Break The Rules, Get Results, And Get Paid, with André Brisson

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast. Today's Multiplier Mindset story is very touching for me to hear André talk because, you know, we have upwards of 3,000 entrepreneurs in Strategic Coach right now. Over the 36 years that we've been coaching, a very, very high percentage of our clients are somewhere on the spectrum of you know, different learning disabilities that they experienced as a child. And that was actually the biggest opportunity that they had to do things differently because they had ways of learning, they had ways of solving problems.
 
And he uses a word, André, which I think is very, very important, that entrepreneurs as a species are actually shortcut creators. They create shortcuts. And it's one of the difficulties that they have in life, that they're told how to do something to get a result, but they have faster ways of getting results. And this makes them sort of an uncomfortable creature in normal learning systems, where the emphasis is following the rules. But life is actually about getting results. So a lot of people spend their whole life following the rules and they don't get very much result.
 
But if you can get to someone who's an entrepreneur by necessity and they begin to realize that the way I can differentiate myself is that I can come up with shortcuts that get results a lot faster. And then the real trick is to get people who will pay you for that. So I was a little bit further ahead than André when I met him, because when I was 66, I was diagnosed. ADHD, I'm ADD, so I don't move around a lot, but my mind moves around a lot. And I had gone through the Amen Clinic, a very, very famous clinic specifically for ADD. You have to do this test before you go in online. It's 200 questions about your entire life, where you come from, what your family's like, what your living conditions are like, what your work conditions are like.
 
And I don't have any problem with that, filled it all in. And then I went and I did the testing for three days and they do brain tests and they do memory tests, they do concentration tests. So at the end of it, I had two hours with a psychiatrist and they went through my whole test. And the woman said, you know, you're really far apart from your answers to our questionnaire and what our tests prove. You seem to live, you know, a fairly tranquil existence. There seems to be a lot of order and structure around you. You don't seem stressed out by what you're doing.
 
And she said, but the tests, you've got a 10-ring circus going on inside your brain. And I said, that's true. I do. And she says, so can you explain to me how you have things kind of orderly and structured and yet you got all this fireworks going on in your brain. So I told her what I do for a living and she said you've created all these thinking tools and she says and this is your business and we've investigated and you're very, very successful. We know that Strategic Coach is a big deal in the entrepreneurial world. But she said, I think you created this program for yourself. She said, I don't know who else you created it for, but you created it for yourself.
 
Well, André is the answer of who I created it for. Because I have a lot of entrepreneurs who have a similar story to tell, each in their own way. What we try to do is to show that everything that works in your life is where you've created a new solution for yourself. And where things don't work is where you're trying to fit into other people's systems. So you got to make a choice that the rest of your life is going to be about the system that you create using our tools in Strategic Coach.
 
And what you're going to find is that if you're willing to think about your thinking, as André said, you'll notice that you've created a completely original system. You may be in a very traditional industry, like he is, and all the professional-based industries, you know, the engineers, the architects, the lawyers, the accountants, the doctors, And I said, but you're an exception to the rules, okay? And since you are able to get results a lot faster using your system rather than using someone else's system, why don't you just make a decision to devote the rest of your life to just developing your system? It gets better and better as you go along. And we'll show you that. You're not the unusual one—you're the normal one.
 
So what you do and the way you do it is the center of your life, and you can keep expanding that throughout your entire career. And you have to get the right type of customers who will appreciate that you're unique in how you do things. And you have to surround yourself with really great team members who, they're unusual in what they do, but they take care of everything that you don't do well. In engineering, you still have to do the engineering, but you don't have to do the engineering. You're the problem solver. You're the person who comes up with the shortcuts. You're the one who simplifies things so that you don't have to go through all the other procedures. That can be done by other engineers.
 
I think the biggest thing that André said, and it warmed my heart when he said it, he said that in that room, when I'm in Strategic Coach with other people who are unusual, and they're unique, we feel that we're the normal people. And we feel totally understood by each other because we each have come through the same struggles, lots of struggles. But once you get over the hump and you make a decision that the way you do it is the right way for you to do it, and you will find the customers, you will find the clients who appreciate that, and they set you apart from everybody else. So you're totally unique.
 
I just love the story, and I told André about the testing that he could go through that would give him a really good picture of who he actually was, and he was able to do that. But he's taken it much further than I did because he created this special program. And he's doing amazingly good work for hundreds of other people just because he was willing to accept that the way he did it was right for him and he could give them insight on how to do things that were right for them.
 
So that's what Strategic Coach is. I've been at it for more than 50 years and my whole life is just designed around how I go about thinking about things, how I go about making decisions, how I put teamwork together to get really extraordinarily fast results. One of the things I feel very fortunate about, and I feel very fortunate about André, is that we live in an age now that's becoming much more of an entrepreneurial world. And people who used to be at the margins, people who were considered oddballs, people who were considered not right for anything that's structured, and they just have to learn the rules. Even if they don't like it, they have to learn the rules.
 
There's now an opportunity, by being an entrepreneur, that you can create a structure that's completely new, different, and better in the world. And the customers are out there to write the checks. So that not only do you love what you're doing and love how you're going about doing it, but you get really well paid for it. And that's a great solution in life.
 
André Brisson: My name is André Brisson. I'm The Impulsive Thinker, and I also am the Chief Troublemaker with Objective Engineering. And I am The Impulsive Thinker with the ImpulsiveThinker.com, where I help high-achieving ADHD entrepreneurs get a good understanding of themselves. With the Objective Engineering, we do a lot of things that most engineers don't want to do, is make decisions, get dirty, and get the problem solved quickly. I went to university for structural engineering, and I'm a non-traditional engineer stuck in a traditional engineering world.
 
I ended up chasing the money, where I got good money in the construction site with new design and build, and I got away from my work equipment and actual construction problem-solving support. And I went down a path where I was just doing a bunch of work that I did not enjoy. I'm good at it, actually excellent at it, using Unique Ability terms. I had absolutely negative passion for it, but it was a service that everyone wanted from me, but I didn't like it. My business partner left about a year ago, and it was quite a stressful survival year. We had over 80 projects dumped on me, not including the 30 that we already had ongoing. And these are projects that take a year or more to complete.
 
And with my ADHD and time blindness, that drives me nuts. And I really didn't enjoy that kind of work. And during that time, with my late diagnosis of ADHD, I started The Impulsive Thinker, where I helped high-achieving ADHD entrepreneurs, as well as myself after I really researched and deep-dived into everything. And then I started realizing that I was spending my energy in the wrong places in the engineering world, trying to fight the traditional system with my non-traditional ways, and that was just a waste of energy.
 
So I've revamped Objective Engineering to stop doing the services I no longer want and go back to what kind of like my passion and my problem solving and do the higher level consulting engineering services where I'm really good at creating systems that are simple and coming up with solutions and methods to simplify and get things done efficiently and quicker by including everyone involved, not just me being the almighty. So when I use the term unconventional or untraditional engineer, the engineering where almost every profession out there, be it accounting, lawyers, doctors, we're all trained to do things a certain way. And in the engineering world, I found after five years, every engineer then is stuck in that way of solving those problems the same way every time.
 
And I always look at every project uniquely and there's always a different solution, a different way of doing things in the engineering world. But I'm fighting more with engineers than anyone else because I'm not following the traditional path. One friend of mine said he goes, most engineers cross the road at that corner all the time, but you cross it wherever it's required for a project. It's a little more challenging to the traditional type engineer because I'm doing something different. I was raised and how I understood my engineering profession is we deal with the gray. We got the regulations and the codes where there's black and white.
 
So the people who are not engineers, they have to follow those rules black and white. But when we get situations that can't be followed black and white in the rules, that's when the engineers get involved. So I deal a lot with the gray. And over the last 25 years in my career, I've seen engineers becoming more rule followers and being black and white and don't like to deal with the gray. So when I deal with the gray, that's when I get the pushback. The editing can be done if the customer's got the time and the money. And sometimes you got to take a leap of faith. I can prove it with my experience in math, that this decision will be safe.
 
It's just that when other engineers don't understand that, they question it. And then they start saying you're incompetent versus them being competent. My ideal clients love that. And there's another term, too, I say, especially in the interviews with people who want to join the team. We're an entrepreneurial engineering company. So that's an oxymoron already right there. So the entrepreneurial engineer, we're a small minority in the field, but we're relied on tremendously when nothing goes well. But then once everything's okay, it's like, get away and stop screwing around with our systems.
 
Yeah, my ideal clients really like my services. I even have some clients that only use me for those special moments and all their traditional commodity type engineering services, they go to another engineering firm. And honestly, I'm okay with that because I only want to deal with the 20% of fun and the 80% boring could be someone else, even though I may have people on my team that can do that. It's just, it didn't work. So now I'm now starting to chase more of my entrepreneurial side in the engineering world. And it's not for everyone.
 
So finding those ideal clients is the fun part. And when I've got one, and actually with my change of services over the last three months, my top three clients all said, thank God, you're going to have more time to deal with the higher stuff that I've actually been wanting to. It's just, they knew I didn't have the time to do it. Therefore, they didn't ask me. And it's amazing how much clients observe and see through your stories of everything's well and things are going. But freeing up that time to be able to work at the higher level is a lot of fun.
 
Yeah, at the same time, it was a tough hurdle to get over my own brain thinking I'm actually doing lazy stuff, less work. Therefore, I must do other, quote unquote, work. But my shift right now is going from working to being in my Unique Ability as much as I can, which is I can do every day, all week, 78 hours a day. I know the math is off on that, but you get my point. But it draws a lot more clientele and higher rates as well, because now it's more value based. I save them a bunch of money and I get a cut of it versus being charged hourly, which is the engineering world.
 
I joined Strategic Coach in 2011 and now it's 2025. So, yeah, I seem to be finding sometimes I find the same problems, but at a higher level or a new ceiling complexity. So what I observed with time is we can never punch through our ceiling of complexity and get to a ceiling of comfort and be comfortable. Because I realized there's no growth in that and I actually get into a lot more trouble doing that. So as long as I'm finding new ceilings of complexity, I know I'm growing.
 
And that's been one of the big insights I had, probably in year five, that is I got to keep looking for those. And that's the way I can grow. And being a high achiever, not doing something like that actually has depressive type experiences of it as well. And then I become my own arsonist, creating my own fires to put out so I can be engaged. This is the first time I actually do something business-wise or work-wise for me first. I've had a couple of snafus where I did some stuff for customers. It was more for them than me. My staff, the type of work that we chase, because that's what they wanted, or started a company with a partner that wants to chase this type of work I don't want to do. Even starting Jada Engineers was more about other people than me.
 
And this is truly all me, The Impulsive Thinker, the new Objective Engineering, where I'm putting my own personal spin on the website. It's definitely me. And if you don't like it, we're not to work together and that's fine and I'm good with that. So that's why I say it's scary right now because this is all for me and I am getting very excited that I can create more content. I want to create content to find those other entrepreneurial engineers that also feel like outcasts and get together with them and help them and support them and then as well create more content to help the growth mindset ADHD entrepreneur as well, which is also me figuring out stuff.
 
And my Unique Ability is devouring complex information and simplifying it for everyone and then just directly get to the point and state it in a clear way that everyone can understand. One of the defining moments in The Strategic Coach Program for me was when I finalized, not even finalized, when I discovered my Unique Ability and the Unique Ability is something that you're very passionate to do. It's something that you're really good at and that you can do all day every day and you'll never run out of energy. It's exponential energy driven, and the thing is, this Unique Ability is—it's not, I'm good at structural engineering calculations. I am good at report writing.
 
It's a little more nuanced than that, where there's that Unique Ability can be applied to anything that you do. And you've been doing it your whole life and you didn't realize it. So I use it in the application of engineering. I use it in my coaching. I'm using it with my kids. I'm using it every time I do woodworking. And that's what's really neat about it. It could be in any field or any support thing. But in the end, it's what brings you joy and energy. And you know what? The scariest thing, and that's for me, is it's not work. It's fun. The Impulsive Thinker is actually one of my best habits and Unique Ability. And I get impulsive ideas, but it's only when I'm talking to other people.
 
And then I was diagnosed late in life with severe ADHD, and I'm also on the autism spectrum. And after life tempest, you know, it's funny how four letters can describe your whole life, right? And I was playing a character that I actually believe was me. So like I do mostly is I dive deep into research. I research ADHD because my psychiatrist says you need to learn about it. So I did. And honestly, I read about 30 books in under a year about it across all over the place. And in the end, I realized it's just three things, which I call the ADHD simplified model. It's an executive functioning difference. It's a time frame, visualization difference, and a brain inhibition difference. And if we just focus on those three things and manage those, then your ADHD quote unquote symptoms are managed.
 
And we don't have to chase dopamine and do all this complex stuff. Because in the end, I realized I reflect a lot. And wait a minute, my ADHD caused a lot of problems. But a lot of my success had to do with my ADHD. And then what I've been saying for quite a few years before was strength can become weaknesses. And then that thought and what I saw with ADHD was when I was successful, my ADHD was managed, was able to focus. When things went off the rails, it wasn't managed and it caused problems. That's when it became the disorder. But underutilized, overutilized strengths are weaknesses.
 
And I started to put that together and noticed. And then with Dan Sullivan's help, as I was talking to him during that time, is even what my psychiatrist told me, says I should not have graduated university. I shouldn't be running successful companies. I shouldn't be married. But I figured something out. And I can look back to my childhood where I was figuring out these little shortcuts and systems to manage the ADHD. So it's a very simple system. And I'm starting to help other people. I talk to other ADHD people and they're starting to see this would work. And that's why I decide I'm going to help ADHD entrepreneurs just to get a good understanding of themselves.
 
And I'm not there to help you with your tasks or, you know, the victim mindset. We've already figured something out. We're going somewhere. And for me, it was that something just is missing. What is that puzzle piece? And then once I realized it was ADHD, everything else fell in place. And now we can augment our success and have more fun with it because I was all successful, but I wasn't having fun and I always felt like a failure. So I work with people to understand their ADHD strengths, your unique ADHD strengths, their non-ADHD strengths, so their cognitive, their affective. And I use different tools for that. So the Kolbe, the PRINT, and the CliftonStrengths.
 
And then we tie all that stuff together to create kind of like an owner's manual on how you work and how you create your own systems that work for your unique ADHD and also your talents, and then create a value statement of why you're valuable to others. But in the end, it's to help you identify on the things you should be doing and not be doing. That's the biggest thing, was self-awareness to self-acceptance is the biggest thing. And another client said that it changed their life. It changed the way they looked at themselves and it changed the way they communicated their differences to others.
 
And that's the one thing I really concentrate on is to create a vocabulary that does not use labels or stereotypical terms. The biggest comment, too, is relationships with their spouses improved because they're able to communicate to them the whys. Like our brain is not importance based, it's interest based. So we know it's important to you, but our brain has a hard time getting over that ADHD inertia to get going. So we know what to do, it's just the challenge is getting to it. So hunters in a farming world, ADHD, interest-based nervous system, all these different ways of looking at it, now you can communicate it differently.
 
And that's where it's just improvement of communication. And once other people understand it, the right people accept it and will live with it. And they know how to come up with compromises now with everyone else, especially their spouse. The Impulsive Thinker, you can find it at TheImpulsiveThinker.com. It's also a podcast. It just started its fourth season. We just broke 350 episodes. So you can find that anywhere, wherever you get your podcasts, The Impulsive Thinker podcast. And it's on the YouTube channel at The Impulsive Thinker, where I'm starting to do more content to share you know, systems and location.
 
And it's, I'm starting to talk with a lot of smart, intelligent people, and I'm sharing that with more people on how to improve their ADHD, understand their ADHD better. But it's more about self-development and self-refinement is what I'm really focusing on and how it ties in with their ADHD. So as long as something's interesting to me and it's an intellectual type of conversation, you'll find it there. Well, that's one of the things that Dan Sullivan did was actually he created Strategic Coach to manage his ADHD unknowingly until he was diagnosed later in life as well.
 
So for me, Strategic Coach, I think that helped my thinking because we had those tools that keep us focused and the environment just walking into that building is a whole different environment that's secluded from anything else. But the biggest thing I like about Strategic Coach is, I'll let my entrepreneurs anonymous group, where we all stand up and say, hi, I'm André, I'm an entrepreneur. But we're in a room of entrepreneurs that are growth mindset ambitious, and we don't feel odd or out of place in that room. Being in a small town, being ambitious, growth mindset entrepreneur, everyone looks at you funny, and you can't have the same conversations with those. So it's nice to be in that room.
 
Every time I go, I always come out with something I know I can make more money or where I can save more time. When I first joined Coach, it was a lot of money to me. But after my first quarter, after doing workshop one by the Entrepreneurial Time System, my three-year-old looked at me and said, you are my friend now—that was the cost, you know, that was my return on investment. So it had nothing to do with making more money or getting more time. It was that relationship improvement over just three or four months. So it changes relationships as well, not only business.
 
So what's your return on investment is the key thing. What are you trying to get out of Coach? If it's not only about making money, if it's time, it's relationships, just don't stick to a revenue-generated return on investment. To me, it's all about personal, getting more free time to spend with my kids, especially when they didn't really want to be near me for a while, and then also turn around and say, you're my friend. So if you're afraid to join Strategic Coach, your excuse might be it's too expensive. Your excuse might be you have too many people in the room that are smarter than you, which is not true. Or they're more successful than you, not necessarily true. Or you're just not sure.
 
My question is, what are you afraid of? So if you're afraid to spend that money, I think you might be more afraid of the results or the possibility of being happy. And it's funny how our brain is set to protect us, to talk us down from things, even a negative or positive influence. And the other thing, too, I realized like myself, I'm actually afraid of success. And I actually got frustrated with Strategic Coach at one point because they did exactly what they promised to do to free up my time to have more success. And that freaked me out. So my question to you is, what are you afraid of if you spend the money? And I think if you can work with that, that might help you to write that check. If you go there with an open mind, you're not going to regret spending that money after one or two quarters.