The end of a year and the beginning of another is a great time to reflect and plan. Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein discuss effective ways entrepreneurs can look back on what’s happened and look ahead to what they want to accomplish, sharing insights from their own experiences running successful businesses. Highlights: A lot of people feel uncomfortable talking about long-term planning. You can use the new year to reflect on the progress you've made over the last 12 months and what you need to do over the next 12 months while fitting it into the context of what your long-term mission is. You can reuse your past any way you want. It’s much easier to think about 25 years as 100 quarters: a quarter is enough time to get stuff done, but not so long that you’ll lose your way. No one can predict the future. It’s all just guesses and bets. Consistency over time in your past is crucial for building your future. For the most part, entrepreneurs starting a new business don't have any structure or process that works. There's a quick deviation from values sometimes when you're trying to just get financial return. The more you plan backwards from the future, the better you get at it. Resources: 10x Is Easier Than 2x  by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy Learn more about Steve Krein and StartUp HealthThe Strategic Coach® ProgramLearn more about Unique Ability® 

No matter how long a company has been around, it’s vital that everyone is clear on and maintains their core values. Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein explain why this is so important, discuss why all team members need to be aligned, and share some of their own companies’ core values. Highlights: In the U.S., core values used to be structured into the environment you lived in. Reminding team members of the company’s specific purpose can help avoid distraction. The value reinforcement of a company today is 10 times more important than it was in the 1950s. You either do or don’t have passion for, have conviction for, and are inspired by a mission. People who aren’t aligned with a company’s mission wreak havoc during times when things shift. Company leaders need to represent the values they want their team members to have. Every entrepreneur is in the continual process of hiring or removing wrong-fit people. In a period of high flux, you go to the organizing structure that actually works.  Resources: Everyone And Everything Grows by Dan Sullivan Unique Ability® The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time Management “Geometry” For Staying Cool & Calm by Dan Sullivan Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Strategic Coach® is approaching its 50th anniversary, and Coach co-founder Dan Sullivan is coming up on 50 years of coaching entrepreneurs. In this episode, Steve Krein and Dan share some of the significant changes to entrepreneurism that have happened over the past 50 years and what the future holds.  Highlights: Steve and Dan discuss what is currently the number one resource on the planet If you look at cultural heroes in the business world and American life itself, they’re the great entrepreneurs. The original definition of an entrepreneur is someone who takes resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. If you don’t have an appreciation for what it means to be an entrepreneur, it can look intimidating and mysterious. Government, corporate, and large non-profit bureaucracies see unpredictably innovative entrepreneurs as their main enemy. Big breakthroughs in technology empower entrepreneurs, not large bureaucracies. When single individuals and small groups create something that goes viral in the marketplace, it upsets everything. Most of the obstacles to becoming an entrepreneur that existed 50 years ago have been removed.  Resources: The Strategic Coach® Signature Program The Impact Filter™ tool Article: The Four Freedoms That Motivate Successful Entrepreneurs Learn more about Steve Krein and StartUp Health My Plan For Living To 156  by Dan Sullivan

Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein continue their discussion about the power of thinking tools and how they can help entrepreneurs achieve their goals. They explore the importance of tension, shortcuts, and tools in simplifying complex problems and generating new opportunities for yourself, your team, and your clients. Highlights: Strategic Coach® began with The Strategy Circle®, the primordial entrepreneurial thinking tool.All Strategic Coach tools share the VOTA structure: Vision, Obstacles, Transformation, Action.By combining opposing thoughts, entrepreneurs can generate new ideas and surprising insights.Tools are shortcuts to help people do things faster and more efficiently.The best tools, Dan feels, are axiomatic, like the self-evident truths that Euclid established for geometry.All sales conversations around Strategic Coach begin with a conversation about the prospect’s D.O.S.® (Dangers, Opportunities, Strengths).Dan discusses his latest book, which is about the unique culture within the Strategic Coach team, and uses the process of this book’s creation as an example of that teamwork.The speed and decisiveness of entrepreneurs require coaching and tools that can keep up with their fast-paced thinking and decision making.Individuals coming to entrepreneurship from a scientific or academic background may be shocked by the speed at which things happen in the business world. Resources:StartUp HealthVideo: How To Transform A Negative ExperienceThe Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time ManagementYour Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan SullivanThe Impact Filter

How do you find great people to join your organization? How do you train them, coach them, and guide them? The answer lies in what makes Strategic Coach® different from all other companies. In this first episode of a two-part series, Steven Krein and Dan Sullivan share the thinking tool culture of Strategic Coach, how it has transformed Steven’s StartUp Health, and how you can use it to upgrade any organization you choose. Highlights: Strategic Coach team members use the same tools as our members do. Thinking tools are at the core of StartUp Health’s value creation and scalability. Entrepreneurs can’t have a more confident future until they have a more confident past. Your past experience is your property, so you can do anything you want with it. Your past is there for learning. You’re always either on the winning team or the learning team. Thinking tools are structured forms, either digital or on paper. You can’t change past events, but you can change your interpretation of them. Never fall in love with your tools until the check writers fall in love with your tools. Resources: StartUp Health Video: How To Transform A Negative Experience The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time Management Your Life As A Strategy Circle by Dan Sullivan The Impact Filter

Most entrepreneurs believe they have to be in constant competition. But there’s a much more enjoyable way to live your entrepreneurial life to achieve bigger and better results: you can enter a zone of collaboration with like-minded people that’s entirely free of competition. Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein explain how to start. Hint: it’s all about simplifying before multiplying. Highlights: Finding collaborators who think the same way as you do is one of the most important activities an entrepreneur can undertake. Don’t fall in love with an idea until customers fall in love with it. You can’t have simplicity in your entrepreneurial life and complexity in other areas because the complications will catch up with you. You need both simplification and multiplication to constantly grow. Most people are too close to cash flow urgency to be able to even think about collaborating. Once you’re in a competition-free zone, you can continually expand it for the rest of your career. Uber and Airbnb started off as Free Zone Frontiers, but got really complicated because they got a lot of headwind from who they were disrupting. Apple has been the best company at maintaining the quality of “Free Zone Frontiering.” There are people who don’t see Amazon as a competitor, but as a capability. If you don’t know up front what success in a project looks like, it’s dead on arrival. Things that are currently underestimated or not even known are going to become entrepreneur capabilities in the next decade or two. Technology companies are really hard-pressed to keep up with what people actually want to do. If you create a disruption, you aren’t responsible for it causing a loss for someone else. Resources: Simplifier-Multiplier Collaboration by Dan Sullivan Free Zone Frontier by Dan Sullivan The Impact Filter™ tool Total Cash Confidence by Dan Sullivan 

In this podcast, the hosts discuss the accelerating innovations in age reversal, challenging societal expectations of retirement, advancements in medical research and cell transformation, collaboration and moonshot thinking for age reversal, and the significance of genuine partners and using your best decade as a thinking tool.

A lot of entrepreneurs are scared right now, while others are excited, feeling like this is the best time to be innovating and creating value. Why these opposing mindsets? In this episode, Dan Sullivan and Steven Krein explain why some people are experiencing anxiety about the future while others are staying cool and calm.  Highlights: Some people see “scary times” as opportunities. The people who we expect to be in charge are responding not only to an event, but to other people’s responses. The majority of people are less prepared now for something different to happen. Strategies, tools, and concepts have prepared Strategic Coach® clients to not be shaken by whatever happens. If your confidence comes from inside yourself, you can find a way to be confident in any situation. When people feel uncertain, they hold onto their money. Entrepreneurs should have enough security to go one or two quarters without worrying about cash flow. In uncertain times, it’s your job to keep your team members’ confidence up every day. Make sure you come out of uncertain times with the same team power you went into it with. When your clients are uncertain about their futures, your job is to enable them to create a new future for themselves. Everyone is 100% responsible for their own feelings. If you’re immersed in just getting your job done, it’s easy to ignore what’s going on in the outside world.  Resources: StartUp Health The Dan Sullivan Question by Dan Sullivan “Geometry” For Staying Cool & Calm by Dan Sullivan The Strategic Coach® Signature Program Scary Times Success Manual  by Dan Sullivan The Positive Focus® Thinking About Your Thinking by Dan Sullivan My Plan For Living To 156 by Dan Sullivan Capitalism—And Everything Else  by Dan Sullivan

Dan Sullivan and Steven Krein discuss Dan’s latest quarterly book, Capitalism—And Everything Else, and explain what capitalism really means, why many people believe they don’t like it, why it’s misunderstood, and its five growth stages.  Highlights: Some people incorrectly approach capitalism as a rival to ideologies like communism and fascism. Capitalism isn’t in competition with anything. Capitalism involves capitalizing on your own talent and time, your production, your abilities, your profitability, and on living in a world of greater prosperity. Communism, feudalism, fascism, and Nazism aren’t methodologies, they’re ideologies. If you multiply the impact of your uniqueness over a span of years, you’ll have done it through the methods of capitalism. There’s a deep emotional element to success from capitalistic activities such as building a business and entrepreneurship. Systems that are anti-capitalist in their ideologies invariably use capitalist methods to achieve success. Wherever capitalist methodology is followed, things improve. Some people are bothered by capitalist methodology because it demands extraordinary individual accountability. Philanthropic efforts often fall flat because they don’t operate within a capitalistic framework.  Resources: Capitalism—And Everything Else by Dan Sullivan Thinking About Your Thinking by Dan Sullivan The Strategic Coach Program Steven Krein and StartUp Health 

Ever wondered what the success formula is for top entrepreneurs? In this episode, Dan Sullivan and Steve Krein discuss the “25-Year Transformation” and how it can benefit entrepreneurs by helping them prioritize their biggest goals and measure progress every quarter. They explain how having a quarterly rhythm can be transformational, and provide insights into how to achieve long-term goals, adapt to advancements in technology and crises in the marketplace, and maintain a transformational mindset.Highlights: Measuring your past progress and planning out the next quarter, every quarter, helps simplify and multiply your efforts.This kind of self-accountability and measurement allows for compounding results.Growth entrepreneurs must have a quarterly reflection to achieve their goals.Entrepreneurs who treat every quarter in business as a 90-day period of progress, recalibrating and staying committed to their goals, are much more likely to weather market disruptions (such as a global pandemic) and will fare better in the long run.Quarterly review and recalibration are essential for achieving not only professional goals, but personal ones as well, and help you build meaningful relationships.Your social circle can either support or obstruct your goals. Curate it regularly.Avoid making major decisions on Friday afternoons. Everything feels much bigger and scarier when you’re tired from the week, whereas you have a fresh perspective and more energy at the start of the week.To reach your quarterly goals, you must commit to weekly improvements.Resources: StartUp HealthThe Strategic Coach® ProgramFree Zone Frontier by Dan Sullivan10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Ben HardyUnique Ability®The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Time Management (Free Days™)