Many entrepreneurs don’t hire well, and those that do mostly dread the activity. Dan Sullivan aims to change that. He explains a mindset shift about hiring differently as entrepreneurs, exploring how thinking of hiring as casting a play creates a new perspective on team building and collaboration.

Show Notes:

• Most entrepreneurs view hiring as a cost rather than an investment.
• An entrepreneur’s attitude toward hiring shapes the future of their relationship with their team.
• The notion of casting, as opposed to hiring, highlights the importance of finding the right fit for a role within the team.
• When entrepreneurs view the hiring process as casting, they shift their focus from simply filling a position to selecting individuals who will fit well within the existing team dynamic.
• It also helps them identify areas for improvement, reallocate roles, and ensure that the team functions cohesively toward common goals.
• It pays to view your business as a theater production, where the success of the team depends on how well each member fits into their role and collaborates with others.
• It doesn’t matter what anyone is doing on their own. It’s all about how you’re producing something as a team.

Resources:

The Impact Filter™

The Front Stage/Back Stage Model®

Unique AbilityⓇ

10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein delve into the power of the “When Are You Great?” tool, discussing how it serves as a crucial planning aid and a potent marketing resource. Using real-world examples, they explore the implications for crafting compelling offers, narrating impactful stories, and leveraging a marketer’s secret weapon.

Highlights:

To figure out what gets talked about, you have to combine everything you’re telling with everything you’re being told.

You share when you’re good because you have competition. Others share when you’re great because they don’t think you have any competition.

Saying when you’re good is trying to make a convincing argument. Being told when you’re great is your compelling offer.

How you're making people feel transcends what you do for them.

Your messaging should include both what you do and what happens when someone participates in it.

Measuring impact is hard in the short term, but unavoidable in the long term.

Resources:

The Four Freedoms

The Self-Managing Company by Dan Sullivan

The Strategic Coach Entrepreneurial Time System®

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan

The end of a year and the beginning of another is a great time to reflect and plan. Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein discuss effective ways entrepreneurs can look back on what’s happened and look ahead to what they want to accomplish, sharing insights from their own experiences running successful businesses.

Highlights:

A lot of people feel uncomfortable talking about long-term planning.

You can use the new year to reflect on the progress you've made over the last 12 months and what you need to do over the next 12 months while fitting it into the context of what your long-term mission is.

You can reuse your past any way you want.

It’s much easier to think about 25 years as 100 quarters: a quarter is enough time to get stuff done, but not so long that you’ll lose your way.

No one can predict the future. It’s all just guesses and bets.

Consistency over time in your past is crucial for building your future.

For the most part, entrepreneurs starting a new business don't have any structure or process that works.

There's a quick deviation from values sometimes when you're trying to just get financial return.

The more you plan backwards from the future, the better you get at it.

Resources:

10x Is Easier Than 2x  by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Learn more about Steve Krein and StartUp Health

The Strategic Coach® Program

Learn more about Unique Ability®

No matter how long a company has been around, it’s vital that everyone is clear on and maintains their core values. Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein explain why this is so important, discuss why all team members need to be aligned, and share some of their own companies’ core values.

Highlights:

In the U.S., core values used to be structured into the environment you lived in.

Reminding team members of the company’s specific purpose can help avoid distraction.

The value reinforcement of a company today is 10 times more important than it was in the 1950s.

You either do or don’t have passion for, have conviction for, and are inspired by a mission.

People who aren’t aligned with a company’s mission wreak havoc during times when things shift.

Company leaders need to represent the values they want their team members to have.

Every entrepreneur is in the continual process of hiring or removing wrong-fit people.

In a period of high flux, you go to the organizing structure that actually works.

Resources:

Everyone And Everything Grows by Dan Sullivan

Unique Ability®

The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time Management

“Geometry” For Staying Cool & Calm by Dan Sullivan

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Strategic Coach® is approaching its 50th anniversary, and Coach co-founder Dan Sullivan is coming up on 50 years of coaching entrepreneurs. In this episode, Steve Krein and Dan share some of the significant changes to entrepreneurism that have happened over the past 50 years and what the future holds.

Highlights:

Steve and Dan discuss what is currently the number one resource on the planet

If you look at cultural heroes in the business world and American life itself, they’re the great entrepreneurs.

The original definition of an entrepreneur is someone who takes resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity.

If you don’t have an appreciation for what it means to be an entrepreneur, it can look intimidating and mysterious.

Government, corporate, and large non-profit bureaucracies see unpredictably innovative entrepreneurs as their main enemy.

Big breakthroughs in technology empower entrepreneurs, not large bureaucracies.

When single individuals and small groups create something that goes viral in the marketplace, it upsets everything.

Most of the obstacles to becoming an entrepreneur that existed 50 years ago have been removed.

Resources:

The Strategic Coach® Signature Program

The Impact Filter™ tool

Article: The Four Freedoms That Motivate Successful Entrepreneurs

Learn more about Steve Krein and StartUp Health

My Plan For Living To 156  by Dan Sullivan

Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein continue their discussion about the power of thinking tools and how they can help entrepreneurs achieve their goals. They explore the importance of tension, shortcuts, and tools in simplifying complex problems and generating new opportunities for yourself, your team, and your clients.

Highlights:

• Strategic Coach® began with The Strategy Circle®, the primordial entrepreneurial thinking tool.
• All Strategic Coach tools share the VOTA structure: Vision, Obstacles, Transformation, Action.
• By combining opposing thoughts, entrepreneurs can generate new ideas and surprising insights.
• Tools are shortcuts to help people do things faster and more efficiently.
• The best tools, Dan feels, are axiomatic, like the self-evident truths that Euclid established for geometry.
• All sales conversations around Strategic Coach begin with a conversation about the prospect’s D.O.S.® (Dangers, Opportunities, Strengths).
• Dan discusses his latest book, which is about the unique culture within the Strategic Coach team, and uses the process of this book’s creation as an example of that teamwork.
• The speed and decisiveness of entrepreneurs require coaching and tools that can keep up with their fast-paced thinking and decision making.
• Individuals coming to entrepreneurship from a scientific or academic background may be shocked by the speed at which things happen in the business world.

Resources:

StartUp Health

Video: How To Transform A Negative Experience

The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time Management

Your Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan Sullivan

The Impact Filter

How do you find great people to join your organization? How do you train them, coach them, and guide them? The answer lies in what makes Strategic Coach® different from all other companies. In this first episode of a two-part series, Steven Krein and Dan Sullivan share the thinking tool culture of Strategic Coach, how it has transformed Steven’s StartUp Health, and how you can use it to upgrade any organization you choose.

Highlights:

Strategic Coach team members use the same tools as our members do.

Thinking tools are at the core of StartUp Health’s value creation and scalability.

Entrepreneurs can’t have a more confident future until they have a more confident past.

Your past experience is your property, so you can do anything you want with it.

Your past is there for learning.

You’re always either on the winning team or the learning team.

Thinking tools are structured forms, either digital or on paper.

You can’t change past events, but you can change your interpretation of them.

Never fall in love with your tools until the check writers fall in love with your tools.

Resources:

StartUp Health

Video: How To Transform A Negative Experience

The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time Management

Your Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan Sullivan

The Impact Filter

Most entrepreneurs believe they have to be in constant competition. But there’s a much more enjoyable way to live your entrepreneurial life to achieve bigger and better results: you can enter a zone of collaboration with like-minded people that’s entirely free of competition. Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein explain how to start. Hint: it’s all about simplifying before multiplying.

Highlights:

Finding collaborators who think the same way as you do is one of the most important activities an entrepreneur can undertake.

Don’t fall in love with an idea until customers fall in love with it.

You can’t have simplicity in your entrepreneurial life and complexity in other areas because the complications will catch up with you.

You need both simplification and multiplication to constantly grow.

Most people are too close to cash flow urgency to be able to even think about collaborating.

Once you’re in a competition-free zone, you can continually expand it for the rest of your career.

Uber and Airbnb started off as Free Zone Frontiers, but got really complicated because they got a lot of headwind from who they were disrupting.

Apple has been the best company at maintaining the quality of “Free Zone Frontiering.”

There are people who don’t see Amazon as a competitor, but as a capability.

If you don’t know up front what success in a project looks like, it’s dead on arrival.

Things that are currently underestimated or not even known are going to become entrepreneur capabilities in the next decade or two.

Technology companies are really hard-pressed to keep up with what people actually want to do.

If you create a disruption, you aren’t responsible for it causing a loss for someone else.

Resources:

Simplifier-Multiplier Collaboration by Dan Sullivan

Free Zone Frontier by Dan Sullivan

The Impact Filter™ tool

Total Cash Confidence by Dan Sullivan