The Transformation Trilogy: Your Road Map To Entrepreneurial Success

Gord Vickman: Welcome to the Inside Strategic Coach podcast. My name's Gord Vickman, filling in for Shannon Waller today. Here, as always, with Dan Sullivan. Dan, in recent years, you have published three major market books. The first was Who Not How. The second was The Gap And The Gain. The third was 10x Is Easier Than 2x. And something unexpected happened when all three came together. But before we jump into what that was, if you want to just sort of lay the foundation for how these books came to be and how the process started, and then we'll discuss how they link together.
 
Dan Sullivan: First of all, a little background. Before I began coaching in 1974, I had been a copywriter at a big Canadian advertising agency. Being a copywriter is probably the best training for being a writer of anything else because you've got six inches of copy or you've got 30 seconds or 60 seconds of time. And you have to tell a whole story in a very short period of time or in a very short space. And it makes me very economical when I write things. But the other thing is, you know what the time and space is before you start, and therefore, you can never have more to say. You can never have more to write. You have exactly this much space to write. And I did that for three years. And I'm grateful for two reasons. One is I knew this was not going to be my career, and I got out right at the moment because I had mastered the rudimentary craft of fast, quick writing. I carried that skill over, so I started Strategic Coach, the program part of the Strategic Coach, which is the same today as it was in 1989. In the early days, it was just next workshop, next quarter, you know, putting out, and I was creating all sorts of workshop materials, but I really didn't have time because I was the only coach. But as soon as we got another coach, I says, now I can fall back and I can start putting the philosophy of Strategic Coach, which was now six years old, and we had a lot of experience. We had well over a thousand entrepreneurial clients and only entrepreneurs. We don't have any clients except people who own their own money-making business. So I said, we're going to start writing books. And one of the things I should explain here, Gord, is that my partner in creating the tools for Strategic Coach and my partner for creating the ideas of Strategic Coach is a 50-50 partnership. So I'll come up with the idea, and I know how to start the conversation, but what the content is, is the conversation that I have with entrepreneurs. And all our tools start with a question, asking them about their experience, both pro and con. What was the experience that you had that didn't work? What's the experience you had that did work? And out of that conversation about what worked and what didn't work pops out new ideas that I can now convert into what I call thinking tools. And all of Strategic Coach is a thinking tool universe. Everything in the Program and the way we run our company is a function of equipping people with thinking tools which are purely entrepreneurial. So the first book popped out in ‘95 and then every year I would have a book but I didn't have a team around me to write the books. Like the first workshops, I didn't have a team around me to plan the workshops, but Babs has a rule: free up Dan to do what he does best. If you wanna know what the number one rule is that governs the Strategic Coach universe, is free Dan up to focus on what he does, is listening to entrepreneurs converse, take their conversation, formalize it, objectify it, put it in a structured thinking form, and sell it back to them. We take our experience and your money, and we magically turn it into your experience and our money, which is the description of every entrepreneurial business in the world.
Gord Vickman: Interesting how that works, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's alchemy. That's why I believe in magic. And then I had done that for a whole number of years. So I started my coaching career in 1974. We started the workshop program in 1989. So I'd had 15 years of creating some fundamental tools that always worked. And then we felt that we could go much broader, we could multiply this. And then I did that for six years. And then we got our first coaches. Now we have 16 coaches. And I do about somewhere between 8 and 10% of the workshops, and the other coaches do the other workshops. Now I had clients who didn't know me. Now Strategic Coach had a growing population. And I said, you know, to assist and support what the other coaches are doing, we need books. And I tried, you know, different books, long books. But then when I was 70, which was in 2014, so I'd been coaching 40 years, I came up with a new thing that the world had changed—dramatically, irreversibly it had changed, that people were being given bursts of information. I mean, you always had television, but then there's 500 channels, and you had the internet, and now there's 500 million channels, and then you have mobile phones, and infinite channels. And what happened was the desire on the part of consumers to get the information really quick. Give a message I can think through and everything, but don't use up days of my time, don't use up hours of my time. So I came up with this 60-minute book that I will write a book and I use its flying to Chicago from Toronto. The moment that the plane starts taking off, you start reading the book. The moment the wheels hit the ground in Chicago, the book is finished. So 60-minute book. And then in a foolish way that I tend to create my future, I said, okay, next 25 years, I'm 70. So from 70 to 95, I'm going to write a book a quarter, so that's a hundred books, and jumped into the deep end of the pool, could keep my head above water, but I had no team. And now we have a 10 person team around me and I can write and finish a whole book in 40 hours each quarter. So it's basically a week. I can write a book in a week and we have a new book. And I have writers. I have sound technicians. I have video technicians. I have editors. I have another main writer who actually does all the writing from my outlines. I have interviewers and everything. But it's a team that every quarter we produce a brand new book. So I'm at Genius Network, Joe Polish's great marketing universe, and a man who is the number one writer on the internet blog platform, which is called Medium, he was the number one writer, had just joined Genius Network, Ben Hardy. And Ben came to me at a workshop, and he says, I notice you only write these little books. And he says, why do you write the little books? I says, the entire readership of my books is my clients. And they buy the books for themselves. They'll buy five or ten of the little books and they'll give them out to five or ten. So it's an excellent marketing vehicle. Because, you know, people who don't know about Coach start to learn about Coach. And we have an audio track, we have a video track, we have a scorecard that you can do. 44 pages written and 22 pages of cartoons, because people are visual. So anyway, it's really interesting because Ben said, well, I've got a contract to write a major market book, and if you ever think about taking one of your ideas and writing it, I'd like to be the writer, OK? Because I know how to write major market stuff that has broad appeal. And I said, huh. You're the right person at the right time. I just made up my mind on the spot. But I said, I know nothing about the publishing business outside of Coach. I know nothing about how you get the contracts and everything else. And he said, I do. But then his publisher and his agent didn't want our books. And the first book was Who Not How, which had just recently been created. And it was a hot number. I said, if I was gonna have one book go big, let's start with Who Not How. And Who Not How is a simple mechanism that simply says, when you have a goal that gets you excited, you have a problem, because the moment you're excited about the goal, you're faced with the negativity that you don't know how to do it. So instead of trying to learn how to do it to achieve the goal, just find a Who who can get you there. And it's just one of those instant thoughts. Fortunately, we were at another Genius Network meeting and we had two other people there and one of them was Tucker Max, who has probably helped, low estimate, 2,000 other writers to turn their books into major market. And he's a literary lawyer, and so he can do the contracts. And at the same time, there was a publisher, Hay House, Reed Tracy, who was there. I introduced myself to him. He said, I know who you are. He says, but you don't write major market books. And I said, I'm thinking of doing it. And I says, Ben Hardy's going to be the writer, and Tucker Max is going to be our coach on it. And they went out that night. I was really tired. They went out, and by the next morning, we had a book deal. So just to sweeten the deal for Ben, I said, here's the deal. We don't make our money by selling books. So all the money that comes from the book is your money for the rest of your life. All the advances are yours, all the royalties are yours, and it was a sweet deal. And we just agreed on one, and then we agreed on a second, then we agreed on a third, and meanwhile, Ben had been writing his own books, and his career got really big, and he was a featured speaker. The first three books, so Who Not How was the first book, and then The Gap And The Gain, which is a very, very central concept, and then 10x Is Easier Than 2x. These books are all available at Amazon. I'm not gonna read the books to you on the podcast.
 
Gord Vickman: No, that would be an audio book.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, an audio book. And I would say we're four years out now with the first three books, and we've sold about 600,000 copies. And they're just doing the best job we've ever had of attracting qualified entrepreneurs to the Program. And the rest is history, you know. And I didn't write any of those books, but I was interviewed idea by idea page and each of the books has interviews with about 25 Strategic Coach clients who tell you how this concept works so it's kind of a dream relationship. When we got to book three, we realized that we had created a trilogy, that these three books, if you read them together, really, really transform not only your entrepreneurial life, they transform your personal life. There's a real magic, so we call it the Transformative Trilogy. Now we're selling them more or less as a package. They're just working wonders. They work wonders for the people who read them and they work wonders for those people who are qualified for Strategic Coach. They give us a call and they say, I love the ideas. How do I get involved? And that's the finest marketing that you can possibly have. And then they start listening to all the podcasts in Strategic Coach. So neat things.
 
Gord Vickman: One thing I think is neat, Dan, is that when they were written, did you have any inclination that they were going to fit together so well as the Transformation Trilogy?
 
Dan Sullivan: No.
 
Gord Vickman: It's just something that happened, I don't even know if you could call it an accident, but when you started, and you had written Who Not How first, you didn't plan these to work so well together. They just sort of fit together like a puzzle. And that was fairly surprising to you, because I know a lot of other people were surprised as well, having finished all three books and then realizing how those concepts fit together. So could you put that together, Dan, put that puzzle together, in your vision, having written these books and created these concepts, how do they fit together for someone who is gonna start with the first, be Who Not How, and then Gap and the Gain?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I'd read them in that order, because the first book makes you more productive the way you read it. I've just seen people that, I had a new client, first day in Strategic Coach, and I was just chatting with him at a break, and he said, the day I got Who Not How, he said, I read the whole thing in a day. These are bigger books. These aren't my smaller books. So there's a couple hundred pages. But it's got a lot of stories, a lot of anecdotes. And Ben is an organizational psychologist. That's his college degree, doctorate. He's got a doctorate. So he knew a lot of the psychology behind these things. And he says, all of your Strategic Coach rules are just the essence of good psychology. But I've never involved myself in psychology. I just involved myself in how entrepreneurs think about their world. But the first one, immediately people said, I just stopped trying to do the How and I started finding Who's who would help me achieve my goals. The second one, The Gap And The Gain, is how do you measure your success so that your success makes you happy? And if you measure against an ideal, it'll make you even unhappier. If you measure backwards from where you started, it'll always make you happy. Again, that's an instant hit. And then 10x Is Easier Than 2x is that, if you have a goal, measure outward, say what it would look like if this was 10 times bigger than what I'm normally doing, which might be 10% over the next year. And I said, give yourself a goal that forces you to stop doing all the stuff that doesn't make sense, and the moment you say 10 times, it was like me, I could talk about, well, I'll write a book, and I can do it on my own, a smaller book I can probably do on my own in, let's say, six months, or I can do it in a year, but if I say 100 books in 100 quarter, I can't. Absolutely, cannot do it the way I'm doing it. So what's my part of it, and then what other nine people are involved in the book? Now this isn't the only thing they do, this is just one of the things they do. But every quarter they have a project which is called a new book. I'm at the point now where I say, I wonder if I can write and complete a whole book in a week. And I did it as a little test and I pulled it off. It wasn't a great book, but you know, there's a psychological, it's not a law, but it's just a thought provoker that says work always takes the time that's allotted for it. Okay. If you give yourself a year to write a book, it'll take a year, probably more. If you give yourself a week to write a book, you'll get the book written, but you won't do it the way you've done anything else. So if you put the three of them together, one of them says, don't do the house, find the Who's. The other one is, measure success backwards, not forward. All happiness lies in measuring your progress backwards. And 10x is much easier because it reduces what your part of the project is by about 90%.
 
Gord Vickman: Dan, can you think of some examples of entrepreneurs in the program or entrepreneurs that you're friends with who have taken the Transformation Trilogy piece by piece and then actionable items and they've come back to you and they've said, this is what I accomplished, this is what I achieved, this is what happened as a result of using these as a one-two-three punch?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I had a, just in the Program, he's just starting the Program right now, but he religiously read the books and applied the books and he's a huge, huge wealth manager in one of the major corporations. He's independent, but he processes his business through this larger corporation. And they have a measurement in that world of assets under management. And then the percentage of the assets indicates your revenues. He said in the last five years, we've taken our assets under management, and it's in the billions of dollars from, I think, $2 billion to $9 billion in five years. And he said, I just religiously applied all your principles. And he said, and as a result of this, I should be able to come in at the top stage of The Strategic Coach Program instead of at the beginning stage, because I'm a big dog, and there are puppies. And I said, nice try, but you're going to start at the beginning. I said, yeah, you're really good, but you're not toilet trained, so we have to make sure that you're fit for the group. And he said, oh, no, I can't. I don't have the time. I said, well, let me tell you what the Program does when you come to the Program. So anyway, I'm at the point where we're the buyer. We're not the seller here. We have certain criteria whether we even let you join Strategic Coach. But the fact that people can consume this stuff and condition their mind is a great jump forward for us. And the 600,000 books really represent the print books and the e-books, but it doesn't represent the Audible books. And the Audible books are one for one with the other forms. So if you've got 600,000 in paper books and e-books, it tells you you have 600,000 Audible books, all because of the glorious technological world we live in.
 
Gord Vickman: fun to have happy accidents. The Transformation Trilogy, how all three books work together.
 
Dan Sullivan: I want to answer your question because I didn't really answer the question when did it appear we had a trilogy, and I said, life only makes sense looking back. And it was reader feedback and client feedback that was telling us that this is a trilogy. And somebody said, well, what's the fourth book in the trilogy right now? And I said, well, you know, that really isn't possible. So I said, if we write a fourth book, it'll be books four, five, and six, which are the next trilogy.
 
Gord Vickman: The fourth book would defeat the purpose of a trilogy. Perhaps that person doesn't know what a trilogy means.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there isn't room for a fourth in a trilogy.
 
Gord Vickman: And all those books available on Amazon. And you can also visit strategiccoach.com to get your hands on them.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I want to say this, Hay House has been just a marvelous publisher because they have the reputation of being a great marketing publisher. Most publishers aren't really good at marketing, but they're very good. And they had just made a decision when we started our relationship that they were going to go from now on purely into the entrepreneurial market. They had been sort of like a new age book publisher, but they could get a drift of where the reading audience was going and they wanted to stake a major claim in the entrepreneurial world. And people said, well, you couldn't have planned that. And I said, life is taking advantage of everything that wasn't planned.
 
Gord Vickman: And the Transformation Trilogy can assist you with doing that as well. Dan, any last thoughts as we wrap here?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I would say one thing about the Audible, when you have an Audible book, I don't read the text because I'm significantly ADD, and squirrels are always interrupting me. They put on little fashion shows. But they hold cards above their head just to distract me. So to sit there and read the actual words of the book, I can't do that. But Ben came up with a really neat trick. He would do the reading. He's got a great voice. I mean, he wrote the words, so he's got a feel for them. But at the end of every chapter, he stops, and then he interviews me on the chapter. This is at the whole end of the book. So the normal Audible is two hours. We have an extra probably almost another two hours of me just reflecting. And I introduce all sorts of new concepts, you know. And people say, well, why don't you take the new concepts and put them back in the book? And I said, it just went from this size to this size. I said, there's a point of how big a book can be that any further pages is a waste of money. But it's all worked out. In essence, we got that book for free because instead of the money for the book, the advances and royalties coming to us, it went to the writer. But my name's first. And I own the concept, so everything worked out well.
 
Gord Vickman: Transformation Trilogy. Who Not How. The Gap And The Gain. 10x Is Easier Than 2x. And you can check those out on Amazon, as we mentioned, or strategiccoach.com. Dan, always a pleasure. Thanks so much.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Gord.