Capability Amplifier EP#84 - Fast Vision Delivery and Execution

All right. One of the biggest things that we as entrepreneurs struggle with and founders is vision delivery. So if you're an entrepreneur, you see a vision in your head, especially if you're a quick start and then you've got this big idea. You can see it from start to finish. But then you go to your teams and you might get bogged down because there's a fact finder there that asks you so many questions. You get lost and you realize that your mindset, their mindset, and you might not have a framework in mind. You just have a vision. So what we're going to spend some time on in this episode is how do you communicate your big idea vision and actually get it executed? And this is one of the things that I always admire about you, Dan. You're cranking out a minimum of four books a year. Really, it's closer to six or seven, plus all the tools which are ahead of the curve. I know in our last strategic coach meeting, you said that you're close to a quarter ahead already, and that's your goal.

Maintain that it's a permanent ability, that I'm always a quarter ahead. Right.

So I think this is an opportunity to get into your head and ask the question that everyone I know wants to know, which is, okay, Dan's managed to build this incredible team that can execute on vision. And how do you communicate that? And if you were going to talk to someone right now, and this is a pretty good setup, let's say you're a busy entrepreneur and you don't spend enough time in your unique ability, your own superpower. You're frustrated because your teams are lagging. They don't move along. They don't understand the structure.

They.

Sometimes it's just getting that momentum going and building the team and, like, who the who should be and what their roles and responsibilities are, and how do you communicate that? So let's do some deconstructing and simplifying, shall we?

Yeah, well, you know, I'd like to hit head on the thing of entrepreneurs have visions, you know, and first of all, I think this is a bit misrepresented in the movies and on television and, you know, and novels. You know, it goes back to the Ayn Rand thing, you know, with Howard Roark and, you know, the, you know.

You know, the whole notion of the rugged individualists and everything else. But when you really examine where there is great entrepreneurism and great things are being created, the entrepreneur is depicted as, you know, sort of, you know, getting lightning bolts from heaven, you know, and the normal human beings don't get these, you know, these kind of visitations from the divine. And. But what I, you know what, I'll just say how I look at it personally for myself, and then I'll say where I think I've avoided a lot of problems by doing it the way that I do, and then I'll talk about the problems. So, first of all, it isn't so much my team that I take into consideration. It's actually the clients. It's actually the. I call it, you know, any idea you have, make sure you test on check writers. So, you know, I, And I say the only people who can know whether one of your new ideas are good is not. Are the people who would write a check for it. So I've got. I've got this attitude. And the other thing, Mike, is that no matter how brilliant I think my idea is, it's only 50% good. So if I work on it for a week, it's 50% good. If I work on it for two years, it's 50% good until I actually test it on check writers, okay? Because the only people to say that this is a good idea are the people who would buy it, use it, and get benefit out of it. My team doesn't have anything to say until I've gotten a read from the check writers. Okay? I never test out a new idea on my team.

But I've got a kind of a really favorable situation is I have a thing called a workshop where I can just test out a new, you know, I can, you know, I just put an idea on the screen and say, hey, I've got this idea. I want. I just like some feedback on, does this mean anything to you? And then, you know, you get a conversation going. Well, the moment the conversation starts, the idea starts to change, you know, and from my perspective, the idea starts to improve when I get the input of my clients. And this is all witnessed by my team. So, you know, they're watching me play with the ideas or watching the testing. And so they know when I, you know, I come to them with the idea. It's already been market tested.

Well, and that's great. I completely agree. I'm a big believer in doing that. And I know historically the way I'd implement this is in the past when I had Traffic Geyser, Instant Customer, and my subsequent businesses. I made a point of doing three to four live events a year. And at every single one, I rolled out a brand new idea, a brand new product, and I pitched it from Audience from stage. So the basic idea is deliver a whole bunch of value, deliver on the promise, show social proof of how something's working. And you do that very much inside the workshop. So it'll be like, let me show you a new thinking tool, Let me demonstrate it, show you how I'm using this, and let's do it together. And then you incrementally bring the audience through and then get feedback, which is perfect. It's like having.

Whatever focus group, a real time focus group, and you can look at the lights being turned on and you have enough momentum of whether it's 30 people or 100 people or more in the Zoom room in this case, or, you know, versus a physical event. So the question I have for you is.

Think about someone who wants to do more of this. So they're in a space where they know they're ineffective at vision delivery, motivating the team to follow along and implement the vision. And they haven't been in the habit of testing out their ideas on paying customers. So the struggle, I could see someone who might be listening or watching this right now saying, well, that's all fine for Dan. You've got a 40 year organization that you've been developing, evolving, but struggling with, gaining momentum, but more importantly, changing the habits, the mental mindset, and gaining the courage and the confidence to be able to practice this without all the failure mechanisms that are preventing them from moving forward. How do you leap the courage gap?

Yeah. Well, first of all, any story that I would tell here is kind of peculiar to the circumstances and how our company developed. So this is how I read how our company has, has grown. First, first of all, one of the unique parts of Coach is that all of our team members actually, on a regular basis, come into contact with the customers and clients. Okay. And I really think that that's a strength of our company because.

Where I think entrepreneurs get very, very unhappy with their team members and where the team members are actually deserving that the entrepreneur be unhappy with them is where there's a total separation between the employees. We'll call them employees. The employees don't know what the company is for. They don't actually know. Yeah, we're doing all this work, but they have no notion of what the work that they do in the company actually, who is it for, how is it used and everything. So the. So they're ignorant and their ignorance makes them defensive. The only thing that they know is that.

Almost anything new can, can be a danger to their job.

And the reason is because they're completely ignorant. This is why government bureaucracies never work, is because.

What'S all this for? You know, what's all this for? Who. Who in a government bureaucracy knows the actual benefit? The person who actually benefits from the government bureaucracy, you know, and it's not necessarily of size. So, for example, you can have great companies. I always thought that the Four Seasons hotels were a great organization. You know, right now they've got 40,000 employees worldwide if you take all the hotels around the world. But.

The people who work in those hotels are totally clear about who the customers are, that they're being served. And I think that's the crucial thing. And I think if the entrepreneur hasn't set up a situation where his team actually knows who the customers are, then they're going to push back against his new ideas because they don't know what the new ideas do for their job security.

Yes.

I mean, does that make sense?

It does, it does. And I'm making a point of while you're speaking, I have a transcript running so I can read your words because these are complex ideas.

And.

The way I would echo this when I look through the structure, I examine everything through a business lens is I have six steps that I'll run something through. So the first one is mindset, and that's my mindset and my target audience's mindset. I need to know what they love, what they hate, what they think about, and everything about them. And I always have a character of one. So if I write a book.

The way I write copy, the way I write anything, is I turn on the camera and I speak to an individual who's my idealized client, as though I'm having a conversation. I transcribe it in real time. I'm always using otter or if I'm doing books, I use rev for that. And then I paste it in a book like document so it actually looks like a book. And then I print it off and I highlight and mark it up, because sometimes operating in the physical world is better. And I'm sharing that. Just again, this is very how to y. But the second phase, though, is market, and that is again, diving down even deeper into the market and where they live and who owns relationships with them. So I think through the concentric rings of influence, if you have your target audience, you have affinity groups they may belong to, you have influencers who influence them. But I think through the lens of an ambassador who can influence the influencers who could put. Who would be willing to put their reputation on the line on behalf of you. The third is the model, which is the business you're selling. That's the product or the perception of what they receive. The next is the message. What are the words they need to hear to raise their hands and say, yes, the media is the next? In other words, do they like books, do they listen, do they do podcasts? And the final one are the multipliers, which are all the little tactics that can make these things happen. So I way, way went deep here. But when I listened to what you just talked about, really everything revolves around.

How incredibly valuable and important that one on one relationship is. And for you, if you're Dan Sullivan, you've got to say, think about, maybe it's Brett Kaufman, maybe it's think about Charlie Epstein, maybe think about, you know, Brian Sweet or whomever, you know, Lisa Cheney, for example.

You've got to visualize that individual and say, how would they react or respond to this right now? So that's my overanalyzed way of digging deep. But did that resonate with what you had said?

Yeah, the thing, you know, that.

You know, probably.

You know, we've adjusted our model many times since I was just a one on one coach, and I was a one on one coach for 15 years. And it was, you know, for most of that time it was Dan and, you know, keeping my finances in my head and, you know, I mean, everything. But what I developed was.

You know, a kind of a curriculum that any client I would have would go through the same steps. And what differentiated them is that all the steps were simply.

Containers for their unique experience. So I was able to kind of create a repetitive process. But what the actual content was was unique to the, unique to the client. You know, so everybody has the same little box and they have 30 seconds to fill them in. But what goes into the box is totally different content, you know, and actually Jeff Madoff, who I just started a new podcast series with, we're just in the launch stage right now.

We did a podcast on.

You know, the creative people don't like being contained with in other people's methods.

And he says, it's always puzzled me how you get away with it because you seem to have an incredible amount of structure, you know, that seems common to everybody. Do it. And I said, yeah, but the structure is there just so that they can get a handle on their own unique experience. So, you know, it looks like they're all doing the same thing every day, but they're all doing the same thing on something unique, which is their own experience. And they'll stay with it for five or six hours because it's just about them, you know, it's not about me. It's not, it's not, you know, you don't have to believe what Dan believes about it. So the whole question is, you know, what sense are you making out of your own experience here? So, and I think that's a trick that I, you know, I mean, it's a, you know, it's almost a 50 year trick that I've learned is how can I get people to be very systematic but at the same time be unique at the same time as they're being systematic?

And I've got an insight on that too. So keep, keep going.

If you had any, you know, I know a lot better. I know a lot more about it now than I did 20 years ago. And the, the other aspect, the other aspect about it is.

And this changes a lot. And, you know, and I've talked to entrepreneurs about that. In 1984, I decided that I would never get killed because of receivables again. In other words, where I had done work but. And the work was completed and I had billed the customer and the client, but instead of 30 days, instead of 60 days, I would get 90 days. And I didn't have the staying power. And I went bankrupt twice because of receivables. And you know, and the bank doesn't care. You know, I mean, the other thing I learned was that banks only love you when, when you don't need them. And you know, and so I said, you know, we, we have to. I can't live with this doing the work and not getting paid. So what we, you know, we just adapted is that you pay before the process, you know, in, in the program as it exists now. You pay at the beginning of the year for the whole year and at all times. We have half of our years revenue coming in. We're always, you know, we always have it. And Mike, the thing that this does, it's an amazing. There's an amazing number of tensions in an organization that are simply the result of unpredictable. Unpredictable and unreliable cash flow.

Yes.

A lot of the anxieties that the entrepreneur passes off to their staff is because.

One is that the finances are not certain. And the other thing is that the employees don't know what the entrepreneur knows about the finances.

Yes. And I think as a founder, part of your responsibility, unspoken or known or unknown, is to create the illusion of security and transfer certainty to your team just as much as you're transferring certainty to your Customer?

Well, yeah, and the thing is that the company can't be as important to them as it is to me. No, it's a job. I mean, a lot of them love their job, and we try to work that. The work that you're doing. We apply unique ability to our team in the same fashion as we apply it to our customers. But, you know, we just had a great digital person who is in. She's been in for about two and a half years, and she's just worked wonders as far as scheduling and filling up with events, and she's got a wonderful personality. But about two weeks ago, two weeks ago, she just got an incredible offer, you know, probably a 40% jump. She's in charge and everything. She says, you know, this is. This is so mainline to where I want to go in the future. She said, I'm going to take it. And, you know, and everybody is sad to see her go. Everybody has voiced appreciation. But, you know.

The whole point is that people do things for their reasons, not mine. You know, and I think the thing is that it's not possible for your. For your team to be as in love with the company as you are. It's just not possible. And it's unreasonable for you to expect them to. You know, unless you're giving them 50% of the money, 50% of the ownership, they can't. They can't. They simply can't have the emotional commitment. You can. And it's unfair of you to even suggest that they should be.

That. That makes a ton of sense. So my interpretation of where we are in here is.

Number one, always test on check writers. Completely agree with that. The next one is.

Really, they've got to be engaged in working with the clients and the customers all the time.

Have direct. Direct contact and understanding between your team and who you're serving.

Right. And you can't expect them to ever understand.

Where they are inside of a bureaucracy. That's always a complicated math problem. And unless they're an owner, it's a job.

And so what, you know, if we really. You've got to rely on the frameworks and the systems. And the one commentary I wanted to give you is.

You know, one of the reasons why.

I love coach so much, it's so valuable, is because to me, it's like going to church. I like having a structure laid in front of me. And just for the record, I was raised a Catholic like you. I never liked going to church, okay? To me, it was hellacious. And I didn't like any of the Structure. I'd never identified with it, but I know from my dad and my mom it was a good tool. And I had an old mentor, he used to say, I like going there, just clearing my mind and hearing the stories. There's something it does for me, it cleans me up. And so the analogy I wanted to create is to me, attending coach is getting to experience the frameworks, looking at my life and my business through a structure which mentally I'm a multiplier, I'm not a simplifier. So I like tools. But what I observe, and I certainly have seen culturally is I think a lot of the customers want to be Dan someday and want to be strategic coach. They want the self running organization. They see it and they see an opportunity to be able to express themselves creatively as a founder and an owner, to experience multiplying and to spend more of their time in their unique ability.

Right.

That's part of the brand promise. And so.

What happens is they see the tools as a springboard. And because they're interactive, they're engaging and participatory, there's a sense of ownership that naturally occurs. And instead of it being a form of.

Prison, it's a springboard and a platform. And I've observed that over and over again. It's a mechanism where they can take ownership in the process, the creative process. And because that is your methodology of teaching and training and coaching, that's part of what makes it work. And there's so much nuance to that. I could never say now that you've adapted to delivering by zoom and digitally. Now, the way you manage our exercises, where you've got a new tool, you demonstrate it, talk about the philosophy, show what you do, and then let's do it together and then break out into breakout rooms.

I think to the average Joe who'd see this, he'd be like, well, I can do that too. Until they realize there's an enormous amount of team nuance, a lot of unmentioned flow to keep things on track and also to regain and retain total control, which you've expertly figured out to do.

So again, as usual, I went way, way deep on it, but do you have any? No.

I think it's an interesting. First of all, I think the.

We're very fortunate in the age that we live that entrepreneurs can literally custom design organizations for their own personal reasons and for.

The kind of creative game they can play with their customers, with their team members. So I think a lot of what we've talked about in the last 20 minutes. Mike, 25 years ago, you couldn't even talk about this stuff because it wasn't possible. And I think that the very, very rapid movement into the virtual world actually creates the possibility of enormous creative flexibility in how you construct an organization. I would say that.

About 50% of the character that your organization takes on is purely a function of who you are as an entrepreneur. And therefore you can't copy someone else's organization because you don't.

It's kind of like you can see the appliances, but you have no idea of the plumbing.

That is so true. The way I've been telling the story lately is even though Steve Jobs has been dead for over a decade, his DNA was injected in that organization. And Apple wouldn't be the most valuable company depending on the time of day, but in general, they're the most valuable corporation in the world. And you look at what Elon's done, I think long after he goes, right now when he opens up his mouth, the stock price increases. And it's not because he's a great communicator, he mumbles and bumbles his way through, but he's a great visionary. And I think that vision, plus the fact that you can imagine yourself into a brand and feel the benefits.

Matters so much. And that is the DNA of the founder.

And whether it's 50% or 100%, I think when it's well done, it's going to live on long after that founder's there. And the bigger the platform of the founder, the stronger the brand and the business is. So. Well, I think, as usual, this has been another amazing episode. Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap this segment up?

Well, I would say.

One of the things that I've been.

Very careful about and very consciously careful about is to, you know, and it's on two levels. One is my relationship with Babs, and the other one is.

Has to do with.

My, my understanding the team, what I think my own future is in the company, constantly projecting ahead of them that what I'm doing. And you know, one of the things that's very, very, very important.

You know, for. And our, our organization, you know, historically has been 80 to 85% women. Okay. And I've seen some real disasters take place in husband and wife.

You know.

Entrepreneurial companies where you have a husband and wife who are co owners and doing it where either one of the partners.

Courts with their staff, you know, and it's disaster. It's just absolutely disaster. And so, you know, right from the beginning, for you know, more than 30 years. The Dan and Babs are totally committed to each other and there's nothing else going on. You know, there's nothing else going on. So that's one guarantee that I do. And the other guarantee is that I don't have some other business in mind. I'm not involved in any other business and this is the only business that I have. And this is the business I'm totally committed to. And I'm not planning to leave anytime soon.

You know, and I'm going to be growing. I'm not just, not just on cruise control that every quarter I have, I have things that scare me. And going into the future there's always going to be new things that scare me just as much as things scared me 20 years ago or 25 years ago. And I want them to know that not only is the commitment the way it always has been, but the commitment is getting greater. And I think that gives them a lot of assurance. They don't have to worry anything about my relationship with Babs and they don't have to worry about anything related to our notion of the future.

That that is super powerful. Just clear, obvious, single minded commitment. And nobody ever doubts what those are. That level.

Yeah, I'm one of those one master dogs.

Just.

It'S just one, you know, it's just one person as one future and there isn't anything else.

Yes, that's certainty, commitment, single mindedness. I think that's a big part of the answer here. Well, let's wrap this segment up. Another great episode. And anything you want to add before we bring this baby home?

The one thing I would say, and it's just an observation that came through from our conversation that if you went.

Back.

You know, if you went back 50 years ago when you know, textbooks are written on business and you know, there's commentary in the news media about business and there's articles written. It was about the, the infinite corridors of.

Large corporations. Large, you know, and you know, all the amazing skills it takes to run, you know, you know, large corporations and the psychology of corporate leadership and you know, and everything. And you move forward 50 years to where we are right now. My feeling is all the most important studies into leadership and you know, into the psychology of having a dynamic organization, having great teamwork will have nothing to do with corporations. It'll all be entrepreneurial networks from now on.

And you know what tells me that is the way that large corporations are trying to be okay for the cancel culture. When Coca Cola and when Nike and everything you know, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball association, and they're paying attention to complainers on Twitter and complainers. I said, you know, there's no more gas in the tank for this model.

And in this particular case, I can't agree more. And it really goes down to this vision of what, you know, you've talked about for a long time, which is what the Free Zone is all about. It's collaborative relationships and totally entrepreneurial. Yes. And the combination of what we're going to start seeing so rapidly with NFTs and blockchain smart contracts are going to ensure that people get paid, results happen when expectations are met and results are created. And the fact that with NFTs there are mechanisms in place to manufacture currency and increase the value of that at an astronomical rate without being dependent upon traditional fiat and be able to convert it in and out of fiat rapidly as well. And that's where we're going to see these, I think for a while, dangerous, absurd wealth creation.

Spikes. But it's just like the early days of the Internet. There's going to be some shenanigans afoot before it stabilizes. And it wasn't too long ago people thought selling books online was crazy.

And 424 hours in Holland, they thought it was about tulips.

Yeah, right on. So, yeah, there's going to be some, there's going to be some bodies in the streets, but we're going to just see.

So many remarkable.

Transformations. I'm so excited for it. And that window is going to continue to accelerate faster and faster and faster.

This is a side note, but I met up with Lee Richter.

Gathered together a small group of.

NFT crypto experts and we sat around for three hours earlier this week and some of the ideas that I got exposed to for how products and businesses are being financed and it's like a new form of crowdsourcing. So a notion, for example, there's a, I'll just say a very famous performer composer is financing a concert with NFT backed art that will be displayed on stage.

Okay.

So the whole idea is people can buy unique art, but it's all digital, that's going to be visible and then they can do whatever they want with it after the concert. But their investment.

Financing, yeah, it's financing the concert and they could set it up so the blockchain could give them, let's say you'd get certain percentage of the concert and the ticket sales for making the investment, which could be paid instantaneously as it occurs. So you know, and we started just creating a bunch of ideas on how to, you know, prevent.

Counterfeits, for example, counterfeit consumables. And again, there's smart contracts. So many, yeah, so many fascinating ways. And I'm interested in inventing these things, you know, and helping businesses move to the next level by, you know, reimagining their businesses and adding value. And so it was just like.

To be exposed to like the technology. The developers who are thinking about this right now are multiplying at incredible rates. And they're talking to the new financiers of the world who are thinking without barriers, borders, politics, party or religion. And that's a new evolutionary mindset. There is no them in the world that they are creating.

Yeah, no, I mean, yeah.

I was reading Tom Wu. Tom Wu is a really good writer. He's a lawyer and he's a professor at Columbia University. And his real interest is information companies. And he said, you know, information companies are, are in the business of doing something very, very different than, you know, you know, making pipes or making shoes or anything. He says they're doing something different. But he says, fortunately we actually have a model for how information companies develop. And it starts with Western Union and then it's AT and T. And to a certain extent.

Standard Oil was actually an information company.

About transportation, about lots of different things. But then you have the NBC, you have the Hollywood studios, and you know, and then it gets up into the Internet, the microchip and Internet based thing. And he says there's actually a model here. And he said it seems to repeat itself over and over that something new gets created at the beginning. Almost anybody with an idea can get involved and actually start something. And then there's kind of a center forms of the industry where the general public starts getting involved and the general public wants to have absolute reliability without them having to do any thinking.

Bespoken.

Yeah, no, they just want, they want reach and reliability, but they don't want. Please don't make me think.

Please make me think. And you know, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make you think, you know.

But he said that in each case.

These.

Information companies got bigger. They got too big for anybody who's good and you break them up. And he's really pushing for the breakup of Facebook. He says, Facebook, they're now at the point where they're suppressing innovation everywhere. And he says there's one thing of creating the highest level value to the public and then you cross over where you're killing any kind of innovation that might Knock you off your perch. And he says Facebook crossed that a long time ago. He doesn't believe Google has, but he believes that Facebook.

Has done it. So it's really interesting. And he's very well thought of in Congress. He's. And he's absolutely charming. If you go on to YouTube, he's got a whole bunch of interviews and everything. He's this very charming person. He says, you know.

This has happened over and over again. We have a model for it. And they've crossed over. They've crossed over. They're not a good company anymore.

Yes.

I couldn't agree more. And.

That'S.

I think I'm gonna leave it at that. I have some thoughts, but that's a great, great way to end this episode.

So, yeah, we've got, yeah, we always, we always finish our trip by giving an indication of four or five more trips. Yes.

Yeah, well, we've got a, we've got a bunch more in the hopper that we'll be recording soon and we got a bunch of ideas. So I took great notes and I'm excited for our next one. So here's what I'd like to leave our audience with. First of all, if you want to get some more insight as to what the experience of being in Strategic Coach is like, I invite you right now to pull out your mobile phone and text the letter CA to 858-43-45316. I'm going to send you a six minute video which is it's life in Strategic Coach, what it's like and how it can benefit you and the quality of your life. Definitely worth checking out and some other goodies as well. And then of course, you can always head on over to capabilityamplifier.com share it with your friends. Comment please. And there's also a link where you can click and leave us an audio message that Dan and I will get and we'll follow up with you especially if you've got an idea for an upcoming episode. So, Dan, anything else you'd like to add?

I feel very satisfied with what we did.

Well done, sir. Another, another success. So thank you as usual, Dan, and thank you everyone for being here, listening, watching, whatever, however you're consuming the content. We really appreciate you. Bye bye.