[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan I'm excited because today we're going to talk about something that you have made a practice for years and that is taking off 155 days a year from strategic coach and why it's good for the business I think this is such an amazing concept that a lot of people go into a little bit of the shakes when they think of doing it for themselves so talk about why you and Babs take 155 days off a year well it's because of Babs that's easy my whole take on free days which we'll explore in this podcast I'm really a convert to this particular belief system and it's really because of my partnership with bab Smith because bab's really had this down pat when I met her and I definitely did not and I would say when I I met Babs in 1982 that my entire work life as an entrepreneur which started in 1974 8 years was without free days as we Define them in strategic coach which is from Midnight to midnight a day from starting midnight last night and going to midnight this night there is no work related Focus there's no work rated activities so that would disqualify any checking computer checking internet for any reason no business related reading and not doing business and basically not thinking about business but allowing yourself to explore all different kinds of Life which in my case has a lot to do with fiction I read murder mysteries I'm a very Avid murder mystery International Thriller fiction reader and also history I really like history a history of anything and Babs and I have a lot of activities like we have certain favorite big cities that we go to we also have nature areas of hiking and seash Shores and forests and mountains and we do all that but we have a life that for 155 days of every year is freed up entirely for free time we don't call the office the office doesn't call us we don't do planning about what we're going to do when we go back to work we just set ourselves free because we do have 210 days a year if you subtract 155 from 365 and that 210 days is to do the business which allows us to have the free days oh I love it now it's interesting I think a lot of people as they hear that number it's hard to imagine for themselves but what you found is that taking that much time off from the business actually has helped it grow and help develop the company and what we call a self-managing company so how does that relationship work and what difference do free days make to your own self and your own creativity well I would say of all the concepts that we have in the Strategic coach the whole concept of taking more free time is the most contrarian because there's almost like a bragging that takes place in the entrepreneurial World about long work days 247 365 it's almost a challenge but it's almost like a contempt towards entrepreneurs who need to have vacation time and you know you'll see people saying well my work is my free time you know I I don't really work I just play when people say that and there's kind of a relig around hard work lawn work I just say I wonder what the other parts of this person's life actually looks like what do their personal relationships look like what does their development of their General appreciation for Life what does their involvement in other topic areas what's that look like and generally I find that when you meet someone who only works and someone who never really takes free time they tend to be very onedimensional and the most I think dangerous part of that work addiction because I think that it properly qualifies as an addiction like drug addiction that working all the time is actually called workaholism so this was already established long before I came on the scene is the negative impact on their organization because they there's an expectation that the people who work for the entrepreneur will also have very little free time and what you have is very high burnout rate among the team members of an entrepreneurial organization and they feel very very oppressed because they also don't have a personal life and they're expected all the time that the focus of their life is going to be coming in early working all the time working late working weekends if you want and what I noticed it just makes them very defensive makes them very dull and there's very high turnover because people can't actually have a life when they're a member of an organization that has this workaholic philosophy you know it's almost a dictatorship of work that they're under and all other freedom of life gets taken away Babs was the one who convinced me of this and she got me to go to Cape Cod for about a week right after our relationship started you know I went begrudgingly and I took a whole bag of work projects that I was going to work there but I got down there and she says just take the first two or three days and walk the beach and let's go have some Lobster and let's go on Hikes and put a fire on and have some fiction books and I didn't read fiction at all but I took some history books after about 2 or 3 days I could feel myself feeling differently very very differently and I never touched the bag of work projects and that was very instructive to me that I was in a different thought frame where before getting to those work projects was seen as something crucial I had to do to be prepared when I went back to work and after about 3 days the whole notion that I was going to do a work project when I had a really beautiful envir environment and I was sleeping longer and we were just having such a great time I was also aware the you know from a a danger standpoint that Babs was sort of laying out one of the requirements if I was going to have a lifetime relationship with her which I was very committed to that Babs was a very Central force in my life I had been through a divorce before and this was my chance to to show that I had actually learned something from it I came back convinced it only took a week then I was very very open you know this is 19 8384 it took a number of years before it entered into being an actual coaching concept that you would actually do that it really wasn't completely convincing to me until we started the workshop program up until then I had just been a one one-on-one coach and we didn't have a lot of teamwork around me but once we started the workshops and we started to see that you know a team was needed for this there was a lot of Backstage to strategic coach and I began to see that the team would grow when we weren't there when Babs and I weren't there and we made it known to the team who was working while we were on free days that they would have to make their own decisions if there were emergencies they would have to transform the situations and come up with a solution this suddenly introduced me to a concept that you don't know how strong your team is until they can't phone you until you're not phoning them and they are essentially running the company and much later the whole concept of the self-managing company came out of that and if we didn't have free days as the lever we would have never come up with the concept of the self-managing company and the other aspect about that was right from the beginning even when we were very small we had two or three team members we established that in the very first year of working with us they were going to get six weeks of free days actual vacation time which is unheard of in North America in Europe not so much like in the UK but the US is probably the most intense work culture on the planet and it's measured in work hours I mean if you measure any other country on the planet total work hours against voluntary work hours you know where people actually voluntarily want to work that the US is way out front you know it is what it is but when you create an entrepreneurial company you get to create an experiment of your own so we established this 6 weeks right from the beginning now the interesting thing is that it's never more than 6 weeks so I'm sitting across from you and you're you're in your 27th year at strategic coach it was 6 weeks the first year you were with us in your 27th year the question I had you know because we're talking on the top how do you feel about the fact that someone in their very first year who just joined us gets the same amount of free time as you do in your 27th year how do you feel about that I actually love it because it means that I'm not working with people who are exhausted I'm not working with people who are grumpy I'm working with people who are rested rejuvenated and creative which is what I want to be working with and it's a different mindset that we have around free days and that is that it's not something to be earned it's not a reward for hanging around for a long time it's simply part of how we work together what I love about it is it means that people are cross-trained everyone knows how to do multitude of different different tasks everyone has their focus and their unique ability but you get smart about organizing your activities so that you can be away as opposed to just defaulting to just working longer and in my previous career I was a total workaholic I think you and I've talked before Dan about when I first met my husband he asked that well-known question do you have a life because I had the highest billable hours in my company and it's one of those questions that if it takes longer than 3 seconds to answer the answer is no and it took me longer than 3 seconds so coming to strategic coach was such a shift cuz I had voluntarily worked ear you know coming early and worked really late so it actually forced me to become frankly a more interesting person because I realized I didn't have any hobbies so I got some and now I'm into traveling and just came back from San Francisco and went to Africa this summer and have a chance to expand what I'm interested in in the world and I work with other people who are interesting people that's pretty fascinating and our clients who who struggle with this a ton they are more interesting people when they actually take free days and we actually attract some really amazing team members one who just related a story over kind of a lunch and learn recently about why he was moving out of his company because they had exactly that culture that you talked about and this one actually gave him a chance to work on his health and spend time with his wife and develop friendships and interests and that was why he moved companies I thought aha I love the fact that everyone the first year they get here gets the same time off it's not incentive it's simply a way of working together I would say that time is very interesting psychological framework because it's everything you know if you take anything that involves human beings one of the major dimensions of anything they're doing is how is time looked at what I tell entrepreneurs I'll compare the way that I live 3 65 days a year and how you do it and this is before they become committed to their own formula for how many days they're going to take off and the fact that those days are really free days I said I bet I can outwork you in 210 days where you're working 365 days and not only that but every year my 210 days are more productive I get more done every year because I start the year I don't have 365 days so if there's more to do it can't take extra time it has to be done with a better use of the 210 days that I had last year this year my 210 have to be more productive so I have to constantly be looking at what makes sense since I only have 210 days to get more done what should I be doing and how should I be expanding the teamwork around me so that other people are systematically taking things off my plate and making them the area where they're even better than I am with these particular areas of activities and it's freed me up enormously not only has the free day portion of my year freed me up enormously to be rested rejuvenated my health is incredibly better 35 years later than it was at that time my mental capacities are much better and part of the reason is because I'm thinking more powerfully about fewer things I have three activities I create new Concepts I create new Thinking Tools for a strategic coach I create a lot of new intellectual property like especially now books because I'm now part of a team that's producing a brand new book every quarter I have podcasts I have videos to do and then I have the actual coaching and I'm doing half the amount of coaching that I'm doing right now than I was for example seven years ago the number of Workshop days has gone from 96 Workshop days a year to somewhere in the neighborhood of about 44 46 workshops this year so it's half the time but the revenues from the workshops the half the workshops I'm doing is three times the revenues from the workshops I was doing when I was doing twice as many sessions per year so it's that there's a set of exponential gears here and one of them is that I only get 210 days I never get more than 210 days so I can't extend and say well we're going to take it to 250 the rule is it's going to be 210 because our free days are already in the schedule on January 1st first of each year we know exactly when our free days are they're already put in the schedule and the reason for that is that we have to work out all my workshop commitments and you know all my preparation commitments for workshops and books so there's no negotiating with the 210 and the 155 free days and then we work continually to make the quality of the 155 days higher every year that we're getting more rest more Rejuvenation more Recreation every year with 155 days and then the 210 days there's a confident emphasis on increase productivity increased results Financial results increased creativity that the power of what's being produced has more and more impact every year entrepreneurs say well that's a huge risk that you're taking and I said well look who's talking you're someone who departed from the employment world and you decided to be your own master in the marketplace I said that's the biggest risk I said in society that's the biggest risk you've already taken the biggest risk I'm just trying to show you a way to get a total payoff for being an entrepreneur in the first place didn't you do it for freedom I think the most Central motivation for becoming an entrepreneur is that you have freedom of your time so I said I am sitting here in the 29th year of the workshop program and I've got massive amounts of freedom of time which then reinforces freedom of money freedom of relationship and freedom of purpose it's very confronting when people first get this but you know they're getting a lot of pressures because the way their workaholic life is operating in right now they're putting enormous pressure on any relationship not only outside their business life but also inside their business life all they have to do is Grant themselves more and more free time during which their team can actually take more and more ownership of what's going on in the company and the other aspect about it is that all their other relationships the most Central relationships of their life with their spouse their family and friends all this gets enriched by this approach Dan this is such a powerful conversation and the impact of actually pre-scheduling those 155 days if you look at their whole year of being 365 days and carving that time off and actually looking at your work year as being those 210 days in your case other people may have a different number that is such a powerful focusing mechanism what an incredible way to escape work dict dictatorship as you call it which I think is a great term and how to really it creatively and I mean this in the best possible way forces you into great teamwork it trains your team to think well for themselves and to learn how to make decisions when you're not there because you're not there as the go-to person all the time which really creates that freedom that you've talked about of a self-managing company so it's interesting how a small idea it's not really small idea but a controversial idea can actually have such an incredibly positive impact the whole idea being an entrepreneur and running a successful business and it's not sometimes without courage it takes to do that and also to hire people but as you said entrepreneurs already taken this risk you know in terms of becoming an entrepreneur in the first place so very powerful thank you it's a game Cher of the highest order because once you buy into this concept there's about 10 to 20 other freedom-based opportunities that happen to your life I keep keep discovering new ones every year because the commitment is total there's no negotiating with us you know you get little things like I will be let's say on free days in London and there will be a big opportunity for me to meet someone in the UK the promise is held out if you meet with this person he can put 50 to 100 new people into strategic coach this is really important contact and I said well can I'm on free days and they said what you know I mean it's like all you have to do is have lunch with this person I said n it's not just lunch it' be me thinking about lunch it' be me spending three or four hours after lunch no it'd be a whole day and then at the end of the day I'd feel kind of crappy about blowing away a free day because this was a free day and people are really shocked they said well you're missing hundreds of opportunities and I said said I'm missing hundreds of opportunities already I says the only question is do I have enough opportunities to grow my company and I have the enough opportunities within the 210 days and then my team can develop other opportunities when I'm not there so that leads to the further evolution of an entrepreneurial company from not only a self-managing company but to a self- multiplying company when your team members when you aren't there can actually take advantage of New Opportunities and set things up well and Dan as you're talking what I'm hearing is that there's an abundance of opportunity and what you said before about now I'm thinking more powerfully about fewer things and I can outwork you in 210 days versus someone else's 365 those are very powerful statements so other people have opportunities but they're so tired or they're switching between tasks they never actually get that deep thinking so you're going going to maximize any opportunity that you do come across and that's really the opportunity that free days provides yeah and it's really really interesting because I can take any one of my 210 days and match it up against your best one of your 365 days and I can guarantee you I got more done in that day than you did and I didn't do very much right okay everyone challenge accepted this is great D well thank you very much this is fascinating about how you can take so much time off and why it's good for the business cuz I think everyone's afraid that it's not for the business so I appreciate your insights to that so everyone thank you so much for listening and if you want to hear some more great content please go check us out at strategic podcast.com and also be sure to subscribe on iTunes okay talk to you soon thank you D thank you