A Good Story Is a Compelling Offer

Jeff Madoff: Hi, this is Jeff Madoff. I’m here with my friend Dan Sullivan for part two of our “Anything and Everything” podcast. And we’re going to be talking about storytelling and the deep distinction between a convincing argument and compelling offer.
 
That opens up something else. There’s a few areas that I want to go into. This is great. And one is the storytelling, which has also become almost a cliche at this point. It’s so pounded into the ground that as the story goes, most people aren’t very good storytellers and they don’t even recognize it. And it’s a certain skill or talent, I think. And parts of it—structure can be taught. I don’t think you can teach somebody to be funny. I don’t think you can teach somebody to be insightful and connect the dots in a unique way. But you can learn structure and maybe you can recognize it in others and hire the right people. But how important do you think as a part of the entrepreneur’s quiver, that arrow of storytelling, do you think that is an important thing?
 
Dan Sullivan: I just went through a quarter where I made a division in people’s thinking about their business, and I said, “What part of how you’re presenting yourself in the marketplace is an attempt to make a convincing argument, and how much of it is that you’re actually presenting a compelling offer?” And what I find, generally, is that people use statistics of things happening outside of themselves and what their competitors are doing: “Well, the competitors are doing this and this and this and this. And what research is showing is that....” Well, the moment you say ‘research’, you’re dead in the water because nobody cares about research. And if you’re talking about your competitors, you’ve just taken yourself out of the game. You’re not talking about your competitors.
 
So the story has to really be about something that’s going on in the customer or the prospect’s life, and that you’re just joining in on a conversation that they’re having with themselves.
 
So I think that great storytelling, why it gets to us so much, and I see a lot, I’ve been watching a lot of comedy clips lately about the punchline, and there’s something very, very interesting about punchlines, because the performer is taking people down a road that they’re totally familiar with the road that they’re taking you down. And everybody says, “Well, this is interesting. I wonder where he is going with this?” And then all of a sudden you bring in another world and it just strikes you suddenly. And with a great comedian, it hits the audience exactly at the same time. It’s a split second and everybody just gets taken.
 
Well, there’s a lot about successful entrepreneurial business is that people are used to this or used to this or used to this, and you’re taking them down the road and you’re not irritating them, but you’re telling them really a story. And then there’s a punchline. There’s a punchline to it. And that just gets their total attention. They said, “Gee, I never thought about that before.” And that’s where the sale is. It’s something they’d never thought about before.
 
Jeff Madoff: And so what is that distinction between the--
 
Dan Sullivan: Can I tell you in Personality where the punchline is?
 
Jeff Madoff: Sure.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s right at the end. It’s right out the end. And it’s where he’s gone to Africa. It was when he was driving, the driving scene, where the driver saying, “Well, what tribe do you belong to? You see my tattoos here? You don’t have any tattoos. Do you belong to a tribe?” And he says, “Well, you’re not even really a person, are you? You’re not even really a person.” And you can see it forming. It’s not the complete punchline. But then he comes back and he’s out talking to the audience, Lloyd Price is, and he’s saying that what he realized was he was an American. He was really an American. And the thing is that in today, if there’s something that people have gotten used to, it’s apologizing for America. Everything is an apology for all the bad that America has done in the world.
 
And you deliver exactly the opposite. His success story as an American success story, his hardship that he went through was an American hardship story. Being drafted into the Army—and he wasn’t a Black soldier in Korea, he was an American soldier in Korea. And that’s the punchline of the play. And it catches everybody by surprise. I’ve seen it two workshops and I’ve seen the play twice. And I’m sitting there waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for that punchline because you can just see the whole theater go like that. They almost stop, because you’re telling a story that everybody’s telling the story, “Yeah, yeah, and they’ve done wrong to me and everything like that. And want to see my scars?” I don’t know. The punchline is this is what happens in America, both the good and the bad.
 
Jeff Madoff: Very interesting to hear that from you. And it’s also his story.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it’s legitimate because I talked to him. I didn’t talk to him for a long time, but I got in a half-hour one night.
 
Jeff Madoff: With Lloyd?
 
Dan Sullivan: With Lloyd, yeah. Yeah. I got no rancor whatsoever from him [inaudible 00:05:47].
 
Jeff Madoff: I’m so happy since you’ve been on this journey with me, and the fact that you got to meet him. He was a very special person.
 
Dan Sullivan: And he was in the same unit as I was in Korea. We both ended up in the Entertainment Special Services it’s called. He was in the same unit as I was.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s wild.
 
Dan Sullivan: I was there 11 years after he was. But the interesting thing about it is that that’s what elevates the story is it’s a story and you can blame this, and you can blame this, and you can blame this. And even his Logan, his greatest personal and business friend, they weren’t victims.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: That is such a refreshing punchline that, “Yeah, this is a story and all sorts of bad things happened. Part of it was because of the color of my skin. And guess what? It doesn’t matter.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. What will be interesting, assuming we go the route that we hope is--
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and Chicago is the perfect place to have this play, I’ll tell you. Because guess what? About four miles south of the theater, there’s shooting going on every night while the play’s going on.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. Well you’ll read it in the update. One of the consistent responses I have gotten since the workshop is how perfect the timing is for this story, for all those reasons. But I want to get back to the entrepreneurship. That’s very interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no. But I want to get to the point that if you have a good product or a good service, you’re telling them a story and then you’re pulling the rug out from under the story. And you said, “Yeah, but we do that.” My first line that really got us started was, “Double your amount of free time, you’ll double your income.”
 
Jeff Madoff: It’s a nice combination.
 
Dan Sullivan: And people said, “What? What?” And I said, “Yeah.” I said, “If you got a good night’s sleep and you took Free Days, you’d make twice as much money. You’ve totally proven that you can’t be any more successful working all the time. You’ve now proven the point that there isn’t any more hours to work and there isn’t any harder to work and it’s not doing the job. So maybe the solution is in the opposite direction.”
 
Jeff Madoff: I remember I was talking to a company, they were thinking about hiring me to do their brand positioning. They were saying, “But you haven’t done this before. What makes you think you can do it now?” And I said, “Well before the first time, nobody’s done it before, right?” And I said, “To be perfectly blunt with you, I can’t do it any worse than you’re already doing it. So if nothing else, it’ll be an incremental improvement. But I think it’ll be substantial.” And it was.
 
But I think that the storytelling skills are important. But when’s the story about a compelling offer? I really want to pin this down. The compelling offer as opposed to the compelling argument?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, no, it’s a convincing argument.
 
Jeff Madoff: Sorry. Yeah. Convincing argument, compelling offer.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because you can make an absolutely convincing argument and the person doesn’t have a comeback to it, but they also have no response to you having made a convincing argument. It doesn’t lead them to action. It doesn’t lead them to a decision.
 
A compelling offer, the whole point, it’s not the offer that’s compelling is that you are compelled to take advantage of the offer. In other words, you’re saying something—you know, like the “Who Not How” is the greatest three lines that we came up with. And I said, “Have you ever had this experience? You got a big goal, and you’re really excited about it. You can almost taste it, you can smell it. You’re already there enjoying the breakthrough. And then you come back to yourself and you said, ‘Oh no, I’m in trouble because I’m going to have to do all this stuff. I’m already got my schedule full and I’ve got to do all this stuff.’“ And I said, “No, the what that you’re excited about, that’s great. And keep the what. Your job is to tell a story about the what, so other Who’s will do the How’s for you.”
 
Jeff Madoff: I think Abbott and Costello did a routine like that. Who’s on first?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But the thing that I get here is, first of all, it’s just great entertainment. What you’re offering is two hours of really great, great entertainment—great music, great dancing and everything, which is very, very compelling. But it tells a story about one of the pioneers who actually created rock and roll. He wasn’t Pat Boon seven years later, he was Lloyd Price. And these were the original trailblazers in Rock’n’Roll combined with some very, very astute visionaries in the recording industry. But it was all new. But then it’s got all the right story, the 1950s and the very, very unresolved racial dynamics and politics.
 
But the big thing was that it was a series of things. The 45 came out. The 45 record came out and cheap, but good phonographs came out and it was teenagers. So it was the breakout that that all happened at the same time. You had the buildup of this tremendous musical culture coming out of the Black churches. And then the timing was right. And he listened to a guy who had a radio program in New Orleans and the guy said, “Come on down to the studio.” And he just happened to be there the day that the visitors from Los Angeles came. And Fats Domino just happened to be available to play piano that day. And Fats Domino. I know Fats. You know Fats. He hangs around here.
 
Jeff Madoff: Which was true.
 
Dan Sullivan: You really underplay it. You underplay all that. American history is starting to come by here and you’re just underplaying it.
 
There’s two things we never understand: We never understand the times that we’re living in and we never understand the society that we’re living in. We’re just participants. We’re just participants in it. And you gave him a great gift, because you got to take him back to the times and you gave him a chance to go back and look at the society.
 
Jeff Madoff: It’s interesting, again, going to our title that always seems to fit, which is “Anything and Everything”, with our podcast. But you mentioned the record players. The key thing that happened with 45 was that it enabled portable record players. So ‘78, there were portables that started and that’s how actually “Lawdie Miss Claudie” was first released was in ‘78. And they were hand-cranked. And so the thing is you had a portability that young people... Older people, never thought of carrying their record player around.
 
You could look at the portable record player in a way, like it was a precursor to the Walkman, which was the precursor to the iPod. And it’s kind of interesting that portability opened up new opportunities. And then I was thinking, “Well that’s interesting because if you go back, the car made us portable.” We could go to different places, experience different things. The world shrunk a bit as a result, and the record shrinking... And now, what do we have that makes everything available to us? Our phones, the smartphones. And portability, I had never thought about it before, but has become a major part of seismic technical and then cultural changes, which I think is kind of interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it was like your own personal space. The car originally was your own personal space, but it had wheels. It had an engine and it had wheels. I think the combination of radio and cars was the ultimate break from home, starting probably in the thirties where you had these unbelievably powerful radio stations in the thirties and then they toned them down. But you had 50,000-watt stations from Chicago. And I remember on really clear nights in northern Ohio, I could get New York City as clear as a bell. I could get Chicago, I could get New Orleans, Nashville. I could get Nashville, it’s 500 miles, but really nice night, no clouds in the sky and everything. And you can do that. And my feeling is that sense that you could get in this room that was on wheels and you could go place and you could turn on the car radio and you could see yourself in those faraway places and you were basically in the vehicle that would get you to those faraway places. I think that was a tremendous jump in a sense of personal independence for teenagers.
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think that the first car radios were invented by Motorola, if I’m not mistaken. It is interesting, because cars made us portable. They transported us around.
 
So when you’re an entrepreneur and you’re looking at an opportunity, a few things: How important do you think it is to be aware of the competitive landscape? Because you can think that you’re offering something unique and you might not be aware that there’s five other companies doing it and they’re doing substantial business. So how important is it to do your homework and to be aware of the competitive landscape?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, what you want to be doing is something new. Okay? So you have to be aware of what’s the same out there that everybody’s competing for. But I think the actual theater in which the story’s being told is inside the mind of the prospect or customer. And to be a good storyteller, you have to be a really good listener, because you have to understand the stories that the other person is telling themselves. So in that respect, I’m not really aware of—first of all, coaching is an unlimited world. It’s an unregulated world. There’s coaching everywhere. As a matter of fact, I have a new little one of my books, and it’s called Technology Coaching Teamwork. There’s a problem with technology and that is that technology doesn’t coach itself. And there’s a problem with teamwork because teamwork doesn’t know how to automate itself.
 
And so there’s a middle realm of coaching. And what I see, where our company’s been going, now we’re in our 33rd year, is that what we’re doing is that we’re getting people to work out the logic between the teamwork that they’re forming internally and the technology that’s available to them outward, so that they can free themselves up through teamwork, but then they can multiply the teamwork through the use of technology. Zoom is our great recent example. And I said, “We’re all in the same business today. We’re trying to create a real multiplier internally called ‘teamwork.’ And we’re trying to create an external multiplier called ‘technology.’ And our value to ourselves and our value to our customers and clients is really the matching up of these two worlds.”
 
Jeff Madoff: So do you think though that it is important?
 
Dan Sullivan: I’m not really at this stage, maybe I was 20 years ago, but we’re significantly, what I would say, unique in the content that we’ve created.
 
I’ll tell you something that’s on the horizon here, which is really quite extraordinary. So we’ve got this IP lawyer from Boston, his name is Keegan Caldwell. And Keegan had an indifferent American youth and he was heading to a fork in the road. One of them was probably prison and the other one was the US Marine Corps. And so he did the US Marine Corps. It did what it was supposed to do. And I think he put in five or six years. He ended up in dangerous situations being a machine gunner, very exposed machine gunner on a vehicle in combat. But he came out and you can tell he’s got a bypass. He doesn’t want to go about things normally. So what he discovered, he got interested in IP law. Actually, he had come back and he was a Chemistry major, actually did Chemistry, but then he just got interested in IP, intellectual property.
 
And he realized that you didn’t have to go to law school to get a law degree. All you had to do was pass the bar exam in most states. So he just passed the bar exam, which isn’t easy to do, by the way. If a hundred tried, maybe one or two people could actually do it. So he passed and he started. For the last four years, he’s been the fastest-growing IP firm in the United States.
 
Jeff Madoff: Wow.
 
Dan Sullivan: Really quite tremendous. And it has to do with what’s happening to the world. Something really, really amazing has happened. So in, I think it’s Forbes magazine, they did a study of Standard and Poor, the S&P 500 and who are the top... So they picked out the top five most highly valued stocks in the American marketplace right now, these are all the big tech companies, and traced them back, the ones that had a beginning in the late Seventies, so they’ve been around for 40 years. And what they did is they looked at the valuation for their stock in 1984, and then again in 2019. That in 1984, the average valuation was based on 82% tangibles—property, equipment, stores, everything. And in 2019, it was just the opposite. It was 82% intangibles and 18% tangibles. So the whole world is being valued more and more on intangibles. I got a belief that stories are intangibles.
 
So we’re creating a program. I’m doing a collaboration with him, for us and for all the entrepreneurs in Coach, where they have a process that they can come in and they “Tell us everything you’re doing and we’ll tell you where your intellectual property is.” Because most entrepreneurs are problem-solvers for 30 years, but they really haven’t taken any of their problems and seen them as copyrights or trademarks or patents. And what they do is you’ll come out and you may think you have one or two unusual things, but they’ll tell you have 30 unusual things. But it’s of no use to you or value to you unless you get it protected. Then they start the process of doing copyrights, trademarks, and patents. From my experience with marketplace, they’re very reasonable in their rates.
 
So then you come back and they say, “Now we’re going to bring in a process that evaluates the value of your IP.” So for example, someone only thought they had two or three things and they copyrighted it, actually registered the copyright, for a few things and purely for a protective reason. In other words, “We don’t want someone else stealing it.” That’s the experience that I went through with He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned. It turns out that the valuation was $50 million, and this is stuff that they never gave any thought to it. And then there are now international banks that will lend you up to half the value of your valuation. So if you’re starting a business, you haven’t really gone out there or anything, but you have had IP. And he said, “The moment you start creating something new, that’s the beginning of the IP process.”
 
So the reason I want to circle this back is the fact that you were given protection for your intellectual property by the government, and there’s five main ones: There’s copyrights, trademarks, and then there’s patents, and then there’s a thing called “trade design”. You just have unusual trade design. You’ve talked about Braun. You know Braun. I bet there are trade designs are worth billions of dollars, just the trade design. And then you have a thing called “trade secrets”. And it’s actually a designation by the government that you have satisfied their definition of a trade secret, but it’s not published. It’s not published. It’s just that you could take legal action if somebody was using your... Well, they can’t get your trade secret because nobody knows about it. It’s a trade secret.
 
And a lot of it’s being done these days. It’s just that we have a black box and it’ll produce this and this result. Well, what’s in the black box? Well, that’s the secret. That’s the secret. Well, what if we ask somebody else to do it? They can’t do it because they don’t know what’s in the black box.
 
I have a client here in Toronto. If there’s cancellations in an airline system, he can re-book 27,000 people in one minute without the airline having to do anything. It’s all done through their cellphone. It’s just a black box solution. And the Chinese said, “Oh, we’d love to have that, but we have to see what’s in the technology.” And he says, “You can’t. It’s inside the black box.” And they said, “Okay, well give us your black box.” And he says, “I’ll give you my black box. But if we notice that you even tried to open the black box, it destroys the secret.”
 
So the thing that I’m saying you know about this is that I bet if we took Jeff Madoff and all the solutions you’ve come up with for various things and ran down, you probably have a considerable about mount of intellectual property that can be valuated right now. Now this has happened within the last five years.
 
Jeff Madoff: Wow.
 
Dan Sullivan: There’s a big jump in the last five years with these valuations. But think about it, it’s intangible. Well, what are intangibles in your world? What are intangibles?
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, as you said, the stories.
 
Dan Sullivan: And then the ways of thinking and the ways of organizing and the ways of getting from here to here—normally takes 10 steps, but yours only takes three steps. It’s intangible.
 
So this is where I see the whole world of entrepreneurship. The whole point is that I’m seeing a spectrum here. You have an innovation which you may or may not take seriously, and then you get it protected and then you have a valuation. And it’s the protection plus the valuation that now gives you market positioning because you’re armed to the hilt out there. But you have to be doing something new. You can’t be doing something that somebody else is doing incrementally better.
 
Jeff Madoff: So what you’re talking about is a way to potentially profit and protect whatever the unique thing is that you are doing?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and the other thing is go on the offense rather than play defense. Because you can negotiate with people. Say, “This is totally protected, and we have, our IP is evaluated at so and so.” And he said the average valuation turns out, for all things concerned, whether that’s copyrights, trademarks, patents, right off the bat, each of us is worth about $400,000 on an average.
 
Jeff Madoff: Wow. And how do you enforce that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you got the legal document.
 
No, it’s just an interesting notice that the vast majority—I would say that 99% of my 2,500 entrepreneurs don’t have a clue about this. So we’re going to start cluing them in. So we’re going to do a collaboration between our company and Keegan’s company, because he wanted a coaching program for himself where he can bring in new lawyers and immediately get them highly trained very, very quickly. And he also wants to use the coaching program for his own clients. I said, “Well, I’m really, really good at creating coaching programs.” So I said, “Here’s the thing, we’re starting it in the fall.” October 26th. October 26th. Put it in your calendar if you can, because we’re going to do a first three-hour presentation of the whole idea, if you’re available.
 
Jeff Madoff: Online or in person?
 
Dan Sullivan: Zoom.
 
Jeff Madoff: Sure. Yeah, I would love to.
 
Dan Sullivan: Sure. So I’ll send you an invitation and we’ll send you the Zoom number.
 
Jeff Madoff: Great. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: But my feeling is that it’s the movement into a totally new world for entrepreneurship.
 
Jeff Madoff: It’s interesting, this is also--
 
Dan Sullivan: That qualifies as “Anything or Everything”, doesn’t it?
 
Jeff Madoff: I would say it does because everything does. And the thing that’s interesting about it also is it’s further proof, whether you think you have a master plan, or a lot of people operate under what I think is the illusion that things proceed in a sequential and linear way. You didn’t know you’d meet this guy and now you’re in it. I didn’t know I’d meet Lloyd. And so now you’re in a whole different pursuit. And if you had closed off your mind to the idea that, “Well no, this isn’t according to plan. I don’t have that.” Well, how could you have it? It didn’t even exist a few years ago.
 
Dan Sullivan: The thing is that you have to have an existing capability to encounter a new opportunity. There’s something you already know how to do when you encounter it, and that’s what makes it an opportunity is that you’ve done something like this.
 
I mean, you’ve done lots and lots of films, lots and lots of filming productions. And actually your introduction to Lloyd was because you were doing a documentary. So you already knew how to ask the questions. You knew how to get the story out. You knew after you had a lot of footage, you were able to break it down. Well, theater isn’t that much different from that.
 
Jeff Madoff: No. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And you’ve put on shows. For 30 years, you’ve put on fashion shows. It’s like putting on a play of the new season. You’re putting on a play. It’s got a plot to it. It’s got a sequence to it and everything.
 
So my sense is that 80% of everything you needed to capture this theatrical opportunity—and you knew it—you got to know who the Who’s are that can do all the How’s that you can’t do.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And you already knew that. You already knew that.
 
You’re probably a joy to work with. That’s what I think all the people, one of the reasons why they’re so faithful and constant to this project, all of your Tony Award winners and everything else, first of all, they love this story and they live in an industry where everybody’s a sucker for a good story. But the thing is, I think you’re probably a real joy to work with.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, that’s very kind of you. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: You just know what the whole thing looks like. You just know what the whole production looks like.
 
Jeff Madoff: I think if you’re paying attention, everything you do informs everything else you do. And so you’re absolutely right in saying it’s not that different. In the broad stroke is not that different. There’s some different vocabulary, but the protocols are essentially the same. And what you need to do is essentially the same. And the hard part is in convincing others that you can deliver on that promise.
 
At least so far, I’ve been fortunate in attracting good investors because they believe in that promise. Because—talk about intangibles, a play before it’s been produced is pretty intangible. So it’s an interesting journey.
 
And I always think in businesses, I position companies that private equity companies are selling. So I’ve been hired by some large investment banks like Raymond James or Lazard, who is representing a sale of a company for a private equity company. So when that private equity company bought the company five years ago, they turned it around, they brought in new management, whatever they did, increased the value greatly. Now they’re looking to sell it. And so I tell that story. The thing about telling the story is it’s everything we’ve been talking about. It’s how you create that compelling offer as opposed to the convincing argument.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The big thing here is that, probably one reason why Personality in its different development forms has been a hit, starting with the first reading, and then the workshop, and then the opening in Philadelphia, is that there are a lot of theater-goers and people who would be theater-goers are looking for a certain type of story right now. They’re looking for a certain type of story, and you provided the story.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, the part that I wanted to touch on, because it’s interesting to me, is that when I’m working with these private equity companies, and they have a deck, and that deck may be 150 pages. And I said, “Who looks at all this stuff?” They said, “Nobody.” I said, “Then why do you do it?” Because they spend a fortune putting this stuff together. “Well, it’s kind of expected.” So I said, “So far everybody I’ve ever spoken to says, ‘Yeah, the projections don’t really mean a whole lot’.” But they’re spending a fortune putting together these presentation decks that create a story or fantasy about why the future of this company is good and why you should acquire it or invest in it.
 
And again, going back to the theater, it’s like how you recoup through the ticket sales. You’re going to be high or low in your projections. You’re not going to hit it right. And it’s really interesting because it’s a dance that everybody in business feels they need to go through. Yet everyone, if they’re being honest saying, “Yeah, it doesn’t mean anything.”
 
Dan Sullivan: So this isn’t going to a private equity company, that’s going to an actual customer.
 
And this is my inventor, the guy who created the black box that re-books all the flights. So he decided that the only person he would talk to in an airline, and we’re talking about the majors here, is the CFO. Because times are tight, especially in the airline business right now, times are tight and they’re looking to be a hero inside their own company. So this is his presentation. He says, “Do you have a whiteboard in your office? We have to have a whiteboard.” So the guy says, “Yeah, we got a whiteboard, we’ve got lots of whiteboards.” So he starts. He said, “I’m going to give you my presentation.” And he goes up and he writes a number close to a hundred million dollars on the whiteboard. And he says, “That’s my presentation.”
 
And the CFO says, “What’s that mean?” And he says, “Well, that’s how much money you’re losing every month, simply because you don’t know how to re-book passengers during cancellation. As a matter of fact, you do more harm to your image in addition to losing this amount of money because of the way that you handle cancellations.” And he says, “And I’ve got a solution.” He says, “I can make that a savings. Whatever the number is, I can make the savings.” And the guy says, “Well, why can you do it?” And he says, “Because I’ve got the solution and you don’t have the solution. As a matter of fact, nobody in the airline industry has the solution. I have the solution.”
 
And he said, “I could do it for you if we reach an agreement here. And you would immediately have that on the plus side rather than the minus side.” And the guy says, “Well, I’m sure there’s other people we could look into. And he goes up to the number and he puts a multiplication sign: ‘x12’.” And he says, “If you don’t solve it in the next 12 months, that’s what it is for the next year. And there’s no solution. There’s no solution. But that money’s yours if you use my solution.” So the guy says, “So what are we talking about here?” He says, “I just want to know how much of this number is mine.” That was his deck.
 
Jeff Madoff: Which is effective and actually falls under--
 
Dan Sullivan: You know why? Because he knew he had a compelling offer. He didn’t have to convince them that they were losing money because of--
 
Jeff Madoff: They already knew it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: It does though, sound like he also presented a convincing argument.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But they already knew the convincing argument. See, the thing is more and more as we talk here, and I think it’s worth, I think that the story that you tell that’s already partially being told in the other person’s mind is the compelling offer. You’re bringing the story they’re telling to a happy ending. That’s what the compelling offer is.
 
Jeff Madoff: No, that’s right. And it’s a thing for another conversation, but it’s a construct out of a fairy-tale: “And they lived happily ever after.”
 
Dan Sullivan: And I’m still enough of a six-year-old that I love a good fairy-tale, especially when it shows up in actual dollars or whatever. All right, what’d you get out of this? I think this is a whole new area. The story that goes on in others people’s head is a very rich thing.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, because I think that’s the only way you can create resonance with whether it’s a audience member or an investor or a ticket-buyer, is because if what you say doesn’t relate to the story in their head, you’ve got nothing.
 
So I think that, probing that, because there’s also touchstones that could be looked at in terms of the creation of that story and that compelling story. There’s reasons those stories resonate.
 
Of all the stuff that’s out there now with streaming and all that, it’s really interesting how there’s still things that rise to the top. And it’s not the water-cooler people talking about the TV show the other night. But in a sense it is. That water-cooler now may be Instagram or Twitter, but stories that resonate somehow find their way out there.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. What’s the story that was the big hit streaming? Babs watched every episode of it. And it’s about the American football coach who goes to England and runs the--
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you’re talking about. Yeah. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful.
 
Dan Sullivan: And what it is that there’s two stories going on there, and one of the stories is a cliche about what Americans are like. And the other one is an actual convincing argument about how British people are. And they put these two things together because he’s just an American loud-mouth. He’s just a happy, totally optimistic American. But he turns a British soccer team around, whose owner doesn’t want it to succeed. So you got these interesting stories that intersect with each other and--
 
Jeff Madoff: “Ted Lasso” is the name.
 
Dan Sullivan: “Ted Lasso.” Yeah. I’ve heard more people talk about “Ted Lasso” than anything else.
 
But I think that just as future thing, the thing is, how do you know what story is going on in somebody’s head, as an entrepreneur? Well, first of all, whose heads are you looking at and what’s going on in the heads? Because not everybody that you want to talk to, but there are certain people who are looking for a certain story about their future and you’re telling them a story about their future.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, that’s right. The guy that brought me into the private equity world, who’s hired me a few times to do that, who’s with Raymond James, a big part of it is listening and asking the right questions. You can’t assume you know what’s going on in their mind, and you can’t assume that you know what they want. So you have to also, and I look at that as, to use Dan Sullivan language, a Unique Ability that I have is in knowing how to interview people and to bring those things out, and they don’t even realize what you’re surfacing. Because it’s not like you can say, “Well, what’s your story?” and they can articulate it. But you have to find out what matters to them.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s an emotional thing before it’s an intellectual thing.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s something that feels differently and they use their brain to make sense of it in a particular way. You got to have a mastery of both where the emotions are—you’re not generating emotion, the emotion’s already there—you’re just telling the person something. But they haven’t done a good job of thinking through what their emotions mean.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. Or even ask themselves a question. And when I will say to somebody, “So are you excited about the future of the company? Why are you excited?” And then letting that be the springboard to an area of questioning where I know I’m going to get some great nuggets because then they aren’t talking about, “Well, we’ve had an ROI of this over the last 15 months.” That’s not it. So they’re sharing their excitement or passion or belief about the company. Get them talking about it in a way that’s then credible. It’s an interesting dynamic.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think this is where all the action’s happening. So anyway, wrapping up this episode of “Anything and Everything”, I’m here with Jeff Madoff.
 
One takeaway for you, Jeff, that informs tomorrow.
 
Jeff Madoff: Paying attention to and listening to what the other person has to say before you form your opinions about what the other person has to say or what their needs are.
 
Dan Sullivan: Before you create the master plan.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. Yes. The sequential A-to-B linear master plan. Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Anyway, the thing that I got out of it is how I think that the world that’s coming for entrepreneurship is more and more—we had the discussion couple podcasts ago—about how big data isn’t doing the job on predicting good customer response, good marketing response. And I think that what they’ve neglected is that big data doesn’t tell interesting stories.
 
Jeff Madoff: Or stories you can depend on.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we got a lot of fertile territory ahead of us to do with this. So until next time, “Anything and Everything” with Jeff and Dan.
 
Jeff Madoff: Thank you, Dan Sullivan. Once again, a total pleasure.
 
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.