Real World, Master Business Coach Danny Creed is an international master business and executive coach, business consultant; trainer, entrepreneur, best-selling author, and international keynote and workshop speaker. (www.realworldbusinesscoach.com). He is a recognized expert in sales, management, and start-up business strategic planning. He is also a business turnaround and marketing specialist with a strong emphasis on business and personal development and growth strategies. Dan is an elite Brian Tracy International Certified Sales Trainer and a Founding Member Trainer and Facilitator of the Brian Tracy Global Corporate Training Courses and the Sales Success Intensive course. Coach Dan has over 13,000 recommendations and has logged to date over 14,000 business coaching, consulting and training hours. He has been involved with 14 successful start-up businesses and over 400 business turnaround challenges. Coach Dan is the unprecedented SIX-time recipient of the FocalPoint International Brian Tracy Award of Sales Excellence.
Some of Coach Dan’s career highlights include;
- Created the first interactive sales training course, widely considered the precursor to Google
- Pioneered the first digital health information system creating the largest digital health information content library ever created
- Led sales organizations for market-leading NASDAQ technology companies,
- Defined, developed, and directed international sales training
- Successfully sold to C-level executives in health care, telecom and US federal government verticals including the Department of Defense
- Presentation team on three separate companies’ public offering
- Internationally sought keynote and workshop speaker and trainer
- Awarded by juried panel, the INAT Summit Mentor Laureate 2018 for most outstanding presentation, and the INAT Summit Man 2018, at the INAT Summit in Belgrade Serbia.
In December 2011, Coach Dan released his first book, BOOTSTRAP BUSINESS. The book was a collaborative effort as part of an established and highly successful book series with world-renowned business development experts, Tom Hopkins (How to Master the Art of Selling), John Christensen (FISH!) and Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Soul). His latest book, A Life Best Lived; A story of Life, Death and Second Chances in now available worldwide on Amazon.com and Audible at http://www.businesscoachdan.com/author/. Dan Creeds next book, Real World Business: Straight Talk on Surviving and Thriving in Business, will be available worldwide in 2018. Following this release, his book Mastering the Grind, is planned for a January 2019 release.
VIDEO - DUwHF #1061 - Danny Creed
AUDIO - DUwHF #1061 - Danny Creed
Listen on iTunes
Howard: It is just a huge honor for me today to be podcast interviewing Danny Creed, who's a master business coach. And being in dentistry for thirty years and lived in Ahwatukee for thirty years everybody loves their craft, but nobody wants to learn the business of their craft. So it doesn't matter if you're in Ahwatukee and you're a chiropractor, a physician, or in a restaurant, or you're a dentist or an orthodontist, if you own a restaurant, you want to learn how to cook. You don't want to learn how to run the business, and that's why I brought you on the show and it's a huge honor that you came on the show today.
Danny: Thank you very much for having me.
Howard: He's a real-world master business coach. Danny Creed is an international master business and executive coach, business consultant, trainer, entrepreneur, bestselling author and international keynote and workshop speaker. His website is realworldbusinesscoach.com. He is a recognized expert in sales, management and startup business, strategic planning. He is also a business turnaround and marketing specialist with a strong emphasis on business and personal development and growth strategies. Dan is an elite Brian Tracy International certified sales trainer and a founding member/trainer and facilitator of the Brian Tracy Global Corporate training courses in the sales success intensive course. Coach Dan has over thirteen thousand recommendations and has logged to date over fourteen thousand business coaching, consulting and training hours. He has been involved with fourteen successful startup business with over four hundred business turnaround challenges. Coach Dan is the unprecedented sixth-time recipient of the focal point international, Brian Tracy, award of sales excellence. His latest book is a must read, it's on Amazon. It's called, a Life Best Lived, a story of life, death and second chances. And what I love about your book is, people are brutal on social media.
Every one of your reviews is a five star. You don't even have a single four-star review. Now, you just must come from a very large family to have all of those fifteen stars. Did you offer them a free Starbucks card at the last Thanksgiving dinner?
Danny: No, that's a good idea though.
Howard: So let's start, this shows watched my dentist. It's watched by people in Ahwatukee. I've been here thirty years in the same location and so I'm in that Safeway, Walgreens, Chase fame plaza and man, the businesses just come and go and come and go and come and go and I can only name a couple of restaurants in Ahwatukee that have been here the whole time. There was Bob Benny's, there was CK's. Do you know how many restaurants have come and gone in thirty years for just CK's and Bob Benny's and you look at CK's and Bob Benny's and it's not that they're just the most spectacular restaurant in the world. I've had a lot of other restaurants in Ahwatukee come and go that had amazing food, but they kept both eyes on the restaurant or the dental office and they didn't keep one eye on the customer and one eye on the business. Why do you think people have, especially healthcare providers, my God, every MD I know can't answer a single business question about his practice.
Danny: Well, we spend a lot of time on this. I have clients all over the world as well as here in Arizona and Phoenix and one of the statistics that keeps coming back over and over and over again every year when they check it. In fact, the numbers have gone up, unfortunately, but the number is somewhere between eight nine and 91% of all businesses started today will be broke in two years or less.
Howard: 91% of all new businesses will be out of business in two years.
Danny: Yes, and the main reason of that is just what you just said is that people start a business with absolutely no idea of what it means to be in business. They do something they love, they do something they enjoy, but they don't understand what it takes to, my keyword is entrepreneur. I just got back from a speaking tour in Serbia and one of the things that Brian Tracy has always said is that it doesn't make any difference where you're at in the world or what the economic conditions are or what business you're in. It makes no difference at all in that there is a foundational recipe for success that applies across the board to any kind of business, again, wherever you're at in the world. And that foundational recipe is things that every business needs to know and again, unfortunately, most business people, particularly in professional services, haven't taken the time to sit down and understand what it takes to be in business.
For instance, dentists or a lot of lawyers, financial planners, all of those professional services they're really good, but you even take it into like plumbers and things like this. They come from a family of plumbers or they're doing something that they really enjoy. So it makes sense, "Well, I really enjoyed doing this, so I thought I'd start a business." And the fact is they have no idea. They're good what we call technicians, but they're terrible as business people. So it's kind of my mission, you know people ask me why I got into become a business coach. Well, the main reason, the cliché is to help people. Well, that's inadvertently why I'm here, but the real reason is as I mentioned, the reason I don't have any hair, I don't know about you, but the reason I don't have any hair is I've done fourteen business startups and I've worked with over four hundred turnarounds and one of the things that again, we learn is that golly, people are great technicians at what they do, but they are not very good businessman.
So I wanted to take the experience that I've had as an entrepreneur doing fourteen startups and all these turnaround projects because I wanted to take all the lessons I've learned, all the mistakes I've made as well as all the things I've learned from some bright people and I want to help others not make those mistakes. I want to help others learn so that they don't kill their family tree, so they don't lose all their investments. I mean, it's pretty sad if you think about that number eight nine to 91% of all businesses started today will be broke in two years. What does that do to people, to families, to groups? What does that do to people's psyche? Well, it's just terrible what can happen. So I became a coach so I could help share those ideas and thoughts and continue to learn and grow and work with people.
So I like to work with business owners who are successful and they know they're successful, but they know there's another level there that they just can't get to. And in turn, I like to work with people that I can help them achieve their goals faster than they ever could all by themselves because so many people get into business and they just expect, "Well, I'm just going to do it all on my own. I'm just going to figure this out and go." Well, they don't. So hopefully I can find those people and help them not make mistakes, help them grow faster just by some of the experience that I have and international experience. Again, I was in Serbia speaking at a big IT conference there and I'm telling you the issues they had and have, are exactly the same issues as we have here in Ahwatukee, exactly. So when we look at professional services, again, doctor's kind of figured it out early.
That's why most doctors will have a practice manager, but they work the books and the doctors still doesn't have to be anything but a doctor and hopefully they have a good practice manager, but for the most part, they're great technicians. They're absolutely great technicians. Dentists are great technicians, but again, I'm not saying anything detrimental or mean, but many of them don't have any idea what it takes to be in business. And that's what I try to help people with. I really try to help them understand the nuances and the elements of that recipe for success that Brian Talks about and Zig Ziglar talked about because if you work on those foundational elements. If I can get them just to look at them and be more aware of what the foundational elements of success are, then we have a much greater chance of being successful.
Howard: But to me, business it's kind of like Math, most Americans will tell you, "Oh I hate Math." And then I'll say, "Well when's the last time you did a math problem?" "I'm a dentist since high school." Okay, so you're fifty years old, you've hated Math for forty years, but you haven't done any single Math. And it seems like everything is a mindset. When you were in college and somebody would say, "Oh man, Math is hard. I hate it." And then they don't do any Math and then they're shocked that they got d's and f's in Algebra. Then other people said, just like, "This is just bizarre." It's like a chess match, it's like trying to figure out how this all goes together and then they would put in the hours and the time. So when I talk to dentists and people who own restaurants and so many of them, like every professional, say, "Well, I hate sales. I'm not going to do sales. I didn't go to school eight years to sell you need a root canal. I mean I'm a doctor, if you have a toothache and you want to know what to do, I said you need a root canal, I'm not going to sell you. Same thing with restaurants, my food should talk for itself and I'm like, food doesn't talk. But they tell you they hate Math, they hate business and then they try to delegate on their unsuspecting wife and it's like, "Well, you run the business." Like okay when you were dating her, did you decide that you were going to be married and have children because of her business resume. I mean nothing on her resume said, "I want to run your million dollar restaurant." And then you just throw it to her because she doesn't want it because you don't want it and she's like, "My heart is with these three kids." And so how do you change someone's mindset to like Math or running their business or selling when they just have already made up their mind? They hate Math, they hate business and they're not going to sell.
Well, the key word there is mindset and the fact is you can't always change, very seldom can you change that mindset. So the key to all of this is number one, changing attitude. The Carnegie Foundation, Andrew Carnegie's organization, they created a lot of research and I do an exercise it's called the Carnegie Triangle, and what we learned, the very short version of the results of this is that we will ask people to list all of the traits that go into being successful that a leader or somebody that's successful has. And I've had as many as eighty-five in a group setting, I've had as many as eight five traits that we've identified and then we find that there are three categories it all falls into. And the three categories are skill, knowledge, and attitude and so then if we go through and apply a skill, knowledge or attitude to every one of those traits, inevitably, and this is a real short version ...
Howard: By the way, I'm taking notes, I'm not texting my mom on Facebook. I'm writing down the Carnegie triangle.
Danny: The short version, the very short version because this is about a forty-five minute exercise where I'm working with the groups and if I ever work with anybody out there watching this, you'll know the answer to this, but it becomes very apparent very quickly, is that if we go put a skill, knowledge or attitude beside all the traits that we come up with, inevitably skills and knowledge represent 15%.
Howard: Skill and knowledge is 15%.
Danny: 15%, 85% of what goes into a goes into success, leadership, and success is accredited to attitude. How people feel, how people think. Henry Ford is famous for saying, "if you think you can or you can't, you're right," and that's where it starts. Now when you say, how do you get people to change? A lot of times you can't. I've worked with a number of dentists and some doctors and, again, professionals and the key is, I believe anyway, the key is for them to understand. In fact, thank you for mentioning my current book. I have two books coming out. If I can throw a little quick plugin, I have two books coming out and one I'm working on right now is the working title is called, Mastering the Grind and the grind is something that I work with people on, like dentists and such, in that we understand what is it we have to do in order to achieve the kind of success you want. Now, let me backup a moment here in that I always ask my clients, how do you define success? Because most people's definition of success is much different than mine.
My definition of success or wealth is much different than yours. So we define success and then once we do, we sit down and we look at what do you have to do to achieve it? What do you have to do every day? You know dentists very well. I'm sure there are things, well, I know there are things that dentists have to do every day whether they like to or not, in order to reach the level of success that they want, right? Well, so I say let's sit down and identify those things. What is it you have to do every day because I define the grind is doing what you have to do when you have to do it, whether you want to or not. So if we can define what the grind is for each person, then instead of griping and moaning and groaning and whining about doing some of this stuff or gosh not even doing it, we set in our mind, we might not like to do it, but we know we have to do it in order to achieve what you want.
Now you can call it selling, you can call it whatever you want, but if you define what it is, we find very clearly that if you define it as imperative that you do every day, then you do it and you just don't worry about. You just say, "Shut up, quit whining. We know we have to do it. If you want to have X, Y, Z. If you want to have X level of success, we know we have to do this and we know we have to do it every day." So to answer your question, part of it is just getting people to understand how they define success and what they have to do to achieve it. Now some of that comes back again to the foundational recipe of success because the elements of the recipes of success requires them to actually think. I've worked with a number of dentists and just the question of knowing who their target customer is. I'm telling on a whole, most business people have no idea who their target customer is. They know what the ADA tells them, they know what they think it should be, but I've worked with dentists, in particular, a number of them, in fact, one of the first things I ask him is, who's your target audience? And they'll say, "Well, it's men." And I we'll look at their website and their website is all men. And we'll look at all their marketing that they're doing, which is sometimes our cake and they'll say it'll show them in and we'll then ... I went as far as having some professionals I work with said, let's go through all your client files.
Now, that's a pain, right, but let's take our assistants and everybody when we have time, let's go through files and build a profile. Guess what we found? That their target customer wasn't men, it was thirty-five-year-old women and yet everything they've been marketing and advertising was men. We found that the thirty-five-year-old woman was the target audience. That she bought all the cosmetic dentistry and if she was married, she brought in her husband. If she wasn't, she brought her boyfriend. If she was married, she brought her husband and her kids and then later she brought her husband, her kids, and her parents, and so by changing just that profile, by really identifying who the target customer is, guess what happened? Business in a couple of cases increased by almost 50% in a year, but you should know, but we come back to what should you know and that's what I work with in helping professionals like dentists and other professional categories, restaurant tours and such, really understand their business better because one of those elements of success in the foundational recipe is clarity. If you come to my office here in Phoenix, you'll see that I have five dry erase boards on the wall and all five of them have the word clarity across the top of them.
Howard: For the people who live in Ahwatukee, where is your office in Ahwatukee?
Danny: I'm at 40, 6th in Chandler Boulevard. Right on the West End of the Kohl's Plaza there. There's professional offices there. I've been there for almost eleven years.
Howard: The West End. What's next to your office?
Danny: We're in the Kohl's, the big Kohl store, we're on the West End of that there, so it's a professional office space.
Howard: Can I tell you about my Kohl's nightmare?
Danny: If you want.
Howard: I don't know if you know this or not, but I'm not a big shopper, but Kohl's it's a square building and all four entrances kind of look the same. So about one out of every ten times, I walk out of there, I think someone stole my car and then you have to go back into Kohl's and say okay maybe I came in that door and sometimes I've spent twenty minutes trying to find my damn car. So you're ...
Danny: You know where the Starbucks is there?
Howard: Yeah.
Danny: I'm right behind Starbucks there in that professional plaza.
Howard: So on Twitter he's @bizcoachdan. I always say that it's your people ... you said Carnegie you talk about skill, knowledge and attitude and 75% attitude. I always said it was people, time and money and it was eighty. You said 85 I always say it's 85% people. They come out of school and you go look at them and they have all this turnover and they'll say, "I've gone through five receptionists in two years." And I'll say, "Well, HR is everything." Look at Michael Jordan he didn't go in the first round draft. Look at the New England Patriots keeping great quarterbacks for several years. Some of these businesses and dental offices and restaurants, there's some restaurants in Ahwatukee, no names mentioned, where every time you go in there it's all different employees and so when you see that, you know they're going to be gone in two years.
So my specifics are you're a business owner, you love your craft and you're shy and you're introvert, but now you got to be a leader and you got to do HR and you got to hire people. And people always say to me, "HR is tough." Well, it's tough for everything. Look at the NBA. I mean the Arizona Cardinals they had a great season, but then you lose your quarterback, you lose your back [inaudible 00:20:30]. So HR is always an issue. I don't care if your company's fifty years old. Some of these NFL football teams are fifty years old and then they just lost their starting quarterback and their great running back and their tight end and they're back to ground zero. What advice would you give to this business owner who just wants to do their craft and now they got to be a leader in HR and attract and retain great people and they would rather just be alone in the kitchen cooking lasagna.
Danny: Yeah, well the first piece of advice I always give is learn your business. You don't have to do it, but learn it because that's how you find people stealing from you and that kind of thing you don't know your business. Let me ask you, you can answer this, but how many professional services people do you know where the industry taught them how to run a business? You can talk about dentists, of all the years a dentist will go through college how many business courses were they required to take?
Howard: None and if I owned a Chick Fillet, the mothership franchisee would be helping me run my business, but in dentistry, the mothership is a nonprofit organization, the American Dental Association. When your mother ships a nonprofit that's your first warning.
Danny: Well, again, though from, from that standpoint, whether most professional service organizations, the organization doesn't teach them to be a better businessperson. They teach them to be a better technician. You go through college learning how to be a better technician, how to be a dentist. You go to conferences, they teach you how to be a better technician. Same with real estate, same with financial planning, same with almost anything, any professional service you can be they're taught how to be better technicians.
Howard: You want to know the funniest example, you and I are both from Kansas.
Danny: Yes, you just found that out.
Howard: The funniest story I ever came ... way back in the day, 1998. Back when it was VHS, I came out with this thirty day dental MBA to help dentists get some training in their HR and people and insurance and overhead and my oldest sister, my two older sisters went straight into the Catholic nunnery straight out of high school and my oldest sister was talking to a troubled priest and so just like dentists, I went to eight years of college to be a dentist. He went to eight years of college to be a seminary. The day after he graduated they sent him to Fort Scott, Kansas. He's in charge of a church that has an elementary school that's a million dollars in debt and teachers are quitting and parents are upset and he's thrown into this deal and he's like, "We read the Bible for eight years and HR and teachers and budget deficit." So my sister said, "Well, my brother teaches this in dentistry." [Inaudible 00:23:14] So this Catholic priest sends me a letter twenty years ago it's in 1998 he says, "I just want to thank you because I know that this was all aimed for dentistry, but I just took out the root canals, fillings, and crowns and put in teachers and PTA meetings and he goes, this is the only training I got." And how could a seminary trained me for eight years and then you're supposed to run a Catholic school?
Danny: Well, I say the same professional services to dentists and lawyers and real estate agents and everyone else. I blame the industry, I don't blame the guy man or woman doing it. I blame the industry. Why don't you teach the people, you spend eight, then you have another what four years of working for someone else and building your practice? Why don't they teach you how to do that? There's not a single sales class required. There's not a business course required to how to read financials. So that's where I come in, that's where people like me come in, in that I love to work with these people because most of them I teach them either how to learn it themselves or how to build a team to answer your question. One of the ways to do that is to understand your business well enough that you can build a team.
You can build a team that you trust and know that can do the things that you don't know how. The great businessmen of our time, Bill Gates always said that the reason he was so successful is that he hired people around him that were smarter than he was, that knew how to do some of those things. He brought in Steve Ballmer to be his CEO because Mr. Gates didn't want to be a CEO, didn't know how to be a CEO, but he let Steve Ballmer become a billionaire because Ballmer was the guy that ran all over the stage and went crazy and could do that, could pop up investors and do that kind of business. So as an independent business owner that is a professional services provider, you have to learn how to do it. You have to get some semblance of knowledge of how a business runs, HR and selling processes and the science of marketing and things like that.
And then so that you don't get taken advantage of and then you either learn to do it yourself and learn to become a business person as well as a professional or you are smart enough now to build a team around you. But you can't just hire a bunch of people because again, that's where you find people ... I just talked to a gentleman the other day who had a bookkeeper steal a couple of hundred thousand dollars from him. He didn't even know it was happening. He just knew all of a sudden he wasn't paying bills. He was getting calls from suppliers that said, "Well, we're going to cut you off." And he was, "What are you talking about cutting me off." And so we brought in a forensic accountant. I had started working with him, we brought in a forensic accountant and found that all this money was missing.
Howard: Now do you use a forensic accountant out of Phoenix?
Danny: There's a couple, yes, that if my client is here.
Howard: Well, if you ever have an [inaudible 00:26:26] I'd love to do a podcast with a forensic accountant because of the dental consultants I know and business consultants in dentistry for thirty years. Every dental consultant I've talked to said when you go into dental offices, 50% are being embezzled from, they don't even know it. And I also want to say something about ego like when I was talking to this dentist last night and he was all upset because his front office, I mean, he can't keep anyone even a year. I mean every six to nine months and I said, "Well, who's hiring all these people?" And he says, "You". And I said, "Well, if I owned the Arizona Cardinals well I'm not a scout, I hire scouts and you go in the NFL, you have scouts that all they do is scout, just the quarterbacks and they know every single person on earth that could potentially play NFL. They know every starter in any college for them. And it's kind of like, "Well, you know what, if you have a miserable tracker, maybe you're just really lousy at HR." And I thought I was really good in HR until twenty years ago I hired this bookkeeper named Lori and Lori was just so much better at HR.
So if you're doing something you really lousy, you got two choices, either get good at it, fix it, or find someone on your team who's better at it and delegate. And as far as the accounting goes so many people rely on a CPA and the CPA doesn't know any of your business and I went to the same church as Dan and Beverley Carney, the founders of Pizza Hut, and I remember Dan telling me when I was in high school that he said, "Every millionaire I know, so by the time they had five employees, two of them are full-time bookkeepers." And he said, "See this construction company over here? They remodeled the house, they built an office deal, they did a remodel and they know to the penny if they made or lost money on every other account and you know which construction companies go out of business, they just bid these accounts they don't know where they're making or losing money?" And he always said know your costs keep all of that in-house and he goes your CPA is some person who carries your relationship between you and the IRS, your federal government paying tax and everything, but they don't know managerial economics. They don't know your business, know your business. So I hired a bookkeeper in-house pretty much out of the gate and then I hired another one ten years later. But I've had a couple of bookkeepers on my team for two decades.
They know where every penny is, every other thing. And so if you're not good at something, get good or attract someone good on your team. Here's another problem we have specific to dentistry. When I meet people who own their own restaurant or a bar or things like that, a lot of times they're just normal people. They got a personality, they like people, but to get into medical school or dental school or law, or medical, let's just go medicine and dentistry. You have to get straight A's in Calculus, Geometry, Physics, organic biochem. These are introvert geeks that sat in the library for four years. If they would have been well rounded and they would have joined a Frat and had a girlfriend and went out and joined a bowling league and country line dance. They would have never got in med school. You had to be bulletproof so it's this natural selection of a lot of scientists, engineer, mathematician types and now they open up a dental office and they have to talk to people, they have to talk to patients. They can't even call the patient a customer. They explain the procedure, "You have interproximal lesion that will need Endodontic therapy because you have a pulpitis and then we'll do ..." And whenever they're done talking, the patient is looking at their gynecologist, their dermatologist, their orthodontist they're all looking at him like, "Was that even in English? Were you speaking Serbian?" So how can you take that natural selection to honor roll math scientist to actually be a leader and sell to your patients, to sell your vision to your staff? Can that be done?
Danny: Yeah, it can you mentioned ego earlier it takes somebody who's open-minded. Successful entrepreneurs and I consider anybody in business today is an entrepreneur, successful entrepreneurs are people who I think the major trader are those who are willing to change. Those who are willing to change. The folks that you're talking about are very close minded and they will say, "Well, this is the way I am so if you can't deal with it the heck with you." Well, they're going broke, they're going broke, they eventually will have issues. So to answer your question, we know and one of the things, without getting too deep into it, we teach a technique first of all through assessment processes. There's different personality assessments and when we believe that everybody needs to know where they fall in four categories of personality assessments and the importance of that is so people understand who they are and then once you understand that, we teach how do you adapt under that personality profile? How do you adapt to others with different profiles? For instance, Howard, have you ever met somebody that when you met him and you left and you went, "What a jerk." You had no reason to say that other than, "what a jerk," or you met somebody you went, "Gosh, I think we're related. I wanted to hug him." Well, that's because your personality profile attracted or repelled, and we know that for a fact. So certain business categories, like professional services, the guys you were talking about will usually fall under what we call an analytical personality. They're very bottom line, black and white, ABC. This is the way to do it. This is the way we've always done it.
Their approval ratings by friends and family and clients are based on the black and white results. Does your tooth hurt anymore? No, well, I did a good job because I did this, this and this. So what we try to do for those who are open minded, because if you're not open-minded today again, you're just not going to make it. I do a seminar called survive and thrive in any economy and there's seven rules in that and one of the major rules is if you continue to do business the way you've always done business, you will be out of business. It's that simple. So what I try to do with people as long as they're open-minded and what we'll call coachable. If they're coachable, we'll sit down and do a quick evaluation, takes fifteen minutes to do an evaluation what their personality profile is, and then we have a process where I will teach them how to identify other different personality profiles and then how to deal with them. I'm not asking them to change who they are. I'm asking them to change who they are in ten-minute increments so they don't have to say, "Well, that's not me, so I'm not going to do it." They can say, "I can do that for fifteen minutes." So a person that's that analytical personality can then if they're around an expressive personality, they know that they all going to have to smile a little more, that they're going to have to laugh at a bad joke. They know that they're going to have to bring them back and focus them and enjoy life with them for a moment or two. But it will make you a better parent, it will make you a better husband, all across the board.
Howard: I always tell them to go Hollywood. Ryan, who's that actor that was in the American psycho, Christian Bale? Christian Bale isn't a psycho. He played one on a movie. So you can be shy, but why don't you just go Christian Bale and give a great presentation, give a great staff meeting.
Danny: We teach them how to do that though and feel comfortable about it because sometimes they hear go Hollywood or something and they go, "Well that's not me." And a lot of people will feel that way, but we've been very, very successful in teaching someone how to, the keyword here is adapt.
Howard: Well when you talk about personality test whenever us dentists take a personality test, it always comes back says you don't have a personality.
Danny: Well they do. I've done enough of them to know what the personality will usually come back as, yeah, but then the key is helping you understand how to deal with other people based on who you are.
Howard: It's kind of funny because when I went to ASU you're really told to believe that man, if you learn Calculus and Physics and if you learn all these things, it's going to be the secrets to the universe and you'll be a superhero and then you come out and you learn that it's like, no, it goes all the way back to kindergarten. The people who mastered the sandbox, the people who have the best people skills go the furthest, not the most Geometry skills.
Danny: One of my favorite quotes is a paraphrase, but, one of my mentors used to say "the world is full of educated derelicts. That knowledge is not power." And we're told our whole lives that knowledge is power. Correct. Knowledge is not power. It's the application of knowledge that is power and so that's the missing link usually. People don't apply what they know. Many of them know it, many of them have been taught it to an extent, but they don't apply it and they don't apply it because it's not easy. It doesn't fit them. Whatever excuse it is. You know today we've really got an issue of whiners. We've got a whole litany of whiners. I've actually had, this came up last week, I actually have had people hire me or try to hire me knowing that their business was going south on them and they just needed somebody to blame other than themselves.
While I tried coaching, it didn't work. I can smell that out now. You've got to just step back and understand what's going on, first of all, be willing to understand what was going on and then change it. Then adapt, to adapt and change and apply the knowledge that you have, but people need to take responsibility today and I think that's a really big issue. There are certain elements and certain things in today's world because it's moving so fast with technology and everything like that, we've got to learn how to change and whether you're a dentist or a doctor or a pipe fitter or whatever, you've got to be willing to change because the past is probably last week. Things are moving so fast with technology and marketing and more than anything, how consumers buy. Howard, I'm sure you've talked to dentists as a dentist, but most people have no idea how easy it is to be replaced today. You know how easy it is to be replaced. Most people ...
Howard: Hey, I opened up my dental office thirty years ago and Arizona, Utah, and Nevada didn't even have a dental school. Now there's a dental school in Mesa and Gilbert, I mean Mesa and Glendale, Utah has two. Nevada has one, so in the valley, they graduate two hundred and seventeen dentists a year so every year in the valley there's two hundred and seventeen more dentists year after year after year. Thirty years ago, you were booked out a month in advance and the patient just had to wait. Now there's a dentist on every single corner.
Danny: Absolutely, and I tell this story a lot. So again, if I am ever speaking in front of you just bear with me when I tell this story, but I was doing a seminar on the science of marketing. When I do this, I don't talk about how to use Twitter and such I talk about the things that you need to know about your business to make any kind of marketing work, okay, and most people don't know that, but I had a heckler in my group and there was about two thousand people in the crowd and I had a heckler and believe it or not. And so I said, I got to deal with it so I had to deal with it. He was like, "Oh baloney. I can't be replaced. That's not true." I go look, "Pardon me, everyone, we're going to talk." I said, "Sir, what do you do and what's your name?" And we'll call him Bob and he goes, "Bob" and I go, "What do you do?" And he goes, "Well, I'm in heating and air conditioning." And I say, "Fine. Let me show you how easy it is. Give you a quick demonstration how easy it is to be replaced." I held up my phone, I held up a microphone, I punched a number and you hear Google comes up. I go, "Google, how many heating and air conditioning companies are there within twenty miles of where we're standing?" And I hold it up, one, two, three, ping. There was like eighty-two. I said, "Okay, watch this." Boom, it rings. A guy says, "Hi, Ralph's heating and air conditioning. I said, "Sorry Ralph, wrong number." Threw my phone on the table and said, that's how easy you're replaced. There is no loyalty today.
When we were growing up in Kansas, we went to the same drug store, the same grocery store, the same bank for generations. It's not that way today. If people don't like you and we have companies like Costco and places like that to thank for this because what happens, you can buy anything there and if it doesn't work or you don't like it, what happens? You can take it back without question. I say this Howard, that there is no reality in today's world, in today's business marketplace, there is no reality. There is only the perception of reality and what that means is people create a perception because everything's knee-jerk. People don't buy what they need, they buy what they want and that includes services.
Howard: I think it was funny how everybody was trying to guilt McDonald's selling all this fast food and everything. So years ago they came out with all these salads and they had baskets with apples and bananas and guess what? Nobody bought them. Nobody goes to McDonald's because they're a health food addict and want to get a salad and a banana and an orange. People get what they want.
Danny: And you know that almost killed him. And I too knew Dan and Frank Carney and Frank ...
Howard: Oh, that's right, because you're from Kansas.
Danny: And I was in radio for a lot of years and Frank told me one time that one of the biggest issues that they ran into is, remember when pizza used to offer spaghetti and pastas and breads and all that stuff. You remember that? Well, that really hurt them because when people used to say, let's go get a pizza. They always thought Pizza Hut first, but when they became perceived as an Italian restaurant, people now put them in a whole different category and that almost killed them. And they got it turned around, but it almost killed them because they tried to become something they weren't. Like McDonald's offering all this health food stuff, that wasn't what they were known as, the with Pizza Hut. And the same with any business, understand what your business is, understand why people come to you and don't try to be much more than that.
If you're offering a peripheral services and such those services have to be complementary, not competitive. if you're offering a competitive service, which is something that competes with your other business, you're always going to have issues. It'll kill you, but if you offer something that makes sense, if you offer something that is complementary to your base business, then you could add additional revenue streams. And we talk about a lot of this in the seminars and workshops that I do with dentists and professional services. There's not hardly any theory in these workshops that I do because I've worked with so many different people and been a businessman myself, which is one of the issues of a lot of people who call themselves business coaches today. Most of them have never owned a business, but I have that experience and so when I get in front of a group like that, we talk a lot about real-world experiences. That's why you'll see my website is branded real-world business coach because we don't talk a lot of theory. We talk about real-world applications because any conversation I have with you, with them, with the folks out there, I want you to leave with applicable, actionable steps to take. Not being all pumped up and then be depressed tomorrow.
Howard: I want to say two things [inaudible 00:44:06] said before when you said how easy it to be replaced. I just want to remind people that the Fortune 500 in 1950 by 2015, 88% of all those companies are gone, but then they'll say, "Well, that was back then." Well since the year 2000 52% of the Fortune 500 companies are gone, over half. Fortune 500 companies they have very sophisticated management and I want to say something about Frank and Dan Carney because Dan's wife, Beverly, passed away. A lot of people give a lot of credit to Frank and Dan Carney, but I'll tell you what, Beverly, in my opinion, was the genius behind the show. She was the one, she was unbelievable. She was looking in all these little Pizza Huts around like Coffeyville, Kansas and all these and she would sit there and realize, okay, by the time you build a pizza, you got to build the land and the building and the deal. Everybody eats from 12:00 to 1:00. They all come in and look at the process, we seat them. Then we take their drink order. Then when their get their drinks, then we take the order. Then we go make it. Then we deliver it and that takes about forty-five minutes and they woof down the food the last fifteen minutes, they leave. Then she takes all the tickets divided by the number of people and she kept coming back to this to two ninety-nine and then one day she sat then and said, "Well, they're all going to spend two, nine, nine, but if we change the process and come in and we just have a two ninety-nine all you can eat buffet. They come in, they make their own drink, they go to the buffet, they get all their food. They sitting on a table to eat and they're gone in thirty minutes.
Danny: Revolutionize, turn the tables.
Howard: So now we get to turn the tables twice so she doubled the return. So think about it you built a Pizza Hut store, it sells a dollar at lunch because twenty tables come in and spend a dollar, but now that twenty tables come in and they flip in thirty minutes and then another twenty tables are loaded and flip. Now that dollar store is doing $2. Beverley Carney, Dan Carney's wife actually pioneered that and I think she's the reason that it exploded and was sold to PepsiCo and they all lived happily ever after. And then I want to ask one more specific question. So if my homies go to your website, businesscoachdan.com. What are they going to find at businesscoachdan.com?
Danny: Yeah, you'll find really what I'm all about. My LinkedIn page will give you even more, but the businesscoachdan.com will give you an overview of what I do and how I do it. Most importantly, there's a section there that we have case studies. There's almost thirty case studies on there of the business. What the issue was, need or problem, what the solution was and what the result was. And if you really want to see real-world results, you can go to that and if you go to the website, I hope you do, be sure to look up the case studies because that'll give you an idea of what we do and how we do and the results. We've been very blessed over time. We've been really blessed over time with the results that we get.
Howard: I want to say something about him. He's too humble of a guy, but he's on LinkedIn. He has twenty-nine thousand followers, twenty-nine thousand six hundred and eleven followers. Let me tell you about LinkedIn, maybe 1% go to that you have fifty, hundred, five hundred to that five hundred plus, maybe that's like 1%. To have twenty-nine thousand six hundred and eleven followers, that's legendary stuff.
Danny: They cut you off at thirty thousand so ...
Howard: Yeah.
Danny: I keep it a little below thirty thousand. I just added a business page so we can overflow it.
Howard: Microsoft bought LinkedIn, they bought Skype and every single time LinkedIn prompts me with some survey. That's the only thing I say, "Why do you cut off at thirty thousand? Nobody else does that. That's crazy, but seriously though, that's extremely, extremely impressive.
Danny: Thank you. Well and almost everybody on my list I've been very specific on the people that I invited and accepted and most of the people there are sea level business owners or CEOs, CFO's, chief marketing officers, they're business owners. I've tried to keep it within the people that I hope to influence and work with.
Howard: But it's a big decision to hire a business coach. I see on your website, book a free session at businesscoachdan.com. So this is uncensored, this is raw. I don't want to talk about anything anybody agrees on. In the uncensored deal if someone's listening to you and they say, "I kind of like the service." But they're afraid like what does it cost. Is it a million, zillion dollars and furthermore, they always think, well, you don't understand because my business is totally different. I've got this totally unique problem. You've never heard of my problem before. How do they ...
Danny: First of all, I'll bet you a thousand bucks I have heard of their problem before. In this business, you hear of everything. I could write a whole book just on stories. I put that in there because if they qualify, first of all, I never ask anybody to pay in the beginning because when they're interviewing me, I'm also interviewing them. I want to work with somebody that's open and that is coachable and that I know if working together, if they'll do what we decide is the best move that they will be successful. But I like to give about an hour free coaching session. It's a sales-free zone and ...
Howard: Is it a phone call? Is it Skype? Is it in person?
Danny: Well, it just depends if they're here or they're someplace else in the world and if they're somewhere else in the world, we do an hour Skype or Zoom call and we just talk about their issues and needs and challenges, sometimes problems. A lot of the times the thing that messes with the people isn't necessarily a problem. It's a challenge or need that they just never were taught, so I'll do an hour and just talk about their issues and maybe give them some insight and thought and then if they would like to talk about working with me, then we'll talk about it. But it's not a setup or a pitch so again, I like the work. I want to work with business owners. I love to work with professionals. I even do from time to time, we'll do workshops like for dentists and professionals where I will have a location and invite people in or we'll do an online program.
Howard: There's a lot of Microsoft people, in fact, my next door neighbor works for Microsoft, but come on Microsoft you bought Skype and you bought LinkedIn and I'm on Apple so I can facetime people. Now you're on Android, you're on Samsung so you can't facetime people.
Danny: No.
Howard: But LinkedIn ...
Danny: But I can do Skype on there.
Howard: Yeah, but LinkedIn owns Skype so I should be able to go to your LinkedIn page, hit the phone icon and then be able to have face time with you.
Danny: Should.
Howard: I mean I'm a dentist and I know that. I tell my neighbor every time I see him at the driveway, I'm like, "Hello." I mean what did they pay $11,000,000,000 for Skype. It's like you own that asset why don't you make that seamless? Because when I'm talking to people, I really like to see them because so much of communication is body language.
Danny: Oh yeah, a lot of it is body language and that's why I love Zoom and Skype and things like this because just by me watching you, I have a new client that's in Los Angeles right now, and I met with him the other day for the first time and it was so valuable for me to be able to see him and I could see when he's getting nervous. I could see when we'd hit a nerve on something that we needed to talk about and sometimes people aren't even aware of things that they're doing that hurts their business. They're not even aware of it. And so that's very important for me to be able to see them because I'll be able to pick up on that because I've become kind of an expert on reading body language and such and I can say, you know, let's talk more about that and before it's over with I'll be able to see it and I'll help them be able to see it because what I do isn't all about telling. I always say I define a good business coach, is somebody that will coach, will teach, will train, and I'll be the first one to hug you and I'll be the first one to kick your rear end when you need it. But through that process, if you're willing to move through that process we almost always achieve success based on how you define that.
Howard: In 2011, you wrote the book Bootstrap Business. Is that still a good read in 2018?
Danny: Yes, it is, if you can find it. It's not in publication anymore as far as I know. I wrote that along with Jack Canfield who wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul and John Christianson who wrote the book Fish and Tom Hopkins, the great sales coach.
Howard: We've had Tom on the show.
Danny: Yeah and I wrote that a collaborative book and, again, it's a collaborative book about starting a business. And then I wrote A Life Best Lived and then the new book is going to be purely about business and really things I've learned from street fighting business, and it's catching a lot of interest. And then later this year, I hope to have Mastering the Grind out at the end of the year.
Howard: Well, you've got a busy year if you're going to release Real World Business straight talk on Surviving and Thriving in Business and then the book Mastering the Grind. You know, the first thing I thought of when I read the title of that book, Mastering the Grind, one of my favorite books of all time was the autobiography of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, Grinding it Out.
Danny: Oh yeah, I've got it on my desk.
Howard: Grinding it Out, the making of McDonald's and it was my favorite movie of 2017, the founder who was that?
Danny: Michael Keaton wasn't it.
Howard: Michael Keaton. The thing that's neat about talking to dentists is every famous person on earth goes to the dentist. So talk about Six Degrees of Separation. If you're a dentist, you got two degrees separation I mean ...
Danny: From almost anyone.
Howard: Well, you couldn't be the CEO or you couldn't be anybody who's made it to that league and be missing your front tooth and have dirty teeth. But if you're, what was that movie stars name, Michael Keaton?
Danny: Michael Keaton I believe it was.
Howard: If you're Michael Keaton's dentist listen you tell him that was the greatest movie. I got to see him when I was ten. So I was born in '62, in '72 when I was ten he bought Sonic drive-in franchise in Wichita, so he had five Sonics in Wichita. He had one in Carney, Nebraska, Childress, Texas, Abilene, Kansas, Louisville, Kentucky and so now I go to dental conventions, but when I was with dad went to restaurant conventions. So we drove down 35 from Wichita through Oklahoma City to Dallas and at a restaurant convention Ray Kroc spoke and I was about ten years old and I was sitting in the front row right on the aisle next to my dad and I was ten and now I'm fifty-five, so I don't remember it. But could I give you my Ray Kroc impression?
Danny: Yeah.
Howard: All I remember from the whole deal he says, "You know what?" So the whole if you go back in the day after World War II we didn't have interstates and when our five star General Eisenhower was in Europe.
Danny: From Kansas ... Abilene.
Howard: Abilene, Kansas, when he was in Germany and he saw how they could make a tank and put it on an autobahn and drive it ninety miles an hour to the shipyard. Then he'd see the tank made in Ohio and it takes six weeks going down dirt roads to make it to the base in San Diego. He came back and he wanted to build his inner state and a lot of people say, that's American folklore. That's not true, the interstate had nothing to do with the military, whatever it was put out by a five-star general who just got done watching the autobahn’s. But anyway that's when franchise took out because before the freeways all Americans were born, raised, reared and died and never went a hundred miles away from home. And then when they had those interstates, people walk out there and go, middle of Kansas like, "Really I could drive that interstate all the way to California and go to Disneyland." And that's when people start going down the deal and Ray Kroc knew that and he knew that when you got to the next town, you didn't know what any of these things was.
So franchises would take off the best because it would be familiar. You'd get to the next town and say, "Oh, that's a McDonald's." But Ray would sit there and I remember him saying, he says, he goes, "You know who decides we're going to eat? It's Mama, it's not Daddy, it's Mama." And when they get to that next town, they're going to have to go the bathroom. Dad, he'll pee anywhere. He'll pee on a tree, he'll pee on his truck, but Mama, she's got to sit down and she knows that filling station bathrooms going to look like a camel just use it and she knows if she goes to 7:11 they're going to lie through their teeth and say they don't have a bathroom. Really, you're working a twelve-hour shift without a bathroom. They're liars. So at McDonald's what we're going to do is we're going to clean the woman's bathroom every hour on the hour and every woman in America driving down that freeway is going to know the cleanest bathroom in town is at the McDonald's.
Danny: And they'll buy something when they come.
Howard: And when in there sitting down, daddy bear and baby bear are going to be buying salty French fries and that deliciously cold Coca-Cola. I can remember that verbatim and I remember thinking that just makes sense and you know what I take away from meeting Dan Carney, Dan Carney was such a jewel. He was so available to all these dumb kids in high school. You had a business idea you could drive over to Pizza Hut and Dan would listen to you at fourteen years old.
Danny: We used to have him come and speak and at radio station sales meetings.
Howard: What a saint, man. And gave all of his money to charities. He's on every board of every charity thing, but what I remembered about those two guys the most is all their genius insights were about the simple ways humans work and think. It wasn't about Algebra, Calculus, there was no fancy theories. It was, this is how people do it. This is what people do, this is how they work. This is how they think and if you focused more on Psychology and Anthropology and Sociology, just focus on your own damn family reunion. Would your aunt Imelda agree with what you just said? Will your uncle Charlie? And a lot of people say, "That person that wrote the Yelp review was crazy." You know half your family's crazy. People are crazy. We're humans. Humans are crazy. And I just love those people, but that movie was a founder. I know you're a busy man and I can't believe we already went over an hour. His website is ...
Danny: www.realworldbusinesscoach.com.
Howard: Oh, I have you businesscoachdan.com.
Danny: That'll get there as well, businesscoachdan.com.
Howard: Okay, businesscoachdan.com. And there's a button there, "book a free session." So if they hit that "book a free session," it just asks for your name, your email, your phone, your message summit. And then you'll call them on the phone and talk about their special, unique situation that no one's ever heard of before and then you can tell them how you've dealt with that exact situation a hundred times before.
Danny: Yes.
Howard: Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Danny: Howard, thank you.
Howard: And it's been a real honor and thank you very much. Hope you have a great day.
Danny: Thank you very much.