How To Amplify Your International Capabilities And Opportunities

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts.

Hi there. This is Dan Sullivan and this is the Capability Amplifier. And this is my podcast with Mike Koenigs. Mike and I are a good team together.

We always have fun. This is so great, Dan. Another perfect day.

Yeah. Lots to talk about these days, Mike. You know, both of us like to see trends. We like to see the end of trends, we like to see the unpredictable emergence of trends. And these are very rich days.

They are when you can actually create them. And I look at this, so I'm going to say something that'll be wildly unpopular. I've loved Covid, and the reason for that is, is I've loved hibernating. I love the simplicity. I've had more client activity than I could imagine. And a lot of things I've been talking about for years and years and years happened about between three to 10 times faster than I anticipated them because of this event. And so many people right now are looking for solutions, opportunities, ways to digitize and dematerialize and virtualize, but also to change their thinking and change their businesses and also improve the quality of their lives in every way possible, whether it's financial, relationship, physical. And that also makes this conversation so interesting because we're all about amplifying capabilities. But what that leads us to, and I like the tactical conversation today, what we discussed talking about is how can we tap into international audiences as business owners and business leaders. You had brought up Mexico specifically, something I'm really, really fascinated by, but also leveraging the way we're doing business because Strategic Coach is zoomified like crazy shifted how you're doing business in a matter of weeks. It was so fast, so rapid and elegantly done. And your team, because I've been talking to them, part of my Free Zone Frontier project has been working with your sales team. They're so open to change and so ready and. And they're excited about the possibility of virtualizing because let's face it, there's a whole bunch of business owners who didn't want to travel before and now will have a possibility and potential to work and do Strategic Coach from anywhere in the world. So let's talk a little bit about the framework, talk a little bit about where we want to go today, and let's go for it.

Well, I think that the biggest change in the world is, as we mentioned, and these are not my original ideas. This is a very, very astute geopolitical strategist. By the name of Peter Zion, who I really follow very, very closely. And he's kind of new on the scene for me. So I've been very, very startled and actually pleased to have a fresh look at the world because I'm a news junkie. My mother taught me when I was six years old in 1950 to follow the news, and I was a good son. Anyway, Peter says that the last 75 years have been an unnatural world. That basically what we call the global society and the global capitalism, the global market is the result of decisions by one country who have, on one hand, the greatest military in the history of the world. And anybody who wants to go into that in detail will find out that that's uniformly true. And the other thing is that the US as the biggest consumer market of anywhere in the world, and practically anything you want to create someplace else in the world, Americans will buy it. And the other thing that's very, very powerful is that the US currency is actually the only currency in the world. Everything else is just an investment that you hope works out against the US dollar. And that's because 100% of all commodity trades in the world are done in US Dollars. All trade coming out of China, all trade going into China is done in US dollars. And somebody said, well, why does everybody use the dollar? And I said, the reason is why everybody uses the dollar is because everybody uses the dollar.

Well, that. And, you know, you can convert it, right? You can convert it into everything, but you can't do that in rupees, for.

Example, or Canadian dollars or Mexican pesos. Well, ask the drug dealers what their preferred currency is. Generally speaking, if it's not going to cause them too much trouble, they would like it in US Dollars, I'll tell you that. Yeah, weapons dealers, preferred currency is US Dollars. So the whole pain, if you got the currency and you got the biggest economy and you've got the biggest military, you're number one. But the US has been a seller. And I told you the difference. You know, in strategic coach, you want to be the buyer as you go forward in your life. And my definition, the seller is someone who can get rejected. The person who does the rejecting is the buyer. Okay, so my sense is that the US decided to be a seller in 1945, that they would sell the rest of the world. Not making war with each other. They sold the rest of the world to repair their economies and to get into what became a global economy. And they sold the rest of the world that if they use lots of energy, all the energy would be safely protected getting the energy to you. So it was a selling job. And the American people actually didn't profit very much from that. As a matter of fact, they lost all their factories to places overseas. Most of the factories that they had, lots of businesses, they lost them to other countries. And starting when the Soviet union collapsed in 1991, one of the greatest geopolitical events of history, and nobody talked about it because they didn't want things to change because the US had created a really wonderful world. And now the Americans, I think, have fundamentally come to a decision. We're not going to be the seller anymore. We're going to be the buyer. So we're going to focus on our own economy. And if you want to be part of the game, make us an offer and we'll consider that you can be part of our game. And I think that's the biggest thing. So you, Michael, who live in San Diego, are right at the border of a country that's going to be really lucky in the new world, Mexicans, because the US has looked at all their supply chains around the world, and they said anything that requires high technology comes back to the United States. Anything that requires cheap labor goes to Mexico. And I think Mexico, they have a very young population. They have massive amounts of young people who can enter the workforce. And I think Mexico just has very, very brave future. Not so much Canada, by the way.

Yeah. So I'm going to give you a little history on my experience with Mexico, because going back almost 20 years ago, when we first moved here, the quick background was I had been doing electronic marketing forever. I had an agency, and I also had been doing software for a long time. My wife had worked in the medical world and then subsequently shifted over and worked and ran Deepak Chopra's marketing. So she had moved over to what I'll call the energetic spiritual publishing. New Agey. Plus, with that medical background, made her very interesting and attractive to a lot of people. We met some people who started an alternative integrative clinic in Mexico called Sonaviv, which did true functional medicine. They had access to tools and technologies that weren't necessarily FDA approved, but had a long history of being very effective for alternative cancer work, et cetera, et cetera. And they're right on the Baja. So for us, we started working with them and we built out their website, their electronic marketing. I trained their teams, but also started doing video marketing before there was a YouTube. So I started recording testimonials and finding ways to help their sales team enroll patients who had Health challenges. But in doing so, we crossed the border every month and we stayed down there for days at a time. And this is 20 years ago when the Baja was very different than it is now. It has come a long way. You'd go in, you'd cross the border and you're like, holy cow, this is a developing country, what people would call a third world country. Just like that. You know, it's like boom and you're over. And we also fell in love with Mexico. And as I like to say, Mexico and Mexicans, not Mexicans, because there is a culture of a hard working behavior in general. There's also a manana mentality that existed, it doesn't so much now. Things have been so Americanized and westernized down there. But also we saw the evolution of electronic marketing video, the adoption of tech mobiles and all that, and also watched what manufacturing was doing. And one thing that did happen is Mexico had some very good technical colleges and technical schools. And I remember talking to Americans who had manufacturing down there and they were telling me they chose Mexico over China because they got just as high, in some cases higher quality product. They felt that it was easier to have relationships of trust in Mexico than in China. And specifically anyone who's done business in China can attest to this. You know, it's a lot easier to get screwed over there, except you're on the other side of the world and then you've got a language barrier and a culture barrier that is definitely very different. So your secret decoder ring necessary to do business was more challenging. So with all that in mind now, for example, especially if you speak Spanish and you can go over there, although young people, everyone speaks English anyway, it doesn't really matter, but you can go over there and get so much more done for so much less. And there is an enormous amount of money in Mexico, very sophisticated business owners who are looking for deep relationships on both sides of the border. And so one of my goals, and I've got some good friends who've been moving over and they're spending more than half the year in Mexico now. It's one of my intentions as well, is to spend a lot more time, build a studio, you can get high speed data, it's very safe. You know, all the stories about it being unsafe are conditional in general and also behavioral. In other words, you can become a target if you act like an idiot. But I think right now what we have is an opportunity because so many people are Americanized and westernized in Mexico. They love our culture in General, they also are experiencing the tensions and they want an out. You know, they want access to America on demand, just like we want access to better costs in an expanded market. My summary here is I think for Strategic Coach and we haven't even talked about this, Dan, but I'll just present the idea as we build out our free zone frontier and our marketing campaigns that we're doing, looking at and thinking about incorporating direct marketing for Mexico would be a smart. I know there's some but probably not a lot of clients and customers but in a virtualized world it just makes sense.

Yeah, well, it's very interesting again using the research and the analysis of other people, but especially Peter Nazi and he has a great website by the way, if you go to his website and he does blogs about twice a day. But he said that basically there's about five or six countries that have a good future. Mexico is number one. Other countries, their biggest problem is rapidly aging populations. So all around the world there's only six countries. Significant countries, maybe tiny countries, but significant countries, you know, countries with muscle. And Mexico is one of them. In South America, Argentina is the jewel. They have just about everything going for them except they have really, really bad government. Their government's just been awful for longest time. Okay. And Mexico's has improved over time. And then France, France has a fairly still significantly young population. They have a lot of problems related to where they are but they have a self sufficient economy. They have their own military, very significant military. The UK is going to leave the eu. You know, that's already decided the European Union. But they'll have to probably enter into the North American Free Trade Zone with Canada, United States and Mexico because whatever business they're doing with Europe, they're going to have to do it with someone. And North America would be their bet. So they'll be fine, but they have to be part of something much bigger. And then you have certain countries like Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden that are well situated, good economies, good work ethic, they do have aging populations. And then Turkey is a big player. And Turkey is right geographically, strategically, right in the middle of everything in the Middle East. And they're big population, young population, best military in the Middle East. Size wise, they're the biggest military. The Israelis are the best military maybe in the world, but they're small. I think Israel will be real good. And the reason is that I think Israel is going to become the world's tech power. I think more innovation is going to come out of Israel technology wise than any other country.

They've been importing talent from Europe.

Well, they got all the smart Russians when the Soviet Union collapsed, all the smart Russians, it would be the United states importing roughly 35 million smart people. Right.

And that's a loss to the United States. But also the fact that we've got the relationship with you.

They're almost the 51st state, though, in their relationship, because their tech is all geared a lot of its weaponry. I mean, the military, they're basically the R and D division of the Department of Defense for the United States. Okay, now here's the big one. And I've been looking at for all of all time, what we call history has been in the Eastern Hemisphere. Okay? So the Eastern Hemisphere starts on the east. If you're going east, it starts in Greenwich, England, because Greenwich, meantime, is where the day starts. Every day, it starts there. So everything to the east of England is basically where most of human history has happened. And that goes to the middle of the Pacific. The Americas, both North, Central and South, are in the Western Hemisphere. And there's very little history there. Very little history there. And my thesis is that for the rest, going centuries into the future, all the really important history is going to be in the Western Hemisphere and not in the Eastern Hemisphere.

That's my intuitive hit on that is. I think you're nuts on.

I've never been described that way.

Yeah, it's a Minnesota term. That's what we used to say. Yep. If you got it right. And it's like. Yep, that feels about right to me.

That feels about nuts on.

Yeah, nuts on. That might be your next book, Dan.

Yeah.

Okay, so if you think through again, let's just take a look at where are the opportunities? Where can we increase our capabilities and amplify them? So we've got Turkey, France.

France, and then sort of that coast, you know, starting with Holland and Denmark and that sort of Scandinavian. That's sort of the UK and everybody else is in trouble because Europe has the fastest growing populations of any place on the planet. Germany, Germany and Russia are neck and neck and they're raised to have the oldest, oldest population. And rapidly aging countries don't innovate.

Yeah.

And caring for the old people uses up all the earnings of the young people.

Yep, exactly.

The U.S. is in great shape, actually, because the U.S. can turn it off or turn it on with immigration. And Mexico has really been a great help there because when Mexicans come in, they're usually young. So Mexicans becoming Americans is probably going to be a big thing. You know, there's a lot of people who want to get here. I think the US Is going to get very selective about immigration as a buyer country. Now they're going to raise their standards. Probably they'll favor entrepreneurial, they'll probably favor educated, and they'll probably favor money. So if you're educated, trained, entrepreneurial, and you have money, you're at the head of the line and your family along with you. And so my sense is that while the US Was in a selling position, almost anybody could get in. And now I think it's going to be harder and harder. And I told my clients who do not come from the United States, I said, there's three things you should really invest in. People are becoming more alert and curious about world affairs. I said, if I were in your position, I was anywhere, there would be three things that I would invest in. One is I would have the US dollar as one of my main investments. For example, here in Canada in the time of COVID the US dollar was 30% higher than the Canadian dollar, and now it's 40%. In three months, it's gone up by 10%. And it'll continue to go up because when the US economy gets back in order, everybody's economy will have the benefit of that. And I said I would just, you know, use the US dollar as an investment. You know, just put money into US Dollars. It's always going to be worth more. Okay. The other thing is that I would seriously think about having investments in the United States, owning property in the United States, investing in business opportunities in the United States. And the other thing is, I would seriously think while it's still available in citizenship or at least getting residency in the United States. And people said, well, that's a terrible thing for my tax planning because the US Taxes on citizenship. And I said, I tell you something, in the future, U.S. citizenship is going to be the gold standard. To have American citizenship is going to be the greatest pass card in the world. So I'm telling people that. And they said, no, well, no, that can't be. And I said, I tell you, the world's going to change. They're no longer the selling country, they're the buying country. And they're going to be buying talent, they're going to be buying ideas, they're going to be buying technology, they're going to be buying everything from around the rest world. You can sell things to the United States. You can't sell these things anywhere else. So anyway, that's just a thought on what it goes. So these are like the big ocean currents. Now, basically the world operates. The world's weather operates according to ocean currents. Now, the ocean currents don't predict storms and winds and rain and everything else, but there's general directions. And the biggest ocean current in geopolitical domain is really that the US Is really going to become more powerful, it's going to become richer and it's going to be the rich, successful, wealthy country in the world. And everybody else is going to be a favored country of the United States or you won't be. And that's the big pattern that I'm seeing. And it's very contrarian right now because the news media hates this. Hollywood hates this.

Yeah. And before we go into the why that is, I'm going to again look for the silver lining and the opportunity in all this because that's where my entrepreneurial brain goes to. You said that you know the what to invest in I was thinking about as I was listening to you today is the title of this podcast should really be amplify your international capabilities and opportunities. And probably in the 19, late 90s, early 2000s, when I started doing online marketing and I did a couple of out of country speaking gigs. So I went to Australia, for example, went to Europe, went to Singapore, and the people who had me come speak just said, hey, you got to realize that we're three to five years behind the U.S. still trying to understand we're not sophisticated marketers. We don't know how to think like you or talk like you. We don't know your vocabulary. So tone it down a little bit and limit it. I paid very close attention to that. And if we fast forward now where we live in a YouTube world where those who have the unfair advantage are more westernized and Americanized, especially when it comes to entrepreneurial mindset through the lens of where is there great opportunity now it's entrepreneur creation in other countries. So I would think about where can I create big multipliers outside of the US and apply my dollars into other countries while having my home base here? So I don't disagree with you at all about property. One thing that if I cared about it, again, it's just a matter of where I spend my energy or time. I'd rather write out a check for certain things than to develop it. But if I cared about it, I would invest in small farming right now. Properties. I think anyone who's thinking about making and raising food on a localized level is very smart just for security's sake, because we're gonna have disruptions in food and manufacture, you know, all that sort of a thing. It's like I like having control.

Yeah, yeah. It's also a lifestyle decision, but there's.

No multiples in it from my lens.

First of all, in the United States there's a lot of land that is very cheap.

The other thing that I'm going to suggest to people in the States, I'll just get this in quickly and then go back to your thesis. The US has half the navigable rivers in the world. It's all part of essentially one system, which is the Mississippi Valley system. It's roughly about 12,500 miles. And the industry that comes back to the United States is not going to be on the coast because the land's too expensive, the labor is too expensive on the east coast, west coast of the United States. It's too congested, it's too regulated. They'll go to the middle of the United States, but they'll position their factories so they can use water transportation. Because water Transportation is 1/12 the cost of any other kind of transportation, 1/12. All you have to do is put it in a boat. Current does all the work, you know. And so what you're going to see is in the middle of the United States and that would be from Pennsylvania, because the Ohio river is in Pittsburgh and that goes through a number of states and ends up going into the Mississippi, the Missouri river, the big Missouri river, which is in the northish western part. And then you have five or six other rivers that all flow into the Mississippi. But what I would suggest is that if you're thinking about really good place to buy personal land, it's near a river and if it's got the extra feature that it's on the interstate highway system. So on the one hand you have a river port and you also have the interstate highway system. Wonderful place to build businesses in the United States. Got population with a big work ethic that's family oriented because there's lots of land. So there'll be cities of 50 or 60,000 which are going to be probably the growth populations in the future. And this Covid will have affect people where they want to settle and where they want to live. Ultimately, you know, I think it's been a wake up call.

Yeah, that makes sense. And there is a movement too and we'll see if the sticks. But as we went through the dematerialization, I know even some of the big tech companies in San Francisco, they're letting more people work at home. They're not requiring that they Come back. I think that will mean that more people will probably leave the cities if they have that freedom, just to take advantage of lower cost of living and not dealing with all the hassles. So again, the mindsets will shift and that also means that either the dollars will go to different areas and will behave differently.

I think the other thing, Mike, that you have to think about, I believe that Covid was a mismanaged accident. But what if a country decides to make it into a weapon in the future? You had gas warfare in the first World War and everything else. So my sense is that people are very, very leery about disease from now on.

That kind of a play, they better be going for the big one. If someone would do that because, you know, being banished from the planet, you.

Would be considered a very, very bad player.

Yep. I think that would be the end.

It would be like a desperation move.

Yes. So who knows? But I still have more faith in humanity than that. And a lot of the fear that we live in is created by a Hollywood mentality, not by one that's real, but who knows, right? There's crazy people out there, there's no question about it. It's just a matter of can they get and stay in power? And right now, in the meantime, with the abundance, the true abundance that exists, the multipliers are going to be how do we amplify and multiply creativity, innovation.

Hey, Mark.

Yep. And that is something else that's worth touching on a little bit. Again, this is purely anecdotal, but hearing it made a lot of sense that during the time of COVID more scientists internationally were partnering and working together and sharing their information and data and resources freely and openly with the objective to craft and create a vaccine or whatever. And I think that's going to be a very important precedent that we're gonna see. And frankly, that's existed in the marketing world. The world I grew up in for quite some time is all of us collaborated all the time, shared real time data. When we were doing launches and creating and crafting, like what messages worked, what videos worked, we tested out technology, we built technology and shared it openly and freely with one another. And every time it made a huge impact in our sales in and our connection with our customers and clients. So I believe that those that adopt that mindset now in every environment and world, again, which is fueled by virtualization, are gonna benefit too. One thing that we didn't touch on, probably should have done it in the previous episode. I just wanna tell you about something really interesting. I Bumped into. It's a tech platform called Rally that allows you to recreate social gatherings online. So the idea is you can be in a room and you know, when you're, let's say you're doing comedy, you've got the person up on stage, but then whoever's not the focus, you could still hear them. They're never as loud as. So you could actually have an audience roaring with laughter and participating. And you have the benefit of the audience self policing. In other words, you can basically lean over and say, hey, would you shut up? And if enough people gang up on a noisy troll, they get booted out of the room, just like in real life, you know, they get shamed or banished. And I think we live in a world where the way power moves through information and control, you can mute and banish on multiple levels. Where in the old days you could just be a physical bully, now you can be a social bully. But then there's platform bullies as well, or platform police that self regulate that exists in a complete, you know, again, there's so much more to explore from a mental and a psychological perspective in this new world we live in.

One of the, you know, unsolvable problems, and we talked about it in a previous episode here, was that inequality is going to widen. You know, the talented are going to have greater advantages over the non talented. The geographically right place people are going to have huge advantages over other people. And actually the last 75 years under Peter Zion calls it the order that the US created in order. And people were never as well fed, people were never had as much opportunity, people were never as safe. But a lot of countries who benefited from it weren't grateful, weren't grateful for it. And China is the biggest, China's just not grateful. You know, they were nothing. They were a 19th century backward agricultural country until the US said we'll take your products, you can bring your products in with no tariffs and everything else. And you could see what happened the moment that Trump put up the 25% tariff on some Chinese products. Not all, all of a sudden they started having reverses and bad, you know, well, if one man's decision of one country can change your economy like that, I would treat them better or I'd create alternatives, but there isn't any alternative to that big consumer market. So, you know, it's an interesting world, but we're back to history. And my sense, Mike, is my team has really responded well to this. I would say strategic coach clients by comparison to other groups of entrepreneurs have really really responded well to this. But I told people, what if this is just the first in a long series of scary times where scary times actually becomes the next normal? I mean, if you can accept that as a normal, then you're going to be further ahead than the people who are always shocked.

I totally agree with that premise. And this is why it's so important to think and be prepared and practice discipline and the act of reinvention all the time. I remember this is a concept. It's not new. And I'm trying to think of the first business I heard of that regularly did may have been the mailchimp company where they developed a product that competed against themselves. And I call it the eat your own young philosophy, which is if you can create an alternative product to your own that can eat it up and destroy it, it's just a matter of time before your competitors do. So it's up to you to actually do that and implement it. And I had also heard times where the best way to create a moat around yourself is to actually create a competitive company that isn't you and be number one and number two in a market. So you appear to be crowded. I think it takes big balls and big discipline, pardon the expression.

Just collaborate with people that see no point in being your competitor.

Yes.

See, my feeling is that the competition is what gets written about. The competition games get written about. I think the collaboration games are completely invisible.

That is brilliant. And I know within the Strategic Coach.

Community, look at all collaborations you have that would never make the newspaper.

Yeah, that's because those little invisible ones can be the biggest levers ever. And they're simply a conversation that's resulted. Maybe what we can do is let's go down two paths in our next episode that we're going to do together. One of them is let's talk about a couple of big collaborations that you see going on. I have a couple to share that I've been doing and deconstruct them. But also, I do want to talk a little bit about some best practices that you and I have learned in this new collaborative world. I know you've learned and are implementing a bunch of zoom strategies and techniques. I want to talk a little bit about them from a salesmanship perspective, an enrollment perspective. It's some of what I'm actually working with on the Strategic Coach team. And why don't we dive into that in our next episode? I think that would be super interesting to our audience and useful for us because we haven't had this conversation yet. And I've intended to do it. Might as well kill two birds at one stone. What do you think of that? Yeah, perfect. Well, let's wrap this up. So this is another of many Capability Amplifier podcast experiences with Dan Sullivan and myself. I hope you've enjoyed yourself as much as we did. So with that, this is Mike Koenigs and Dan Sullivan. Thanks for listening.

Bye bye.

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