Smooth Out Your Entrepreneurial Path

Dan Sullivan: Jeff, I've just been thinking, because we're both big history fans, that the period that we're entering, from when I read history, is almost pre World War I.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Uh-huh.
 
Dan Sullivan: We're going back, except the planet isn't organized on empires. The empires are completely gone, the national empires are gone. And that we're going back to where countries really matter. There's going to be bilateral trade, country to country, but there aren't going to be these big multilateral trade groups. It just strikes me from a historical standpoint. And I haven't analyzed it enough to sort out what the seven boxes are that I'm checking off here to do it, but it seems to me that things are becoming less homogenized and less standardized. That some countries are really in great shape, some countries are in bad shape, and a lot of it has to do with population.
 
Dan Sullivan: That there's only sort of taking the African countries out of the equation, that if you have advanced countries, there are very few countries who have increasing populations. Populations is going down. Europe totally is just dropping population really, really fast, with the exception of France. France is the only country that's keeping its population, kind of the 2.1. And they do it through immigration because they get a lot of North African immigration that comes across from the Mediterranean. Also, they still have French, more or less colonies where people, big aspiration, they grow up speaking French, they understand French culture to a certain extent, and they tried to move back to the home country. The exceptions to the rule are the settler countries and that would be probably the UK itself. But then all the major countries that came from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, because they can turn the immigration faucet on and off when they want to.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it just strikes me that historically we're... The second World War is now over and what was set in place after the Second World War no longer applies. So that's just a thought to start this off. But I've been reading a wonderful book and it's called The Big Change. And it's the history of the United States between 1900 and 1950 from, I think he was the chief editor for Harper's Magazine, and he wrote this book in 1952.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's a great read. It's a great read. And he just does a lot of comparisons to the way the United States was just at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. And then he's writing it two years after 1950. So we were both alive. I mean we were young.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Not sure if I was yet speaking in 1950.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you just hadn't found any reason to talk to other people. You were totally talking to yourself.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well that was supposedly Descartes didn't talk until he was, I think it was, was Descartes or Kant, I don't remember now, who didn't talk until he was like six.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh wow.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And his parents were wondering why and he said, "I really didn't have anything to say."
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I was two and a half before I said anything. And then I had a vocabulary, and I had sentence structure, and it's not like I hadn't been paying attention.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But apparently one night in my high chair, my favorite chair for my whole life was my high chair, and we were at dinner and I just said something. And I said it grammatically and everybody was struck because my mother was starting to wonder. She was starting to wonder if I was, you know, but I've made up for it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's funny, I don't know how old I was when I started talking, but I started typing when I was 11 months old. So my mom gave me a royal typewriter and I was sitting there at the high chair. So it's interesting, The Big Change, the book that you mentioned...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I would argue that there are much bigger changes that have happened since then that have affected how we live our day-to-day life and globalization.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: There's no question that airplane travel shrunk the world.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: We could just get around and it wasn't only for the wealthiest to be able to get around. And now it's quite significant and I think-
 
Dan Sullivan: Television certainly because it really became a popular thing just after the fifties. Just after the fifties started. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And then, yeah, I remember when my dad brought home our first color TV. I think we were the first in the neighborhood to have a color television set.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But movies, and this was actually later than that, became a major export.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But that's probably, I'll bet you that's more like in the last 25 years that movies have become such a huge part of the global market.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which is why we have basically the same movie being made over and over and over again with the superheroes and all of that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And of course the internet.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm. As far as I can see from reading this book and I'm almost finished with it, Dean Jackson put me onto it and Dean doesn't recommend many books to me. So when he does, I read it. Like when you recommend books, I read them. Then I read all of the books, Tim Wu, was a great one that you gave me. And that book, what's his name? Creek or Greek? The Information.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The name's Gleick. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Gleick, yeah. That was a fascinating book.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Isn't it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But the big one really, if you have the 50-year span that this writer lays out, there's no question that the automobile was the change maker of the first 50 years.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: In America.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think that accelerated post World War II, because the highway system...
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: ...Was incredible change agent. I mean, once you could leave the little town or village and there was the ability to work at a remote place, not remote in the way they're talking about it today. I mean it's all really interesting. To me, what would, obviously I haven't read The Big Change, but to me it strikes me as being quite interesting is what someone in 1950 thought of those previous 50 years and the impact. And now we can look back from 75 years later. And look back at that prognostication and what that was, which is kind of fascinating.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Oh, I want to say one thing. He just mentioned the Roaring Twenties and there was a number which I found you would find fascinating. It was the number of new plays in 1927 on Broadway and it was 267 new openings in 1927.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well yeah, there were something like, I don't remember the number, but over 300 theaters in New York, not just Broadway. And what we now call Broadway actually started way downtown initially. And then that eventually changed. I mean I think there's only, I don't remember for sure, it's 24 Broadway theaters or something like that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But the number of theaters that were legitimate big theaters like Broadway theaters, there were a few hundred of them.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean that all changed. Until I studied a bit about it I didn't realize it all started down in lower Manhattan Wall Street area.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: As the genesis of that. And by the way, I sent you the update. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at it yet.
 
Dan Sullivan: I've just come back from the cottage. I was at the cottage for 12 days. So I'm in the woods. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well you'll see the theater too, so we'll talk about that another time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I looked it up. This is a Studebaker that you're talking...
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, I looked it up. It looks gorgeous.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It is. They finished a multimillion-dollar renovation very recently.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it's a beautiful place.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And quite a history to it too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, one of the medical offices that I go to is just two blocks to the... I have to get my directions because the lake is not where it is here, but it's north. The way I go for one of my medical stops in Chicago is about two blocks north on Michigan from The Studebaker.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And you're in Chicago for amount of the time, aren't you?
 
Dan Sullivan: Out of eight months, we're there a week for a month. So it's eight weeks. Yeah. But we'll have a lot of people come because I've put the word out.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's great, thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: When's push off date?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's to be discussed. It's either going to be second week of May or just after Memorial Day.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, so it's next year.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. So it's exciting. You'll see it in the update, but Adam has already confirmed our creative team in availabilities for that. And so that's really excited. Everybody's quite excited about the play.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which is wonderful. I'm excited just to get back to work on it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well it's a timeless play. I mean from the standpoint that you're not catching a fashion wave.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Or any particular topical wave. It's a timeless American play.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And it's got everything that we like about rags to riches, nobody to somebody really important. And a piece of history that is missing from...
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Most accounts of the history of rock and roll.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So I wanted to ask you some things since I think you may be an expert in this area, entrepreneurship. I've heard you've dabbled and that you've...
 
Dan Sullivan: I've dabbled, I've dabbled.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Every entrepreneur that I know, particularly creative artists and musicians and writers and so on, but to business people also, like Daymond John, they said that they wish they had learned more about business. The business of business before starting their company. And that they found themselves up against the wall just filing taxes, how to put together an invoice, how to collect money that you're owed.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And that's of course not what any of us get into our businesses for, those tasks. But they are essential to success, I think. And I was wondering your thoughts that, what do you see as the basic skills that are lacking in entrepreneurs and what they should really be thinking about as opposed to the "follow your passion, I want to bring value" part of it.
 
Dan Sullivan: So you're asking me about what I actually learned from my first two bankruptcies? Is that what you're trying to get to the bottom of here? It was the lack of understanding that actually caused that. So 1978 was the first one, 1982 was the second one. And both of it was because of receivables. I had done the work but for different economic reasons in the general economy, instead of getting paid in 30 days, I didn't get paid until 60 days, or even 90 days. And I was just too close to the line there. And you can't be picky about bankruptcies. Everybody gets included. You can't say, "Well I'm going bankrupt in relationship to this person, but not bankrupt." These are things that you owe in the marketplace. For example, we have a rule that you can't join Strategic Coach until you've had three complete years as an entrepreneur.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the reason is what I would call the annual cycle is a very, very important piece of information of how you have to plan out not the next month or the next quarter. You have to plan out the whole year. And the quarters are, in most businesses, the quarters are not equal to each other. There's real busy quarters and there's less busy quarters. And this one, I think, will really strike home with you, Jeff. The other thing is that most entrepreneurs don't actually create a business. They actually create a job. It's like a self-employed job. And the danger of that is that when you're actually doing the job, you can't be out marketing. And when you're out marketing, you're not doing the job. So it's like you've got to get these two activities in sync with each other. And the truth is that you always have to be doing the job and you always have to be marketing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that's a great distinction. The notion of recognizing it as you building a business, or you just create a job for yourself.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I would say what people call entrepreneurs, the vast majority of them, and I see that at various conferences that are in the marketing conferences, and that when you really talk to the person, it's a full-time job where they're the boss and they go home with the boss that night. And I think that really was the hardest thing for me is to understand that cycle of how you have to be doing what makes the money now. But you have to be laying the groundwork for money a quarter from now. And that was the toughest part.
 
Dan Sullivan: And also not having enough money to hire anyone to free you up from work, which really can be done by other people. I mean, most entrepreneurs are high in the imagination. They're very imaginative. They can see the future almost as if it's real. But the other thing is that generally speaking, they're only really talented in one of two areas that have to do with the product that they're delivering or the service that they're delivering. And so much of the other skills that are required to have a complete business, they're completely lacking in, but they're not hiring anyone to do that work. And that work really tires you out and that's the difficult part of it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So how do you attract talent when you don't yet have the revenue to attract that talent? Are there ways to do that? You know that you don't get buried in having to clean up huge messes because of past receivables, or payables, or the taxes that were overlooked because you were just involved in that waterfall of things. How do you attract that talent or how do you find to use your, and Ben Hardy's phrase, the "Who Not How"?
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: How do you do that in a way that's affordable?
 
Dan Sullivan: First of all, I think this is easier today than it was in the 1970s when I started. It's easier because you can buy parts of weeks of people's time. You can buy five hours of time or 10 hours of time. So you can break jobs down into modular units. Oftentimes they're students, you're hiring students. Even today, every summer we have probably in Toronto, we have three high school or college students who are working during the summer. In Chicago, we have a couple good local high school in Chicago. And that's a steady period. There's always, every year there's going to be two students who come over from the local high school and they're going to work after hours. They'd come in around 3:30 to 6:00 and they set up things. Predictable...
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Repeatable tasks.
 
Dan Sullivan: Repeatable tasks. Actually though a woman who runs our Chicago office, who's now about 35, she started with us when she was 16.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And she was an intern?
 
Dan Sullivan: As an intern, a high school intern, and then a college intern during her college days. And then she joined us full time after college. And now she runs the whole office. She runs the entire operation in Chicago.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Wow. I would imagine also in today's world, with people working remotely...
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Buying those X number of hours a week...
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So calculating that you need a bookkeeper for a day, a week or whatever it is...
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And making sure that you know how to orchestrate the workload.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So that you're maximizing their time when you have them. You can get experienced talent and there's a real value in that experienced talent too. That maybe weren't available even a few years ago. But because of the way that a lot of people have learned how to work, that becomes a thing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Have you seen that at all going on?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think it does. Now, I'm a bit removed from who's being hired now and how it's being hired right now. One is that unlike a lot of businesses that I've talked to right now, we're really attracting really great people right now. I'm really struck. But back then, the biggest thing I was missing is someone to run the entire backstage so that I could be front stage. That was the biggest thing. And that was Babs.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: I met her just shortly after my second bankruptcy. Actually it's next Saturday, 40 years ago I met her.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Happy anniversary.
 
Dan Sullivan: And my life changed. Yeah. She was captivated by what I was trying to do. Because I had started eight years previously, had actually, and it was a tough eight years. I mean the seventies were a tough decade economically. But I knew, we've had this story told on previous podcasts, but I knew I wasn't going to go back to the employment world. I would've stayed with it regardless of what the results were. I would've stayed with it. And I think that that simplifies things if you don't allow there to be an alternative in your thinking about the future. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. The no plan B.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's no plan B, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. That raises some interesting questions too. Because I think we've been to some conferences together and I've been to a number of them, and what I'm oftentimes struck by is people are starting companies, calling themselves entrepreneurs, and somehow they think, "Yeah, I control my time now and I'm working for myself." And they're not. They're working longer hours.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, as far as thinking about it...
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: There are no Free Days. If I remember back the first eight years, Free Days, you were thinking about it. I mean I don't even remember if I took any Free Days during the first eight years.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So the question I have is, right alongside that, is what are the misconceptions that people who want to be entrepreneurs or who are starting out and they're finding it's a lot harder than they thought it was going to be. What are those main misconceptions that you've seen and how do you deal with it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it may be a case that Gino Wickman who created EOS, it's called the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And what it is is the complete coaching program for an entrepreneur's team. So we have a wonderful collaboration. He's sold, all except 10% of it, and he's got a equity group that came in and bought the company and he's got other members of his organization, but they're really big. They have 500 coaches now and they're worldwide, at least they're North America and Europe. I don't know about South America, but I think it's all English speaking. He's written a book which is called The Entrepreneurial Leap. And it's really designed for people in their late teens, the book. And it's got a series of questions. And it's actually got a thing, it's one thing to have the entrepreneurial dream, it's another thing to have the entrepreneurial mindset and the entrepreneurial capabilities. And high on the capabilities is that you have to be a good salesperson right from the beginning.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because you are the product, you are the service when you start off. And you can remember back to your fashion days. Even today, I still consider myself the number one salesperson for the entire company. It comes with different hats that you're wearing from one decade to another. But I'm always the front stage spokesperson for the Coach. And I write books now and I do podcasts and I do things like that. But I'm still selling the whole promise of Strategic Coach. And if you're the right person, we can form a really good partnership here, that we can help you think your business through and do anything.
 
Dan Sullivan: I would say the other thing is that it really helps if you're either single and you're okay with that. Or you're happily married and your spouse is okay with it, if you're going to start being an entrepreneur. I think the worst is where you're single and are lonely because it's very lonely. I think it's the main cause for all entrepreneurial problems, is that it's just lonely. In single life you can probably get into more trouble than you can in married life. But the other thing is that you may have a spouse that they can't put up with the insecurity, they can't put up with the unpredictability. So quite frankly, I believe that all the reasons for failure of entrepreneurial businesses is found largely in the personal life of the person. It's not found in the business life. Because the lessons, they may be painful, but they're easy to learn. Did that wrong. Next month, don't do that. Do something right. And I find it's much easier to transform yourself strictly in business terms than it is in personal terms.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, yeah. I don't think we respond more to perceived emotional threat than, the thing is, if you know that your payroll is due at the first of the month, as long as you have the revenue, or your taxes are due quarterly, that's not a hard situation to correct, assuming you have the money of course, but that's not hard to correct.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But if your spouse or partner is feeling left out of the equation, ignored or whatever, that becomes a much more difficult issue to deal with.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And especially if they then as a result, even resent your business because then there's a competition that's set up and that's not healthy.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well that was a case with my practice marriage. That's what I call. That's what I called the first one. Is I had to practice. One is that Babs and I are both Americans. Americans have much greater feel for entrepreneurism than Canadians do. You know, we have the three countries we're in. And same thing with the UK is that entrepreneurs in today's world were thought of very favorably, much more so than corporate executives, or much more than government voice or anything. I think entrepreneurs, I think if you looked at all the psycho statistics or cultural psycho statistics, the attitude towards entrepreneurism in the U.S. is off the chart as a culture compared to other countries.
 
Dan Sullivan: So the one thing that if you're an American, the tide is kind of with you. I mean the economy may not be with you, but the cultural tide is really with you. And the great cultural heroes that are lasting cultural heroes, tend to be in the entrepreneurial realm. And that would include the arts, that would include the science and technology and everything else. But we don't remember great executives, great executives that much in American history. And today, now they're kind of faceless individuals and they don't stay with their companies very long. And I find that entrepreneurs and the thing of taking risks, you got to be okay with that. That that's a good thing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When you talk about the uncertainty, which is a big part of entrepreneurship...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I always laugh when I talk to people about whether it was really your business and putting together a business plan or what we're doing now with the play and we're putting together, here's how you recoup.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: There's 620 seats in the theater, an X amount of price and we'll project 85% capacity. And it's all a fantasy until you actually sell the tickets. You've concocted a story about how you can get your money back, but who really knows?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You don't know until you're actually offering your product or service for sale. Then people write the checks. So it's funny because it creates this illusion of control then, this is what's going to happen. You don't know.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well the one thing that you can control that is a constant, and I find that I don't feel much different about myself now... It'll be 50 years in two years. So in 2024 I will have been unemployed, unemployed since 1974. But the person I am is, I relate to the person I was in the 1970s. And the one thing is that you can't control things outside of you, but you can control your responses to things outside of you. And if there was a skill, that is the make or break skill, is whether you had the internal ability to respond to unexpected things, uncertain things. And you're okay with that. And as a matter of fact, you realize that getting really good at controlling your responses is the skill for life. If you have that skill, then you have skill for life. I mean, think of what you've been through. I don't remember you having COVID in your plans when you started the play. I don't remember you...
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I didn't share everything.
 
Dan Sullivan: We might have a worldwide epidemic where the entire theater industry is shut down for more or less two years. I don't remember you anticipating that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I didn't want to put that into projections.
 
Dan Sullivan: You thought you would demoralize. They would demoralize you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. You learn what to emphasize, what not to emphasize.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but I don't remember you being panicky or anything. I mean maybe it's well hidden, but I don't remember you ever, I mean you took one blow, you took another blow, you took another blow.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thanks.
 
Dan Sullivan: But what that says to me is in your half century of being out there in the entrepreneurial world, that you've learned that getting control of your own reactions... You respond, you don't react. I mean reaction really gets you into trouble. It's responding. You say, "Okay, there's something else I have to be responsible for and that's a new skill I have to do." But there's a constant confidence at the center.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's interesting, opening night of the play, a few people approached me, well actually I didn't even really know they were theater subscribers, few of the investors. And they came up to me and said, "Aren't you nervous? You don't look nervous." I said, "I'm not nervous." "You're not nervous?" I said, "No." "Oh, I'd be going crazy." I said, "I have confidence in the material. I have confidence in the talent. And it's 20 minutes before curtain, there's nothing I can do."
 
Dan Sullivan: You had total confidence in the topic.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. But the other thing, like with COVID, there's nothing else I can do.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The curtain goes up in 20 minutes. I can't rewrite anything. But I had confidence here. Correct. I had confidence in what we were presenting, what we're doing. I felt we were really ready. And I think that maybe that comes with age. I was never one really to freak out about things because I was more interested in either finding a solution, or something. But I learned young, I guess, it's weird. And I don't know if it came from, this is the first I've ever thought of this, Dan, this is interesting, but I was really close with my grandfather. And he had a huge impact on my life, even though he died when I was seven. And he's the one that instilled the joy of storytelling in me. And he died.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I remember it's the first time I saw my parents cry. And after they told me that grandpa died, I went into my room and looked in the mirror to see if that would start happening to me. If I would start crying like that. And I'd never seen that reaction in my parents before. It was weird. But I knew that, I know, certainly looking back, I interpret it this way, put it that way. Because I think that's how a lot of our life goes. They knew that he was gone and there was nothing they could do about that. And they couldn't minimize the pain to me. And they didn't make up any story. Grandpa's dead. It's not that he's gone away or he is on a long trip and you're not going to see him or anything like that. And both of my parents being entrepreneurs also, I think that combination of that emotional grounding that they had taught me by example, that there are certain things that are going to happen in life that you can't do anything about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So you keep moving forward as best you can, but you don't stop and you don't try to control. It's like punching the ocean. I mean, you don't try to control what you can't control.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Because you'll drive yourself nuts.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing is that, I mean, there's also the fact that what gets bought in the first instance when you start a new venture, is you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: In other words, if there's investors, what they're buying is you. Okay. So I'm very conscious that when times are good, I don't have to show up very much as far as my team goes or my customers and the entrepreneurs. But when things like the spring of 2020, I really had to show up. I was nothing but positive for all the team members. And I said, "We're getting a chance to try out something new here." I said, "We know how to do Zoom. It's just that there was never anybody at the other end. Now the whole world's at the other end."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: But we're really going to have to hustle. We took advantage of the government giving us back our money in both countries. People said, "Well isn't it great, the government's giving you money?" I said, "It's not their money, it's our money. And they just figured out that we could probably use it better than they could." Or whatever they figured out. I don't know what they figured out. But we have always had good backup. I mean, right from the beginning with Babs, we always have a lot of staying power in savings and investments that are liquid investments. And we can do that. I think the other thing, I don't know where, and it happened with you, but it happened to me I think probably during the tough years of the 1970s, that this was a life venture. This wasn't something I was just going to try out for a number of years to see if it worked or not. This was a life venture and what that tells you, don't delay in getting smart.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. When you say it's a life venture, and this ties back also what you were saying in terms of the uncertainty. As I've been out promoting my book and doing podcasts and so on, and I've been asked the question several, several times is, "What's your master plan? What's your master plan?" And I didn't have a master plan. So if you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, there's certain prerequisites you got to pass, like getting the education and getting a license in order to practice. But as an entrepreneur, I didn't have a master plan. And it comes down to I think, maybe this is mindset, I want to know your opinion on this, is I think there's a certain Unique Ability just to be able to recognize opportunities.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: As an opportunity. And what is your thought about that master plan idea and how life actually unfolds? Because you can't control your master plan, I don't think.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, I don't remember ever writing down a master plan. I mean, if that's what you're talking about, plan. But even in your head, one is that as you go along, you recognize what would be a much more desirable future performance on your part that was getting better results. So I think you start developing a picture of yourself in the future, not too far down the road. But let's say a quarter down the road, at the beginning of the next quarter, there are three or four things that we're going to be doing better that's actually measurable in dollars. And measurable in people actually saying that what you're creating is actually working for them. And they see this as part of their ongoing year, that they'll be involved with you. The other thing that goes along with this is that all the failure I believe I deserved.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And how are you defining that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well is that it was nobody else doing something to me. It was just my lack of knowledge, and my lack of skill, and that nobody else cared.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, nobody else cared whether I was failing or that it wasn't working for me. So it was strictly my game. You declared yourself independent from other people's games by starting the game. So you can't very well hold them responsible since you declared yourself independent of it.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I just felt that if things didn't work, you deserved that grade. You deserved that result. If you did this wrong and you did this wrong, then you're going to get a wrong result. And you have to accept that. So I think that there's almost like a mathematical formula to this. I mean, you can't get angry at math if you didn't get the right answer. You just didn't do the formula right. I mean, look at the knowledge of you just starting to put the Personality adventure together. One is that you have a tremendous ability to capture other people's stories that you've been working on for a long time in your video, your film career and everything else. And the story of a season in the fashion business, you grasped that. So my sense is that your storytelling capability is what's constant. And that started from your basement when you were a kid, when you were putting on movie productions, you were presenting.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It actually started back with my grandfather from what I was talking about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: How that made me feel in hearing his stories and how that was so magnetic to me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That I wanted to be able to do that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: 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.