Discover Two Keys To An Effortless Entrepreneurial Life, With Greg Griffith

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast.
 
It's Strategic Coach, and this is our latest episode of a real entrepreneurial transformation story. Our featured interview today is Greg Griffith, and Greg lives just above Tampa on the west coast of Florida, and he's in risk management. He's got a wonderful story, certainly about his business life, but it's really about his personal life. So our approach in Strategic Coach is that your entrepreneurial life is your entire life. And that it's not for everybody, you know. Only about 5% of the working population ever have the commitment and, really, the courage to go out and face the marketplace straight on. And if they don't succeed, they don't eat. That's the proposition. But Greg's whole focus, and I'm so happy for him to recount his experience, is the importance of having a great partner in your personal life. And I know this for a fact because I really struggled with Strategic Coach the first 10 years from 1974 to 1984. So I started 50 years ago this year, 2024. It's 50 years coaching. And this is before people even knew what coaching was. People said, "Is that sports?" You know, in the arts, you had coaches, and in sports, you had coaches. And some people thought, am I in the bus line? Do I have a bus line, a coach, bus coach line? So it wasn't so much you had to explain what the industry was before you could actually tell people what you're doing.
 
So I had a really tough first 10 years. I was bankrupt twice. And one of the bankruptcies I did at the same time as I got divorced. So that was two very, very bad report cards on the same day. And so I really appreciate the personal element of entrepreneurism, that you really, really have to have someone who's your life partner, who gives you total support for what you're doing in your entrepreneurial life. And if they increase that and add another dimension to it—and in Greg's case, they've gone to Coach programs where we have couples workshops, his team members attend Strategic Coach workshops. But the importance also, and he mentions a particular tool that we have in Strategic Coach, which is called The Impact Filter. It's probably one of the greatest tools. Right now, we have 240 entrepreneurial thinking tools that we have trademarks for. We have copyrights, we have trademarks, and we're just starting the process of getting some of our best tools patented.
 
But The Impact Filter is probably the best tool for just getting instant focus on something that's really important to you. And you're very, very specific about what you're looking for. In his case, he wanted to have a relationship, and he recounts that this is the way that I kind of got my thinking straight about who I wanted to be in relationship with. And I put together a checklist for myself, and this would be in the summer of 1982. I'd just been divorced in 1978. In 1982, you know, I was a free man for a number of years, and one day I just got the official documentations for the divorce, and I went out to a coffee shop, and I said, well, I'm not going to get divorced again, but I am going to get married again, and this is what I want the relationship to be. And I put down, I think I had 10 points, and it wasn't who the person was, but it was just the quality of the relationship. One year after I made the list, I met her. I kind of knew it right away. I kind of knew right away that I was just interacting- It was a weekend conference, a business conference. We encountered each other four or five times. And in my mind, I was going, check, check, check, check, check. I don't think I ever told her about it for maybe 10 years that I had done that, that I'd put in an order and she showed up.
 
And I've seen the opposite in entrepreneurial relationships where actually the easy part of your day is being at work, and then you go home at night and that's where the tough part of the day goes. And it's one of the big obstacles that when people come into Strategic Coach, they have to resolve very quickly because they're not going to have the energy, they're not going to have the focus, and they're not going to be as creative and they're not going to be as productive if, when they leave the office, the war starts when they get home. So I really appreciate Greg sharing the experience because it really rings home with every entrepreneur I've ever met. And I've coached 7,000 entrepreneurs. Our company is just passing the 22,000 mark of entrepreneurs. And you got to live a 360-degree life. It can't be just about your business success. There's got to be personal success, and you have to have really great relationships in your business, but the best relationship has to be the one that you have committed yourself for an entire lifetime.
 
Greg Griffith: Hi, I'm Greg Griffith. I'm from Homosassa, Florida. I'm in risk management and risk control. I head up our risk control consulting services for a company called CNA Insurance that's headquartered here in Chicago. And I've been in risk management, risk control as an occupational safety major starting out at Illinois State University, I started out. And I've been doing this for 38 years. So it's been an exciting journey, and Strategic Coach has really helped me. I've been in Coach the last 11 years, and to say it's been life changing and game changing would be a complete understatement.
 
I started out as an accounting major. A couple of my roommates had let me know that if I moved over to occupational safety—and this was going back in the 1980s—that I would probably get a stable job with a company car and I'd be able to travel. And, you know, that sounded great to me at that particular time because I didn't really have a lot of certainty in accounting. My dad was an accountant. And he ultimately became a certified fraud examiner and got his designations in that for the state of Illinois and Springfield, Illinois. But occupational safety, I'd never heard of it. It just seemed like, you know, interesting, and I seemed to do well with it. I was interested in the courses, and I kept learning and growing, and off we went.
 
I've always been entrepreneurial with the companies that I've worked with, and I always had my own set of clients with the individual insurance companies and insurance brokerage. So, it felt like I would take ownership of my clients and I'd set up service plans with them on helping them reduce their losses. You know, risk is something that scares people, and I always felt like I could be a voice of reason and comforting and come into a room and sit down with their management team and help them, you know, kind of baseline where their risk was. And all this is primarily workers' compensation, general liability, property losses, automobile, that type of a thing. And I guess just being able to help people, you know, make progress and improve not only their savings, but, you know, the safety of their employees and, you know, it's still good.
 
My mother, Linda Millburg, had always helped me with listening to audio tapes when I was growing up. And my company car would be traveling from client to client. I'd listen to Tom Peters and Norman Vincent Peale and some other ones. And she got me a subscription to Success magazine. And within the magazine, there was a CD in the middle that had recordings. And Darren Hardy, who was a publisher at the time of Success, interviewed Dan Sullivan. And I listened to that particular interview, and I was just struck by how different his way of thinking was and his take on Free Days and growth, and I think he talked about The Strategy Circle and the Referability Habits, and it just kind of stuck with me. So that's kind of how I got started with it.
 
When I first got into Strategic Coach, basically it was a relatively good investment, and still is, but I'd never really invested in myself before. I'd been kind of a couple-hundred-dollar seminar kind of a person and let the company send me and that type of thing. So the thought of coaching—and, you know, I've now been in Coach 11 years—was somewhat foreign to me. So, and to go, you know, quarterly to workshops and thinking about my thinking, again, was a completely new concept. So, I'd say my family, my mother was very supportive. She was excited for me to be involved with it. I think my kids at first, Tonja and I have three kids, three children, and two of them have actually been into the Unique EDGE Program, and they've had nice experiences there. But, you know, no one had really heard of Strategic Coach, you know, and what it was and what it was all about. So it was new, and I was probably looked at as maybe a little bit of a fish out of water going to a coaching program and, you know, and again, investing in myself.
 
On November 5 of 2017, I remember that Dan had said he'd written an Impact Filter or he'd written down all the things he wanted to have in a partner and described Babs. And then when he met Babs, he threw out the list, you know? So I was really kind of a broken person and at the time, relationship-wise, in a bad spot. So, I thought, you know, I got nothing to lose. So I wrote that Impact Filter describing my ideal soulmate and the person that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, knowing the one that I was currently in a relationship wasn't that person. And I kind of parked it for a while. I eventually got out of that relationship. And about nine months rolled around, and I pulled out that Impact Filter again, and nothing had really happened. So I made some tweaks on the Impact Filter, and I think one of them was, I said, hey—because you put a time on the Impact Filter about when you want it to happen—and I kind of looked at it and tweaked the time. I'm like, I'd like for this to happen relatively soon, and this was Labor Day, September of 2018.
 
Well, on October 4 of 2018, I met Tonja, my wife. We instantly hit it off, fell in love, and that type of thing. And a couple weeks into the relationship, because when you're in Strategic Coach, sometimes it's kind of heavy to let somebody know that's not into Coach, that you're into Strategic Coach, that I let her know that I was in this coaching program. And, oh, by the way, here's some things I'd done. Well, she came across my Impact Filter, and she read it. And she goes, "Do you understand the significance of this date?" It was November 5, 2017. I said, no, not really. She goes, my birthday is November 5. And this was one year later and her birthday. So I had written an Impact Filter about a person that I hadn't met yet and wanted to meet. And I actually, before I met her, I wrote it on her birthday. So she was completely impressed with Strategic Coach to say the least. And what I was doing. She said, well, you know, this sounds like a pretty good program to me.
 
Tonja and I have been to Couples Connection. We went to one in person in Florida. We've also done a virtual one that, you know, happened over the pandemic. And life just becomes easier, right, because she embraces the Strategic Coach tools, you know, the Four Freedoms. We use the Largest Cheque tool to grow passive income. We've had, you know, I think a 46% growth of our passive income this year, year to date. And, you know, there's more, there's a couple more months in the year to keep going. So I want to keep working on that number. But when you're with the right person and you're in the right coaching program, you know, life gets easier in so many ways. It doesn't mean that, you know, you don't have your obstacles, you don't have your struggles and things to overcome—in coach terminology, your dangers, opportunities, and strengths—you know, that hit you on a daily basis. But if you're trying to go through Strategic Coach and the person you're in a relationship with isn't buying into that program, it's like swimming upstream against water. It's difficult because it's a struggle. To be able to share Strategic Coach not only with, you know, my mother originally and now my wife and our children, I mean, it's a blessing.
 
In my way of thinking, I don't know a life without Strategic Coach. I'm 11 years into the Program. To me, it's the gold standard of coaching programs, and the community, the network is top-notch. I try to soak up as much as I can when I'm in my workshops or on the Positive PowerUps and use the tools. I teach the tools to my team, and it's interesting because sometimes they'll pick up on the tools way faster than I did, and I'm in the Program, you know, and it kind of cracks me up when that happens. But I think if you're in the Program, stay with it, keep coming to your workshops. There's always a few gold nuggets that happen in each workshop that I think are so valuable. Just putting yourself in the room or on the virtual call is so valuable, so I can't say enough great things about it. I know there's other programs out there, but to me, Strategic Coach is the gold program.