How To Ensure You’re Only Getting Into Good Relationships | Capability Amplifier

Hello and welcome to Capability Amplifier. My name is Mike Koenigs. I'm here today with my good friend Mr. Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach and in Capability Amplifier, we're going to be talking about relationships today. I'm going to be asking Dan some strategies he uses that enhance the quality of relationships and actually connect with more people more effectively. So, Dan, it is great to be here as usual with you, sir.

Thanks, Mike. You know, I've been living through the technological age since the 70s. Actually. I got onto the microchip was going to make a difference 1973, and it really triggered my thinking about being a coach to entrepreneurs. So this has been 45 years in the making. But I didn't start in the technological age. I came out of the radio age and the cradle telephone age. And there's lots of talks, you know, like you don't need relationship anymore if you have technology. And I said, you know all it's a foolish thought because even with the highest technology, if it's good technology, it just enhances your ability to have great relationships. So I'll just say that as my first point, that you start with relationship and work outwards with any new capability that comes along just to actually enhance relationships like we're doing right now with the podcast technology.

Right on. Well, I'm going to get this going. And just to frame this question, where this came from is I was brainstorming with my wife, Vivian, and she is in the nonprofit business, but she raises money. We actually just came back from her 31st trip to Africa, it was my sixth, where we visited schools, hospitals, all the work that she's been doing. And a big part of what she does is raises money and she has gotten in front of some very big figures. So most recently, Michelle Obama reopened their Let Girls Learn program. So she actually has direct connection with the Obama family, as well as the Wynn family, for example, and a number of other sizable ones and the Bush foundation as well. Texas A and M recently did a whole bunch of work for her. So the point of this is she's at the point now where to maximize her time, raise the maximum amount of money, but actually have real significant relationships. Not using relationships, but those that matter. Her question specifically is, what's the best way to have one on one relationships when you don't have time for a one on one relationship. And again, I thought this would be a very relevant question because all of us as business owners are in a spot where you see people try to maximize time all the time and they end up having shallow Relationships with lots of people and everyone knows it and they don't feel special. So what's your strategy? How do you maintain so many significant, meaningful, intimate relationships with people that genuinely like and love you, but also want to do business with you and are connected with you on a very, very deep level? Dan?

Yeah, I think it's really a great question. So I'm going to just introduce that you have to have filters and the filters have to have criteria. And that is, you know, we can get pulled in all directions out of our enthusiasm for creativity, enthusiasm for new enterprise. And I think that the number one criteria that I have right off the bat, it's a bit like Warren Buffet. Warren Buffett says, you know, I obviously look at the numbers before I make an investment. And we have all sorts of criteria on investment. And he said, the first criteria I have, do I actually like the person that I'm going to be investing with? The second one is, do I trust the person? You can like somebody, but they're not trustworthy. And the third one is, do I admire what they've created and do I respect the way that they've gone about growing it? You know, so it's like trust, admire and also respect. And he said, if those four check off, then I really look at the numbers. But if those don't check off, I don't look at the numbers at all because the numbers are meaningless. And my sense is that we all know the feeling of people that we like what that feels like. And so that's been developed since we were born. I would just stick with that and not be fooled by all sorts of other considerations until you've checked those four out.

That's very good. So that's definitely the quantitative, which makes a lot of sense. So if you were going to. I'm just kind of curious, this is more from my perspective, but how do you weigh these? So it's sort of like, look at the numbers. And that Warren Buffett one, which. The first one is, do you like them? Do you trust them?

Well, the numbers come second. I mean, he's interested in the numbers, but then he checks out, right? These are really the qualitative checkoff boxes, not the quantitative. Then he says, let's look at the numbers, if it really makes sense from a business standpoint. But he said the relationship standpoint has to be established before I actually look at the numbers. And, Mike, you and I have witnessed an enormous number of people who have been willing to get involved in bad relationships because they thought the numbers were so good. If I take a look at Vivian's situation, there's a lot of people with big money around the planet who could write a very, very big check. And I know she has a special interest in girls education of, you know, really creating a much, much better way of encouraging girls. And the reason is if girls get educated, it's the single factor that makes the biggest difference in any society is educated girls. Okay? Because educated women raise good boys. We were at JJ's wedding, and there was a raffle, and we just wrote a big check because of both Babs and I totally believe in what Vivian is doing. But here's the thing, Mike. Think of a situation where the numbers tempted you to get involved in something where you were leery about the relationship on the one hand, and on the other hand, it's somebody you just wanted to work with the person, and then it turned out from a number standpoint to be a lot bigger than you ever thought because the relationship was good. I mean, just contrast those two situations.

I couldn't agree more. And that is there's two words that pop into mind when I listen to you. One of them is compromise, and the other one is coping, which is if you violate any one of the qualitatives from the very beginning, and I did mess that up earlier, the qualitatives, you wind up compromising and coping. And then on the greed side, the same exact thing happens, which is it is a lot more expensive to get out of a bad relationship than any benefit you'll ever get on the front end, you know, which is, are you playing the long game or are you playing the short game? But the next thing that I think is interesting and worth looking at is just from an energetic perspective, how you do one thing is how you do everything. I don't know who first said that, but I think when you look at. And you get to know someone by asking some great questions, which is really what leads me into my next question for you, is what kind of questions do you ask people in order to get to know them really well, very quickly? Because I know from past experience, when I fall in love with someone too easily, my greed gland gets activated. You can make a snap decision and jump into a relationship very, very quickly. You know, I actually know someone who got married after meeting someone a week later, and it's like everyone around them shaking their head. I know in my past, I've made partner mistakes, you know, because I, at the time, I got what looked like cheap labor that was good enough. And eventually some other partners myself. Included, we outgrew the person and it would have been a lot better off just paying them a salary, even if it would have been difficult in the beginning because the business outgrew the partner. I outgrew the partner and they failed or were unwilling to grow, expand and increase their capabilities and skillset. I know in one instance I had a partner that literally cost me millions of dollars to, to buy out. And at the time, writing out checks for millions of dollars meant that there wasn't money going into my bank account for a good chunk of time. Right. Or was there available to invest capital? So that leads me back again to the question that I have for you, which is, what are some of the questions that you ask in order to get to know someone really well? And again, I'm going to just repeat. So like questions. Let's just start with like questions. What are some of the things that you find out you want to know in order to get a sense other than just an energetic presence or their charisma or their being?

It's very, very interesting because you constantly discover new and better questions to ask. I'm smarter now than I was 20 years ago about this, and one that I found particularly fruitful because it either generates no conversation or it generates an amazing conversation. So I mean, you can pick up a lot if you get people to talk about what they're really passionate about. And this is one that has emerged for me just in the last six months and its relationship to the new program that we have in Strategic Coach called the Game Changer. The question is, 25 years from now, if you devoted yourself for 25 years and you created something that was really extraordinary, who would you want to be a hero to as a result of those 25 years? You're giving them a time frame and what it tells you is that they can think in terms of a long time frame. The other thing is that they would devote themselves to a particular thing over 25 years. And the other thing is their biggest payoff for 25 years of creativity and productivity is that they would be a hero to some particular person who they actually have in their life right now. So for me, it's entrepreneurs who would be willing to devote 25 years of their life to create some new form of game changing value in the marketplace and they would be hero to a particular type of person in the world. So in the answer to it, it's about creativity, it's about growth, and it's about relationship. And we're not talking about money anywhere along the way. Okay. I said if you did this, you'd probably make a great deal of money, but you're not doing it because of the money. And the other thing is, I'm looking for Mike, and you'll really appreciate this one is I want to see if they have cash flow confidence right now that they could actually be a big player going forward. So there's a lot of people who have dreams and they're very passionate about the dreams, but they haven't handled the present well enough for them to be actually a good player.

Very good. So let's dive into that last one, the definition of cash flow confidence. So that's their ability to generate cash flow now based on who they are and what they do and what they.

Know and what they've done up until now, and what kind of team do they have around them, what kind of relationship do they already have with the marketplace? So there's a predictability to the cash flow. And quite frankly, the criteria of having cash flow confidence is really unique to each individual. I would say here. And it's sort of an underlying theme here. My preferences is dealing with entrepreneurs.

I completely agree with that. I think, again, I'm going to go down this rabbit hole a little bit. I'm attracted to entrepreneurs too, and the ones that I've enjoyed working with the most. And what I really dedicated the next chapter of my life to which I'm in the process, as I mentioned, of selling my current business. And I decided to liquidate a whole bunch of stuff around me because there's a lot of things I'd been doing for decades. And I realized that I outgrew a lot of them. And I'm like, huh? And what is it that I like the most? And one of the topics that I want to dive into on a subsequent episode is something I call my Dream 100 list. It's a strategy that I use for figuring out who I want to surround myself with, how do I message, how do I communicate, and who do I identify, who I want to be a hero to or connected to. So that's just a little seed to pop in your head for another episode. But anyway, what I look for are reinventors. And my definition of reinventors, part of it is I consider myself one. So that's why I'm interested in it as a self interest part. But it'll be entrepreneurs who are serial entrepreneurs with the willingness, the guts, the confidence, and the courage to outgrow what they've done. Be willing and able to leave it, because think about how many people get stuck and for the sake of fear, they continue doing what they despise and, and wind up being miserable. Either alcoholics, their relationships fall apart and you can tell they're just dying inside or dead inside. And then those who again are able to just liquidate, move on, start something new and reinvent from that perspective, cold, so to speak. But the second are those who are willing to reinvent inside their current organizations and reimagine, rethink, because again, to go a little bit deeper there, I was working with a particular client of mine who I absolutely adore, who she does hormone replacement therapy and she thought she was going to have to get rid of her existing business in order to rebrand herself because she thought she had priced herself too low in the marketplace and wanted to establish herself as being a higher end business. After just an hour, I was able to help her rethink who she is, how she presents herself, and shift her language patterns in a way that she repackaged herself. And the conversations the next week allowed her to repackage reprice and start bringing in a lot more money, effectively tripling her revenue. So that would be my answer to what you had said, is respect for that. So let's go on the next question then. What's a question that you would ask in order to determine if someone is trustworthy or that you trust them?

Well, we came up with this about 25 years ago because there were knockoffs of this out in the marketplace. We trademarked it as the Dan Sullivan question. It's a question that I actually asked the entrepreneurs to memorize and some of them are very resistant to that. But after a while they come back to the actual wording of the question and the way it goes. And you've heard it many times, Mike, and this is in a business situation, but if we're actually at the threshold of entering into any kind of relationship with anybody whatsoever, I always say if we were having this discussion three years from today, and then you name the date, so today's the 30th of November, and we would go three years to whatever the date is in the future, 30th of November. And we were having a discussion looking back over that three year period, what has to happen in your life for you to feel happy with your progress, both personally and professionally? It's a very interesting question because you find out immediately, does the person have a future that they've clarified for themselves, which gives you a sense of trust. But the big thing is they will either answer the question or not answer the question. So I always tell people that if someone says, well, you know, this is a bit personal and I don't think I'd like to talk about this right now. You know, there's no trust. There's just no trust. They actually don't want to have a relationship with you. They would like to see if they can get some free information from you or some free knowledge from you. So I tell people, you know, if the person hesitates to answer the question, they don't trust you. And I don't trust people who don't trust me.

You know, right off the bat. I mean, if you don't trust me, I mean, I'm a good guy and you don't trust me, then you've got bad judgments. So I don't trust you. But the other thing is, does the person actually have the ability to create a future for themselves and are they committed to that future, and are they someone who actually measures their progress? And you'll know, first of all, if the person doesn't answer the question, you just save yourself a lot of bother. Okay? And I always say to the person, you know, and I've had clients who would not answer the question, and I said, well, thanks for that response, because my job was to come here and see if there's any way that I can be useful to you in your future. And you've just told me that it's none of my business. And so I just want to thank you for that clear cut answer. I appreciate the minute that you've given to me. And it jolts people when you walk away, because what I'm saying is that I'm actually the buyer here. I'm actually the buyer. And I think that's an important thing, is to have your own personal standards. You used the word before, Mike, of compromise, not compromise. And ultimately, the person who has an attitude that I'm buying good future experiences and I'm very, very careful who I get involved with just does well. And I would say in both of our cases, you know, if you look at where you are right now, Mike, and you can talk a little bit about this, that you've cut clean from your past, essentially you're treating everything you've done in the past as a big stage one, and now you're starting a stage two, and you want all your time back, but you've developed certain standards for the type of activity and the type of relationships you want to have now, which are at a much higher level than they were when I first met you. I met you at Eben Pagan's event in Miami Beach. That's where we first met. But who you are now, compared to who you were back then, just from an outside standpoint, has really transformed. And I think that you have a lot of insight into the transformation that has gone on over the last dozen years or so.

Well, thank you for that. I'll address that one first, which it is fascinating. And the truth is you can do this all in your mind with great imagination, which is imagine you're starting off from scratch. You have to create a framework in your mind and a brand new playfield where again, you're not in a state of compromise and coping. And compromise and coping very often for entrepreneurs comes from a space and a place of fear. Actually, I have a whole file. I'm going to show this to you visually and for people who are just listening to us. I've been thinking about documenting observable fears that I see in entrepreneurs and also what the top ones are that men and women have and what their triggers are. And those are the things that keep us stuck ultimately. And the origin points, the traumas that create repeating fears which actually occur and become habits. And that I think really drives character, which all of these questions really are designed to extract character traits very, very quickly. So going back to starting from scratch, what I've noticed is just like when you were talking about having the ability to just walk away after asking a question and say thank you for the clarity, you know, if you're useful and the idea of being trusting or trustworthy, which you can't have a relationship if someone doesn't have the ability to have trust and think that.