The Greater Game: Chapter 1 – Greater Ambition

John Bowen: Dan, we are here on our first official podcast of The Greater Game. And we wanna bring everybody on the journey, not only the book and the dashboard, but all the research. And this is a 25-year journey that you and I are on. And it's pretty exciting because the whole thing we see—and I know you've always done this. It's so easy to get caught up in a kind of a smaller vision. And we have an 18-month window, I believe, with AI and our teams. And we can jump ahead very quickly to kind of jumpstart that 100x along the way, but give me some of your big framing on this as we dive in and we'll, I want to share some of the entrepreneurs we wrote in the book too. I mean, there's so many good stories out there that you and I know, and I want to encourage everybody that if they're an entrepreneur and they're listening to this, boy, the future is indeed bright.
 
Dan Sullivan: I was lucky when I first became a one-on-one coach. We didn't have a company at that point. It was just Dan making house calls. But I used to have this big artist's sketch board, and I would just say, tell me, you know, if you could have the capabilities that you needed, what's possible from your standpoint, just with you, what you do in the marketplace, and what kind of clients and customers you actually had. And I would just say, just free form here. I'm going to draw it out. I'll draw a sketch of your future. And right off the bat, I began to notice an enormous jump in ambition that individuals had when they got in touch with the capabilities that they already had. So my approach to ambition is that it is the master capability. It's the capability of capabilities and that all new capabilities that you develop happen because of your ambition, but every time you develop one of those new capabilities, and we're certainly seeing that in the age of AI, that every time somebody gets a new AI capability, their ambition constantly expands. So my sense is, it's not a function that you have a gas tank and your gas tank runs out of ambition at 55 or 60 years old. As long as you're developing new capabilities, you always expand your ambition.
 
John Bowen: No, it is. And the part, to me, is once you start letting your mind go and think bigger, and I think one of the best framing we have in the book, and you and I talk about a lot, is thinking 100x future. You know, wherever you are today, as a successful entrepreneur, when you start thinking 100x where you are now, you go, that's too much. But then you start thinking about what's possible because of where we are in today's world. And we start thinking, okay, we can build platforms. We can build ecosystems. We can kind of abandon the model that we had. And we can create systems that multiply. And we're going to go over all the multipliers that do this. Then all of a sudden, thinking bigger gives you a huge advantage.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the interesting thing about it—you have to do a little history here. So I started off with 10x as the operating mindset.
 
John Bowen: And I said, 10x, I can remember the first time you introduced it to me. The 10x, this is a long time ago. I'm going, that may be too much. You know, all of a sudden, you know, you get a little nervous and I want to acknowledge everybody. If 10 was a little too much for me, 100 might feel that way now, but we're going to give you the roadmap, but go ahead, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the big thing is you have to do a history lesson. So I asked people, when were you one tenth of where you are right now? And for the entrepreneurs that I deal with, it wasn't 25 years ago. It might have been 10 years ago. And I said, so let's break how you did the 10x the first time, because you've already done it. I'm not introducing a new idea to you. You've already done that. They go back, and I said, let's break that into five jumps that you took, and then we analyze the jumps. And they come to the end of the exercise, and immediately they say, wow. And I said, I can tell you right now that 80% of what you did in the past to get to where you are right now is still valid for the future, but what has changed in the world is the technologies. And not only that, team members with technologies that can now take you 10x faster. And they all do it, you know, they do it in four or five years, where before it might have taken them 20 years.
 
John Bowen: Well, it's not only your internal team, but your external team as we create community. We'll talk about that. But our partnership together, I mean, what we can create, we started a 25-year partnership a couple of years ago to study entrepreneurship. And it's evolved to, not only the research we're collectively doing, but also The Greater Game book, the dashboard, all the tools, the journey. And it's really made a difference. I want to share just some of the statistics from the research. Let me hit the right slide. Greater ambition: engineering your 100x future. I mean, a couple of things to be thinking about. I'm putting this slide up if you're watching it in video. If not, I'll talk to it. But the big statistic, when we look at, there's always going to be, 5.4 is the most successful entrepreneurs. So over half of them really embed a long-term vision, that 25-year vision. They're very focused on it. When we look at the other group, the 94.6 hitter, they've already won the game. I mean, everybody here, you know, substantial 5 million and above net worths, you know, we found only 14.2. And a big part of this was 25 years. And you talked about this, Dan, but, you know, once you start thinking 100x, it forces you to abandon, you know, just doing incremental improvements. I mean, you're forced to architect something totally different. And that's what really gets me excited about all this.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, the definition of an entrepreneur is very recent in history, as far as I can tell. Entrepreneurs as we understand them today were first defined in 1804 and it was a French economist who was a great student of Adam Smith who created The Wealth of Nations and it's 250 years since Adam Smith brought out The Wealth of Nations. And what he was noticing that in Great Britain, where he was Scott, but he was noticing that all of a sudden there was this new class of people in society who were taking advantage of the first really great multiplier technology, which was steam power. And he was noticing that they just operated very, very differently from the way wealth had been created. First of all, they could do it honestly. A lot of wealth before 1800 was you were granted it because you had the right political connections or you stole it, you know, and that kind of gave people a notion, well, these people are just stealing, but they're not stealing. What they're creating is great new value from a vastly expanding consumer base who wanted to travel much faster with rail power, and then the application of steam power to every other industry, and they just began.
 
But his definition of an entrepreneur, which is very, very crucial to our discussion here, an entrepreneur is someone who takes resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. And he was asked the question, what kind of resources? And he said, any kind of resource, starting with yourself. So what we're doing, we're taking the resource called the entrepreneur who's watching our podcast, and we're saying you're the number one resource that's going to get expanded here. And when you expand yourself as an entrepreneur and think 10x, now 100x because of the technologies we have, we're way past steam power. We're into a completely cosmic realm now with AI. And there's one other I'm going to mention, which is very, very important here. and that is regenerative medicine, that if you take advantage of medicine today, there's no upper limit on how long you can continue being an entrepreneur.
 
John Bowen: I mean, why don't we go into telling some stories from the book? There are two transformations, and I'd like to start with Paul, because this one's near and dear to my heart. Because when I first started working with you, Dan, I talked about that I was going to retire at 65, and I would be with you for a few years and wind it down and get a great value. I'm now 70, and I'll be 71 this year. And I got to tell you, I've never been more excited and making a bigger impact and enjoying it. And it has nothing to do with the money. I mean, you and I are both financially, we can do whatever we want. But what this allows us to do is to really have a purpose. It's amazing. And I want to set the stage with Paul because—do you want to tell a story?
 
Dan Sullivan: Do you want me to set the stage? Paul, as many of our Strategic Coach clients, he came in through a great referral. He came in and he immediately walked up to me and he says, I know I'm starting my first workshop, but I want to tell you that I only have a very, very short plan here because I'm going to retire. I'm going to use your Strategic Coach concepts, your tools, your thinking tools, so I can get to a point where I can retire. Then I'm going to, my wife and I are going to create a gourmet coffee shop. And he was already a very, very successful engineering company. He had created an engineering company. I think at the time they were at about $40 million. Well, he went from 50 million, 50 million, 600 through this process. Yeah, and basically, I said, well, you know, we've got some thinking to do today. So you tell me 90 days from now, if there's been any change to your vision of the future. So that was a decade ago. And Paul is now the number one engineering company in his category. And he's gone over a billion in his revenues. His company has gone from 400 engineers to over 3000 engineers. And his life has gotten simpler, his life has gotten more enjoyable, his health. And he says, you know, I don't know when I would stop. He said, I have no concept of why I would stop. And he said, I realized that I was planning to die around 76 or 77. And he said, well, that's what I am now. And he said, I have no comprehension of how long this can go, but I do know that every step I take, it gets more enjoyable.
 
John Bowen: I like the line I pulled out of the book where he shared with us, you know, my wife thought I lost my mind, you know, ‘cause they were ready for the coffee. He's ready to retire traditional. And then, you know, she saw how energized, how much he loved the business and he built the acquisition machine. So he became one of the major players, you know, his valuation that I had from when we were talking, he told me, you know, when he started, when he was thinking coffee shops, it was a $60 million valuation. Today, it's well over $1.2 billion, and, you know, a 20-fold increase over a 10-year period. You know, Dan, he's just getting started.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I will tell you, he looks 10 to 15 years younger than he did when he started the growth process. Growth actually makes you younger.
 
John Bowen: I want to share another one. I feel that way personally, too. Roderick Walker. Roderick. Roderick, I'm sorry, went from two locations to 14, 70-hour workweek. You know, this is where it gets really, you know, you don't know what's possible. He's killing himself with two. This is how you get healthier. You're doing only 25 hours a week and then 2 to 18 million. Dan, this is so important, and the thing that I loved on his quote is when he showed up at Coach, he found out it was totally a different possibility here.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I will tell you this, that when I started coaching in the 1970s, this was not possible. It really wasn't possible. If you thought about this type of growth, that meant you had to work harder and work longer than you were working right now. And I said, no, it's just the opposite. You have to shift into a totally different gear that your growth now depends upon it being shorter and easier.
 
John Bowen: Yeah, it's an exciting time to be alive because, you know, what you can do is really so amazing. And I think taking the time to really put together your vision, where would you want to be 25 years from now? And so often, you know, we get concerned because, you know, we're not sure where we want to be tomorrow. But creating that, going through the entrepreneurial fog, creating a vision, you know, you're putting a flag in the ground, you can move it type thing. But all of a sudden, not only you, but the rest of the team can get behind that and it's really with today's tools, you know, the access to capital, there's no shortage of capital. There's no shortage of tools. Dan, it's, you know, you and I talked about it. It's a great time to be alive.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And part of the interesting thing is attracting really great talent. People say, well, you know, you're talking about great people to have in your company. But he says, where I live, we don't have great people like you're talking about. And I said, oh, they're there. They're just not looking for you. I said, but people who want to be team members in a great company, what they're looking for is somebody who has a huge vision where they know that just automatically their best talents are going to be used in the best possible way. That's a guarantee that you have to give to people. I mean, there's all this talk about AI getting rid of people, and we don't have that. I said, no, no, that's not the way it's going to be, is that you have to put a message out to the world that I'm into growth, I have expanding ambition, and this is where I want to go, and I want you to have a place in my company where your talents, the best talents you have, are going to be identified, and we're going to arrange everything that you're doing so that you at your best are growing.
 
John Bowen: Well, it's an exciting time. And we're hiring about eight people a quarter now. So, I mean, we use AI like crazy. We have a whole bunch of proprietary things. And we need more people than ever.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
John Bowen: So, and I think that's going to happen. The rules are going to change. But I want to go back to the hundred acts. And, you know, there's a concept we talked about in the book called Strategic Abandonment, where you've got to abandon kind of what you're doing now and think about what's required for the hundred acts. You know, what are the systems that you need to put in place? And really, as you think through the vision, what I want you to be thinking about is this whole headline kind of 25 years out, what is the impact that you're going to make? And Dan, I know, you know, why don't you share a Strategic Coach? You're in the trillions of impact that you want to make. And it's every entrepreneur you get to touch. And it's the same with me, with the financial advisors, the entrepreneurs we help through our different companies. It's just, it's exciting time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I'd like to go to the middle concept on your slide there, which is the 25 years. Why 25 years works, one of the main reasons is 100 quarters. So you have a 25-year vision and that's like a journey that you're going on, but you get to do it 90 days at a time. And every 90 days, you employ greater talent in your company and then you have technological component. And the way that AI is going is that you're acquiring great talent but it's coming in a technological form so it's a combination of great humans and great technology and you do it a quarter at a time and it's one quarter at the end of that quarter, you review your progress. You see what worked, what didn't work. You make a course adjustment, and all of a sudden, your ambition for the next quarter, it's like going through a lock system in a canal. Every 90 days, your elevation goes up. Your capabilities go up. The work becomes more enjoyable, but your impact in the marketplace goes up. More and more, you're creating value for the best kind of customers and clients.
 
John Bowen: Now, this is so powerful. And one of the things that Dan and I both want you to do is be successful, win this greater game. And one of the ways we can do it is have you on the journey with us. And we have created a dashboard that you can go to. If you're on video, you can see the QR code. If you're not, it's thegreatergamedashboard.com. You can check out your score on this one, ambition, the very first multiplier. You're gonna come here, and it's a great resource. If you're just going to it, start the assessment, and it'll go through a series of questions on all 10 multipliers. If you've already done it, just sign back in, and you will have your scores of where you are with the 10 multipliers, the four stages. And we go through, and it's really powerful, but we'd love to have you join us on this journey. We're going to continue every month. We're surveying 500 of your fellow successful entrepreneurs. We're going to be sharing stories. We're going to be sharing what we call The Entrepreneurial Pulse, The Entrepreneur Confidence Index, and how you can make that 100x. We'll see you in the next podcast, where we go into one of my favorite subjects, greater security.