Why Building A Business Is Really Building Yourself

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan. Today is part two of something that Dan and I started last week, which is kind of looking under the hood and the individual aspects of what drives us, what drives our businesses, and how we view success and how we view growth and authenticity. And we only have partway through because it was so interesting last week. And so we're doing a part two to kind of follow up. So this is a first, but it still fits into anything and everything. Wouldn't you say Dan?
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, there's an oldie but goodie quality about what we do, simply because we're ancient, the two of us. But the other thing is that we're always looking for the new thing that we haven't done before. First of all, we stuck to a topic last time, and we've never done that. And I was a bit worried about it during the week, actually, that were we becoming complacent? Were we becoming lazy? But at the end of the week, I said, that's not possible.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree. So jumping back into where we were last week, we were looking at some of the personal aspects of business and expectation and aspiration and so on. And it made me think about, because I recently have gone through this within the last few years, if your business ceased to exist tomorrow, what aspects of your identity and sense of success would remain intact?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I gave that a great deal of thought, but I think that I would reverse the order in which I looked at those two things, my current business and my identity. And what I came up with is that my business only exists because I was pursuing something in terms of who I was, okay? So, I mean, I think one is that I'm an entrepreneur, so that narrows down the possibilities of the business. And then it was a coaching business in the 1970s before that was even recognized as an occupation. And not so much coaching. There was coaching in sports, there was coaching in entertainment, but there wasn't coaching in entrepreneurism because Jeff, if you'll just think back to the early 70s or 1950s, there were very few entrepreneurs.
 
Your parents were entrepreneurs, my parents. But these were considered marginal creatures in the overall economy. The economy was very large corporations. And in the 70s, that hadn't changed. It loosened up a little bit in the sense that the large corporations were failing. They weren't able to guarantee lifetime job security, the benefits that had been there were starting to disappear. In the United States, it had just basically been the United States and everything the United States did, and now you were starting to get foreign companies coming in, especially in the car makers. Electronics were starting to come in from overseas and everything like that.
 
So entrepreneurs, they didn't have a way of scaling themselves except by becoming a corporation. And in the 1970s and 80s, all of a sudden with the one edition of the personal computer and all that came with the personal computer, all of a sudden entrepreneurs could really scale themselves while still retaining ownership, still retaining a sense of direction about what they were doing. So I went for each of these stages. You went for each of these stages.
 
One is I want to be independent. I want to be in control of my own life. You have to be an entrepreneur if you're going to do that. And then I went right for the entrepreneurs themselves with an activity called coaching, where it wasn't a set sort of cookie cutter that I was going through to sell. It was all based on an interaction between me and another person. And then the quality of people got better, the quantity of money got better. And so I kept going in this same direction. And my sense is that my business is actually a by-product of just who I'm trying to be in life.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think that's true. But how would you, if Strategic Coach was no longer there? Yeah. I guess it's a two part question. Number one is, do you think that your identity and sense of success would remain intact? Or do you think that it is inextricably interwoven with the business you do?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think it is because I can't think of a better one. I can't think of a better business. And the other thing is that there's really two parts to the company. There's the actual operational company. So we have coaching workshops, we have close to 3,000 entrepreneurs from around the world, different industries, and they go to workshops, which are all-day affairs, nine to five, and they go through a series of thinking tools, okay? Now I've reached the border between the company, the operating company, and the intellectual property, because we own all the tools that are used in the company. So, if the workshop stopped, you know, and for some reason we couldn't go on with the operational company, all the tools would still exist.
 
Okay, and those aren't the company, the tools are processes and they're all copyrighted. Half of them are trademarked and I would say probably right now about a quarter of them are patented. So that's separate property. Now, if for some reason that happened, I might look at what the company looks like totally differently now that I have the intellectual property. I say, you know, I might do a deal with an SaaS company or something, and now we digitize them all and they go out into the world. So I don't think my identity is tied up to the operational company. I think my identity is tied up to creating the thinking tools.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean, in my case …
 
Dan Sullivan: I've had distinctly different—that's a great clarification for me, by the way, the fact that you asked me that question.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so articulate that clarification for us again.
 
Dan Sullivan: You want me to clarify what you just clarified for me?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, you can be clear about it, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: What I realized, and I've realized this over a period of time, that thinking is a difficult exercise for a lot of people. Not that they're not good thinkers, but they never learn thinking like they learn math. They never learn thinking like they learned language. Thinking is just something that happened. And it's never been presented to them in a way that when you're in this situation, here's a good way of thinking about this, and when you're in another situation, and you can multiply those by hundreds of different entrepreneurial situations. And so that when you're confronted with a situation, you have this inventory, almost this, you know, we sometimes use, you've got a tool shop, you've got a tool bag, and you've got these thinking tools.
 
In other words, how do you look at time? How do you structure a day? How do you structure a week? We have tools for all those. Not that people are going to do it that way, but they know that if they're getting off track or they're getting confused or they're getting stuck, they can go back to one of the tools and it gives them clarity on what they're going to do next. That is identical with who I am. You know, I don't see myself apart from all this thinking I've done. This goes back 50 or 60 years, these tools. So it's kind of who I am, you know, Dan's sort of a tool maker.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I used to have a handy, handy toolkit. Did you have one of those when you were a kid?
 
Dan Sullivan: I never did because what would I do with them? Now, what I mean by that, I've always been interested in thinking, right from the beginning. It really struck me that there was this whole world of thinking and how you went about thinking about things. Two things, one is it wasn't taught to me in school, it wasn't taught by my parents. And the second thing was that other people didn't seem to know how to do this.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you're touching on the reason why I, after my initial exposure to philosophy and psychology, why that became very clear to me that those were going to be my majors in college.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they're going to be your majors in life.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, because it, well, it is philosophy is study of life. That's the translation.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, I just want to catch this before, you know, sometimes the thought comes by and that just goes by and I want to grab this one and pull it back. I've asked you a lot about who you like interviewing and I think you like interviewing people who have a philosophical and psychological grasp of what their life's all about. Yeah, I think just see their life as a series of events. And, you know, that doesn't really interest you because you personally are not getting anything out of the conversation. They're not getting anything out of the conversation to start with. But you don't get anything out of the conversation.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think that what's interesting, it's a fascinating insight you have there, because to me, it's all about these mysteries. Who are we? Why do we operate the way we operate? How do we regard ourselves? How are we regarded by others? All of these sorts of things. And to me, it's the human drama that is ultimately most interesting. And, you know, that can go from a movie like Citizen Kane, you know, to Lord of the Flies, which in some ways isn't so different, you know. And it's that mystery of life and how we think about what we're thinking about, which you and I share.
 
So, you know, when I've had distinctly different businesses, from clothing design to film and video production to teaching, and the different things that I've done, I consider I'm the through line in that, kind of like how you consider yourselves a through line in Strategic Coach. So I'm wondering, to what extent does your internal sense of worth rely on external validation or recognition?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think once we've gotten past money, you know, that I have enough, I mean, that I have enough money to, you know, pay all the bills and expand, you know, you want to expand your money too. I don't think the validation—for example, I lived in Toronto for 54 years. But I'm far more well known as a Strategic Coach in the United States than I am in Toronto. Hardly anyone in Toronto knows about me. And the reason is Toronto is not our market. Canada really isn't our market for entrepreneurs.
 
I think the United States is an entrepreneurial republic, you know, that basically the founders who were, if you check out what they did for a living, most of them were entrepreneurs. And it was just at a period in history when you had to be, because there weren't built up businesses, there weren't built up industries, you more or less had to create the industry. So, plus they were involved in one of the major entrepreneurial projects of human history, which was creating a new country.
 
And my sense is, and you really see it in the Bill of Rights, just the first ten amendments, which were actually the cautionary rules that were insisted on if the other aspects of the Constitution, you know, the division of powers among the executive and the legislature and the judiciary and all the rules, you know, the wiring of the country, that was not going to be agreed upon if they didn't guarantee all these rules. And my thesis is they unusually guaranteed the rights of entrepreneurs to more or less do what their ambition told them to do without interference. So I think basically, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, I think it's best to be an entrepreneur in the United States. And I think if you're going to be a coach to entrepreneurs, the best target market is the American market.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think it's the largest in many, many instances, if not most instances. I think that that's true. But what about your sense, you know, in either validation or recognition.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I like it. And I mean, I am well known without doing too much to promote myself. You know, like first of all, I've been doing it for a long time and we've had a lot of really good entrepreneurs who've told a lot of other people about it and they've sent other people like themselves to us. So I had a plane flight from Phoenix to Toronto about two years ago. And I was flying back, and three people who I didn't know came on board, and they said, you're Dan Sullivan, aren't you? You're Dan Sullivan. And they said, I've been listening to your book. This is why I like the books. I like the books so much, the books or the audios, because half the so-called readers of the books are actually listeners of the books and not readers of the book. So that's happening. I won't say it's happening a lot, but it's happening increasingly. And I enjoy that. I mean, they want their picture taken. So, you know, they, I was on the flight with Dan Sullivan.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, I of course, I appreciate that. Right, but I wasn't asking if you appreciated it. I think, you know, we all appreciate a sense of validation and acknowledgement that what we've done has had a positive influence in one way or another. If you didn't have that, do you feel that part of your internal sense of worth is based on external validation? Now, that's not a bad thing. I'm just asking the question, or do you feel at this point secure enough that you know what you do is good, you know that you're good at it. And it's always nice as an additive to play to a larger audience.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think what I would say, it's a bit of a, and I think this is where we left off last time we were on the topic where we left off, is that what matters to me is that the thinking tools that I create are as valuable to other people as they are to me. And people will tell me that, you know. I just got a note through one of our team members. A note came in from a British client who I don't know. I've never met them. I will meet them in about two weeks because I'll be in London. And he asked if he could, you know, meet with me. But he had a story to tell. His mother had gone through a very long and painful sickness, and then she died. And he was the sole support, you know, while running his business.
 
And it's, you know, used up an enormous amount of his what otherwise might have been leisure time or even work time helping her. And we have a concept called The Gap and the Gain in the Coach and that is how do you measure whether you're making progress or not and the one way not to do it is to have an ideal that you're trying to get to and then you achieve a goal and you think the goal is going to give you a sense of the ideal but it doesn't. It's like making progress towards the horizon line physically, but you find out you never make any progress.
 
And a lot of entrepreneurs, and you've certainly come across this yourself, Jeff, that a lot of people who look like extraordinary achievers, from the outside feel like failures on the inside because they never get to the ideal. And I said, it's not about that. I said, it's about measuring backwards where you came from. You see, oh, I left there and look how far I've come. And you always measure backwards with your achievements and it always gives you a sense of confidence about it. And he said, if I hadn't had that concept, he said, I don't know if I would have gotten through that experience. And that pleases me. Yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, it's gratifying to know that you have a positive impact on somebody.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. And I think, largely, if you really measure human happiness, it has to do with your sense of a positive contribution that you've made to other people. I agree with that, yes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But it's interesting also because since I was a kid, whether I was doing performing or setting up the movie theater or just the various stuff that I had done all the time, I don't know what it would be like to not get that validation. So I can't say that I feel very secure within myself. I think part of that is because something we've talked about in previous things, the difference between courage and confidence. It takes the courage to take the chances to do those things. It becomes a capability and you have the confidence it's going to work out.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it still requires courage each time you do something new. I think being in that process is a very, very satisfying experience. And I think your evaluation is that you're in a process that's constantly creating new things that people find more and more useful. I think that's a nice formula to have.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think it is. I think it is.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think that's why our theater concept for the book that we're writing, Casting Not Hiring, I think that's why we're getting at something is that enormous number of people today are involved in work that does not give them sense that they're doing something that's really useful.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, so this ties back to what you were talking about earlier. Me having grown up in Akron, Ohio, and it was the heyday of Goodyear and Firestone and Goodrich and all the rubber companies, and the factories were always buzzing, and—I think like a good rubber. Yeah, I think like a good rubber. And, you know, those are gone. Those are gone.
 
Dan Sullivan: Not the rubbers, but the companies.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's correct, yes. We have a population growth to know it's not just the rubbers. And so, you know, when we were coming of age, those jobs were forever jobs. You know, if you landed a job there or any major corporation, you would be set. You know, and it was good for them because they maintained the employees and knowledgeable workforce. And the incentive for people to go someplace else wasn't that high because they didn't want to screw up their pension. They didn't want to screw up their insurance or, you know, whatever.
 
Well, that's all gone. And now there are no jobs that are those kind of forever jobs. And I think that's, we still don't know the full impact of that, but I also think that feeds into what's oftentimes a misconception about what entrepreneurship is, because that's difficult too. You know, to build a business is not easy. So I think that there's, it comes down to, I think, what are the core values? If you're an entrepreneur, what are the core values that influence your business decisions? And I'll ask you also, have your values ever conflicted with your profitability or growth in business?
 
Dan Sullivan: I would say no, and I think that's been conscious and it's been intentional.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Tell me what you mean by that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the values and what we do coincide. In other words, my feeling is that the business got created out of the values. The values were the building blocks. That it was about them, it wasn't about me. That's one of my values.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Except the overarching value of that is it is about you, because that's the playground you want to set up.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's actually at the very core of what we do, is that to be a great coach, it can't be about you. It has to be about the aspirations of the person that you're sitting across from.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, I've had situations, I don't know whether it's hurt my business, there have been people I've chosen not to do business with, but it wasn't that I was lacking for business if I did that. So, I could seem to be more courageous in my principle, but that's because I could afford to be.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but here I'm gonna do a little switch around on you on that. I think that your aspiration for money is so you could be independent anytime that your values would conflict with a paycheck. One of your money goals was to always be in a position where you would never sacrifice your values for a check.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: However, you can only do that as an entrepreneur, by the way.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's interesting. I'll share a story about my wife, Margaret, when she was modeling and she was a very, very popular model in throughout the 80s. And she was approached to do Virginia Slims cigarette campaign.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so they offered her a nice package of money and she was going to be the Virginia Slims woman. And she said no, and they offered her more money. And she said no, and they offered her more money. And her agent said to her, they're offering you an awful lot of money. Someone else will take this. 15% of it is mine.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that's right. That's right. They were offering. Yeah, don't blow it. I want to get back to where the decision is.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. And she said, I don't want to do anything that promotes smoking. Yeah. I think it's bad. I think it's unhealthy. I don't want to do it. They came back with a final offer and she said, no. So I said to her, wow, I really respect that you did that. That's great. And she said, well, I could afford to do that. If I wasn't able to pay rent, if I needed the money, I don't know that I could have made such a lofty decision. And I think that's an important context to understand things in too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, to go to the deepest kind of situation where that happened, we went to Jerusalem, we went to Israel, and we went to Yad Vashem, that's sort of a courtyard and it's got trees, and each of the trees is for a person throughout history, but mainly during the Nazi period, the Holocaust period, when somebody for no personal gain of themselves, put themselves at risk to save the lives of people who could have been killed in the concentration camps. And the one requirement was, is that they took total risk in doing this and there was no reward. And the thing that they said is that you can never put yourself in the position to know how you would actually choose.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You don't know how you would. You can say, well, that'd be pretty simple. I would just put myself at risk. I said, that's not simple. And you don't know that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Now, that's probably the most extreme case of people being put in a position to take a risk for their lives that I know in history. Yeah, well, I think that there's all kinds of different presidents of universities are not capable of making that decision.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that may be going on in one school now, which is interesting with Harvard. But, you know, that opens up a whole other basket of other …
 
Dan Sullivan: That's another podcast. But I think that see how good we're getting. We're saying we could be tempted to.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The amazing discipline and restraint that we're exhibiting.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm feeling it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, it's really interesting, because I think that context, I mean, tremendous respect for the decision that Margaret made. The clients that, when it was clear, before we started anything, in those initial meetings, when it was clear that it just wasn't going to be worth working with this person. It would be too much pain for not enough gain. And, you know, so.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they had a deadline. They had to get the commercial made. And, you know, and I mean, they weren't seeing it as a moral issue or a values issue at all.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I saw the obvious mistreatment of other people as an issue to me because I wasn't willing to place myself in the position of being mistreated like that for money. It wasn't worth it.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's why you want to have a lot of money.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and as you and I talked about a couple of weeks ago, and this is not good or bad, it's just is, is neither one of us like being in debt.
 
Dan Sullivan: And that's, yeah, it's one thing to be in financial debt, but there's another thing of being in moral debt.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's true. That's true.
 
Dan Sullivan: You can get out of financial debt. It's hard to get out of moral debt.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and we Jews don't have confessional booths. So, you know, I can't get any credits, you know. So do you think that you can clearly separate your entrepreneurial identity from your personal self? I mean, I've gotten to know you pretty well over these last few years. And I know Dan, the entrepreneur, but I also know you as a person. So do you feel that there are two distinct aspects to your personality?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I know which one's prior. You know, the big thing is I want both. You know, I want to be able to live with myself based on my values. And I want to be very successful business-wise.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Because it gives you the freedom to avoid problems the other thing could bring up.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, this is binary, you know, this is sort of a binary situation. There's no half living by your values. That's right.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You can sacrifice your integrity once. And that's it. And when you go down that path, you know, people have a remarkable ability to rationalize their behaviors, no matter how bad they are, you know, they have their reasons for that, they think offer justification, which makes me think of that phrase, you're lying to yourself. And so I think that, I have never been so ambitious that I was willing to—it's funny, it's like I would be invited out to somebody's home for the weekend, purely this is business stuff. And I didn't wanna do it, simply because the only reason for doing it wasn't because I so enjoyed spending time with them, it was that I wanted to cement a business deal. And I figured I could do that within regular hours. But I'm sure that I know that affected me.
 
Dan Sullivan: But I would say that you've devoted so much consciousness to this particular issue, okay, that it's now making finer and finer distinctions in your life about who you spend time with. Anyway, you know, just you'll spend time with them anyway, for the sake of getting a paycheck, you know, for the sake of getting a paycheck. I mean, Babs and I were talking about this, and this goes back to the 80s, because we met in ‘82. And not once since 1982 have Babs and I ever socialized because it was important for business reasons. The only reason why we socialize is that we enjoy the people and we know that we're going to have a good time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And to me, I would add by saying, and what other reason is there?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, there's a lot of books written on you should never eat alone.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. I know that person.
 
Dan Sullivan: I do, too. And I have never eaten alone with him.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And if you ate with him, you would be alone anyhow.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, one of the things in Coach we put a lot of emphasis on is the concept of autonomy. Okay. And it's Greek and Latin. It's auto nomos. Auto means self and nomos means law that you have self-laws. Okay. Other people have laws, you know, that controls their behavior, the laws of the marketplace, the laws of profitability. But the big one is, are you okay with yourself alone? And you have laws for being alone with yourself. Well, that's not a simple thing. That's actually, it's got millions of different considerations of, you know, are you operating by your own laws, you know, doing this. And one of the …
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Would that be laws, I'm sorry, but would that be laws or principles?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it's law, nomos is laws. I don't know if it's Greek or Latin, but it goes back to, but autonomos means to live by your self laws, to live by the laws that you've created for yourself out of your own reasoning. You've established laws on how you do this. I'll give you a great example of this, and it never came out until after he had retired, and this was Tom Brady, the football player. And so he played and won more Super Bowls. He was in 10 Super Bowls. Nobody's been in 10 Super Bowls. And his team won seven times, six with New England and once with Tampa Bay. And a quarterback is the central player, it's the most important role in football. And it was discovered afterwards, after he left New England, that he only took 60% of the paycheck that he could take as a quarterback.
 
So there's a rating, you know, the agents all know this, and whoever has it, it's the type of situation that Margaret had with her agent. And that is that he only took, he left 40% on the table in New England so that they could have really great second string offensive linemen. He played offense and he says, what I've noticed is that the teams that win the Super Bowl are the teams that have the best backup offensive linemen because they get injured. And so he said, I'm just going to leave part of my salary on the table so that we can get the best. When number one goes down, we have a great number two, and that's for five positions.
 
So he left a lot of money on the table, you know, and he was bitterly criticized this by other quarterbacks. And he was bitterly criticized when it was found out. Well, that's stupid. That's stupid. Why are you leaving money on the table? You don't know. They don't have any loyalty to you. And he says, yeah, but I've got loyalty to them. Well, you know, he says, you like being in the Super Bowl? He says, I like winning the Super Bowl. And I especially like the celebration afterwards with my team members when we won the Super Bowl. I don't have that experience. He said, I don't even watch Super Bowls on television. He actually said that. He says, well, you know, the other quarterbacks are criticizing you. And he says, yeah, but they watch the Super Bowl on television. You know, like that. But it just shows you somebody who's got his value system totally clear right to the Super Bowl, you know.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and it's also a very smart, strategic question, which is what does it take to win?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And none of the others would pay the price to find that out.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: They think the money that they're getting and being the most highly paid person. I said, I wonder what that does for the motivation of the other people on his team.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it's very interesting. I never knew that, but I don't really follow that. But that's interesting. It's a very interesting approach.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. He isn't just playing his position. He's playing the whole game. He's the chessboard on which the other players are playing. You know, he's sort of created a chessboard role for himself.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So in doing that, Brady was taking a risk with his money and so on. How do you evaluate whether a risk is worth taking and what criteria guides your decision making?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, with my case, I mean, you're talking about with my business. What's it look like for the whole team? We have 120 team members. What's it look like for our 16 other coaches? What's it look like for our 3,000 entrepreneurs? I said, well, what's the game look like? And then what's my role in this? So taking all those factors into account, what's my role? What should I be doing every day? And that's creating new tools. You know, I mean, the vast majority of the coaching in 2025 is done by this year. There'll be 600 workshop days where there's a full group there. There's a coach, they're coaching, and 12 out of the 600 are mine.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Nice ratio.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, they're depending on new tools every quarter to keep the whole thing going. But.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: My guess is that 30 years, 40 years ago, 47 years ago, when you started Strategic Coach, and up until maybe 10 years ago, I don't know, but I'm guessing, you had no idea that you would be in this position. It's something you were striving for, but maybe not even, hadn't even defined what you were just striving for yet. So all these decisions and, you know, even in things to not get involved with, I'm sure there were people were saying, but Dan, you're the main one they want to hear from. You've got to get up on stage in front of all these things. And at a certain point, no, I don't. And you made a decision. It was a risky decision at the time. Am I correct in assuming there's a number of people that said, no, you've got to be there? You're Dan Sullivan. You're the one that's got to be there. So it became a risk. What was the criteria for you that guided that decision before, now it's a fait accompli, but it wasn't then?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think it goes back to, you know, and you've probably come across this a lot, you know, going back to Margaret's story, I think that, well, if, you know, Margaret, you're getting a bad reputation in the marketplace. Margaret has a future version of herself down the road of how she's going to look back at how she conducted her career. And she says, this is my payoff. I want this payoff in the future. I mean, monetary is part of it, but reputation is part of it, too.
 
But mine, in terms of my company, and I noticed this in probably the late 1980s, I was watching because coaching entrepreneurs was now becoming a growth business. There were a lot of people involved in it. But in every case, it was based on their personality. It was based on their personality of being on a stage somewhere, and that's where the money was. And I said, well, that's not a company. You've just created yourself a high-paying job. Some of them were getting highly paid, but I said, you're going to have to be working.
 
One of the very famous ones, and we've, you know, we've talked to each other periodically over a period of, certainly since we've had the company, we've talked to each other. It was in New York City and I was at a conference where I was actually being given an award for something. And he was too. So we were basically in the green room together to talk. And he had just been on a trip to Estonia to give a talk. And he's now in this business. And I said, why are you flying? He's my age. He's actually about three months older than I am. And he says, gotta pay the bills, gotta pay the bills. And the entire company, you know, very famous, much more famous than I am. I mean, many more books, many more TV appearances, many more, certainly speaking.
 
I mean, he'd probably give 130 speeches in a year. The last time that I gave a speech that would duplicate what he was doing 130 times a year, the last time I did that was about eight years ago. I haven't done it in eight years, you know, and I could get a check that's big, you know, in the speaking. I said, why would I do that? I said, I wouldn't do that. And I said, but I've got a company where that type of selling is happening every day without me. So which is a better kind of company?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it really comes down to, I don't know if it's better, which do you want? I mean, that's really the thing is, what are you willing to do? And what do you want? As you have gained success, financially and otherwise, how has your definition and approach to risk evolved?
 
Dan Sullivan: I'll make it personal. I'm always doing things that contribute to the insurance policy that takes care of things if I'm not here. Which means that we have tremendous reserves. I mean, we're past the point we could make no money in a year with our company and it would be okay. The reserves would take care of that. That's great. There aren't many companies that can do that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, that's right. That's right. Is it the money that has mitigated your sense of risk? Certainly done that. How much can this hurt me? I want to try it and how much can it hurt me?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but the big thing is that I'm thinking that I want the game to go on whether I'm here or not. The game called Strategic Coach, Babs feels exactly the same way. We both want, you know, we've created something which I think has lasting value, so we want it to last.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it's interesting how our perception of risk changes as our life circumstances change, you know, and what that is. Is there ever a time that business decisions were at cross purposes with personal decisions?
 
Dan Sullivan: You mean the Strategic Coach purposes? Or even, you know, earlier on in your… Yeah, well, I would say that there's sort of an internal morale issue in the terms of the way I would interpret this. And that is that, you know, like what I said before, you know, that it couldn't be about a personality. You had to build it on a system. There was a system in place. It's very interesting, Jeff, in the last month, goes back just about till this time in March, I've met in being in our offices here in Toronto and being in our office in Chicago, I've met four clients who've been in Coach 25 years or longer, and it's the first time that I'm meeting them. And they say, boy, you know, this has changed my life. Well, I said, yeah, you've been here for 25 years. You've written 25 checks. I take you seriously.
 
Anyway, I felt an enormous amount of gratification with that. I felt an enormous amount of gratification because it's something that exists outside of yourself as a reality there that someone's getting value so much so that they would renew 25 times or more and come back, you know, and I talked to them about it and, you know, I've had little lunchtime discussions or break time discussions with them about it. And they said, yeah, it's just changed everything in my life.
 
So one thing in order to grow in our business, you can take one approach or another. Okay. You can take the approach that you're going to create a permanent cookie cutter for the Program that doesn't change and that coaches can be hired to do this and they're professional coaches and they're doing that. Or you can establish one level of the Program and then at a certain point saying, I'm not going to do this level of the Program anymore. I'm going to jump to a higher level of the Program, which we're not guaranteed. We're not guaranteed because we're going to double the check. Okay, it's going to cost twice as much as I've been charging.
 
And there was enormous pushback internally from our team saying, well, you know, we can't sell it if you're not the main event. And I said, that's one way of looking at it. But what if I'm not the main event and we can sell even more without me? It’s that you got to make a choice. I mean, it's a binary choice. You're either going to go in one direction and create the cookie cutter, or you're going to take the innovative approach and there's constant new things at a higher level. And I've done this three times now successfully.
 
And so our checks, you know, the check that people paid in 1989 for being in the full year of the Program with Dan as the coach was $2,000 a year. And now they're paying $50,000 a year with me as a coach, but the people at the lowest level are paying $16,000 for other coaches, you know, but you have to make a choice. That's a risk. I mean, that's a risk because you can't bet halfway.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Right. But as success has informed and mitigated the risk. So I think over time, the perception of risk diminishes because you've now done it three times successfully.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: The other thing is raising your price. I mean, we do that. We don't do it yearly, but we would do it every five or six years. You know, we say it's inflation. I mean, first of all, there's inflation operating in the marketplace and you have to do that. But, you know, when I went to college, we studied the, you know, we studied the Greek wars. There was the Trojan Wars were in The Iliad, the Homer's Iliad, and then you had The Odyssey. But there was one Greek general who invaded Persia, you know, just across the Mediterranean. And when he got to the shore with all his boats, he said, burn the boats. And they said, burn the boats. And he said, yeah, we'll come back in their boats, or we won't come back at all. I said, that's a very clean decision. I said, there's no ambiguity about that decision.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, there's not.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I like that kind of decision. I like it because it keeps things really simple. Keeps everything properly focused.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So what did you get out of today?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I think we've made enormous headway over the first one. Okay. And I think that the essential thing that keeps, to use the boat analogy, your values are the boat, you know, I mean, you're, you don't burn your value, you don't burn your, and the metaphor breaks down pretty quickly here. But the whole thing is without your values, you don't have a business. And I think you don't understand what you—your business is your values. It's a set of activities. And you're always testing your values because you're always engaging in the marketplace. You know, and I think the big thing, if you're running a transactional business, you can play fast and loose with your values. But if it's a transformational business, you can't.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and I think what I'd like to do is, I think we have a part three, and that's about relationships, legacy, and reflection, which I think could be pretty interesting to get into. So this has been anything and everything.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's good. I mean, now I am worried. We really stuck to the subject this time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Actually, it's a risk. We're taking a risk. We're taking a risk here. We're doing something we haven't done before, and it may become a capability.
 
Dan Sullivan: We're putting anything and everything at risk. No, I really love this. And again, it goes back, why do we enjoy talking to each other? And I think it has to do with that we're both completely 100% values-based.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think that, well, there's a mutual respect for the quality of each other's character, whether or not we agree on everything. I don't see that as a thing. I think that the humanity is the common ground, and the curiosity is the common ground, and the valuing of others is the common ground, and the unwillingness to compromise on what's most important to us is a common ground. And I think Maxwell House Coffee had a common ground at one point in their ad campaign, I don't remember, but.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I got the humor in that, I'm just not breaking the spirit of the moment.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But thank you for defining the subtext. I appreciate that. I think there should be, to me, this kind of reflecting on one's decision-making process, on one's assessment of risk, on what is at stake, I think all those things are so important on so many levels. As I've said before, to me, the true currency in life are the relationships you have and maintain. Because if your only relationship is with money and your business and the hope of impressing others, for me, that's pretty empty. I am much more proud of saying that my best friend's daughter moved to New York and she's now best friends with my kids. You know, that's something that means a great deal to me. Also, again, going back to the example I gave with Margaret, and that was really embedded in my brain, which was, I have the luxury to be able to afford to make those kinds of decisions. It's interesting. Well, this has been great, Dan. Thank you very much. And you want to take us out?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep. Well, this is another episode of Anything and Everything. And in spite of the risk that we might do something from start to finish that was consistent with the theme that we started with and we did it, I still don't think that we've undermined our brand on the podcast at all. I think we've just expanded what anything and everything can mean by going deeper and higher. That's the way I'm rationalizing this. So anyway, we'll see you a lot. If you like this, recommend us to the friends you value most, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Dan.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thanks for joining us today on our show, Anything and Everything. Jeffrey Madoff: Thanks for joining us today on our show, Anything and Everything. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit acreativecareer.com and madoffproductions.com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach.com.