Deadlines Are The Only Way To Turn Ideas Into Action

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything And Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: We were just talking about the importance of deadlines and the role that deadlines play both in the theater world, which he's doing, and entrepreneurial world, which he's doing. And deadlines are really the vehicle by which entrepreneurs and theater productions actually make their way in the world.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Over to you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Over to me. So that was my deadline for just sitting here quietly while you spoke.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep, yep. "When is he gonna stop talking?"
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, we have a tremendous amount to accomplish in what is basically, I think it's 24 days. My previous trip here, which was about six weeks ago, is when we started doing the casting, which we got wrapped up the day before I left, the Friday before the Saturday I left, which was like the 28th of September or something like that. And there are so many logistics that have to go on, and each of them create deadlines. So we've been and will be this week rehearsing where we have been, and then we move to the theater. We have the theater for basically not even two days. So in those two days, we have to set up all the lighting cues, work out where the actors are going to change clothes, where we put the wardrobe, all that, because we're not doing the full-up production. But we're doing a significant chunk of it. We aren't building sets. You just can't do that kind of put in for this, but each department has a deadline.
 
Now we've been on deadline, which has some flexibility, but we've been on deadline for the choreography, for certain acts, for everything to be prepared so we can just concentrate on tech blocking entrances and exits when we move into the actual theater. A complicating point in this, and I said before we started recording that this has been intense. That's been really intense because, you know, we find out that one of our major supporting characters, young Lloyd, has tonsillitis. Now, I don't know if you remember, but we hit something where our adult Lloyd in Pennsylvania lost his voice and couldn't do a performance. And, you know, it's just, when you're dealing with 45 live bodies, actually even more than that, something's gonna happen. Somebody gets sick, you know, whatever. But we're also dealing with people that are doing our show, but they're in other shows.
 
So what has happened is, they've gotten permission, they're missing two performances. The shows in London, like in the States, they have Saturdays or an afternoon and evening matinee. So we're doing an afternoon and evening show. We've had to work around their show schedule. So putting together the rehearsal schedule for Sheldon and Shelton, our musical director, and Edgar, our choreographer, is working with the different pieces of the puzzle, oftentimes with just placeholders, but not the person that we need at that point. But these people are so well-trained and so good at what they do and, including our creative team that like Sheldon works with the company managers to schedule these people in and out so they make their obligations. So it makes it even harder. And it's hard enough. It's hard enough.
 
If this is the only thing they're working on, then I think of them, that they're carrying around the show they're currently doing, and they're having to learn the lines of ours or the dance steps for ours or whatever. So deadlines trigger things. Remember, the image I have in my head is there was a Walt Disney thing when I was a kid. I think it was Hemo the Magnificent about your blood. And there was a vast tabletop that had all these mousetraps with ping pong balls. And ... do you remember this? And they toss-
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't remember the show, no, I don't remember it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The narrator tosses in the ping pong ball, which pops one, which pops the other, and like popcorn, they're all going like that all of the time, because there's just a knock-on effect of all the activity. And that's kind of what happens. So it's interesting, it's challenging. I think that it's a good thing to have deadlines. It's also a good thing to be realistic about what can be and can't be accomplished in a given period of time. My whole career life has been deadlines.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm, mine too.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, and so, when I know on those rare times, we had to do it, those rare times when I said, "Look, I can't finish this in that period of time," it's based on experience, not nervousness, because I like meeting deadlines because that focuses my activity. You know, how do you deal with it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I like them, you know, and the closer to a deadline I get, the more relaxed I get. And I think the reason is, is that there just can be no distractions. You're at a point where, you know, I mean, socially you'll deal with distractions where there isn't a really tight deadline. So you'll take care of this, and you'll take care of that. But I find once you get to solid deadline, you have permission from the universe just to focus on one thing. And I get very, very relaxed when I do that. And I get more productive. I get way more productive when there's no option except you have to be delivering whatever. A lot of mine is writing. A lot of mine would be, you know, it might be an event where things have to be organized like you're doing. It's taking place in a particular location and everything has to be organized with it. But I actually like it. It's very exciting, and you get an amazing amount of things done in a very short time. And I like that. I really like it. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's interesting to me because my process, and the only process that's important is the process that works for you and discovering what that is. I can appear to not be working, but things are percolating. And as those things percolate, I get to a certain point where then I have a lot of output because the framework and the construction has happened in my head. And then when I start doing the writing, it comes out very quickly because I've been obsessively thinking about it before taking the action. Some people just purge everything out and then start putting it together then. I don't happen to work as well that way, but, you know, there's no substitute for putting your ass in the chair and getting to work. And there's an old saying, "A job expands to fit the amount of time you have to fulfill it." You gotta be careful that you don't combine that with just procrastination.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the way I do it is that I go into a teamwork mode that there are other people depending on what I do, where if there isn't a deadline, it's more or less me motivating myself to move forward. But once I'm in a situation where other people's results depend upon my timely results, then I find it easier. I like showing up in a teamwork sense. And I'm sure what you're going through is an extreme teamwork sense.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it is. It is because each of the creative team isn't just working with our onstage talent, you know. It's really cool. I hope I have the opportunity to eventually do a making of one of these shows, because what I've been privy to hear because of the unique position of being both a writer and the lead producer, and the relationship that I have with my talent, you know, with Sheldon and Shelton and Edgar, you know, like watching Edgar and Kaylee, his associate, realized, and I didn't even think about it, and then I realized, you know, because they're showing every gesture, every move. And until you put them all together, you don't have a dance. You just have a bunch of separate moves, right? And really what they're doing is, they're teaching the dancers the script, if you will, through movement. So they have to memorize those movements so the muscle memory is instantaneous. So I had never thought about it quite like that before, where each gesture, each move, each turn, each glance, each flip of the wrist, whatever it is, those are all planned. Those are all the physicalization of a written script.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, it's like a dialogue.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, actually, it's a monologue, and then it becomes a dialogue.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so with the musical director, it's the same kind of thing, you know, what they need to be doing while they're moving and what they need to be singing. But it also has to work with the intent of the director, Sheldon, in terms of what are they communicating, what's the intention of the communication and what they're doing. So there's a lot going on at one time.
 
Dan Sullivan: A lot of mousetraps.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: A lot of mousetraps, a lot of ping pong balls. That's right. And it's really an interesting process because what's also, it happens, as you know, Sheldon is very articulate. He's incredibly thoughtful and well-spoken, and his direction is very clear, not dry, clear, actionable. You know, I remember working with clients, somebody would look at a video, you know, look at the video, and go, "That doesn't work for me." I said, "Okay, what doesn't work for you?" "I don't know," she said, "it doesn't work." I said, "Okay, that's not anything that's actionable. What doesn't work? Are you confused? Did it derail you in some way? What didn't work?" "Eh, you know, it just doesn't work for me."
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, I was hoping you'd give me something that works for me.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that's why I'm paying that it works for me, and it's not working for me. You're not reading my mind.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. I said, you know, I thought that you had hired me for directorial services. You want a psychic. But that's right. And that's, you know, the bane of anyone's existence who is creating something for somebody, and you get that kind of useless feedback. And so what I have found, by the way, to be a useful technique sometimes is just say, "You know, I've been thinking about what you said, you know, you said it didn't work. And I think I get it. Let me work on this a little bit." Which means the polite way of saying, "Would you go away so I can keep moving forward? Because this is going nowhere. You're trying to exert control, yet you don't know how to do it because you don't know where you want to go anyhow."
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, the real problem with it is that there's something else. I don't want to take this too far off track here, but when…
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Our podcast is Anything And Everything. You can go ahead.
 
Dan Sullivan: I know that, but, you know, I'm trying to deal with time zones here, so I'm being very, very sympathetic about time zones. Anyway, I'll give you an example that happens in the entrepreneurial world, and that is that an entrepreneur comes into our program for one year. They have four workshops, quarterly workshops. They just thrive on it. They're super excited about it. They come back and they report on progress using our concepts and our strategies. Comes to the end of the first year, and it's time for renewal and they don't renew. And our Program Advisors, they're in touch with the clients all the time to the degree that the clients want them to be between workshops. So you have a coach in the workshop who's the workshop coach, but then you have the in-between, they don't really advise the person on their business, they advise them on how to use the Program to think through things.
 
And the person is, from all signs, is giving every indication, not only are they back for the next year, they're back for many years, okay? But they say no. And usually the explanation is, "Okay, I'm gonna take what I've learned and now I'm really going to double down on it." It's never the case. What's happening is that they're actually growing to the discomfort of people who are very close to them back home, family members, friends, colleagues, and they're suddenly going through a growth burst where the person back home isn't, and they're being told, stop growing, you're making me uncomfortable. So I'm relating it to the example that you gave, is the person that doesn't really do anything for me. It actually doesn't have anything to do with the activity that you're talking about. There's some other problem they're dealing with. And one is that you don't have their full attention or that they've gotten that far in their life without ever being clear and committed. And you're asking them to be clear and committed.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think sometimes it also has to do with control. You know, it becomes a control issue, except that they don't know what they want control of.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, but they want to put their thumbprints on it. It's like this guy probably be in meetings with at a very large company. There were no small meetings. The small meetings were like 12 people, you know. And it was, yeah, you know, "I think it's an interesting idea. I don't know if Ralph will like it." And the second half of whatever he said in the first half is canceled out. So it's basically covering your ass. So if Ralph likes it, he said, "I told Jeff I thought that was an interesting idea." And if he doesn't, it's the same sentence. If he doesn't say, you know, "I told you I didn't think this would work." He's covered both ways. And being who I am, after the third example of that kind of crap, I said, "Have you ever uttered a complete sentence that the second half didn't cancel out the first half? Because what you're saying to me is of no use."
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing, think about your creative partners, you know, the choreographer, the director, the music director. They have to make firm decisions all along the way.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: We're going to do it this way. We're not going to do it that way. You have to make a decision. And that's why you love the kind of work that you're doing. Why, as entrepreneurs, you have to make decision, decision, decision, decision. There's no going back. And you're killing off the alternative, you're killing off the option. The person you're talking about, who's bureaucratic, they live by never making commitments, where they don't have options.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. No, you're absolutely right.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's why we love theater, because theater puts everything on the line.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right, that's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Every actor, every backstage person, everybody involved, they have to make decisions, and there's no cover for it. You have to make the decision.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And, you know, as we know, in live performance, you either get the laugh or you get the applause or there is... I love Sheldon's phrase-
 
Dan Sullivan: Or you get the painful silence.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Or, as he said, when it was silent in a very emotional part of the play. And he said, "Do you hear that?" I said, "What? I don't hear anything." He said, "That's the sound of people listening." And I love that because they're leaned forward. They're taking it in. You've got them. And that's great. So many people don't realize, they look at committing, I think what happens is they look at committing as something that limits options. And they don't have any place to hide if you commit to that one, no, we're doing it this way. And I think that that becomes a big part of it. And I also think bureaucratically, the person on top, so to speak, has got to feel they're controlling it. Instead of, you know, my ideal thing is, I've put together the best creative crew that I could. And that part of being the best to me is not only the talent, but how you work with others to make the whole greater than if you were just doing it alone. That's what's satisfying when, wow, that's really cool.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's only forward. There's no backing up. You can't back out of a decision. And you're tightly compacted. You have less than a month to go from, OK, we've got the cast, almost all the cast, to we're performing. There's not a pause in any time in that time frame from the moment that you get the cast together and we're off and running. There's no pause. There's rest days, but there's no, let's think it over again. There's no think it over again.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And then when you're doing something like this, you're right, because another thing goes along with that is, you know, we thought that we had James, his agents just called, they won't release him for rehearsal period. And then you go through that three or four times to be, oh, they're great. And then you think you have them and you don't. And you have to just keep moving. You can't really lament it because what's that going to do for you?
 
And there's always a lot of... My grandmother used to say, "'If' is the longest word in the English language." And she was right, because if we would have done this, if we would have done that, well, we didn't and we can't. There's no point in talking about that. But I think that expecting people to be a mind reader, exercising control, all of these kinds of things, I think, can act to sabotage good work and good people.
 
I think it's safe to say, although we're still, you know, next week at this time, Dan, I'll be on a plane going back to New York. I mean, it's very cool.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, it is. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Very exciting. And I don't even know how to articulate it in the sense that there is so much going on, and ultimately you have to trust the process.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Because if you don't trust the process and you second guess yourself all the time, those are the kind of people that drive all the people that they've got reign over-
 
Dan Sullivan: Crazy.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. That's right. And at the end of our first week of rehearsal, we had the whole cast together and Sheldon said, "Does anybody have any questions?" And one of the ensemble raised his hand and he said, "I don't really have a question. There's just something I'd like to say." And Sheldon said, "Okay, go ahead." And he said, "This experience, the story that we're telling, I feel like, you know, it's so important to be able to create a new play, to tell an important story, to recognize a legacy. And the way that this is being done here, I just want to say that I am so proud to be a part of this." And it was really nice what he said, and it was from the heart.
 
And I talked to him before he left, you know, to thank him for what he said. He said, it's not usually like this. It's not usually this open where people will, like Sheldon or Edgar, where you can ask a question or offer something. And there's a point where you can't anymore, because we're committed to this, this is what we're doing, and we aren't going back to the drawing board, right? But to me, that's very powerful. Because committed people commit to the mission, commit to the goal, and commit to the work necessary to accomplish it. And it isn't easy, but it's satisfying. And I suspect that most people in their jobs, they don't find it satisfying.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, not the type of experience that you're talking about.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Differentiate it for me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they live in a process. They don't really live in a project. Project has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They live in a process that what we're doing three months from now isn't that much different from what we were doing three months ago. You know, that, you know, we're showing up and we're going through it. And it's not that there aren't scary things, but usually the scary things are mismanagement or it's a change in the marketplace that, you know, blindsided them and everything else, but the work itself is not that interesting.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Of the people that you work with that own their own businesses…
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they all own their own businesses.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. I mean, they're all entrepreneurs by definition. I don't know how you would even know this, but you always surprise me with what you know. What percentage would you say aren't really fully engaged in what they're doing or whatever the attraction was initially has dissipated and now it's just work?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I would say that's the reason why they come into the Program. We call it the Ceiling of Complexity. They've sort of maximized their first ambition. They were going to get to a certain level and, you know, that could be measured with money, that could be measured, you know, with the rewards that go along with financial success. And they've got that, you know. And the other thing is that in order to get the money they have, they have to deal with people they don't really like. They don't really like. And they believe that their teams should be just as excited about their ambition as they are. And-
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's a key thing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And they're not. They're not. They're excited about whatever they're doing in their life. They're not excited about what you're doing in life, and everything. So there's a series. It wouldn't be just one aspect of that, but I could see that. And the other thing is, they've gotten to the point where success is predictable enough is that there's not really any more risk or courage required in what they're doing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And where does that take one?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you just... then, you have an affair. You buy a little red sports car. You know, you start spending in kind of stupid ways because they need the adrenaline hit, but they're not doing it actually. There was an adrenaline hit when they started before they, you know, when they first got into the marketplace because they had to pay the rent. And that was always exciting to get enough money to pay the rent. You know, and to get a foothold in the marketplace, that was very exciting. But they've been at it enough. And we don't take new people, like there's no just, I'm becoming an entrepreneur, they have to have a number of years in, they have to have a certain amount of income, that they know the business cycle, they know the relationship between marketing and delivering, they've got that down.
 
But, you know, they're very talented. You know, they're automatically, by what the qualification is to get into the Program, they're really high up on the income earning level. You know, the average income, if we took 2,500 people, it's over a couple million dollars, their income level. You know, stretched out. Some were very high, some lower, but yeah. But I would say that they're starting to get bored. They are bored or they're starting to get bored, and they want excitement back. They want excitement back in their life.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, we have a play that we could have them fill their life with excitement. If they help fuel it. But you know, the thing is, I think part of the reason people invest in this journey is because it's very different and there is that adrenaline rush that people get and feel a part of that's exciting. But what you do, you're now in a position where finance is not an issue. You know, you've got enough money that you and Babs can do whatever you want, and you don't have to sign another coaching client. What would you say is your main motivator at this point—to acquire more money, to develop more tools, the satisfaction you get from meeting people from all over the world? I mean, and has that balance changed over the years?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, we have growth goals, you know. We're taking on new coaches, we just opened a new city, you know, and I always find that very exciting. You know, it's capability goal, you're increasing your capability. I think the technology goals always interest me and that is, this has nothing to do with our front stage except for marketing, but the internal cooperation, internal teamwork of the company where technology can make things faster, easier. That always excites me. But I think the main activity is having the clients throw me a new curveball of a situation they haven't thought through. And I can create a new thinking tool to simplify their thinking.
 
I think it's the interaction with the clients as something new has happened. And for example, this year, they're all affected in some way, or their clients are, by geopolitics, by what's going on, trade relationships between countries. And so I put together a 10-pointer: This is how you have to think about this. I said, I've been through this before, but not in the particular circumstances. I've been doing this for 50 years. So over the decades, there's been different things. There's been downturns, there's been market changes and everything. And I always like responding to it in a new way with thinking that you structure and formalize into books or into thinking tools. And they say, "This is great. This is what I really needed."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When you were starting out, was it, you know, you had gone through a bankruptcy...
 
Dan Sullivan: No, the starting out was the cause of the bankruptcy.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Okay. So at a certain point it had to be satisfying that you were doing enough business to pay your bills and to grow.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you're way past that point now.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes, I am.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I guess what I'm trying to get at is, what is it about what you do for Dan Sullivan? What really is it that lights you up?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I think it's what happens in the workshop. We're dealing with entrepreneurs, and they're very different from each other. I mean, the uniqueness by its very nature shows up as one and then another unique and everything. And they're dealing with various issues. You know, money, for the most part, isn't one of them at the level that I coach. Money isn't the issue. It's interesting money is the issue. In other words, there's a repetitiveness that's taking place in their life that just doesn't turn them on anymore. They want novelty. They want something new happening. And the workshop itself is an answer to that question because it's the best community they've ever had in the entrepreneurial world.
 
So what draws them back to it is to be in this community, to socialize the night before, take breaks, you know, and they meet each other in the 90 days afterwards. They call each other, they get together. Entrepreneurism is a lonely life. It's, I would say, the root cause of almost all problems that entrepreneurs get into is loneliness. They were lonely in regard to their family. They were lonely in regard to kids that they grew up with, and lonely in the sense that they're experiencing things that other people don't understand and can't talk to other people about it. In this community, they really can.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But I'm asking about you, not them.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I'm the same thing. It was lonely for me too. And I now have created the community around me where you can talk about anything entrepreneurial. And the other thing is, we know from our success with intellectual property that we're doing unique things that have never been done in the entrepreneurial world. We're putting together structures which are patentable. And as far as we know, there's not a single other entrepreneurial coach in the world that's got any intellectual property. None of the big ones, you know, that are very famous motivational speakers, no intellectual property. So that gold standard of the patent from the U.S. Patent Office really says we're doing unique things because if you're not doing something unique, you don't get a patent. Yeah. And I like that. I really like that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think you're also very fortunate to have your wife and life partner, someone similarly invested. But in a complimentary way. Which frees you up to do what you love doing the most.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because the first wife wasn't.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You found a new solution. So when you're talking about novelty, unique experiences and so on, that takes me to another place. And it's, I look at what's new. And I also look at innovation. And innovation- Well, how would you define innovation?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it's in the eye of the beholder, actually, that all innovation simplifies. If it's any good at all, it simplifies. Things have gotten very, very complex in an area, and you create a simple way of thinking about it, a simple way of taking advantage of it, and a simple way of getting a bigger, better result. It's an innovation. Could be an idea innovation. It could be an invention innovation. It could be a process innovation. Those are all innovations, but it's important that things get done faster and easier, and they're getting done harder and longer. And there's money involved and there's competition involved and you want to get something done easier and faster at a lower cost. Okay. And that's what an innovation is.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And it could be an improvement on an idea.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It could be a story. You know, I mean, you're innovating with the play. You know, one of the things that attracted me about Personality, your musical, is that you're summing up an area of American history and also musical history that I went through, but it's been largely forgotten. Everybody remembers Elvis, but they don't remember the hundreds and thousands of people who had to come before Elvis so that there could be an Elvis. And Lloyd Price is probably number one across the bridge from whatever existed before rock and roll and rock and . He was the first one across the bridge. So for me, it was a murky area. And now I think you've given great clarity to it. So that's a great innovation.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So I think that with innovation, it's interesting. If you get something new, to me, one of the differentiators about, in terms of business, something new can mean that you're buying into status. You know, you got the new iPhone before anybody else did, you know, so you get certain bragging rights and so on. And innovation, think of the iPhone. Before the iPhone, there was the first sort of phone that caught on was the Palm Pilot. You remember that one? And then it was BlackBerry. And then Apple innovated on those innovations, made it better and easier to use, to your point. And so Apple copied and then innovated on that idea. But in business, most people resist innovation because whether it's the disruption of it, the extreme example which we're facing every single day is AI. Is this an innovation that's going to open up new opportunity? Is this an innovation that is going to lead to our destruction? Yeah, both things are right. No, we don't know.
 
But there is a resistance to innovation because I think people get used to something, so I guess the iterations, but innovation becomes frightening. And I think, you know, every new thing- Rock and roll was an innovation in music that scared a lot of people, you know? So, innovation is also, I think, about creating value creation. That you are finding another way. You put the GPS system along with a phone and you get an iPhone, you get an Android, you get Uber, which can marry those two technologies. That's all innovative. And then there's also things that happen along the way that people either buy into or are frightened about, or there's endless editorials about how this is going to lead to either destruction or utopia.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I think one thing is, being a canny innovator is knowing who wants this. Okay. It's not who doesn't want it. I'm not interested in the opposition. I'm interested in who's going to go for this right off the bat. And Apple's great insight was, you go after the artistic community. You don't go after the corporate community. IBM and Microsoft, the two of them together, had the corporate industry. But it isn't an interesting market. I mean, it's an interesting market quantitatively, but not qualitatively. You know, but Apple came along. And I think by who the two innovators were, that the whole series of innovators who got Apple going, that's who they hung out with. They basically sold their thing to people that they hung out with. But you have to have staying power. You have to have financial staying power. And they were close to the cliff. For the first 20 years, they were close to the cliff.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It was interesting. Yes, they were. And that's why they got rid of Jobs at one point, but then realized you eliminate him, you eliminate the spark that ignites the fire. And you bring in somebody who was running Pepsi. It's not the same thing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, one of the things that we innovated that still hasn't really been copied is that we introduced the idea to the multi-year quarterly workshop schedule. For example, I have a client who's the longest continuous client in the process, and he came back in July for his 38th year of quarterly workshops. But every quarter he came back, there was something new in the agenda. And so we had in the first years, the word went out that Strategic Coach was doing these quarterly workshops and that you signed them up for a year ahead of time. There was money up front for four workshops. And a lot of the big motivational speakers who were top of the line and they were conference speakers, they created a lot of books and everything like that. They immediately copied our model. The only problem was that when you got to the next year and you had to renew people, nobody came back. They were like 10% renewal, 20% renewal. We've never been below 65% renewal in 36 years. In other words, six out of 10 people who complete a year go on to the next year. And then you have mergers of workshops as you go along.
 
And the key was, you have to be in touch with now, what are they interested in? What are they next? And then I would create new things for the next quarter, for the next workshop. And my advertising agency experience was very good there because in the ad agency, what you did yesterday doesn't really matter. What new thing are you going to do today? And the other thing was that they were selling a personality, the other programs were selling a personality, and I was selling a system. And that made all the difference in the world, and nobody's matched it since. There's no other coaching program that's set up the way we did, because they don't have the ability to continually respond to the new things that are happening to the clientele. They're trying to create a cookie cutter where they're selling the same cookies every time. And they eat that cookie, then they want a new cookie. But if you're gonna make your life on innovation, one, you have to be capable of constant innovation.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and what can't be replicated- They can replicate the idea of quarterly meetings. They can replicate a number of ideas, but what they can't replicate is the unique chemistry from the people that you cast as opposed to hired. And I think that that's significant.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you know, I mean, I approached it from a theater standpoint right from the beginning.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right, which wasn't alien to you because of your army experience and what you were drawn to anyhow and performance and so on. You know, and that's what a lot of people don't realize is a lot of things can be copied, and if they're successful, will be copied, but they can't copy the unique chemistry that you set up. You know, and that's something else. And they're trying, you know, as you said, they're, I mean, I guess, you know, Coach is personality driven in terms of who you are and your reputation, but—I haven't asked you this before—I don't consider you a motivational speaker. You consider yourself one?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, they're already motivated.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so what ignites that pre-motivation, so to speak?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, these are self-motivating people. They got to where they were as entrepreneurs from being able to motivate themselves. What they are is they've got to a level of complexity in their life where their inability to think through what's happening is now stopping their progress. You know, they just have too much going on and they haven't arranged their life in such a way where they get breaks from what they're doing so that they get simplified on the one hand, they get refreshed and rejuvenated on the other, and they're able to go back at it. Some of them have not taken care of their health, others haven't taken care of their relationships, and others haven't done a great job- They make a lot of money, but they haven't kept a lot of money. And all of it is causing a lot of tension, a lot of anxiety.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to make money. It's another thing to be smart enough to know how to keep it. That's right. Yeah, it's funny, because I think people who don't know, just from conversations I've had, you know, will put you into that category, not really knowing what Coach does. You're not a motivational speaker, that's not what you do at all. And as I've learned over time, it's, you know, I think what lights you up is, I see two things. One is the satisfaction you get when introducing a tool that works. And that that's exciting, and the response that that gets for you is also exciting. And do you think people, like the people you're talking about, whether it ends up that they're drinking more, they ruin their relationships, they're spending money stupidly, do you think that they ever paused and thought, "All right, so what is success? Because I achieved this financial goal that I thought was something, but I feel just as hollow as I did before."
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, they're seeking freedom. You know, it's, I think, a misconception on the part of people who aren't entrepreneurs that what drives entrepreneurs is money. It's not. Money allows you to get into the casino and sit down for the game. Yeah, it's table stakes is that it allows you to play the game and it allows you to show some outward indicators that you're successful at what you're doing, you know. And so that's it. But they're really striving for freedom. And there's, the problem is there's two types of freedom. One of them is freedom from a life that you didn't like. A lot of them are trying to escape from a past that they didn't like. They weren't understood. They were poor, they had a lot of negative activity going on in their childhood, and they're trying to get away from that. But the ones who really become successful is where they switch it from reacting to a negative past to creating a positive future. And it seems like a simple distinction and it isn't because the negative reaction is your environment and everything that you've been through is controlling your ambition. Where it comes from the internal, you want to express something, you want to create something, that's coming from the inside. There's no happiness for the first one, and there's increasing happiness for the second one.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I would say, by the way, Lloyd was that. Lloyd wanted to escape the small town thinking. He didn't want to live a life where he was invisible.
 
Dan Sullivan: Didn't want to dig trenches.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. And I think that a lot of people are afraid because, as the saying goes, it's the hell I know. But then you medicate yourself other ways to dull the pain that it's causing you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the other thing is, you know, we're 36 years with the company. I had 15 years just as a one-on-one coach. And then we started where we could have workshops and you could really build a company around it. So we're 36 years into that. And the thing about it is, it's just fun creating something that hasn't existed before. It's just enormously enjoyable creating this. But to this day, we're 36 years and we have good marketing, we have good selling. 80% of signups are still coming because of personal referral.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's the best-selling tool there is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's the most convincing and best there is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, theater works on that basis.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Everything does, doesn't it? I mean, you know, everything. You got to read this book. You know, you need to see this movie. You know, you got to taste this. You got to go to that restaurant. I mean, it's that kind of thing. Everything has just gotten bigger with social media, but they're trying to replicate the effect of word of mouth under the umbrella term "influencers," you know, that they have people's ears. How do you react to, you know, when you started this and up until probably 20 years ago, if anybody said "coach," you would think most likely of sports, you know, and now anybody can call themselves a coach. How do you react to that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, I think it's a function of a change in the economy. I think it's going from an industrial economy to a digital network economy. And what I mean by that is that a lot of the structures that used to be management structures in the business world... You know, I'll give you an example. General Motors at its top when General Motors, I think they had a half-million employees, they had 18 levels of management from the CEO down to the factory floor. And all those were human management structures. You know, this person sent this message, and they had all these procedures and everything like that. Well, when I first started talking about this in the 1970s, I said, you know, bureaucracy is just a really poor attempt to create a microchip, basically what it is. But instead of integrated circuits, you're using human circuits. And for the most part, humans are really bad at passing on information accurately. They add their little twist to it, or they forget part of it. And consequently, oftentimes, when you send a message, when the person receiving the message gets it, it means just the opposite of what was intended, and that causes a lot of problems.
 
So if there was any replacement for management, it happened at the level of digital hardware and software, and we've gotten to the point, there was still thinking that needed to be done. There was still decision making that needed to be done. You were responding to new situations, and they needed someone outside of themselves to help them become clear about their thinking, to get clear about what their action plan was going to be. And that's where coaching came in. So my feeling is that coaching is to the 21st century what management was to the 20th century. In order for things to work, you need a lot of coaches. And there's lots of people who are coaches who don't call themselves coaches, but it's useful to have this person's insight.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, doesn't that relate really to having to be accountable to someone?
 
Dan Sullivan: Accountable, but you have somebody to bounce things off of where it produces a good result for you to think things through. And I think there's always been coaches. They weren't official, though, and they didn't call themselves a coach because it wasn't in the language of, you know, what was happening. When I started in '74, there was quite a bit of explanation that you had to give for people to grasp what your role was. Well, that's no longer true. That's no longer true. But it's more of a change in technology. You can see what's happening in every country now is that they're getting rid of bureaucratic employees, you know. And these bureaucratic employees were just passing information from one person to another. They weren't creating the information. They weren't adding anything to the information. They were just transmitters. And you now have technology transmitters, which are better. It's not plumbers and electricians and carpenters who are being replaced by technology. It's educated, white-collar people who are getting replaced by technology because they're not adding any value to what they're doing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Middle management, essentially. Is there any kind of, it just occurred to me, not that I'm ever going to do it, but I think that it could be potentially a money-making situation. Is there some organization that certifies coaches? So then they do that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. People who are really bad coaches. Yeah. The people who create associations weren't very good at the activity that they want to regulate. No, there's been attempts ever since I started coaching. I've been approached by people who want to create an association for licensing coaches. But the problem is that it's like a professor who's an entrepreneurism professor, but he doesn't have a business. He's got a job at a university.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. What was it on electrical devices they had? Those initials and that stamp meant that this was a safe appliance to use or an approved appliance to use? I mean, there's always these certifying bodies that I never quite understood how they came about.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, that stuff's required. I think it's especially required for machinery because you get it wrong one time and you reproduce it a million times. It probably caused all sorts of problems, you know. There's always attempts for people to regulate. I think people who are regulators are the opposite of the people who are creators.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: A dear friend of mine, his dad had a small grocery store. And when Passover came about, one of the salespeople would come in, the food salespeople selling meats and so on, and say, we can offer you these kosher for Passover stickers. You know, so that you could put these on the food.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Hey, why not?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, you know, because they'll pay more for the kosher for Passover. It's a small window of business. And it's just kind of funny. Even the Oscars, you can say that's a certification in a way for talent, but that started, you know, basically, not basically, it was a marketing tool for the initially, I think it was just MGM. And then it became an industry wide thing, because I think they all realized we'd all benefit from it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's very interesting. The word sincere comes from the marketplace in Rome where merchants sold silver and gold statues of the gods on holy days. And some enterprising guy found out that if you carved out, so you just had a very, very thin outer shell of silver or gold, and you put hard wax into it and then sealed it off with the actual metal, you could get the exact weight with wax. And so the ones who were honest or wanted to be known as honest would say, without wax, which in Latin is sine ceri. Sine ceri, sine ceri, you have no wax. Anyway, so this is a game that's been going on for a long time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: See, I was hoping you were going to say that the root word in sincere is sin. And I thought it would go in a whole different direction.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, it's without. In Latin, sine is without. Well, you know, the thing that we're talking about in the book we're writing, Casting Not Hiring, is that you're bypassing the concept of job. I think job descriptions are a map, they're not the territory. You're saying the area of activity that the person is in, but you're not saying anything about what's going to happen with that job. We have job descriptions in Coach. Everybody's got a job description. But as soon as you get in, we want to know what your role is. We want to know what you uniquely are good at so we don't waste your time with these activities; we focus you on those activities. That's not a job. That's a role.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So I was in, I think, ninth grade, and Summit Mall, new great big mall was opening up. Did you ever go there?
 
Dan Sullivan: I certainly know the advertising.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So the shoe store was opening, and they advertised for somebody that was at least 25 years old, married, had a minimum of three years of shoe selling experience, and I applied for the job. And I was 16, I had no shoe selling experience.
 
Dan Sullivan: And you weren't married.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I was not married, that's correct.
 
Dan Sullivan: No. I'm not saying you didn't have children, I'm saying you weren't married.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so the manager of the store, and this was, I don't know if you remember Faflik Shoes, but it was a Faflik Shoes store, and they had like five stores in Northern Ohio. And the manager of the store, he and I kind of hit it off, and he said, "I can't hire you." I said, "What do you mean?" He goes, "25 years minimum, that's what we said, 25 years old minimum, you're 16. You've had no shoe selling experience, you're single. I mean, we have this criteria for this job." And I said, "Well, Bob, it's gotta be a lot harder for me to sell you on who I am than it is to sell you a pair of shoes. If I can do that, I can certainly sell shoes, can't I?" And he goes, "I'm sorry, I can't do it." And so I'm walking out and he calls after me. He said, "Jeff, Jeff, come here." I said, yeah. He said, "You're right. It's harder to sell me than it is a pair of shoes. You did that, you got the job." That moment taught me a lot because what he was doing and didn't know it was casting not hiring, and he saw an ability that I had that went beyond just the definition of the role.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah well, the other thing is, you understood what the play was.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: What do you mean?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the play was to have somebody sell shoes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. That's right. Oh, I see what you mean.
 
Dan Sullivan: 25 years old, married, three years’ experience doesn't tell you anything about whether the person can sell shoes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. Yeah, that's right. You know, what's interesting is how much what we're talking about in the Casting Not Hiring just kind of makes sense. Just like what you said, pointing out that the flaw, where in that profile, this is a say that this person knows how to sell anything. Okay, I'm 25, I'm married, and I sold shoes prior. Where do you get that? And later in life, when I was hiring people, although I had a job description, that was only a general reference. And beyond that, it's, did I think this person had possibility? Beyond that job. Because I wouldn't want somebody that would be happy just doing that. I wanted people that wanted more out of their lives than just that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I got my job right out of university to be a copywriter with BBDO. But it was only because I met the creative director and he was a self-made person who came up off the streets of Detroit, you know, not educated at all. But we just hit it off, and he knew I loved ideas and advertising is a lot about ideas, you know. And I had created the college newspaper because the college I went to, St. John's, didn't require any writing except one document a year at the end of each year. And I said, I think writing is really important. So I had created the newspaper, and I wrote editorials every week. However many weeks there are in a school year, that's how many editorials I wrote. But he didn't ask to see them or anything like that. But anyway, I got the job and I mean, I could have done it, but it wasn't what I really wanted. The coaching is what I wanted to get to, but really happy for the experience. It's a great school if you're not in it too long.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah. I also think if your eyes are open, everything you do informs everything else you do.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And those seeds are planted quite early. I think that that's really important. I mean, you always enjoyed figuring people out in a certain way. And your reward at that time, it was a lot cheaper to have an association with you back then. A few chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and you'd be there for the afternoon. I think your rates have gone up.
 
Dan Sullivan: Pricing is very important.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: With your neighbor to just start off just getting one cookie, then you said, uh-uh.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, that was simply how long you could keep her going. Anyway, I think this thing about this started off with deadlines, but I think the deadlines create no distraction freedom to actually use your capability. That's what a deadline does.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think it's something, actually, those who might interrupt you, it's something that they respect when it's like, I'm on deadline.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. "Sorry, I can't do it."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Well, sort of wandered around the perimeters of anything and everything from that to innovation to the difference between being new and being innovative. What is success and how to get hired when you have no qualifications like I had in terms of, although I had set a sales record for Fuller Brush the summer before. Being a Fuller Brush man.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. That's tougher than selling shoes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, it was. But I also think being in the suburbs, Akron, Ohio, in the early 1960s, doing door-to-door sales. I don't think anybody ever opened their door for anybody anymore. In those days, they did, and it was such a novelty to see a 15-year-old kid, you know, and I had a sport jacket and tie, I dressed up nicely, so they weren't afraid.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the truth is, nobody's got all the brushes that they need.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That was my opening line. "Hi, nice to meet you. You know, nobody has all the brushes that they'll need. You can always use another brush."
 
Thanks for joining us today on our show, Anything And Everything. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit acreativecareer.com and madoffproductions.com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach.com.