Ignite Unlimited Business Growth The Strategic Coach Way

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here with Dan Sullivan on Inside Strategic Coach. Today, we're really excited to give you a conversation that we've just completed about our newest book called Everyone And Everything Grows, The Extraordinary Coach Culture. We have gotten so many questions about how do you find and keep such great people? Well, this conversation is the answer.
 
Dan, we're talking about the latest book, which is called Everyone And Everything Grows, The Extraordinary Coach Culture. And I am very curious, what inspired you to write this book right now?
 
Dan Sullivan: We have a very unique company, and it's unique in a couple of respects, Shannon. What we actually offer to entrepreneurs in the marketplace is actually the way that we run our company. So the main value creation that we create for entrepreneurial clients is thinking tools. So these are thinking tools that are geared just for entrepreneurs to think through in a much better way, a much more strategic way, a much more, what I would say, advanced way about thinking about how to be an entrepreneur in today's world. And this goes back to 1989 when we actually started the company in its present form. But all the tools that we have the entrepreneurs master is what all of our team members master Back Stage. So there's no difference between our Back Stage and our Front Stage. And that's unique.
But the other thing is, the entire Back Stage is put together with thinking tools. So my particular specialty is looking at any entrepreneurial situation, see what works, doesn't work, and then I construct a thinking process so that it just always works. That's how they organize their life, you know, both their personal life and their business life, and how they plan their future and how they focus just on what the individual entrepreneurs themselves, he or she, how they just focus on what they love doing and free themselves up by building a team that does all the things that they don't like doing and all the things that they're not good at.
 
That gives entrepreneurs enormous freedom. But having said that, this is the way all of our team members actually advance inside Strategic Coach. And you're the team member who is the lead person here because you've been in the company in your thirty-third year now, thirty-third year of the programs, which almost takes us right back to the beginning. So all the tools, you've created a, what I would say, a support coaching program for all the team members, the team leaders of the entrepreneur's company. So you know all the tools because those are the tools that the entrepreneurs learn in the Program. So what triggered this book is the next question you're going to ask me.
 
Shannon Waller: One of the things you talk about is having a thinking tool culture, which is a really interesting way to define a culture. But I am curious what in particular, you know, as you said, triggered you or inspired you to capture this and take what is normally for us a [unintelligible] experience and make it a Front Stage capability for other people?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, since COVID, we have two components to our program. We have now virtual workshops because we had to do some quick thinking when everything got shut down. And our business is people will come in person to workshops, and they're in-person workshops. It's workshops full of entrepreneurs, anywhere from, let's say, 30 to 50 entrepreneurs. And so it's learned in a community of entrepreneurs who are all successful, they're all talented, and they're all ambitious, but they're learning thinking tools and they're comparing notes with each other how they're using the thinking tools. So other members of their workshop are also applying the same tools. So they're trading knowledge and they coach each other: "Well, I tried this and this way" and they say, "Oh good, I'll try that too." But the thinking tools, they have a language, it's a growing language of breakthrough-type thinking. Okay, and that's been going on, and we have clients who are 30 years in the Program too.
 
And we have team members who have been in, you'll give me the actual numbers here, but we have team members who have been here since certainly 27 or 28 years learning the same tools. It's unusual, there's a complete congruity between our Back Stage and our Front Stage, and that's what we teach the entrepreneurs, how to have complete congruity between their Back Stage and their Front Stage. So that's the thing. But since COVID, it's always been the case that they wanted to know one big question: how do we get such great people in our company? But how do we keep such great people for such a long period of time? So over the last couple of years, especially, the requests have been numerous of asking me, well, how do you put your Back Stage together? I mean, how did you put the Back Stage together? So we're writing 100 books in 100 quarters, and I had a new quarter coming up. I said, it's time to actually tell them how we actually put our entire Back Stage together so we have such a good Front Stage.
 
Shannon Waller: I love that it was inspired by the question, how do you get and keep such great people? I love the fact that this book is the answer to that question. Thank you, Dan. So Dan, you've been talking about thinking tools, but let's just really dive into exactly what is a thinking tool, because most people think of other types of tools, but a thinking tool is a little bit different.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it comes from the first thinking tool that we created when I was a one-on-one coach was from 1974 to 1989 when we started the workshop program. So for 15 years, I was just a individual entrepreneur whose business was helping other entrepreneurs think more clearly about their future. And any kind of entrepreneur, I think, you know, the numbers are 60 or 70 different industries all over the world. I think the number's in the 30 different countries that people come from. But it's fairly universal what an entrepreneur is. And I think an entrepreneur in one part of the world totally understands an entrepreneur in another part of the world. But going back in time, back hundreds of years, thousands of years, it's the one occupation that is timeless. It doesn't change. You've got a particular capability, you've got a particular product, you've got a particular service, and you've identified certain clients, customers who could really use what you have. And then there's a whole relationship that develops around your thinking, helping them to think more clearly. So that's true of all entrepreneurs.
 
But first of all, the word entrepreneur is very, very different from the way I was, which is just a one-person entrepreneur. And I didn't really have a team at all for the first 15 years. And for me, an entrepreneur who is a true entrepreneur has developed a team around them. It isn't just the entrepreneur. It's not just a self-employed individual out in the marketplace. I mean, our clients, some of the clients have a thousand team members, you know, some of the companies. But mostly they're in the three or four people up to, you know, 50 people. That's the sweet spot of who we go after. A lot of them aren't small companies. They're medium-sized. We're a medium-sized company. We have 130 team members. We're in three countries. So what happens with a lot of entrepreneurs, they never get much beyond their own capabilities. They don't develop an organizational capability. We've grown from just me to 130, and we use the growth structure and the growth process that we went through to go, you know, from a good living for me and for Babs to a point where it's a good living for hundreds of people.
 
And then we've coached, you know, we're quickly approaching 25,000 entrepreneurs since 1989. We're doing this in 2023, but 2024, I've been at this for 50 years next year. But the first tool that I had is called The Strategy Circle, and it's in Workshop 1 when people start the Program. It's a process that I came up with 1982, and that is, you ask people where they want to be in the future on a certain date, and they name the date, so let's say it's three years. So you name the date, so it's three years from now. I will have improved in this way, this way, this way, this way. And you put numbers to all those things that these are actually quantifiable. There's a huge jump in quality, but the big thing is it can be measured in quantitative terms. And that really focuses entrepreneurs' brains. Entrepreneurs love numbers because they're measurable.
 
So then you take that vision and then you say, well, what are all the obstacles that you have right in the present that prevent you from getting to that vision that you have of yourself three years from now? And immediately the obstacles all come out, and then we teach them a very important thing. The obstacles to your vision are your raw materials. So you have vision, then you have obstacles, and now you're gonna take each of the obstacles, transform it into an action, it's a communication, and they're going to create a team that helps you transform each of the obstacles into action. So there's a formula: vision, obstacles, transformation, action. And that's VOTA. But what we've realized is, that's one application of VOTA, but we've discovered hundreds of other situations where you create a vision of how you're bigger and better. Things are getting done easier. Things are getting done faster with a much bigger result and those are all VOTA-based thinking tools, but it could be related to hiring people. It could be related to dealing with customers and clients. It could be related to dealing with new kinds of technology. It could be related to your personal life, how your personal life, how you manage time, you know, and just focusing on what you're great at and then go looking for everybody who loves doing what you are not good at and is better than you than what you did it.
 
So, that's what a thinking tool is. We have 2,000 copyrights on our tools, over 2,000, and we have at this point roughly about 250 trademarks, and now we're starting into the patent flow, and we have eight patents and we have over 50 patents pending, which will be patents in the next two or three years. So the way that we've grown, we teach other entrepreneurs how they can grow in the same way using our thinking tools.
 
Shannon Waller: And Dan, one of the insights that came out of the book for me, having been using the tools since 1991, is that they are "thinking about your thinking" tools.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thinking about your thinking. Most people don't think about their thinking. They think about things, they think about technology, they think about property, they think about their office structure, you know, the actual office. Obviously, they think a lot about time savers, anything that's a shortcut, and those are things. And then they think about people. They think about, this is most people, they think about people, you know, who do I want in my life, in my business life? Who do I want as clients and customers? What kind of vendors do I need to have? What kind of collaborators do I have in the marketplace who help my business grow and I help their business grow? And then in my personal life, you know, starts with family, your life partner, your children, and then your friends and the community you're living in. But each of these, when you dive deeply into it, triggers a new thinking tool.
 
Shannon Waller: It does do. So people can think about things, they can think about people, they also can think other people's...
 
Dan Sullivan: And then they think about thoughts. You know, there's famous people who have ideas, but the vast majority of people on the planet think about things, they think about people, and they think about thoughts. But they're not their thoughts; they're other people's thoughts. But our tools, when you use one of our tools, you think about your thinking about things, people, and thoughts. And very few entrepreneurs ever are in the fourth area of thinking, except if there's a crisis, they'll do it for a short period of time or they're creating something new and they have to do it. But most people don't like going there because it feels uncomfortable because you're working on yourself and a lot of people don't like, aren't comfortable. The school system certainly didn't teach them to do that. Their parents necessarily didn't teach them how to do that, society in general. You know, it's all coming at you. You're being broadcast to other people's thoughts, but you're not just focusing how your brain actually works and how you're responding to your situations. And we've organized this whole vast area of thinking about your thinking, and it goes on forever. I mean, 10 years from now, we'll have twice as many thinking tools because the world is changing, and quite remarkably, right now, the world is changing. This all requires new thinking tools.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, and the thing I love about our thinking tools, Dan, is that I can have a rough idea of my thoughts about something, but I never come out of it not feeling smarter, wiser, clearer. So I always end up feeling-
 
Dan Sullivan: More confident.
 
Shannon Waller: Far more confident and having an ability to communicate it then to other people. So it's interesting how transformational in thinking the thinking tools are.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And your competitors in the marketplace who they might be in the same business, they might be in the same market. They may be marketing to the same types of clients and customers, but you're thinking about your thinking, and they're not thinking about their thinking. And there's a Free Zone aspect. You're in a Free Zone here. Nobody can think about your thinking the way that you think about your thinking. And that gives you, it's not a competitive advantage. You're just not competing.
 
Shannon Waller: Right. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's no one's going to think about it the way that you think about it.
 
Shannon Waller: And what I see is it keeps people... People who do not think about their thinking are very reactive. And yet, people who think about their thinking are able to-
 
Dan Sullivan: Get totally creative. That's always creative. You always come up with something that no book would have, you know, except my books, because my books are all about thinking about thinking like the book that we're talking about, Everyone And Everything Grows, is a book about how you think about putting together your Back Stage.
 
Shannon Waller: Dan, in this book, Everyone And Everything Grows, one of my favorite parts in one of the early chapters is called "No Defense Budget." And as someone personally who is very interested and passionate about teamwork and how people work together well at work, No Defense Budget is unique. So can you please tell me what you mean by No Defense Budget?
 
Dan Sullivan: I sort of start the book with the ending that what you get is an environment, a company environment, where nobody has to defend themselves, nobody has to worry about criticism, nobody has to worry about politics, and the thinking tools make that possible. And the number one thinking tool that we have that everybody learns from day one is that you have a Unique Ability, and we're hiring you for certain work that you have to do, certain jobs. But from the moment that you start working at Strategic Coach, we're going to say there's an area of work where you're better than anyone else. You're absolutely unique at it. And not only that, it's an area of work that you love doing. And a third thing about it is that the thing that you do best, that you love doing, is the thing that have the greatest value to us and the greatest value to all our other team members.
 
And then we add another component to Unique Ability, and the Unique Ability is teamwork. You can be very good at it, and you can love doing it, and it produces a great result, but the real thing we're looking for is how you take your Unique Ability and team up with other people's Unique Ability. So we call that Unique Ability Teamwork. It's strange because growing up, you're not taught this. As a matter of fact, you're told this is what you should focus on because this gets you a long way in the world. You should go into this profession, you should go through the educational system and get this degree and everything else. But none of that has anything to do with your actual Unique Ability. I mean, it might coincidentally overlap. But there is no thought about this in the educational system, about just the thing that you do great. So they teach you everything, but only some of what they teach you actually is useful for expanding your Unique Ability.
 
The moment that you know that this is the deal, at Strategic Coach you're a team member, then you know you're not in competition with anyone. And you don't have to defend yourself. And guess what—you take on projects that you've never taken on projects before and the first time you do it it works and some of it doesn't work, and we don't criticize you for that. We say, let's reinforce what you did which is really works and let's just take a look at what didn't work and maybe that part of the work you shouldn't be doing. Maybe somebody else should come in and do that work. So, we don't want you to do anything where you'll fail a second time. But you got to work with us here. You know, we take your Unique Ability seriously, but if you don't take your Unique Ability seriously, it isn't going to work. So you may be headed for someplace else rather than Strategic Coach. But the ones who really buy into the Unique Ability deal can stay forever because they always grow and everything they touch always grows.
 
Shannon Waller: You said stay forever, Dan, which is true. Some of us have been here a long time, more than half our lives.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think we've just crossed over 25 team members who are above 20 years. Maybe it's more. And I expect you to reach 40. I expect you to reach 50 years that you've been here. You're in your 30s right now. And you just keep always growing. And everything you touch grows. And everything you take on grows. So there's no problem here.
 
Shannon Waller: That's what I wanted to ask about because we need you to take yourUnique Ability seriously because we promise to take it seriously. It works only if you're in Unique Ability Teamwork with other people, so you can't squish other people's. Some people would say, and you said this actually in an earlier video, it's not about status. How do people grow in a company where it's focused on Unique Ability versus the traditional hierarchy?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, we as a company are always taking on new things that require new leadership. You know, we have an organizational structure. There are, I think, a dozen specific teams that handle everything that makes the company work. And we have certain team leaders, but they're only team leaders if they stay in their Unique Ability. And the thing that their team is doing grows. And we've had team leaders who use their Unique Ability and Unique Ability Teamwork to get to leadership positions. But then they said, well, I'm the leader. I don't have to grow anymore. And if you don't grow, you go.
 
Shannon Waller: In fact, that is one of our mottos: grow or go.
 
Dan Sullivan: Grow or go. Yeah. Yeah. Because somebody who is staying within their Unique Ability is going to surpass you. They're going to do it in a different way. They're going to do it in a uniquely different way. But growth is the standard for everything. It's the standard for every individual, and it's the standard for every activity. It's the standard for every team. Everything has to grow.
 
Shannon Waller: Dan, another chapter that I think is going to be very impactful for people is "Positive Focus Protection." So what exactly does that mean? I'm curious.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the world we live in outside of Strategic Coach has a lot of negativity to it. This has been multiplied by electronic media. There's no question that social media makes its way in the world through negative rather than positive conversations, discussions, lots of criticism, lots of blaming, lots of attacking other people. And generally, life in the world outside of Strategic Coach is very competitive. Some people compete to be as good or better, and some people compete by tearing down other people, attacking other people. So it's very complicated, it's filled with conflict, but we don't want anyone when they leave that world and come into the Strategic Coach, we don't want them to bring that with them. Check your negativity at the door.
 
So the way that we safeguard what goes on in the Program is that everything in Coach is projects and meetings, progress meetings about our projects. Everything's broken down into a project. Teams have ongoing new projects, and they have to meet to discuss, "All right, we've achieved this, and this is the next step we're going to take." But in order to ensure that everybody is in the meeting 100% devoted to growth, we start the meeting... Everybody has to communicate something that they're really excited about that's very positive in their life. And it can be from any part of their life—their work life, they could be studying, taking new training and is positive about that. It's about great things that are happening in their personal life, and they can communicate that. But everybody has to go around before the meeting starts to actually say positive, and it raises the whole level of the meeting to a very energetic level, and it seals off this meeting from anything else that might be negative outside.
 
You have the meeting, and we have structures for the meetings. There's tools that we use in the meetings, thinking tools, so we get to the best possible result and the greatest degree of cooperative clarity by the end of the meeting. And then we do a Positive Focus, say, "What's the greatest thing that you got out of the meeting?" And, you know, in the course of a week, there's 100 meetings and every meeting starts with a Positive Focus and every meeting ends with a Positive Focus. That's just standard procedures. You start and finish with a Positive Focus, and that gives Positive Focus Protection to everything that takes place in Strategic Coach. And it goes right back to the original notion. Nobody's going to need any defense budget. So all your energy, all your capability can just be devoted to, how do we grow from where we are to the next step?
 
Shannon Waller: So Dan, this is our second time together today, and we did a Positive Focus before the first one, and we did a Positive Focus again. I do a Positive Focus before the Weekly Planning Call, or at the beginning of the Weekly Planning Call. So it is built in, as you said, it's our standard operating procedure, both Front and Back Stage. I coached a workshop last Friday, and it's like, I cannot not start with a Positive Focus. Bad things would happen. So let's talk about it. I love hearing about it as a protection. But the other part of it is, you know, when people are protected from that negativity, they can operate and show up quite differently than someone who has just heard something negative before a meeting or had a bad traffic situation before they came in in the morning.
 
Dan Sullivan: Or they were watching the news.
 
Shannon Waller: Or they're watching the news or they got a bad alert on social media. So why is it so critical for you and for us that people have that protection? How does it allow them to function differently than if we didn't do this?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I'm able to operate at my best. You know, I'm participating in the meeting. And there's hundreds of meetings I'm not in. And as the owner of the company, the founder with my partner, Babs Smith, we do this in our personal life. We begin the day and we end the day with a Positive Focus. And we were just on a trip, a long trip to South America, and we just got back and we talked about what worked and what we liked about it and everything else. But it neutralizes you to the negativity of the world. And I think the big thing is it makes you immune to the world. And more and more, what we find is that having this environment 100% when they're at work, our team members tend to insist on it more and more in their personal life. So working at Coach actually improves your personal life. It actually improves your relationships. You have negative people, and you say, "How long is this gonna last? I can't be around this negative person anymore."
 
And some of it requires quite drastic decisions. You know, you give the other person the chance to be positive, and if they don't get the memo, then you make decisions. And we all do this. I mean, everybody's done this since childhood. But a lot of people get involved in a group of people where there's a lot of negativity, but it's normal. They can see you growing, and your growth is negative for them. They don't want you to grow. You're outgrowing them, and that forces decisions. So I think that the benefit is that you're never worried about politics at Strategic Coach. And if you start introducing political factors into Coach, you're not long for the company.
 
Shannon Waller: Interesting. One other aspect to this, Dan, too, is that with that negativity focus slash bias that happens a lot, people are not open to new ideas. They're not open to things that would actually cause and create that growth. And when someone's coming from a positive standpoint, there's a famous Google study on psychological safety. The teams that were by far the most successful by a large margin are the ones where they had enormous psychological safety. They didn't have to play politics. And they were the most creative, the most productive, in our language, the most profitable. And that's a huge part of it. If you're going to be doing new things, you have to be coming from a place of confidence and capability, not being grumpy or mad or upset or fearful. That's not conducive to growth. So Positive Focus Protection just helps your own ability to think. So I think that's another key aspect of it for me.
 
Dan Sullivan: And that's the way I like to live my life. You know, I mean, I'm a positive person. I was born positive, and I've seen the alternative and there wasn't much attractive about it. So, yeah, I mean, I like being happy. I like being productive. I like being creative, you know, and the more I can expand that through thinking tools outside of me, the better off I am.
 
Shannon Waller: And the better off everyone else is too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. It works both ways.
 
Shannon Waller: Dan, you've talked a little bit about how congruent what we do with our clients is also what we do with our team in terms of thinking tools. So I want to dive a little bit deeper into Front Stage/Back Stage and particularly the fact that everything is predictably congruent. What does that mean? And what does that look like? And what does it feel like?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I've listened to entrepreneurs, you know, main stage entrepreneurs who are talking about their success, and you'll hear them describe more or less an ideal sort of situation. But then you start talking to their team members, or they don't even call them team members, they call them employees, and they say, "Well, he can say what he wants to say, or she can say what she wants, but nobody stays here very long because it's very toxic." And "She's really good at PR, he's really good at PR, and cosmetics, if you will. But you don't know what it's like working for this person. You know, there's constant criticism. They demand perfection. You don't get credit for doing it right because it's not perfect." You know. It just strikes me as a waste. First of all, the person really isn't telling the truth about the whole situation.
 
And my feeling is, I want to be in a position where I never suggest to our clients that you do something that we don't do it that way ourselves. I don't want there to be any inconsistency between how we grow our company Back Stage and what we tell the entrepreneurs Front Stage. And I'm especially sensitive to this more than anyone else because I've studied organizations all my life, and for the most part it's a very, very rare organization that is completely consistent from Front Stage to Back Stage. But I do know that if you have an organization like that, your growth multiplies almost without effort because people are looking for consistency. They're looking for congruency in the marketplace, because there's a lot of fraud in the marketplace. And by fraud, I mean, it ain't the way that you talk about it. So you're not practicing what you preach. And nothing turns people off that what the person is saying is inconsistent with how the person actually acts when they think nobody can see them.
 
Shannon Waller: This means walking our talk, doing what we say, what's true for team members is true for clients and vice versa, being consistent with our thinking tools. So it's not two-faced. And I think you're completely right, Dan. People in the marketplace are looking for, I was gonna say truth, but they're looking for that congruency in a good way. And that consistency, it's like, oh, okay, this looks like a great company. Let's peel back the covers. Is it really? And when they're like, it is, they're like, whoa, that's unique. It is different in the marketplace.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think part of the reason is, I don't look at the individuals who are our team members any different than I look at the entrepreneurs who are our clients. They're each an individual and they have a Unique Ability. So, I have team members that have worked with me for—you for 30 years. Other team members have worked with me for 20 years. My attitude toward them and their abilities and who they are as people is exactly the same as the way I look at clients. And we have clients who are 25 years going on 30 years. And the reason is, they've never had any sense that what we're saying is inconsistent with how we actually run our company. And people say, well, that must be a lot of work. And I said, well, try the other way of being inconsistent. That's a lot more work.
 
Shannon Waller: 100%.
 
Dan Sullivan: First of all, you have to be replacing people all the time. But not only that, people who've had a negative experience, that there isn't an integrity, there isn't a consistency, they talk about it when they go out in the world. If you treat people badly, they'll tell a hundred other people. If you treat our clients bad, they'll tell a hundred other people. And it was very interesting. We're just going through a major collaboration with a big, famous organization, and one of their members is going to be a speaker at our biggest conference. And they checked us out, all of our internet presence. And they said we're the only organization that they've ever come across where there's nothing negative on the internet. And the reason is, nobody ever has any reason to say anything negative about us because we treat everybody with respect. We treat everybody in terms of their uniqueness. We're deeply interested in what they do uniquely well. In any way we can, we want to help them grow their uniqueness. And it's just one approach, so we don't have to have 10 different approaches for 10 different situations.
 
Shannon Waller: It's very congruent with you too, Dan, because you want a simple, consistent, easy-to-remember, easy-to-implement strategy.
 
Dan Sullivan: I like simple. Once it gets complicated, I'm not interested anymore.
 
Shannon Waller: I love how you said it. Each person on the team is an individual, and each person has a Unique Ability. And that is true of our clients, it's true for our team, and that way of looking at things, which is really, really important, that that thinking goes all the way through the organization. Because if you have that mindset, but a team leader doesn't, or a team member doesn't, it does harm to that culture.
 
The one other factor I want to touch on, and you've mentioned it a couple times, is the longevity of what happened. We haven't really talked about this as a longevity strategy, but when you put into place all of these factors, there's no reason for people to leave. They have incredible freedom to be themselves. They work for a very congruent organization. They are valued for what they do uniquely in the world. There are always new opportunities to expand and to do something new and different. Like, why would anyone leave? And given...
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, people have different goals. So we've had really great people who've left the organization. But anytime we encounter them, they feel like they're still part of the organization, and we treat them like they're still. If you've been a good team member at Strategic Coach, we treat you like you're always a member of the community. And the same thing for entrepreneurs. If you've been in Coach and we helped you grow, then when we encounter- You may have not been with us for 10 years or 15 years, and we treat you like you were here yesterday, you know. But it's just the simplicity of it. I mean, the world is complex enough, and the world is confusing enough. Why not just have a single policy that always works?
 
Shannon Waller: And it's very attractive, and it does have people stay a very long time. Dan, one of the other things that you talk about in Everyone And Everything Grows is the fact that Free, Focus, and Buffer Days is part of what we coach our clients, but it's also something that our teams can take advantage of as well. So I'm sure people are super curious to see how this works.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the Time System is one of the most singularly unique things about Strategic Coach. And again, we recommend that our entrepreneurs organize their time like this. Part of my background is entertainment. And what I notice in the entertainment world, they have three kinds of days. They have performance day, they have rehearsal day or practice day, and then they have free days. They have days when they're not engaged. And this is very different from a bureaucratic time system where you have workdays and you have weekends. A lot of them ask people to work on weekends, especially in today's world. Your value to the company is if you're willing to work, do your work on workdays, and then you have vacation days, but we're suggesting if you really want to get points that you use some of your vacation days to work.
 
And generally speaking, their workdays wear them out, their vacation days don't renew them, and they're always worried that they should be doing work at home after hours. And now, you know, you'd think that virtual work would free them up because a lot of them have lost commute time. But now they're expected to be available, in some cases, 24 hours a day. And you can't grow. You can't grow. You can survive, and you can be rewarded for sticking with it, but you actually don't grow as an individual. And the projects you work on, you know, you're told if you don't complete the project the way we want, you're gone. So it's total defense budget. The way the bureaucratic world operates. And then when you're at work, people don't knock themselves out because it's going to be this way forever and you know it's not a series of sprints, it's a marathon, and all you hope for is that you can get to retirement age and then you can start enjoying life. You know, put in your 40 years and then you can start enjoying life.
 
And I said, why don't we have people enjoy their life right from the beginning? So, when a team member is hired, they have a three-month trial, and that's got legal status because it's understood that you can fire a person after three months with no cost to it. There's nothing.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, before three months, you can let them go.
 
Dan Sullivan: Before three months, yeah. So what we do is, we do just the opposite. Everybody's three-month trial, and then the moment that you make the three-month cut, we say, "In the next year, you get just as much free time as somebody who's been here for 32 years." So it's six weeks of what other people would call vacation, so it's 30 days, but it's never more. So someone who just joined the company and has made the three-month trial, they will have just as many Free Days in the first year as Shannon Waller, who's been here for 32 years. Because I don't treat Free Days as compensation. It's a necessity so that you have a completely full outside life. And we don't ask you to work beyond hours. And if you do, we take a look at it and say you shouldn't be working past work hours. If it's required that you work on a weekend, and let's say it's two days of work, then you get to take two normal workdays and treat it like your weekend. So you always get your full allotment of days.
 
And then the days themselves are different because we have three days. Free Days. And then you have Focus Days, and Focus Days are just when you are doing the work that produces the results that's most profitable for the company. And you can declare, this is a Focus Day, I'm just working on this. And then you have Buffer Days, and Buffer Days are Back Stage days. It's planning, it's training, it's learning new technology, it's learning new knowledge, it's creating new systems. And this is what we teach the entrepreneurs, but everybody in our Back Stage gets exactly the same time system.
 
And the majority of our clients are workaholics. By our definition, they've never had a Free Day. When they're on what are called Free Days, they're thinking about work, they're checking their phone, checking their computer, they're working on projects, they're doing reading that's related, they're networking business, they're always working. And we say, no, we want close to half the year when you're not working and you're not thinking about work. What that produces, enormous energy, focused energy, productive energy, creative energy, profitable energy when people are working. Give them a big whack of time every week, give them a big whack of time every quarter, every year, and when they are working, they can throw their entire Unique Ability, energy, and talent into working. So we get a better deal.
 
Shannon Waller: Which is so counter to most people's thinking about it.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's counter to the world.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes. Yeah. Because usually free time has to be deserved through long periods of hard work as we talk about one of our models. And you're like, no, let's do it ahead of time. Let's make sure they're rested and rejuvenated, as you say, put their full self into it and be their most creative and productive, and then take a break.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, have a great home life and have a great friendship life and have a great rest and relaxation activities. And we don't ask you to think about work when you're not working.
 
Shannon Waller: Which is, again, so different than people working evenings and weekends and vacation, which is pretty normal.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And if you're always coming in early and staying late, we have to talk about that because obviously the normal work time allotted for your activity, you're not good enough to get it done during normal hours. So let's have a conversation about that.
 
Shannon Waller: I know one of my team members, anon, whom, you know, I tend to come in maybe a little bit early and tend to not look at the clock and be, I'm not a clock watcher. But every day she would be ready to leave at five. And I'm finally like, how are you thinking about this? She goes, if I can't get my job done by five o'clock, there's something wrong with how I'm doing it. I was like, Oh, she's not wrong. That's a great education.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it's not about time and effort. It's about results. If you can get your results done in four hours, where it takes most people to do eight hours, we're not going to load you up with more work.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: But I want to go back to the start of this. All of these are a result of thinking tools. Okay, and we've just identified the sweet spot that's best for entrepreneurs in any situation in their personal life or their business life. And we say, eliminate what isn't the purest, most productive, most creative, most enjoyable activity, and just get rid of it. Let the world do all the crap. You don't do the crap.
 
Shannon Waller: I love it. Well, Dan, thank you so much for laying out all of the different ways of thinking, the thinking tools, you know, how to really set up an entrepreneurial culture so that everyone and everything grows. It's unique. It's a privilege to be a part of it. It's a joy to be a part of it. And it's very fun to find a place where you can be 100% yourself and 100% growing all the time. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's been a delight to be in teamwork with you for 32 years.
 
Shannon Waller: Thank you, Dan. Same here.