Unlocking The Secrets To Entrepreneurial Freedom, with Ben Laws

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here, and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with special guest Associate Coach Ben Laws. Ben, I am so excited, A, because you're one of my favorite humans, but B, I'm excited because I'm excited for our audience to get to know you. You are a brilliant coach, phenomenal entrepreneur, great coach of your team. We've worked together a lot on that regard. And I think your insight and way of looking at business, way of looking at life, way of looking at your family is something that I respect hugely, and I'm excited for other people to get to know you as well. So with that introduction, first of all, tell us a little bit about Ben. So where you're from, where do you live, some of those good things, maybe about your family, and then we'll get into your entrepreneurial career and how you got started.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, well, thank you for having me. Anytime we get to have a conversation, it's always fun. And I feel very honored to be able to share a little bit about who I am with our audience. And so my name is Ben and I live in central Wisconsin, which is like dead center in the States. I am a husband to an amazing wife who's also co-founder in many of my businesses. I'm a father of three. I have two girls and I had a son who was born and who passed. And yeah, I feel very blessed when it comes to my personal life, especially considering the fact that Strategic Coach has influenced so much of how my personal life functions, like in these naming and the structures. I had this big realization that the ultimate freedom is delegations, structure, and rules. And when I think about like, who I've surrounded myself with in my personal life, specifically my wife, is that she is the opposite of me from a Kolbe perspective, which can be interesting at times, and as we've had our maritable moments, but it's been the greatest blessing because it's created, you know, as our friend Christopher Johnson said, these mindset fortresses, the things that protect my ears, like, and protect my eyes, you know, as Dan's saying of, you know, your ears hear and your eyes see what the brain is looking for. And so, the success I've had, I think the catalyst of why it's so exponential is because of my relationship with my wife.
 
Shannon Waller: And she's a wonderful person. I know her too. She is.
 
Ben Laws: By the way, as people are listening to this, her name is Jenna.
 
Shannon Waller: I was going to say Jenna. Perfect. Yeah, Ben and Jenna. So that's powerful. So tell us a little bit about your entrepreneurial career. How did you get started? When did you know that you were an entrepreneur slash not suitable for anything else? And how has that progressed?
 
Ben Laws: It's a really good question and I was a late bloomer when it came to this entrepreneurial life. I grew up in a household where my mom was a nurse and started off in ER and then she transitioned to hospice and my dad was a pastor. So, you know, I got to see maybe a little bit of what the entrepreneurial life could look like. You know, my dad was around 24/7, you know, but also would have to rise to the challenge. But I probably should have figured out that I was an entrepreneur going back to when I was like four or five. And again, this is all happenstance. I found out later in life when my sister, Beth, who is actually one of my main collaborators today in life, when she would tell me that, like, I would look at my room and say, like, hey, I don't want to do this, but I'll exchange, like, I think I got, like, two cents of allowance for, like, a week or something like that. And I was like, I will exchange this if you do this. And this idea of now I know as Who, Not How. And she would do that. But, you know, as I went through school, you know, I get in trouble for talking or, you know, maybe being unruly, not following directions. And then I know, shocking for all the entrepreneurs who are listening to this, that they're like, yep, that sounds about right. And then when I got to high school, it became really clear that I think I had a unique social skill in the fact of forming connections and helping people solve problems. And I still, again, just thought it was, hey, coming from a house where my mom's a nurse and works within hospice and helping people. And my dad being a pastor, I was like, okay, this is environmental, environmental influences that are impacting me.
 
It wasn't until I actually got to college when I realized, as a result of a conversation I had with my football coach at the time, coach Dan Marlowe, he's like, there's all these different geniuses, Ben. He goes, I keep wanting to say this, but you're like a social genius. And I didn't really know what that actually was. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, it's the first time someone said genius in the same sentence as me. So I was like, I'll take it. And I thought he just meant like, oh, I'm just good at talking with people. And even in college, when I got the opportunity to be an intern in the financial services world, and my job consisted of picking up a phone and cold calling people, even then I didn't realize I had this unique skill, but I crushed it on cold calling people, just by how they would say hello. You can start to know, oh, hey, how's this conversation need to go? And so I would be booking 13 to 14 meetings a week. And then when I made the jump from college, which I left college halfway through my junior year to hop into this, because I figured, you know what? Hey, this didn't seem that risky. I was like, you know, most people expect I'm probably going to fail anyways, you know, as I'm leaving college, right? Because that's not the normal route. Again, in retrospect, these are attributes of an entrepreneur. It didn't seem risky to me, but to everybody else, it seemed incredibly risky. And started in the financial services world. And again, at the time, I thought I was like, I'm just an advisor. And then I started going through that. It seemed really lonely. It didn't seem very effective. So about six months after starting, I actually hired my sister, Beth. And then I saw like massive jumps into there because she was really good at certain things and allowed me to be really good at things, certain other things. And I thought, I was like, well, this is good. I was like, why don't we grow this? So we grew a team and it didn't work. So we had to kind of start back at ground zero.
 
It wasn't until I actually got to Strategic Coach. I thought by that point, I was like, I own a business. You know, it's like I'm an advisor. Now I built like a team and, you know, I built something that I would say I'm a business owner, right? You go business after five, you know, with other business owners. But it wasn't until my workshop, my first workshop in year one, where you usually introduce yourself and you say, hi, my name is so-and-so and I'm an entrepreneur with a specialty in fill in the blank. And I remember going, entrepreneur, boy, like. What? I know it sounds silly to say, but like, what is that? You know, like, what really is that? And what's the big difference between the two? But when I really understood that an entrepreneur is different than a business owner, because a business owner is going to be about like, hey, how do we keep things status quo? How do we keep things like going on the rail? An entrepreneur, actually, in the very word, it's actually French, means to swim out. And so when you think about that, that seemed so natural to me, because I looked back through my life going, I was like, you know, leaving college early, swimming out, even how I actually picked my college, right, in terms of it was swimming out to what other people thought it was like risky. And so I wasn't born into the entrepreneur world really until Strategic Coach. And once I realized that, boy, dance analogy, if you name the game, you own the game. And me, once I realized that I was an entrepreneur, things just started to unlock for me.
 
Shannon Waller: That's really interesting. And you didn't stop at one business. How many do you have now?
 
Ben Laws: Four businesses.
 
Shannon Waller: Can you talk about those? Because some of them are intuitive and make sense. And some of them you're like, that's interesting.
 
Ben Laws: My OG company, my gateway company, if you want to call it, it was a wealth coaching, wealth management company. And then the next company that I bought was I think most people will be able to see like, okay, I can see the similarities in this, is I bought an accounting firm. Which is like a nice sister company that kind of can run parallel to my existing company. The next company I bought was a digital video production company. And the reason why I did that was that Dan had talked a lot about Peter Diamandis’s 6Ds, right? And one of those things was this idea of like digitizing and democratizing. One of the things I started to realize early on is that as founders and as entrepreneurs, we often say the same thing again and again and again. If we really want to grow, what ends up happening, the farther we get away from the epicenter of where it like the ignition happened and we start to become more self-managed and self-multiplying, is there's the risk that in terms of what made the company great, which was your energy, which was like your umami, starts to maybe get diluted.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, it dissipates.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, it dissipates. And so the digital video production company was really designed in what I call value telling and the ability for us to go in specifically with entrepreneurs and help them understand what is the story that they have been telling? How does that find itself in their products, in their culture? How do they want their training to potentially happen so that they can make these things repeatable, replicable, and scalable? And then lastly, and this is really the one that is really the most newest one, is a coaching company. And this one is still evolving, you know, in terms of helping entrepreneurs initially with talking about experience, right? How can they actually bring experience? Because it's the one thing that can't be commoditized. But this is quickly moving in a direction in part. But having conversations with entrepreneurs is that one of the gifts that I think I bring, because this is truly the thing that I want to do. The thing that gets me fired up is watching other people win, is the ability to actually find the hidden potential and galvanize that in their own hearts and minds. And so that's the one that to me is really exciting. It's the one that actually then naturally like pours over into my role as an Associate Coach here at Strategic Coach.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, I can totally see that. And galvanize is one of your geniuses as per Working Genius, which I love. It's so cool because you galvanize me on more than one occasion. You're like, Shannon, have you done this yet? I'm like, okay, okay, I'll do it, which is really fun. So what inspires you most about being an entrepreneur? I mean, I love your distinction between being a business owner and being an entrepreneur. And it's like not about the status quo. It's about new things. But I can tell there's almost like this freedom or something, I'm not sure how you would articulate it, that just is very enlivening when you talk about being an entrepreneur. What inspires you?
 
Ben Laws: That's a really good question. When I think about being an entrepreneur, in the other interview, I said, like being an entrepreneur and the question they'd asked me real quickly was like, what's the difference between a good entrepreneur and a great entrepreneur? So I think this really comes back to what inspires me about being an entrepreneur is this ongoing, never ending journey of self-discovery. And what I used was this idea that I took from when I was over in Italy for two weeks. We went to go visit Pompeii, and Pompeii was buried in six to seven meters of ash, and they've excavated, I think, something like 77% of all of the ruins. But what made me think about this as I was walking around there, and what does it mean to be an entrepreneur, and what inspires me to be an entrepreneur, is that we already have and are the world's greatest entrepreneur.
 
The question is, are we continually spending enough time digging down and excavating and discovering? And I think that's the part to me that gets me so fired up about waking up for myself being an entrepreneur and not only that, but being on this journey, especially like with Strategic Coach and every 90 days being in the room and being surrounded by this incredible community of entrepreneurs who have Strategic Coach operating system installed, is that we are non-stop excavating. Who is it that we want to be, not who are we, but who do we want to be? And as we uncover these nuggets, what ends up happening is that then we turn around and take those nuggets and we go out to the marketplace and we fascinate someone, we motivate someone, we actually solve someone's problem, or we basically change their game. And in my opinion, there's no greater call to loving your neighbor than being an entrepreneur.
 
Shannon Waller: Right. That's so powerful. It's like you get to do what you're best at, but you're also creating value for somebody else. Dan and I were recording some podcasts and he talked about Adam Smith. Adam Smith is really well known for The Wealth of Nations. What he's less known for is The Theory of Moral Sentiment, which has to do with creating value for other people. And you can't really have one without the other. So if you think about Unique Ability, Unique Ability Teamwork, and creating value in our current language, that's exactly it.
 
A fun thing that I've learned, you know when you're trying to instill personal laws for yourself or rules to live by? I only have one. And it is, I trust people to the degree that I think they know themselves. So when you talk about self-discovery, I talk about know thyself, and that's probably why I live and work, hang out with entrepreneurs, is because they know themselves. They're on that path of self-discovery. They're always being challenged. Even if their companies are staying the same, the marketplace isn't. Something's going to change in the world that they need to be dynamic and respond to. And it's always an opportunity to go deeper, as you said, to learn more, to explore new facets of themselves. And you said, you know, free up people's hidden potential so that they can be more fully out in the world. I mean, no greater path. I love that.
 
Ben Laws: And it's super interesting. I love everything you just said there, especially one of the things that people look at maybe entrepreneurs who have had more success. What I think if you actually sat down with them and found yourself in a deep conversation is that their level of self-awareness is exponentially higher. And so I think that there's a correlation when someone goes, boy, that person is so successful, they're so disciplined, is I actually think that discipline is just another word for intentionally built structure, but they understand themselves in a way that they know exactly what is intentionally built structure that they need to have that allows them to shine. And so I just think there's no better calling than to be an entrepreneur.
 
Shannon Waller: It makes me think, this is off-roading a little bit, but intentionally built structure. You are one of the most conscious, conscientious people I know about habits with regard to family, I think also free time and health. Can you just talk about one of those areas? I was thinking about health, but you're using in front of me, every time I see you, you just had a birthday. You look even younger than the last time I saw you. So clearly you're doing something that works. So those intentional structures that you're talking about, that's not something you just see other people do. That is something that is very real for you. So share one aspect of that part of your life. I think that'll be fun.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, you know, as an entrepreneur, we don't like rules. But Jocko Willink says, like, discipline equals freedom. And I think for me, and I think I might have said this before, that ultimate freedom equals structure, delegation, and rules. And so one of the things that for me, that I've surrounded myself with is, I want to control what's actually inside my control. So like, how do I spend my time? Like, who do I spend my time with? So one of the things I actually took from a CEO that I had seen him put out there was something called net time, no extra time. For example, every single Wednesday, Jenna and I sit down at 4:15 p.m. Central. So if you don't know where I am at Wednesday at 4:15 p.m. Central, is that we map out the day from the moment I wake up. So the moment I actually go to bed every single day, so on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and what that does is that it allows me to fill my days with the things that make me feel like I'm winning. So for example, wake up at 5, I go and do my cold tub for like 5 to 10 minutes, then I get out and I do my EWOT, exercise with oxygen therapy, for like 10 and a half minutes, then I get done, and then I do my Somadome for, it's about like 20 minutes. But then, by then, I'm done, and by that time, like, my daughter wakes up, I get her up, and then I get her milk, and then we sit and have, like, just daddy-daughter time. This one is three. But what it's allowed me to do is that I'm constantly winning. And so they say success is what we repeatedly do. Therefore, success is just a habit. Is that one of the things that I think that often happens is people feel like life is happening to them rather than for them. And so for me, it's about having the structure. So that's what I do personally. So I know outside of like my business hours, I know exactly what I'm doing, like who I'm doing it with and why I'm doing it proactively, basically a week to two weeks ahead of time. I don't know if that answers your question.
 
Shannon Waller: It totally does, because what it means is you're, again, very conscious and very intentional about how you spend your time. Dan and I also record a podcast that is about Free Days. And he goes, I'm as intentional about my Free Days as I am about my work days, which is very unusual. He says, if you watch me on both days, I'm doing the same thing. You know, work days, he might be on his laptop and doing some writing or thinking. And if he's at home, he's on perplexity.ai asking, I think one of his queries was, how does Catholicism, how has that impacted capitalism? I'm like, okay. It looks the same, but Dan's having very different queries. But again, was it no extra time? He's very clear on what's in exercise, people, parties, relationships, all the things. So I totally appreciate that.
 
Ben Laws: Just to be clear, this is in my Outlook calendar and this flows through to we have this display that downstairs that shows everyone in our family. And the goal of it is that there is no white space. There is no white space. And what this actually does is actually prevent from me being overscheduled. I know it sounds weird, so stay with me. By me actually scheduling what it is that I want, it prevents me and anyone else to actually schedule in things that would make me feel overscheduled. Because as Dan says, an overscheduled entrepreneur does not have the capability to be creative.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, to transform. And it was funny, I misquoted him and he corrected me, which is funny. I still laugh at myself. I said, oh, a too tightly scheduled entrepreneur can't transform. He goes, no, Shannon, it's not too tightly. A tightly scheduled entrepreneur can transform. But what I'm hearing in your calendar is you have you know, chill out time with Jenna or going for a walk in the woods or playing in the pool, you know, that kind of thing, like that kind of stuff is scheduled in. And I appreciate that because, again, you've got that leisure time, that downtime scheduled in. So you're not too overscheduled, which is powerful.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah. All right. It's transformed. I think it's the idea that as entrepreneurs, our number one job is to protect our confidence.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes.
 
Ben Laws: And this allows me to protect my confidence. And I think that the most important part, like what we do as entrepreneurs, but who we are is, well, you're a parent, you're a spouse, sibling, you're a friend. And that's what allows me to like continually bring that protecting my confidence and winning into my personal life. And there's a direct correlation. The more I'm winning personally, that has an exponential catalyst on me professionally.
 
Shannon Waller: The whole term balance, which seems like such an elusive thing, that's exactly what you're talking about. You're showing up to be a great spouse, a great parent, a great business leader. We're going to talk about you being such a great team leader as well, because that's also one of your gifts. I like how you put it, being winning in every area of my life, but it's not one at the sacrifice of another, which is how so many entrepreneurs live their life. So, awesome. Now, I want to talk about one of the other cool things about you, Ben, there are many, is you've got five words that you live by, and then you've really distilled down your purpose. Can you share those? Because I see you executing those in all areas of your life, but I love that you've been able to boil it down to five words.
 
Ben Laws: I appreciate that. Yeah. These five words actually came from an exercise I did. I was actually in a room with Chad Johnson and we're talking about Unique Ability. And they wanted me to like really narrow this down to what my Unique Ability was. And in typical entrepreneur fashion, I was like, you know, don't put me in a corner. It was very like dirty dancing. No one puts baby in the corner. And I was like, you know what, I need something a little bit higher up. And when I started thinking about the places where I am happiest, where I just am naturally, I'm not there, I'm here, right? I'm like here and expanding from is building, coaching, creating, inspiring, and learning. And when I started asking myself the question, you know, Dan always asks, like, could you do this for the next 25 years? And for me, I realized I could do this for the rest of my life. And it was a call to action that when I started looking at my calendar, like, how do I spend my time? Which, again, is so important that even 95 workshops in that, I still come back to measuring where am I spending my time? Like time is the great equalizer. I looked at it and I said, hey, my schedule, where I spend my time needs to be doing these five things constantly, whether it's both personally or professionally.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, well, it is great because that becomes, you know, it's either a hell yes, or full body yes, as we talked about in one of the workshops, or no. And it's really clear, you also are clear on with whom you want to be doing that, from a client standpoint, from a team standpoint, from a collaborator standpoint, from a coaching standpoint, coaching client standpoint, you're very, very clear on what you're doing, and with whom. And I just imagine that gives you just a bedrock of, again, you've been talking about confidence, but also clarity about what's a yes and what's a no.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, and you gave me this incredible nugget when I was first talking with you about these, like, five, I call them, like, my power words, right? Like, these are, like, my five power sources. And you also said, for whom, and I thought that that was, when you name the game of what it is that would fascinate and motivate you for the rest of your life, it adds a clarity, just like my calendar does, but like my no extra time, it adds clarity that I know I'm winning, right? Why no winning? Because I can look at it. And if I'm not winning, I can adjust it. But by having clarity on these words, it allowed me to get really clear for whom, like, who am I building for? Who am I creating for? Who am I inspired for? Who am I learning for? Who am I? I think I said, build, coach, create, inspire, and learn. And I think that that is so powerful because as an entrepreneur, if you go back to it means to swim out, like, notice it doesn't say to whom, right? But I swim out by building, coaching, creating, inspiring, and learning. And I do it with the context is that I want to galvanize people because it pains me to not see people win. It pains me to see people not see the resource that is them that's naturally out there. And I just want to make it come alive.
 
Shannon Waller: I love that. It's interesting because one of the aspects of Unique Ability, people can do what they love and are best at, right? The thing that gives them energy, they can always see room to get better. It keeps them endlessly fascinated and motivated. But being really tuned into who is the right fit audience for your Unique Ability, because you can build, coach, create, inspire, and learn with the wrong people in front of you, and it is not satisfying, not gratifying, not productive, and not profitable. Then you start questioning yourself. You're like, oh gosh, do I actually have it right? And then all of a sudden you get in front of the right audience, you're like, you know, they're appreciative, they start winning, they applaud, we get paid, all the good things. So one of the really important but not always talked about aspect is who is the audience for your Unique Ability?
 
Ben Laws: Yep. So thank you for that, Jim. That has echoed around my brain so many times. But for whom?
 
Shannon Waller: Yes. A couple other things I want to touch on before we wrap up. You have, because I've worked with your team and then you work with your team, you have Strategic Coach installed. You've got Strategic Coach inside your companies. Just a minute or two on your mindset about your team, because you have the same way you're talking about your audience, you have the same thing with your team. You invest a lot in them. Can you just share your thinking about that?
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, I think it starts and stops with your team, right? So many entrepreneurs, especially after reading Dan's book Who Not How, are looking externally for other entrepreneurs. And the greatest engine that they have of all time is literally sitting in their backyard and it's their team. By the way, if for anyone who's listening to this, if you haven't checked out Shannon and her programs around team, you are literally burning money that you don't even realize you're burning. So my mind is that when I actually started Strategic Coach, I realized Coach was going to give me a roadmap to joy. I mean, think about it, just to joy. Like, I mean, to me, that's the ultimate currency. Right? Because that just means that you just are literally just getting to live friends. Base root is love, right? So at the end of the day, you know, we are love. But when I think about team is that I realized that the only way that Strategic Coach was really going to take off was if I could get it DNA deep in my team and to each person.
 
And so this idea of Time System, having Free Days, right. That was like crucial. So we initially created like an unlimited Free Day policy because we said, hey, if it's important for an entrepreneur to actually, you know, do it right, if we are like the fuel and the vision of in the hands or on the driver's wheel, well, you know what, the parts of the engine that are actually making an engine move, they probably need some time off. Right. Or if they don't, they're going to get warped. It's going to create bad culture. And so for me, I just realized that to get where I want to go and for me to continue to be on my roadmap to joy is that I needed my team to win and not just win professionally, but we pour a lot of time and resources into helping them win personally. I have a goal that I want our team to become so wealthy that they could potentially, quit, retire in the very time and efforts, economy type words, but they choose to stay. And why? Because we've created such an incredible playground that they go, why would I ever want to leave here? We are doing too much impact. I'm winning too much. And so to me, I just look at if we do that, what is the probability that where I want to go, the impact that I want to have, the winning that I want to bring out into the world isn't going to happen?
 
Shannon Waller: That, to me, is such an inspiring story. And you have such a financial goal. They could retire, but they don't want to, because it's way too much fun, way too much impact, way too gratifying to want to stop. I mean, that's the ultimate, as far as I'm concerned. So thank you for inspiring with me. One other question before we wrap up, and I think this came out of a conversation you had earlier with some people. How do top entrepreneurs think about productivity? What's your thought on that?
 
Ben Laws: A lot of Americans think about productivity sort of like athletics does, like the harder you work, the better you're going to perform. No pain, no gain. And I think that it's also from a Time-and-Effort Economy sort of meaning like you have to earn it. You can only be productive. And by the way, I fell into this trap before I started Strategic Coach. In the industry, I think in the financial service industry, the average appointment counts like four and a half appointments a week. I was running like on average 23 to 24 like appointments a week. And I thought I was like, hey, this is really great, right? I'm being super productive. And what I realized is that in that productivity is I was actually burning myself out. I was burning my family out. I was burning my team out. And I was and honestly, the product that was going on in the field was not nearly as effective as when I actually started to put these systems and structures in place that actually allowed me to be more impactful, right?
 
I'm more effective of when I'm actually, if you want to say, in the game. And so the conversation we had this morning with a bunch of entrepreneurs was just this, I want to say, misguided ideal to show up and work hard. And I think that the thing is, if you can show up and actually bring intentionality to what it is you're doing by either where you're spending your time, where you're getting your energy source from, and then also bypassing obligations that seems that everyone else wants to put on us, right? Or that we think that we should. I think that the conversation should be, is that if you're doing the thing that fascinates and motivates you, and you're doing it with the team that literally supports you in doing those things that fascinate and motivate you because it's reciprocal, because you want them to be fascinated and motivated, is that you start to slowly eliminate this word should.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes, it's a horrible word.
 
Ben Laws: It's a horrible word.
 
Shannon Waller: Should was actually a four-letter word in my house. I mean, it's not four letters, to be clear. I can more easily get away with swearing with my mother than I could with the word should. Literally, she had a button with the word should with a red line through it. Ugh. This was my mother. And then when we met Dan, because Marilyn has been a coach too, he goes, yes, should is an externally imposed expectation not created by you. I was like, Right. Yeah. It does not come from within. And what you've been talking about the whole time, Ben, is really unblocking. I love that word. Tapping into the hidden capabilities that people have. And so this should start to go away. But the more you become yourself, your authentic value creation self, you know, connected to your audience's issues that they need to solve, this should start to fall away. So I love that you brought that up. That's awesome.
 
Ben Laws: Can I share with you in the audience like the biggest should that people feel like they should or that they have to be doing is checking email. One of the exercises I did this morning with actually a group was the question said, what would you like to say no to? And I remember when I first heard that not even realizing that was the question I could even ask myself. And for me, it was email. And I don't know anyone else who literally loves email, but I just hate being at email. It feels like an obligation mess every single time. Like each one of those messages feels like an obligation. And so I built the system structure and the rules around it. If you guys remember to me, like that's ultimate freedom. And I spend now only 30 minutes a week on email. So to me, productivity is just like this, eliminating these obligations, right?
 
Shannon Waller: But not abdicating.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, not abdicating.
 
Shannon Waller: No. There are rules, there are structures, and there's a system delegation to make sure stuff gets handled, just not by you.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, just not by you.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh my God. Even just talking to you, Ben, the sense of freedom I have to live life your way, to do less, produce more, create more value, have a bigger impact, which I know that's part and parcel of who you are, is so exciting. Even without you saying any of those, well, you've said some of those words, but not that exactly. That's what I'm… picking up. And not only are you an example of that, you coach it now in Coach, which is so phenomenal and rave reviews from all of your groups, which is really fun. So just to wrap up, let's talk about how people can join Coach. So if they want to tap into your awesome energy and awesome coaching of all the Coach concepts, let's jump into that.
 
Ben Laws: Yeah, well, I think that if you want to join Coach, well, actually, I would just give a little background of my story. It's a cautionary story, but it also identifies me as probably like the right person, as Dan would say, is that Strategic Coach is really good for slow, deeply committed learners, right, with deep pockets. And that being said and just, but when I started my journey to get to Strategic Coach, it started about a decade before I actually started it. In part because I heard about it and it seemed too good to be true. I heard about some of the things, this idea of taking Free Days and that seemed so antiquated to the fact that I was like, no, no, I got to ramp up from four meetings to 10 meetings, 15 meetings. And if I only do that, then I'm going to actually get to all the places that like the Strategic Coach-installed people are talking about.
 
And I look back and I think where I have a lot of passion talking about why should people join and when should they join? It's because I don't want them to make the same mistake. I don't have very many regrets, but I sometimes look back and go, where would I have been? Or where would I be now if I just would have started earlier? I mean, from that 10-year time period, I can go back and look at it financially, right? I 2x. Right. But I will tell you personally, I put on 35 pounds during that like 10 years, right? I got divorced during that like 10 years. But I look at the last nine years of Strategic Coach, I've 10x’d my time, I've 10x’d my money, I've 10x’d my relationships, I've 10x’d my purpose, and I'm doing it with about 50% of the time needed to be committed towards it. And that's what's crazy. When I started, I was so burnt out. It felt like I was like, how much more can I really produce with one company? Now we have four. And oh, by the way, I'm also an Associate Coach here at Strategic Coach.
 
So for people who are thinking about, hey, should I join Strategic Coach? The answer is yes. I will tell you, if you're looking for a silver bullet, this is probably not the place to come. Because, I mean, if you think about anything that you've ever done in your life, it doesn't happen overnight. So if you're willing to show up, and slowly start to excavate and be in a room with other incredible entrepreneurs who are doing the exact same thing. I'm telling you, just that alone, I mean, that's getting at least 4 or 5x. Just being in the room, right. Again and again and again. So in my mind, if you're thinking about doing Strategic Coach, do a Discovery Call. That I think is the number one thing, because they're going to be able to like hear you to say like, hey, is this a fit or is this going to be a waste of time for you? Or is this going to be something that's going to be exponential at Strategic Coach? We don't want to waste people's time. I'd say do a Discovery Call. And my guess is if you also ask, hey, is there other entrepreneurs who'd be willing to talk to you who are in the Program? The answer is yes.
 
I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are thinking about maybe getting into the Program in part because I want them to get sucked along in this current that I've gotten sucked along in. Shannon, you and I have talked about this. There is something that you can't explain, right? In the food world, we call that umami, right? It's not sweet, it's not bitter, right? I mean, it's not one of the things that our sense is, but it literally adds the savoriness to it. Strategic Coach is that in comparison to all the other different coaching programs that I've done before coming to Strategic Coach, Strategic Coach is alchemy. It teaches you what your alchemy is and what you want it to be and where do you want to like apply that and with whom, for whom. And so me sharing all of this and what's in this for me and sharing this is that I just want you all to win.
 
Shannon Waller: Ben, thank you. I can't imagine a better way to wrap up our conversation. And I think you'll be interested in this. We were talking about what is Strategic Coach and we keep trying to refine our messaging and stuff. And two words came out of it, catalyst and community. And that's kind of what you just said, alchemy. I'm like, you know, it's exactly that. And so for people who are like, okay, I don't want a 2x, I want a 5x, I want a 10x. And you want to do it in the structure, like quarterly workshops, and then lots and lots and lots of support in between now, which is so much fun. You're never left alone for too long, as I like to say. So it's the community, which as you said, will get you part of the way there. But then the unique conversations and the unique concepts are what 100% take you the rest of the journey. But it doesn't happen overnight, it's not a silver bullet.
 
Thank you for so brilliantly articulating who you are and what Strategic Coach is all about and for sharing your own personal story. That's powerful. So one of the best ways to take action to book that Discovery Call is simply visit strategiccoach.com. That is the best way to do it. You can reach out to us. There's lots of cool downloads. But really, to your point, having that Discovery Call, we are interested and invested in having the right people In the Program, for your benefit, we don't want to waste your time or your money. So we'll let you know based on what you want, what you're looking for in your future, whether or not Coach can help you get there. The Program, like you said, Ben, is about you. So Ben, thank you. Always, always, always a pleasure to spend time with you.
 
Ben Laws: You're welcome. And thank you for having me. It's always a joy to have a conversation with you. And it's also a joy to talk about the impact that Strategic Coach has had on my life.
 
Shannon Waller: Awesome. Appreciate you. Thank you.