The Power Of Shared Language To Grow Your Community

Dan Sullivan: Hi, everybody. It's Dan Sullivan here and I'm here with Steve Krein. And this is the next episode of Free Zone Frontier. And when we came on this morning, we had a question for me that I immediately said to myself, we got to do a podcast on this.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Well, you were telling me about your trip to London and your concert experience with Babs seeing the one and only 81-year-old elder to you, Barry Manilow.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it was an amazing experience. You know, I had heard the music. It just didn't zero in on me who Barry Manilow was all these years. First of all, it's really, really good music. I really like it now that I can attach the singer to the song. But what I was most impressed was just the overall show business presentation. I mean, from start to finish, it was just a flawless presentation. But the thing that we were talking about before we came on, Steve, is the amazing way in which he's included the audience as part of the presentation.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, yeah. As you were describing it, I was really struck by the notion of Barry Manilow and a lot of entertainers know how to engage with their community, whether it's the community in the venue that they're in, whether it's the global community. And we're watching that with Taylor Swift globally right now with her fans. I get to see it being the dad of three teenage daughters up front and close. But it's really this idea of what makes great community and what makes a great leader and facilitator of great community.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, in his case, I wouldn't be surprised if you really took a look at who was in the concert that night. He had people in that concert who had seen him 50 times, I'm pretty sure. There were families there where the mother had really queued in on Barry Manilow back in the ‘70s. Goes back ‘78. He pegged the date that when he first went public because he had been a songwriter for other singers up until then. And then he cut an album and it just went right to number one. He showed some videos of his actual first entertainment that he had done in London. And it was like a talk show that they brought him on. He had a band and he talked about it. And he was very, very young. I mean, he was in his he seemed to me almost in his teens, but he was older than that. And it was terrific. It was terrific. And then he did a neat thing. He had himself singing on the screen and then he went over to the piano and he matched it. So it sounded like a duet between it’s very, very young Barry Manilow and now 46 years later. And it was really, really great because his voice has dropped a bit, as happens. He had canceled the night before because the doctor said, you know, you can't go out there and sing. And he built that into his act. He says, well, here I am going to give it my best. But I could tell that just about everybody in the audience knew the words, you know, and he'd get them to sing along with me. The slow songs he sang and everybody sat down, but if it was going to be a fast song, everybody stood up and they were singing with him. And it's just marvelous that a man, you know, a performer has such a loyal following. But on the other hand, he's built that following into part of the act.
 
Steve Krein: I think a lot about this as it relates to our community, your community and being a part of any community, which is shared language, shared experiences, shared things that creates an environment where people feel more comfortable. And I was struck by your talking about how he really engaged with the community the entire time. And quite frankly, I was thinking about you and being in your coaching sessions for 25 plus years knowing that is it any different than you being able to talk about a Free Day, Focus Day, or Buffer Day, or being able to talk about one of your tools like Certainty/Uncertainty. Is it any different really?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I don't have the music, but I do have the words. Yeah, I've given this a lot of thought because the whole concept of the word community means shared language. One of the interesting things, it's a bit of a diversion, but one of the things I've noticed about English and why English as a language has taken over the world is that you can speak it any way you want and people will feel a connection with you. There's actually about 85 different versions of English where the English language has been affected by a local way of speaking. So it's almost like a patois. It's almost like its own form of English. But one of the things about English-speaking people as opposed to sharp contrast here, French-speaking people in Paris, if you try to speak French, they answer in English. You know, the attitude is you're not worthy to speak our language. So we've gone out of our way to accommodate you by speaking your, but don't try French on us. You know, English doesn't do that at all. I'm always noticed on the street in Toronto because we have like New York, we have a very multicultural population here. And somebody who's, they have a rough version of English, they'll come up to you and ask, and you'll give them any amount of time to sort of get what they're asking and then do your best to give an answer that gives them what they wanted to do. And I think that's why English has taken over the world is that any attempt that you make to speak the language, it's going to work.
 
Steve Krein: Well, you know, I think this idea of shared language, the idea of community, for me, it's front and center. We build these, we help Moonshot communities as part of our global community of entrepreneurs. And what I've noticed when you bring together entrepreneurs working, everyone's working on Alzheimer's disease or everyone's working on type one diabetes. There's an instant shared language, but there's also shared challenges that they all have a deep familiarity with. Some have been through something that others have not yet gone through. Some have been through it a number of times. There are shared opportunities. together to, you know, not only individually, but collectively. But there's also really a lot of shared networks that become instant capability. It's really fascinating to see the unlock when you bring a group of people together and really intentionally create that culture of sharing and collaboration. And that's why I think for this Free Zone podcast episode, I thought it'd be interesting to dive deeper into what makes a great community and I think with our Free Zone community as a perfect example of what's happened over, has it been six years now since we've been doing this?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, six and I checked the records, you've been 27 years in Coach, ‘97 I think is when your first workshop was. Yeah, and you know, what I'm trying to reflect, I was just thinking about this because we have quite a vast universe now of thinking tools that each have a name, you know, obviously some more well-known than others. I was trying to think, what am I actually doing here? Where every quarter for 35 years, every quarter I've come back with something new. First of all, the whole workshop just depended upon The Strategy Circle, which was our first tool. And then I would hear something, and then out pops Unique Ability, and out pops Free Days, Focus Days, and Buffer Days. And I'm just listening to what's being said, in the workshops, and then between workshops, quarterly separation, I'm saying, how do we get a handle on this? How do we create something, a structure or a process, that has a name to it, to see if this makes it easier for everybody to think through this experience in a common way, so everybody has sort of a shared approach to it. And some of them work, some of them they're a one-time try, and it doesn't really work. But I don't really, really care, because I think people are very forgiving that I'm making an attempt to structure an experience that's very important to them.
 
Steve Krein: It's interesting. So you're looking for shared experiences, challenges, issues that come up and giving them names to create the shared languages. How much do you think that shared language? You know, there's so many aspects of building community. There's curating the right people. There's creating the right environment. But you brought up shared language is one of the first ones. We were talking about Barry Manilow, shared lyrics, and people understand tunes and it probably brings them back to times in their life that they first heard the song or lived through that experience. But tell me about how you think about shared language and how intentional it is, even 35 years later now, in building the culture of the communities at Coach.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, it has to work. I mean, you come up with a name and I don't just come up with a concept. I have a structured sheet that's a diagram and it's usually five or six things you have to do on the sheet. And they're all questions that relate to the entrepreneur's experience. I brought a couple of new ones along with me today that maybe we can look at. The first one is You At Your 10x Best, which is a close relative to a Unique Ability concept. And I simply say, if you look back to the start of your career as an entrepreneur, what is the activity that you're doing when you can honestly say, I'm getting a 10 times result out of this activity? And I listed about five or six for mine, going back 35 years, and then I have them do that, and then I say, what are the outstanding examples of you using this particular activity that has really produced great results? Okay, so they're attaching an activity to actual results. And then I, at the bottom of the sheet, I asked, what are your three insights when you see the activities that always produce a great result, and then the actual great results you produce by doing this? And the whole room locks in. You can just feel there's a lock in here. And it's not everything that I do that produces a good result. And it's only when I do these type of activities do I actually get a great result. And it simplifies their thinking about their whole career.
 
Steve Krein: Well, you know, it's funny, as you were talking about the questions you ask, I was reflecting, as I mentioned to you and Gord at the beginning of the session, that I was listening to your podcast with Gord and Joe from Daily AI, Joe Stolte. And you were talking about one of your first experiences with ChatGPT or Perplexity, I forget what it was, which one of the tools, but you were saying, oh no, it was the one who said they could create a version of you, a GPT of Dan Sullivan. And you said, the problem is people don't ask you questions, you ask them questions.
 
Dan Sullivan: They want to respond to a question I'm asking to them because that really puts them into their own experience. If they're asking me a question, you know, about what I do, then they're kind of in my experience. And that doesn't really interest me that much. I mean, I'll tell them to the best that I can, I'll answer their question, but telling them about my experience really isn't as useful as me asking them a question about their experience. Questions are more powerful than answers.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Yeah, well, so you've created a culture in the community, a coach that has normalized your approach to doing worksheets, to breakouts, to reflecting on your relationships, qualifying them around aligned mindset and other things. And so I think it's interesting. In fact, I was looking through your worksheet on your 10 best and I was looking at each of these items are aspects of what makes your community, your community and the Strategic Coach community, unique to other communities you might be a part of. Obviously, the topics could be different in another community, but in particular, each of these, you know, we have seven things here, coaching successful entrepreneurs to think about their thinking, creating thinking tools, combining people's Unique Abilities into collaboration. This is the unique aspects of your community.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, it's a description of me and action. Okay. And as entrepreneurs, we've done a lot of different things as far as the Program goes. I mean, you've been an entrepreneur and have been doing various activities. But if you have that long look backward, you can really, really see some things that if I'm successful today, it's because I'm doing these things.
 
Steve Krein: Many years ago, I remember I'd come back from a Strategic Coach workshop and the next day I'd have my YPO forum and it was an instant shift to a different kind of community with a different group of entrepreneurs with a different purpose, quite frankly. For a number of years, I struggled between the two of the mindset shift that you'd have to do. And I was for many years comparing them to think about why am I in both and what is it about both that make me both excited, by the way, for different reasons about attending a YPO forum or a Strategic Coach session. And now it goes back probably 13, 14 years before I launched StartUp Health. But I realized, because I love entrepreneurs, I love entrepreneurial community, I love breakouts, I love forum and being in a discussion, a very intelligent yet deep conversation and deep perspective discussion with other entrepreneurs who are in charge of their own life, in charge of their own destiny, who have made decisions to be independent. And that's kind of what gave birth to even the idea of StartUp Health, which is, I love entrepreneurial community, but for me, it was about obviously mission-driven entrepreneurs working on solving the biggest health challenges in the world. And then when you go deeper in that community, you can see the unique discussions that are taking place around curing Alzheimer's disease or other things. And so it is me at my 10 best or 10x best actually revolves around entrepreneurial community. And I'm grounded by it for most of my adult life, immersed in it with different people in different ways for different reasons.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you know, and I too have other groups. I belong to Genius Network, and Joe has a particular language about how he goes about things and how he conducts Joe Polish. Peter Diamandis with A360, I belong to that community. And Richard Rossi has created DaVinci 50. I can just tell, I've only been at it for about a year and a half now, but I can tell there's a particular language, there's terms that Richard talks about, and I get enormous benefit from all three groups. Some of it forces me to think, well, how do I create my own tool that sort of connects my clients who are not in those groups, it sort of marinates them a little bit. If they join that other group, it would add to their entrepreneurial experience.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, I wonder how many entrepreneurs, and I don't know if you've ever surveyed your community, I haven't done this with mine, but how many people in your community are part of other entrepreneurial communities because they purely love the kind of engagement, the kind of people to be surrounded by, the other people who think about their thinking, but they're obviously very topically different, they're led differently and they serve different purposes. But I wonder how many people are in other types of entrepreneurial communities.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think it's the majority. If you're in one, you're in many. Right from the beginning, we had a lot of EO, you know, I actually worked. I actually had the people who were in charge of EO at that time. And they said, so what do you think about EO? I said, I think it's a bad business model. They have to quit when they're 40, I said. I said, they only get interesting when they're 40. Why would you do that? Why wouldn't you keep them forever? And then, of course, it became, it was YEO, then it became EEO. And it wasn't just me saying it, probably a lot of other people were saying it too. And then YPO, and there's others. Vern Harnish has a community, which is scaling up, basically scaling up. But I've only got so much time to go on to the communities that I belong to. But I'm always on the listen for people. A lot of them are Tony Robbins. They've been to Tony Robbins things five or six times, and there's very famous—he was probably one of the first ones I really came, who was it? His main thrust was that you should always create your company as if you were preparing it to sell your company. The e-myth, the e-myth. Gerber, Michael Gerber.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, Michael Gerber, yeah. I was like looking, I'm like, I got that on my shelf somewhere.
 
Dan Sullivan: That was back in the ‘70s, but it was very interesting. John Farrell, you remember John Farrell. He was our first great IP lawyer that really helped us think about protecting our intellectual property. And he called me one time and he said, that community is up for sale right now, the E-Myth community, would you be interested? And I said, no. I said, you know, I have clients who've done all the work, but I said, it would just be a lot of work. And that's not really how we grow. We don't grow by mergers and acquisitions. But I support any effort in the entrepreneurial community that gives people a sense of community.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. One of the byproducts of, I guess it was 20 years ago, maybe it was over 20 years ago, you started the Goal Cultivator program where you kind of gave, I think it was probably 16 different modules and workbooks that created almost like mini forums or book clubs that, you know, now I'm going 21 years. We came up to Toronto maybe five, six years ago, met with you, but we've been meeting religiously every quarter since 2001 or 2002, every quarter, we were all YPO-ers, but I had gone to my forum and said, you know, hey guys, let's do goals every quarter, you know, we'll got this goal, nobody was interested, interestingly enough. Me and another guy started our own. We just said, let's go pick out the 10 people in our chapter who we know are goal setters, who are achievers, who we want to be around. And here we are, there's seven of us still as part of the original group that have been meeting not only quarterly, but once a year we go away together. What's interesting is there's a couple of the modules that have stuck around setting up the repeat of what we cover every quarter. But the interesting thing is there's one topic that we're allowed to present on every quarter to get help on. And we go deep for about a half hour where we explain in 5 or 10 minutes what our issues are, what our issue is, I should say, that we want to get help on or feedback on. then the group kind of convenes and talks and asks questions and really helps kind of think through. But over 20 years of doing that every quarter with the same goal cultivator framework, that was just one, Dan, that stuck and was so powerful. But it created, I believe there's probably other goal cultivator communities like that, but the shared one there is incredible.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the interesting thing about it is we did that, you know, we watched it for a couple of years. We had another one, Always Increase Your Confidence, which was another module set like that. But we ended up competing with ourselves and our sales team would come across a possible prospect and they'd say, well, we're already doing Strategic Coach. We're doing the goal cultivator. And I said, I don't think that. I don't mind a group that's been doing it, but when I got thousands of people who would sign up for that and not come to ours, that doesn't do us really any good. But I'll tell you, I'm taking another crack at this. So the new book, which you'll get the download to it probably this week, which is I have the quarterly books and the quarterly book, this is book number 38, is called Everything Is Created Backwards, and we attach a tool to it. And the tool is the Triple Play. So you have a download and say, before you read this book, just download this tool. And I have a little coaching session where I take them through the tool. And I'm only choosing tools that are patented. We already have the patent on Triple Play. And I'm doing one now with Jeff Madoff, who you know very well. And it's called Casting, Not Hiring. And we talked about this on a previous podcast. We're going to include a tool called the 4x4. 4x4, that's been around for a while.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Did you refresh it or are you doing the same thing?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, it stands up. And actually I'm using Gord. It was the one that I… I remember that.
 
Steve Krein: Didn't you hire him with a 4x4?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, 4x4 was really crucial, you know, and it was spectacular from our standpoint. I think Gord would say the same thing. And what it is, it just tells you, I just want to put your mind at rest. This is what I'm going to expect of you every day as it relates to me. Okay, this is who you have to be with me. So Jeff didn't know the tool, so we had a podcast on Sunday, just this past Sunday, two days ago, and I took him through the 4x4, and he was just entranced by it because he's in the actual process. This week, they're signing the contract to take Personality, his soon-to-be-a-Broadway play, to London, to the West End of London.
 
Steve Krein: I remember him talking about that when it was just an idea. It's amazing what he's done with it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the company in London is very excited about that. They said the British audiences will really love this play and everything else, but he just is in the process of getting the casting going. And he's going to bring four real stalwarts that he had almost right from the beginning to London. And they're restricted how many Americans they can bring. All countries have these rules. Yeah, you can bring the play, but you've got to cast it up with mostly British talent. There's an enormous amount of talent in London. But it's interesting. And, you know, the thing is that our tools go out and work in the world in ways that I don't know about and I don't care, but don't go into business using my tools as a coaching company and competition with me, because we'll introduce you to our IP lawyer.
 
Steve Krein: So let's go back to your book that you're talking about that's coming out this week.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, this is called Everything Is Created Backward. And I got the idea from a guy who I think lives in New York City. His name is Mark Mills, and he's with an organization called the Manhattan Institute. And it's a very, very entrepreneurially-based research group. He was talking about the merger of AI with things already going on in the world. Okay. And he said, what you find is that first of all, there is never a technological breakthrough. That's just one thing. He says, if you look at history, going right back to the middle of the 19th century, let's say the telegraph, the railroads, they're always a combination of a whole bunch of technologies that already exist, and usually there's three of them. There's three of them. And he says, this is operating over here, this is operating over here, this is operating over here, and they're all successful, but if you take three of them and put them together in a new form, all of a sudden it becomes a breakthrough. I have Perplexity as my go-to AI program, and I asked Perplexity, can you give me the examples of 10 technologies where it was a combination of three things, and 15 seconds later, they had them. It included the first car, electricity. I mean, these are major, major world-changing technologies.
 
Steve Krein: Of the 10, did many of them surprise you out of curiosity?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the first time I saw the list, it surprised me. And it gave me the idea that the technology isn't about thinking up brand new things in the future that haven't been tried. It's actually taking things that already work and putting it into a new form. And one of the examples I use is Steve Jobs with iTunes. Yeah. The MP3 player already was there. That's what you started with, the MP3 player. And Sony had the market. I mean, Sony was the 800-pound gorilla in that. The internet already existed. But Napster, the first try at downloading music and selling them, I don't know if they sold it. It wasn't a successful company, I think, basically, because they were stealing, which is not a good business model. And then the other thing is he already had on the operating system a little app called iTunes where people could download on their Apple platform and songs. And so he said, why don't we just put all these three together? And that way, if you hear a song, you can just buy the song. You don't have to buy 11 other songs like you have to do with a go to the record store. I want this one, they says, you got to buy 11 others with it. He just put that together and Apple, a computer company within two years after he introduced the iTunes internet download, they were the biggest music distributor in the world. But it just shows you that just thinking up new things, I mean, there's some strange ideas in the technological world, you know. I had a laugh when Peter says, oh, Elon Musk has created the Boring Company. It just creates fast rail transport underneath the city. And I was listening to it and I said, oh, I think there might be some problems there. And he says, why? And I says, well, in the United States, if you own land on the top, you own every piece of property underneath. So it's a proper name for the company, the boring company, because you're going to be in a lot of boring meetings. And they gave it up. They gave it up just in the past six months. You know, it's just.
 
Steve Krein: So what's the book called again?
 
Dan Sullivan: It's called Everything Is Created Backwards.
 
Steve Krein: Everything Is Created Backwards. And the premise is what you do in the three by three, really a nine by nine, because you do your threes and then your threes and then your threes. Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the case of the reader, I ask him to take five different areas of experience and do five Triple Plays. And I just start off with a simple, the two level Triple Play. You have three things. Let's call them A, B, and C. And you say, how does A and B connect? And then you put a connection there. And then you do B and C and C and A. And that's how we started off. I didn't have three levels when we started off. And people said, oh my, I'm seeing these experiences totally differently. And I said, well, you just created something new. You took three experiences, and I started them off with three unhappy experiences. And just do A plus B, B plus C, C plus A. And how do you feel now about those three experiences? And people always say, oh, I really learned something here. I have unhappy experiences when I do this. And I said, well, now you've created something for the future. You've taken past experiences, which weren't doing you any good because they were unhappy. And now you've created a new lesson and new course of action out of your past experience. I think you can do this with any three experiences. But the big thing is a download and we get their information. So everybody who uses it, we get their information and it's patented. You know, don't be too ambitious with my material.
 
Steve Krein: Right. You mentioned you're going to try it again, Go Cultivator versus this. You're saying just trying to get people to use your tools outside of Coach like Go Cultivator was.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, we're attracting interest. I mean, we're getting people engaged with Strategic Coach experiences, but I'm not giving them a whole program. I'm just giving them a tool.
 
Steve Krein: Well, I noticed you said in I'm trying to think of which episode of your podcast you were talking about how much more educated your prospects are having read either one of your three big books or even your quarterly books than they were 10 years ago because they're kind of been not only educated, but kind of fermenting, if you will, around all of your content. And then they show up and they're very familiar with it. Can you talk a little bit about that from a marketing standpoint?
 
Dan Sullivan: And this is feedback both from our sales team, which we call Membership Advisors. They bring new members in and then the Program Advisors, who are the in-between workshop advisors. And they don't tell people about their business, but they tell them how to use the Coach tools in their business. But we've just noticed, and this is the books that we created with Ben Hardy. Okay, so we had a collaboration. It was a collaboration between Hay House Publishers and Ben and Strategic Coach. You know, we're around 750,000 of these books, all three of them. And they're selling today like they sold the first week they were out. You know, every week getting 2- or 3,000 sales. I'm just going on the evidence of our salespeople. They said there's been an abrupt change in how interested people are, but already knowledgeable about Coach before they get in contact with us. You know, you're trying to grow your community. I mean, there's dollars that come along with each new person that signs up.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. So the funnel opens up. but it's not just a funnel of uneducated leads.
 
Dan Sullivan: The big thing is that, yeah, I heard so-and-so is in Coach. Tell me about it. You know, that's sort of the thing. So tell me what your coach can do for me, what your coaching workshops can do for me. Well, that's one kind of conversation. The other conversation is, I've read all three books and boy, this is for me. So can you tell me how I get engaged? Well, that's a different kind of sale. And then we're the buyer and we put them through the R-Factor Question about what they want to achieve over the next three years. We check out how much money they're making and everything like that. And now we're giving them something. It's called a Discovery Call. And then we do intros where I will do a Zoom. About every quarter I do a big Zoom, I'll get 200 people. I take them through a couple more tools. We just had one two weeks ago and we've already got 25 signups. But in every case, they had done two things. They were familiar because of the books or the podcasts. And the other thing is they've done the R-Factor Question before they're even invited. Okay.
 
Steve Krein: So yeah, they're marinated, that's on the entry point. How are they if you've looked at all as members of the community and as clients once they're in if they've been developing the muscles, if you will, and working out before they got in and now they come in? Are they any different in terms of their trajectory through the different programs or their activity level?
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't have those numbers in front of me, but we pay attention to the longevity of clients. But the other thing is that once they're in the program, they start buying the books to send to other people. You want your existing clients to be part of your marketing team.
 
Steve Krein: Yep. Good community. Going back to Barry Manilow, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. No, I was mentioning with Barry Manilow, there were grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who came as a team. And so one of them started off in the 1970s, another one picked it up in the ‘90s, and now they're picking it up 20 years later. And it's a bit like we had Kathy Ireland as our feature speaker at CoachCon in Nashville. She's got one of the most remarkable business models I've ever seen. And she's been at it for 28 years. She was a model, a very famous model. But after 15 years at age 32, she packed it in and she said, I'm an entrepreneur. I, you know, my looks can only carry me so far. And so what she's done, she's got a model. And it's all geared to women. It's all geared to women. And she picks them up at 15 or 16 years old. And she has Barry Manilow furnishings for your room, you know, as you're living with your parents and you have it. And then she catches them when they think about getting married. She has marriage centers and then equipping your first home. And then you're having children. So you have Kathy Ireland, and this is all licensing on her part. She finds really great products, and then they have a Kathy Ireland license. So it's part of the Kathy Ireland, and she's got thousands, thousands of products, thousands of experiences, training experiences. And her model is 15 to 85, but all women. She's going after women. And she says, I've met great grandchildren who, you know, it's four generations in a family and they like being part of the Kathy Ireland universe. She's a terrific person.
 
Steve Krein: I'm assuming she collaborates on all those things she licenses and doesn't create all that stuff herself.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, and then she's got high standards of what qualifies and she checks them out just what kind of role the communities are playing in the community outside of them. What do they invest in as far as causes? And she's got her set and they have a grading system of those who are involved. Then the other thing is that there are big firms that invest in her. So she's part of the Berkshire Hathaway investment community, Kathy Ireland.
 
Steve Krein: They bought her?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, they bought part of it. They bought part of it.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Yeah. How fascinating.
 
Dan Sullivan: But she's the majority owner. You know, I tell people, you know, when you get involved in investors, there's two numbers that really matter. One of them is called 51%. The other one's called 49%. And I said, if you have 51%, it's the same as a hundred percent. If you have 49%, it's the same as zero. Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Well, Dan, great conversation around community. I want to, got to jump on and do another episode, but what was your biggest takeaway from this conversation around both shared community, but the characteristics of community, anything else that came up?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you know, anything I learn, I say, what's the new, what's the new thinking tool I just got. And I think I'll put out an exercise called building community. You'll probably see it. I'll mention your name as the inspiration for this, but the patent bonds to us.
 
Steve Krein: We've all been doing community a long time, but I love the idea of digging into the characteristics of what already successful people are doing to get even more successful and surround themselves with people like them. But I think the underpinning of what you shared with the Barry Manilow example of everybody singing the songs together in that room and how you didn't know very much about, you didn't think you knew a lot about him or knew his songs, but you did, because they probably had been around. And even tunes that, I always think of like James Taylor, there's certain entertainers where you already know all of their songs, even though you don't realize you know all of their songs.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, you've got a wonderful brand StartUp Health. Okay. First of all, it's a great name because it explains what the activity is and who the members are. But the other thing is there's a whole culture. There's a whole language basis for StartUp Health. So it gives me an idea. Another possible tool was creating your own language, you know, because I think language is really crucial. The other thing, just if I can drop these two other ideas for future podcasts, is having coached for 50 years now, I've identified one thing that is the root cause of almost all bad decisions, bad involvements that entrepreneurs get, and that's loneliness. They're just lonely. They're way beyond what their family ever achieved before. They're way beyond friends that they grew up with. They've gone way beyond and they're very lonely. Who do I talk to about what's happening right now to me as an entrepreneur? Okay. And I think what the community approach that you introduced as the topic for our podcast here is that you're creating a community so that very ambitious, talented, successful entrepreneurs can have a sense of community with other people who are also experiencing both the breakthroughs and the breakdowns that they're experiencing.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. There's an interesting emotional part of it that is nothing to do with business or maybe it's just like literally the emotional connection when you're in a trusted environment is extraordinary.
 
Dan Sullivan: Who do you talk to, you know? So I mean, first of all, it's a small percentage of the population that we're talking about here. So, you know, I read articles, you know, AI is going to turn everybody into an entrepreneur. And I said, no, no, it's not. Electricity didn't turn everybody into an entrepreneur. I don't think AI is. And I said, first of all, you can spot them early. And more and more, I'm convinced that you can see something that happens about eight years old. One kid goes this way and everybody goes that way. You know, money becomes more important than hanging out with the gang because they want independence and doesn't take long as a human being to know that money gives you independence.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, that's a good topic for the next episode. Okay, I actually like that. Well, Dan, always a pleasure. Always enjoy the conversation and look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks for the partnership.