How To Make Growth Inevitable, with Lior Weinstein

Dan Sullivan: Hi, everybody. It's Dan Sullivan here, and I'm here with my podcast partner, Steve Krein. And this is FreeZone Frontier, the podcast. And we have a FreeZone transformer with us, Lior Weinstein. And a great pleasure it is, Lior. Great to have you with us.
 
Lior Weinstein: Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a pleasure.
 
Yeah. And Lior, I've known personally, I would say, what would you say, Lior, who we kind of got to introduce, first of all, on Zoom during COVID.
 
Lior Weinstein: Just before COVID, like 2019.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay, that's when we introduced and more and more, I got intrigued with the way that Lior thinks about things. And I have had many, many reports that if you have the good fortune to have Lior working with you, you'll get amazing results. So those were all the right reports. So anyway, Lior, just to give a little background, how you got to where you are today, if you just give us a little bio. Lior is new to the United States, and he started in Israel. And Lior, just a little Israeli background, and then U.S. since you got here and expanded your entrepreneurial career.
 
Lior Weinstein: Yeah, born and raised in Israel. So I spent all my young and early adulthood in Israel and moved to the States when I was around 26 or so.
 
Dan Sullivan: After some interesting IDF experiences.
 
Lior Weinstein: Great service in the IDF, very influential. I got the opportunity to be a part of the Intelligence Corps in a few great positions, which taught me a lot about great teamwork and also what big missions are and extreme complexity of big projects and big implications, but also still how do you get a very small team to be very effective. That's where I learned how to be extremely effective and efficient. And I think it took me many years to get another priority, which is be happy first. And that's, I think, one of the big things we entrepreneurs and Strategic Coach also learn to prioritize. In fact, I say a lot of my decision-making is I work to be happy, effective, and efficient in that order. Efficiency is the last thing that I try to do. So after happy, it's effective, and after effective, it's efficient. And my background, I've been, you know, taking your model of we're already there and expanding as opposed to we're here and we're striving to go there. Ever since I was a kid, I was entrepreneurial. I started trading stocks at about fourth grade. So this is pre digital terminals and websites that give you stock quotes. So every day, the back of the newspaper had the last day closing of the stock prices. And my neighbor at the time had a T1 line at his home trading direct to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. So he was kind enough to mentor me and show me what to do and let me use his terminal to kind of buy and sell. Then, you know, starting the class newspaper, in which I didn't know anything about it, but I went to a guy, I know he's funny. You're going to write jokes. And it's a guy that, you know, played a lot of computer games. You're going to do like hacks and cheat codes for computer games. Another one did puzzles and we published a newspaper every week or every couple of weeks in my house, just printing everything using a copy machine. So I've been always since a young boy just trying to get an idea and get people organized to make it real, make it happen. It's always stuff that were fun to me and were intriguing to me. I think I had endless curiosity. I remember when I was in seventh grade, I bought a domain. This is still early, so we're talking ‘90s, allabouteverything.com. I'm just going to do a website that has allabouteverything.com. It's a good one.
 
Dan Sullivan: That was my frame, you know. Jeff Madoff and I have a podcast that's called Anything and Everything, just so we can always stay on topic. Yeah.
 
Lior Weinstein: And I think that mindset is still persisting today. I'm highly curious. And one of the reasons why I can be effective is because I can just rabbit hole into you know, bottle cap production, and then a day after on some very complicated AI neural network stuff or medical device, you know, so I still have that mindset. And, you know, when I was young, I thought it was going against me, because of these you know, idioms like jack of all trades, master of none, you know, those kinds of things. Right. So I always kind of took it as like a bug, not a feature. And then it took throughout my adult years to realize, oh, this is like a big feature. It's not a bug at all. And now I have that, you know, appreciation and perspective to leverage that and not look at it like a handicap. And it's also a signal for me if I know if somebody tells me, oh, go work on this project for the next eight years, that's, you know, probably not going to be a good idea. Let's not do that. Let's do something else.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we've been sort of chatting about a topic for several years. And in spite of investigating a lot of different things, looking backwards, you can see a constant.
 
Lior Weinstein: Absolutely. And I think the biggest thing for me, even since I was, you know, just had this problem in our workshop about if you were back to being eight years old and people looked at you in the room, would they recognize you? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. I actually just saw a photo of me when I was five, standing in a kindergarten photo, and I'm just standing there with a serious face and my hand rolled up together. So I had the demeanor and the mindset ever since I was very young, and just one of those classic breaking things apart, trying to see how they work. We had a computer at home since I was very young. My mom had a Mac too. And my dad bought my brother, I'm the youngest of four. So he bought my brothers like an IBM PC, right? It was like an SX and then a DX2, DX4. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Coach started with Mac 2.
 
Steve Krein: Really? Like in ‘89 or when was that?
 
Lior Weinstein: Well, yeah. ‘89 is the beginning.
 
Dan Sullivan: We got the Mac 2 in ‘88. Yep. Yeah, and that was the beginning of Coach. That was one of our crucial team members when we first started the company was the Mac too. You know how much it was in Canada? A lot.
 
Lior Weinstein: It was worth the $5,000.
 
Dan Sullivan: $3,800. Yeah. It was an expensive machine.
 
Lior Weinstein: Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't realize that I was very lucky to have those things at home. You know, like my dad had the big, you know, cell phone bricks, the Motorola bricks. And so, you know, breaking those computers apart. And really, I just saw a comedian recently, my age, older millennial, and he sees his mother getting so incredibly wowed by his kids using like an iPad or an iPhone. And he's like, that's like built for, you know, simpletons. Like it's a screen and just move your hand. Like we had to like code in DOS, right? We had to like see column forward slash, like we had to code when we were five to use a computer. And that was my lived experience as well. So ever since I was young, seeing my brothers kind of play with those things or use those things. And then I was just like, nobody told me I shouldn't. So I just started doing it. And from earlier on, I just wanted to know how things work, not so much what the thing is. And that applies, you know, to this day.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, I have a much better understanding as you're describing this. Like, I didn't know all that background and the way you describe, you know, who you are and what you've done now has a much better context to what you're doing now. And I'm excited to dig into the context of today, what you're doing and how it translates into—even since COVID, you're getting introduced to Coach, what's transformed in the last couple of years for the last two years to like what you're doing over the next 10?
 
Lior Weinstein: Yeah, so the big transformation for me after the military, I got involved with a whole row of businesses. mostly in parallel. So I was developing high frequency trading algorithms for a large hedge fund. And I was building two different software companies at the same time. One for desktop software with like image recognition and complex search stuff. Another one for mobile apps, did a few dozen mobile apps that had tens of millions of downloads. And I was actually putting a lot of operational focus on those businesses. So I was acting generally professionally, both as different things, one as a CTO, just leading kind of technology development and everything related to that as the chief product officer. So thinking about what is the thing that people actually use and care about? And then as a CMO, which is, how do you create something that makes people interested? Or how do you let them know that the thing exists? How do you let the right people know that the thing exists in a way that makes them not just aware of it, but interested in it? And my form of CMOing, of marketing, was at the time, I started off as an affiliate marketer. Then they called it digital marketers. Now people calling it those kind of funnel work and those kind of things. But really, I always said, I'm not a brand guy. I'm just like a number-based marketer. And that's still true today. Like every time someone talks to me about brand, I'm like, hey, I can be an effective brainstormer. I'm like a creative guy, but I'm not a brand expert. I know brand experts. Let's bring them in. But once the brand is there, I know everything that needs to happen to get people interested in it, to create the gravity, to create the thing that people would get attracted to at scale. And really what happened over the years, I was just specializing in what I now refer to as artificial growth, as differentiated from like organic referral-based. You know, a lot of people I coach, when I started meeting them, I'm like, yeah, I ran this business for 20 years, 30 business. I was amazed. I'm like, this is not a skill that I have, right? Or I didn't have it at the time when I started meeting those people. And they've grown their business by reputation, by referral, but they had no sense of, well, what if you just wanted to do it 10 times faster in two years? They don't know how to do it. That's a foreign concept. And for me, coming in the Israeli startup environment, where everything is in that context, everything is like, you're going to raise a million bucks, $2 million, $5 million, and you're trying to be a billion-dollar company in under seven years. That's generally what you're trying to do. And to an IPO, to an M&A, you're trying to be that valuable in the market. So the mindset, back to nobody told you you shouldn't or can't, the mindset is, make it very big, very quick. And I learned from the best. I had some of my friends from the military and generally in the Israeli business community, some of the best entrepreneurs I've ever worked with. Again, nobody told me I shouldn't, so that's how I expect that things need to grow. If you start something, you should probably have a million bucks in sales in a few months. And then you should probably get to a few double digits within two years and so on and so forth.
 
Steve Krein: So your expectations are set, and then you're leveling up to them, and that goes for yourself as well as your clients or the companies you work with.
 
Lior Weinstein: That's the mindset I had. And then when I joined Coach, and the first thing I remember, because when I joined Coach, I didn't have anybody in Coach. So I'm one of those, nobody told me about Coach, I wasn't really referred in. Actually, one of the other Coach members, that's how, by kind of proxy, I learned about it, Michael Mogul. But it's not like I had a conversation with him and was recommending. He was telling another friend and she was sending me your podcast and I was listening to your podcast during like the sabbatical year. And I ended up joining because I kept learning like new different ways to think about things, which I really appreciated. And I told my wife for the first workshop I had in Toronto with you, told her this is either going to be the most expensive trip to Toronto ever, or it's going to be, you know, great. And seven minutes in, I remember this, like during the workshop, I texted my wife, I got my money's worth, just from just being able to look at a few things. Now, that was the first, like, Lifetime Extender exercise, you know, we had done. But in that same workshop, we talked about the Four Freedoms. That changed profoundly how I look at business, period, and how I look at life, period. Out of the freedom of time, money, purpose, and relationship, the biggest one for me that I realized that I want my life to focus on is actually freedom of relationship. I just had this very profound understanding from all the projects I've done over the years that if I'm spending time with smart or kind, ideally both, people that are genuine and curious, I have a good day. And if I spend time with, you know, people that are not thoughtful, people that are malicious, you know, people that are transactional in mindset, I have a bad day. So I'm like, I'm just going to organize my entire business life and personal life around relationships. And if I do that right, the money and the growth are going to come. Yeah. So from having a focus on what is the thing we're doing and how fast can it grow, I'm like, who is this person I'm doing it with? And it's going to compound and grow anyway, if we do it right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You didn't learn how to do things slow.
 
Lior Weinstein: Right. 100%. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: But the examples you used were quantitative multipliers. And my focus with Four Freedoms is on qualitative multipliers. In other words, 10x can be measured in many different ways. I mean, obviously, quantitative is the easiest way to measure 10x. But if you were to increase your Four Freedoms each two times, you would have a 10x result.
 
Lior Weinstein: That I think was the big shift for me because I looked at life. The reason why I was very effective and not just efficient is that I pretty much with any business challenge that came up, I try to figure out what's the formula here. Like what are those variables and what is the result we're trying to get? And if I can measure it, I can improve it. If I can measure more of it, I can improve more of it. That was basically my working assumption. It's still my working assumption in a lot of ways, but it's no longer the first thing I ask about. Yeah. Right now, the first thing I ask about is, who's this person that I'm working with? Do I and can I have a long-term deep relationship with them? And if that statement is true, then okay, what's the party we're doing right now? Okay, we're trying to build this little business, this widget, this big app. It doesn't matter. I'm like, that's just what we're doing in 2024. But if we do this right, in 2030, we'll do something else. And in 2035, we'll do something else, or not. But I focus really on, from my quality of life perspective, I stopped chasing how did numbers change, and really focused on the quality of my time. And then that certainly got more emphasized. Now I have three kids, and they're still very young, all three are under 10. And I saw some saying, on a video, parenting is only hard if you care. And I think that's the same for me. Like I keep thinking about them and I keep, am I a good enough parent? Am I, you know, am I creating the past for them that I want them to have? Because that's really the only thing I can create for them. I can't create a future, but I can create a past and how to balance that over business. And I realize if, if business just means great relationship, then it's never going to be an issue because that's the upside.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, so you've got, I think, a foundation in a certain mindset growing up in Israel. You have clearly seen your unique capabilities and abilities around how you work with clients, customers. I don't know what you call your people engaging, but what are you doing? Is it a company? Is it a business? Is it driven by something that people would ascribe to, like, I know when to call your company or to reach out?
 
Lior Weinstein: As far as right now?
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Lior Weinstein: So my main focus is joint venture. I mean, I've done a lot of consulting projects over the years for huge companies, for medium sized businesses, even a small, but with the introduction of the Four Freedoms, I realized I just don't want to be in a point where I'm selling my time. So it doesn't really matter how much money kind of goes into that. So I really just prefer to build assets. And the thing about the joint venture is what's nice about me not filtering the opportunity based on how much cash do I make right now, you know, in a quarter or in a year, then it makes it a lot easier to engage on all sides. So if somebody's coming in, my ideal joint venture is where someone on the other end has a deep understanding or a pain in their industry. And the real ideal is that they have access to the market, so if there was a product, they can sell it. And the true best ideal is that they're already spending money on the problem. So let's take a couple of examples in that, right? So one guy I met last year, law firm, personal injury lawyer, and I was giving this AI workshop that I gave a few dozen of last year. And he came to me at the end, he's like, you know, one of my biggest pet peeves is lead intake in the industry. And I'm like, oh, tell me more. And he's like, basically people call in and you don't know in personal injury if it's, you know, a real case, a big case, if it's part of a huge lawsuit, small lawsuit. So you have to process the person. And there's a lot of questions, like a hundred questions. Now, plus medical record collection, it's a whole thing, right? It's a rabbit hole. But then he told me, I already spend two some million dollars a year on this myself. And I know exactly what needs to be built and there's no vendor that I like. I'm like, that's great. Let's build it. So we started a new company, 50/50. He brought in all of his expertise. So his team were basically acting as the product experts. Like, what needs to happen? A call comes in. What are the questions? What's the sequence? Do we need to send a docu-sign with a PDF? You know, what needs to happen? And then I brought in developers. Like, okay, you are going to create this. This is how we're going to work. This is the structure. That's going to take us, based on what I think it's going to take, it's going to take us about 10 weeks. Ended up taking about 12 weeks and we launched and he became the first client. So on month one, he has 50% savings, right? Because he's diverting the money that he already spent into a company that now he owns 50%. It actually didn't cost much, so everybody just kind of covered their own costs in this particular case. But the company now has seed money, and he has access to probably $5-7 million in monthly revenue from just his little network, because of his size and his position. Bang out ideal, right? Like he knows the problem, spends money on the problem, I can build it. We build it, he becomes the first client, and then we scale it out to other people. On the other side, they have one with a FreeZone member. they're working on right now. I remember, so we were on a Zoom call with Dan last September, and at the end of the call, he shares, oh, I had this concept earlier in the year to sell my capability to other people, right, to other people in my industry. And he said he finally had a chance to pitch it to someone, and the guy liked it. He ended up closing a high six-figure contract per year on a 10-year basis. And I'm like, what? So I called him after, told him, I need to learn more about this. I mean, I've seen high six figure deals get signed, but rarely have I seen them signed for 10 years. And then he said he already got the deposit like within a week. I'm like, I've definitely never seen that. So then he describes what it is. It is very valuable. And then he tells me, I think this can be a hundred-million dollar company. And I'm like, this can be a billion-dollar company if we make it into a tech company, not a professional services company. if they're signing a licensing agreement and not a professional services agreement, and if we add just a little bit of tech in between what you said and I kind of describing those parts. And it took us a few months to flesh it out. I had to fly to his team, his offices, and kind of really figure out all the parts. And now we know what to do. So we're launching that company. In this particular case, It's not like he is spending money on the problem, right? But he definitely has a deep understanding of the pain in the industry. He's been in his industry for 30 years. He's great. A true expert. He did validate the market, like he got a check, right? So he had an initial signal, this is valuable. Now he's had more sense. And that's another great joint venture. Now, the reason why both are great joint ventures, back to what I was saying earlier, are the people. In both cases, I'm like, I can be a business partner with these guys for the next 50 years. I love how they're very different individuals. The attorney is basically like me, but somehow became a lawyer. Like, you know, crazy techie, very smart, you know, thinks and does 50 different things. And somehow he grew up as a lawyer, right? Professionally. But we share values. You know, we have young kids. We look on the world in very different lenses, very different, but shared values. And same thing with the other partner. So the biggest reason why both of those are great ventures is because of the partners. The second biggest that they're really pros at what they do, but they don't know how to do the fabrication piece or they don't know how to do the growth piece.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's very interesting. Peter Diamandis was commenting because he's known Elon Musk for decades. And he said that Elon was talking to him and he said, you know, my whole life has been about creativity and innovation. I used to think that that was the hardest part of any project. And he said, then I got into manufacturing, and he said, manufacturing is really, really tough. And basically, you're a manufacturer, Lior, you're a manufacturer of good ideas into the marketplace. Would you say that that fits?
 
Lior Weinstein: Absolutely. And one of the ways, Steve, to your question, I'm really great at zero to one. I'm really great at it. I'm also very good at one to 100. I don't like it as much.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. So you don't like those long tails.
 
Lior Weinstein: That's right. I don't like the long tail. You know, I like takeoffs. I don't like landings. I like the complicated piece. How do we get it to escape velocity? How to get it out of orbit. But then there are much better pilots, you know, than me to get it into the next, you know, planet, whatever that is in the zero to one, because of the cross-functional way I think about things in terms of technology has to work with product, has to work with marketing, has to work with sales. And I'm also a practitioner in those areas. So I understand sales systems very deeply. I understand marketing systems very deeply. So when I make a decision, I make a decision with all of that in context. But the best thing for me, one of my biggest inspiration was Apollo 13 when the movie came out with Tom Hanks. And there was a scene there that got stuck in my brain, and ever since I think about it probably once a month, of, you know, the astronauts don't have oxygen, we have a duct tape and a tube sock, you know, what do we do? Right? And that's my mental model to solutioning pretty much anything. So I'm one of those techies that hates to build tech. I'm one of those marketers that hates to do marketing. I'm like, I'm not one of the hammer, scissor, nail at all. I try to do the best I can not to do anything. Kind of like Dan's model, can this problem be solved without me to do anything? And then the next piece is, okay, so it's not nothing, what's the minimum? As opposed to, let's build this huge machine that's going to take us, you know, 18 months before we can hit the market and get some signal that this is even valuable.
 
Steve Krein: What I'm hearing you describe sounds like you don't have a company behind you. You have, you're a collaborator with other entrepreneurs and your Unique Ability is zeroed in on just being one-to-one with them. And so are you building a ecosystem of these JVs? Is that kind of the model?
 
Dan Sullivan: Right.
 
Lior Weinstein: Yeah, so there's an ecosystem of JVs. I have very long-term, you know, teammates, I call them teammates, that I bring into a lot of these projects. So they're not employees, right? They're kind of volunteer, you know, mercenaries, if you will. But we've been collaborating for many, many, many years. They might as well be employees, you know, from that standpoint. So from that perspective, there is a team. It's not just Lior, meaning those people are consistent and—
 
Steve Krein: There's teamwork, but there's no company with the contract. And I think there's a growing trend that I think AI, and we haven't talked a lot about AI yet, but I know there's a big theme in your life and your world around AI. But in particular, the question in the back of my mind is, a new generation of entrepreneurs able to do a lot of great work with a lot less infrastructure and cost and complexity. And so a simplified, if you will, model of entrepreneurship where you don't need to build a big organization behind you to have really good, scalable use of your Unique Abilities.
 
Lior Weinstein: Yeah, to tie that in, in 2007, I had a very large affiliate marketing business, and affiliate marketing was still fairly new at the time. And a lot of people around me asked me, like, what do you do? And I'm like, I couldn't quite explain it. And then The Four Hour Work Week came out by Tim Ferriss. And I just bought the book to everybody because that's exactly what I did and still do. I was also a big buyer on Elance at the time, and he was as well. And again, back to nobody told me I shouldn't. I heard about affiliate marketing a few years back before that point. And I'm like, how do I do this? And I'm like, well, I guess I'll find somebody online to hire. And I'm like, I'll just pay him to do the thing. I'll just pay him for the unit of work. You know, you're going to write a landing page. You're going to code something. You're going to design something. And I had dozens of people working for me, dozens on hundreds of projects, literally hundreds of projects over the years in those kind of mid-2000s there. And I just assumed that's a good way to do business. I actually remember back in 2014, I had this guy visiting me. I met him in Atlanta through a friend and I was describing at the time what I was doing. I was buying and selling online businesses. I did about 30 of them in a two-and-a-half-year period. And it could be content businesses, e-commerce businesses, software businesses. I was describing what I was doing and he's like, so where's your office? And I'm like, I don't have an office, it's at my house. And he's like, so where's your team? I'm like, you know, I have people in Canada and Brazil and Israel and Italy and Philippines. And he's like, I don't understand. I'm like, come visit me. This is a very wealthy guy from the Emirates. Very wealthy guy. And he visited me for like four hours to just shadow me while I was working on my computer in a small little, you know, bedroom and using these communication tools, right? Using stuff like Slack, like email, using, you know, they were bought out by another company that became Upwork and using those tools, communicating with them, looking at a project management and seeing what instructions do I tell them? So when's the next time I need to look at a task? What's the eye of Sauron moment that I need to pay attention to this, you know, right now. And literally, like, it blew his mind because he spent like half a day with me and he's never seen it. But fast forward a few years later, COVID happened and now the world went online. Everybody went Zoom. Everybody went remote work. Nobody could come to the office. And suddenly it's like everybody caught up with you don't have to have an office. And there's a lot of benefit, by the way, in person, but that's not a requirement for most knowledge-based businesses like this. And that said, over the years, besides the joint venture models, I realized that I was helping a lot of companies as a fractional executive. And that could be at a fractional CTO or as a fractional chief revenue officer. So either they needed help on the growth side or on the fabrication side, the technology. And I really like doing it. Like it's fun for me to solve problems, but from an upside perspective, it never made a lot of sense. Is it like, there's no amount of cash that a business could pay that could possibly trade the upside of just owning a business, right? Just owning equity in a business that works. And what I had decided to do is open an accelerator for CTOs, for fractional CTOs. So that is an actual company, it's an actual business that I also have partners in, where we teach people how to do this, how to be fractional chief technology officers, so they can go in and help those businesses. And that's for me, one, it's a passion of mine, training these people, like coaching these people, but I like sharing my mental models, how to look at a company or look at a problem and fix it quickly. And then not just fix it quickly, fix it in a way or transform it in a way that it can grow for a long time. I used to have, before I joined the Coach, I had a performance marketing and technology company where we basically came to businesses, was an actual company I was CEO of and said, hey, give us a retainer. It was 10,000, 20,000, just something basic. But give us all the ones and zeros, any bit in the business. Doesn't matter if it's IT, website, Facebook, it doesn't matter. If it's digital, we'll take it. But give me uncapped profit share, right? You set a net new growth. So you set the baseline. If you're growing by 10% a year, fine. Any dollar over 10%, it doesn't matter. You set the threshold. You set the commission rate. Some businesses could pay at 5% because of their business model, by 5% of revenue. Some businesses could pay us 25 because they were more profitable. But they said the revenue, they said the commission, told them no contracts, handshake only. If you don't want to work with us, text me, you know, give me a 30 day courtesy notice. But even then, you know, if you're really pissed, just let me know. And that business grew very fast. We grew to almost half a million dollars in monthly income within the first six months, eight months, mostly on commissions, mostly on value we're creating. The reason why I decided not to do it, and some people at Coach told me that I'm making a mistake, and maybe that's true in hindsight, because I realized I suddenly became the CEO of an agency that's selling time. And I was starting to manage almost 30 people, account managers, and project managers, and designers, and so on. And I'm like, I don't want to be the CEO of an agency. This is terrible. This is blocking and tackling galore. But within that model, I was explaining to clients, I cannot promise results, but I can promise input. I can promise effort and I can promise best effort. But generally as a mental model, we told our clients, how can we create an environment in this business where growth is inevitable? So we'll remove all the constraints, we'll manage all the risks or remove risks if we could. So the only thing left is just growth. That model, mental model I use personally, that's when I try to do fat loss. I'm like, how can I create a metabolic environment where fat loss is inevitable? Like no matter what I feel about it, fat loss is gonna happen or muscle growth is gonna happen and so on. And by far, that's my approach to any of these ventures or any of these fractional work as well.
 
Dan Sullivan: Steve, tell Lior what your background is, just so he can get a sense of a model that's developed over a long time. Steve, I think, has been in Coach since 1997.
 
Steve Krein: You're aging me, Dan, but yeah, I was 27 or 28 years old when I joined Coach. I like things that last forever. Well, I got to tell you, you know, the view of how much time it's been and how much better my life is 25 plus years later as a result of the underpinning of what we talked about earlier with the Four Freedoms, I think is at the core. Because for me, you know, tapping into my Unique Ability, tapping into what I love to do and who I love to work with, I think really in 2011, the unlock about 10, 11, 12 years after joining Coach was putting everything I learned after building my first company and taking it public and selling it was learning the power of community. I was in YPO, I'm in Strategic Coach, and I see the power of entrepreneurial community is unparalleled or unequaled in terms of multipliers for all of us entrepreneurs. Being able to lean on people who might be ahead of you, behind you, to the left of you, to the right of you, to truly accomplish more together than you can do alone. So community was kind of built into my early experiences as an entrepreneur. And so in 2011, we harnessed the power of that model around community, along with coaching, and quite frankly, along with storytelling and brand amplification of the progress that you can make as a community to launch StartUp Health really to unite and educate and empower a global army, if you will, of entrepreneurs that we call health transformers, right? The entrepreneurs solving the world's biggest health challenges, but for having this kind of single global community that's broken down into smaller health moonshot communities is the idea that nobody can do anything alone. You talk very much about specific unique Abilities that when you JV with people, but multiply that organically by people being in either physical or virtual room together on a regular basis, talking about shared problems, shared networks, shared relationships, shared opportunities. where they can almost like take a deep breath and focus on what they do best. And so we now have this 13 years later, global army and community of entrepreneurs really organizes an ecosystem around these health moonshot themes that are underpinned by collaboration, collaborating around solving problems.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, last time I talked, you're approaching 500 companies.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, we're now past 500 companies. And the work that we've done over the last two years around deeper community around Type 1 Diabetes and really going instead of having one or two companies, having thirty-five companies focused on Type 1 Diabetes is not just, you know, thirty-five times better. It's like three hundred and fifty times better than having just a few of them. And we're now replicating that for Alzheimer's disease. And the underpinning of this is how do we enable collaborative opportunities of entrepreneurs and companies working together and benefiting from not having to duplicate what the other people are doing? And so many years ago, people would ask about competition in the community. And what do I do if somebody is working on something similar? That doesn't come up as much anymore. And we have so many examples of the opposite, that the focus is collaborative community solving the biggest health challenges of our time. And it's very difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs to not be in tunnel vision around what their specific problem is. And they don't ask for help, look for help, or realize how much help could be out there. So trying to unlock that is at the core of the StartUp Health model. And really just, you know, I've seen community really solve problems that seem impossible when you're sitting alone or with just your own company. But as soon as you get onto a call with 10 or 20 or 30 other people or walk in a room with 20 or 30 other people, you see how much more you have in common and how much we can do together.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I think it was the first summit, the FreeZone Summit in Chicago. Steve brought his sister.
 
Steve Krein: I brought my chief strategy officer, who happens to be my sister.
 
Dan Sullivan: Anyway, I was just pondering. You were sitting close to the front on the right-hand side. I would just wander over and chat with you throughout the session. And I said, you know what I think you're creating, Steve, is the first global entrepreneurial R&D lab in medicine. It's the first time you've actually created a whole lab, but it consists of now 500 companies, but they have a sense of unity, they have a sense of cohesiveness, but they're in last count, it was 26 countries. I think you were there. And I think this is really, really unique because they're benefiting from all the progress everybody else is making. There's a lot of growth of intellectual capital that can be shared throughout the community of how you get things done easier, faster, cheaper, and better. I thought that this would be interesting to you, Lior, to know the background of this.
 
Lior Weinstein: Yeah. And I mean, what's amazing about that kind of a community is that you really just grow in leaps. You know, nobody goes there to figure out, oh, what am I going to do next week or next month or how to solve like a tiny challenge. So any single insight is really just collapsing. The timescape for the business, you know, probably one meeting, you know, can save them years, either years of not doing something now, which is probably my favorite thing to do.
 
Steve Krein: You know, what's interesting is you talk about your first seven minutes in coach, and it's one idea that makes it valuable. You could call it cheerleading, emotional support, recognizing you're not alone, whatever it might be that day or that quarter or that week or wherever you are in your journey. Kind of like whenever you get onto or walk into a Coach session, you instantly get your batteries charged no matter how you're feeling when you walk in there. Of course, it begins with the idea that you're walking in or showing up, wherever you might be, but that transformational, whether it's two hours or a day, that you experience truly does change the trajectory of whatever it is you're working on, whether it's a recalibration, whether it's a problem you're solving. But it's the deep work when you start to have people in the same vicinity, like Type 1 Diabetes, 35 companies working on Type 1 Diabetes. I mean, I've had two and three in a community before where you're like, oh, they work on type one and type two and their diabetes. When you actually have 35, it's a very different community. The capabilities are extraordinary, which is why I was thinking about your JVs and wondering whether they're all siloed or whether they are themselves a community of people who are And I don't know if there is a thread of a certain type of customer client that you work with, because one of the things that was going on in the back of my mind is, what's the best kind of client? And I don't even know if I drilled down or we drilled down with like, how do we help you by introducing people to you? Or how do we help people we know get introduced to you? And what's your right fit client?
 
Lior Weinstein: It's an evolution. I'm learning that. So one of the latest refinements that was very helpful is I realized I really like to work with founder-led companies with big missions. Like if I have, you know, two companies, everything being equal, I'm definitely going to do the founder-led and definitely going to do the big mission one. Because usually in those areas, because I can make them more effective and more efficient, you know, faster, whatever mission they had is now bigger and they can achieve it faster. And those that gravitate more than others. Now on just the pure business side, from a mind shift, we were just talking with Dan about cash confidence, right? That concept at Coach. And I was sharing, I've had cash confidence since I was 14. Not because I had a balance in the bank, right? It was because I trusted my ability to generate money at will. And from that perspective, I haven't been in the rat race for many years. Like that wasn't the primary motivator. So when I look at the business, like if I have two businesses that are equal, and one can make, you know, 100 million, another one can make 20, that doesn't mean I'm going to choose 100. The relationship thing is actually going to be the tiebreaker. Like, who am I doing this with? Because assuming the business makes, you know, enough money, I also have it in when I built start-ups, like what's the total enough market here, as opposed to the available market, then the number beyond that doesn't matter at that point. So if you take, let's say these two ventures that I gave you as an example, right? For those two ventures, you know, it's not like you can argue huge humanitarian mission around improving lead intake, right? You can do anything. I mean, you can reason your way into anything. You can say eventually you're making everything better. You know, the lives of the people that got hurt and injured and so on and so forth. But really it's a simple business to build with a great partner that provides a simple value to the industry and to everybody involved, to the clients, to the partners, to the users and so on. And it's going to be fun. Also, it's a business that makes money. I also have an inordinate amount of my time goes on nonprofit work. So business is not the only thing that I engage in, but that's a good reason for me to enjoy a business relationship. But then again, there's other companies, right? So I'm working with another FreeZone member, Dave Berg. He owns a company called Redirect Health. An incredible company. And the ability to help Redirect Health to grow 100x than what they are right now is profound. It's a profound change for the members of Redirect Health, for the employees of Redirect Health, for the market as a whole as an operating model and what healthcare should be like in the United States. And that's why I chose to work with them because of that reason, big mission and Dave being the founder.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. you know, David has created with Redirect Health is that he can fix your health cost. Year to year to year, he'd keep your health costs constant. And the interesting thing is that everybody talks about the healthcare system, but he's the first one who's introduced it at the blue-collar level. He's got the first national blue-collar healthcare system. For people who just ordinarily don't have healthcare, which is the vast majority of people who are making less than $20 an hour, they don't have a healthcare system. And I think it's revolutionary. And there's a big political shift in this direction going on right now. I think it's a tectonic shift, equal to some of the others in U.S. history, that there's a developing blue-collar, working-class political establishment that's starting to emerge. And it's been going on since probably the ‘80s. It's gradually been gathering and unifying. And I do a lot of political history. And the New Deal, which started in the 1930s, was a tectonic shift in the United States. And it was the growth of mass labor and industry, who had very few rights, they had very few benefits. And it emerged over about a 40-year period. So this has been emerging for about 40 years. And it's the next big thing. But the interesting thing, we're talking about community here. You don't have a community unless you have a common language. The first thing you have to do with a community, you have to start creating a unique common language for that community. That's why I put all the emphasis on tools. The language of Strategic Coach is 240 unique tools. And there's concepts that go along with them. I mean, sometimes it isn't a pure tool. Sometimes it's just a concept that we have. Always make sure your future is bigger than your past is a concept. No retirement is a concept. You don't retire. You just shift roles as you get bigger.
 
Lior Weinstein: That's probably why my favorite ventures are with Coach people. We share the basic values of the freedoms. We share the basic mental models on, on an Impact Filter. Gap and the Gain. So we know how to talk to each other. We have the interface. We have the verbal interface. We have the intellectual interface. I would say founder-led companies are Strategic Coach members that—
 
Steve Krein: So without getting into which companies in particular you're discussing, because I don't want you to have to go with confidentiality issues or anything like that, but like, what are you doing when you engage with the right fit customer or client, founder, that makes it like, what is your three-step process or your five-step process that you take them through? And if I was to imagine how you do that transformative work, what's your kind of outline and framework?
 
Lior Weinstein: So it depends on the direction of the engagement. So with, let's say with redirect health, Dave came to me and said, hey, I have a thing, you know, I have a thing I'm trying to solve versus the other example of, I reached out and I'm like, I think there's a thing. So those are two different modalities of work. When somebody comes to me with a problem, I really focus on the impact. I really try to imagine what's this universe that he's talking about. And once I understand it, then I back into what needs to be true for that thing to be true. What other things need to be true for that thing to be true. You know, some of the mental models about this, I like to look at the future. I think that's something entrepreneurs do organically. It's like these shadows of buildings that aren't there yet. And based on how the vision that they share, I'm trying to imagine what is this building that's casting this shadow that he's describing. And in practice, somebody comes in and says, here's what I'm doing. Here's what I'm trying to do. And usually first question is why? Because that gets probably, you know, easy 80% off the projects because then they say some why and I'm like, why, why is that important? Like, what are you trying to make more money or trying to exit? Are you trying to save money? Just understanding if they have clarity of thought and vision. And if they don't, in many cases, they end up dropping the thing. They realize, oh, you know what, this is not important. I actually just had it with another Coach member. He was describing, oh, I want to do this education course. And I want to create this AI that people come in and based on the answers, it automatically scores them. And I'm like, why? And he says, well, I want them to have the right diagnosis. I'm like, so how are you doing it right now? And he shows me this Excel spreadsheet that he's been using. I'm like, this seems fine. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, just use the spreadsheet. Like, why do you need AI? It's just like seven columns, you know, eight questions, not a big deal. You don't need complicated, you know, algorithms for this. Have you tried to just use the spreadsheet? He's like, no. I'm like, great, let's use the spreadsheet. And after that, tell me what's going on. So that's really the first kind of like a doctor, right? So I asked these questions to figure out what is the actual symptom that they're describing? Like they usually say one thing, but I'm trying to figure out, okay, what is the underlying reason? And then I've tried to really dig through the business impact or the personal impact, like what sometimes there comes in a project and they're trying to just reduce a lot of anxiety from their operating model, right? They don't have the Who Not How nailed down. They think technology can solve it or they think, you know, marketing or sales can solve it or whatever it is, but really trying to distill that. And then it just goes to auditing. And this is a technical thing that I haven't had a good system yet that I'm actually working on operationalizing right now. So there's an audit process. Once we get through that first layer of what are you trying to do? How big is this? Why do we care? Is this real? Is this a real thing? Or is this in your mind?
 
Steve Krein: It seems like there's a lot of room within those boundaries that you talk about. What's your Unique Ability within the context of that? Is it the technology? Is it the AI? Is it the relationships? Is it the funnel that you talked about earlier? I'm just trying to figure out what the unlike is. I could see how people could put you in different buckets, but where's the sweet spot of where you can apply your Unique Ability to help that growth happen?
 
Lior Weinstein: So I think there's capability, which is more horizontal, because I have capabilities in a few of these things, right? And I have something that a lot of consultants don't have from that perspective. Like, if you think about that, like, as a consulting event, you know, somebody's sharing their problems and somebody's trying to get answers to the problems. Consultants don't have an owner mindset. I have an owner mindset. I am an entrepreneur. So I care about the problem, but I put myself in the owner's shoes, right? And looking at it through the owner's eyes. And that's a big difference. Like you can have somebody that has the same level of skills that I have in the marketing concept or technology, whatever it is, or more, but they don't have the owner mindset. They're trying to figure out what's the check here. Can I get $10,000 from you? Can I get $25,000 from you? Can I get $250,000 from you from an engagement? And I don't even think about the money. I'm like, I'm trying to be empathetic to them. I'm trying to put myself into that. Like, I'm the CEO. I'm the one with the problem. What would I do? Right? Emotionally, how would I solve this? And then practically, how would I solve this? That means some people know Lior as a marketer. They don't know Lior as a technologist. And some people know Lior as a technologist. They don't know Lior as a marketer. And that's actually a very common thing. I can introduce some people and they're like, oh, I knew he was like techie, tech savvy, but I'm like, I have a few patents in technology, in AI. Like, this is not tech savvy, you know, versus the other side. I'm like, oh, like I ask him everything about tech. I'm like, you can help me on the sales side of the growth side of the marketing side. They have no clue. And that's actually very common because the reality is most of those engagement, they have a problem that they think they have. And because I'm looking at it from those dimensions, then maybe I tell them technology is not the solution. I just think you're missing on the marketing side, or I think you actually have a good marketing team. You don't have a good dashboard, but they don't have the right feedback loops. They're not responding to the right things.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay, so this is the wrap-up of Episode 1 of our FreeZone Frontier discussion with Steve Krein and our guest, Leora Weinstein. But stay tuned, because Episode 2 is going to come along.