Inside Strategic Coach: Building Extraordinary Coach Culture

[Music] hi Shannon Waller here with Dan Sullivan on inside strategic coach today we're really excited to give you a conversation that we've just completed about our newest book called everyone and everything grows the extraordinary coach culture we have gotten so many questions about how do you find and keep such great people well this conversation is the answer Dan we're talking about the L this book which is called everyone and everything grows the extraordinary coach culture and I am very curious what inspired you to write this book right now we have a very unique company and it's Unique in a couple respects and what we actually offered to entrepreneurs in the marketplace is actually the way that we run our company so the main value creation that we created for entrepreneur urial clients is Thinking Tools okay so these are thinking tools that are geared just for entrepreneurs to Think Through in a much better way a much more strategic way a much more what I would say Advanced way about thinking about how to be an entrepreneur in today's world and this goes back to 1989 when we actually started the company in its present form but all the tools that we have the entrepreneurs Master is what all of our team members Master backstage so there's no difference between our backstage and our front stage and that's unique but the other thing is the entire backstage is put together with Thinking Tools so my particular specialty is looking at any entrepreneurial situation see what works doesn't work and and then I construct a thinking process so that it just always works and that's how they organize their life you know both their personal life and their business life and how they plan their future and how they focus just on what the individual entrepreneurs themselves he or she how they just focus on what they love doing and free themselves up by building a team that does all the things that they don't like doing and all the things that they're not good at that gives entrepreneurs enormous freedom but having said that this is the way all of our team members actually Advance inside strategic coach and you're the team member who is the lead person here because you've been in the company in your 303 third year now 33rd year of the programs which almost takes us right back to the beginning so all the tools you've created a what I would say a support coaching program for all the team members the team leaders of the entrepreneurs company so you know all the tools because those are the tools that the entrepreneurs learn in the program so what triggered this book is the next question you're going to ask me yeah because one of the things you talk about is having a thinking tool culture which is a really interesting way to define a culture but I am curious what in particular you know as you said triggered you or inspired you to capture this and take what is normally for us of experience and make it a friend stage capability for other people well since Co we have two components to our program we have now virtual workshops because we had to do some quick thinking when everything got got shut down and our business is people would come in person to workshops and they're inperson workshops it's workshops full of entrepreneurs anywhere from let's say 30 to 50 entrepreneurs and so it's learned in a community of entrepreneurs who are all successful they're all talented and they're all ambitious but they're learning Thinking Tools and they're comparing notes with each other how they're using the Thinking Tools so other members of their workshop are also applying the same tools so they're trading knowledge and they coach each other well I tried this and this way and they say oh good I'll try that too but the Thinking Tools they have a language it's a growing language of breakthrough type thinking okay and that's been going on and we have clients for 30 years in the program too and we have team members who have been in you'll give me the actual numbers here but we have team members whove been here since certainly 27 or 28 years learning the same tools it's unusual there's a complete congruity between our backstage and our frontstage and that's what we teach the entrepreneurs how to have complete congruity between their backstage and their front stage so that's the thing but since Co it's always been the case that they wanted to know one big question how do we get such great people in our company but how do we keep such great people for such long period of time so over the last couple years especially the requests have been numerous of asking me well how do you put your backstage together I mean how did you put the backstage together so we're writing a 100 books and 100 quarters and I had a new quarter coming up I said it's time to actually tell them how we actually put our entire backstage together so we have such a good front stage I love that it was inspired by the question how do you get and keep such great people I love the fact that this book is the answer to that question thank you Dan so Dan you've been talking about Thinking Tools but let's just really dive into exactly what is a thinking tool because most people think of other types of tools but a thinking tool is a little bit different well it comes from the first thinking tool that we created when I was a one-on-one coach was from 1974 to 1989 when we started the workshop program so for 15 years I was just a individual entrepreneur whose business was helping other entrepreneurs think more clearly about their future and any kind of entrepreneur I think you know the numbers are 60 or 70 different Industries all over the world I think the numberers in the 30 different countries that people come from but it's fairly Universal what an entrepreneur is and I think an entrepreneur in one part of the world totally understands an entrepreneur in another part of the world but going back in time back hundreds of years thousands of years it's the one occupation that is timeless it doesn't change you've got a particular capability you got a particular product you got a particular service and you've identified certain clients customers who could really use what you have and then there's a whole relationship that develops around your thinking helping them to think more clearly so that's true of all entrepreneurs okay but first of all the word entrepreneur is very very different from the way I was which is just a one person entrepreneur and I didn't really have a team at all for the first 15 years and for me an entrepreneur who is a true entrepreneur has developed a team around them it isn't just the entrepreneur it's not just a self-employed individual out in the marketplace I mean our clients some of the clients have a thousand team members you know some of the companies but mostly they're in the three or four people up to you know 50 people that's the The Sweet Spot of who we go after a lot of them aren't small companies they're mediumsized we're a mediumsized company we have 130 team members we're in three countries so what happens with a lot of entrepreneurs they never get much beyond their own capabilities they don't develop a an organizational capability we've grown from just me to 130 and we use the growth structure and the growth process that we went through to go you know from a good living for me and for Babs to a point where it's a good living for hundreds of people and then we've coached you know we're quickly approaching 25,000 entrepreneurs since 1989 we're doing this in 2023 but 2024 I've been at this for 50 years next year but the first tool that I had is called the strategy Circle and it's in Workshop one when people start the program it's a process that I came up with 1982 and that is you ask people where they want to be in the future on a certain date and they name the date so let's say it's three years so you name the date so it's 3 years from now I will have improved in this way this way this way this way and you put numbers to all those those things that that these are actually quantifiable there's a huge jump in quality but the big thing is it can be measured in quantitative terms and that really focuses entrepreneurs brains entrepreneurs love numbers okay because they're measurable so then you take that vision and then you say well what are all the obstacles that you have right in the present that prevent you from getting to that Vision that you have of yourself 3 years from now and immediately the obstacles all come out and then we teach them a very important thing the obstacles to your vision are your wrong materials so you have Vision then you have obstacles and now you're going to take each of the obstacles transform it into an action it's a communication and you're going to create a team that helps you transform each of the obstacles into action so there's a formula Vision obstacles transformation action and that's VOD but what we've realized is that's one application of VOD but we've discovered hundreds of other situations where you can create a vision of how you're bigger and better things are getting done easier things are getting done faster with a much bigger result and those are all voter based Thinking Tools but it could be related to hiring people it could be related to dealing with customers and clients it could be related to dealing with new kinds of Technology it could be related to your personal life how your personal life how you manage time you know and just focusing on what you're great at and then go looking for everybody who loves doing what you are not good at and is better than you than what you did it so that's what a thinking tool is we have 2,000 copyrights on our tools over 2,000 and we have at this point roughly about 250 trademarks and now we're starting into the patent flow and we have eight patents and we have over 50 patents pending which will be patents in the next two or three years so the way that we've grown we teach other entrepreneurs how they can grow in the same way using our Thinking Tools and Dan one of the insights that came out of the book for me having been using the tools 1991 is that they are thinking about your Thinking Tools thinking about your thinking most people don't think about their thinking they think about things you know they think about technology they think about property they think about their office structure you know the actual office obviously they think a lot about Time Savers anything that's a shortcut and those are things and then they think about people they think about this is most people they think about people you know who do I want in my life in my business life who do I want as clients and customers what kind of vendors do I need to have what kind of collaborators do I have in the marketplace who help my business grow and I help their business grow and then in my personal life you know starts with family your life partner your children and then your friends and the community you're living in but each of these when you dive deeply into it triggers a new thinking tool it does too so people can think about things they can think about people they also can think other people and then they think about thoughts you know there's famous people who have ideas but the vast majority of people on planet think about things they think about people and they think about thoughts but they're not their thoughts they're other people's thoughts but our tools when you use one of our tools you think about your thinking about things people and thoughts and and very few entrepreneurs ever are in the fourth area of thinking except if there's a crisis they'll do it for a short period of time or they're creating something new and they have to do it but it's most people don't like going there because it feels uncomfortable because you're working on yourself and a lot of people don't like our uncomfortable the school system certainly didn't teach them to do that you know their parents necessarily didn't teach them how to do that Society in general you know it's all coming at you you're being broadcast other people's thoughts but it's you're not just focusing how your brain actually works and how you're responding to your situations and we've organized this whole vast area of thinking about your thinking and it goes on forever I mean 10 years from now we'll have twice as many Thinking Tools because the world is changing and quite remarkably right now the world is changing this all required new Thinking Tools well and the thing I love about our Thinking Tools Dan is that I can have an rough idea of my thoughts about something but I never come out of it not feeling smarter wiser clearer so I always end up feeling more confident far more confident and having an ability to communicate it than to other people so it's interesting how transformational in thinking the tools are yeah and competitors in the marketplace who they might be in the same business they might be in the same Market they may be marketing to the same types of clients and customers but you're thinking about your thinking and they're not thinking about their thinking and there's a free zone aspect you're in a free zone here nobody can think about your thinking the way that you think about your thinking and that gives you it's not a competitive Advantage you're just not competing right yeah no one's going to think about it the way that you think about it and what I see is it keeps people people who do not think about their thinking are very reactive and yet who think about their thinking are able to get totally creative that's always creative you always come up with something that no book would have you know except my books because my books are all about thinking about thinking like the book that we're talking about everyone and everything R is a book about how you think about putting together your backstage Dan in this book everyone and everything grows one of my favorite Parts in one of the early chapters is called no defense budget and as someone personally who's very interested and passionate about teamwork and how people work together well at work no defense budget is unique so can you please tell me what you mean by no defense budget I sort of start the book with the ending that what you get is an environment a company environment where nobody has to defend themselves nobody has to worry about criticism nobody has to worry about politics and The Thinking Tools make that possible okay and the number one thinking tool that we have that everybody learns from day one is that you have a unique ability and we're hiring you for certain work that you have to do certain jobs but from the moment that you start working at strategic coach we're going to say there's a area of work where you're better than anyone else you're absolutely unique at it and not only that it's an area of work that you love doing and a third thing about it is that the thing that you do best that you love doing is the thing that have the greatest value to us and the greatest value to all our other team members okay and then we add another component to Unique ability and the unique ability is teamwork you can be very good at it and you can love doing it and it produces a great result but the real thing we're looking for is how you take your unique ability and team up with other people's unique ability so we call that unique ability teamwork it's strange because growing up you're not taught this okay as a matter of fact you're told this is what you should focus on because this gets you a long way in the world you should go into this profession you should go through the educational system and get this degree and everything else but none of that has anything to do with your actual unique ability I mean it might coincidentally overlap but there's no thought about this in the educational system about just the thing that you do great so they teach you everything but only some of what they teach you actually is useful for expanding your unique ability the moment that you know that this is the deal at strategic coach or your team member then you know you're not in competition with anyone and you don't have to defend yourself and guess what you take on projects that you've never taken on projects before and the first time you do it it works and some of it doesn't work and and we don't criticize you for that we say let's reinforce what you did which is really works and let's just take a look at what didn't work and maybe that part of the work you shouldn't be doing maybe somebody else should come in and do that work so we don't want you to do anything where you'll fail a second time okay but you got to work with us here you know we take your unique ability seriously but if you don't take your unique ability seriously it isn't going to work MH so you may be headed for someplace else rather than strategic coach but the ones who really buy into the unique ability deal can stay forever and because they they always grow and everything they touch always grows you said stay forever Dan which is true some of us have been here a long time more than half our lives I think we've just crossed over 25 team members who are above 20 years maybe it's more and I expect you to reach 40 I expect you to reach 50 years that you've been here you're in your 30s right now and you just keep always growing and Everything You Touch grows and everything you take on grows so there's no problem here that's what I wanted to ask about because you know we need you to take your unique ability seriously because we promise to take it seriously it works only if you're in unique ability teamwork with other people so you can't squish other people's so some people would say and you said this actually in earlier video it's not about status so how do people grow in a company where it's focused on unique ability versus the traditional hierarchy well we as a company are always taking on new things that require new leadership you know we have an organizational structure there are I think a dozen specific teams that handle everything that makes the company work and we have certain teams leaders but they're only team leaders if they stay in their unique ability and the thing that their team is doing grows and we've had team leaders who use their unique ability and unique ability teamwork to get to leadership positions but then they said well I'm the leader I don't have to grow anymore and if you don't grow you go in fact that is one of our motos grow or go grow or go yeah yeah because somebody who is staying within their unique ability is going to surpass you they're going to do it in a different way they're going to do it in a uniquely different way but growth is the standard for everything you know it's the standard for every individual and it's a standard for every activity it's the standard for every team everything has to grow Dan another chapter that I think is going to be very impactful for people is positive Focus protection so what exactly does that mean I'm curious well the world we live in outside of strategic coach has a lot of negativity to it this has been multiplied by Electronic media there's no question that social media makes its way in the world through negative rather than positive conversations discussions lots of criticism lots of blaming lots of attacking other people and generally life in the world outside of strategic coach is very competitive and some people compete to be as good or better and some people compete by tearing down other people attacking other people so it's very complicated it's filled with conflict but we don't want anyone when they leave that world and come into the Strategic go we don't want them to bring that with them you know check your negativity at the door so the way that we Safeguard what goes on in the program is that everything in coach is projects and meetings progress meetings about our projects everything's broken down into a project teams have ongoing new projects and they have to meet to discuss all right we've achieved this and this is the next step we're going to take but in order to ensure that everybody is in the meeting 100% devoted to growth we start the meeting everybody has to communicate something that they're really excited about that's very positive positive in their life and it can be from any part of their life their work life they could be studying taking new training and it's positive about that it's about great things that are happening in their personal life and they can communicate that but everybody has to go around before the meeting starts to actually say positive and it raises the whole level of the meeting to a very energetic level and it seals off this meeting from anything else that might be negative outside you have the meeting and we have structures for the meetings there's tools that we use in the meetings Thinking Tools so we get to the best possible result and the greatest degree of Cooperative Clarity by the end of the meeting and then we do a positive Focus say what's the greatest thing that you got out of the meeting and you know in the course of a week There's a 100 meetings and every meeting starts with positive focus and every meeting ends with a positive focus and it's just standard procedures you start and finish with a positive focus and that gives positive Focus protection to everything that takes place in strategic coach and it goes right back to the original notion nobody's going to need any defense budget so all your energy all your capability can just be devoted to how do we grow from where we are to the next step so Dan this is our second time together today and we did a positive Focus before the first one and we did a positive Focus again I do a positive Focus before the weekly planning call or at the beginning of the weekly planning call so it is built in as you said it's our standard operating procedure both front and backstage I coached a workshop last Friday and it's like I cannot not start with a positive Focus bad things would happen so let's talk about I love hearing about it as a protection but the other part of it is you know when people are protected from from that negativity they can operate and show up quite differently than someone who has just heard something negative before a meeting or had a bad traffic situation before they came in in the morning or they were watching the news or they're watching the news or they got a bad alert on social media so why is it so critical for you and for us that people have that protection how does it allow them to function differently than if we didn't do this well I'm able to operate at my best you know I'm participating in the meeting and there's hundreds of meetings I'm not in and as the owner of the company uh founder with my partner bab Smith we do this in our personal life you know we we begin the day and we end the day with uh positive focus and we were just on a trip a lawn trip to South America and we just got back and we talked about what worked and what we liked about it and everything else but it neutralizes you to the negativity of the world and I think the big thing is it makes you immune to the world and more and more what we find is that having this environment 100% when they're at work our team members tend to insist on it more and more in their personal life so working at coach actually improves your personal life it actually improves your relationships you have negative people and you say how long is going to last I can't be around this negative person anymore and some of it requires quite drastic decisions you know you give the other person the chance to be positive and if they don't get the memo then you make decisions and we all do this I mean everybody's done this since childhood but a lot of people get involved in a group of people where there's a lot of negativity but it's normal they can see you growing and your growth is negative for them they don't want you to grow you're outgrowing them and that forces decisions so I think that the benefit is that you're never worried about politics at strategic coach and if you start introducing political factors into coach you're not L for the company interesting one other aspect to this stand too is that with that negativity Focus SL bias that happens a lot people are not open to new ideas they're not open to things that would actually cause and create that growth and when someone's coming from a positive standpoint there such famous Google study on psychological safety the teams that were by far the most successful by a large margin are the ones where they had enormous psychological safety they didn't have to play politics and they were the most creative the most productive in our language the most profitable and that's a huge part of it if you're going to be doing new things you have to be coming from a place of confidence and capil not being grumpy or mad or upset or fearful that's not conducive to growth so positive Focus protection just helps your own ability to think into so I think that's another key aspect of it for me no and that's the way I like to live my life you know I mean I'm a positive person I was born positive and I've seen the alternative and there wasn't much attractive about it so you know I mean I like being happy I like being productive I like being creative you know and the more I can expand that through Thinking Tools outside of me the better off I am and the better off everyone else is too yeah yeah it works both ways Dan you've talked a little bit about how congruent what we do with our clients is also what we do with our team in terms of Thinking Tools so I want to dive a little bit deeper into front stage backstage and particularly the fact that everything is predictably congruent what does that mean and what does that look like and what does it feel like well I've listened to entrepreneurs you know mainstage entrepreneurs who are talking about their success and you'll hear them describe more or less an ideal sort of situation but then you start talking to their team members or they don't even call them team members they call them employees and they say well he can say what he wants to say or she can say what she want but nobody stays here very long because it's very toxic you know and she's really good at PR he's really good at PR and cosmetics if you will but you don't know what it's like working for this person you know there's constant criticism they demand Perfection you don't get credit for doing it right because it's not perfect you know and it just strikes me as a waste you know first of all the person really isn't telling the truth about the whole situation and my feeling is I want to be in a position where I never suggest to our clients that you do something that we don't do it that way ourselves I don't want there to be any inconsistency between how we grow our company backstage and what we tell the entrepreneurs front stage and I'm especially sensitive to this more than anyone else because I've studied organizations all my life and for the most part it's a very very rare organization that is completely consistent from front stage to Backstage but I do know that if you have an organization like that your growth multiplies almost without effort because people are looking for consistency they're looking for congruency in the marketplace because there's a lot of fraud in the marketplace and by fraud I mean it ain't the way that you talk about it okay so you're not practicing what you preach and nothing turns people off that what the person is saying is inconsistent with how the person actually acts when they think nobody can see them this means walking our talk doing what we say what's true for team members is true for clients and vice versa being consistent with our Thinking Tools so it's not two- faced and I think you're completely right Dan people in the marketplace are looking for I was going to say truth but they're looking for that congruency in a good way and that consistency it's like oh okay this looks like a great company let's peel back the covers is it really and when they're like it is they're like whoa that's unique it is different in the marketplace yeah and I think part of the reason is I don't look at the individuals who are our team members any different than I look at the entrepreneurs who are our clients okay they're each an individual and they have a unique ability so I have team members that have worked with me for you for 30 years other team members have worked with me for 20 years my attitude toward them and their abilities and who they are as people is exactly the same as the way I look at clients and we have clients who are 25 years going down 30 years and the reason is they've never had any sense that what we're saying is inconsistent with how we actually run our company and people say well that must be a lot of work and I said well try the other way of being inconsistent that's a lot more work 100% first of all you have to be replacing people all the time but not only that people who've had a negative experience that there isn't an Integrity there there isn't a consistency they talk about it when they go out in the world if you treat people badly they'll tell a hundred other people you know if you treat our clients bad they'll tell a hundred other people you know and it was very interesting we're just going through a major collaboration with with a big famous organization and one of their members is going to be a speaker at our biggest conference and they checked us out all of our internet presence they checked and they said we're the only organization that they've ever come across where there's nothing negative on the internet and the reason is nobody ever has any reason to say anything negative about us because we treat everybody with respect we treat everybody in terms of their uniqueness we're deeply interested Ed in what they do uniquely well in any way we can we want to help them grow their uniqueness and it's just one approach so we don't have to have 10 different approaches for 10 different situations it's very congruent with you too Dan because you want a simple consistent easy to remember easy to implement strategy I like simple okay once it gets complicated I'm not interested anymore I love how you said it each person on the team is an individual and each person has has a unique ability and that is true for our clients it's true for our team and that way of looking at things which is really really important that that thinking goes all the way through the organization because see if you have that mindset but a team leader doesn't or a team member doesn't it does harm to that culture the one other factor I want to touch on and you've mentioned it a couple times is the longevity of what happened we haven't really talked about this as a longevity strategy but when you put into place all of these factors there's no reason for people leave they have incredible freedom to be themselves they work for a very congruent organization they are valued for what they do uniquely in the world there are always new opportunities to expand and to do something new and different like why would anyone leave and given well people have different goals so we've had really great people who've left the organization but anytime we encounter them they feel like they're still part of the organization and we treat them like they're still if you've been a good team member at strategic coach we treat you like you're always a member of the community and the same thing for entrepreneurs if you've been in coach and we helped you grow then when we encounter you may have not been with us for 10 years or 15 years and we treat you like you were here yesterday you know but it's just the Simplicity of it I mean the world is complex enough and the world is confusing enough why not just have a single policy that always works and it's very attractive and it does have people stay a very long time Dan one of the other things that you talk about in everyone and everything grows is the fact that free focus and buffer days is part of what we all we coach our clients but it's also something our teams can take advantage of as well so I'm sure people are super curious to see how this works yeah I think the time system is one of the most singularly unique things about strategic coach and again we recommend that our entrepreneurs organize their time like this part of my background is entertainment and what I notice in the entertainment World they have three kinds of days they have performance day they have rehearsal day or practice day and then they have free days okay they have days when they're not engaged and this is very different from bureaucratic time system where you have work days and you have weekends but a lot of them ask people to work on weekends especially in today's world your value to the company is if you're willing to work do your work on work days and then you have vacation days but we're suggesting if you really want to get points that you use some of your vacation days to work and generally speaking their work days wear them out their vacation days don't renew them and they're always worried that that they should be doing work at home after hours and now you know you think that virtual work would free them up because they a lot of them have lost commute time but now they're expected to be available in some cases 24 hours a day and you can't grow you can't grow you can survive and you can be rewarded for sticking with it but you actually don't grow as an individual and the project you work on you know you're told if you don't complete the project the way we want you're gone so it's Total Defense budget the way the bureaucratic World operates and then when you're at work people don't knock themselves out because it's going to be this way forever and you know it's not a series of Sprints it's a marathon and all you hope for is that you can get to retirement age and then you can start enjoying life you know know put in your 40 years and then you can start enjoying life and I said why don't we have people enjoy their life right from the beginning so when a team member is hired they have a three-month trial and that's got legal status because it's understood that you can fire a person after three months with no cost to it there's no yeah before three months you can let them go before three months yeah so what we do is we do just the opposite everybody's three Monon trial and then the moment that you make the three-month cut we say in the next year you get just as much free time as somebody who's been here for 32 years so it's six weeks of what other people would call vacation so it's 30 days but it's never more so someone who just joined the company and has made the three-month trial they will have just as many free days in the first year as Shannon Waller who's been here for 32 years okay cuz I don't treat free days as compensation it's a necessity so that you have a completely full outside life okay and we don't ask you to work Beyond hours and if you do we take a look at it and say you shouldn't be working past work hours if it's required that you work on a weekend and let's say it's two days of work then you get to take two normal work days and treat it like your weekend so you always get your full allotment of days and then the days themselves are different because we have three days free days and then you have Focus days and focus days are just when you are doing the work that produces the results that's most profitable for the company okay and you can declare this is a focus day I'm just working on this and then you have buffer days and buffer days are backstage days it's planning it's training it's learning new technology it's learning new knowledge it's creating new systems and this is what we teach the the entrepreneurs but everybody in our backstage gets exactly the same time system and the majority of our clients are Workaholics by our definition they've never had a free day okay when they're on what they're called free days they're thinking about work they're checking their phone checking their computer they're working on projects they're doing reading that's related their networking business they're always working and we say no we want close to half the year when you're not working and you're not thinking about work okay and what that produces enormous energy focused energy productive energy Creative Energy profitable energy when people are working give them a big whack of time every week give them a big whack of time every quarter every year and when they are working they can throw their entire unique ability energy and talent into working so we get a better deal which is so counter to most people's thinking about it it's counter to the world yes yeah because usually free time has to be deserved through long periods of hard work as we talk about one of our models and you're like no let's do it ahead of time let's make sure the rest of rejuvenated as you say put their full self into it and be their most creative and productive and then take a break yeah have a great home life and have a great friendship life and have a great rest and relaxation activities and we don't ask you to think about work when you're not working which is again so different than people working evenings and weekends and vacation which is pretty normal yeah and if you're always coming in early and staying late we have to talk about that because obviously the normal work time allotted for your your activity you're not good enough to get it done during normal hours so let's have a conversation about that I know one of my team members and on who we know I tend to come in maybe a little bit early I tend to not look at the clock and be I'm not a clock watcher but every day she would be ready to leave at five and I finally I'm like how are you thinking about this she goes if I can't get my job done by five o'clock there's something wrong with how I'm doing it I was like oh she's not wrong it's a great education well and it's not about time and effort it's about results if you can get your results done in 4 hours where it takes most people to do 8 hours we're not going to load you up with more work yeah yeah but I want to go back to the start of this all these are a result of Thinking Tools yeah okay and we've just identified The Sweet Spot that's best for entrepreneurs in any situation in their personal life or their business life and and we say eliminate what isn't the purest most productive most creative most enjoyable activity and just get rid of it let the world do all the crap you don't do the crap I love it well Dan thank you so much for laying out all of the different ways of thinking The Thinking Tools you know how to really set up a entrepreneural culture so that everyone and everything grows it's Unique it's a privilege to be a part of it it's a joy be a part of it and it's very fun to find a place where you can be 100% yourself and 100% growing all the time thank you it's been a delight to be in teamwork with you for 32 years thank you Dan same here

[Music] hi Shannon Waller here with Dan Sullivan on inside strategic coach today we&#39;re really excited to give you a conversation that we&#39;ve just completed about our newest book called everyone and everything grows the extraordinary coach culture we have gotten so many questions about how do you find and keep such great people well this conversation is the answer Dan we&#39;re talking about the L this book which is called everyone and everything grows the extraordinary coach culture and I am very curious what inspired you to write this book right now we have a very unique company and it&#39;s Unique in a couple respects and what we actually offered to entrepreneurs in the marketplace is actually the way that we run our company so the main value creation that we created for entrepreneur urial clients is Thinking Tools okay so these are thinking tools that are geared just for entrepreneurs to Think Through in a much better way a much more strategic way a much more what I would say Advanced way about thinking about how to be an entrepreneur in today&#39;s world and this goes back to 1989 when we actually started the company in its present form but all the tools that we have the entrepreneurs Master is what all of our team members Master backstage so there&#39;s no difference between our backstage and our front stage and that&#39;s unique but the other thing is the entire backstage is put together with Thinking Tools so my particular specialty is looking at any entrepreneurial situation see what works doesn&#39;t work and and then I construct a thinking process so that it just always works and that&#39;s how they organize their life you know both their personal life and their business life and how they plan their future and how they focus just on what the individual entrepreneurs themselves he or she how they just focus on what they love doing and free themselves up by building a team that does all the things that they don&#39;t like doing and all the things that they&#39;re not good at that gives entrepreneurs enormous freedom but having said that this is the way all of our team members actually Advance inside strategic coach and you&#39;re the team member who is the lead person here because you&#39;ve been in the company in your 303 third year now 33rd year of the programs which almost takes us right back to the beginning so all the tools you&#39;ve created a what I would say a support coaching program for all the team members the team leaders of the entrepreneurs company so you know all the tools because those are the tools that the entrepreneurs learn in the program so what triggered this book is the next question you&#39;re going to ask me yeah because one of the things you talk about is having a thinking tool culture which is a really interesting way to define a culture but I am curious what in particular you know as you said triggered you or inspired you to capture this and take what is normally for us of experience and make it a friend stage capability for other people well since Co we have two components to our program we have now virtual workshops because we had to do some quick thinking when everything got got shut down and our business is people would come in person to workshops and they&#39;re inperson workshops it&#39;s workshops full of entrepreneurs anywhere from let&#39;s say 30 to 50 entrepreneurs and so it&#39;s learned in a community of entrepreneurs who are all successful they&#39;re all talented and they&#39;re all ambitious but they&#39;re learning Thinking Tools and they&#39;re comparing notes with each other how they&#39;re using the Thinking Tools so other members of their workshop are also applying the same tools so they&#39;re trading knowledge and they coach each other well I tried this and this way and they say oh good I&#39;ll try that too but the Thinking Tools they have a language it&#39;s a growing language of breakthrough type thinking okay and that&#39;s been going on and we have clients for 30 years in the program too and we have team members who have been in you&#39;ll give me the actual numbers here but we have team members whove been here since certainly 27 or 28 years learning the same tools it&#39;s unusual there&#39;s a complete congruity between our backstage and our frontstage and that&#39;s what we teach the entrepreneurs how to have complete congruity between their backstage and their front stage so that&#39;s the thing but since Co it&#39;s always been the case that they wanted to know one big question how do we get such great people in our company but how do we keep such great people for such long period of time so over the last couple years especially the requests have been numerous of asking me well how do you put your backstage together I mean how did you put the backstage together so we&#39;re writing a 100 books and 100 quarters and I had a new quarter coming up I said it&#39;s time to actually tell them how we actually put our entire backstage together so we have such a good front stage I love that it was inspired by the question how do you get and keep such great people I love the fact that this book is the answer to that question thank you Dan so Dan you&#39;ve been talking about Thinking Tools but let&#39;s just really dive into exactly what is a thinking tool because most people think of other types of tools but a thinking tool is a little bit different well it comes from the first thinking tool that we created when I was a one-on-one coach was from 1974 to 1989 when we started the workshop program so for 15 years I was just a individual entrepreneur whose business was helping other entrepreneurs think more clearly about their future and any kind of entrepreneur I think you know the numbers are 60 or 70 different Industries all over the world I think the numberers in the 30 different countries that people come from but it&#39;s fairly Universal what an entrepreneur is and I think an entrepreneur in one part of the world totally understands an entrepreneur in another part of the world but going back in time back hundreds of years thousands of years it&#39;s the one occupation that is timeless it doesn&#39;t change you&#39;ve got a particular capability you got a particular product you got a particular service and you&#39;ve identified certain clients customers who could really use what you have and then there&#39;s a whole relationship that develops around your thinking helping them to think more clearly so that&#39;s true of all entrepreneurs okay but first of all the word entrepreneur is very very different from the way I was which is just a one person entrepreneur and I didn&#39;t really have a team at all for the first 15 years and for me an entrepreneur who is a true entrepreneur has developed a team around them it isn&#39;t just the entrepreneur it&#39;s not just a self-employed individual out in the marketplace I mean our clients some of the clients have a thousand team members you know some of the companies but mostly they&#39;re in the three or four people up to you know 50 people that&#39;s the The Sweet Spot of who we go after a lot of them aren&#39;t small companies they&#39;re mediumsized we&#39;re a mediumsized company we have 130 team members we&#39;re in three countries so what happens with a lot of entrepreneurs they never get much beyond their own capabilities they don&#39;t develop a an organizational capability we&#39;ve grown from just me to 130 and we use the growth structure and the growth process that we went through to go you know from a good living for me and for Babs to a point where it&#39;s a good living for hundreds of people and then we&#39;ve coached you know we&#39;re quickly approaching 25,000 entrepreneurs since 1989 we&#39;re doing this in 2023 but 2024 I&#39;ve been at this for 50 years next year but the first tool that I had is called the strategy Circle and it&#39;s in Workshop one when people start the program it&#39;s a process that I came up with 1982 and that is you ask people where they want to be in the future on a certain date and they name the date so let&#39;s say it&#39;s three years so you name the date so it&#39;s 3 years from now I will have improved in this way this way this way this way and you put numbers to all those those things that that these are actually quantifiable there&#39;s a huge jump in quality but the big thing is it can be measured in quantitative terms and that really focuses entrepreneurs brains entrepreneurs love numbers okay because they&#39;re measurable so then you take that vision and then you say well what are all the obstacles that you have right in the present that prevent you from getting to that Vision that you have of yourself 3 years from now and immediately the obstacles all come out and then we teach them a very important thing the obstacles to your vision are your wrong materials so you have Vision then you have obstacles and now you&#39;re going to take each of the obstacles transform it into an action it&#39;s a communication and you&#39;re going to create a team that helps you transform each of the obstacles into action so there&#39;s a formula Vision obstacles transformation action and that&#39;s VOD but what we&#39;ve realized is that&#39;s one application of VOD but we&#39;ve discovered hundreds of other situations where you can create a vision of how you&#39;re bigger and better things are getting done easier things are getting done faster with a much bigger result and those are all voter based Thinking Tools but it could be related to hiring people it could be related to dealing with customers and clients it could be related to dealing with new kinds of Technology it could be related to your personal life how your personal life how you manage time you know and just focusing on what you&#39;re great at and then go looking for everybody who loves doing what you are not good at and is better than you than what you did it so that&#39;s what a thinking tool is we have 2,000 copyrights on our tools over 2,000 and we have at this point roughly about 250 trademarks and now we&#39;re starting into the patent flow and we have eight patents and we have over 50 patents pending which will be patents in the next two or three years so the way that we&#39;ve grown we teach other entrepreneurs how they can grow in the same way using our Thinking Tools and Dan one of the insights that came out of the book for me having been using the tools 1991 is that they are thinking about your Thinking Tools thinking about your thinking most people don&#39;t think about their thinking they think about things you know they think about technology they think about property they think about their office structure you know the actual office obviously they think a lot about Time Savers anything that&#39;s a shortcut and those are things and then they think about people they think about this is most people they think about people you know who do I want in my life in my business life who do I want as clients and customers what kind of vendors do I need to have what kind of collaborators do I have in the marketplace who help my business grow and I help their business grow and then in my personal life you know starts with family your life partner your children and then your friends and the community you&#39;re living in but each of these when you dive deeply into it triggers a new thinking tool it does too so people can think about things they can think about people they also can think other people and then they think about thoughts you know there&#39;s famous people who have ideas but the vast majority of people on planet think about things they think about people and they think about thoughts but they&#39;re not their thoughts they&#39;re other people&#39;s thoughts but our tools when you use one of our tools you think about your thinking about things people and thoughts and and very few entrepreneurs ever are in the fourth area of thinking except if there&#39;s a crisis they&#39;ll do it for a short period of time or they&#39;re creating something new and they have to do it but it&#39;s most people don&#39;t like going there because it feels uncomfortable because you&#39;re working on yourself and a lot of people don&#39;t like our uncomfortable the school system certainly didn&#39;t teach them to do that you know their parents necessarily didn&#39;t teach them how to do that Society in general you know it&#39;s all coming at you you&#39;re being broadcast other people&#39;s thoughts but it&#39;s you&#39;re not just focusing how your brain actually works and how you&#39;re responding to your situations and we&#39;ve organized this whole vast area of thinking about your thinking and it goes on forever I mean 10 years from now we&#39;ll have twice as many Thinking Tools because the world is changing and quite remarkably right now the world is changing this all required new Thinking Tools well and the thing I love about our Thinking Tools Dan is that I can have an rough idea of my thoughts about something but I never come out of it not feeling smarter wiser clearer so I always end up feeling more confident far more confident and having an ability to communicate it than to other people so it&#39;s interesting how transformational in thinking the tools are yeah and competitors in the marketplace who they might be in the same business they might be in the same Market they may be marketing to the same types of clients and customers but you&#39;re thinking about your thinking and they&#39;re not thinking about their thinking and there&#39;s a free zone aspect you&#39;re in a free zone here nobody can think about your thinking the way that you think about your thinking and that gives you it&#39;s not a competitive Advantage you&#39;re just not competing right yeah no one&#39;s going to think about it the way that you think about it and what I see is it keeps people people who do not think about their thinking are very reactive and yet who think about their thinking are able to get totally creative that&#39;s always creative you always come up with something that no book would have you know except my books because my books are all about thinking about thinking like the book that we&#39;re talking about everyone and everything R is a book about how you think about putting together your backstage Dan in this book everyone and everything grows one of my favorite Parts in one of the early chapters is called no defense budget and as someone personally who&#39;s very interested and passionate about teamwork and how people work together well at work no defense budget is unique so can you please tell me what you mean by no defense budget I sort of start the book with the ending that what you get is an environment a company environment where nobody has to defend themselves nobody has to worry about criticism nobody has to worry about politics and The Thinking Tools make that possible okay and the number one thinking tool that we have that everybody learns from day one is that you have a unique ability and we&#39;re hiring you for certain work that you have to do certain jobs but from the moment that you start working at strategic coach we&#39;re going to say there&#39;s a area of work where you&#39;re better than anyone else you&#39;re absolutely unique at it and not only that it&#39;s an area of work that you love doing and a third thing about it is that the thing that you do best that you love doing is the thing that have the greatest value to us and the greatest value to all our other team members okay and then we add another component to Unique ability and the unique ability is teamwork you can be very good at it and you can love doing it and it produces a great result but the real thing we&#39;re looking for is how you take your unique ability and team up with other people&#39;s unique ability so we call that unique ability teamwork it&#39;s strange because growing up you&#39;re not taught this okay as a matter of fact you&#39;re told this is what you should focus on because this gets you a long way in the world you should go into this profession you should go through the educational system and get this degree and everything else but none of that has anything to do with your actual unique ability I mean it might coincidentally overlap but there&#39;s no thought about this in the educational system about just the thing that you do great so they teach you everything but only some of what they teach you actually is useful for expanding your unique ability the moment that you know that this is the deal at strategic coach or your team member then you know you&#39;re not in competition with anyone and you don&#39;t have to defend yourself and guess what you take on projects that you&#39;ve never taken on projects before and the first time you do it it works and some of it doesn&#39;t work and and we don&#39;t criticize you for that we say let&#39;s reinforce what you did which is really works and let&#39;s just take a look at what didn&#39;t work and maybe that part of the work you shouldn&#39;t be doing maybe somebody else should come in and do that work so we don&#39;t want you to do anything where you&#39;ll fail a second time okay but you got to work with us here you know we take your unique ability seriously but if you don&#39;t take your unique ability seriously it isn&#39;t going to work MH so you may be headed for someplace else rather than strategic coach but the ones who really buy into the unique ability deal can stay forever and because they they always grow and everything they touch always grows you said stay forever Dan which is true some of us have been here a long time more than half our lives I think we&#39;ve just crossed over 25 team members who are above 20 years maybe it&#39;s more and I expect you to reach 40 I expect you to reach 50 years that you&#39;ve been here you&#39;re in your 30s right now and you just keep always growing and Everything You Touch grows and everything you take on grows so there&#39;s no problem here that&#39;s what I wanted to ask about because you know we need you to take your unique ability seriously because we promise to take it seriously it works only if you&#39;re in unique ability teamwork with other people so you can&#39;t squish other people&#39;s so some people would say and you said this actually in earlier video it&#39;s not about status so how do people grow in a company where it&#39;s focused on unique ability versus the traditional hierarchy well we as a company are always taking on new things that require new leadership you know we have an organizational structure there are I think a dozen specific teams that handle everything that makes the company work and we have certain teams leaders but they&#39;re only team leaders if they stay in their unique ability and the thing that their team is doing grows and we&#39;ve had team leaders who use their unique ability and unique ability teamwork to get to leadership positions but then they said well I&#39;m the leader I don&#39;t have to grow anymore and if you don&#39;t grow you go in fact that is one of our motos grow or go grow or go yeah yeah because somebody who is staying within their unique ability is going to surpass you they&#39;re going to do it in a different way they&#39;re going to do it in a uniquely different way but growth is the standard for everything you know it&#39;s the standard for every individual and it&#39;s a standard for every activity it&#39;s the standard for every team everything has to grow Dan another chapter that I think is going to be very impactful for people is positive Focus protection so what exactly does that mean I&#39;m curious well the world we live in outside of strategic coach has a lot of negativity to it this has been multiplied by Electronic media there&#39;s no question that social media makes its way in the world through negative rather than positive conversations discussions lots of criticism lots of blaming lots of attacking other people and generally life in the world outside of strategic coach is very competitive and some people compete to be as good or better and some people compete by tearing down other people attacking other people so it&#39;s very complicated it&#39;s filled with conflict but we don&#39;t want anyone when they leave that world and come into the Strategic go we don&#39;t want them to bring that with them you know check your negativity at the door so the way that we Safeguard what goes on in the program is that everything in coach is projects and meetings progress meetings about our projects everything&#39;s broken down into a project teams have ongoing new projects and they have to meet to discuss all right we&#39;ve achieved this and this is the next step we&#39;re going to take but in order to ensure that everybody is in the meeting 100% devoted to growth we start the meeting everybody has to communicate something that they&#39;re really excited about that&#39;s very positive positive in their life and it can be from any part of their life their work life they could be studying taking new training and it&#39;s positive about that it&#39;s about great things that are happening in their personal life and they can communicate that but everybody has to go around before the meeting starts to actually say positive and it raises the whole level of the meeting to a very energetic level and it seals off this meeting from anything else that might be negative outside you have the meeting and we have structures for the meetings there&#39;s tools that we use in the meetings Thinking Tools so we get to the best possible result and the greatest degree of Cooperative Clarity by the end of the meeting and then we do a positive Focus say what&#39;s the greatest thing that you got out of the meeting and you know in the course of a week There&#39;s a 100 meetings and every meeting starts with positive focus and every meeting ends with a positive focus and it&#39;s just standard procedures you start and finish with a positive focus and that gives positive Focus protection to everything that takes place in strategic coach and it goes right back to the original notion nobody&#39;s going to need any defense budget so all your energy all your capability can just be devoted to how do we grow from where we are to the next step so Dan this is our second time together today and we did a positive Focus before the first one and we did a positive Focus again I do a positive Focus before the weekly planning call or at the beginning of the weekly planning call so it is built in as you said it&#39;s our standard operating procedure both front and backstage I coached a workshop last Friday and it&#39;s like I cannot not start with a positive Focus bad things would happen so let&#39;s talk about I love hearing about it as a protection but the other part of it is you know when people are protected from from that negativity they can operate and show up quite differently than someone who has just heard something negative before a meeting or had a bad traffic situation before they came in in the morning or they were watching the news or they&#39;re watching the news or they got a bad alert on social media so why is it so critical for you and for us that people have that protection how does it allow them to function differently than if we didn&#39;t do this well I&#39;m able to operate at my best you know I&#39;m participating in the meeting and there&#39;s hundreds of meetings I&#39;m not in and as the owner of the company uh founder with my partner bab Smith we do this in our personal life you know we we begin the day and we end the day with uh positive focus and we were just on a trip a lawn trip to South America and we just got back and we talked about what worked and what we liked about it and everything else but it neutralizes you to the negativity of the world and I think the big thing is it makes you immune to the world and more and more what we find is that having this environment 100% when they&#39;re at work our team members tend to insist on it more and more in their personal life so working at coach actually improves your personal life it actually improves your relationships you have negative people and you say how long is going to last I can&#39;t be around this negative person anymore and some of it requires quite drastic decisions you know you give the other person the chance to be positive and if they don&#39;t get the memo then you make decisions and we all do this I mean everybody&#39;s done this since childhood but a lot of people get involved in a group of people where there&#39;s a lot of negativity but it&#39;s normal they can see you growing and your growth is negative for them they don&#39;t want you to grow you&#39;re outgrowing them and that forces decisions so I think that the benefit is that you&#39;re never worried about politics at strategic coach and if you start introducing political factors into coach you&#39;re not L for the company interesting one other aspect to this stand too is that with that negativity Focus SL bias that happens a lot people are not open to new ideas they&#39;re not open to things that would actually cause and create that growth and when someone&#39;s coming from a positive standpoint there such famous Google study on psychological safety the teams that were by far the most successful by a large margin are the ones where they had enormous psychological safety they didn&#39;t have to play politics and they were the most creative the most productive in our language the most profitable and that&#39;s a huge part of it if you&#39;re going to be doing new things you have to be coming from a place of confidence and capil not being grumpy or mad or upset or fearful that&#39;s not conducive to growth so positive Focus protection just helps your own ability to think into so I think that&#39;s another key aspect of it for me no and that&#39;s the way I like to live my life you know I mean I&#39;m a positive person I was born positive and I&#39;ve seen the alternative and there wasn&#39;t much attractive about it so you know I mean I like being happy I like being productive I like being creative you know and the more I can expand that through Thinking Tools outside of me the better off I am and the better off everyone else is too yeah yeah it works both ways Dan you&#39;ve talked a little bit about how congruent what we do with our clients is also what we do with our team in terms of Thinking Tools so I want to dive a little bit deeper into front stage backstage and particularly the fact that everything is predictably congruent what does that mean and what does that look like and what does it feel like well I&#39;ve listened to entrepreneurs you know mainstage entrepreneurs who are talking about their success and you&#39;ll hear them describe more or less an ideal sort of situation but then you start talking to their team members or they don&#39;t even call them team members they call them employees and they say well he can say what he wants to say or she can say what she want but nobody stays here very long because it&#39;s very toxic you know and she&#39;s really good at PR he&#39;s really good at PR and cosmetics if you will but you don&#39;t know what it&#39;s like working for this person you know there&#39;s constant criticism they demand Perfection you don&#39;t get credit for doing it right because it&#39;s not perfect you know and it just strikes me as a waste you know first of all the person really isn&#39;t telling the truth about the whole situation and my feeling is I want to be in a position where I never suggest to our clients that you do something that we don&#39;t do it that way ourselves I don&#39;t want there to be any inconsistency between how we grow our company backstage and what we tell the entrepreneurs front stage and I&#39;m especially sensitive to this more than anyone else because I&#39;ve studied organizations all my life and for the most part it&#39;s a very very rare organization that is completely consistent from front stage to Backstage but I do know that if you have an organization like that your growth multiplies almost without effort because people are looking for consistency they&#39;re looking for congruency in the marketplace because there&#39;s a lot of fraud in the marketplace and by fraud I mean it ain&#39;t the way that you talk about it okay so you&#39;re not practicing what you preach and nothing turns people off that what the person is saying is inconsistent with how the person actually acts when they think nobody can see them this means walking our talk doing what we say what&#39;s true for team members is true for clients and vice versa being consistent with our Thinking Tools so it&#39;s not two- faced and I think you&#39;re completely right Dan people in the marketplace are looking for I was going to say truth but they&#39;re looking for that congruency in a good way and that consistency it&#39;s like oh okay this looks like a great company let&#39;s peel back the covers is it really and when they&#39;re like it is they&#39;re like whoa that&#39;s unique it is different in the marketplace yeah and I think part of the reason is I don&#39;t look at the individuals who are our team members any different than I look at the entrepreneurs who are our clients okay they&#39;re each an individual and they have a unique ability so I have team members that have worked with me for you for 30 years other team members have worked with me for 20 years my attitude toward them and their abilities and who they are as people is exactly the same as the way I look at clients and we have clients who are 25 years going down 30 years and the reason is they&#39;ve never had any sense that what we&#39;re saying is inconsistent with how we actually run our company and people say well that must be a lot of work and I said well try the other way of being inconsistent that&#39;s a lot more work 100% first of all you have to be replacing people all the time but not only that people who&#39;ve had a negative experience that there isn&#39;t an Integrity there there isn&#39;t a consistency they talk about it when they go out in the world if you treat people badly they&#39;ll tell a hundred other people you know if you treat our clients bad they&#39;ll tell a hundred other people you know and it was very interesting we&#39;re just going through a major collaboration with with a big famous organization and one of their members is going to be a speaker at our biggest conference and they checked us out all of our internet presence they checked and they said we&#39;re the only organization that they&#39;ve ever come across where there&#39;s nothing negative on the internet and the reason is nobody ever has any reason to say anything negative about us because we treat everybody with respect we treat everybody in terms of their uniqueness we&#39;re deeply interested Ed in what they do uniquely well in any way we can we want to help them grow their uniqueness and it&#39;s just one approach so we don&#39;t have to have 10 different approaches for 10 different situations it&#39;s very congruent with you too Dan because you want a simple consistent easy to remember easy to implement strategy I like simple okay once it gets complicated I&#39;m not interested anymore I love how you said it each person on the team is an individual and each person has has a unique ability and that is true for our clients it&#39;s true for our team and that way of looking at things which is really really important that that thinking goes all the way through the organization because see if you have that mindset but a team leader doesn&#39;t or a team member doesn&#39;t it does harm to that culture the one other factor I want to touch on and you&#39;ve mentioned it a couple times is the longevity of what happened we haven&#39;t really talked about this as a longevity strategy but when you put into place all of these factors there&#39;s no reason for people leave they have incredible freedom to be themselves they work for a very congruent organization they are valued for what they do uniquely in the world there are always new opportunities to expand and to do something new and different like why would anyone leave and given well people have different goals so we&#39;ve had really great people who&#39;ve left the organization but anytime we encounter them they feel like they&#39;re still part of the organization and we treat them like they&#39;re still if you&#39;ve been a good team member at strategic coach we treat you like you&#39;re always a member of the community and the same thing for entrepreneurs if you&#39;ve been in coach and we helped you grow then when we encounter you may have not been with us for 10 years or 15 years and we treat you like you were here yesterday you know but it&#39;s just the Simplicity of it I mean the world is complex enough and the world is confusing enough why not just have a single policy that always works and it&#39;s very attractive and it does have people stay a very long time Dan one of the other things that you talk about in everyone and everything grows is the fact that free focus and buffer days is part of what we all we coach our clients but it&#39;s also something our teams can take advantage of as well so I&#39;m sure people are super curious to see how this works yeah I think the time system is one of the most singularly unique things about strategic coach and again we recommend that our entrepreneurs organize their time like this part of my background is entertainment and what I notice in the entertainment World they have three kinds of days they have performance day they have rehearsal day or practice day and then they have free days okay they have days when they&#39;re not engaged and this is very different from bureaucratic time system where you have work days and you have weekends but a lot of them ask people to work on weekends especially in today&#39;s world your value to the company is if you&#39;re willing to work do your work on work days and then you have vacation days but we&#39;re suggesting if you really want to get points that you use some of your vacation days to work and generally speaking their work days wear them out their vacation days don&#39;t renew them and they&#39;re always worried that that they should be doing work at home after hours and now you know you think that virtual work would free them up because they a lot of them have lost commute time but now they&#39;re expected to be available in some cases 24 hours a day and you can&#39;t grow you can&#39;t grow you can survive and you can be rewarded for sticking with it but you actually don&#39;t grow as an individual and the project you work on you know you&#39;re told if you don&#39;t complete the project the way we want you&#39;re gone so it&#39;s Total Defense budget the way the bureaucratic World operates and then when you&#39;re at work people don&#39;t knock themselves out because it&#39;s going to be this way forever and you know it&#39;s not a series of Sprints it&#39;s a marathon and all you hope for is that you can get to retirement age and then you can start enjoying life you know know put in your 40 years and then you can start enjoying life and I said why don&#39;t we have people enjoy their life right from the beginning so when a team member is hired they have a three-month trial and that&#39;s got legal status because it&#39;s understood that you can fire a person after three months with no cost to it there&#39;s no yeah before three months you can let them go before three months yeah so what we do is we do just the opposite everybody&#39;s three Monon trial and then the moment that you make the three-month cut we say in the next year you get just as much free time as somebody who&#39;s been here for 32 years so it&#39;s six weeks of what other people would call vacation so it&#39;s 30 days but it&#39;s never more so someone who just joined the company and has made the three-month trial they will have just as many free days in the first year as Shannon Waller who&#39;s been here for 32 years okay cuz I don&#39;t treat free days as compensation it&#39;s a necessity so that you have a completely full outside life okay and we don&#39;t ask you to work Beyond hours and if you do we take a look at it and say you shouldn&#39;t be working past work hours if it&#39;s required that you work on a weekend and let&#39;s say it&#39;s two days of work then you get to take two normal work days and treat it like your weekend so you always get your full allotment of days and then the days themselves are different because we have three days free days and then you have Focus days and focus days are just when you are doing the work that produces the results that&#39;s most profitable for the company okay and you can declare this is a focus day I&#39;m just working on this and then you have buffer days and buffer days are backstage days it&#39;s planning it&#39;s training it&#39;s learning new technology it&#39;s learning new knowledge it&#39;s creating new systems and this is what we teach the the entrepreneurs but everybody in our backstage gets exactly the same time system and the majority of our clients are Workaholics by our definition they&#39;ve never had a free day okay when they&#39;re on what they&#39;re called free days they&#39;re thinking about work they&#39;re checking their phone checking their computer they&#39;re working on projects they&#39;re doing reading that&#39;s related their networking business they&#39;re always working and we say no we want close to half the year when you&#39;re not working and you&#39;re not thinking about work okay and what that produces enormous energy focused energy productive energy Creative Energy profitable energy when people are working give them a big whack of time every week give them a big whack of time every quarter every year and when they are working they can throw their entire unique ability energy and talent into working so we get a better deal which is so counter to most people&#39;s thinking about it it&#39;s counter to the world yes yeah because usually free time has to be deserved through long periods of hard work as we talk about one of our models and you&#39;re like no let&#39;s do it ahead of time let&#39;s make sure the rest of rejuvenated as you say put their full self into it and be their most creative and productive and then take a break yeah have a great home life and have a great friendship life and have a great rest and relaxation activities and we don&#39;t ask you to think about work when you&#39;re not working which is again so different than people working evenings and weekends and vacation which is pretty normal yeah and if you&#39;re always coming in early and staying late we have to talk about that because obviously the normal work time allotted for your your activity you&#39;re not good enough to get it done during normal hours so let&#39;s have a conversation about that I know one of my team members and on who we know I tend to come in maybe a little bit early I tend to not look at the clock and be I&#39;m not a clock watcher but every day she would be ready to leave at five and I finally I&#39;m like how are you thinking about this she goes if I can&#39;t get my job done by five o&#39;clock there&#39;s something wrong with how I&#39;m doing it I was like oh she&#39;s not wrong it&#39;s a great education well and it&#39;s not about time and effort it&#39;s about results if you can get your results done in 4 hours where it takes most people to do 8 hours we&#39;re not going to load you up with more work yeah yeah but I want to go back to the start of this all these are a result of Thinking Tools yeah okay and we&#39;ve just identified The Sweet Spot that&#39;s best for entrepreneurs in any situation in their personal life or their business life and and we say eliminate what isn&#39;t the purest most productive most creative most enjoyable activity and just get rid of it let the world do all the crap you don&#39;t do the crap I love it well Dan thank you so much for laying out all of the different ways of thinking The Thinking Tools you know how to really set up a entrepreneural culture so that everyone and everything grows it&#39;s Unique it&#39;s a privilege to be a part of it it&#39;s a joy be a part of it and it&#39;s very fun to find a place where you can be 100% yourself and 100% growing all the time thank you it&#39;s been a delight to be in teamwork with you for 32 years thank you Dan same here

Transcript for:Inside Strategic Coach: Building Extraordinary Coach Culture

Transcript for:
Inside Strategic Coach: Building Extraordinary Coach Culture