Are You Happening To The World, Or Is It Happening To You?

Gord Vickman: Welcome to the next episode of Podcast Payoffs. My name is Gord Vickman, here with Dan Sullivan, as always. Dan, on the next episode, we're going to be discussing the system and why you, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, could perhaps benefit from not being the system. And I thought an anecdote or a short story that we could use to take us into this is your 6 p.m. doorbell analogy that I've loved for years. So let's do some role play here, Dan. Dan Sullivan and Babs Smith are enjoying a lovely evening at their home on the east end of Toronto, and I, Gord Vickman, come up and I ring the doorbell at 6 p.m. What does Dan Sullivan do?
 
Dan Sullivan: I look at the watch and I says, after six, somebody knocking at my door at six o'clock in the evening, it's not for my benefit that they're knocking on my door. And so I have no obligation to actually go and open the door. Okay. So they're not doing that for any benefit of mine. They don't know what I'm looking for. You know, they're working a numbers game. If I knock on a hundred doors, maybe I can sell something to five people. I'm not going to improve the person's odds.
 
Gord Vickman: No. So as an entrepreneur, so you might be wondering, where is this going? As an entrepreneur, is your constant availability actually hindering your growth? Now, there's a story that I read. It was quite a while ago. It was a woman. She was executive level at some company, not important. And she said, I built this culture with my team where they felt like they needed to bounce everything off me. I needed to be involved in every decision. I needed to be in the know. And she said, I freely admit that I did this to myself. She had borderline nervous breakdown, so she went away somewhere, I don't know where, for a week. And she came back and she said there were 660 emails from the team sitting in my inbox.
 
So she did something and she said, oh, it was really scary, but I decided to do it anyway. Again, like maybe borderline nervous breakdown. She just mass deleted all of them. She zeroed the inbox from 660 emails that had arrived while she was away. And someone said, well, why did you do that? She goes, anything that is really important, anything that was critical, they're going to write me back. And how many emails did she get back three weeks after mass deleting 660? She got six. So of the 660, there were actually only six decisions that required her immediate attention, but perhaps the need to feel involved for other reasons, could be ego, who knows. Entrepreneurs sometimes tend to get into this trap. Is this something that you've seen with the clients that you talk to where being involved all the time makes them feel warm and fuzzy?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, not only that, but they've given permission anytime you need something I'm available. So they granted permission to be bothered. You know, they can do that. And I don't do that. One is that it's disruptive. It's very disruptive. But the other thing is that, you know, the main reason I have a cell phone—let's just use cell phones as an example. The main reason I use a cell phone is because I have Oura and I need the cell phone attached because I want to see how I slept overnight. That's the most important piece of information that I get on my cell phone, iPhone, every day. I mean, you've been at the company for eight years. Is it your experience that anytime you needed me to really talk about something, I was available?
 
Gord Vickman: Well, if you're on Free Days, no, but the way that you and I communicate, Dan, we do sort of rapid fire and we spend, you know, enough time together with the podcast recordings and we see each other in the hallways. We're at the office. So what I do is I just take my opportunities. Oh, I need Dan for this. Is this mission critical right now? Is the building going to burn down if I don't ask him this question right now? If the answer is no, and it's always no, then I just wait until I see you because you have other things on your mind. And you don't text me on Sunday morning if there's something going on with the podcasts.
 
Everything can presumably wait until the next time we see each other because we see each other enough. Your lack of availability, at least in the seven years, has never hindered anything that I've needed to do. And I don't believe that when I'm on a Free Day or if I'm going somewhere for a few days, it's going to limit the progress of any of the projects that we work on together or that I'm working on for you for this, that, or the other thing. So it hasn't been a problem up to now. I don't anticipate it will be a problem in the future. If the past is an indicator of the future, so far, so good.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think the issue here is that generally if it's internal, if it's inside the company, somebody wants to delegate thinking to me. Okay. They don't want to do the thinking. They want to delegate the thinking to me and I don't want to do their thinking. I mean, this is a good example of our podcast. It's in the schedule, you know, like we have a scheduler, and you talked to Becca, who's the scheduler, and you know, we do podcasts every quarter.
 
So if I see it in the schedule, I know we're going to have a podcast, but I also know that before the podcast, you're going to send me two Fast Filters, which say, this is what we're going to talk about, this is the reason, this is the topic that we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about what it looks like when it's the best result, we're going to talk about it when it's the worst result, and what's going to make it the best result, there's going to be five topics that we're going to hit on, and I get them, I read them within 15 minutes before, and I got a top of line, Gord's done the thinking here, and this is what he wants to think about. But I also know that once we get into it, we're going to go all sorts of different places.
 
But I know that you're real serious about it. You've prepared. So that's handled, you know. But if I didn't do that, it wouldn't be you because you don't do this to me. But people say, I've been thinking about the podcast and what do you want to talk about, Dan? And I said, well, you're the person who runs the podcast program, you know, what do you want me to talk about? Or what do you want us to talk about? So I think that there's this instant connectivity or this instant availability prevents thinking. I want thinking. I'm thinking a lot about a lot of things, but when I want to check out with somebody, I write up, you know, best result, worst result, five criteria, and I send it to them. This is what we're going to talk about.
 
And they are informed. They're real clear. They know that I'm taking it seriously. They know that I want to do a good job and everything like that. And we didn't have to chat. We didn't have to chat about that. The other thing is, since childhood, I've hated talking on the phone. If I can't see the person, I really don't like it. And Zoom has been such a great breakthrough because I just communicate better when I can see the person.
 
Gord Vickman: My father is identical. It's so funny. When I call my parents to say hello to catch up, if my dad will pick up the phone, he will say four words and he'll go, oh, do you want to talk to mom? And then just pass it over. So for a long time, I was wondering like, oh, I wonder why dad doesn't want to talk to me. And then I realized he just hates talking on the telephone. I'll talk to mom, who loves talking on the phone. She'll talk for 400 years. And then mom will relay what I'm up to, to dad in a later session. But dad's great in person. He's a wonderful conversationalist. He's just something about putting a phone up to his head, tells his brain to stop talking and hand the phone to his wife. A lot of people are like that.
 
Dan Sullivan: I have to understand when I was first introduced to the telephone, we were out in the country and we had a party line. And there were people whose occupation every day was to listen in on other people's phone line, you know, and it was noticeable. You could hear a click, there's a little click. You know, you could hear breathing. You knew that someone, the success of their day was how many other people's phone calls that they were able to listen in. And then they would phone, do you realize that so-and-so is doing something like that? So I said, no way. There's no way that we're going to do this. You know, I don't like other people listening in on my phone calls.
 
Gord Vickman: Just for context, Dan, for the young-uns, what is a party line?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, a party line is where instead of having direct, you know, sole contact with one person, you dial the number, you know, that's where dialing came in. You had switchboards, but it was a party line. So, you know, you might have had 20 homes in country and everybody was on the same line.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah. And it had a different ring for every house. My grandfather had one at his cottage up in Northern Ontario. We called it the camp. There was a rotary phone. I remember being a kid. This is the 80s. And I think it was like two quick rings for the Vickmans. And then if it was a short and a longer one, then it was the Jensen's next over. So I am familiar with the party line. It went away, you know, pretty quickly. But we as kids just couldn't resist the rotary phones ringing. You got to pick it up. Pick up the phone no matter what it did, and grandpa would lose his mind because he's like, stop picking up the neighbor's phone calls. We just wanted to pick up the phone. So I do have experience. I was pretty young, but I knew what the party line was. I just thought we should give some context that people would be thinking, what's a party line, like a group chat? One line, 20 houses. Listen for your ring.
 
Dan Sullivan: Uninvited listeners. Snoopers.
 
Gord Vickman: Snoopers, yeah. Great for the neighborhood gossip, but not so great for people who want to do some deals or whatever. And we even talk about human behavior a lot on this. Technology is what we talk about as well on this podcast. Podcast Payoffs is about the intersection of teamwork and technology. I heard a great line at a conference. I want to get your thoughts on this. When you're thinking about availability, the line was, tech isn't creating better leaders. It's making them more available to be louder and faster at the wrong things. I wholeheartedly agree.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we're learning, but the whole point is, you know, do I want to participate in this? And I don't. But what I've built in is layers and layers of teamwork between me and whoever wants to get a hold of me. You know, I can't remember ever since we started Coach that somebody just phoned me and got me. I mean, first of all, it was impossible because I wouldn't pick up the phone.
 
Gord Vickman: The 6 p.m. phone ring is the same as the 6 p.m. doorbell.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, emails, you know, cell phone. I like text on the computer. Like, if you really want to get my attention, send me an email and I want to tell you that you're probably not someone who would get my email number, okay? But here's Becca. Becca handles it. She screens people, and oftentimes, I'd say 90% of the case, somebody who's on my team will be in a better position to actually give the person the information they want, or could Dan speak at such and such. There's no way they're gonna get through to me. And she's my scheduler, so she knows what my schedule is. And, you know, she really shields me. And that's her job, is to shield me. When I'm working on something, I don't like being interrupted. You know, I like focusing.
 
Gord Vickman: You just gave me a fun idea. I'm going to ask Fatima, who's our relatively new Front Stage Coordinator, how many times does the phone ring on the average day and someone says, Dan Sullivan, please? What does she say? Probably, what would you say, a hundred times a day? I have no idea. I'd be curious, just for my own curiosity.
 
Dan Sullivan: She would send it through to somebody else. I mean, she would have been taught, you don't send anything directly through to Dan. And the big thing is that I treat that type of communication just like I treat any kind of meeting. That I'm not going to do it right at the moment, so don't bother me in the moment. And if it goes through the filters of our team members, that this is something that Dan should be on, it's scheduled just like a one-on-one meeting. And I prefer Zoom. I want to see the person, you know.
 
But I've had people who will approach me at conference and they said, you know, you're the most difficult person in the world to get in touch with. And I said, you just walked up to me. I'm right here. I'm right here. And then, you know, they'll make a request, and I'll never say yes. I'll say, first of all, I don't know my schedule, so I'll talk to my scheduler. Is there time for this? I have a Zoom call tomorrow, and this was set up about a month ago from one of our clients in the Free Zone Program. He said, Dan, can we just have a half hour Zoom call? And I said, you gotta talk to Becca about that. She'll put you in the schedule.
 
And I looked at the schedule and a Fast Filter had not come through from that person. And Becca said, are you just gonna talk? And I said, oh no, they have to have a Fast Filter. I wanna do a little thinking about it before I'm on the Zoom call. But there's a fundamental issue here. Are you happening to the world or is the world happening to you? And it's a very fundamental issue. And for the most part, I like to say I'm happening to the world, so it's going to happen on my schedule. It's not going to happen on someone else's schedule. If they really need it, then it's got to be on my schedule. It's not going to be on their schedule.
 
Gord Vickman: What kind of message do you think it sends if you're a founder or an entrepreneur at the very top level being constantly available to your team and to the public? Is that perhaps maybe you don't trust them? Or what kind of message do you think that would convey?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think first of all, you're sending out a message that you can get a hold of me anytime you want. And that's not confined to business hours. That's not confined to business days. I mean, I've seen people, you know, that just phone people and it's Sunday and I don't work on Sundays. They say, oh, the word is Dan’s available all the time. Well, it's not just the person involved who knows that they spread the word Dan’s easy to get a hold of. And I sent out a message, Dan, it's not easy to get. It's really special if you get a hold of Dan. That's the message I want to put out. I mean, they just want to know what the rules are. I think I'm hard to get a hold of.
 
Okay, have I been penalized for that? I have no idea because as far as the successes I've wanted to have in my life, I've had them. But there's this notion that you're missing opportunity. I never feel like I'm missing opportunity. I got a lot of opportunities that are self-created that I'm following through on. I mean, you're the only one to say that something's an opportunity. It's an opportunity or it's not an opportunity. And in 36 years of being in the present form of the company, I had 15 years before that, but even when I was just a lone entrepreneur, they had voicemail and I would pick up on the voicemail.
 
They said, you know, I left a message three days ago. Why didn't you get back to me? And I said, I'm getting back to you. And I said, I had important things to do over those three days, and this is the first chance I had to actually follow through. But being the Program we are, and being what the whole purpose of the Program is, is to regain your freedom over what happens to your time as an entrepreneur, and I said, if you're always available, your time is not worth very much to you.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah, because if you think about it, if your time was valued like the products you're selling, would you be giving it away so liberally? You just reminded me of something. This is a total sidebar. This would be a community note. We get messages from people who are trying to reach you. And we have a general box. I call it the swamp box. And it's mostly just bounce backs from people and people aggressively trying to pitch products and services that we don't need, we never asked for. When someone sends an email and it's just something we don't need, never asked for, and then days later, they'll send another one, and the first line is just bumping this up.
 
Everybody needs to stop doing that. It's the stupidest, laziest way to try and convince someone to answer your message. Either they're working on it, like you said, you know, three days later, voicemail. That's not an unreasonable length of time. But just bumping this up in the inbox does not work for anyone who may have any inclination to answer you in the first place. So everyone far and wide from California to Japan, the other way, stop doing that when you're trying to reach someone. Don't bump it up. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk. That's all I have to say about this. Bump it up.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm speaking in New York. I haven't given an outside talk anywhere, I think, probably about five or six years, you know, because my number one activity is to create new thinking tools for the people who are our clients. And it's scheduled. They have workshop days when they do that, or they have two-hour Zoom calls. So far, we're having the business success we want. I'm really dealing with great, great entrepreneurs in the Program. You know, it's all in the schedule. I can see a year out that I'm going to be meeting. So I've just restricted the time.
 
And then after 36 years, people know, if you want to talk to Dan, sign up for the Program. And if it's not at the level that Dan is coaching, then you're going to have to find some other way of getting it. But it's your desire to talk to me. It's not my desire to talk to you. So we got an inequality here of purpose. I think the impact on our clients is, don't bother Dan unless you got something that you know that Dan would be really interested in it. So it takes their discernment up. But I think it comes around that you're missing opportunity, and I don't think I'm missing any opportunity, you know. Big things happening out in the world, but they're big things for other people who are doing it. It's not necessarily they're big things for me.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah. And you can be found sitting in the cafe. We have a beautiful cafe at our offices in Liberty Village in Toronto and then in the Chicago office as well. You're sitting in the cafe.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Gord Vickman: I don't think you're that hard to find. And it's like, where's Dan? He's sitting right there. So if there's an opportunity, you're sitting right there. Now, maybe you would be working on something and I don't know who would be approaching you anyway, but you're not that difficult to find when we have one of those office days. So it's not like you're in your evil lair and you're, you know, concocting plans and doing this, that, and the other thing behind closed doors. You don't even have an office. We've never mentioned that on the show. You have no office because …
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm not neat. So we have a cafe and it's like going to Starbucks, you know, they clean up and everything like that. But it just seems to come down to what is my role in the company? What is the contribution that I make? And I try to, I forget who said it, but you know, the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. So I've got a notion of what the main thing is. Podcasts are the main thing. Writing books are the main thing. Creating new tools. That's all part of the main thing. There's four or five activities. They're all related to each other. They all reinforce each other. And then I like reading novels. You know, I got all sorts of interests of my own, but I don't like being bothered. I just fundamentally don't like being bothered. And I don't think that someone's attempt to bother me puts any obligation on me.
 
Gord Vickman: Interesting. So, Dan, as we wrap here, one of my takeaways from our episode here, I hope you and I, throughout this podcast episode, have created a new slang or maybe a new definition. We could call it the 6 p.m. doorbell. So, oh, yeah, have you talked to Tom lately? Yeah, Tom. Oh, did you meet his buddy, Larry? Yeah, I met Larry. Yeah, Larry. Larry's a 6 p.m. doorbell. What does that mean? Larry's kind of doing everything for his reasons and not my reasons. He's a 6 p.m. doorbell. I don't know. I hope that works, because then all of our listeners could use that. And that would be someone who does things for their reasons, not your reasons, for here and forevermore, be it. He's a 6 p.m. doorbell.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'll give you an example. This conference, I'm going to do a tool. I'm going to take them through a tool. There's about 500 of somebody else's clients, but they're totally within the framework of the type of clients we'd like to have at Strategic Coach. One is I really like the entrepreneur who invited me. Very successful, and he's a very respectful person. He's very appreciative and very respectful. And he asked me about it, and I said, yeah, I'll do it. So then their information went out about the conference and who was speaking. And right away, I get an email from somebody who said, you know, I'm a fellow speaker, and I just want to tell you, I've got a technique for how you can maximize the number of people who sign up for your program. And I just wonder if we can have a Zoom call so I can show you by using my method, you know, you can actually maximize, you know, your participation. And so I just deleted it.
 
Gord Vickman: You deleted a 6 p.m. doorbell.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and then I talked to the person who was my host, the person who invited me, and I said, how did you get my email? And he says, oh, well, we just give the information. I says, well, I'm doing this for you, and I think it's great. And I said, I know if I talk to 500 people and take them through a thinking tool that we're going to get a good number of people who want to go further with Strategic Coach. And I said, I don't want somebody that is taking advantage of your conference to try to get me as a customer. I said, I think it's inappropriate.
 
I said, I just want you to know that I don't want my email. And they said, we have contact information for our sales team, and if anybody wants to do that, that's fine, but not me. And he said, oh, but he lives in a world where everybody trades everybody's information. And I said, no, it irked me. For five minutes, it irked me, and I said, don't like this, flies and mosquitoes, you know, there's a broken screen somewhere. They're getting in, pull out the Raid, pull out the Off. Yeah well how would you get out of this? I mean is this an unusual attitude, no?
 
Gord Vickman: I think it's an attitude and the way that you do things, I appreciate it. And I think it's interesting. And I think we live in a world, you know, without being like grandiose, like everybody knows that everybody can be reached at any given time. And sometimes I'll get a text message. I like the person who sent me the text message. I like the message they sent to me. It was pleasant. Maybe it was funny, but I don't answer it right away. It might take a day. And I often wonder how that comes across, because I know how certain people would interpret the 24-hour lag between sending Gord Vickman a text message and the response. But sometimes it's just because I know that person, after having received a response from that, now we got a thread going. Now we got a text thread.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thread or threat?
 
Gord Vickman: A thread that may involve some threats. Because I know this person's proclivities, and I know that when you answer a text, then you get one back, and it has a question, and then you send one back, and then you, ah-ha-ha, it's like, okay, the barn door is kind of closing here. And then they send something else back, and then, so I know my friends, and I know that there are certain individuals that can send me something, hey, you got the plans? Yep, done. And then some people, they use it as sort of like, that's their opening.
 
So I have to be prepared for the thread. I can't answer them as I'm getting in the car because I know I'm going to be getting 15 more back. So that's sort of an obtuse observation in terms of availability is, we all have the right and, you know, I'd suggest the obligation to use that concept of the 6 p.m. doorbell. Are they doing it for their motivations? Are they doing it for your motivations? And especially in an entrepreneurial environment where we are, protecting your time, which is the most valuable asset, seems like something that with our connectivity right now could be something that people may be well served to spend a little bit more time thinking about it. Does that make sense?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the big thing is that I want to have time for the people who are involved in my teams, you know, and the clients and everything else. So I want to maximize the amount of availability, and to do that, I've got to cut off all other availability. You know, more and more, you just cut that off. Now, if we were going bankrupt, you know, because I'm not getting back to people, that's a different story. We've sort of arranged the company in such a thing that cash flow is good, profitability is good. Something new has happened with connectivity, the fact that, you know, anybody anywhere in the world can, if you have a number and you have a link, you can get in touch.
 
And that's a new thing. Certainly in my lifetime, it's a new thing. But do you need this new thing? And I don't. But here's a workaround I just want to tell you about. Babs was saying, it was just a couple of weeks ago, and she said, we had four signups. You know, I mean, it's not a little commitment you have to make financially to be in the Program. I mean, at the minimum, it's $15,000. And we had four people sign up that day. And she just happened to be looking at the call record between them and the salesperson and coach. And all four of them had signed up because they had read one of the books.
 
And that's my whole point is have millions of books out there where they're actually having a conversation with me. But, you know, it's not using up time. They're doing it for their own reasons. They're really interested. And it would be better than me meeting with them because they got to read the book, they got to think about. And usually if they've read one book, they've read more than one book. So they're prequalifying themselves. They're selling themselves. It's not using up any time.
 
Gord Vickman: It's a brilliant strategy and it works quite well for Strategic coach. The books Dan's talking about, The Transformation Trilogy: Who Not How, The Gap And The Gain, 10x Is Easier Than 2x. We'll put the links to those books as well in the show notes. Dan, I think that puts a bow on it and wraps things up very nicely. Always a pleasure chatting with you. Thanks so much.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you.