[Music] hi Shannon merer here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan I am excited today as I always am to talk to you because today we're going to focus in on how businesses are changing due to the pandemic covid-19 and what some of the Innovations are that we're seeing how our clients are being a hero to their audiences how they're actually using this as a chance to kind of reshape you and I have talked about in our previous podcast you know putting the pieces and sometimes the game board back in the box and then pulling it out differently and we're also going to share how we are doing that so I'm super excited to do that and I hope you enjoy this sneak peek backstage to inside strategy coach so Dan just to kick us off you know we've been talking a lot about you know these are scary times and there's a certain way to respond that's creative versus reactive in scary times so let's jump into that to kick us off today yeah well I just celebrated a birthday birthday so I was born in 1944 so I was born just before the Normandy invasion and I have to say that looking back you know there's been a lot of big changes that have happened and especially technologically but what's happened in the last two months is the biggest shift that I've ever seen in such a short period of time with zoom especially and I know other people use other platforms but Zoom now has the verb they're like Kleenex you know they're like Xerox doesn't matter what platform it's zooming and you and I were familiar with zoom before this and you know parts of our team were very familiar with zoom I have podcasts and on a number of my podcasts I've done it on Zoom for the last five years but I've never seen where everything went to a new technolog iCal platform in such a short period of time so I would say that 10% of our entire entrepreneurial client base at the beginning of March was using zoom on a daily basis and I would say 95% are now right and I don't think they'll ever go back we've had a couple months now to get used to it and I think that it's natural now it's sort of normal for thousands of entrepreneurs and it's changed the way they think about the future and it's changed the way that we think about the future so let's talk about that because changing the way we think about the future is kind of a fascinating topic and one of the things that I've been so thrilled about with zoom is how everyone is jumping their capability level at the same time you know never do I ever remember a circumstance where we all had to kind of jump onto this new capability you know including really just appreciating what looks good as a background and how to keep people engaged and communicating but we're all getting better quickly and can you talk a little bit about Dan how the two-hour sessions that you've been doing and how you see our clients using Zoom too well the way I think about business is uh you have a backstage which is how you get ready to do what you do and it's all the support you know behind the scenes and then there's front stage and this is in our case it's Workshop for entrepreneurs and then other Communications for entrepreneurs so March 13th was the decision that we knew we were going to have to close down as far as in-person workshops for the foreseeable future we thought we might be back by June 1st but that's turning out not to be the case and then the big thing was that we had to get the entire backstage everybody at work had to move from offices in a number of different locations in two business days everybody was set we have over a 100 team members you know we're across eight time zones from London England on the East to Los Angeles on the west and then the whole point was now how are we going to replace our main way of interacting with our clients which was live workshops and we do 125 Workshop days a quarter 500 a year and these are full one-day workshops I'm one of the coaches you're one of the coaches we have 16 other coaches besides us and you know counting everybody it's about 3,000 entrepreneurs in their teams and it took us from March 13th I think it took us 10 days to hit upon a new form which was a two-hour form we weren't sure about it a lot of it is experimental when you have no alternative but shift to a new capability but we were really as much as we had a lot of things we thought we would need to improve actually our very first two-hour session went really well what's more our clients really liked it you know the ones who we had immediately in that first week of Zoom workshops I call them Zoom mini workshops they really liked it and there were lots of neat things about it I mean I can talk about that but there's a lot of neat things about Zoom which I think are superior ior to in-person workshops what I've noticed is the actual delivery of content is better on Zoom than it is in person the socialization of people becoming friends and you know really really knowing a lot about each other that can't be done on Zoom that really happens in person so we're seeing Two Worlds there's the social world that wraps around the delivery of knowledge but I think that Zoom is really Superior for delivering knowledge that's interesting so why is that Dan is it in terms of how we do our models or our conversations or questions what do you think is that makes it Superior well we've always had a sacrifice you know there's a sacrifice to doing strategic coach and that is unless you lived nearby you had to travel but even if you lived nearby it was a commute you know and we major cities were major hubs we have La we have Chicago we have Toronto we have London England they're all traffic congested cities and then everybody else is usually flying to get in and you know we have Australians who do their workshops in LA or Chicago or any of the four cities the Australians come to well you know from start to finish they have to figure on about five days turnaround time from the moment they leave home get to where the workshop is do the workshop get back home it's about five days so for four Workshop days a year it's actually 20 days and that's just the time there's considerable cost for this Shannon you did a workshop with I think 17 Australian entrepreneurs and all they had to do was at the appointed hour turn on zoom and they was there and I think they loved it they absolutely loved it the obvious implication is in the future and we're really going to test that out over the next three months we can do workshops for anyone anywhere we can do workshops for anyone anywhere and the same insight and the same kind of surprising lesson that we've received from this I think the vast number of our clients have received you know I've always thought of local or Regional at the most and now I'm thinking National and I'm thinking Global and it's remarkable you know I mean it's remarkable it's like fiveyear jump in three months right yep we're going through our own Evolution and we have something to talk about towards the end of the call in terms of how strategic coach is doing that so in in case anyone's wondering we are still continuing with inperson workshops they're going virtual temporarily until we can safely do so to people back together but we have that last night was my 75th night at home 75th straight night at home and I don't know when I've ever done that not in my adult life I can tell you right yeah we're used to being on planes and well not so much Planes Trains and Automobiles but definitely planes and traveling around a lot so it's been quite novel to be at home for such an extended stretch I mean I feel exactly the same way you know this is how we're transitioning but we've also you have had phenomenal conversations in your 22 sessions with entrepreneurs who are just really looking at this time period as an opportunity you know not that it's happening to them they're not victims they're actually being incredibly proactive in terms of how they are shifting their business adapting so I'd love to share some of those examples too and one of the people that comes to mind is Norm so he's not someone who can do what he does by Zoom because he runs a very successful restaurant and bar so can you share his example too because he's someone who's taken the existing circumstances what he had and done something completely new with it that was very valuable anyway I don't want to give away too much but can you talk about him because he's someone who's adapted quickly and rapidly and very successfully yeah for those of you who don't know strategic coach our Workshop programs are just for successful entrepreneurs they have to have quite a number of years experience and they have to be very very successful financially and usually they've hit a ceiling that represents that they've already achieved earlier goals that they had in their career and now they have to create a new future which is a lot bigger than what they originally thought they would get to and Norm dunan is a great example of this he lives in a very Scenic historic town called aen South Carolina it's a place that they had a lot of horse farms and big mansions and everything else very very pictures but he's got a terrific restaurant where the main feature is whiskey and then he's got a five-star menu festar Chef to go along with whiskey and whiskey lovers love going there because it's all private Distillery so it's not the kind of whiskey you could buy at the local liquor store these are special casks and that from distilleries from about five or six states around South Carolina but anyway the big problem is they have shut down they had lock down like everywhere else so he was just done now he's got other businesses so he had cash flow from other businesses but this was his passion so he was talking to another entrepreneur in our program and this was like in the first week of shutdown and one of the big problems right at that time and it was North American wide I don't know how it was in the rest of the world but both Canada and the United States the supermarkets just were mobbed shelves were cleaned out and people just couldn't get things so Norm was talking to another entrepreneur who's a marketing entrepreneur Dean Jackson very famous marketer on the internet and Dean said said you know don't think of yourself as a restaurant think of yourself as a very specialized supermarket store because he said you know all your clients personally you have all their contact information so he said just go through and do an inventory of every product that just normally comes into your restaurant all the food products you know the makings of the food you know the flour milk eggs and so forth and then all the cleaning products you have including toilet paper and you're on a completely different Supply route and I'm I'm sure if you called your A supplier for all of your normal daily and weekly supplies they would be thrilled to ship them so what he did is he just turned it around in a day he itemized everything that he had available and then he sent a note with the inventory to all of his clients and he says if you just order these and give us six hours ahead of time we'll have it all packed up for you and you can just come to the front of our restaurant and somebody will hand it to you and we've done your shopping for you and so you can deliver that and he found after about four weeks that his gross income you know the sales was 75% of what it would be if the restaurant was open but his expenses had gone down by 80% so it was very profitable period I'd like to point this out as an example Shannon that entrepreneurs don't react they don't don't get paralyzed by everybody else's fear they don't get really Paralyzed by their own fear they take their emotion the fear and the uncertainty and they say okay how do I have to think about this differently and then they take action just like that I'm very close to Norm because I really love how he's doing what he's doing because he plans to go National with his ideas about beer pubs and whiskey restaurants so that's for another entrepreneur but you could just see the instant you know turn around in his thinking and then his team just fell into place and they loved it they loved it you know because there was a fair amount of staff you know properly masked and properly gloved who had to do the packing of the grocery packages for the clients it just shows you and I'd like to use that as kind of like a universal example of one how entrepreneurs rather than people who aren't entrepreneurs respond but also how the particular entrepreneurs who in some cases have 10 12 15 20 years in strategic coach how they think about things it's just like that a danger becomes a capability in a matter of 24 hours that's amazing to me that's kind of the heart of this conversation is how people can take a set of adverse circumstances and transform them quite rapidly into new forms of I would say value creation and you've seen this happen multiple times I mean Dan you talk all the time about entrepreneurs basically sign up for scary times just by virtue of being an entrepreneur and this is a global scary time but there's muscles that have been built which make entrepreneurs much more I would say resilient and creative in the face of some of those challenges and I know this is also why they're your Absolut favorite people with whom to work yeah well first of all I want to make a point here that some of our entrepreneurs have really been blindsided I mean their cash flow has been cut off so what I'm saying here that there's a spectrum from really bad to really great I mean I would say 30% of our entrepreneurs that I've talked to you know and I've talked to four or 500 at some point in the last two months and I would say 30% of them are hiring during this period because a lot of really great people have been leted off by other companies and they said what a great time because I have to tell you over the last three or four years the biggest issue that a lot of our entrepreneurs had was just having good people to hire because you know we had such low employment before the US was virtually at full employment before the pandemic happened Canada not so much but us I mean it was the greatest employment Market in 60 years before and there were a lot of good people who not because they weren't great people but simply because the businesses themselves had to let them off that were now available so they said I'll hire a great person even if I don't have a job for them just to make sure I secure it because I'm probably not going to get this opportunity again so you had at the top end people doing so great people never having such great quarters in their life and at the bottom people who this is going to be probably the toughest year of their entrepreneurial career both of them are positive both of them are saying well I'm just going to have to rethink things maybe some thoughts I had about the future we can act on those thoughts right now maybe I'll start all over again with an entirely new approach and sometimes even a new industry maybe this is a sign that things I was frustrated about this industry maybe it's time just to depart and start a new entrepreneurial future so that's the kind of thinking I'm going to talk about and I'm going to say that every individual is unique they have different family situations they live in different Geographic locations they're under different governance you know the states are very different from each other the provinces in Canada very different from each the UK is a completely different situation week ago we had a great Zoom sales intro primarily for workshops in London and we're getting normal results but it was with probably 12th of the time and 12th of the cost to get the same results that we're getting after just one week it was right now it was a week ago yeah and I was on that event with you which was a great fun I mean selling is happening different differently delivery of your product service experience is happening differently having that capability Dan to adapt to be positive and it's interesting that people we've seen that are very reactive is the word that comes to mind they're the ones who are kind of like listening to the general narrative and getting pretty freaked out by the whole thing and yet what we've been able to see despite as you said either end of the spectrum from our clients how positive they are and how resourceful and creative they're being and their thinking and it's you know certainly your incredible mindsets with scary times has been a massive contribution to people's ability to get unstuck and move forward so thank you for that but they're doing that and they're providing leadership and Direction and capability to their audiences but just the sheer resourcefulness of our clients is amazing to me so there's actually a ton of opportunity which I think entrepreneurs are seeing and can provide enormous direction for other people because they're paying attention to the spefic specifics not to the general can you just share your example of having turned off the news a couple years ago yeah it was really interesting I began noticing I think about two years ago so in July it'll be two years I was noticing how different my experience was from what was being reported on the mainstream news that all my entrepreneurs thought that the world was going great and my mother you know when I was 6 years old told me you should really pay attention to the news because very important things are happening in the world well in 1950 that was 1950 you know it was right after the second world war we were into the Cold War we were going through atomic bomb rehearsals if there was ever an atomic bomb we were in the middle of the polio pandemic and you know I grew up on farm and I just got fascinated my mom gave me a lot of good tips and that was a really good tip so I'm a News Junkie and the internet has been just amazing for me I'm like a Hoover I go you know I just suck it up every day but I just noticed that the mainstream media and all the cable news especially which I usually spend maybe a half hour or an hour on a day and I just noticed a complete disconnect between what the reporters and the commentators were talking about and it was like they were talking about life on another planet I said this has nothing to do with the entrepreneurial world and this wasn't a decision at that time that I wouldn't watch the news but it was a great summer here in Toronto and in Chicago it was great summer you know so we'd eat outdoors on the patios so we just got out of the habit and you know we're in Cottage Country during the summer so we have a cottage up on a lake in Ontario and I realized we got back had labor days so that for six weeks I hadn't watched any news and I hadn't missed it at all and actually I felt more relaxed because I wasn't watching the news and I said six weeks I wonder how long I can keep it going well I'm approaching two years now and I'm especially happy I haven't watched it during the pandemic it's very very strange I mean I pick up YouTube clips you know on the internet and I'll watch it and I'll say I live on a different planet from the news media and it makes sense that I think that the news media are fearful but they're not fearful for what's happening to other people I think they're fearful for what's happening to themselves because in all news media advertising is what makes a go and I think that the combination of Facebook and Google who are the two greatest advertising platforms in the world I think they've destroyed the advertising revenues for the news media so my feeling is that the reporters and writers and commentators and opinion makers on the news media are facing a very very dire future for themselves in their own industry and it seems to me that they're just projecting their own fear on their listeners but they're not actually in contact with their listeners readers and Watchers they're just projecting their own fear will I even have a job next week will our station even be in existence will this newspaper even be in existence this magazine and everything else so I think the news media is living in their own fearful world but they have this impact on other people as if what they're reporting is the world of the other people but it's not I think it's the world of the news media and they're in their own Dark World and probably a lot of them aren't going to make it out bit that's very true Dan before we wrap up I want to talk about our you just talked about their dark world and I want to talk about our brighter future yes I think that's pretty exciting so we talked earlier about we are still an in-person Workshop company that hasn't changed and as soon as it's say do so we'll go back but we are also launching a new virtual only strategic coach program and that really goes back to what you were saying is just you know this brand new capability that we have it allows us now to think the new geography for me right now is time zones we now have to start thinking in terms of time zones instead of Workshop locations which I find kind of interesting so I mean I know that you're excited about this so Dan before I give people how to kind of get in touch with us if they want to know more what do you see I mean you talked earlier about going kind of global in your thinking but what's your excitement about this well it starts next Thursday so a week from today so everything that was in the calendar for June July and August at the start of the Year thinking we're living in the in-person world every one of those live workshops inperson workshops is going to be a zoom workshop and we've come up with a beautiful six hour design with breaks at the end of every hour lunch break lots of breakout sessions and zoom has just been superb I have to tell you I doubt in my life I've ever been so impressed with a technological company you know they just haven't let us down at all they had a few glitches you know they had some vulnerabilities but they seem to have solved them in 24 hours this will be good so I'll be doing we as a company will be doing 125 Zoom workshops in the summer months June July and August and I think we're going to learn enormous amount that this is a for that's going to continue on even when inperson work workshops come back and the other thing is that when people come to a workshop usually they're there one month and then three months later they're back for another Workshop there is contact in between but my sense is that we're going to fill the three months in between their workshops with a lot of one hour you know 90 minute two hour refreshing and reinforcing sessions so it's not either or when we're finished it's both and that we're going to do so I think our capabilities for having more workshops is going to increase dramatically because we can have zoom only workshops going forward we have a lot to learn in the next three months exactly how we're going to do that and then inperson workshops will come back we're already thinking that our future has been vastly expanded just because of our R&D over the last two months and going forward next couple months I love it so thank you Dan my next Workshop is next Thursday so I'm really excited about that and that's the regular workshop and then we are starting a brand new virtual only that is not dependent upon coming to inperson workshops and that kicks off in September so if you're interested in either one of those options or if you want to know more I have to tell you I've lived in a world where I get requests to create this and create that and create that so there's vastly more activ ity and decisions and new initiatives that are taking place in the Strategic coach company that I'm told about later you know true the only constant to my life is usually almost every day we're talking about something yes you're good with following marching orders Dan so if anyone would like to know more please connect with us at strategic coach.com virtual there'll be more information coming up there shortly but Dan thank you thank you for sharing how pivoting and how some of our clients are pivoting and just really reinforcing you know the resourcefulness the resilience so the scary times muscles that entrepreneurs have kept developing I think it's really fun to hear some specific examples of that so as always thank you very much thank you Shannon