The Innovation Property Builder

Dan Sullivan: Hi everybody, this is Dan Sullivan. And this is the next episode of the Free Zone Frontier. And I'm here with Steve Krein, no fresh looking. That's Upper West Side of New York City out of the window. I'm in Chicago. And we're back to talk about a, probably a very, very crucial subject in the entire world of entrepreneurism. And that is, what is the value of your innovation when you create new solutions? What is the value of that? How do you value that? How do you get it protected? How do you get it packaged? And how do you have that as a crucial element of the valuation of your overall entrepreneurial company?
 
So Steve, this is I think-- We did a wonderful podcast, the last one, and it was a three-part podcast. And it was with Keegan Caldwell, who's in the Free Zone program. And Keegan has been for the last three years in the United States the fastest growing IP firm. It was eye opening for me, Steve, and I know that the questions you asked sort of indicated that new ground was being created.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, I think Keegan does an amazing job just simplifying complex topics and making them seem almost accessible to lay people and every entrepreneur who has stayed away from or just been intimidated by the discussion around intellectual property and IP and patents and trademarks, and just simplified it into a very normal conversation. So I have a big appreciation for his simplification of something that I think way too many entrepreneurs don't spend enough time focusing on early on in the development of their companies.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And so one of the things I took from the podcasts that we had with Keegan, he mentioned, he says, you know, what I'd really like to do is, along the way is create a coaching program so that I can actually educate entrepreneurs, you know, whether or not they use my services or not, he said, I think it's just really valuable.
 
But, you know, if it really worked out well in the education process, then we would form a business relationship, and we would do the IP protection for them. And he said, also it would speed up members of his team, because he's growing fast, and he's bringing on new people, it would educate all of my new team members on exactly what we're up to as a firm, because we're not a usual firm, you know, that we're doing something really different in the marketplace. We're growing really quickly. And we have a different approach. And he says, so the coaching program would serve a double purpose. I mean, those were magic words of mine. You say the word coaching, and you've got my full attention.
 
Steve Krein: I love it. And I think there's not that many lawyers looking to do that. Right? And most think about, how do I get more clients and bill them more hours, and, you know, get more business? But I think, once an entrepreneur moves, shifts to wanting to help other people through coaching, that helps, you know, show them a pathway that I think makes them feel a lot more confident about the topic, whatever it is they're coaching on.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you should know that because part of your training before you developed your entrepreneurial empire was you went through law school.
 
Steve Krein: Yes. And quickly deviated away from going into practicing law given that the nature of what-- And by the way, interestingly enough, I think Keegan not going to law school, but still taking the bar, patent bar and being able to become a lawyer was a fascinating-- I think something I hadn't realized, the reason why he's able to be an entrepreneur practicing law and doing something, I think, with this IP protection process that most lawyers won't or can't do, because he's just looking at the whole problem differently. So.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, he's actually looking at the problem as a solution.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know. Which I think, I mean, it's really, I'm discovering more and more that what most people see the problem is actually the solution. And we've kind of nibbled at that, you know, from the very beginning in Coach with The Strategy Circle, that all those things which seemed to oppose your goals are actually the raw material of achieving your goals. But he's done it in a way that-- It was amazing because we just came off two workshops in Chicago. One was at the 10x Program where we had 54. I know the number because the number was important, as it turns out. And then the next day, about 30 of them were in the Free Zone. So they did the Free Zone Program yesterday.
 
The topic of our podcasts here is a presentation, just an outline that I put together, because I knew Keegan was going to be there. And it was my response to his desire to have a coaching program. And I'm, you know, this is what I do for a living. I turn knowledge that's not really available to other people into a coaching program so that people can kind of grasp the essence of something new, and then learn what the mindsets are that you have to have, and then learn the, you know, the behavior that you need in order to master a new area.
 
So I said, you know, Keegan's going to be in the workshop so I'm just going to lay out a process, and then I'm going to invite him to the front of the room and just talk him through it, you know. I'll be the guide here. And he's got enough of, you know, in Strategic Coach, we have the Kolbe profile that kind of tells you how people will respond if they're suddenly and without preparation asked to do something, and he's got a profile that tells you he can do that, you know, so I've never done--
 
Steve Krein: Nine Quick Start?
 
Dan Sullivan: Nine Quick Start. I said, you know, the thing is, if you have that profile, you can get shocked, but you enjoy it pretty quickly.
 
Steve Krein: So let's walk through that process. Let's start with it, Dan. You know, most people think of IP or terminology around IP as intellectual property. You title this Innovation Property Builder. So can you elaborate a little bit on that to start?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, because generally that which becomes intellectual property. And there's technical terms in the IP world. There's copyrights. So everybody sort of copyrights. Trademarks, that's another form. And then there's patents. And then there's others like trade design, which is a separate category. That's the way you've designed your thing constitutes the monopoly protection. And then there's things called trade secrets.
 
And I'll give you an example of a client who's coming into Free Zone before the end of the year or early next year. And he has just created something that's extraordinary, but it's a trade secret. And that is, he has something that is so powerful and so transformative that he can keep it in the form of a black box. And he's dealing with an industry where if he gets five or six key clients, he's got the whole industry. So he doesn't allow any possible competition to actually even know how he's going about doing what he's doing. But the payoff is so fast. And it's so remarkable what he does. And we'll get to that. That it makes more sense for him not to say how he does what he does.
 
And a famous example of that is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs never submitted patents for anything he did. And the way he positioned himself was, he would say, I'm gonna give a two-hour presentation next Wednesday from 2:00 to 4:00 Eastern Standard Time, and the stock market stopped. Our technology world stopped. Because he had that kind of persuasive position in their minds. And then, you know, he'd introduce iTunes or he'd introduce, you know, the iPad, or he introduced the iPhone, and everything like that. And he said, and by the way, what I've just described is available for sale tomorrow. You can buy it tomorrow.
 
So he never did it until he was ready to hit the market because he didn't want anybody knowing even the area that he was looking at, you know. So that's sort of a different approach. I mean, a lot of this just has to do with market positioning. So, how do you create new things, package them, and get them out so that the moment that they go into the market, they have a monopoly position in the market? I mean, this is the ideal. Like StartUp Health, you know, it's got a monopoly. I don't know, is there anything like it in the world in the way that you're doing it?
 
Steve Krein: It's very interesting, Dan, because as you've been talking this morning, both in the pre- podcast discussion and during this, I've been thinking a lot about the evolution of StartUp Health over the last decade. And for most of I would say, the last 10 or 11 years since we launched StartUp Health, we've been talking about this global army of entrepreneurs working to solve the biggest health challenges of our time. And, you know, with 400-plus companies in 28 countries and over 1,000 entrepreneurs, the interesting thing is we've had this framework called Health Moonshots that helps us organize all of our companies and entrepreneurs into these themes.
 
But over the last year, we've been working on really looking at the moonshots themselves versus just the companies themselves as the real vehicle to accelerating everything. And so we started looking at like type 1 diabetes within the Cure Diabetes Moonshot and say, what if we just took the type 1 diabetes problem and we organized a focused, cross-disciplinary collaborative board of experts together, led by an entrepreneur? By the way, underscore that: led by an entrepreneur. Because that is a unique part of what I think's been holding a lot of breakthrough innovation back—scientific and other academia, leading a lot of scientific advisory boards, but entrepreneurs have never been, not often been leading those boards.
 
So starting off with the leadership of this moonshot with a really great board with an entrepreneur at the helm. And then building everything underneath of a very specific goal like a type 1 diabetes cure. Management and prevention. It's included in that, but the cure. And what I've noticed when we started talking about single mission moonshots-- We have one on Alzheimer's now. You know, Alzheimer's and related disorders. Doing one on youth mental health, a big problem that's accelerated, especially through COVID has been the mental health of youth and teens and young adults. When you start to get into very specific themes like that, what you all the sudden see—and I'm going to use a page out of your "Who do you want to be hero to?"—you all of a sudden see all of the noise part away from the idea of just health and into a specific problem people want to rally around solving.
 
And I've seen it as a fascinating shift for us into the topic around how do we actually achieve moonshots? Not just how do we help entrepreneurs build companies? And so it's a very evolved thinking around this, but I come back to your original question around intellectual property and the process that we're putting in place. And it's really at, how do we really solve the big problem? Not, how do we solve someone's problem?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I think the other thing is that, if you go to the Constitution of the United States, in Article One. So, Article One is the start of the Constitution. And it basically states what the Constitution is for, but very early in Article One, there's a whole paragraph about intellectual property, okay. And a lot of the American Revolution happened because of the fact that American colonists were creating new solutions. But the solutions that were created, were not being respected by Great Britain, you know, by the mother country. That was one grievance.
 
The other grievance was that the form that intellectual property would show up in Great Britain like blueprints, and-- You know, drawings and designs and descriptions would be protected in Great Britain. But they made it a capital crime if you took those blueprints from Great Britain to the United States. Okay. And what it said is that Great Britain just wanted the American colonies to be a source of raw materials, which would be taken back to Britain, they would be manufactured using their innovative designs, and then sold back to the colonists. And a lot of people don't realize that, but when you look at the very, very essence of why the rebellion happened, you know, they had a lot of reasons, which were emotional reasons.
 
But the big reason was that Madison and-- And they were all in their 20s, by the way. A lot of people think of the founding fathers, a bunch of old white people. They were in their 20s and 30s, these guys. I mean, that was maybe old in the days, but they all lived into their 70s and 80s, with a few exceptions. But the whole point was, I think that they saw it as that for the first time that you could actually have a new government and a new country, which was essentially based on entrepreneurial innovation. And that's the thing they wanted to protect most, that we're going to be able to protect that. Yeah.
 
So anyway, just to talk about it, where it all starts. And it's the best in the world. I mean, the U.S. does the best job in the world with IP, and they have the best legal system for turning around patents as fast as you can. And they have the greatest investment capital system in the world that if you have an idea, you can get it to the marketplace really quickly. But if you don't have intellectual property for your idea, you're not going to get the investment capital.
 
Steve Krein: So let's talk about the six-step process here. And then, I mean we all know what D.O.S. means, or at least I hope people listening understand--.
 
Dan Sullivan: It says that all innovation in an entrepreneurial sense comes from what's happening to your clients or customers. And that is that they have dangers, where they could lose something if a solution is not created to help them; they have opportunities that they could capture but they don't have the means to it so you help them create the innovation that's going to allow them to capture the opportunities; and they have strengths that they're not maximizing, and you have the innovations as the entrepreneur that you can create solutions that you could help them, you know, help them maximize their strengths.
 
That's where the value creation process is. It doesn't start with you having a good idea; it starts with them having a fundamental issue regarding their future growth that they don't have a solution for, and you're helping to create the solution. I mean, easily applied to StartUp Health and the 430 entrepreneurial start-up companies, medical companies that you have, you know, around the world is that you've created a whole set of solutions where if they didn't have those solutions, they could easily, you know, die an early death as a entrepreneurial firm.
 
Steve Krein: So if you were to frame the six steps that you outlined for Keegan into what's unique about what he's doing to help entrepreneurs and companies, what would you say it is? Again, across this six-step process analysis through positioning.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, fundamentally, he says—and this came out in our conversations over a two-day period—is that the moment you have the idea for something new, that's when the IP process starts.
 
So I have that sort of upward, it's called the 10 Ps, is an exercise. He says, the moment you have an idea that's a plausible idea, and you start writing it down, that's when the IP process starts.
 
A lot of people think you create something, and it's ready for the marketplace. And then you get intellectual property protection for it. And what Keegan says, no, no it starts when you have the idea because the very solution you're creating is the intellectual property. So put the intellectual property considerations in right from the beginning.
 
Steve Krein: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay. So the first thing, what he's doing, so he was hitting veteran entrepreneurs, I would say the average, you know, in two rooms on a Monday and a Tuesday, probably 25 years, was probably the average, you know, they're probably people that have been out there for 25 years. They're very, very successful. And I would say for the most part, they're mainly service business, as opposed to manufacturing.
 
But we have a growing number. And I would say 10 years from now that half of Strategic Coach will be manufacturing companies because there's a reshoring movement going on right now. And it's going to be very, very innovative, high level of manufacturing in the United States, with labor in Mexico, and, you know, other countries. But it's gotta be available, the, you know, the supply chain problems, that's a security issue for the country. So it has to happen, and there's just going to be an enormous growth.
 
So, I can see, you know, 10 years from now that half of the—I won't say the total, but the top entrepreneurs coming into the Program—will be manufacturing of, of a new nature, you know. So I'm just going to walk you through. And what I'm describing here is what Keegan uniquely can do with his firm. I'm not saying that this is what happens in the intellectual property law industry, because it doesn't, but this is what Keegan does. So I'm describing his Unique Process here.
 
First one is, you make an appointment, and he comes in, and he says, "Show me what you're doing and tell me all the solutions you have." And they say, "Well, you know, I don't think this is IP." He said, "Can I be the judge whether you're doing IP or not?" Okay, and he'll just go through and he says, "Yeah, clearly you have a trademark there. Do have the trademark?" "No, I don't have the trademark." He says, "Okay. Everything you do can be copyright protected." And people say, "Well, you know, this was just a one- time solution." He says, "You can copyright it. You can get a registered copyright for what you did." "Well,I'm not using that anymore." He says, "It's a copyright and you can get a copyright for it. It doesn't matter if you're going to use it again. It's got value. It's got value."
 
And then the big thing, he gets two patents, and he said, "Now, you've got some things that are not in patent form. But if you take a couple of your copywritten processes together, put them together, that would be a patent." You know, and he just goes through and he does a complete analysis. Okay? So then he said, "If you want to take the--" Two and three are actually very connected together. Because what he can do just on the basis of his analysis, he can say, "My estimation here would be, based on what you've shown me, you have about $10 million worth of intellectual property value. This would be added to the valuation of your property. They won't if it's not protected. In other words, you don't have the official documents that say it's a trademark and copyright—from the government, it has to come from the government--"
 
But he said, "If you did that, that you would have just added $10 million to your valuation of your company." So, I'll stop there. But to do this, because he said this in his podcast with us. And we were both wide eyed when we did it, because I was just taking the number of clients I have in Strategic Coach and multiplying by the number. Okay, so 10 million is not a big deal. I mean, he said, almost everybody would have at the level of people, you know, in the 10x Program, he said, "You have so much creativity over the last 25 years, but you haven't really approached it from that fashion." But if you look at your 430 companies—that was the last number you gave me—you multiplied 430, and it might be 50 million times 430.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Well, I think there's an underlying step in there that for the entrepreneur is to get a third party perspective from an expert, like Keegan who is able to at least validate some of the ideas as it relates to packaging the idea. And I think the idea of packaging an idea is something that a lot of entrepreneurs, because they're swimming in them, and oftentimes overrun with them, you start to feel like it's a commodity and they don't have value. And I think the idea that a Keegan can come in and at least compartmentalize the discussion around each idea, and create a framework of a discussion that there's a value there, in and of itself is a great discussion, right? So you've created value by just saying, "This is an idea. This is how we protect the idea. And if we protect it, this is how much more valuable it is." It's very oversimplification of what a lot of entrepreneurs don't put any value on is the abundance of ideas they have, and I think this is starting to do that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the other thing is that intellectual property is fungible in the sense that a lot of people, you know, think their company is worth something. But it's not well organized backstage. You don't have your processes documented. You've got relatives on the payroll, you know. And you've got different deals with vendors, and you've got different deals with clients. And it's a really, really messy affair. And there's a whole expertise in the marketplace that gets you ready to sell your company, and they simplify it down. But IP, if it's protected as simple to start with, it's a fungible value right off the bat.
 
The truth is, if you went through Keegan's analysis, and you got the complete inventory of trademarks, copyrights, patents, okay, and you had the protections, which is not a long process, and evaluated that, and you evaluated the rest of the company, immediately, if you are of the mind to, you could sell the IP. It's ready to be sold into the marketplace where your company would have required an enormous amount of work to get it ready for that, you know. I mean, I've been through enough conferences, where, you know, people say, run your company as if you're gonna sell it, you know. So, you don't do things up front that would interfere from an easy sale and a lucrative sale at the end. And all he's doing is, you have ideas that you've used, and you just take them for granted because that's what you do for a living. And I'm telling you that every time you create one of these solutions, it has an IP value.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, well, I think therein lies for purposes of a mindset shift that needs to occur for the entrepreneurs to truly understand that their ideas are part of the value creation engine that they've created. And Keegan seems like a partner or a collaborator for that that just kind of makes things easier so you don't have to worry about them. I don't know how much time he's suggesting it takes out of an entrepreneur's life, but it seems like a--
 
Dan Sullivan: I think it's pretty quick. I think it's pretty quick. And one of the problems with a process like this is the IP, you know, the entrepreneur, it's like getting your finances ready because, you know, you have to get a loan or something. And it's an arduous process, or it's like getting your medical records ready because you're checking in with a new clinic. And it's an arduous process. And you say, you know, I mean, geez, why do I have to do this? And, as I understand, Keegan is training his staff to actually take control of the process for you inside your own company. And the moment you realize that any idea that you've created—a solution idea you've created—has value, if it's identified and protected as IP, it really is enormous incentive for you to really move quickly and get everything out there.
 
Steve Krein: What's he charging for his product?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think it varies because of the size of the body of knowledge that he's using, you know. But he's got sort of fixed prices for patent, like patent is the most expensive process. And I'm not talking about the analysis here. Because, you know, I think that's situation by situation. But like his standard price for a patent is about 10,000 hours. And he's got a 99.3% success rate so far, in the history of his company. The industry average is around 60%. And those are not his numbers. Those are the U.S. Patent Bureau's numbers regarding his patents.
 
Steve Krein: What's been your biggest shift from your John Farrell conversations and using him to protect all your trademarks and things like that, and the conversation that you're having with Keegan around the patent stuff? How's your mind shifted over the past couple of months and couple of iterations of this for yourself for Strategic Coach?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think the first thing, you know, that kind of woke me up was that for the first time in 33 years of the company, or at that time 31 years, we had to launch a major litigation against violation of our intellectual property. And it was like a two- year process, and it was expensive. And you know, we have a nondisclosure on it, you know, we can't say anything. And the only thing I can say is, I wasn't unhappy with the result. Okay. And one of the things of why I wasn't unhappy is that it was like taking an advanced graduate degree in understanding what we had done right. Because we had done a lot of things right. And our lawyers said, "You know, I have major corporations who haven't got their act together like you guys do."
 
But there was a lot of stuff where there were holes in the system. The other thing is, we were being reactive to a situation that happened in the marketplace, and I said, "We're never going to be reactive, we're going to be totally proactive." So that was a mind. And, you know, where John is going as an IP firm is very, very different from the ideas that I was getting.
 
And then Keegan came into the Program. And he's a new, you know, he's relatively new in the market. I mean, he's within his first 10 years of IP, you know, on his own as a company. Plus, he came into the Program, went through Signature Program, came into the 10x Program, and then jumped up to the Free Zone. So he was an active player, so I could talk to him a lot. But the biggest switch was, I was thinking only in terms of our company, you know, and would have just thought in terms of our company, with our further work with John and John is still, you know, IP lawyer for Strategic Coach. But now I'm thinking about everybody else's company in Strategic Coach, and that would not interest John, but it totally interests Keegan. So that would be the shift.
 
Steve Krein: Excellent. That's helpful. And I think you just went from a convincing argument to compelling offer of the shift that you're making inside of why you are caring prior to that about your own intellectual property and now you're caring about other people's.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and not just about their property, but increasing the valuation of their business. If we can bring a capability into Coach, you know, probably at to 10x level, if we can bring in that instantly, in a matter of a quarter would increase the value of your company by let's say, $5 to $10 million. And it's like sitting there and you don't know it. And all it is is an analysis and then a protection process that you go through. And it's a one to 10-- At the very least, it's a one to 10. You pay $1 and you get 10x value back. I mean, if you think about the expense of doing it and the return. I said, "This is a very sweet offer that we're making."
 
Steve Krein: What's the shift in the four, five, and sixth steps where it's company funding and positioning. I understand the analysis, protection, and valuation. What happens at company funding and position?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, once you get to one, two and three, you have created a second company, and the second company is the IP company. And you move all your IP into a separate company from the operating company.
 
Steve Krein: And then the funding and positioning?
 
Dan Sullivan: Once you're at that stage, and here, I'll use some bigger numbers. But he had, he just gave an example of a client where he had done one through four. And it was determined that the value of intellectual property—and that's intellectual property that's out there, intellectual property that's in the process of being created, and intellectual property that's just being started—the value of it was $250 million. And then there are insurance companies, big, big insurance companies, that will come in, and they'll get someone like Keegan who's official, and he's verified one, two, three, four. And they'll grant you a loan of up to 50%. It's kind of like, they'll take an insurance policy and give you half the value in the insurance policy, which, as you know, Steve, from your own entrepreneurial experience, and then the start-up entrepreneurial experience of your 430 is that they have to give away equity. But here your IP provides the start-up equity.
 
Steve Krein: So he's been creating these intellectual capital, intellectual property companies, and then getting separate funding for those?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah. Because the IP company that's creating the-- I mean, what most people are funding is actually intellectual property.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, and then the operating system has to be up to the quality of the IP.
 
Steve Krein: So, we're gonna have to have Keegan back now for an update series of episodes to talk through this. I'm assuming his last 48 hours at Coach was transformational.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, yeah. So just to give a little bit more context to our listeners here, I just asked Keegan-- I put this forum together. I didn't have number four. That was a surprise that came out of the conversation that we had over the two days. But I had the other five. And then I just had Keegan use that as a way of explaining to people what IP is in general, but especially his unique take and compelling offer. You know, so I put him in the spotlight. And he responded, yeah, I mean, he responded very, very quickly. So I said to him, I talked to him at a break. And then we sprung this question. I said, Keegan, 'You're looking at a room of 54 entrepreneurs, and without knowing anything about what's going on inside any of them. But just from your experience of dealing with entrepreneurs so far where you go in and they have a lot of IP but don't know it, what kind of valuation would you put on this room of undiscovered IP?" And he says, "How many?" And I said, "Fifty-four." And he says, "Probably about a billion dollars of IP value that's not being realized." That's not a convincing argument.
 
Steve Krein: It's a compelling offer.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's a compelling offer.
 
Steve Krein: And everybody wants to be a big piece of that, or at least, hopefully it feels like they're a big piece of that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and in the next 24 hours, he set up 35 appointments for him to go out and do number one, number one.
 
Steve Krein: Right. And that's what he's trained his team to do.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. And then, when you have this, the funding then is the outside source, it's a insurance company. And then number six is the IP positioning, that this is building tremendous confidence in your company that your most powerful marketing tool is the monopoly power that you're gaining from your, you know, the valuation of your IP. You're totally protected when you go into the marketplace. Your packaging, you know. But not only that, you've probably speeded up the development of your company by using the funding that's available from the valuation of your IP.
 
So I mean, I'm looking at your thing. There's StartUp Health itself. Your company, StartUp Health, has an operating company, and then it would have an IP company for yourself because you've created all sorts of IP in creating this network. Okay, and then each of the entrepreneurial companies that you have, they also would give an analysis to your-- I mean, you're the person to say and the process that you use to spin this out. So maybe you start with a top 10 and you do it. But each of them would go through the six steps. And they also would have an IP company. And I think it would change, totally, I think it would totally change your message to your institutional investors.
 
Steve Krein: We have a call scheduled with Keegan in a couple of weeks to actually explore this-- I brought that up on the last podcast we did about scheduling time. And we actually had one and it got moved back. But I do think-- Look, to summarize, I think this now fourth in a series of conversations of episodes about intellectual property is, in order to be in the Free Zone framework and mindset for building companies, in order to truly make sure that you're not just running so fast that you're not taking care of packaging up, protecting, and valuing. And even now, what I hear you describing is perhaps being creatively funding your company, you're leaving a lot on the table without stopping and making sure that's taken care of, and I think, not as an administrative back end, which is the way I think a lot of entrepreneurs think, but it's a value creating front end.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, it changes your whole notion what it means to start and grow a company and make it successful in the marketplace. It's almost like you have a superpower that's available to you. But for the most part, you're never educated by any conventional industry or any conventional business school. I mean, this would not be known in any business school, what he's doing.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. So Dan, just sum up your feeling coming out of being able to, as you said, re-listen to the previous episodes, came up with this process and framework, delivered it back to Keegan, spent a couple of days talking about it with him in the community, what's your biggest takeaway of the arc of learning from the first conversation to today? And what are you taking away from the you know, the overarching new capability that you now have access to?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, first of all, you know, as part of the collaboration with Keegan and his team, we would just have him come in and do it to us. I mean, we have 550 copyrights, you know, that have been--
 
Steve Krein: But no patents.
 
Dan Sullivan: We have a couple of patents. Strategy Circle is a patent. And we got another one. And then we have probably dozens of trademarks. And, you know, we would just have him go through it. And that's part of my education, to create the coaching program for this is to actually go through the experience, and then make sure that we don't have any holes, you know, things not covered, so that we'd go to further process of protection. And I have an IP team. I've got, you know, I've got a team right inside Coach. So, you know, we can get our own copyrights by ourselve. We can get our own trademarks by ourselves. Probably can't get our own patents by ourselves. And then get a valuation and then create the separate company because we haven't done that yet.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay. It's not that we need funding. We don't need funding. We fund out of growth. We have a no-receivables company, so. I based it on the movie industry. I said, you know, "When do you pay for a movie, on the way in or on the way out?" I said, "Let's just have it be on the way in." But the whole thing is that we've been an IP firm right from the beginning. That's all there is in Coach is intellectual property, you know. We don't have a product, we don't have a service in a conventional sense. What we have is a vast ecosystem of entrepreneurial focus questions and thinking processes. And so it's entirely an—
 
And I think yours is exactly the same way. That's exactly what your firm is. So then I would do that. And then we would develop the Program, the coaching program, to such an extent that it would guide all of our Free Zone and 10x clients to go through the process for Keegan. You know, with Keegan. And to do this. I mean, regardless of whether they're in Coach or not in Coach, I mean, you'd want to do this, it's a no brainer. Found money, you know, it's a found money exercise.
 
Steve Krein: It'll be interesting as we go through it and you go through it, we compare notes and see how we learn through doing this process how to unlock the inherent value in all of the intellectual property inside our organizations and our clients' and partners' organizations.
 
Dan Sullivan: The interesting thing, as you've gone along with this, when you do your annual or however it works, you go back and talk to the some of the big investors that are in the fund, that you use that and say, "Oh, we've immediately added value to all these companies over the last year." I think it will be a very, very interesting meeting. You know, I mean, people say, "Oh my god, how'd you do that?" "Well, you know, we've come up with this process."
 
Let me ask you a question. You know, I'm making this up on the go, you know, and that's how things get done. But from what you had gathered after our day with Keegan on the podcast, what's this added to your understanding?
 
Steve Krein: I think the second part of it, not the first part of it, was the most directly value creating. In other words, the idea of having IP, protecting IP, and valuing is a great exercise, but moving into monetization of, or being able to turn it into capital or funding or just measuring, I would say, that is the big takeaway. So I do think you having written all six of these steps to the process down, and in particular, step number five. Interestingly enough, I would think it would be five and six would be flipped because I would think would be "Create a company position" and then you get funding.
 
But I think it's an interesting thing to have funding in there, which then positions it. I think the idea of being able to measure the impact of intellectual property protection is a compelling offer versus a convincing argument. So I think that, in and of itself, was, now that I'm actually saying it out loud, the big takeaway. It's now a compelling offer versus a convincing argument to care about and start with getting your intellectual property evaluated.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think the other thing is--
 
Steve Krein: We just found the topic for the next episode.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I think the other aspect of it is that it puts the emphasis in your company on constant neverending innovation because every time you do one, it's got a value.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, you know, interestingly enough, I think everybody's used to innovating. The question is now valuing the innovation. So I think there is an element there of, would you call this Innovation Property Builder? And I think it's putting a different descriptor in front of just what people think of as intellectual property, which, by the way, a lot of people just think about it, like, "I gotta do accounting and legal work." Right? That's kind of the typical attitude towards a lot of this by most entrepreneurs.
 
So. Excellent. Great episode, Dan. Appreciate us having another episode in the books. And, more importantly, I want to dig into, on the next episode, compelling offers versus convincing arguments, which is and that was a topic yesterday in the workshop. But as we tease this out a little bit, I think there's an element of that, which plays into a good conversation and helping dig into the different perspectives you gain in having that discussion with a group of 30-plus Free Zoners yesterday.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yup. And I've got a thinking tool that we can use as the basis for this.
 
Steve Krein: Perfect. All right. See you on the next episode, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: All right. Thank you, Steve.