The Greater Game: Chapter 6 – Greater Teamwork

John Bowen: Well, welcome. We are here at podcast six, and this is all about Greater Teamwork, the Greater Teamwork Multiplier. And it's all about moving from managing people, which, Dan, I don't know many entrepreneurs who like managing people, but multiplying genius, they do love. I love the leading and the unique abilities. And I want you to set the stage here because we're in stage three, the collaboration, multiplication, and your team is critical in this.
 
Dan Sullivan: John, I've always been a big fan of teamwork. One is that in my own family, I'm the fifth child. The one thing about being a fifth child in a family is you know you're not number one, you're not number two, you're not number three, and you're not number four. So all the conventional ways you can distinguish yourself in the family are already used up before. And what I discovered very early on a farm in northern Ohio in the 1940s and 1950s is the best way to making a happy family life and happy childhood is just notice where you could be useful to other people. And I think the secret to teamwork is that, let's say you have ten people, but each of the ten people, their main motivation is to be as useful as they can to the other nine. Fortunately, we have a secret to that. I mean, this is the basis of our Strategic Coach coaching program. We call it Unique Ability, that everybody has a Unique Ability where they're useful in a completely different way. And if they're alert and they're curious and they're responsive and they're resourceful, they can create a tremendous exponential power out of just the people that they're actually working with. But one of the key factors is that entrepreneurs have the tendency to be the only hero in their company, and then they've got a lot of support team around them that allow the entrepreneur to be a hero. But what we're talking about in The Greater Game is that everybody gets to be a hero in different ways, in different situations.
 
John Bowen: We see so often in the book, we talk about as a founder dependency and that at some point we're all going to realize the value of our businesses, whether we sell it, you know, at what point or other, and founder dependency is one of the lowest valuations you're going to get out there. And having the right people on the bus, Jim Collins line, is so important. But so many of us as entrepreneurs, and I know I've made the mistake, Dan, that I didn't really take advantage in releasing the opportunity for my team, what they're capable of. And when you start doing that, and you only bring in people who are not looking for you to lead from a standpoint of, you know, micromanagement where they're just executing on your vision and you're doing, you know, you're really an operator in our term. You're optimizing the business, just, but you, now you're going ahead. And what you've done is you're bringing in these self-managed people. I mean, I, I love getting up every morning and see what was created by my team. I'm blown away. We're recording this on Memorial Day, and Dan and I have got busy schedules and Free Days and all that. But one of my top people just sent me something that they did over the holiday weekend that is going to change the lives of our clients. And I didn't know anything about it, type thing. This is where the power is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and John, I just want you, because of all the entrepreneurs that I know, Strategic Coach, you've been the lead dog in showing yourself, but showing other people what an entrepreneur can do with AI. I just have an important question about that. One of the things I find about AI, because I work with it every day, when I talk to my team members, we have about 120, and Strategic Coach, they're all doing something different with it. So I think that AI doesn't make people into conformists; it actually makes them into unique creators. Because when AI interacts with a different human brain, different things happen as a result of it.
 
John Bowen: You know, one of the things you and I both talk about is AI as a teammate. I mean, I love having tremendous AI resources, and then we have our own proprietary one. But, you know, I use it for strategy, for vision. I feel like I have a McKinsey consultant sitting on one side, Bane on the other, and in case I need it, I got a Boston consulting guy behind me and I can do things that I would have in the past paid $30,000 to $100,000 outside consultants. My team created, you know, we have Kami and we have Sammy, I haven't even seen these things, but they're taking all the sales conversations, Sammy, and it, it does some amazing things and make sure we're serving our clients. We have Kami that records all we'll record over 10,000 coaching conversations this year. But none of that I did, this is my team doing, and you know, many of the things they've done, I would have never thought of because they're approaching it a different way. They're doing a different part of the business. And this is why, you know, Dan, you and I talk about 100x versus 2x, because if you could unleash the team, amazing things happen.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's not only just teamwork with your own team, it's that they're interacting with other people now in the technological world. They're forming their own groups with other people who are experimenting with, you know, ways of putting together commercials in two minutes. And they're learning themselves. So it's an expanding network of interest and alertness that's going out from your own team. But the big thing is you have to make a decision. I'm not the star and the hero anymore, okay. It was necessary for me to be so. It was necessary for all the years that we were creating a foothold in the marketplace. We had great clients and everything like that. But at a certain point, it's not about you anymore. You get released from all the obligations and other tasks that you have to do to go back and say, this is what I'm really unique at. But you're also unique at this, and you're unique at this. And I think why our project here with The Greater Game is interesting, John, in a previous podcast, you said, I can't imagine two people who created coaching companies getting together and actually creating something much bigger than anything that they've done on their own inside their own community.
 
John Bowen: And I'll hold up the book this time, Dan, The Greater Game. You know, one of the things authors do is they want to have the book handy. But, you know, this is something that we're both passionate about, entrepreneurs. I'm on the financial advisor wealth management side, and I love having super successful entrepreneurs that are financial advisors that I have a privilege of working with, but their best clients are entrepreneurs. You know, I sit in, and since 2009, I've been in Strategic Coach, and I sit in your Free Zone collaboration, and there's so many entrepreneurs that are so passionate about delivering value and the lessons learned and the ability to collaborate, but also sitting down and talking with them about what they're doing with their team. And it's exciting.
 
I do want to share just a statistic real quick. I can't help it from our research. But again, this is the foundational research for the book. It was a little over a thousand successful entrepreneurs. And I want to point out, this isn't that easy to do. You know, of the 5.4, only 38.2 percent said they had a truly Self-Managing Company. And when we look at the 94.6—so remember, everybody's successful, 5 million or more net worth as entrepreneurs, all the way up to 150 million—it was only 12.7. So this is hard. But one of the things that I like, Mike, I met through you, Dan. And Mike, we've talked about because he's starting another business in the nuclear side. But he's taking his family business, just an amazing, and I didn't know the numbers. And when we started going ahead and looking at it, this is where the power of having the right team and structuring. I mean, he was a 60 million dollar company. He went ahead and 600 employees, 80 hour weeks, constant resign as 180 people resigning. He built a machine that he hated. It consumed his life.
 
And today, now he's really multiplying the geniuses. And he's done it really well. And it's from 60 to 120 million. He's now at 250 employees. His net margins went from 15 to 24. And the valuation, and I think this is one of the most important for entrepreneurs, the market selling him is doing really well. Went from 3x, nobody really wanted the business, to now 8x. And he's on his way to 15x. But pull this together, because this Unique Ability is one of the foundations of Strategic Coach. We've got all these teammates that we're not letting play with us well.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I think part of it is just what's happened over the last 50 years with technology. There's an interesting number that I track, and that is the number of actual corporations that there are. So when you have a business, you have to be incorporated. You may be one person, but you're a corporation. You may be one million, and you're a corporation. Ten years ago, the average number of employees that were in a corporation were 24, and now it's 12. But the number of corporations has exploded. And what's more interesting than the dashboard that we have—your research company created a dashboard that is very central to what we're doing with The Greater Game here. It's showing that the more you allow each individual in your team to be uniquely in their own capability, and they're supported by technology, that's where the 10x growth comes from. That's where the 100x growth comes from. And you have to realize the way that the technology is today is going to seem very, very old a year from now, even a couple of weeks ago, it feels like.
 
John Bowen: And one thing I should have mentioned on Mike, too, is really important. He went from 600 to 250. He didn't fire everybody. He had a huge attrition. So it was a combination of the attrition and the role redesign that really created that and drove it. And, you know, most founders, we sell our, we get to the, we hate our business and then we sell it so somebody else can fix it and capture all that value.
 
Dan Sullivan: What's interesting is Mike is in the manufacturing business. The vast majority of entrepreneurs are in service businesses, but Mike is in manufacturing. And with the need for greater and greater energy, the one thing that the emergence of AI has proven is that we don't have enough energy on the planet to supply the growth of the AI that everybody's going to want. Mike knows how to manufacture all the components of that AI. So he's like a shark at a beach party right now because everybody wants his advice now. Everybody can think about how we get greater energy. He can actually manufacture the greater energies. So he's doing two things at once. He's making his whole organization more Unique Ability times Unique Ability times Unique Ability Teamwork, and at the same time, the technology is multiplying the greater productivity that they're doing just out of greater teamwork. Read the backstory in the book. Talk a little bit about the dashboard, because we're creating a technology here that's an interactive research-based technology.
 
John Bowen: And we're doing this for all of us. One of the things, you come in, you've already won. Anybody reading this book, you've already won. It's now, though, how can we play a greater game? And we want to take the lessons from other entrepreneurs who have done it. How can we make it happen? And just real quick, you know, again, we have a series of questions. Take about 15 minutes to go through. There's 10 multipliers. We're going to ask you about questions on each. All you got to do is slide. And, you know, this is for you. So definitely be really clear on where you think you are now. You can always come back. I'm going to open up a demo account. And this allows you to have the 25-year vision. You can have your profile. You look at, we call it the GMI Index Of Growth, multiplier index. We've got our 10 indexes here, multipliers. But these are each of the stages that you go through. And you can see how you're doing relative on that. And then you can come down.
 
Also, one of the biggest things we have is security. As we're building this foundation, kind of proof of concept, we've got to have the vision, we've got to have the security. And where are you financially? Very, very important. If you come in, you can change at any time any of these. This is where you can dive in and we have, what are the three biggest opportunities? You can see right now for this one is teamwork multiplier, recommended actions, VFO. One of the things that we find, so many entrepreneurs, things are siloed. In our research, most recent one we did of 3,108 entrepreneurs, very successful, 59.2 percent wanted to change their financial advisor because they wanted someone that was going to offer a more coordinated against—and this is eight pillars you can dive in more and learn, but if you want a second opinion to see how you're doing that's great.
 
Also one of the things that's been very powerful Dan for me is this Strategic Coach acceleration, and you can have a conversation here on the framework, and again, go in—I love the multiplier effect to see where you stand right now. And then we dive into research on where you are, you, how you compare against your peers, whatever revenue side you said you were, where you are against the book. And then we're studying over 500 entrepreneurs every month. And as we do this, we're going to keep on adding more features. Next week, we're putting in the entrepreneur pulse. So you'll be able to see the confidence of entrepreneurs and what's changing and why. And then we're going to be building in stories as well. So we're building our community so that you can have a great team. It's all teamwork. It is.
 
I'd love to just touch on one more entrepreneur. I think we have 26 or so. I forgot the number of entrepreneurs in the book now, but I'm going to put up the slide here on Kent. Yeah, I don't know Kent as well. I know Mike very well, but maybe you could tell just a little bit about Kent in the background. Because, I mean, one of the things I love, everybody thinks this is, you know, okay, well, I'm going to grind it out. No, you don't have to grind it out. I mean, that's one of the things that's so important with Strategic Coach is going from 14 to 100, you know, why he's building an amazing business.
 
Dan Sullivan: This is what I love. Yeah, well, Kent's been in Strategic Coach now, as much as I can figure, it's been about 10, 12 years. He's just one of those people that wherever you offer the possibility of having a new capability and creating teamwork, he just takes it. And one of the ways we prove teamwork, and this is central to our Strategic Coach Program, is that in order to be more productive as the entrepreneur and to have great teamwork around you, you have to take a lot more free time. Because you only know you have a team when you're not there.
 
John Bowen: Yeah. Now, if you're available for everything and everything runs through you, then you have an ineffective team.
 
Dan Sullivan: We have a whole teamwork program that supports the entrepreneur and Strategic Coach. And we do surveys among the team members. And one of the things, what are your two biggest wishes about your entrepreneur? The two things is we wish our entrepreneur made a lot more money because it guarantees our jobs. And we wish the entrepreneur took a lot more Free Days so we can actually get the work done.
 
John Bowen: I have a very much a self-managed team, but I am also the strategic visionary guy. And, you know, when I go to a conference, I'm traveling three times in June and one going to CoachCon. It takes up pretty close to a week with all the travel and everything else. And, you know, my team loves that. They love, not only do you go out and they're knocking off priorities and so on. And I think, you know, this vision of self-manage, so many people don't understand it, Dan, because the freeing effect, I mean, you know, Ken going from 14 days to 100 is just huge, but also being much more successful and creating more value. And your team wanting you to do that, too. Maybe just bring this all together, Dan, because this is such an important one that too many entrepreneurs get wrong.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I think that the big thing here is that when you're starting as an entrepreneur, and everybody who's watching our podcast here can remember the first days. And the first days are tough. They're very tough. And the thing is that you have to do everything on your own because you don't have the cash to pay for team members. You don't even call them team members. You're just like secretaries and everything like that. There are so many things that you have to do that it becomes a bit hardwired. And you say, well, I'm the one who has to do that. But actually, your Unique Ability is that you take the risk on new things. You're the person who other people said, you're just crazy to do this. Why don't you get a good job and don't worry about this? But you have the ability to take the risk to create something new. And that's where your Unique Ability is. Everything else that's new to support and make the new thing normal requires teamwork. You've now done that. You're very successful. Now you have to jump to the next level because AI has entered the picture right now. And AI, if you allow them to operate uniquely and self-managing, your team is going to be multiplied by AI.
 
John Bowen: Yeah, very much so. And the thing to come back to is you don't manage your way to multiplication. It doesn't happen. You've got to architect it. You've got to have a greater teamwork. You've got to move from managing people to multiplying their genius. And one of the ways to take a look at all this is take The Greater Game Multiplier Index. That's at the Greater Game Dashboard. And read the book. Yeah, read the book. Take the dashboard, get your score, where you are, what stage, your three highest leverage points, and really start executing and share this with the team, because they want you to be successful. It's in their enlightened self-interest to do that. Let's make it happen. Now, Dan, I want to wrap this up because we're going to go to, I think, one of the most important ones is Greater Autonomy, podcast seven. But one last thing on teamwork as we close this up.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, there's a great book that was written by a scientist, Joe Heinrich, Joe Heinrich. And he said, you know, humans are not the strongest creatures on the planet. We're not the fastest. We can't fly. You know, we're not great swimmers and everything else, but humans are the number one species on the planet. And he said, how'd that happen? He says somewhere, we don't know now, it's hundreds of thousands of years ago, but one human got the idea that, you know, I can do certain things, but Nog over here, you know, he's really great at other things, and Nog is working with so-and-so who does other things. Why don't we just put it all together that I just do what I'm great at, he just does what he's great at, but we have a common purpose, so we're each doing something unique to do it. And he says that's why humans are humans. And all the people who are creating the great new things in the world right now, and the 5.4 percent who are being better entrepreneurs than any other entrepreneurs, they figured this out. You can figure it out too.
 
John Bowen: Well, and we've got the tool for you to do it. So go to The Greater Game Dashboard and make this all a reality. And we'll see you the next podcast, number seven, Greater Autonomy. And we're going to talk about how you can move from being indispensable to invincible. See you there.