hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to a special episode of the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan we've been doing some reflections over the last 30 years and the next 30 Years and I want to talk today about the origin of certain key principles and Concepts and actually even the Strategic coach name so let's start there for fun where did the term strategic coach actually come from this dates back to when I was a one one coach which happened between 1974 and 1989 so for the most part I was just out there on my own and I made house calls in those days you know everybody comes from around the world now and they go to one of our centers or one of the hotels that we use for our quarterly workshops but in the old days first 15 years it was me going to people's businesses sometimes their homes I would take a whole day or a half a day depending on the the agreement I had with the entrepreneur sometimes it included their family members and sometimes it involved their team members the actual organization that they had and I remember I was coming in to see one of my longtime one-on-one clients he had a visitor and he said I'd like to introduce Dan Sullivan he's my coach this is my strategic coach up until then I was just known by the very very catchy name Dan Sullivan and he said strategic coach and I says oh I really like that so within weeks I had this actually put in as something that could be trademarked and I got it back and we have the trademark for a strategic coach I think it rang such a bell with me because strategy if you really think about strategy is about narrowing your vision it's not expanding in Your Vision it's actually narrowing your vision you're just looking for what you do best and who you do it best with and then you're doing it for the best possible person so that they can create their best possible future that's really what strategy is it's ignoring everything except what produces the biggest results you're doing it with someone who is a big results producer and they've got a future that's going to be bigger than their past and that's what I do I'm very very good at getting people just to focus on the 5% that really makes a difference and ignore the other 95% and I'm a coach I do it by asking questions I don't really do it by telling them oh you should do this and you should do this and research shows the only research that I really am interested in and what's going on in the other person's mind that if I ask them questions things that could be conflicting or confusing using in their mind or they're not clear about all of a sudden as a result of one of my questions all of a sudden they say oh yeah there's 10 things here but if I just focus on this one thing I really don't have to pay attention to the other nine and I said yeah focus on that for 90 days and then we'll come back and you'll see you've produce bigger results and then there will be another big thing that you can focus on and maybe three or four others during each 90-day period so strategic coaches I don't know sometimes when you name something you do everything possible to become the name and you know our understanding of strategic coach today has vastly more Dimensions to it than it did when I first got the name but it was good back then and it's good today well I really like that Dan because it is about the 5% and you have an incredible ability to really hone down on what is the most simple effective strategy to employ without getting caught up in some of the complexities and tactics it's not about that you always make sure that people are laser beam focused through your questioning process on what is actually most essential which frankly until you're in a workshop can be really hard to see you know it's funny because where I work in the office is not that far from the workshop room and I've attempt to sit down at my table in my office and do the exercises and it just doesn't work as well it isn't until I'm in the workshop environment with you with the other clients and then my thinking shifts it's really that thinking shift that the program is all about one of the quotes that you say a lot and I've quoted you many times on this is that a really good coach asks really good questions you're known for your questions and you come up with new ones every 90 days which is a very powerful approach that you take and that's what people keep coming back for first of all I would like to say two things about questions one is that the human brain is constructed in such a way that it can't ignore a question now a person may be asked something and they may refuse to answer but they can't unthink the question so there's something about questions that the brain once you've heard a question you can't ignore the question the other thing is I only ask one kind of question I only ask a question that I don't know an answer to so when I ask somebody a question I don't know what the answer is because the answer lies in their thinking and I can get them to focus on the part of thinking where the answer is but I myself don't know what the answer is so I always tell people never ask a question of a entrepreneur that you want them to give you a certain kind of answer one is I think it's a worthless activity okay because the other person isn't going to learn anything from it but the other thing is that you're only useful what I'm saying about myself here or any of our other associate coaches where only useful to the point that we know that certain types of questions will allow people to actually do their best thinking but what they think about as a result of your question cannot be known until they actually do their thinking yeah well that's so interesting because it kind of flips on the head it's the opposite of law training no I mean in a courtroom lawyer is told from the first day of law school never ask a question unless you have the answer do not ask a question that you don't know the answer to you know and so it's just the opposite of the legal training and I find so many people it's called rhetorical questions where they try to control an individual or a group or a an entire Auditorium by asking questions that the person already knows and you feel manipulated as the person being asked the question you always feel resentful and manipulated when somebody does that but where it's an open-ended question where the only proper answer is the answer that the person actually creates for themselves so that's I would say that that is a fundamental philosophical commitment I will never ask you a question that I know the answer to which is profound because it's the opposite as you mentioned of manipulation but also it's not about ego it's not about prior knowledge and how well have you studied something it's not a test and it's not about me and it's not about you yes and automatically that leads to conversation so coaching for you is not separate from a conversation which is another key aspect of Coach which I think is fairly critical for people to know one to appreciate about that oh Dam we can talk about that forever but there's a couple other things that I want to touch on I would love to know and for other people to know where free days came from and we have an entreprene time system of free days Focus days and buffer days but free days is something that where Babs had a pretty substantial contribution bab's your wife and business partner so talk about that how did free days happen in the coach system well first of all Babs and I bab Smith who's been my partner in life and my partner in business since the 1980s she grew up in a family where taking vacations and taking free days was a normal part of life and I grew up in a family where vacations and free days weren't a part of life as a matter of fact in my first 18 years at home I can remember only one family vacation and it was so unpleasant and I grew up with a lot of siblings so that I remember we went to Florida and I think that there were eight of us in a car and it was very very unpleasant and I think without talking about it we all vowed we would never do that again so I was a workaholic my dad was a workaholic probably from the time he was 6 years old there's almost never a day when my dad didn't work and I just thought well if you're going to be an entrepreneur you work all the time and growing up on a farm growing up on a farm and then you know in your early entrepreneurial days you have to substitute working time for actual skill M you know you just have to put in lawn hours to make up for the fact that you don't know fast Solutions right you know I call that the brute force method it is it's the Jackhammer approach to being an entrepreneur then I made Babs and what I noticed right off the bat she wasn't available all the time because she was taking vacations on her own and she would go here and she would go there and then when we really connected and we were living together and she said well we're going to go away and I says man I says I've got so much to do you know you go off will phone and she says well I'm going to make it real simple for you she said you're going to take free days with me when we take free days or we're not going to have a relationship and I had been through a divorce before this you know I call it a practice marriage but she really laid it out for me she says it's life with me for the rest of your life but you have to take free days because you're know better when you work all the time if you took a week off two weeks and actually the first time we went off we took I think seven or eight days the fingernails were still on the floor as I got dragged out to the car and I groused about it and it was Cape Cod actually which became a key feature in our relationship over the next 30 years I was there you know first two days and it poured and it was terrible and it was windy and then you know as Cape cow can be it just got gloriously Sunny about the third day in I said oh this is really neat that's really neat and I had brought work to do and I didn't do any of the work it was an instant conversion I began to see that this is really crucial and this is about five or six years before we actually created the program so right from the beginning we build in planning for free days because if I was a workaholic the vast majority of the entrepreneurial clients were Workaholics and they had worked themselves into a wall that they couldn't progress they couldn't grow they couldn't get more skillful they couldn't have better opportunities they couldn't have better client and customer relationships they couldn't attract better team members and I saw that free days was The crucial thing for entrepreneurial growth and our first great great marketing message to the marketplace will get you to double the number of free days that you take and in doing that we'll double your income and it was so contrarian you know you were saying well this is how nature works the rain goes back up into the clouds you know water falls go back up you know they climb they don't fall and then we really really began to see that this was crucial and what happened is that enormous balance came into people's lives and there wasn't this stress that was taking place between what they were doing when they were working and they thought you know I'm not being fair to my spouse and to my children and then when they were with their spouse and children they were saying you know I'm not getting the work done and suddenly this freeay concept became really the first great strategy that went around the world because it was so against all the entrepreneurial advice people have yeah if you're not doing 80 hour weeks you're not serious about being an entrepreneur I mean Harvard Business School all the Big Business Schools is the same thing because so many corporate Executives they have no free life and you know anybody who's doing anything where there's a lot of people depending upon them they work work work work and I said no no you got to have this whole part of your life where it's just completely free and then you develop as an individual so that happened simply because it was the fork in the road in my own relationship with Babs I said I'll change myself whatever way I have to change just so that I can spend the rest of my life with Babs and I have to tell you that's making it very dramatic but the entrepreneurs who don't stay in the program this is the number one stumbling block they can't take free days and they never achieve a self managing company either so it really is the foundational idea to actually start creating a smarter company you know self-managing one a better life people don't end up on their third marriage you know it really is a GameChanger yeah and I would say the whole thing about you mentioned team members I would say on average if you go across the countries the three countries that we're in we give easily 20 25% more free time for our team members than any other place of work yeah and they don't get burned out as a result of that I think that's the key point and people have much longer Futures when they're not exhausted or cranky or any of the other things that keep those great relationships they come up with better new more original ideas they can keep Pace with technology much more easily there's so much resting on a rejuvenated creative brain and human rather than just being an exhausted tired one yeah and I think that people who are under a great deal of stress and they're fatigued become very quarrelsome you know they don't cooperate well they don't create together very very well I have a line which I've been saying this line I try not to do this but it's too tempting and I say how many of you in the audience I did this last week in London and I said how many of you notice that when you get fatigued everybody else gets stupid I said how do the stupid people know to show up on the day that you're tired you know how does that actually work you know and it always gets a big laugh and I said it too last week yeah yeah there's some oldies and goodies you just stay with it's a wasted opportunity if you don't give them the punch line well it's really all about you not them yeah Dan there's one other concept that I want to touch on the origin of and that is really about unic ability Teamwork because I think what a lot of people don't know is that many moons ago you would fly out to Calgary at Edmonton by yourself and run the ire Workshop can you share that experience with us and then also fortunately what shifted after not too long so that you didn't have to do it by yourself anymore well we started my coaching and we started the Strategic coach Workshop program in Toronto so our first Notions of expanding outside of Toronto we went West and there were three cities we started in Calgary and then we went to Edmonton in Alberta and then we went to Vancouver the interesting thing about about this Babs would always go with me when it was Vancouver but she wouldn't go with me when it was Calgary and Edmonton especially not Calgary and Edmonton in the cold weather which except for July could be any time so in the early days I would go by myself now if anyone have seen the team that comes with me wherever I go you know I was in London last week and I think we had including the UK staff I think we had nine people you know that we actually making sure that Dan just had to do what he did but in the early days I would go out and you know I'd have to do the setup I would have to do everything related to preparing for a workshop actually doing the workshop doing the after the workshop work collecting the payments collecting the payments up the boxes phoning back who was there who wasn't there and then I would do the renewals and I would renew into the next year and I did that all my myself and so I adapted the simplest fastest easiest way to do that and so consequently this is I'm talking probably early 90s now you know I come with a full team but I never ask the team members really to do much that we haven't agreed on before the workshop over and I think it it actually just reflects back to when I had to do everything myself so the one thing is that once the workshop starts you can't change the game and so for the most part when I coach a workshop once we've agreed as a team that this is going to be the workshop I don't change anything during the day except maybe a tool that we can readily get from inventory and bring into the room but generally speaking I kind of keep things the same and I think it was because I was a oneman company on my road trips and I I learned just how simple simple can actually be I love that and for those of us that work with you a long time I remember when you would fly out west and by yourself and you'd call it in I have to tell you I used to go on marketing trips by myself and the one great breakthrough and this hearkens back I told this story in a previous podcast but we had a lot of financial advisers especially life insurance really top-notch worldclass life insurance agents and I was after the program had started I was invited as a speaker and I went to I think it was Amelia Island which is right at the border of Georgia in Florida and I went there and you were a salesperson at that time I remember but I went on my own and I spoke on two days I got 31 registrations for the program I remember 31 because it was a brand new special program we were creating we usually didn't do dedicated groups but I just decided with this one opportunity we would have a dedicated workshop and we had 31 people so I got back on Monday and went to the office which we then had you and Susan Aldridge who was there at that time and they said how'd you do and I said oh yeah it was pretty good so I had this briefcase and I had the 30 and I said look at this one two three and by the time it got to 10 they said how manyy did you get and I said well I might as well give you the other 21 I got and I think it's still one of the biggest sales dat in the hist you know where I did it and I had to check that all the credit cards you know in credit cards I mean some people wrote checks and for everything so this was in the early days but I remember I came back and I had phone Babs but she didn't know the full story till I got back and I said I got 31 registrations and she gave me a big hug and she said no you're my hero I said that's a reward enough and I remember you were all really excited excited that was an incredible result well and it's neat because and one of the things that Babs has always done is look at how to free you up and so it wasn't too much longer before she kept adding people to the team and it's true you're not high maintenance I mean you do have an appreciation for what it takes and everyone has their designated role to help create it's not even just about Dan it's actually just to make sure that the experience for everyone yes is the best it can possibly be and then everyone does what they're there to do it's not ego it's all about the clients it's all about them and it's quite a joy to work in that environment and one of the things that I've enormously appreciated throughout my life was luxury hotels because it really wasn't part of my growing up experience but as soon as I had money I started staying you know in my 20s and my 30s that whenever I could afford it I stayed at a top-notch hotel one of the best you know in the world I actually started right here in Toronto and that's the Four Seasons Hotel and I used to go and stay at a Four Seasons and it was like going to a conference or a workshop because I would just watch how the Four Seasons as an organization and their team members how they really made things great for all the guests there and I said you know as we developed a workshop program we have to treat all of our entrepreneurial clients who come to strategic coach as if they were staying at a five-star hotel the food how they're taking care of the individual attention they get and everything else I never started with a how do other workshops operate how do other people's programs work I never started with that model I always started how are people treated when they go to a luxury hotel and then wherever we can we build in that quality of hospitality and that individualization that you really take care of people people like the guests at a really luxury hotel mm and Dan I love that you've drawn your inspiration not from management companies not from business but you've actually drawn up from sports and entertainment and great Hotel years and they experience economy if you want to call it that and that I think really has set the bar really high it's kind of funny that you talk about the office because as I was walking around shutting down the other night I actually thought gosh our office is so beautiful and I took pictures of the bookshelves and our you know cartoons on the wall and the plant wall that we have with our great signage and I posted it on Facebook saying I just love her office it's such a phenomenal environment to be in because I was just appreciating what a unique space it is and backstage is not that different than front stage it's not like the front's gorgeous and the back is trash it's not that at all we've got beautiful working spaces I love that it's a unique compilation of all the things that you find are really important well the thing is packaging that you have a look to you and you stay with the look you know I was in advertising before I launched out into my coaching career and I was always so impressed that you establish a look and you stay with the look you know and some of the greatest companies in the world if you go back a hundred years the look they had a century ago is still very very clear Coca-Cola being one of the great packagers in the world but one of the companies that was just getting started when I started coaching was Starbucks and Starbucks were just right from the beginning were great packagers and I used to go and spend an hour or two in Starbucks and look at all their cups and look at you know how the stores were actually designed and they were consistent you know you could always tell a Starbucks so one of the things that gives people a sense of confidence and gives them a sense of certainty about the experience they're going to have is that there's a great consistency and it looks like it's been thought through the other thing is that the colors we use on our materials the type faces the kind of design that we have if you go back to the early 90s you could tell it was coach stuff then and it's coach stuff now and our clients really really comment on that you know it's not halfhazard there's some very very Central rules and we keep refining them one is the tech technology for packaging has just exploded but you could go crazy with different types of techniques you know it's when people first discovered type faces in one page they have 10 different type faces which was like impossible to read or they do dark type on a dark background or white type on a light background and it drives me I say oh gee that that makes me feel nauseous you know I'm a trained artist so I had a art background a commercial art not fine arts but Commercial Art we used to have an art artist who always gave us grief about the fact we always use the same type face and it's the most used type face in the world it's called helvetica helvetica is just the greatest type face that's ever been created on the planet and she said well you know everybody uses helvetica and I said I wonder why that is I said why is it that everybody uses helvetica why is it that it's the most famous type face in the world why is it that it looks new 30 years later you know looks clean and new she says well I mean why don't we put some variety I says variety confuses when it comes to design I says we do not want to confuse we want to give Clarity and confidence and it has to be in our design so that you know that's the origin I mean I did have the theater background I have a advertising background so I had a real feel for how you present yourself and get it right in the first place and then you never have to change uhu well that's fascinating so Dan thank you for sharing the beginnings of so much of what is true about Coach some may think if they just joined us that it's you know new but actually the thinking and the intentionality has been there since day one so I love hearing this and you sharing that information thank you thank you at strategic coach we focus on growth in every area of your business and life leading to Freedom that entrepreneurs dream of join Dan Sullivan founder of strategic coach for a brand new OnDemand web presentation it's a breakthrough hour of wisdom insight and proven strategies over 18,000 entrepreneurs can't be wrong watch today at Dan 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