[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to a special episode of the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan we're in our 30th year now at strategic coach which is kind of spectacular pretty exciting and we're going to do a couple of episodes on just kind of early starts what things were like and I want to start off by asking you what has changed and what has stayed the same from when strategic coach started in November of 1989 actually I'd been reflecting on this before the project of creating this podcast this particular podcast had come up Shannon and I would say there's three things that are have not changed at all since 1989 so it's November 13th 1989 and the first one is who coaches for and it was for successful talented ambitious entrepreneurs in in 1989 and it has remained constant and I would like to say that I've had many invitations to take strategic coach into other dimensions into other Realms over the past 30 years and I've very politely declined to do that because the type of customer that I really want to be a hero to is exactly what I said a successful talented ambitious entrepreneur with a bigger future than a past and I I would say that that's our definition of who we're looking for 30 years ago and it's exactly the same today the second thing that has stayed exactly the same is our coaching model which is based on the fundamental tool that started all other Thinking Tools and strategic coach which is called the strategy Circle where you simply ask someone to go into the future future pick a date when their life is going to be transformed and four or five things that would be measurements of how their life would be bigger and better in the future and then once they're clear about that then to entertain all the present obstacles that need to be transformed into actions which will lead to the result that they're looking for and that in the essence in 1989 was the coaching model that we used and 30 years later we're using exactly the same coaching model with a lot of different dimensions of obstacles that we found are common for everybody any kind of entrepreneur and I'm really excited that we've just published your life as a strategy Circle as one of our quarterly books so if anyone wants to check it out please go to our strategic coach.com store when we reflected this was the tool that kicked off the company and was part of your partnership with abs and really instigated so much of what we now do and and it's really great cuz that book actually expands from the past into the future but more about that if you check out the book and the third thing is that our business model how we run the company is exactly the same and that is that we have one way of making money and that's to create strategic coach workshops it's been expanded to include the teams and and also the spouses and the family members of the entrepreneur but those other what I would call support workshops are really there to support the focus and the success of the entrepreneurs themselves we started in our first workshop with six people and I was delighted I thought it was tremendous because I had been a coach for 15 years before our first strategic coach Workshop and I was seven years with the strategy Circle as a thinking tool and the whole program has remained constant and consistent with the original coaching model and our business model is exactly the same as it was back then so I've told you about three things that haven't changed so who we do the Strategic coach for what the business model is that we use when we first started in 1989 9 and also the coaching model has stayed exactly the same but I tell you the number one thing and those other three wouldn't be true if I didn't tell you the one thing that is absolutely stayed constant but it's vastly expanded and that's my teamwork with bab Smith on one of her birthdays in the last couple years we all had t-shirts and said no Babs no coach so I'm very very clear that if I hadn't met bab Smith none of the Strategic coach programs at present doly exist would be known to anyone mm and you know your husband and wife your business partners soulmates soulmates creative Partners yeah it's a brilliant partnership to watch and to be a part of and often that can be a sort of divisive factor in the company but with you guys you give it the best possible I think reputation of any couple in business I've ever seen yeah and I think it gives enormous confidence to the other team members in the program I mean you've been with us almost from the very very beginning and there's been a constant just in terms of the teamwork that you see operating between Babs and me which I very much love and appreciate and I do count on it and there's some interesting aspects of that model which again have not changed and that is it's a quarterly workshop and all the money's up front so talk up a little bit about how those things came about because that was a little bit through trial and error as well well first of all I had had 15 years as was a one-on-one coach and about 10 of those years was really painful I believe I was too early for the marketplace coaching in 1974 when I stopped being a copywriter in a big advertising agency and I just went out on my own based on the confidence I had had in kind of coaching some of the smaller owner operated companies that the advertising agency had they make their money on the Chryslers or the World The Craft foods of the world TD Bank of the world so this was a really really large second biggest in Canada but part of a worldwide company called bbdo which is still today one of the major ad agencies in the world I had just gotten an Insight that my desire to help people think about their business period and these were all owners of small mostly family operated businesses is my passion for asking them questions about just what they were going to do about their future period was more interesting to me and I had far far more passion for asking them about the future of their company than actually finding out how do I write the ads for these people and it was mostly print ads it wasn't radio or television at that time so I got this idea you know I could be a coach out in the marketplace I could have my own company and this really was not the first time in my life I thought about being a coach because when I reflected on my entire life up until that point and I was 30 years old when I got this idea that I had always been a coach I had always had the ability to ask people really good questions that got them thinking about how they were thinking and so I would say that the other thing that's remained constant over the 30 years of the program is that every concept we have and every tool we have in the Strategic coach has one purpose and one purpose only and that is to in question form ask people how they're thinking about their thinking so that they're not thinking about things they're not thinking about people they're not thinking about other people's thoughts they're just thinking about their own thinking saying J how am I thinking about this so we have this ability which I won't say we've perfected but we've certainly gotten better at it over a 30-year period of Simply getting people to think about how they're actually thinking about their past present and future and what kind of thinking that would be better for them and produce bigger and better results in the next 90 days so we found that 90 days is just a really really great period between workshops that you can get very excited you can get very clear you can get very conf confident one day to start a quarter and then about 2third of the way through that quarter the tank of gas that you got to fill up at the last Workshop you're starting to get low and you got to check into your Workshop again 90 days later and our whole world runs on this 90day and we didn't invent this there's lots of things in the world the entire economy of the world the economy of you know the countries we operate they all operate on this 90 framework so it's it's an interesting 90 days just seems to be if you got excited about something you can stay excited for basically not more than 90 days and you can be clear not more than 90 days and part of the reason is that momentum starts slowing down and the world changes the one thing that has changed enormously and I've got two or three things that have really really changed the technology that's available to entrepreneurs has has improved exponentially since 1989 I remember people were getting very very very excited about using fax machines I was excited 1989 the other thing was that the computers the personal computers you know which really entered into the entrepreneurial world right around 1980 and for me that is the real change in the entrepreneurial world is when Entre rurs had computer power and then think of the vast Dimensions that that has led to first of all Wireless I mean just having Wireless having the internet and then having the apps almost any capability that can be programmed now is available to entrepreneurs almost for free if you compare the capabilities that someone gets today you know as an entrepreneur that can simply be downloaded for almost free you know might be $5 might be even if it's $500 it gives you access to capabilities which if you had you know when I first started coaching if you had tried to actually have these capabilities it would be in the millions of dollars you know and then all the other technology driven tools that really accelerate and multipy people's communication capabilities their information processing capabilities that's just changed dramatically and before that all of those capabilities had only been within reach of really large corporations corporations and then it became much more for the individual which you've always been a champion of and I think about now and then it went mobile so went from a stationary computer on your desktop to a laptop to you know MacBook Air to an iPad to an iPhone I actually know one of our clients who runs his entire business on an iPhone and an iPad and that's it yeah that has changed enormously and I would say that the types of problems that entrepreneurs had in 1989 hasn't really changed very much but the speed with which interruptions into what they consider to be predictable in the marketplace I think that that has changed drastically and so what we keep pushing for in the program in terms of thinking is that we've extended out the planning time period in 1989 the maximum we went out was 3 years you know we had a three-year framework 12 quarters and I would still say that 3 years is a good time frame for transforming your life and the way you're handling time how you're making your money who it is that you're working with both internally and out in the marketplace and your purpose for being an entrepreneur I still think are Freedom driven I think people become entrepreneurs because they want greater personal individual freedom to actually design their own future and not have their future thrust upon them or change from the outside but I think that the alertness that's required today is vastly greater you could make predictable projections about your industry that might last five or 10 years in those days and there aren't too many Industries today that you can get too far ahead of yourself you know I mean things are changing and transforming and so what we've always looked for is things that if you think about them today in a very clear and confident manner that would still be true in 25 years so we use a 25-year framework instead of a three-year framework now and nice thing that's fallen out of that the 25 years is that it's 100 quarters so we we say think about 25 years and then just what will be the best use of your capabilities your talents and your attention just for the next 90 days Come Back review then do another quarter the next one being better than the quarter and just every quarter is better than the quarter that you're in but you have to do certain things in this quarter so that's that's the game plan and uh here we are you know we're in three countries vastly bigger Vues vastly bigger profits but just how we go about doing what we're doing exactly the same as in 1989 M and just on that planning period Dan there's something very powerful about having a 25-year framework to grow into and then being able to make course Corrections every 90 days I love that Focus because you have some control might be a strong word but you have some impact on the next 90 days and then again you get to refocus and recalibrate every quarter and people see incredible progress often in a much almost get where they think they were going to get in 10 years they'll get there in five just by having that quarterly Focus so that's a really powerful way to look at things so this is kind of fascinating now I just want to do a slight deeper dive on who our first clients were and who they are now because when you first got going you actually befriended and had as clients some very successful people in the financial services industry and that really kind of helped open things up for coaching yeah and I had noticed in the late 1970s first of all who were my one on1 clients so for 15 years from 1974 to 1989 the nature of my business was me you know basically it was just Dan as a coach and I would go out and had really good referral ability because what I noticed is that the best of my clients really like liked just checking in every 90 days and having me go through the thinking process with them of what had they achieved for the last 90 days where were they right now and what did they want to do for the next 90 days and this was all created through trial and error you know how you actually set up the structures and the one thing that I learned and this was because of two bankruptcies was that I didn't have enough Financial guarantees into the future that I could not be paid in 30 days you know and some of my clients were 30-day pay I do the work and then 30 days later I get paid and then we had some Financial downturns I estimate since 1974 I've been through seven or eight major downturns in the market caused by something or other I didn't have enough caring power that I could sustain people instead of paying me in 30 days they paid me in 60 days or they paid me in 90 days or they didn't pay me at all so in 1983 84 I came to a decision that all the money would be upfront so we would sign on for a year and I would get paid for that year UPF front and I started off you know I would get paid a quarter UPF front but it just came to me going to the movies one day and I said you know I should be in the movie business cuz in the movie business when do you pay to see the movie on the way out no no no you don't pay on the way out you pay on the way in and sports you know which is a form of entertainment too all the money's up front and I says from this point forward I get paid up front so here we are sitting with upwards of 3,000 active clients in the Strategic coach and we have half of our next year's income in hand at any given time has simplifi your business enormously if you don't have receivables and I have actually transformed the thinking of a lot of entrepreneurs of saying what part of your business can be a no receivables business I mean if you're selling a product probably and you're doing it in bigger and bigger amounts probably you will have receivables but I said you know the simplest model and I did this for survival purposes I didn't do it you know it wasn't like I was you know a strategic genius here or nothing but I said I've been bankrupt twice I won't be bankrupt a third time so that came to me and you know people said well you know that's not the way the world works and I said I don't care how the world works is the way I'm going to work and there were people who said no I won't do it that way you do the work and then Bill me and I said nope don't work that way so obviously when you introduce a new strategy you have to be willing to have people say no and some people did but I found more and more as the word went around that I was really good at what I was doing that they would follow whatever rules that you want and that's the other thing I said be very very clear about your rules and don't deviate from your rules establish standards don't deviate from your standards and so we've been very good at that over the years and you said people that our clients were connected to talk a little bit about financial advisors because they really helped connect you with everyone that you want to be connected with well there's something that's really changed and that is the nature of the Financial Services Industries it was a very segmented industry there were hundreds and hundreds of companies and I found at first it was the life insurance industry that I was attracted to working with and some of the top agents in the world actually there's an organization called top of the table and I was fortunate that some of my very first very successful very talented life insurance financial advisers were actually in life insurance and I remember I was invited in 1981 to their annual conference in Florida it wasn't for pay but they paid your way and you were given four days at a great resort beach resort and I was able just to spend those days just really talking to the agents and I began to recognize that these every really successful entrepreneur has a really great life insurance agent and that if I got to know the life insurance agents and I really did good work for them that they would mention it to their customers who were almost all business owners every kind of business every kind of business product or service and gradually I said you know all I have to do is stay with this one industry they will introduce me into all the other Industries and that proved absolutely accur accurate and I think it took about 20 years and then all of a sudden I noticed the number of clients that we had started to grow and grow and grow that they outnumbered the financial advisers and now you know I start really big workshops and the other thing that was just workshops that's the thing that's remained the same I do not do one-on-one coaching and I get lots of offers you know I'll send my private jet I'll write you a big check and I said no no I just do workshops I don't do any other kind of coaching so keeping your model the business model and the coaching model exactly the same in a world that's changing everybody's doing different versions of their business they're starting five or six different businesses my mind doesn't work that way I've got one one model I've got one company we've got one way of doing it and we've kept it that way for 30 years well I love it Dan and I think especially in coaching you know when I joined in 1991 I used to have to explain that strateg coach was not a bus line well we're a bus to the future you know we're a transportation vehicle to a bigger and better future exactly but I had to explain that to the assistant barring the way to potential clients it's really fun to kind of recap what's changed and what stayed the same it's impressive to me that the coaching model the business model and who our clients are and entrepreneurs really have not changed in terms of what their issues are over that time period And I think there's a steadiness and consistency that is incredibly count aable for our clientele and people know exactly what to expect so thank you it was very insightful thank you shamon at strategic coach we focus on growth in every area of your business and life leading to Freedom that entrepreneurs dream of join Dan Sullivan founder of strategic coach for a brand new OnDemand web presentation it's a breakthrough hour of wisdom insight and proven strategies over 18,000 entrepreneurs can't be wrong watch today at Dan webinar.com [Music]