you have to have that in all times you know keep more of the money that you make but that should just be uh and all the time policy what would you say about hiring team members not hiring team members what's your take on that in recession well the the two things Babs and I who you know we're 30 33 years into this so when we have a recession or two things that we focus on number one is every day make sure everybody's confidence is really high so a lot of positive feedback about improvements a lot of positive feedback any gain gets praised and rewarded the other thing is come out of the recession with Estrada team as you went into the recession with okay and the reason is because half your competition is not going to get out of bed during the recession and the half that do get out of bed only half of them will be sober no I'm telling you you just lose all your competition during recession oh really great companies make their biggest market gains during bad times yeah the other thing is that you're willing during recession to try out all sorts of new things that have been on the back burner right oh I love this stand this is so fun okay so keep morale High you know praise and reward all gains and improvements have the goal to be to come out of the recession with as strong or maybe even stronger team than you went in with and then you know try new things that have been sitting on the back burners during a growth phase sometimes you just keep in Pace but now there's hopefully time and capacity to actually experiment that's what I'm hearing well it's kind of interesting because I mean we're saying this in public but the public we're saying it to our people who are entrepreneurs but during coved and as we've gotten out of covid people said well how is the covet period I said oh God you know I didn't want it and it was so great we made so much progress during covid I mean the new capabilities I said and the new team members we hired during covet I don't think we've had a comparable period since we started the company in the 1980s as good as kobet I said I was getting to the point I said I just hope this doesn't end too soon and people says well that's kind of cruel and I said no no I'm not talking about how other people did it I'm just you asked me the question how was go fit for us I said it was phenomenal I just loved it and then people say well what if we go into a really long recession I said it's almost sugar on top of the dessert we already have I said you know I mean can we be this lucky can we be this lucky I said we're just I mean it's we're going to be sharks at a beach party here you know it's just amazing how much progress we're going to make I can't believe how much progress is coming up just because we're having a recession and you know either people want to get to know me better or they never want to meet me again when I say things like this but the truth is that all the people that are in our program have the same mindset can't wait for the bad times because the best possible things happen during bad times Dan this is so incredibly refreshing and fun I'm laughing I'm trying to laugh out too loud but it's so great I think if you're a strong resilient dos-focused entrepreneur this is a huge opportunity and often when there's a recession other people are struggling so this is an opportunity the other thing is a lot of really great people get let go so the talent that's becomes available during the recession is way bigger it's hard to find Talent during real boom times yeah which has been true recently yeah yes I'm so I love it so take advantage and be recession oblivious Dan Awesome coaching thank you so much thank you Shannon