Sometimes, knowing which strategies work best for you is not enough to sustain your business. Instead, you have to think outside the box and be attentive to the external factors by having an investigator mindset. Dr. Tracey Jones sits down with Dan Goodwin to discuss how every leader must possess the qualities of an attentive investigator. Dan explains how to take advantage of interrogative-like questions and well-targeted time management regarding entrepreneurship and sales. They also discuss how to forge an effective ten-section business plan, putting a proper working pace to avoid weariness, and dealing with business divorces.
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Episode 121 – Dan Goodwin – Leaders On Leadership
Our guest is Dan Goodwin. Dan brings 30 years of investigative sales and negotiation experience in his consulting and coaching business. He teaches people and clients to think like an investigator as they move forward in their businesses and careers. You are going to love reading what Dan has to say about what it takes to pay the price of leadership.
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I am excited because my guest is Dan Goodwin. I want to tell you a little bit about Dan. Dan Goodwin leads entrepreneurs as they grow their businesses from startup to stability and preparing for scale-up and funding opportunities. Dan uses his corporate background and real estate experience to help business owners adopt best practices. He enjoys working with organizations to develop the skillsets necessary to compete and crush results in the economy nowadays. This is going to be a good one. After his corporate career, Dan completed projects related to business planning, strategy sessions, investigations, and security issues.
Dan has used his unique ability to ask probing questions, to help clients self-discover what they truly want. Based on those revelations, Dan is able to give directions and help clients create business plans. Dan speaks to various business groups on such topics as Think Like An Investigator, Cover Your Assets, Networking, Business Planning, Success Strategies, Critical Thinking, Intuitive Decision-Making, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and The 25 Things I Wish I Had Known When I was 25. Dan, thank you for being our guest.
Thank you, Tracey. That guy sounds like an awesome guy. I'm going to meet him. I'm like, "I've got to cut that bio down a little bit."
Dan and I connected through the C-Suite Network. I always like to pride people, the context that I have vetted Dan. He is tremendous and he knew my father. He's a big book reader, so this is going to be fun. One of the reasons was Dan sent me a sweet, humble bio. When I got reached out to him on LinkedIn to say, "We're going to do our recording." I looked at what he was doing. Those of you that read this blog know how I feel about the investigation, critical thinking skills, and digging down. I'm sorry, Dan. I had to throw that in there because this is going to be an exciting, cognitively-stimulating conversation and I can't wait.
I appreciate that, Tracey. It's 30 years of experience and almost 19 of that in the corporate world before I transitioned to be an entrepreneur. I'm excited to add whatever I can to your tribe and your followers and have my people to pile in when they can and take what they can from this and move forward.
I love that you're a hybrid, like many people out there, our readers, a lot of us started out in the bureaucratic world, the corporate world, whatever you want to call it, and then we transitioned out. That's a lot of our readers here. I love that you have walked in both worlds because they're different skillsets and that you are claiming your authentic self in the entrepreneurial world now. My father wrote this speech called The Price of Leadership and he was a real pragmatist. He believed that leadership is a privilege and a joy, but it's also tough. You're going to get your nose and your knuckles bloody because it's tough. There are some things that you have to be doing at a price you have to pay in order to be truly considered a leader.
Investigator Mindset: Ego and identity are wrapped up in profession.
I'd love to unpack your perspective on each of those, Dan, as far as what that meant in your leadership journey because you've been in a lot of different roles. The first price that my father talks about is loneliness. We've all heard that it's lonely at the top but loneliness has a different take for a lot of different people. Could you unpack what loneliness when maybe you've experienced it in your career and maybe some words for some of our readers that may be in a season of loneliness?
Thank you for bringing the book back into focus. I'm an avid reader and I did reread your dad's book and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's been a few years but I do remember that speech and talk that he gave. Loneliness, as I was keeping that in mind as I was reading it, to me, meant to be resolute, to have resolved, and part of that comes from my own experience. The resolve part is when I left the Sprint corporation in 2007. There were things when I got home that next Monday, I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror and said, "What did I do?"
I volunteered to be paroled. I wasn't pushed out by any. I volunteered because I was restless. I'd got my MBA. I thought entrepreneurship was where to go, but the loneliness piece hit pretty quick. The was in March of '07. It's like, "Did I make the right decision?" We identify with our profession sometimes. Especially for the males, for the guys, our ego, our identity is wrapped up in our profession or what we do. I was good at what I did. I got paid good money to go out and do internal investigations on behalf of the corporation. The loneliness piece hit me quickly and the thing I had to do was to concentrate on those daily tasks, moving me towards the next piece of results.
That is a good step for those readers out there that are thinking about coming out and doing their own thing. When you have that camaraderie or the corporate identity when you leave that is jarring. Same as you, I left huge organizations in 2009 and came back to run a little tiny family publishing company. It's like, "Where are the processes? Where are the people, where are the resources?" It's different, but I love that you talk about the application is get out of loneliness by concentrating on the task you left for a reason. Now you’ve got to bring it to fruition.
The other piece of that is, as I look back on it, and this is what I coach. I call these people encore career people, getting the golden parachute, or making the choice to retire to do something else especially in the entrepreneur space. I wish I would have taken more time to educate and research for myself. When somebody calls me and says, "I have this business idea," they want to know what they should be preparing for. If they've never managed the department, if they’ve never had to make their department a profit center or treat it as a profit center, if they're a line person, a widget maker and an accountant. If they've only had a single focus for their career, they are surprised and sometimes shocked when I say, "We need to form the ten sections of your business plan."
To see all the moving parts of a robust business plan, it's a real eye-opener. I thought I was ready. I finished my MBA in 2004. I thought I knew all. Theory versus practice. That is a passion of mine is when people are thinking about a startup is to help them vet their idea. They may be the greatest widget maker in the world. However, if there's no demand for their widget, hopefully, the money they spend with me to help them prepare will be a tenth of what they would have thrown out there to see if their idea got stuck, a mud on the wall, so to speak.
Did you say you called them an encore career? I love that. I've never heard that. I deal with a lot of people in my space like that midlife or 70s even saying, "Now, what's next?" When you work with them, you walk them through the process as far as vetting their ideas. Have you read Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited?
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
I quote Michael all the time. I talk about strategy working on your business versus in your business. When you're solopreneurs especially, you're wearing all the hats, the CFO, CMO, CTO, CEO, and COO. That's overwhelming to some people. Gino Wickman talks about the two types of people, visionaries and integrators. Knowing there are three times as many visionaries than integrators, because like me and you probably, we get bored easily. We're looking for the next project and opportunity. I want to make something, find somebody, go hire talent to carry this out, execute this so I can go on and decide what I want to be when I grew up tomorrow. That's how I feel.
If they're in that space where they're overwhelmed and I know a lot of our leaders are especially our entrepreneurial leaders. What would you recommend for them now?
Number one, take a breath. There's a lot of stresses that come in on us as we consider businesses, breathe. I would say, find a construct and a system to help you dissect the pieces that ten sections of the business plan. It will not be done overnight. Michael used somebody that baked awesome pies in the original The E Myth. It’s because somebody tells you, you make awesome pies doesn't make you a business owner. That just means you make great pies. We have to put flesh on the bones. We have to flesh this out. In the startup piece, the chances for success are 10, 20, 50 times greater if you will put the work in before you even open a door.
A lot of times you're doing that as a singular individual because you started out and we'll talk about that. Going into weariness, how do you stay refreshed, replenished? How do you combat this? It's a lot of work. There are stresses on people at the top. Somebody said to me in an organization, “I get this whole shared leadership, collective servant leadership,” but let's face it. Not everybody in the entity is equal. Everybody's a human being, but certain people get paid more because they're responsible for more stuff. How do you combat weariness, Dan? Can you tell a season where you were tired or worn out?
The fact of the matter is for the last few years, I have been working behind the screen. I've been using Zoom for years. I've trained and coached thousands of people all over the world. The difference is when it's your choice to do that, without figuring that somebody is telling you to have to do that because, as human beings, we're resistant. We want to buy in and we've got people saying, "No, you have to do it this way." Here's what I think about technology and then I'll get right back to the weariness.
What's happened with COVID and everything that we've been dealing with is it has forced our workplace 3 to 5 years in the future about how the workplace would work and how it would look like. Technology is moving on and you better get on the train, or you're going to get left behind at the station, wondering where the train is at. Embrace it. I've always been an early adopter on the bleeding edge of early adoption. I always want to keep that movement.
Back to your question, I went down that rabbit trail, the weariness piece of it is pace yourself. Not only breathe, not only take a breath and practice gratitude but pace yourself, realize that a life perfectly in balance means you're not moving. If you stand up and stand straight and you're perfectly in balance, that means you're not moving. You're standing still. The technique to manage your in balance, there are going to be days that you're working 10, 12-hour days, and the family is going to be on the short end, but to keep balanced, you need to also plan days for the family is the priority.
Your significant other is the priority. I schedule my meetings much on the hour in the afternoon and there's always about a 10 or 15-minute buffer between. I've timed it. I've got a ten-minute walk from my house to the top of the hill where the church is and back. That gets the blood flowing, gets me out of the seat, prevents muscle cramps and aches. The weariness part is pace yourself. Remember the old saying is, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Your business is not built in one day, Tracey.
I was on doing a Zoom course and talking about what is your purpose. What is your vision? We're going to get to that. One of the young men said that, "If you dial in your clarity in your vision, what do you have to sacrifice?" He was going back to your points of, you're going to have to shift priorities. That's okay. There are going to be days when you are going to work a twenty-hour day, and then there are going to be times when you have to focus on the family. That's great wisdom because going into it, nobody wants something to drop in your shirt.
You don't want your health friends, family, or faith to drop. That can't happen, but you're going to have to get creative in how you balance it all out. I love to get out, walk, and even a little bit. One guy said all his great ideas come to him in the shower, getting up, moving around, doing that thing. Loneliness, weariness, the next thing my dad talked about was abandonment. He would always tell me, "Tracey, I do more in a day to contribute to my failure than I do my success." I think he was getting onto the topic of focus. If we're honest with ourselves at the end of the day, if we give ourselves a billable hour thing, there's a lot of time in there that maybe we were dwindling or doing stuff that wasn't of the utmost priority. Can you help me understand what abandonment meets for you and how you hone your focus?
It's funny you used the word focus because when I was preparing for this show, I wrote a keyword next to each section and focus was the fourth I wrote down. For abandonment, all I can say is tremendous minds think alike. Focus is where it's at as far as drill-down, protect time type of focus. I do my best creativity activities in the morning time. What I derive energy from is interaction. I have set, you can call it a planning, lead generation or you can call it a number of things. It is where you are focused and going back to Gerber, you're working on your business. That is where your focus comes in.
In the real estate business, we would say, there is no emergency that is allowed to happen before 10:00 AM. If you're having a closing or a transaction, that's closing, there may be. The whole point is there is nothing you need to worry about. The thing to do is you make your client calls between 8:30 and 10:00, and then you take care of any issues after 10:00. Protect the golden flash platinum hour or an hour and a half, depending on how you work and the rest of the stuff you can address later in the day when everyone else has finally had their coffee and they're awake also.
Would you consider the client calls to start the day with the revenue-generating activities and then go to more of the operational tasks throughout the rest of the day? Is that what you're saying?
That has worked for me. There are people, Tracey, that their body's schedule is flipped and I get it. The point is it's not when you do it, it is that you do it. It is that you have that time. We’ll use C-Suite as an example, I had to limit my "get to know your calls" from 1:00 to 3:00, Monday through Friday. If I didn't put limits on that at the rate that our network is growing, I would be doing these all day every day. That is not an income-producing activity. It's great. I love the interaction. I love learning about other people and how they impact their world. It's not income producing until you do something to collaborate or joint venture or whatever the case may be.
Investigator Mindset: In the startup piece, the chances for success are much greater if you put the work in before you even open a door.
I appreciate that but the point is, you're saying you have to have chunks of time where you focus on one thing and not the other. I think too many of us the alarm goes off and we take it at as alarm and we start running blindly into the day. At the end of the day, we didn't get anything done that we needed to get done. I've had that happen a few times.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Bringing it back to the focus piece, the abandonment piece is it does get and Zig said this, "Lonely at the top," when you are your solopreneur and you are wearing all the hats, it does get lonely. To me, the abandonment piece is as soon as you recognize that, then you use that as a reason to find your tribe, to find people that can help you that are giving freely. Does that mean you may have to invest some money in a coach or consultant? Yes. You may have to. I promise you the investment you make will 10x, 20x at least, and reduce the scope of time for you to get to an answer into production with whatever your question is.
I would echo what you said because my dad always said that you're going to be the same person five years from now that you are now, except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read. I'm glad you brought that up. Dan, there are advocates, people that freely give. C-Suite is a big part of that. There are resources, the more the transactional relationships, and no matter how many blogs or things you read, we can only unpack ourselves. I'm working with a lady now to help me with my marketing and my branding because we can't see it in ourselves.
She even admits she has to have somebody, even though she does it for everybody else. I appreciate that you hit on that, Dan, when you get to that point where you realize, "I'm not able to figure out there are tons of resources out there and you need to make an investment in that too." For the entrepreneurs, a lot of people say, "I don't have money to invest and it's like a vicious cycle." You're not going to be creating revenue unless you have somebody help you get to the revenue-generating idea and systems.
To use the DISC personality, I find the SCs, I'm not admitting to this, I may have married a wife who was a perfectionist because she may read this and I wouldn't want to label her. The personality type that wants to know every piece of information before you launch and I'm exactly the opposite. I'm going to go and bump into walls and skin my shin and keep going. There is a balance there, and sometimes we run past the barrier, and then we have to go back and clean up the mess. Life is messy, business is messy. Sometimes you don't connect or engage with the right people then you feel abandoned.
I had an ex-business partner years ago. I found out through a series of events that we didn't have a shared value on how we treated people. My wife warned me. I went right through that barrier. I had a coworker come to me and say, "Are you sure you want to team up with this person?" I ran through that barrier. Luckily, I was able to menace the extraction process, but I did feel abandoned, but it was self-imposed. That's always the worst.
Dan, thanks for bringing that up because I deal with that too. That's one of the big fears, fear of abandonment, but I teach people too. There are things where I got involved with people that I knew there was the value congruence was slightly off or the trust wasn't wholly there, but yet somehow, it's going to appear. Those are the hardest abandonments is when you know you never should have been yoked with that person in the first place. Thank you for being authentic and sharing that.
It's tough. It still has fallout to this day. I still have some cringe-worthy moments and I feel my personal brand was salvaged. I moved forward with other ventures with people that know about that, but they came to realize it was not me. It was not Dan, the man. It was the other person that was driving the train. I wasn't the key, the founder, the leader on that. I was in that executioner role.
Abandonment also means you're going to have to abandon either a customer, a client and a business partner that when you say, "This is as far as it's going to go, we cannot grow together.” It's time to cut your losses and call it.
The sooner, the better. Sometimes the business divorces can be messier than personal divorces. We haven't even talked about investigating issues. We'll get there. I promise, but make sure you paper it up on the front end to save yourself grief, time, and money on the backend.
Before we get into all that investigation, let's talk about vision. When there is no vision, people perish. What does vision mean to you and what are your vision amplifiers?
Vision to me is encouraging people to live into their strengths, their goals, and their projects. My vision for my business or streams of income, I have multiple businesses, is me. It's personal to me and/or my wife, we're a team. She doesn't like anything to do with what we're doing now, but we have other projects we work on together. It is to cast division. I've always been a dreamer. I've always been someone that can paint the picture. You can call that communication, gift to gab. My family calls it something else. Two letters that start with B. It is the ability to communicate and help others see, define, clarify, and help them believe in themselves to reach their goals and their goals don't have to be my goals.
How do you do that? How do you get smarter in the business? I know you're a big reader. Do you study, research it? Are you writing it down or what's going on? How do you keep honing your craft?
Investigator Mindset: When you are a solopreneur wearing all the hats, it does get lonely.
I hone my craft through reading. I've got a whole stack of books here. One of the things I try to do, and I would encourage your readers to do also, is a practice that I've adopted especially with our C-Suite compadres. If somebody has given you 30, 45 or 60 minutes and they've written a book, buy their book. Buy a hard copy so they make some money on it, honor that time. I don't care if it's $5, $10, $15, $20, $25. Make it happen for them and give them. I'll read the book, I'll give it a review on Amazon. That's how I honor that piece of it. How do I stay sharp? It's reading. How do I discover a vision? That goes back to my skillsets and what I was trained to and learned in my corporate life that I have brought over to my entrepreneurial life.
Thank you for sharing about the book too and the Amazon thing, that's one of the things for our readers C-Suite focuses on is reciprocity. If somebody gives you the gift of their time, thank them and honor them in some way. If they're telling you something and they wrote a book, then they're a credible person, so definitely go ahead and read it. Thank you for sharing what your vision is and helping other people unpack that. Can we talk about that? I'm fascinated to hear a little bit more about your process. I'm an engineer by trade, so I'm like, “Root cause analysis. Don't chase it after solutions. What's the problem?” How do you help people unpack that?
The first thing I'll say is my investigative background prepared me for entrepreneurship because it taught me how to ask thought-provoking pattern-interrupt questions. For example, I put in the can, I finished production on a course called Don't Get Fooled Again. It is for people who are experiencing a betrayal, a trial, or a catastrophe in their business. That could be fraud, theft, embezzlement and it could be an inappropriate relationship. It could be stolen IP, whatever the human issues are.
They're experiencing that they're going through it now, they're reaching out to me. They came through it and they're trying to make adjustments to systems, processes, and people, or they want to prevent it from ever happening. The whole thing that has helped me is you're an engineer. I have a system. I have a way of processing information that helps me drive deep and drive it quickly based upon the fact of how to deepen rapport. I am with people, because people still have to know, like, and trust you. My background in training was internal investigations for Sprint.
I was sent to the same interrogation and interview school that the feds, the states, the counties, and the locals were sent to. I learned the process of the psychology behind how to conduct investigative interviews. We never called them interrogations in the corporate world. That was a little harsh. I get along with 95% of the people I meet I feel like I'm a nice guy and people find it easy to talk to me. It's easy to get into that rapport. That's how I started creating my construct for this.
I want to connect the readers with you. Anything else, Dan, as we cycle back on leadership that we haven't covered, that you would like to share with our leaders who are reading out there?
One of the leadership lessons I believe is to practice gratitude. I know I mentioned that but to be thankful for the skills and talents that you have been given to practice gratitude. There will always be things that come against us every day. What you mentioned a while ago, critical thinking skills, intuitive decision-making, and financial education need to be taught in school. I don't do the financial education piece, but I do use critical thinking and intuitive decision-making that's based on thousands of employee interviews. It is the self-talk piece of what you feed your mind.
What you feed your mind is what you're going to reflect. That's why it's important that we go back to the reading piece. We go back to surround yourself with great people piece. We dive deep and explore values for potential joint venture partners, even vendors, clients. There are some clients that the 80/20 rule will apply. That's my philosophy on the leadership piece. That's what I walk through when I am coaching or consulting with somebody that's going through a huge situation in their workplace. By the way, I don't do marriages and sorry about that.
I bet when you help that person de-stress their own professional burdens, I'm sure that has positive ramifications in the marriage.
Yes, because what we're talking about are principles. My personal development, professional development, and it's easier for somebody to invest and think they're investing in professional development, but the whole point is hopefully, they'll listen to you. They'll implement an action plan and that should be reflected in their personal stress level.
Dan, where can people get in touch with you if they’re interested in working out with you? You mentioned that Don’t Get Fooled Again. Did you say that's a course or a book coming out and up?
It's a course. It's for twelve hours. It's an hour-long and I'm going to put out the link on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the place I live and breathe. If you look for Dan Goodwin-CYA Consulting, CYA stands for Cover Your Assets. I know maybe in other parts of the world, you've heard it differently. It's tongue-in-cheek and I'm a little naughty. I have a whole other talk called CYA WTF and other TLAs. People say, "What's a TLA?" TLA stands for Three-Letter Acronym. In the military, we've got all these TLAs. WTF is Wow That's Fantastic. When you have a WTF moment, it is a reframe. We have to reframe in order to move forward. You're allowed to be upset for fifteen minutes and then you have to seek a solution. Rant and rave for fifteen minutes. That's what you do.
As my dad would say, "No more thumb-sucking. Time to seek a solution." My dad would say to people, "Of course, you've got problems. You're not dead. Get on with it. Let's find something else that we can cry about. Let's move on."
This is what we get paid for. We solve problems. That's why people pay me to help them work through the structure and the process. Now you’ve got me preaching.
Investigator Mindset: If somebody has given you around 60 minutes and they've written a book, buy their book.
As a military girl, I know every acronym in the world. I've even invented some of my own and I love acronyms.
That talk, I can expand that from ten minutes to an hour. We can go over twenty acronyms, the mnemonics and I've made some of mine up. I have four-letter acronyms too. DTFW stands for Do The Fantastic Work. You may have heard it differently. You've got to do the work. You can't just sit around and wait for the sky to fall and say, "God is blessing me because I made a plan." No, God blesses you when you take action on your plan. That's what happens.
It's like you were talking about being perfectly balanced. Unless you're in motion, you're not going to get anywhere. Dan, thank you. It has been a great time for enlightenment. I'm one of those learners that when I hear it, I have to write it down because the day gets away from me. You gave me some great insights. You spoke a lot of truth into me and I know you did to our readers as well. Thank you for being here.
Tracey, I appreciate this opportunity in the faith you put in me to reach out through your show to your tribe. If there's anything I can do for you, or if your tribe reaches out, you need to ask. That's what we're here for.
For the entrepreneurs out there, don't go it alone. There are people like us. I think that's where people are reading these blogs and that's one of the benefits. People are into this more and realizing, "There's a tremendous amount of resources out there." When Dan says connect, Dan means connect. When I say connect, I mean it too. Thanks, Dan. To our tremendous readers out there, thank you for being a part of our tremendous tribe.
If you like what you read, please hit the subscribe button wherever you're at. If you do us the honor of a five-star review, we would be thankful. Lastly, I'd love our readers to get over on our TremendousLeadership.com website. If you sign up for our list, we've got two free weeks of eBooks. We've got downloads of free webinars, all tremendous things, and you can check out all our other backlog of episodes to help make you a more tremendous leader. To all our leaders out there, you keep on paying the price of leadership. Thank you for being with us.
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About Dan Goodwin
Dan completed his lengthy corporate career in 2007 as an internal investigator and transitioned into a business owner, coach, mentor, consultant, and teacher. Dan uses his unique talents and training of interview and interrogation techniques to assist entrepreneurs as they prepare and/or revise their business plans.
Dan's interactive style makes him unique in his ability to communicate to the complete range of business contacts, whether that be solo entrepreneurs or C-level executives. In addition to in-person appearances, Dan leverages technology and uses video and webinar training as a part of his follow-up sessions. Dan brings a large network of contacts and is fiercely loyal to those whom he endorses.
When considering a business coach, conference keynote speaker, or simply want to explore a new business idea, you can reach Dan at Dan@OurConnectedLives.com.