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Dan Sullivan Hi, everybody.
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It's Dan Sullivan here.
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And this is our favorite podcast with the EOS duo of Kelly Knight and Mark O'Donnell.
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And we're here to talk about all things entrepreneurial and to talk about what coaching means.
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in the entrepreneurial world.
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I just sent an article that I wrote.
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I'm now using AI to write really interesting articles.
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And I came across a report from the Small Business Administration, American Small Business Administration, that was talking about the all-time new company formations that have happened over the 12 months ending in June.
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It reflected that there were 3.5 million new incorporation starts in the previous 12 months.
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And in June alone, there were 500,000 new business starts in the U.S.
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I just found it a fascinating number.
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A couple thoughts about it was that are a lot of young people now, specifically young people, just going into business and starting their own businesses now, AI being a capability that's sprung up over the last three years.
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Any thoughts on that of your own personal experience or things that you've noticed in the entrepreneurial marketplace?
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Yeah, I mean, we definitely have seen a huge increase in demand for coaching, demand for everything that is related to the starting of a new company.
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And I think it's just simply because the barriers to entry are just really lower than ever.
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It's easier to
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have an idea.
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I mean, many people have lots of ideas.
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And when people know you're a business owner and entrepreneur, they're like, oh, I have this idea, but then they never really do anything about it.
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Right.
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All these ideas, no ability to make them real.
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And I think AI has just created a world in which you can take those ideas.
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You can go from vision to reality.
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or at least the first 80% of reality really quick.
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I mean, it just really takes no effort at all to do that with AI.
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And so, yeah, I mean, we're just seeing that all over the place.
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Mm-hmm.
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I would say practically inside of our business and even those other entrepreneurs that we're talking to, it's this real combination, Dan, of unique ability, which we talk about in Strategic Coach a lot, paired with AI is this perfect combination of being able to take your ingenuity and your creativity and the things that you're dreaming about and figure out maybe different ways to execute on them or how do I do this or scale it or grow it in a way that I might not have thought of on my own.
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So...
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You're seeing this a lot in young people, going back to the point about education is if you can make a connection between my ideas and real world execution and getting a return on that investment and also the consequence of it, too.
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So for every tradeoff that we all have, it's where will I spend my time to get further ahead to what I want to become.
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And my capabilities and my courage and my confidence over time.
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So I think it's created a lot of freedom, actually, for people to believe that you don't have to go this one route, which at one time was my greatest shot at becoming something is to go to college.
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It's just not true anymore.
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In my sense, because I was born in the 1940s, I was born in 44.
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And I remember when I was getting ready to launch into the marketplace, 1974, you know, I did some research, but you had to go to a library, just look it up.
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You know, what's it take to start a business and everything like that.
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But it was hard labor.
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You know, I mean, first of all, it really tested your resolve.
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where now you can just ask a question and it'll create an entire game plan for you.
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I mean, it depends upon the quality of your question, but, you know, you can ask, I'm just starting a business.
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What should I know?
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I'm living here and how do I go about doing it?
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And it's that quickness of the response that you get now that I think supports commitment.
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I can remember the hard years.
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The 1970s, that was the bankruptcy and divorce decade that I went through.
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It was tough back then.
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But it seems to me that the technological environment and just the capabilities that are now digital capabilities are a thousand times greater.
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Mark, when did you start?
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When did I start with the entrepreneurial aspect?
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Oh, yeah, I started my company in 2007.
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I really was planning it in 2006.
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I launched it in 2007.
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And just as you said, lots of friction.
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I had to change my initial name of my business like four times because the state didn't like it.
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It was just very manual, very laborious, lots of friction to start it.
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But at the same time, it's interesting, one of my mentors early on, Louis Schiff, who I think you know, he said, hey, you know, the best entrepreneurs have this blend of ignorance and ego.
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You have the ego to believe.
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I call it excitement.
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But he's just like, hey.
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You've got to have the ego to believe that you can do it.
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And you're so ignorant, you still think you can, even though the odds are against you.
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That was kind of me when I started, which kind of makes me think about since we're removing the friction, since the technological advances of AI are really lowering those barriers, removing friction where the crucible that you have to go through, the grit and perseverance is really being removed.
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It makes me wonder if while we see a massive increase in the number of new business formation, if we'll just see the opposite on the other side, just a massive number of business failures.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Now, do you think that the people who are not hardwired to be an entrepreneur, they're going to start businesses and they're going to fail?
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Or do you think it's more along the lines of pre-industrial age where everyone sort of worked for themselves?
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You had your own farm, you had your own trade, and you could work for multiple customers applying that trade as opposed to the idea of a company coming together and growing and scaling.
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First of all, I think it's going to be very, very complicated to get a handle on what's actually happening, because my sense is that the basis for ambition is actually you have some sort of capability already.
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So if you have someone who's 12, 13, 14 years old who got involved with AI technology,
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really, really early.
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They're probably meeting adults that say, hey, can you do this for me?
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And my feeling is that it's very low grade to start with.
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It's a very low grade activity.
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It's extra money.
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They're getting paid.
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It's probably cash.
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It's probably a cash economy.
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No checks written, no digital transfers.
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It's actually cash.
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And they're getting used to
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just being in the marketplace and, first of all, gaining more capabilities of what they can do.
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But the other thing about it is that they're getting used to this transaction that doesn't require a job.
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They're being entrepreneurs.
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I mean, I was cutting lawns.
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I was a caddy.
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I was doing all sorts of things at 10, 11, 12 years old.
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And it was extra cash.
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I remember once on a weekend, I caddied 36 holes double bag on Saturday and 36 holes double bag on Sunday.
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And that weekend, I made more money than my father had ever made in a week.
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Something there.
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Something there, you know.
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Of course, I blew it all within about two weeks.
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I mean, baseball cards are just really attractive things to buy when you're 12.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But my sense is that there's a great complication going on.
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For example, Wall Street's really, really worried about the huge amount of money that's being spent on AI where they're not seeing a return.
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Right.
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And yet, when I talk to strategic coach clients, and I'm sure you're talking to the entire EOS population, it's very, very positive with AI.
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At the FreeZone Summit that we had in California in February,
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I did a survey and I said, how many of you are using AI?
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Every hand in the room went up.
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There's about 130.
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And I said, how many of you, just in terms of yourself, can see the basis or you're already having evidence that you're becoming more productive personally because of the AI, all the hands went up.
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And how many of you can see it spreading to your team and all the hands went up?
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So my sense is that it's a consumer breakthrough right now.
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that it's actually individuals, entrepreneurs, but other individuals who are falling in love with these new capabilities they have.
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But I think mostly it's not detectable.
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I don't think from a media standpoint, you can detect this growth.
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As a matter of fact, I think the media would probably be negative because they're being bypassed by the technology.
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And all the scare
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Right.
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Probably when printing started, you know, in the 1400s, all of a sudden people were reading, they were getting eyeglasses.
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They found out that most Europeans were farsighted and they couldn't really concentrate.
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So the eyeglass industry went through the roof.
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But it seems to me that it's a hard technology to get a big picture view of what's happening, because I think millions of people are doing millions of different things with it.
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Yeah, that's right.
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Well, what I like is it's a great way to experiment.
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It's low stakes with great speed.
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And we even see that at EOS and just in terms of things that we would IDS, identify, discuss, and solve and think about.
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We can do the research.
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We can do an experiment.
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We can look at things so much faster.
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So what we might have taken a whole 90-day, a whole entire quarter to do, we're doing literally sometimes in weeks or even minutes or hours.
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So...
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What does that mean for capabilities with entrepreneurs?
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I think it means we can experiment and try and win and fail faster.
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You know, the jury is out on that.
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But I think that's what the early stage, I mean, here the last couple of years, that's what we're seeing.
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I think it's the speed of either success or failure, which is highly attractive.
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I kind of treat it like a game of tennis.
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So I never ask it to do a big thing.
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I just serve and the volley comes back to me and I feel good.
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I get a dopamine hit, I guess.
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And it's very addictive.
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I'll ask it to do this and it comes back in 15 seconds.
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Okay.
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And then I say, oh, yeah, now let's fine tune this.
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And then it comes back.
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And I think it's the speed of interchange of coming back.
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You know, I'm highly distractible.
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I'm clinically diagnosed with ADD.
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And if it doesn't happen fast, my resolve and my commitment disappears really quickly.
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And I think it's that speed of response that I really love so much about it.
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I agree.
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And Mark, you were saying earlier about friction, reducing friction.
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Well, when we reduce friction, we also reduce frustration.
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And so for entrepreneurs, sometimes it is that speed and the energy around it.
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So if we can reduce that, I think that just gives us more energy towards, you know, the greater good of what we're trying to do too.
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that that's reducing frustration too.
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The big threat, you know, and this is sort of the high level of threat.
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This is Sam Altman and the other tech clients are doing this.
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They say, well, it's just going to destroy all jobs.
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I see no evidence of that whatsoever.
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As a matter of fact, most of our clients are hiring.
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Most of the entrepreneurs are actually hiring and,
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But I think at the corporate level, they're taking great risks of firing people and then finding that it's destroyed their culture.
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There's nothing that destroys a culture as the threat of execution.
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Yes, that is true.
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That is true.
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Yeah.
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So I asked people about that.
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I said, is your mind going that you're going to be replacing jobs with it?
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And I don't see anybody.
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There's a couple, you know, have done it very extensively for very specific reasons, because it was mostly...
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communication replacement.
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They could do the communication much faster and they were paying people for the communication.
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But what about in EOS?
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I mean, is this a topic that's being talked about?
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I'm sure it is.
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Yeah, it's definitely a topic that we are talking about and what we're seeing with clients is I wouldn't call it a massive hiring boom.
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I would call it more of a pause and then an expansion.
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So what we're seeing is that once AI tools start getting used, the capacity to do more, to grow and knock things off the list that they were just hanging around, they just couldn't get to, one person is able to do multiple jobs at once.
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They're able to think through things faster.
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And that just frees up overall capacity for them to grow.
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As Kelly said, you know, what used to take a 90-day rock to go complete and execute on this project, that project is now a massive project.
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And some of those things require people and some of them don't.
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And it's always an interesting way people are negotiating that jagged edge or that jagged frontier of what is uniquely human versus what the machines can do better.
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And I just see them negotiating this.
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And as models change, as the capabilities of what AI can do changes, they are really looking for nimble thinkers.
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They're looking for people who can jump in.
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And while the quality of the answer is related to the quality of the question, you kind of don't even have to have that.
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You just really have to have a clear view of what the job to be done is.
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And then you ask questions.
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AI, what the question is I should be asking.
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So you start metaprompting and the employees who are able to think at that level and get really, really clear on what it is they want.
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Mm-hmm.
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They can use the tools to achieve that at a much higher degree.
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So I do see people hiring in relational sales roles, in starting new businesses and new geographies.
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And the investment to support those geographic expansions are...
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much lower because I don't need to hire the business developer, the sales person who can, I need to hire them as the relationship lead, but I don't need to go and hire administrative support and data people and all those different types of things.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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They just do more because it's all relationship based.
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Yeah.
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Expansion.
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Yeah.
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Well, it's an interesting thing that I'm talking to the two of you, because first of all, you've had, you know, from our previous podcast, this has been a really huge growth period.
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What's the total number of implementers now?
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If it's a state secret, I won't...
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It's not a state secret.
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It is not.
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It's just over 900 right now, Dan.
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Yeah.
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And we've got almost 50 more coming in here in the next couple of months.
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And so we'll be over a thousand early part of next year.
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So what a change has occurred over the years.
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That's a real threshold number.
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I think that's a really great.
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It is.
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Yeah.
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That's like your muscles grew.
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Yeah.
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But the big thing is it's happening right now with what I think is certainly one of the great technological breakthroughs, certainly in my lifetime.
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I think the personal computer was a really huge breakthrough, especially when it got supported by software and you had the Internet and everything else.
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But this one has many, many more dimensions.
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Wow.
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But it'd be interesting, having gone through this growth period, but this revolution is happening right now as you're, you know, you've been amazing at simplifying your model by going to the franchise model.
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I can see if this had hit you.
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Yeah.
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You know, when you took over and everybody was tempted to do their own version of the EOS program and there wasn't uniformity and there wasn't agreement on it, this could have amplified the complications tremendously.
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And I think amplifier is the perfect word for it, because if you take an organization, a community, a company, a team who is 100% on the same page with their vision, where they're going, how they're going to get there, all that human energy, all those arrows pointing in the same direction and you add AI to it.
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It's a 10x, 100x result quite easily.
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But if you have a business model, an organization, a team that is a little bit disjointed, a little bit complex, a little bit chaotic, and you add AI to it, you just end up with 10x, 100x chaos.
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And it could destroy the business.
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I think most companies don't have that level of clarity and organization where they are fully able to take advantage of the technological age that we exist in.
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So they use the tools and they win on the edges.
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They just don't win big.
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Yeah.
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I mean, because we've been in conversation pretty well since the start of it.
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And it's almost looking back, it was like you were beating the train to the intersection and you got across before the train came by.
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You planned it exactly that way.
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Time means everything, Dan.
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Yeah.
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It just seemed to be that you weren't as scared as you should have been.
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Yeah.
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That's not the case all the time.
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Maybe that's that intelligence comment from earlier, Mark, with your mentor.
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Maybe we're in that same boat.
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But yeah.
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Well, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
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And it is timing to a certain degree.
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But, you know, with AI, I find it's really interesting because people want to be connected to vision.
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They want to see where they fit in the equation.
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So whether you're the entrepreneur or team members, leadership team members, you want to see how what your contribution fits in to that vision.
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the standards get higher and higher all the time on ambitious driven organizations.
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So really the differentiator is that how am I going to take whatever tools that I have right now, the big one that everyone's talking about is AI, but use it to my advantage.
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How do I differentiate my organization?
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How do I differentiate for some people who look at competitors, for people that want to differentiate what they do in their seat?
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It really is to the degree that you can master.
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your tools and capabilities is to the degree that you'll master getting what you want.
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Yeah, it was really interesting when John Bowen and I, as we were finishing up the Greater Game Book, we were just talking about what goes on the cover.
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In Coach, I mean, we were out there talking about 10 times.
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The most successful of the three books, the early books, was 10 times as easier than two times.
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We were playing with some numbers.
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I said, why don't we talk about 100 times now?
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John said, that's really, really interesting.
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I said, well, I'm going to talk
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I think the internal basics of going 10 times, you know, that you're clear-minded, that you are thinking in terms of who, not how, and you're thinking in terms of unique ability, I says, I think it all applies.
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But I think there's a multiplier out there now.
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Plus, we're also talking about 25 years.
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Think in 25 years, you know, if you get real clear at the beginning, you know,
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25 years is reasonable.
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If it's going to be more complexity and everything, then it's silly.
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And that really hit home.
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I'm talking about it at 82, but we're talking about people who are 35, 40, 20-year-olds.
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They're hopeless.
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They can't think in those terms, you know.
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They don't know what 25 years is because they haven't been conscious for 25 years.
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You know, for 25 years.
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Plus, they think they're immortal.
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They don't realize there's a wear and tear basis to some of this.
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But my sense is that the simplicity of your model and the clarity of your focus
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that you can approach AI for let's let AI prove itself and you don't have to rush into it.
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I was just thinking of your software because the SAS companies are really, really being threatened with AI.
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Some 18 year old just figured a way to bypass Salesforce, you know, or something like that.
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I think there's nervous nights in that industry right now.
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Certainly.
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Well, we divested of our software, talk about beating the train to the crossroads.
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We divested our software and it's now a licensed partner of ours back in 2025, in the summer of 25, really right before the most advanced models were able to replicate software.
282
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So we have five or six licensed software providers, and we are just focused on the human parts of implementers and what they do with clients in session rooms.
283
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And I think there is a difference between vibe coding Salesforce and being able to use it for individual use.
284
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But I think it's a whole other world to replicate enterprise-level software, maintain it, update it.
285
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And you see the light at the end of the tunnel, like you start going through those adjacent possibles and you're like, oh, I'm here, I'm here.
286
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But let's face it, the 18-year-old kid or 19-year-old kid who replicates Salesforce cannot serve millions of small businesses and keep the servers running and they just can't do it.
287
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At least not yet.
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Maybe they can relieve the agents to do it.
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But they can't create the data centers.
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They can't invest $100 billion in a data center to keep it rolling.
291
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So I think it makes for really great headlines.
292
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But I think much of it is, I always call it smoke and hopium.
293
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We all hope that this is true because would that be cool?
294
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But the reality is I don't think we're there yet, if ever.
295
00:24:03.741 --> 00:24:11.488
But there is still some hesitation from an investment point of view into SaaS businesses to start a SaaS company.
296
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We see the one-person billion-dollar valuation company, but you turn out that it's not really one person.
297
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It's lots of people.
298
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Just as subcontractors.
299
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Besides, they don't have any free days.
300
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They definitely don't have any free days.
301
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And they definitely have subcontractors who are doing the work.
302
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I think that AI is definitely changing the way we think.
303
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It's allowing people to think in much bigger futures than before because you're moving through these adjacent possibles.
304
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It's giving a lot of people hope that they could be an entrepreneur too.
305
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It's democratizing access to knowledge and information in ways that Google attempted to do but didn't quite get there.
306
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It turns out they kind of invented the technology that did get there just used by somebody else first and faster.
307
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I think that's why you just see this massive increase in business formation.
308
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I don't know if you saw the 30 X increase in books published in 2026 compared to any other year.
309
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So the friction to write a book, as you know, having written lots of books without the assistance of AI, lots of friction there.
310
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Now you remove the friction 38 times.
311
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And it kind of makes me think about from a coaching perspective from both of our businesses, right?
312
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Coaching entrepreneurs, our model is obviously different, but from a coach perspective, you have these high-quality in-person experiences where I could listen to a podcast and go through a McDonald's drive-thru.
313
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Or I could go to one of the coach locations, be with high end people, having a high end experience with great lunch and great teaching.
314
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And I think there's an ever increasing need and a premium on those types of experiences and that humanness of that.
315
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But yes, I can get the information, you know, and I can eat a fast lunch.
316
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Yeah.
317
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Our book, Casting Not Hiring, which is just going to the publisher for November, it took about two years to get the whole thing fleshed out and get it written.
318
00:26:27.099 --> 00:26:34.645
Lots of interviews with people who are approaching entrepreneurism as a theater-based enterprise.
319
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But one of the things is that we're noticing certain trends that live entertainment is through the roof.
320
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Live anything is through the roof right now.
321
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So my sense is that people like personal.
322
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My sense about it is that in the best possible way, AI is freeing us up to be more human.
323
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if we have that ambition.
324
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Because not everybody's got the ambition, but the people who have the ambition to have things more human, I think are experiencing that there's a real desire for this.
325
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And I think that small companies, small to medium companies, you know, not more than 150 people, there's a real craving that you get to know the people that you're working with.
326
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There's a certain level of efficiency that you want from your organization.
327
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But I don't think it's an optimization thing.
328
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There's a point where optimization becomes inhuman.
329
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And I think people say we don't want to go that far.
330
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Okay, we want to be profitable.
331
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We want to be productive.
332
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We want to have energy.
333
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We want to have mission.
334
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But those are human qualities.
335
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They're not technological qualities.
336
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That's right.
337
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The human connection is real.
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And sometimes we forget that that is aligning human energy towards something, a common purpose, mission, cause, whatever that might be.
339
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And I mean, people love to be lit up inside with something that they couldn't recognize on their own was their capability.
340
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And so that's sort of part of...
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Founders, entrepreneurs, visionaries, integrators, leadership teams is helping to curate the best out of people and combine that with the greatest capabilities that we have through technology.
342
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And so there's a real excitement behind that because people don't really always want to go it alone.
343
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You want to be in it together and have that connection, that truly human connection that makes life worth living.
344
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It's not just the outcome of what we're building.
345
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Well, that also is exciting.
346
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Yeah.
347
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One of the things that we had to overcome over the last year and a half is that AI is doing strange things to digital marketing.
348
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Things are just getting eliminated at your first attempt to send out emails and everything like that.
349
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So this has been a bit of a slowdown period for us.
350
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for about six months, just that our communications are not going through.
351
00:29:02.680 --> 00:29:03.861
We're being spam-ified.
352
00:29:05.821 --> 00:29:07.262
Right, right.
353
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We are experiencing pretty much the same thing, not necessarily in terms of our email deliverability, but at the beginning of 24 going into 25, we saw a massive drop-off in website traffic,
354
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really the way people are interacting with our content.
355
00:29:28.489 --> 00:29:37.994
We just like you do lots and lots of video content and podcasts like this one and the ability to drive traffic to them.
356
00:29:38.074 --> 00:29:40.875
People are just going to AI and saying, oh, this is the answer.
357
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And then they kind of move on.
358
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So I think we have not quite yet figured out.
359
00:29:46.058 --> 00:29:53.162
We still do live in an attention economy, but the old ways of garnering that attention are changing.
360
00:29:53.985 --> 00:30:01.487
Yeah, there was a great guy at Genius Network about five months ago, and he's quite young.
361
00:30:02.167 --> 00:30:07.848
I think he's late 20s or something, but he's been at this for mid-teens onward.
362
00:30:08.588 --> 00:30:14.169
And he says he effectively thinks that search engine has reached the end of its lifetime.
363
00:30:14.189 --> 00:30:21.771
And he says it's not SEO anymore, it's AEO, it's Answer Engine, that you have to put out your answer.
364
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so that it attracts a certain number of people who have questions about it, you know.
365
00:30:28.196 --> 00:30:33.401
So I wrote a book, Who We're Looking For, and we just laid out, this is who we're looking for.
366
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We're looking for this type of person.
367
00:30:35.943 --> 00:30:38.266
Our team was kind of surprised by it.
368
00:30:38.606 --> 00:30:40.768
They said, well, you're kind of narrowing the market.
369
00:30:40.828 --> 00:30:43.570
I said, I want the market down to this size.
370
00:30:44.211 --> 00:30:47.212
Yeah, I said the smaller the niche, the bigger the market.
371
00:30:47.512 --> 00:30:57.495
If you tell somebody we're looking for you and you already are this type of person and you already have these qualities and you're already doing this and this and you're very successful.
372
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And the only reason why you'd be interested in us is that you're lonely.
373
00:31:05.461 --> 00:31:06.302
You're on your own.
374
00:31:06.603 --> 00:31:09.486
You've done all this, but who are you telling?
375
00:31:09.627 --> 00:31:10.728
Who are you talking to?
376
00:31:11.369 --> 00:31:14.634
And so we say that's stage one of your entrepreneurial life.
377
00:31:14.674 --> 00:31:19.080
Stage two is now you're in a community where everybody is like you.
378
00:31:21.045 --> 00:31:28.249
And Dan, how is that informing how you find that small niche, that target market that you're looking for?
379
00:31:28.309 --> 00:31:32.792
Where are you finding them outside of all the referrals that you get from your own?
380
00:31:32.812 --> 00:31:34.633
Yeah, I think it's still a referral business.
381
00:31:34.853 --> 00:31:35.133
Yeah.
382
00:31:35.494 --> 00:31:41.997
But what we did is we found that people would take five or ten of these books, you know, and we'd give them five or ten of the books.
383
00:31:42.398 --> 00:31:45.039
And they'd say, I got a whole bunch of people who would like to read this.
384
00:31:45.559 --> 00:31:47.561
So we're going right back to...
385
00:31:48.281 --> 00:31:52.382
The greatest marketing is the people who are entrepreneurs in the program.
386
00:31:53.322 --> 00:31:53.543
Right.
387
00:31:53.683 --> 00:31:54.463
One hundred percent.
388
00:31:54.483 --> 00:32:03.725
And those that are check writers who have gained the four C's and have that freedom and capability to be able to speak with that real world experience.
389
00:32:03.805 --> 00:32:12.328
And that's some of what we're working on to in the U.S. is how do we find more that are like those that are the best implementers inside our own community?
390
00:32:12.828 --> 00:32:16.489
But your book is a great way to do that because you're being very clear about it.
391
00:32:17.190 --> 00:32:29.083
In all the noise that could be whether it's search engine or Claude or whatever AI you're using, there's nothing like that personal touch of handing someone a book that says precisely what this thing is.
392
00:32:29.344 --> 00:32:36.171
So we shouldn't forget about some of the tried and true methods in which everyone has been able to share their value.
393
00:32:36.932 --> 00:32:37.252
Yeah.
394
00:32:37.293 --> 00:32:49.004
So what I'm getting out of our conversation today is that the proper way to look at AI is that you want to use AI to make your organization more human.
395
00:32:49.825 --> 00:32:55.090
So free them up from machine work and have them more and more involved in human work.
396
00:32:55.790 --> 00:32:56.271
That's right.
397
00:32:56.711 --> 00:32:57.932
The reverse industrial age.
398
00:33:00.612 --> 00:33:02.334
Yeah, I saw YouTube.
399
00:33:02.474 --> 00:33:06.337
They have some great AI historical depictions now.
400
00:33:06.517 --> 00:33:12.803
I mean, they picture a scene in Manchester, England in the 1830s and 1840s.
401
00:33:12.883 --> 00:33:18.408
And it's amazing how real, I mean, it's all created AI characters and everything else.
402
00:33:18.508 --> 00:33:19.188
But...
403
00:33:20.335 --> 00:33:23.016
I'd rather be living today than living back then.
404
00:33:24.037 --> 00:33:30.039
But, you know, there was a writer here in Canada, very left wing, Naomi Klein.
405
00:33:30.600 --> 00:33:36.502
She was on this real rant about what happens in the Nike factories in China.
406
00:33:36.963 --> 00:33:38.763
They're mostly women for the most part.
407
00:33:38.823 --> 00:33:41.685
That's one of China's really big problems.
408
00:33:42.525 --> 00:33:46.668
is that the women and men are actually separated in the economic realm.
409
00:33:47.189 --> 00:33:49.350
Women are the ones who are at Qualcomm.
410
00:33:49.791 --> 00:33:52.032
They're doing the chip designs, not the men.
411
00:33:52.072 --> 00:33:54.114
The men are 100 miles away.
412
00:33:54.134 --> 00:33:57.456
And she was talking about how terrible it is.
413
00:33:57.677 --> 00:34:03.421
Eight women are in a very, very small apartment, you know, and they have long work hours.
414
00:34:03.521 --> 00:34:04.982
They have everything like this.
415
00:34:05.682 --> 00:34:08.344
Somebody answered her book, and he says,
416
00:34:09.465 --> 00:34:10.726
You know why they're doing this?
417
00:34:10.806 --> 00:34:13.567
Because it's 100 times better than where they came from.
418
00:34:13.587 --> 00:34:22.029
And I think this industrial revolution, as bad as we would think it would be, it was actually a huge improvement in their lives.
419
00:34:22.650 --> 00:34:23.890
Yeah, absolutely.
420
00:34:23.910 --> 00:34:25.251
Absolutely.
421
00:34:25.291 --> 00:34:25.631
All right.
422
00:34:25.771 --> 00:34:26.371
What'd you get?
423
00:34:26.851 --> 00:34:29.292
Anything you're going to think more deeply about?
424
00:34:30.009 --> 00:34:38.153
For me, it's that AI and technology, it really frees us to become the best that we can be, to be the most human that we can be where it matters most.
425
00:34:38.253 --> 00:34:42.174
So being relational, being connected, being related and relatable.
426
00:34:42.574 --> 00:34:43.235
Being funny.
427
00:34:43.655 --> 00:34:46.536
Being funny, having fun, all of those things.
428
00:34:46.656 --> 00:34:50.078
It sets us free to be more of who we are, where it matters most.
429
00:34:51.683 --> 00:34:54.925
For me, technology is an accelerator.
430
00:34:55.105 --> 00:34:56.826
It always been an accelerator.
431
00:34:56.846 --> 00:35:10.231
I think people make the mistake of thinking and using the technology for technology's sake, and they lose sight of what they're trying to accomplish, what it is that they want.
432
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And as we're saying is we're built for relationship.
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And I think as we go forward,
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coaching entrepreneurs, building relationships with them, helping them get clear on what it is that they want and how to go execute on that and make it a reality.
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AI is just a really great tool to do that.
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And there's going to be more of them.
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Yeah.
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The three of us are all in the right industry because I think coaching is to the 21st century what management was to the 20th century.
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And the reason is because technology does not coach itself.
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No.
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Although now everyone's going to try to prompt itself to coach itself.
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Good luck.
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Have fun.
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Tell you when it's sufficiently coached.
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Yeah, good luck.
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Train's coming.
447
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Yeah.
448
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Anyway, real pleasure.
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And I just want you to know that I have a special paragraph in my acknowledgement section for the book, where I talk about people who allow me to endlessly explore entrepreneurism.
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And Kelly Knight and Mark O'Donnell are prominently mentioned.
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Thank you.
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That's a huge honor, Dan, and always a pleasure to be with you.
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Good time today, and we'll be seeing you soon in Chicago.
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Yeah, good.
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See you.
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Dan Sullivan Hi, everybody.
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It's Dan Sullivan here.
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And this is our favorite podcast with the EOS duo of Kelly Knight and Mark O'Donnell.
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And we're here to talk about all things entrepreneurial and to talk about what coaching means.
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in the entrepreneurial world.
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I just sent an article that I wrote.
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I'm now using AI to write really interesting articles.
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And I came across a report from the Small Business Administration, American Small Business Administration, that was talking about the all-time new company formations that have happened over the 12 months ending in June.
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It reflected that there were 3.5 million new incorporation starts in the previous 12 months.
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And in June alone, there were 500,000 new business starts in the U.S.
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I just found it a fascinating number.
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A couple thoughts about it was that are a lot of young people now, specifically young people, just going into business and starting their own businesses now, AI being a capability that's sprung up over the last three years.
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Any thoughts on that of your own personal experience or things that you've noticed in the entrepreneurial marketplace?
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Yeah, I mean, we definitely have seen a huge increase in demand for coaching, demand for everything that is related to the starting of a new company.
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And I think it's just simply because the barriers to entry are just really lower than ever.
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It's easier to
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have an idea.
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I mean, many people have lots of ideas.
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And when people know you're a business owner and entrepreneur, they're like, oh, I have this idea, but then they never really do anything about it.
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Right.
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All these ideas, no ability to make them real.
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And I think AI has just created a world in which you can take those ideas.
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You can go from vision to reality.
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or at least the first 80% of reality really quick.
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I mean, it just really takes no effort at all to do that with AI.
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And so, yeah, I mean, we're just seeing that all over the place.
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Mm-hmm.
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I would say practically inside of our business and even those other entrepreneurs that we're talking to, it's this real combination, Dan, of unique ability, which we talk about in Strategic Coach a lot, paired with AI is this perfect combination of being able to take your ingenuity and your creativity and the things that you're dreaming about and figure out maybe different ways to execute on them or how do I do this or scale it or grow it in a way that I might not have thought of on my own.
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So...
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You're seeing this a lot in young people, going back to the point about education is if you can make a connection between my ideas and real world execution and getting a return on that investment and also the consequence of it, too.
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So for every tradeoff that we all have, it's where will I spend my time to get further ahead to what I want to become.
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And my capabilities and my courage and my confidence over time.
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So I think it's created a lot of freedom, actually, for people to believe that you don't have to go this one route, which at one time was my greatest shot at becoming something is to go to college.
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It's just not true anymore.
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In my sense, because I was born in the 1940s, I was born in 44.
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And I remember when I was getting ready to launch into the marketplace, 1974, you know, I did some research, but you had to go to a library, just look it up.
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You know, what's it take to start a business and everything like that.
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But it was hard labor.
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You know, I mean, first of all, it really tested your resolve.
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where now you can just ask a question and it'll create an entire game plan for you.
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I mean, it depends upon the quality of your question, but, you know, you can ask, I'm just starting a business.
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What should I know?
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I'm living here and how do I go about doing it?
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And it's that quickness of the response that you get now that I think supports commitment.
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I can remember the hard years.
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The 1970s, that was the bankruptcy and divorce decade that I went through.
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It was tough back then.
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But it seems to me that the technological environment and just the capabilities that are now digital capabilities are a thousand times greater.
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Mark, when did you start?
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When did I start with the entrepreneurial aspect?
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Oh, yeah, I started my company in 2007.
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I really was planning it in 2006.
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I launched it in 2007.
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And just as you said, lots of friction.
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I had to change my initial name of my business like four times because the state didn't like it.
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It was just very manual, very laborious, lots of friction to start it.
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But at the same time, it's interesting, one of my mentors early on, Louis Schiff, who I think you know, he said, hey, you know, the best entrepreneurs have this blend of ignorance and ego.
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You have the ego to believe.
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I call it excitement.
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But he's just like, hey.
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You've got to have the ego to believe that you can do it.
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And you're so ignorant, you still think you can, even though the odds are against you.
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That was kind of me when I started, which kind of makes me think about since we're removing the friction, since the technological advances of AI are really lowering those barriers, removing friction where the crucible that you have to go through, the grit and perseverance is really being removed.
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It makes me wonder if while we see a massive increase in the number of new business formation, if we'll just see the opposite on the other side, just a massive number of business failures.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Now, do you think that the people who are not hardwired to be an entrepreneur, they're going to start businesses and they're going to fail?
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Or do you think it's more along the lines of pre-industrial age where everyone sort of worked for themselves?
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You had your own farm, you had your own trade, and you could work for multiple customers applying that trade as opposed to the idea of a company coming together and growing and scaling.
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First of all, I think it's going to be very, very complicated to get a handle on what's actually happening, because my sense is that the basis for ambition is actually you have some sort of capability already.
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So if you have someone who's 12, 13, 14 years old who got involved with AI technology,
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really, really early.
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They're probably meeting adults that say, hey, can you do this for me?
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And my feeling is that it's very low grade to start with.
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It's a very low grade activity.
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It's extra money.
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They're getting paid.
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It's probably cash.
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It's probably a cash economy.
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No checks written, no digital transfers.
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It's actually cash.
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And they're getting used to
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just being in the marketplace and, first of all, gaining more capabilities of what they can do.
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But the other thing about it is that they're getting used to this transaction that doesn't require a job.
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They're being entrepreneurs.
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I mean, I was cutting lawns.
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I was a caddy.
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I was doing all sorts of things at 10, 11, 12 years old.
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And it was extra cash.
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I remember once on a weekend, I caddied 36 holes double bag on Saturday and 36 holes double bag on Sunday.
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And that weekend, I made more money than my father had ever made in a week.
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Something there.
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Something there, you know.
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Of course, I blew it all within about two weeks.
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I mean, baseball cards are just really attractive things to buy when you're 12.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But my sense is that there's a great complication going on.
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For example, Wall Street's really, really worried about the huge amount of money that's being spent on AI where they're not seeing a return.
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Right.
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And yet, when I talk to strategic coach clients, and I'm sure you're talking to the entire EOS population, it's very, very positive with AI.
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At the FreeZone Summit that we had in California in February,
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I did a survey and I said, how many of you are using AI?
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Every hand in the room went up.
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There's about 130.
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And I said, how many of you, just in terms of yourself, can see the basis or you're already having evidence that you're becoming more productive personally because of the AI, all the hands went up.
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And how many of you can see it spreading to your team and all the hands went up?
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So my sense is that it's a consumer breakthrough right now.
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that it's actually individuals, entrepreneurs, but other individuals who are falling in love with these new capabilities they have.
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But I think mostly it's not detectable.
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I don't think from a media standpoint, you can detect this growth.
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As a matter of fact, I think the media would probably be negative because they're being bypassed by the technology.
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And all the scare
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Right.
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Probably when printing started, you know, in the 1400s, all of a sudden people were reading, they were getting eyeglasses.
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They found out that most Europeans were farsighted and they couldn't really concentrate.
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So the eyeglass industry went through the roof.
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But it seems to me that it's a hard technology to get a big picture view of what's happening, because I think millions of people are doing millions of different things with it.
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Yeah, that's right.
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Well, what I like is it's a great way to experiment.
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It's low stakes with great speed.
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And we even see that at EOS and just in terms of things that we would IDS, identify, discuss, and solve and think about.
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We can do the research.
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We can do an experiment.
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We can look at things so much faster.
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So what we might have taken a whole 90-day, a whole entire quarter to do, we're doing literally sometimes in weeks or even minutes or hours.
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So...
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What does that mean for capabilities with entrepreneurs?
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I think it means we can experiment and try and win and fail faster.
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You know, the jury is out on that.
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But I think that's what the early stage, I mean, here the last couple of years, that's what we're seeing.
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I think it's the speed of either success or failure, which is highly attractive.
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I kind of treat it like a game of tennis.
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So I never ask it to do a big thing.
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I just serve and the volley comes back to me and I feel good.
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I get a dopamine hit, I guess.
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And it's very addictive.
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I'll ask it to do this and it comes back in 15 seconds.
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Okay.
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And then I say, oh, yeah, now let's fine tune this.
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And then it comes back.
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And I think it's the speed of interchange of coming back.
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You know, I'm highly distractible.
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I'm clinically diagnosed with ADD.
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And if it doesn't happen fast, my resolve and my commitment disappears really quickly.
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And I think it's that speed of response that I really love so much about it.
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I agree.
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And Mark, you were saying earlier about friction, reducing friction.
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Well, when we reduce friction, we also reduce frustration.
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And so for entrepreneurs, sometimes it is that speed and the energy around it.
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So if we can reduce that, I think that just gives us more energy towards, you know, the greater good of what we're trying to do too.
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that that's reducing frustration too.
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The big threat, you know, and this is sort of the high level of threat.
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This is Sam Altman and the other tech clients are doing this.
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They say, well, it's just going to destroy all jobs.
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I see no evidence of that whatsoever.
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As a matter of fact, most of our clients are hiring.
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Most of the entrepreneurs are actually hiring and,
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But I think at the corporate level, they're taking great risks of firing people and then finding that it's destroyed their culture.
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There's nothing that destroys a culture as the threat of execution.
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Yes, that is true.
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That is true.
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Yeah.
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So I asked people about that.
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I said, is your mind going that you're going to be replacing jobs with it?
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And I don't see anybody.
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There's a couple, you know, have done it very extensively for very specific reasons, because it was mostly...
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communication replacement.
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They could do the communication much faster and they were paying people for the communication.
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But what about in EOS?
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I mean, is this a topic that's being talked about?
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I'm sure it is.
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Yeah, it's definitely a topic that we are talking about and what we're seeing with clients is I wouldn't call it a massive hiring boom.
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I would call it more of a pause and then an expansion.
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So what we're seeing is that once AI tools start getting used, the capacity to do more, to grow and knock things off the list that they were just hanging around, they just couldn't get to, one person is able to do multiple jobs at once.
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They're able to think through things faster.
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And that just frees up overall capacity for them to grow.
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As Kelly said, you know, what used to take a 90-day rock to go complete and execute on this project, that project is now a massive project.
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And some of those things require people and some of them don't.
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And it's always an interesting way people are negotiating that jagged edge or that jagged frontier of what is uniquely human versus what the machines can do better.
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And I just see them negotiating this.
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And as models change, as the capabilities of what AI can do changes, they are really looking for nimble thinkers.
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They're looking for people who can jump in.
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And while the quality of the answer is related to the quality of the question, you kind of don't even have to have that.
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You just really have to have a clear view of what the job to be done is.
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And then you ask questions.
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AI, what the question is I should be asking.
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So you start metaprompting and the employees who are able to think at that level and get really, really clear on what it is they want.
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Mm-hmm.
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They can use the tools to achieve that at a much higher degree.
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So I do see people hiring in relational sales roles, in starting new businesses and new geographies.
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And the investment to support those geographic expansions are...
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much lower because I don't need to hire the business developer, the sales person who can, I need to hire them as the relationship lead, but I don't need to go and hire administrative support and data people and all those different types of things.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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They just do more because it's all relationship based.
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Yeah.
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Expansion.
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Yeah.
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Well, it's an interesting thing that I'm talking to the two of you, because first of all, you've had, you know, from our previous podcast, this has been a really huge growth period.
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What's the total number of implementers now?
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If it's a state secret, I won't...
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It's not a state secret.
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It is not.
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It's just over 900 right now, Dan.
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Yeah.
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And we've got almost 50 more coming in here in the next couple of months.
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And so we'll be over a thousand early part of next year.
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So what a change has occurred over the years.
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That's a real threshold number.
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I think that's a really great.
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It is.
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Yeah.
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That's like your muscles grew.
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Yeah.
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But the big thing is it's happening right now with what I think is certainly one of the great technological breakthroughs, certainly in my lifetime.
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I think the personal computer was a really huge breakthrough, especially when it got supported by software and you had the Internet and everything else.
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But this one has many, many more dimensions.
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Wow.
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But it'd be interesting, having gone through this growth period, but this revolution is happening right now as you're, you know, you've been amazing at simplifying your model by going to the franchise model.
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I can see if this had hit you.
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Yeah.
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You know, when you took over and everybody was tempted to do their own version of the EOS program and there wasn't uniformity and there wasn't agreement on it, this could have amplified the complications tremendously.
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And I think amplifier is the perfect word for it, because if you take an organization, a community, a company, a team who is 100% on the same page with their vision, where they're going, how they're going to get there, all that human energy, all those arrows pointing in the same direction and you add AI to it.
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It's a 10x, 100x result quite easily.
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But if you have a business model, an organization, a team that is a little bit disjointed, a little bit complex, a little bit chaotic, and you add AI to it, you just end up with 10x, 100x chaos.
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And it could destroy the business.
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I think most companies don't have that level of clarity and organization where they are fully able to take advantage of the technological age that we exist in.
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So they use the tools and they win on the edges.
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They just don't win big.
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Yeah.
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I mean, because we've been in conversation pretty well since the start of it.
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And it's almost looking back, it was like you were beating the train to the intersection and you got across before the train came by.
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You planned it exactly that way.
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Time means everything, Dan.
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Yeah.
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It just seemed to be that you weren't as scared as you should have been.
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Yeah.
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That's not the case all the time.
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Maybe that's that intelligence comment from earlier, Mark, with your mentor.
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Maybe we're in that same boat.
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But yeah.
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Well, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
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And it is timing to a certain degree.
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But, you know, with AI, I find it's really interesting because people want to be connected to vision.
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They want to see where they fit in the equation.
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So whether you're the entrepreneur or team members, leadership team members, you want to see how what your contribution fits in to that vision.
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the standards get higher and higher all the time on ambitious driven organizations.
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So really the differentiator is that how am I going to take whatever tools that I have right now, the big one that everyone's talking about is AI, but use it to my advantage.
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How do I differentiate my organization?
250
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How do I differentiate for some people who look at competitors, for people that want to differentiate what they do in their seat?
251
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It really is to the degree that you can master.
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your tools and capabilities is to the degree that you'll master getting what you want.
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Yeah, it was really interesting when John Bowen and I, as we were finishing up the Greater Game Book, we were just talking about what goes on the cover.
254
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In Coach, I mean, we were out there talking about 10 times.
255
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The most successful of the three books, the early books, was 10 times as easier than two times.
256
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We were playing with some numbers.
257
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I said, why don't we talk about 100 times now?
258
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John said, that's really, really interesting.
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I said, well, I'm going to talk
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I think the internal basics of going 10 times, you know, that you're clear-minded, that you are thinking in terms of who, not how, and you're thinking in terms of unique ability, I says, I think it all applies.
261
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But I think there's a multiplier out there now.
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Plus, we're also talking about 25 years.
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Think in 25 years, you know, if you get real clear at the beginning, you know,
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25 years is reasonable.
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If it's going to be more complexity and everything, then it's silly.
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And that really hit home.
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I'm talking about it at 82, but we're talking about people who are 35, 40, 20-year-olds.
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They're hopeless.
269
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They can't think in those terms, you know.
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They don't know what 25 years is because they haven't been conscious for 25 years.
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You know, for 25 years.
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Plus, they think they're immortal.
273
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They don't realize there's a wear and tear basis to some of this.
274
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But my sense is that the simplicity of your model and the clarity of your focus
275
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that you can approach AI for let's let AI prove itself and you don't have to rush into it.
276
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I was just thinking of your software because the SAS companies are really, really being threatened with AI.
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Some 18 year old just figured a way to bypass Salesforce, you know, or something like that.
278
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I think there's nervous nights in that industry right now.
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Certainly.
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Well, we divested of our software, talk about beating the train to the crossroads.
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We divested our software and it's now a licensed partner of ours back in 2025, in the summer of 25, really right before the most advanced models were able to replicate software.
282
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So we have five or six licensed software providers, and we are just focused on the human parts of implementers and what they do with clients in session rooms.
283
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And I think there is a difference between vibe coding Salesforce and being able to use it for individual use.
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But I think it's a whole other world to replicate enterprise-level software, maintain it, update it.
285
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And you see the light at the end of the tunnel, like you start going through those adjacent possibles and you're like, oh, I'm here, I'm here.
286
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But let's face it, the 18-year-old kid or 19-year-old kid who replicates Salesforce cannot serve millions of small businesses and keep the servers running and they just can't do it.
287
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At least not yet.
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Maybe they can relieve the agents to do it.
289
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But they can't create the data centers.
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They can't invest $100 billion in a data center to keep it rolling.
291
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So I think it makes for really great headlines.
292
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But I think much of it is, I always call it smoke and hopium.
293
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We all hope that this is true because would that be cool?
294
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But the reality is I don't think we're there yet, if ever.
295
00:24:03.741 --> 00:24:11.488
But there is still some hesitation from an investment point of view into SaaS businesses to start a SaaS company.
296
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We see the one-person billion-dollar valuation company, but you turn out that it's not really one person.
297
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It's lots of people.
298
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Just as subcontractors.
299
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Besides, they don't have any free days.
300
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They definitely don't have any free days.
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And they definitely have subcontractors who are doing the work.
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I think that AI is definitely changing the way we think.
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It's allowing people to think in much bigger futures than before because you're moving through these adjacent possibles.
304
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It's giving a lot of people hope that they could be an entrepreneur too.
305
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It's democratizing access to knowledge and information in ways that Google attempted to do but didn't quite get there.
306
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It turns out they kind of invented the technology that did get there just used by somebody else first and faster.
307
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I think that's why you just see this massive increase in business formation.
308
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I don't know if you saw the 30 X increase in books published in 2026 compared to any other year.
309
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So the friction to write a book, as you know, having written lots of books without the assistance of AI, lots of friction there.
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Now you remove the friction 38 times.
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And it kind of makes me think about from a coaching perspective from both of our businesses, right?
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Coaching entrepreneurs, our model is obviously different, but from a coach perspective, you have these high-quality in-person experiences where I could listen to a podcast and go through a McDonald's drive-thru.
313
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Or I could go to one of the coach locations, be with high end people, having a high end experience with great lunch and great teaching.
314
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And I think there's an ever increasing need and a premium on those types of experiences and that humanness of that.
315
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But yes, I can get the information, you know, and I can eat a fast lunch.
316
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Yeah.
317
00:26:15.910 --> 00:26:27.059
Our book, Casting Not Hiring, which is just going to the publisher for November, it took about two years to get the whole thing fleshed out and get it written.
318
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Lots of interviews with people who are approaching entrepreneurism as a theater-based enterprise.
319
00:26:35.386 --> 00:26:41.451
But one of the things is that we're noticing certain trends that live entertainment is through the roof.
320
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Live anything is through the roof right now.
321
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So my sense is that people like personal.
322
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My sense about it is that in the best possible way, AI is freeing us up to be more human.
323
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if we have that ambition.
324
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Because not everybody's got the ambition, but the people who have the ambition to have things more human, I think are experiencing that there's a real desire for this.
325
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And I think that small companies, small to medium companies, you know, not more than 150 people, there's a real craving that you get to know the people that you're working with.
326
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There's a certain level of efficiency that you want from your organization.
327
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But I don't think it's an optimization thing.
328
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There's a point where optimization becomes inhuman.
329
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And I think people say we don't want to go that far.
330
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Okay, we want to be profitable.
331
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We want to be productive.
332
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We want to have energy.
333
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We want to have mission.
334
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But those are human qualities.
335
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They're not technological qualities.
336
00:27:47.919 --> 00:27:48.440
That's right.
337
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The human connection is real.
338
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And sometimes we forget that that is aligning human energy towards something, a common purpose, mission, cause, whatever that might be.
339
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And I mean, people love to be lit up inside with something that they couldn't recognize on their own was their capability.
340
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And so that's sort of part of...
341
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Founders, entrepreneurs, visionaries, integrators, leadership teams is helping to curate the best out of people and combine that with the greatest capabilities that we have through technology.
342
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And so there's a real excitement behind that because people don't really always want to go it alone.
343
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You want to be in it together and have that connection, that truly human connection that makes life worth living.
344
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It's not just the outcome of what we're building.
345
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Well, that also is exciting.
346
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Yeah.
347
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One of the things that we had to overcome over the last year and a half is that AI is doing strange things to digital marketing.
348
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Things are just getting eliminated at your first attempt to send out emails and everything like that.
349
00:28:54.017 --> 00:28:57.499
So this has been a bit of a slowdown period for us.
350
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for about six months, just that our communications are not going through.
351
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We're being spam-ified.
352
00:29:05.821 --> 00:29:07.262
Right, right.
353
00:29:07.682 --> 00:29:23.487
We are experiencing pretty much the same thing, not necessarily in terms of our email deliverability, but at the beginning of 24 going into 25, we saw a massive drop-off in website traffic,
354
00:29:24.307 --> 00:29:28.209
really the way people are interacting with our content.
355
00:29:28.489 --> 00:29:37.994
We just like you do lots and lots of video content and podcasts like this one and the ability to drive traffic to them.
356
00:29:38.074 --> 00:29:40.875
People are just going to AI and saying, oh, this is the answer.
357
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And then they kind of move on.
358
00:29:42.856 --> 00:29:45.478
So I think we have not quite yet figured out.
359
00:29:46.058 --> 00:29:53.162
We still do live in an attention economy, but the old ways of garnering that attention are changing.
360
00:29:53.985 --> 00:30:01.487
Yeah, there was a great guy at Genius Network about five months ago, and he's quite young.
361
00:30:02.167 --> 00:30:07.848
I think he's late 20s or something, but he's been at this for mid-teens onward.
362
00:30:08.588 --> 00:30:14.169
And he says he effectively thinks that search engine has reached the end of its lifetime.
363
00:30:14.189 --> 00:30:21.771
And he says it's not SEO anymore, it's AEO, it's Answer Engine, that you have to put out your answer.
364
00:30:22.711 --> 00:30:27.796
so that it attracts a certain number of people who have questions about it, you know.
365
00:30:28.196 --> 00:30:33.401
So I wrote a book, Who We're Looking For, and we just laid out, this is who we're looking for.
366
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We're looking for this type of person.
367
00:30:35.943 --> 00:30:38.266
Our team was kind of surprised by it.
368
00:30:38.606 --> 00:30:40.768
They said, well, you're kind of narrowing the market.
369
00:30:40.828 --> 00:30:43.570
I said, I want the market down to this size.
370
00:30:44.211 --> 00:30:47.212
Yeah, I said the smaller the niche, the bigger the market.
371
00:30:47.512 --> 00:30:57.495
If you tell somebody we're looking for you and you already are this type of person and you already have these qualities and you're already doing this and this and you're very successful.
372
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And the only reason why you'd be interested in us is that you're lonely.
373
00:31:05.461 --> 00:31:06.302
You're on your own.
374
00:31:06.603 --> 00:31:09.486
You've done all this, but who are you telling?
375
00:31:09.627 --> 00:31:10.728
Who are you talking to?
376
00:31:11.369 --> 00:31:14.634
And so we say that's stage one of your entrepreneurial life.
377
00:31:14.674 --> 00:31:19.080
Stage two is now you're in a community where everybody is like you.
378
00:31:21.045 --> 00:31:28.249
And Dan, how is that informing how you find that small niche, that target market that you're looking for?
379
00:31:28.309 --> 00:31:32.792
Where are you finding them outside of all the referrals that you get from your own?
380
00:31:32.812 --> 00:31:34.633
Yeah, I think it's still a referral business.
381
00:31:34.853 --> 00:31:35.133
Yeah.
382
00:31:35.494 --> 00:31:41.997
But what we did is we found that people would take five or ten of these books, you know, and we'd give them five or ten of the books.
383
00:31:42.398 --> 00:31:45.039
And they'd say, I got a whole bunch of people who would like to read this.
384
00:31:45.559 --> 00:31:47.561
So we're going right back to...
385
00:31:48.281 --> 00:31:52.382
The greatest marketing is the people who are entrepreneurs in the program.
386
00:31:53.322 --> 00:31:53.543
Right.
387
00:31:53.683 --> 00:31:54.463
One hundred percent.
388
00:31:54.483 --> 00:32:03.725
And those that are check writers who have gained the four C's and have that freedom and capability to be able to speak with that real world experience.
389
00:32:03.805 --> 00:32:12.328
And that's some of what we're working on to in the U.S. is how do we find more that are like those that are the best implementers inside our own community?
390
00:32:12.828 --> 00:32:16.489
But your book is a great way to do that because you're being very clear about it.
391
00:32:17.190 --> 00:32:29.083
In all the noise that could be whether it's search engine or Claude or whatever AI you're using, there's nothing like that personal touch of handing someone a book that says precisely what this thing is.
392
00:32:29.344 --> 00:32:36.171
So we shouldn't forget about some of the tried and true methods in which everyone has been able to share their value.
393
00:32:36.932 --> 00:32:37.252
Yeah.
394
00:32:37.293 --> 00:32:49.004
So what I'm getting out of our conversation today is that the proper way to look at AI is that you want to use AI to make your organization more human.
395
00:32:49.825 --> 00:32:55.090
So free them up from machine work and have them more and more involved in human work.
396
00:32:55.790 --> 00:32:56.271
That's right.
397
00:32:56.711 --> 00:32:57.932
The reverse industrial age.
398
00:33:00.612 --> 00:33:02.334
Yeah, I saw YouTube.
399
00:33:02.474 --> 00:33:06.337
They have some great AI historical depictions now.
400
00:33:06.517 --> 00:33:12.803
I mean, they picture a scene in Manchester, England in the 1830s and 1840s.
401
00:33:12.883 --> 00:33:18.408
And it's amazing how real, I mean, it's all created AI characters and everything else.
402
00:33:18.508 --> 00:33:19.188
But...
403
00:33:20.335 --> 00:33:23.016
I'd rather be living today than living back then.
404
00:33:24.037 --> 00:33:30.039
But, you know, there was a writer here in Canada, very left wing, Naomi Klein.
405
00:33:30.600 --> 00:33:36.502
She was on this real rant about what happens in the Nike factories in China.
406
00:33:36.963 --> 00:33:38.763
They're mostly women for the most part.
407
00:33:38.823 --> 00:33:41.685
That's one of China's really big problems.
408
00:33:42.525 --> 00:33:46.668
is that the women and men are actually separated in the economic realm.
409
00:33:47.189 --> 00:33:49.350
Women are the ones who are at Qualcomm.
410
00:33:49.791 --> 00:33:52.032
They're doing the chip designs, not the men.
411
00:33:52.072 --> 00:33:54.114
The men are 100 miles away.
412
00:33:54.134 --> 00:33:57.456
And she was talking about how terrible it is.
413
00:33:57.677 --> 00:34:03.421
Eight women are in a very, very small apartment, you know, and they have long work hours.
414
00:34:03.521 --> 00:34:04.982
They have everything like this.
415
00:34:05.682 --> 00:34:08.344
Somebody answered her book, and he says,
416
00:34:09.465 --> 00:34:10.726
You know why they're doing this?
417
00:34:10.806 --> 00:34:13.567
Because it's 100 times better than where they came from.
418
00:34:13.587 --> 00:34:22.029
And I think this industrial revolution, as bad as we would think it would be, it was actually a huge improvement in their lives.
419
00:34:22.650 --> 00:34:23.890
Yeah, absolutely.
420
00:34:23.910 --> 00:34:25.251
Absolutely.
421
00:34:25.291 --> 00:34:25.631
All right.
422
00:34:25.771 --> 00:34:26.371
What'd you get?
423
00:34:26.851 --> 00:34:29.292
Anything you're going to think more deeply about?
424
00:34:30.009 --> 00:34:38.153
For me, it's that AI and technology, it really frees us to become the best that we can be, to be the most human that we can be where it matters most.
425
00:34:38.253 --> 00:34:42.174
So being relational, being connected, being related and relatable.
426
00:34:42.574 --> 00:34:43.235
Being funny.
427
00:34:43.655 --> 00:34:46.536
Being funny, having fun, all of those things.
428
00:34:46.656 --> 00:34:50.078
It sets us free to be more of who we are, where it matters most.
429
00:34:51.683 --> 00:34:54.925
For me, technology is an accelerator.
430
00:34:55.105 --> 00:34:56.826
It always been an accelerator.
431
00:34:56.846 --> 00:35:10.231
I think people make the mistake of thinking and using the technology for technology's sake, and they lose sight of what they're trying to accomplish, what it is that they want.
432
00:35:10.251 --> 00:35:13.733
And as we're saying is we're built for relationship.
433
00:35:14.273 --> 00:35:15.173
And I think as we go forward,
434
00:35:16.954 --> 00:35:28.585
coaching entrepreneurs, building relationships with them, helping them get clear on what it is that they want and how to go execute on that and make it a reality.
435
00:35:29.166 --> 00:35:32.289
AI is just a really great tool to do that.
436
00:35:33.982 --> 00:35:35.383
And there's going to be more of them.
437
00:35:35.883 --> 00:35:36.104
Yeah.
438
00:35:36.924 --> 00:35:45.029
The three of us are all in the right industry because I think coaching is to the 21st century what management was to the 20th century.
439
00:35:45.730 --> 00:35:49.072
And the reason is because technology does not coach itself.
440
00:35:49.852 --> 00:35:50.032
No.
441
00:35:51.013 --> 00:35:54.155
Although now everyone's going to try to prompt itself to coach itself.
442
00:35:55.836 --> 00:35:56.517
Good luck.
443
00:35:57.657 --> 00:35:58.358
Have fun.
444
00:35:59.726 --> 00:36:01.307
Tell you when it's sufficiently coached.
445
00:36:01.648 --> 00:36:02.288
Yeah, good luck.
446
00:36:02.368 --> 00:36:03.029
Train's coming.
447
00:36:03.709 --> 00:36:07.933
Yeah.
448
00:36:08.233 --> 00:36:09.334
Anyway, real pleasure.
449
00:36:09.554 --> 00:36:21.785
And I just want you to know that I have a special paragraph in my acknowledgement section for the book, where I talk about people who allow me to endlessly explore entrepreneurism.
450
00:36:21.805 --> 00:36:25.768
And Kelly Knight and Mark O'Donnell are prominently mentioned.
451
00:36:26.891 --> 00:36:27.392
Thank you.
452
00:36:27.412 --> 00:36:30.559
That's a huge honor, Dan, and always a pleasure to be with you.
453
00:36:31.060 --> 00:36:34.547
Good time today, and we'll be seeing you soon in Chicago.
454
00:36:34.567 --> 00:36:35.609
Yeah, good.
455
00:36:35.869 --> 00:36:36.090
See you.
