Who Not How: Stop Doing the Things You Hate, Free Up Time, Be Happier and Richer with Dan Sullivan

Brandon:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast, show 423.

Dan:
I think procrastination is build up lifetime wisdom that says, “I hate this type of activity.” Procrastination is not a bad thing, so I often notice that what you shouldn’t do, you already procrastinate at.

Intro:
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Brandon:
What’s going on about with Brandon Turner, host of the BiggerPockets Podcast, here with my cohost, Mr. David Greene. David Greene, I have a question for you, you want to hear the question?

David:
Yes, I would love it.

Brandon:
The question comes from today’s show. The question is, what do you have to stop doing right now to be number one?

David:
Oh God, this is painful, but I know what it is. You really want me to answer that?

Brandon:
Yeah. What do you have to stop… Here’s what I’m saying, I want you to think about this for a minute, I want you to answer it in the outro. So here’s the deal, today’s show is with a very, very well known, successful, we’ll call him performance coach, entrepreneurial coach, mindset coach. He runs a company called Strategic Coach. You’ve probably heard of it before, if not, they’re one of the largest coaching organizations in the world, Dan Sullivan. Dan is a very, very well known name in the world of entrepreneurship and coaching. I’m so lucky to have him here today talking about his latest book, it’s actually called Who Not How, it’s all about getting other people to do things to help you achieve your goals.

Brandon:
In fact, I even took a screenshot from the book and I want to read it real quick to you guys what I wrote here. It says this, “The promise of this book is dead serious and simple, every time you apply Who Not How by imagining a new goal and getting who’s, quote who’s, to work toward it, you will improve your time, increase your income, expand your relationships and deepen your purpose.” And so that’s what the show is about today with Dan Sullivan. One of the questions he asked in the show was, what do you have to stop doing to become number one or to become the best? And so, David, I’m going to actually ask you that in the outro of today’s show. But before we get to that, let’s get to today’s quick tip.

David:
Quick tip.

Brandon:
That was a long quick tip. Today’s quick tip is very simple. If you are not currently either in a mastermind group or meeting with a performance coach of some kind or an accountability partner of some kind, somebody that’s going to hold you accountable to your goals and help you be the best version of yourself, can I encourage you to find a way to make that happen in the next week? Now, you can sign up for performance coaching. There’s expensive people, there’s cheaper people. I’m not talking about what the gurus who’re going to teach how to do real estate, that’s not what we’re talking about today. You’ll hear what a coach is today and what a coach isn’t. But I’m talking about somebody who’s just going to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and be working towards that stuff.

Brandon:
I mean, if you buy the Intention Journal from BiggerPockets, I’m not trying to plug that here, but just FYI, if you buy that, you get access to your own mastermind group in that, so it’s something to consider. But either way, are you with somebody, a group of people, an individual, who’s helping you become your best self? If not, make that happen. And you’re going to hear today why that’s so important. I know David and I are both big fans of performance coaching, mastermind groups, getting together with other people who are successful. It’s been huge, right, David? Back me up man.

David:
That’s exactly right.

Brandon:
Back me up.

David:
When you initially, let’s say you’re a player, go into the NBA-

Brandon:
Ooh, analogy.

David:
… you’re like, “I never want to make the team. I don’t want to get cut. How do I make the team?” And then it becomes, “How do I become a better member of the team?” And at a certain point, like let’s say you’re Allen Iverson, you get so good at basketball, you’re one of the best players in the league. You start asking, “How do I win?” Winning doesn’t happen by an individual player, winning is done by teams. And so if you really want to get to the next level of financial freedom, wealth, the life you really want, the stuff in your life you’re doing right now still has to get done, but you need to find the people that are going to do it.

David:
So this entire concept of team building is hand in hand with financial freedom and living the life you really want, this is a skill you have to have to get there. We obviously spend a lot of time talking about this because we’re struggling with these issues and we’re trying to clear a path for the people that are coming behind us that don’t want to struggle as much.

Brandon:
Yeah, there you go, man. That’s a really, really good summary of what we’re about to cover. Today’s show, again, is with Dan Sullivan, who’s somebody ever wanted to go on the show for years. I look up to him a ton. He has a lot to say about a lot of different topics, so we’ll go all over the place today, and I mean that in a good way. You’re going to pick up some real gems today that’s going to help transform your business, whether you’re trying to build a real estate empire or trying to build any kind of business or just be a better anything in your life, this stuff is gold. So grab pencil and paper, take some notes. And now let’s get into today’s show.

Brandon:
Now, keep in mind, at the end of today’s show, we’re going to unpack a little bit of what Dan talked about for real estate specifically, so hang tight to the end. And David’s also going to answer in the outro what’s the one thing he’s going to give up to become number one. So let’s get to the show right now, and then after we’re done with Dan, make sure you stick around for the final 10 minutes or so.

Brandon:
All right. Dan Sullivan, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. This is a complete honor to have you on the show. This is amazing. I’m so excited. You know what I mean now, I’m so excited.

Dan:
I try as much as possible to respond to invitations because I think podcasting is just one of the most amazing breakthroughs of, for me, last six years. So I’ve been podcasting. I have nine different series that I do, and I do them with partners. And I’ve found that conversations is my favorite medium rather than just talking to the microphone and talking to the screen, I really like having conversations. So already we’ve opened up some things to talk about here.

Brandon:
Yeah. On that note, what’s interesting is I feel like a candidate for president. We tried to get a few like candidates from the US here to be on the show and we struck out, we couldn’t get either one of them, but what’s interesting is like they will fly across the country and they will go and go to an event that they go in a jet to fly, to lose two days of their life to go to an event with 1,000 people. When I’m like, “You could be in your underwear and you could tell a quarter million people or half a million people whatever you wanted.” I don’t think the politicians have caught on to podcasts yet, but they’ll get there.

Dan:
You know why I take that is, I take bullshit doesn’t travel well on podcasts.

Brandon:
It’s true.

Dan:
Who you are really comes across. I mean, you look at the big stars on podcasting, they’re real people. I follow Scott Adams, I watch Scott Adams probably every day. Joe Rogan, I watch Joe Rogan. I don’t do it to learn a fan, I just do it because I enjoy how they… One of them is strictly himself and the other one, he’s got some of the great guests that you could possibly have.

Brandon:
Yeah. It’s pretty phenomenal. All right. Well, that said, we got you for an hour or so, and so we’re digging into your mindset. So first of all, for those who may not know who you are, maybe before you were Dan Sullivan, the guy we all know in respect and love, who are you? Where’d you come from before that? And how’d you get into this world of Strategic Coaching?

Dan:
Yeah. A real fast bio here. A farm boy from Northern Ohio. My family had produce farms, sweet corn, string beans, tomatoes. I’m a fifth child of two fifth children. Both my parents are fifth children in their family, and I’m a fifth child. A fifth child is kind of like an only child with no responsibility whatsoever. So I went wandering as a kid, and I’m a wanderer, and I got a lot of encouragement growing up. I had a good school system, went through that, got out of high school with no money, so I got a job with the FBI for two years in Washington DC, when JFK was president. I met J. Edgar Hoover.

Dan:
Then did some interesting things that took me out of school and got drafted in the Vietnam war, so I spent two years in South Korea, and I was the coordinator for entertainment for about half of South Korea. I had a background in theater, I had a background in entertainment and came back and I went to a college that’s called The Great Books College St. John’s. Man, all you do is read the great books of the Western world. Small groups, 12 to 18 people, and you just read and you talk. All the ideas, I just wanted to know what they were, I didn’t have the discipline to read them on my own, so I went in debt to pay for it. Came out, was on a trip Toronto, the Christmas before I graduated from St. John’s.

Dan:
And I was late, I was 23 to 27, so I was graduating from college when I was 27. And at a party in Toronto, I met a co-owner of the second biggest ad agency in Toronto, and we got to talking and he says, “Boy, what an interesting background.” He says, “Have you ever seen an ad agency?” I went down and saw it. He took me to lunch. He said, “What are you going to do when you graduate?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “How about a job as an ad writer?” He says, “I’ll hire you on the spot.” He says, “I think you’ve got what it takes. I’ll give it to you for six months.” He says, “I’ll get you across the border.”

Dan:
So I went and moved Toronto, and it’ll be 50 years next June. I moved to Toronto 50 years ago. I did it for three years, found out it wasn’t going to be my life, and I had this notion about coaching back in the early ’70s that I thought the world was going to change rapidly because of technology and that individuals didn’t want managers, but individuals would like to have coaches, especially entrepreneurs. And so I jumped in the deep end of the pool, went bankrupt twice, was divorced and bankrupt on the same day in August of 1978. Extreme market research, I call it.

Dan:
Met the love of my life in 1982, and she’s my wife. We own the Strategic Coach. We created Strategic Coach. Strategic Coach is for already successful entrepreneurs who’ve hit a ceiling and they were they’re young. Most of them are young, they’re in their 40s, 50s, and that’s young today. And what we show, we individually show them in a group that they can actually structure an entire rest of their entrepreneurial life that’s based entirely on freedom. We have four freedoms, freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose. I have 32 of them that are just approaching 30 years, I’ve seen them every quarter for 30 years.

Dan:
We have about 2,500 in the program, they come from 26 different countries. And since March, we’ve become a virtual company, so everything that was in person before that became virtual.

Brandon:
Yeah. So maybe we can talk about those four freedoms here just for a minute, because I want to unpack a little bit. You said it was freedom of time. And what do you mean by that? Let’s just go each one maybe.

Dan:
What happens with entrepreneurs is they get started, and the first day they’re an entrepreneur, they got all the time in the world because they don’t have any customers. And then as you accumulate customers, complexity comes with it. And after a while, the entrepreneur who is usually a good salesperson, I would say almost every entrepreneur I’ve ever met might not take of themselves as a salesperson, Brandon, but they actually have an ability to get into another person’s mind and actually see what that person is trying to achieve and then they suggest to them that they can help them to actually achieve what they’re trying to achieve. That’s the way I look at it.

Dan:
But the biggest thing that I’ve noticed with entrepreneurs is that they’ve run out of times. They may be very successful financially, but they don’t have any time. And two ways they don’t have time is, one is that they’re working 60 hours a week. The other thing is they’re working nights, they’re working weekends, and there is no such thing as a free day. If there’s business to be done that day, then they’ll do it, which wreaks havoc with their family life, with her spouse, with children, other relationships. So what we do is we, through a series of tests from the outside and through our own thinking processes, we take the entrepreneur, let’s say the entrepreneur has a big circle of activities, and we get them down to just activities where they really have what we call a unique ability.

Dan:
And a unique ability is really something you’re born with. You would have been born with it. And I suspect that podcasting took its time getting around to you, but I suspect just from seeing you that you have a unique ability in this particular medium, that you love the medium and the medium loves you. The more that you can build your future around this medium, then that’s the real sweet spot for you. So I’m really good at coming up with new thinking processes for entrepreneurs. And I’m a good front stage person, I do audios. I do videos. I’m a good front stage. I’m a terrible backstage person, terrible at details, terrible at technicalities, terrible at anything.

Dan:
I’ve been bankrupt twice because I thought I could do those things and commit myself to clients, and I couldn’t deliver so I disappointed a lot of people and I got punished with a bad report card called bankruptcy, screwed up my first marriage. So the whole point is, a lot of entrepreneurs have paid a real price for visible success, but behind the scenes, they’re a mess. So what we do is we show them how they can, first of all, right off the bat, we can get them to free up 1,000 hours, which is about… You would think it would be half their work life, but it isn’t, it’s like 40% of their work life of just taking things that they’re not good at and giving them to people that are better.

Dan:
They have the money, in our system, they have the money, so they can write a check for somebody time and gradually they get freed up, and then they get more and more simple in what they’re doing. They’re just doing two or three activities, and all of a sudden they become available to opportunity. Opportunity’s, been looking for them, but they’ve been too busy, actually great talent, other people’s great talent has been looking for them, but they’re too busy. They don’t have any life, personal life. And the opportunities are there, but they’re too busy to do it.

Dan:
So what we do is we get them real simple. It takes about two or three years in the program. And all of a sudden, they have a self-managing company so that everything except creating new opportunity, creating a bigger future is taken out of the hands of the entrepreneur and given two very, very skilled people who like being part of a big future, they like supporting someone else, but they’re not the person to do that, entrepreneurs, there aren’t many of them. And I think it’s about 5% of the working population even have the instinct toward being an entrepreneur, but there’s tremendous other people who would like to be part of the team.

Dan:
So what we do is and what happens is that the money increases really quickly because right now, the entrepreneur’s working on projects and opportunities that maybe were important for them 10 years ago, but it’s not important, but they didn’t have time to look for bigger things as they go along. So that’s the basic thesis, but we always say that within three years, you’ll double your income and free up half your time.

Brandon:
That’s amazing. And a lot of it is basic, because I’ve been following a lot of like what you’ve talked about and written about and spoken about for years now, including this idea of the unique ability. And I don’t want to gloss over this because this is so important. I went from, not to pat myself on the back here, but because it’s not me. But It took me what, 15, 14 years to get to 100 units, and I just crossed 1,000 units in the past year. So it was this dramatic shift where I spent so many years grinding, doing everything. I was out there looking for properties, I was out there talking to real estate agents, making offers, fixing properties, hauling toilets from one room to another. People have heard that story multiple times.

Brandon:
I did everything. And then the last year, I shifted my thinking entirely to what your new book is, Who Not How, who can do this stuff for me? And so I built a team of, I think there’s six people on the team right now, people who are so good were they’re like unique ability. Like for example, Mike, he’s the head of my investor relations. He’s so good at talking with people. He loves phone calls, he loves building connections with people. I don’t like phone calls at all. I don’t want to get on a phone call with somebody, talk for an hour about life and about our fund and about what we’re doing. He loves it.

Brandon:
So as soon as I did, then I let go of every single thing and I focused on the one thing that I do best, which is really just podcasting. All of a sudden, the business grew tenfold. I mean, tenfold in a year, because all of a sudden I had my unique ability. So my question for you is, how does somebody? Not everyone’s going to be a podcaster, how do you identify what your unique ability is? That feels like a difficult thing for a lot of people.

Dan:
Well, one of the things is that you just ask other people who you think have an insight into who you are. It could be a friend, it could be a family member, it could be someone that you’ve done projects with, and say, “I’m in a program where we identify people’s unique ability and then create a unique ability team around them. And to start, I just need some feedback, and so I have to ask people whose opinion and judgment I trust, and you’re one of them. So if you could say three things that I should always do and not do anything else, what would it be the three things that you think I would do?”

Dan:
And then we ask people to get 10 reports back in, they come back in and notes and letters, or somebody will audio something or they’ll video it and they’ll just do it, but we get it transcribed. And it’s like a Venn diagram. There’s about an 80% overlap of everybody’s opinion, and I says, “Where everybody overlaps, that’s who you are.” And I said, “You can believe that, or not believe that, but it’s their judgment that actually… They don’t have any stake in you finding this out, they’re just telling you what they think.” And then we get people to identify experiences they’ve had in the past that if they did only the things that were identified in the circle, they would think that…

Dan:
This is really interesting, Brandon, they’ll say, “Yeah, but it was easy, there was no struggle with it.” I can’t get any satisfaction out of things that are easy, and that’s the real problem right there. There’s the problem. Your unique ability is the easiest thing in the world, you don’t have to even think about it. You didn’t have to go to training school for this, you didn’t have to do it, you just have this unique ability. And I think that very few people got to operate in their unique ability until recently because the technology wasn’t there to support people.

Dan:
I think the last 25 years, especially, has been uniquely good for people to identify their unique ability. Unfortunately, the educational system is the last institution in society to catch up with where people are going, and there’s been this enormous emphasis that you have to be good at everything, you have to pass your grades in every subject, you have to involve yourself in every kind of activity, and it’s a big bore for I think most individuals to have to go through that. And so I think that we’re in a unique age right now, where I think being an outlier is actually an advantage to a lot of people because your unique ability can be focused on, you can package it, you can promote it, you can get, you can get check writers.

Dan:
The only thing you need to make a living is check writers who are willing to write a check. As mine, I’m a born coach, I have to tell you. When I was like six years old, I could get adults to talk to me and I just asked them a bunch of questions about their experience. And I was born in 1944, and I can remember 1950 people would come back from the European war, the South Pacific war, and I’d sit there and I talked to them for two or three hours. There was a 78-year-old lady that lived on the farm next to us, and I’d go over and visit with her and she’d give me milk and cookies and I just asked her questions.

Dan:
And she had been born in 1874, and I was just like, “Well, how could you be on a farm without electricity? How could you be on a farm without tractors? How could you be on a farm without a telephone? Without electric and all the modern conveniences?” And she’d just talk and talk. And then she called my mother and she said, “Danny was over again. I just say so many things that I’ve never thought about when I’m with him.” Well, that’s a good coach. That’s a good coach. And so I had it, but I had to go through a lot of hardship like everybody else does. You’re told to do this and focus on this, and this is a big opportunity.

Dan:
It wasn’t really until I was my late 30s that I got on the scene of coaching. I said, “I bet I could just make a living out of asking people questions to clarify their vision.” And that’s really what’s developed. We’ve coached over 20,000 entrepreneurs. We’re in three countries, we have somewhere around 110, 115 team members. I think I’ve been lucky and I think I’ve had the skill of taking advantage of my luck. I think you need both. You have to be lucky and you have to have the skill of taking advantage of your luck.

David:
Dan, one of the areas where Brandon and I talk about this exact concept a lot has to do with team building, and this relates to real estate investing because I wrote a book called Long Distance Real Estate Investing, and what I basically said was, you could buy it anywhere you want if you’ve got a team there. If you’ve got these people to do the job, you can invest anywhere. And now I’m a real estate broker and a loan broker, and Brandon’s building a fund where he needs to have a team, so this comes up in conversations that he and I have constantly. And I know that as our audience grows, they’re going to be in a similar boat. What I’ve found in my experience, and this is from my background playing sports.

David:
When you said you’re a boring coach, I thought, “Yes, says Bill Belichick, and he’s the best at what he does.” Sometimes being boring is like, fundamentals are boring, but that’s what makes you successful. One thing I’ve noticed with my team is that, let’s say we’ve got five people involved in the real estate team, someone to show houses, someone to analyze deals, someone to look for deals, someone to do the paperwork and someone to have the vision. It becomes five times better when everybody’s on the same page and everything feels effortlessly easy, but there’s five times more ways it can go wrong. If four of those five people do their job great and one of them drops the ball, it’s like if four of the offensive linemen make their block and the fifth guy misses it, the team goes down.

David:
So it feels like it’s five times harder to make it work, but then it’s more than five times better. Is that in line with what you found from other people you’ve coached?

Dan:
Yeah. Well, I think that entrepreneurs are caught because to a certain extent to even become an entrepreneur, there’s got to be a bit of rugged individualism to do this. You got to ignore a lot of social indicators to actually go off and bet your financial security on your own talents. It takes a certain amount of just ignore it. I always say that the two requirements to become an entrepreneur is a total confidence and absolute ignorance. And the reason is, if you really knew what the hardships and the dangers were of being of an entrepreneur, I mean, only civil servants with a lifetime pension know the real dangers of being an entrepreneur and they don’t go anywhere near there because it’s really tough.

Dan:
Even those who succeed would grade themselves as failures. You have to be very tough on yourself to a certain extent, but at a certain point, and I think this is the point of the Who Not How book, you have to flip gears completely. And it has to be exactly what you were saying, David, it has to be total teamwork. I’m 76 and the future I have in front of me is way, way bigger than anything I’ve achieved in the first 75 years, 75 years. And the reason is that this amazing, especially this year, this gift that we’ve been given with Zoom. I have to tell you, this is the greatest capability that has been presented to me in the first 75 years. I can do collaboration with anybody on the planet right now.

Dan:
I was on this morning, I had six of our top level entrepreneurs. One was in Mumbai in India and the other one was in Newcastle, England, Portland, Oregon, Phoenix, Dallas and then we had one in Minneapolis, and we were just talking and I said, “Isn’t this the greatest thing in the world that’s ever happened?” And I said, “How many of you, to travel on a plane now, it’s got to be for pleasure, you got to be flying for pleasure.” You’re not doing it for business because you don’t have to fly to do business anymore. You can get people write a eight figure checks and sign it on DocuSign right now. Your presence isn’t required anymore. So the whole thing is the, what I think David is, the real solution these days is that your vision can be really big, and what holds the team together is the vision of the entrepreneur.

David:
What do you mean by that?

Dan:
Well, if it’s just about money, I wouldn’t be a member of a team that was just about money. It has to be that you have your personal goals and a lot of it’s about your personal goals, but one of the great goals, listen, I want to create the greatest real estate team that’s ever existed. A team requires someone to give the vision and to put the vision out there, another one requires all the different activities that you told, and we got to work very, very smoothly. And here’s the thing, it has to be great for all of us. The deal has to be great for all of us. And it will be bigger. It’ll be 10 times bigger, as you said, Brandon, is 10 times bigger.

Dan:
Well, most real estate people can’t think in terms of 10 times, they can think in terms of 10% they can’t think in terms of 10 times. You can only do that through teamwork. I remember I had the top residential real estate guy in my program, that was back in the ’90s, and he wanted to be the leader. He was part of an association, part of a company, and I said, “Well, why do you have to stop doing to be number one?” And he says, “What do you mean stop doing it?” He says, “I have to do everything.” I says, “No, you’re doing everything. And you’re like number 23. I don’t think you can get to number 22 the way you’re working right now.” And what he hated was presentations, so he hired an actress, and she loved homes, and she dressed well.

Dan:
And she had a limousine and she’d picked people up and taken them to the… He went from number 23 to number four in the first 12 months that he did that, he just hated presentation. He said, “I can’t stand it.” And I says, “Well, when you’re presenting, they know you can’t stand it.” I said, “You’re the biggest obstacle to your own progress right here just because you’re doing something that you hate doing.” This really cuts against a lot of people’s morality. There’s still this thing, if it’s not tough. Well, being born as tough, learning how to walk is tough, cutting your teeth is tough. You know I mean? Nobody’s worried about that.

Dan:
But I think that the whole point is, we didn’t have the ability to operate in teams previously, I would say 25 years ago. I think you had to have the internet to do what we’re doing right now.

David:
This is brilliant. I love what you’re getting at because that’s very similar to the thoughts that I’ve been thinking. The reason everyone does everything themselves is because for the most of your life, you had to. We have this luxury now where most of our immediate needs, if you live in America at least, start taking care of. There’s very few people, relatively speaking, in our country is starving to death. And now we can start to get into some of these higher level thinkings of, we have the luxury of paying someone $90,000 a year to only look at spreadsheets and make sure the money is where it’s supposed to go. Whereas before, to be a good entrepreneur, you had to be good at that, you had to be good at the customer service. It was just harder.

David:
Now there’s so many more companies and teams that you can be a part of. And Brandon and I talk about this often to our listeners, that you’ve got to bring that way of thinking into your investing business. If you’re insecure and terrible with numbers and spreadsheets and analization but you’re great with people, you should find a Brandon, like Mike Williams did, and be the person that talks to his people and fills this funnel up for the analyzers who need you because they don’t know what… They are useless if you’re not giving them something to analyze and vice versa when you’re the analyzer. And that’s one of the reasons we were both so excited to talk to you because you’re one of the four front thinkers in getting ahead of this.

David:
So would you mind, whatever you think is most valuable on that topic, sharing with people that are either struggling to find their team or build their team?

Dan:
There’s a surefire in addition to the exercise where your friends tell you what you are. In coach, we have a concept called simplifier multiplier, and I’ve found that entrepreneurs only come in to species, they’re either a simplifier, they take complex things and they make them really simple. Or they’re a multiplier, they take someone else’s simplifier and they take it out to the world. And the best teamwork in the world is where a committed 100% simplifier collaborates with 100% pure multiplier. And if you look behind any great success story in the business world, you’ll see a person and they’d make it sound, but if you go backstage one room, you find there’s the other person.

Dan:
I think Steve jobs was a great multiplier. He could stop the world, he could stop the stock market, he could stop the tech world. He could stop everything for an hour because he had some thoughts about a new product that he was going to present to you. And by the way, you could buy it tomorrow. This wasn’t vapor ware that he was selling, but behind the scenes he had simplifiers who could take… He had this great product design guy who was one of the greatest product designs people. And my sense is that wherever you have a great success story, oftentimes you only see one person, but the other person is a simplifier or multiplier.

Dan:
My wife is 100% multiplier. If it moves, she’ll talk to it. I can go five days without people and it doesn’t bother me at all because I’m working on stuff, I know I don’t need to talk to anybody. I think this is one of the big things. We have a way in a very short period of time that people can discover whether they’re a simplifier or a multiplier, and it’s just based on experience and you can ask other people what it is. The other thing is that procrastination is not a bad thing. I often notice that what you shouldn’t do, you already procrastinate at. The problem is you obligate yourself to things that you’re going to procrastinate at, and that puts you in a real bind. It actually does it.

Dan:
So I think procrastination is build up lifetime wisdom that says, “I hate this type of activity. I really hate it.”

David:
I love it.

Brandon:
What you’re saying Dan, if I understand you right, is it’s like a signal you should listen to of your own body or brain saying, “You shouldn’t do that.”

Dan:
Don’t go there. Don’t go there. Don’t do that. But we’ve been trained to do it on our own. Since birth, we’ve been told if you get somebody else involved, it’s cheating. It’s cheating

Brandon:
So you shame yourself when you procrastinate, saying “I should be better. I should willpower my way out of that.” And what you’re saying is, no no, no, listen to that as this is a sign from the universe or God or whatever. That’s the wrong thing, that’s someone else’s job, bring them in.

Dan:
Yeah. I mean, there’s two parts to it. You have to tell the truth about that you don’t like it, and you can tell it drains your energy. It just drains your energy. You put it off, you put it off. And finally, you’re in a crisis mode where you have to deliver at the last moment, but that’s no way to live your entire life. You know what I mean? So my sense is then you have to grant to other people the same thing that you grant yourself, they also have a unique ability. So in the book Who Not How, we have a exercise that you can go through, it’s called The Impact Filter. And if you fill this in, it’s just a form, it has a whole series of questions, the biggest thing that you want someone else to do, you have to be sold on the project before you tell them about the other thing.

Dan:
So a lot of people have what I call drive by delegation. It’s kind of like that and you slide things under people’s door and everything else. This isn’t delegation, David, this is a handing up to someone who’s a lot better than you. This is not a handing down to someone who’s only 80% as good as you. This is a handy knob to someone who is just infinitely better. And what makes them better is they can do it every day and enjoy it and you can do it for three hours and then take a two week break.

David:
That’s so, so good, and this is what I’m really… What I’ve found has been stopping my business’s growth is my growth in this area. As I get better at that, both finding the right person to hand it to and handing it off, both being willing to and the skill with which I handed off, my business grows. I finally turned the corner with this in 2020, and in spite of COVID and everything else, we more than tripled what we did last year when I was already the top person in my office. And it was this, which is not easy to do. Man, it forces personal growth in so many ways, but the ROI that you get on it is immensurable, you can’t compare.

Dan:
Well, the other thing is the experience of teamwork, you have that experience and yourself. The experience of teamwork is just an incredible, I have ex-Navy seals in the program, I have professional guys who played sports and everything like that. And they said, “You know, when you get into a great team and everybody’s in sync,” they said, “There isn’t any individual experience that’s better than that experience.” So oftentimes, people have things, it’s procrastination because something’s going to require a great deal of commitment and courage to go through it, but I’ve tested out long suffering and short suffering and I’ve decided just to go for a short suffering.

Brandon:
Take the [crosstalk 00:36:54].

Dan:
Yeah. But it’s the same thing with work that you’re doing, it’s like a relationship you’ve had with an activity that just doesn’t make you happy. And you can go and take training courses and everything, it’s not going to make a happy, you are just never going to be happy with this activity and you have to tell the truth on that. And I think it’s that. And I would just make a list of everything that if it could be gone in six months from now, no matter what I had to pay for it, no matter I’ll find a way to pay for it, but in six months, these activities have to… because it’s not just the activity time itself, it’s the dread time.

Dan:
Dread time takes up as much time or more time than the actual working activities, dreading the activity. I’ve gone through all the pain of this and not like I was born genius on this, I’ve gone through all the stupid things and getting into tight spots and working 80-hour a week, and developing bad eating, and drinking habits, and having bad relationships. I’ve gone through this, and I said, “Well, you were stupid, you should’ve been punished. You were stupid, you were doing stupid things. Don’t do stupid things.”

Brandon:
All right. There’s 100 places I want to go and we don’t have time for all of them, so I’ll point out a couple of things. First of all, I love the procrastination thing. I think that’s so true, I think we are trained from birth when things are hard-

Dan:
Well, I haven’t met any human being who doesn’t procrastinate about something. And everybody’s guilty about it. And I says, 8 billion people are guilty about something, that’s wisdom. And this is pretty stupid.

Brandon:
That’s so good. So good. There’s people who like, for example, I procrastinate on my email. People listening to the show, if you sent me an email, you know I probably didn’t respond to you either ever or within a month. I’m just really bad at it, I just let it build up because I can’t stand it. Yet for years I thought I had to handle my own email all the time, that’s what I do, that’s my responsibility to respond to everybody. And I also felt like I had to respond to every single person who reached out to me. So I’m learning now, there’s things like that, that’s my gut telling me that I shouldn’t be working on my email all the time, somebody else should be doing that.

Brandon:
And so I started hiring people, I always have mentioned, I hired a big team of people, a small team of people around me who are all amazing at what they do. But one of the things I struggled with a lot in the process and I feel like I’m at a good spot with it now, it took me a while to get there, but I want to know your thoughts as somebody who’s helped a lot of people and you’ve hired a lot of people yourself and you’ve helped a lot of people hiring. How do you, and I asked this question a few weeks ago on the show to some other people, but I want to know your thoughts. Typically I see like three things when you looking to hire somebody.

Brandon:
Some people have a cultural fit, they really fit the culture of your business. Other people have the experience, they’ve done the exact job you’re hiring for many times before. And some people maybe don’t have the experience, but they have the skillset, they could figure it out pretty quickly. How do you look at those three things, the cultural fit, the experience and the skill set. How do you either rank them? Or how do you hire someone based on those if you had to pick one as more important, how do you, I guess, help people hire correctly? Because Who Not How thing is vital, yet hiring the wrong person is terrible?

Dan:
Well, Brandon, the first step I made is that I’m terrible at hiring people, so I don’t do it.

Brandon:
Okay. I love that you do that. That’s great.

Dan:
Yeah. Are you a good salesperson? Yes, you’re a good salesperson.

Brandon:
I think I’m okay-

Dan:
The salesperson is the last person you want hiring somebody because they treat the interview like it’s a sales situation.

Brandon:
That’s so true.

Dan:
They’re excited. They’re excited about your job, not the job you wat them for, because you seem to be having so much fun in this job that they want your job. The people who do all of our hiring are poker players. You can’t see anything, there’s not a movement in their face in there. And we do testing, there’s some really nice tests out there, one of them is Kolbe, K-O-L-B-E, it’s from Phoenix, a woman there. And it tells you what, left to your own devices, if you could take action, how do you take action? It’s really great test for entrepreneurs, K-O-L-B-E.

Dan:
And so what they do, and one of the thing is, I asked them because we’ve hired a lot of millennials. There’s been a lot of millennials who have come in because it’s the main job market. And I’m not noticing any of the attitudes, there’s parodies on YouTube about millennials who show up at 8:00, “No, no, I don’t do eight o’clock, 10 o’clock. I do yoga.”

Brandon:
Yeah. There’s a lot of stereotypes.

Dan:
Stereotypes, And I didn’t notice any of the stereotypes, and I said, “Are you doing something different with the millennials?” And she said, “Yeah, we’ve got a question.” And I said, “What’s the question?” You ask the person, “If you come to work at Strategic Coach, where do you think you’re entitled to?” And if they start giving you a list, they’re gone.

Brandon:
That’s fantastic.

Dan:
But if they say, “Well, I don’t think I’m entitled to anything, but I’d really like the opportunity to learn and be part of your culture.” That’s the right thing to say. But it’s amazing, an entitled person won’t see the track. Glad you brought it up because I brought a list.

Brandon:
Can I also just point out here what you just did that is so funny, I could just tell us in your nature, when I asked the question, because I basically said, how do I hire people? You immediately took your own, the title of your book, Who Not How, you twisted that to, who’s going to hire people? That’s just the nature. You can tell, I don’t naturally think that way yet, I’m trying to, but it’s like, how am I going to hire someone? Who’s going to hire someone? I’m not good at that. You’re like, “I’m not good at it.”

Dan:
Here is a question for both of you, David and Brandon, have you been told in your life that you would be really successful if you only applied yourself?

Brandon:
When I was younger, people would tell me that.

Dan:
What about you, David?

David:
No. I don’t think anyone ever said that to me.

Dan:
Okay. So we divided in half right here. The thing is that you look like you’re capable, both of you look like you’re really capable. And the thing about it is, I can do detail work really well for about three hours, and then I’m tired for two weeks. Of someone’s unique ability, they can do that thing every single day and love the experience more and more as they go along. And that’s really the thing. It’s not that you can’t do it in a pinch, it’s not that you can’t do it when you’re up against an emergency, I can perform in all sorts of task areas if it’s emergency as long as I know I don’t have to do it tomorrow. Unique ability is lifetime in the same niche.

David:
I like the point you made about you can do it for a short period of time, but it would wear you out. There’s a time a quarterback needs to run the ball. A handful of times in the game, that’s a good strategy, he’s got to pick up two yards, he can go get it, but you certainly want to hand it to the running back the majority most of the time. And there’s a handful of trick places where maybe a running back has to throw a ball, ut that’s a great way of looking at it that I may need to maybe descend into my business and play a role for a period of time to get us over a hump, but the majority of the carriers should be going to the person that’s better.

David:
Brandon and I have really been like ringing that bell, we’ve come up with this concept here that says, “Follow your fire.” Because you should be asking yourself, like what lights you up inside? What makes you want to do stuff? And that’s the part you should focus on and then let the other people.

Dan:
Yeah. The other feedback loop that will really help you is to ask your team and just ask them, “Look could you tell me what I should be focusing on. You’ve observed may for six months, you’ve observed me for a year, and what do you notice that if I just focused on this thing, then everything would work a lot better.” And then all the things I shouldn’t be doing, who’s going to handle it? And I tell you, your team, if they’re a good team, they’re honest people and everything else, they’ll tell you exactly because it makes their life easier.

David:
That’s such good advice. That’s one of the reasons that I recommend talking to other people about your struggles, because every time I do, Brandon knows immediately what I need to do. And when he comes to me and says, what he’s struggling with, it takes me like three seconds to say, “Well, why are you looking at it like that?” And Dan, I could probably lay everything out for you, and you could immediately say like you just said with Brandon, “Well, buddy, who’s the one that’s supposed to be hiring? It shouldn’t be you.”

Dan:
Well, the other thing is I’m not experiencing the emotions of it, I’m just getting the framework. So it’s easier for somebody outside your emotional field to actually talk about it. Well, what I’ve observed is every time you talk about this, you light up and you don’t smile when you talk about this. And I’m sorry, I’ve just discovered from life that people who smile when they talk about something and don’t smile when they talk about something else, they like this and they don’t like that. It’s just an observation. What do you think?

Dan:
And a lot of people they’ve got a lot of musts and sheds from their past life, you should do this. One of the things is I find this as harder to pull off in a small town than it is a big city. So I was telling this one guy, he travels about 200 miles a day, he’s a sales person of one sort or another. And I said, “Why don’t you get a driver?” He says, “In my town, get a driver? Who do you think he is?” Yep. And I say, “So what is it? Your town or your future?”

Brandon:
I’ve told the story in the podcast before, but I’ll say it again now, one of my best friends in high school, his family owned a plumbing company, a very successful, good, big plumbing company. We have a small town, But my friend wants admitted to me that he had a house cleaner that cleaned their house and oh boy, I got to not let him live that down, we made fun of him. All the guys would get, they’re like, “Oh, look at rich kid over there, I got to have a house cleaner.” And what I never realized until I was grown up is that he wasn’t rich and therefore had a house cleaner. He was rich because he had a house cleaner.

Brandon:
His dad had this concept that he just understood, probably he was in Strategic Coach, but he had this concept of, his unique ability… Honestly, his dad didn’t go and fix plumbing parts either in a plane company. His dad had a very specific thing that he did in the company, him and his mom and dad both ran it. And they were very, very successful at it because they focused on the things that they should be doing the most of, and it fired them up, it got them excited. In fact, going back to the coaching thing, you said earlier, a coach job is to really ask the right questions that help the client answer almost for themselves I a way just by the questions you ask.

Brandon:
And then you brought up the fact that you can see the energy in your clients when they’re talking to you. I would say some of the most impactful things my coach has ever done is been simply when he says, “Seems like you have a lot of energy behind that. It seems like that really excites you, Brandon.” I’m like, “You’re right, that does excite me.” Because somebody else can point that out a lot easier than you can. This has been amazing. I’ve just got a couple of quick follow-up questions as we go through here. First of all, first question, the book, Who Not How, I know you co-wrote it, Benjamin Hardy, who’s-

Dan:
No. I did it as a collaboration. Can I tell you?

Brandon:
Please.

Dan:
I write a quarterly book because so I have a little book that I write. When I was 70, I said, “I’m going to write 100 books in 100 quarters. So right now I’m in the 25th quarter and we’re writing a book 25 and I have a nine-person team. It takes me about 35 hours a quarter to write a book, and it’s mostly talking and it’s transcribed and etc. And then I have a cartoonist who cartoons it. And so Ben Hardy, who was at Genius Network, Joe Polish, and he came up to me and he said, “I’ve been following your work for about five years.” And he said, “But I noticed you don’t do major market books.”

Dan:
And I said, “I just don’t have the bandwidth for a major book.” I said, “If I can’t finish it in 90 days, I don’t want to do it, I just can’t do it. I can do a little book, it’s about 60 pages. I can do a 60-page book.” But I said, “I have a nine-person team.” And he said, “Well, if you ever want to take this idea Who Not How and write a major book,” he says, “I’ll be your writer.” And I say, “You’re on.” So we started talking about it and I said, “Here’s the deal, I don’t know the publishing business at all, I haven’t been out there, I don’t know it. So what I’ll do is that all the money from the book goes to you. So all the advance, the royalties, everything. If you sells a million copies, all the money goes to you. I want the readers who sign up for Strategic Coach.”

Dan:
And then he says, “Oh, I’ve got this great strategist, Tucker Max, and he knows how to strategize the book, and he knows how to package it, he knows how to test and everything else.” He says, “Can we bring him on?” And I say, “What do I care, it’s your money?” And then they found the publisher Hay House, now, we have a 10 book every October. We have a major book coming out in October, and I spent 45 hours on this book. And Ben really put himself through this and he really dug deep into it, and he had nights of terror and he had weekends and everything else. And he got finished, he said, “Boy, this has been a real experience going through this. And I says, “Well, Ben, of the two of us, one of us had to be worried.”

Brandon:
Yeah. I love that you took this whole concept of Who Not How and applied it. And it’s not that you didn’t like… your concepts are in there, I know you are, and I know you know this stuff, but the actual sitting down to write the stories and the things that go with it.

Dan:
There’s not a word in here of mine. And I said, “10 books, 10 years? I’m 40 years older than he is. I said, “It’d be a good 10 years for you. If I could have been doing what you’re doing when you’re in your 30s, I would have been happy with it. The whole point is, the money is the big thing. I have to tell you, David, you were asking me questions about it? What would you rather have, money right now or 100 times capability in 10 years?

David:
The 100 times capability.

Dan:
Yeah. A lot of entrepreneurs, first of all, they don’t have the cash confidence that they can even entertain the question. So my feeling is, I love Stockpile and I’ve got Tucker Max on my team. I’ve got Hay House on my team, I’ve got Ben Hardy on my team, and I’ve got all these collaborations, I have about three or four of them with people where basically they get all the money. And I said, “Yeah, but I get the capability, I get your capability for 10 years. And I said, “I couldn’t write a check for your capability for 10 years, but I can give you all the money.”

Dan:
And the thing that surprises people is they say, “Well, why don’t you take a little piece of the money?” Why don’t you take 5%?.” And I says, “It’s like I build a new swimming pool and I’m having a full party, and just to launch and I pee in the pool.” That’s what your 5%. I said, “No, no, let’s just keep it clean. Let’s just keep it clean for 10 years?” And they said, “Well, what if it sells 10 million books?” I says, “Then you’ve had a good 10 millions.

David:
You had a good time.

Dan:
Yeah, you had good deal good.

Brandon:
Whether you’ll get it on the backend and Strategic Coach.

Dan:
I get the backend and I said, ” I’ve just gotten your capability for 10 years.”

Brandon:
I actually did that with my real estate fund, I buy a lot of big mobile home parks. I did the same. We make fees when we buy a property, there’s administrative fees and all this things. And that money comes in, but in fact, I probably lose money owning this company a little bit. If I make money, all that tells me that I need to hire somebody else who can get me even more because I know 10 years from now, when we package up a billion dollars of real estate and sell it to a big hedge fund or whatever we ended up doing, that’s when I get my payday, I’d rather have it down the road. So I just keep looking at that. And I think that’s an entrepreneur mindset that’s different from an employee mindset.

Dan:
Well, here’s what I tell you, if you have a capability that goes up 100 times in 10 years, but there’s no money, the IRS doesn’t see that 100% increase. And so it’s kind of invisible capabilities. So the big thing is you have to be total cash confidence so that you’re easy with that type of deal. We do real well, Babs and I we have great lifestyle. We don’t need to really improve it at all, kind of simple. I’m not a big social guy, neither of us.

Brandon:
You’re not out at the club every night?

Dan:
No, that’s not my thing.

Brandon:
The Toronto club scene, I don’t know, probably gets one, for sure.

Dan:
It’s pretty locked down right now. Yeah, it’s pretty, it’s pretty. Toronto in winter anyway, and now locked down, This is going to be… The liquor stores are up 38% this year.

Brandon:
I bet they are. They’re doing well right now.

Dan:
Cannabis shops are doing well, it’s legal across the country here.

David:
Something you mentioned about that delayed gratification, When I ask Brandon, “Hey, how well did your business do this year?” He literally said, “I made X million dollars 10 years from now.” That was how his answer was, I don’t remember what it was, but it was like, “I added eight million dollars in 10 years.” He’s thinking that way already.

Dan:
This is an old thing that you can go back to the Greeks and read about what they says, delayed gratification. It’s the person who can see the future and doesn’t get confused by the present.

Brandon:
Well, on that note, who do you need right now? Is there anybody, I guess, anybody that you’re looking for specific, with a quarter million people listening to this, is there somebody specifically you’re looking for in your life that’s going to help you in any way? Anything we could put a shout out?

Dan:
Yeah. Well, I want people to sign up for the program. Yu got to be making 200,000 minimum personal income and you got to be talented, you got to be successful, you got to be ambitious, but you’re hitting a ceiling because you’ve already achieved your original goals of being an entrepreneur. You’ve hit the road and you know that you haven’t done it in a way that makes you completely happy about your success. And you know there’s big opportunities, but you can’t do it, up until now, you’ve done it alone. And as David said, the future is all about teams. My whole future is just about teamwork. It’s not about me anymore, it’s being a part of great teams. And so that’s who we’re looking for.

Dan:
And the other thing is that, this book is really great for everybody, all you have to do is be human to actually understand the message in this book. And that is that, every human is great at something, but they don’t get to spend time doing that, they don’t recognize that they’re really good at it. So my sense is that, set really big goals for yourself, get excited about the goal, and then a question will say, “How am I going to do that?” You don’t ask that question of yourself is that, who’s going to do this with me? Who’s going to do this for me?

Dan:
And that’s the thing. You just have to switch a dial in your brain not to say, “How am I going to do this?” You’re not going to do this, you’re establishing the vision, you’re communicating the vision and you can find other people to do it. And, “Well, I can’t afford a full-time person.” Good, get five hours a week, make more money, move it to 10 hours a week. If you have the goal, it’s like you were saying about the guy whose dad ran the plumbing company, he wasn’t wealthy. He wasn’t paying someone else to wash his house because he was wealthy, he got wealthy because he had someone else wash his house and all that. And that’s the way with everybody, everybody I see. And it starts with you.

Dan:
You have your sense of future that you’d like to have, you want to have more control over your time and use your time in a way that’s enjoyable. You want to make quality money and you want it at the quantity you want, the relationships, you want to deal with people you like being with, and that with people that you don’t like. And then you have a purpose to your life, this has an impact, this creation of an entrepreneurial company has a big impact? Can I share mine just before we leave.

Brandon:
Please.

Dan:
That in 2044, I’m 100 years old, so it’s 23 years from now, and the total network of Strategic Coach entrepreneurs, and I think it’s going to be about 10,000, we’re at about 2,500. So 23 years, I’m sure it will be at 10,000, the GDP of the Strategic Coach network that year is $15 trillion, which would place them second to the United States right now as a GDP. And that’s my goal to create the thinking and the tools for entrepreneurs to stay within their unique ability and create massive uniqueability cooperation around the world and using the tool now, if zoomed in to improve it all over the next 23 years, we’ve got the tool that we can do it with.

David:
That’s amazing, man. I love the vision, I love how well thought out you are on that. And I think to get accomplished in that is totally going to be in your grasp. So man, thank you.

Dan:
Yeah. And I don’t have to have the 15 trillion, I’ll just check the sofas after they stand up and I’ll find it in lose change, I’ll find all my money in lose change. But I really want to thank you for inviting me on.

David:
Thank you.

Brandon:
Where’s the best place for people to follow up with you or get to know you more, like website, something like that?

Dan:
Yeah. Just Strategiccoach.com. Just go there and it’s a great website and anything you want there. And entrepreneurism has come of age right now. In the 1970s, when I started in 1974, I started, they were marginal creatures. The personal computer is the great breakthrough that once entrepreneurs got a personal and then the software, it was the real software, that you can be a global organization today with Zoom. You can have a small team, but you can do work globally. And this is entrepreneurial. And my sense is that the growth in the economy since the COVID is about 30% of the growth is new businesses using zoom.

Dan:
New kinds of teams, new kinds of projects, look how quickly they got to the vaccine, nine months. I bet the collaboration is greater than the Apollo project when they put a man on the moon.

David:
The next virus we get hit with how much quicker they’ll come up with a vaccine then because now people have an established role within a team, they’ve gone through that learning period. You’re exactly right.

Dan:
My team life is better right now than they were in February.

David:
One of the things that I think often when we do well, is I tell myself, my team is better than your team. It’s really not that I’m doing better work, it’s that I’ve assembled a better team. You want to be on the Avengers, that’s what your call is.

Dan:
Yeah. And I think the checkup point is that, everybody on my team loves what they do and they can do it every day and they love it more the longer they do it. That’s just the checkout point whether you have a great team or not.

David:
There you go. That’s so good. Well, thank you, Dan. This has been amazing, really, really, really good stuff today.

Dan:
Yeah. Thank you. Real pleasure.

Brandon:
All right. Now, with our show with the Dan Sullivan. Awesome, awesome stuff. He’s got so many of those, like zingers is like the best word I can use, I was just like, “Oh yeah, that’s so good.” Like the presentation thing and all the stuff, it’s just really, really powerful stuff that if people just take this and apply it to their business, they’re going to see huge shifts.

David:
Well, I think there’s a huge amount of cumulative wisdom in what he’s saying. He’s been around and he’s seen successful businesses and very successful people, and he has seen people that struggled to get going and he’s recognized the patterns that the successful people have embraced.

Brandon:
Yeah. Well, David, on that, what is the one thing I seen in the intro? What do you have to stop doing to become number one?

David:
I have to stop not trusting people. I have to stop thinking that I’ve got to be the one to do it if it’s going to be done well. And maybe to a second degree, I have to stop avoiding difficult conversations with the people on my team because if I think, “Hey, they’re not going to do it like me, I’ll just go do it.” Then I get out of who not how, and I get into the how. So in order for me to trust more, I have to have more difficult conversations and just commit to that process and then watch as people flourish. And I think if I do that and I put myself back into the visionary role, like what Dan was saying, we should absolutely become number one.

Brandon:
Yeah. That’s really good. Well, I know you didn’t ask me, but my answer to that question, is I got to stop managing my calendar. If I literally had somebody else who knew my priority, and knew my goals, and knew my vision better than I tend to execute my own stuff, I think I would get a lot more of my unique ability done because the person in charge of my calendar would be scheduling those things for me and saying no to the things that don’t, and saying yes to things that do, I’m just too much of a sucker. I’m a sales guy, I love everything and I want to do everything all the time. I need somebody who’s going to be a no person and a prioritized person.

Brandon:
So I’m going to let go of my calendar. I’m actually hiring an executive assistant right now for that or an administrative assistant.

David:
That’s a team member.

Brandon:
That’s a team member, that’s it.

David:
I would say the advice I’d give to people who want to be more successful is you’re either going to build the team or you’re going to be a part of a team, or you’re going to be a part of a team and then build a team. You can also be a part of a team and then build a separate team. There’s different ways to do this, but ask yourself, what would it take for me to be a better team member? Does my attitude get in the way? Does my stubbornness get in the way? Does my fear of doing new things get in the way? What’s stopping me from being a better team member and then find a team you think would be a good fit.

David:
So as people hear Brandon talk about here’s the struggle I’m having, if you know that’s a skill of yours, see if there’s a place you could fit on Brandon’s team, see if there’s a way you can fit on my team, BiggerPockets is hiring. They’re always looking for new people. Could you go get on the BiggerPockets team and be someone who brings your skills into that world?

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s really good stuff. On that note also, I want to talk about a couple of points about today’s show and how it relates to real estate investors. First of all, remember what he was talking about at the end of the show that he didn’t write the words that were in the book yet his name’s on the front cover and he gets a lot of benefit at the end of the day, Ben Hardy, which we’re going to get him on the show as well, hopefully soon to talk about this stuff in even more detail, but Ben, the reason… Here’s what I’m going to say with this, it was not a random person who came to Dan and said, “Hey, I can write a book for you and write a book with you and take all your thoughts and put them into fancy words.”

Brandon:
Ben had been a writer of multiple books already, he’s a member of Strategic Coach or at least of a genius network, Joe Polish’s thing. So he put in the time, he put in the effort, he had the skillset, he had the thing, and then he pitched Dan on it. So this is the thing that David, you were just talking about a second ago is how can you bring value to other people? If you want to get on their team, you really have to ask yourself, have you done the work needed to get them to accept you on their team? Because this is probably one of the biggest mistakes I see new real estate investors make, is they want to bring value to me or the thousands of other experienced real estate investors that are out there, and they want to learn from them, but they haven’t done the work necessary-

David:
They haven’t taken the shots and practice so that they will succeed when they get their chance.

Brandon:
Exactly. It wasn’t a random non-writer that came to Dan and was like, “I want to write a book with you.” I bet you, hundreds of people have approached Dan in the past wanting to write books with him because Dan has not traditionally published book in the way that normal people do. It wasn’t until the right person came along because he put in the shots, he took the practice. So what does that mean? It means if you’re trying to get into real estate and you want to be part of someone else’s team, start putting in the shots right now, start analyzing deals, get really good at the skills needed.

Brandon:
And that might be buying your own particular smaller deals right now, might mean getting really good at analyzing or really good at lead generation. Even if you can’t close the deals yourself, start getting good at those skills needed so that when you got the deal, you can take it to somebody like a David here and say, “Hey David, I got this amazing deal on a 12-unit apartment. I found the deal, I’ll manage it for you, I’ll take care of everything, I don’t need anything, but I just need the dow payment. Will you help me get the down payment?” and David would be like, “I’ll look over your stuff.”

Brandon:
But if you had proved yourself, and you had the experience, and you had everything you needed, why would David or thousands of other real estate investors out there, millions of other real estate investors, why would they not take you up on that? Of course, they would, in a heartbeat, but you have to do the homework out of 10.

David:
That is the best thing I’ve heard you say in a long time.

Brandon:
Thank you.

David:
That’s fire advice. That’s so good. I really can’t say that enough. In fact, if somebody did that, I would say it’s probably a virtually impossible for them to not succeed. If they commit to, I’m going to analyze 100 deals before I go say, “Brandon, can I work with you?”? And they’re so good at analyzing deals, it’s like Larry Bird shooting. Who’s going to say, “No, I don’t want you and your shooting ability on my team?”

Brandon:
So good. All right. I want to talk about that. Also, I wrote a few more notes as we were talking to Dan about things I wanted to cover later. One thing you mentioned about how technology is changing the world to be more team-based, and this is so true with real estate, 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, it would have been very hard to do what I’m doing today, which was finding people with certain unique abilities, bring them together and we’d go take down big deals. Today, that’s super easy, you can find people. BiggerPockets itself is a technology that has changed the game for real estate investors. If you are good at one unique ability aspect of real estate, you can find people with other aspects, just by networking on the forums, going to local meetups, talking on the forums, talking on the Facebook group, things like that.

Brandon:
And then you put it together via Zoom and you can build an Avenger-style team, VIA Technologies, and take down some really massive big deals right now, or a bunch of small deals if you wanted as a team. So that’s just another thing that we never talk on the show, but it’s totally true, technology has changed everything.

David:
Yeah. Technology has amplified the ability to take your skills and get more out of it. And that’s I think something that people should pay attention to, is you might’ve had a slight advantage if you had more skills, but technology is like the knots, the boost that whatever you are good at, it amplifies your ability to crush it there. So I agree with Dan, when we said, “Hey, the future is teams.” I 100% believe it. I see that happening in real estate, I see it happening with business, I see it happen with investing. That is absolutely the truth.

David:
So get a headstart on everybody else and start embracing the things that will make you a good team member and help you to build good teams, and you’ll be one of the people to enjoy the first fruits.

Brandon:
Yeah. So good. Last point I want to make here is, he mentioned a coach helps you find your energy points. Basically he said, makes it easier for you to do your best things, to do the things that you do best. And they do that by asking the right questions. I wanted to ask you David, how have you found that true in your life by working with performance coaching with people who define for you, what it is you should be doing?

David:
My coach works with both me individually, my real estate team and my mortgage team. And we have a meeting every single week because it’s expensive, but it’s so worth it, where all of the issues that we’re having, like let’s say that you’ve got a person on your team that keeps missing things when he’s analyzing stuff, and you’ve said to that same person three times, stop missing this, and they keep missing it. You could go to them 10 more times and they would feel like, “Why am I getting picked on, why am I the only person Brandon talks to?” Their performance will start to drop, they’ll feel isolated.

David:
When we bring it up in the group setting, it’s not David vs angry person, or person that has an issue. It’s a collaborative group where our coaches can mediate what that conversation is like, and then dig in on, “Why do you think you’re missing that? Are you rushing? Is it resentment? Do you not understand how important that is?” And they get to the root cause of why the behavior is happening. And then that person doesn’t just fix the symptom, but they actually help the problem. That’s a huge piece because it’s not my voice over and over, and over saying the same thing.

David:
And then in my own life, they’re so useful because they see my blind spots. I don’t realize how I come across when I talk to other people. I don’t know very well the image I’m putting out. Other people can tell you that really easy, a performance coach is someone that has your full permission, you’re paying them to tell you, “These are your blind spots. This is where you’re making life harder.” And we all know what it’s like when we have a person who is, I think, that the example that Dan said is, you’d be great if you really applied yourself for, they would be awesome except for this one thing.

David:
Imagine how much that one thing is costing. That’s what I say, is like, “Do you know how expensive that habit is of not admitting you’re wrong, or not working with other people well?” Whatever the thing is, it’s so expensive. People don’t realize how expensive it is to hold onto character flaws or traits they have that are hurting them. And a performance coach’s job is to get in there, isolate what that thing is, highlight it, and then help you get it out of you.

Brandon:
Yep. That’s 100%. That’s what it is, kind of what we said in the quick tip today was, find a group of people, whether it’s a performance coach you pay, for a mastermind group and accountability buddy, it doesn’t matter, find somebody that’s going to hold you to your best self and watch the transformation in your life. With that said, let’s wrap this thing, it’s been a long show, but every piece of it was worth it. Thank you for being with me again, David Greene, you’re awesome, man. I appreciate you.

David:
Thanks. I love doing this with you. I hope everyone listening got a lot of value out of this as well. I hope as Dan was speaking, everyone was able to relate that in their life to some way, and they understand the importance of a team, and as far as the mindset shift to make. And thank you guys for listening to this long episode with us. For those that stuck all the way through, you’re the real MVP. This is David Greene for Brandon, my favorite teammate Turner, signing off.

Outro:
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