[Music] hi welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan and me Shannon Waller today we're going to talk about a concept that has been really helpful for our clients to really strategically figure out how to handle one of the big areas of complexity in business which is relationships so the concepts we're going to talk about here are the top 20 in the farm club so Dan with the top 20 farm club how is it this concept came about what problem were you solving when you conceptu this yes well a lot of our organizations companies in strategic coach right from the beginning dealt with uh large numbers of clients or customers what I began to realize for myself when we started getting a large number of customers and clients and also the entrepreneurs who were in the program that you get to a point where you're treating all the customers and all the clients as if they're the same they have of equal importance but we know there's a thing called the standard distribution bell curve and it seems to be true in just about every area of human activity that an another law that a lot of people know it's in the field of Economics it's called paro's law that in any field if you have a 100 people 20% of them will produce 80% of the results and very interesting if you took just the 20 who are producing 80% of the results and you just dealt with them you would find that 20% namely four of them would produce 80% of the results there and I suspect if you went down to four of them one of them would produce 80% of the results the interesting thing is that people perform differently and make different contrib R butions if they're considered in the same side of group and therefore from an entrepreneur's standpoint in terms of budgeting your time and who gets the most attention and where the best future opportunities are going to be right off the bat is that you have to treat your clients unequally you have to treat your customers unequally and that it makes no economic sense it makes no strategic sense to treat all your customers and clients as if they operate equally okay that's just the fundamental starting off point and some people you know they say well we treat all of our customers and clients with equal care and I says no you don't I said that's a lie and uh that's a lie and take it back because I'm going to find you that when you look at them first of all some of them are just more fun to deal with some of them are always coming up with new exciting opport opportunities that require even more of your company's products and services and right off the bat they will make themselves unequal in terms of performance and if your thinking doesn't adjust to the fact that they're unequal then you're going to make bad decisions you're not going to plan properly you're not going to perform properly in the marketplace that is such a cool way to put it Dan and and I think I haven't really thought of it before is people are treating you unequally there for it actually makes sense to treat them reciprocate reciprocate it and I think when most people say we treat people equally they're meaning they treat people to a minimum standard you know they're not going to treat one person way worse than somebody else necessarily well first of all you're not going to treat anyone badly yes but you're going to treat some of the clients much better than the others and when I mean treat them much better you're just going to do more business with them the simplest reason is that it's just extraordinarily enjoyable doing more business with them so even I you know I mean with the coaching I deal with a very very select group of people virtually all my clients personally make more than a million dollars a year I've got over 500 of them right now but some of them actively seek out communication with me talking with me suggesting new opportunities with them some of them have excit ideas which really fall into the category of they're a real gamechanging entrepreneur they would love to have me almost like a strategic partner or someone that they can consult with all along and I'm going to respond to that you know I'm going to respond to that but I'm going to guarantee that what our value creation promise is everybody's going to get it equally but some people are going to distinguish themselves and put themselves in a totally different light just as we go forward and that's just human nature but a lot of people while that is true and I think the point you made is so so important is that everybody treats you unequally so why don't you figure out how unequally you're being treated and go for the people who treat you better than equal better than equal and what I mean is they want a partner they don't want just a vendor who provides them with products or service they're really looking for a strategic partnership and you know at my stage after 43 years of coaching my Spidey senses are really out to pick up on people who really want to play a big game I like participating just in the conversation because it inspires me and I get ideas I mean Peter diamanis is a good example Joe poish with anything that he does Stefan vonach with engagement multiplier I have a lot of people that people know about because I do podcast series with them Dean Jackson and others and I'm always open to this we have so many entrepreneurs who are just extraordinary innovators and I'm just fascinated I mean this is my life I just Thrive when I'm in conversation with people who are just doing new inventive different and better things in the marketplace I love this I mean it's one of my big rewards I get paid well but my big reward is just where people are using strategic coach Concepts to multiply themselves to actually turn themselves transform themselves into extraordinarily different more valuable companies in their Marketplace and have a transformative effect on their Marketplace I mean that's my real reward so how do you make sense of this and how do you keep track of it 253 years ago we came up with a concept of the top 20 in the farm club you know top 10 top 20 is just a phrase that's used in all sorts of different areas I mean I grew up with rock and roll and I would listen to the various radio programs and say and this week's top 20 you know and you wanted to know what the top 20 were you know and these were the winners for the week and right now if you look at your client base main it depends upon the size of your client or customer base but what you're you're saying here there's going to be a portion probably a fifth of my clientele who I'm going to pay more attention to than the other four fifths with extra things not with the normal thing I'm going to give the normal thing to everybody but if there's some extra things I'm going to find the top 20 or the 1 the 20% who if I invested in them I would get a huge payoff in many ways and then when I'm working with them I'm going to have another group called the farm club who are not there yet I'm not really going to budget a lot of extra time for them but I'm keeping an eye on them because they're comers they're going to grow and what's true for me 25 30 years ago is true for me right now and it'll be true for me 25 years from I'll always have this top 20 or top 20% in the farm club that I'll always be thinking about my future growth and development in terms of these relationships M I really love the top 20 F because because it's such a focusing concept it's such a focusing way to look at your clientele and particular your opportunities so one of the ways we talk about it a lot is you know if you take a look at the next quarter MH what are your biggest opportunities for Revenue generation and that can be existing clients who are going to bring in more money their prospective clients who you also get really excited about so that's a really energizing that's where our attention should be focused and then the farm club are those longer term 91 days plus sources of income and revenue and I particularly think you've coached me many times over the years really developed those relationships in your farm club because they feed your top 20 it's their introductions it's their referrals the more you just build relationships anything to do whatsoever with your farm club or top 20 is automatically a focused activity and I found that very supportive because I meant I could just build relationships with people and then that would generate the business and the revenue that I wanted in terms of growing the program well the other aspect about a Channon is you build your organization around this concept because why do you staff up you know why do you team up because at a certain point I mean we do it in two ways one is our own formal organization of strategic coach so in you know a period of 28 years we've gone from a couple people to to 120 people who support the overall activity but we've also done it with our associate coaches you know we have 15 associate coaches and the thing is that if someone's at the signature level and they're making $150,000 personal income well it's not a really good use of my time to be coaching at that level but it's very appropriate that someone's coaching at that level and I'll say this that whoever is coaching at that level would be doing it in a much more dedicated and excited way than I would be and the reason is because I did that 2025 years ago and it's not really where my thinking is right now and the concepts that I have really would not be appropriate for that level you know the entrepreneurs be at a higher level so you know I can remember the progression you know that first of all there was just the client-based period one coach Dan and then we made a dividing line that you had to make at least $250,000 to have Dan and then we brought in one two three four other coaches who coaches at that level and then Dan went to the above $500,000 level and then we move more coaches up and we move more coaches in and we build in and then there was all the support team for all these coaches and then we we were doing it in different cities and then we had two countries and then we had three countries but you can see the progression that every time I moved up I was moving up to the 20% of the 100% that I was doing six years ago when I moved up to the 10 times level well guess what the people who moved to the 10 times level were 20% of the client base okay but they were the ones who wanted to go 10 times they were identifying themselves cuz they had the Choice everybody that I was coaching had the choice to come with me and a lot of them didn't for whatever reason I'm not saying their reason but what it did is it create enormous opportunity for our other coaches to move up and now you know a year down the road I'm creating another group which is called The Game Changer workshop and guess what it's going to be 20% of the 10 times program that will move up so this is really tied closely to what we talked about in our last podcast then which is your largest check yes so really in terms of everyone generating their next largest check it's going to be based on the top 20 top 20% of your clientele one other attack I'd like to take with this Dan and this is a little bit if you look at our strategic coach model sometimes people can actually figure out how to treat those clientele even better is by bundling them together you did that when you went from a one-on-one coach to being a group you know in a workshop program and some of our client I can think of some dentists actually who were getting overwhelmed by the number of people that they had but then they looked at their cosmetic clients that really helped them be able to focus and treat them almost as one item on their top 20 club and really take even better care of them than they had before I think that's a really great Point depending on your level of capability and confidence as we talked about last time you have to figure out are you going to be paying the best attention to them is that who you want to be directing your energies towards is that who your excited by and they're excited by you there has to be a match there for your top 20 you know it's kind of hard because of the whole thing of the perception that I'm leaving people behind but I always say you know the greatest value that I can create to you like one of the head honchos at strategic coach I said the greatest value that I can create for you is to show you that after 43 years of coaching I'm at the top of my ambition and I want to jump another level after 43 years in my 70s I want to jump and I had just started a brand new group at the 10 times level a little bit more than a week ago and one of them who originally from India and he stopped me because he was visiting our office after the workshop a couple days later and he said I want to tell you something he said I found all the is really valuable but the biggest thing is that you in the 70s are so excited and you are so he says I don't mean this an insult but you're almost childlike in your enthusiasm for what you're doing and he said I'm a lot younger than you are and I want to tell you how much of an inspiration that is he says my biggest goal coming out of the workshop was that at your age I can be as energetic and optimistic and ambitious as you are and so one of the ways that I maintain that value creation to my clients is by continually to think to a higher level I can go and quite frankly it scares me right now this new project that I have scares me because it's got to be a lot better it's got to be different than what they're getting at the top level right now I have to surpass where I am right now and I feel as scared as I have been at any time in my career and that's good for me and that's good for everybody else so it's definitely going to require courage yeah in your part yeah and I think that's a really interesting point and I've heard a lot of clients tell me that your enthusiasm and excitement and it's clear you're not worn down by what you do you're not burnt out you're not tired in any way shape or form and you're much more energetic and excited than a lot of people 30 years younger and they go oh I have some work to do after they they see you in action it really is this point of continually upgrading the people with whom you're working and and the thing again about the top 20 and you've always emphasized this is that it's about relationship you know in terms of largest check which we talked about in the last podcast with someone who writes the check there's someone whose name is on there there's most of the time or there's something that represents that and when you really get clear on the relationships that are most stimulating most interesting make best use of your unique ability in ire you with new ideas ask new things of you so you can enhance what you're already good at that's part of what keeps you so revitalized and I have to grow to keep up with some of the clients I mean I'm constantly aware that I can get a bad report card from them just like they can get a bad report card from me you know I'm you know I'm at the point right now 40 years plus in to my career where I am now coaching entrepreneurs whose daily activity is changing the world in substantial ways and they have very very high performance criteria they have very high metrics of who they want in their world they're working with me but I'm learning so much from working with them I think of you know Steven palter and Michelle Lang all the metrics in the world say he's probably the number one IVF doctor in the world and he and Michelle have the number one IVF clinic in the world World Peter deamus is talking about asteroid Mining and going to Mars so after 43 years just the normal people who are coming into strategic coach at my workshop level are doing really really huge things and some cases you know I'll finish a workshop and I hear some of the progress reports and I said you know I really have to pull up my socks to go on deserving to be the coach of a lot of these individuals and so I run scared during periods of every quarter that I'm going to pull it off again but this has been the same case for 43 years and it's been the same case in the workshop for 28 years and one of the things is keep playing with bigger players and the top 20 Club in the farm club is just a perfect way to make that a very very visible and achievable outcome that you're shooting for and again you know the problem is complexity and this is another one of those simp Fiers that we've created that you may have hundreds of thousands of clients but I have to tell you you have to know how you're treating them unequally I could not say it any better Dan you talked about sales people too in a previous conversation where sometimes your top 20 are in fact your internal people and what's the caliber of salesperson that you can attract you know so that could be some of the names on your list that you're growing but always focusing on who are the core people who are making that difference and and how can you attract more of those and how can you keep those people happy so that whole holding to that high standard I think is a very interesting and important Point great so just to wrap up this conversation how would you coach people to take action on figuring out their own top 20 in farm club I would say that you just take the total number of your clientele and you just arbitrarily say who are the top 20% who are at the bottom 80% and if you compare that to actual money and you'll find out that probably the top 20% whether it's 4 out of 20 or whether it's 20 out of 100 or whether it's 200 out of a thousand they're responsible for all your profits and once you get below 20% you're probably paying to actually do business with the rest of them and that's one first indicator why these people deserve more than great treatment they deserve extraordinary treatment treatment it's a shock to most people when they do that I said you know you've got a few of the clientele who are paying the bills and everybody else it's actually costing you money to work with them and just telling the truth right off the bat about what's what immediately clarifies your mind of who you want to clone in other words that if you could clone any of your existing clients I have to tell you very few people below the 20% line would make the cut and probably the vast majority above the line would make the cut and I think you also want to structure your business not on your whole clientele but really on those top 20 because they can generate more people like them yeah that's the Growth Company so if you look at your entire client base as there's what I would call the critical mass company in other words that if you're a $20 million company you have more critical mass than if you're a $2 million company but it doesn't tell the whole story story that in your 20 million there's a number of individuals who are first of all they represent a greater impact in the present but they promise a much more multiplied impact in the future and your job as the head entrepreneur is to direct most of your attention to where the growth clients are and then organized in such a way to take care of everybody else in the highest possible way if it's worth it to you if it's worth it to you you know so you got to make decisions all the time of who gets to play with you who's in your sandbox that's great Dan thank you very much this feels like a new take on the top 20 farm club which is one of our Concepts been around for a long time so I really appreciate the refreshed perspective for everyone listening if you want please subscribe on iTunes and also if you want to hear more podcasts with Dan and some of the other favorite people that you have or if you want to hear the team success podcast visit us at strategic podcasts.com again that's strategic podcasts.com 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