Dean:Hi, Dave.
Dave:Hey, there he is. So, are you in Winter Haven today?
Dean:I am. Yes. At the lovely Four Seasons Valhalla in Winter Haven.
Dave:Which is the name for your house, right?
Dean:That’s exactly right. We are bunkered in and yes, I’m luxuriating, yes, in home comfort.
Dave:And what’s the … Yeah. What’s the weather and temperature like? I’m always conditioned to always want to know what the weather and condition … And temperature.
Dean:It’s beautiful right now. Let’s see, weather today … Well, it’s a hot one today, Dave, 90 degrees right now.
Dave:Okay. And climbing, sunny?
Dean:90, not a cloud in the sky.
Dave:Okay.
Dean:Not humid though, so it feels nice today.
Dave:Okay.
Dean:I was out earlier this morning. Yeah.
Dave:Well, good. Well, thank you for being a guest on my podcast.
Dean:I’m excited.
Dave:I am too. Well, let’s get started.
Dean:Okay.
Dave:Let me read your bio. It should only take about 20 minutes to go through it, so I’ll try to shorten it.
Dean:Okay, perfect.
Dave:So, Dean Jackson … So, I’m not even sure how to describe you, but I’ll take a shot at it.
Dean:Okay.
Dave:You’re a published author-
Dean:True.
Dave:Host of multiple podcasts-
Dean:True.
Dave:An entrepreneur, owner of multiple companies-
Dean:Yeah.
Dave:A consultant, a coach and formerly a world class tennis player, I believe.
Dean:That’s … Wow, this is like … I feel like This is Your Life.
Dave:So, but how do you describe what you and your companies do?
Dean:So, overriding our simple organizing purposes, that we help entrepreneurs make more money. That’s really the bottom line of what we do and that means that’s our kind of guiding core so that all of the things that we do … We’re not an education company that’s teaching technical skills or teaching theory or teaching how to do this or that. We are a strategic providing coaching and tools that are directly related to increasing revenue and whether it’s through generating new clients, through generating referrals, all of the things we talk about in this holistic approach to businesses that divide them into a before unit, a during unit and an after unit and all of those with an eye on maximizing revenue.
Dave:Excellent. Well, that is a good summary. What are the types of companies who most benefit from the type of work you do or maybe give us an example to just kind of help understand, our listeners to understand some ways you’ve helped companies?
Dean:Perfect. So, there’s so many … Like any business, you’ve seen the model that we use which is our breakthrough DNA process where … And I call it that, the breakthrough DNA process, because we’ve identified eight profit activators that are universally present in every business and they are all there whether people are paying attention to them, aware of them, moving the knobs and dials that control them or not and they are all universally present but they manifest differently in every business. So I’ve had a long … Starting now since 1988, 32 years now of experience working on this model and I think the first 10 years was unconsciously working on the model without the name for it and without the structure around it and the last 22 years consciously with the …
Once I identified the system and … So, I’ve seen the application of it in businesses from the real estate business to the coaching business to industrial businesses to mainframe outsourcing for Fortune 1000 companies business, franchise operations, business to consumer companies, business to business and I’ve seen so many types of businesses that when you apply all of the things that … You see how many things work in other businesses. There’s always a way to find the way to apply it to your business.
Dave:Okay.
Dean:But it’s been the fun thing for me.
Dave:Sure, sure. And you have a podcast where every week you do just this with a different business owner, right? Isn’t that-
Dean:That’s exactly right, yes.
Dave:And what’s the name of that podcast?
Dean:So that one is called More Cheese, Less Whiskers, which is one of our philosophies of business is that you focus on the results that people are going to get more than … Make your approach to things about them more than it’s about you.
Dave:Right and what does that name mean? Because the first time I heard that, I’ll be honest, I was … I misunderstood it.
I thought it meant like me as the consumer buying cheese, I wanted more cheese and I wanted less animal whiskers in my cheese.
I don’t think that was the idea, was it?
Dean:Well, how that podcast came to be was out of the I Love Marketing podcast, which is crystal clear in the name of what that one’s about-
Dave:Sure.
Dean:Is that we … I started talking about this idea that I was curious why are mice used in psychological testing because it turns out that their motivations and response systems are very similar to the way humans respond to things and I started thinking about it that the reality for a mouse is that they have a very simple life. The two prime directives of a mouse are get cheese and avoid cats. That’s pretty much it for a mouse, and I started thinking about that-
Dave:Hence the whiskers.
Dean:Yeah, exactly.
Dave:The cat whiskers.
Dean:What I look at is that you don’t have to convince a mouse to try some cheese. They’re drawn to it. They’re seeking it out and if there’s cheese on the other side of a three-inch wooden door, they’ll chew their way through the door to get to it but as soon as they sense whiskers, as soon as they sense a cat on the other side, they’ll run away because we’re conditioned that we’re always skittish about … It’s more important to live than it is to get that cheese. So I learned something interesting about evolutionary psychology and how that applies to us that why bad news is always more motivating is that we’re weighted … We’re genetically wired to put more importance on negative news than on positive news because if it was a 50/50, if we had to evaluate every piece of incoming information and make a decision on whether is that cat close enough to get to me or anything that we would be extinct as a species because we don’t have time to evaluate this stuff.
So, at a mitochondrial level, we’re wired that it’s almost like if you touch a hot stove, before you can logically figure that out, your hand is immediately drawn away from that and that’s the way that we, as consumers, are looking at the things that we’re considering, right? Like we want to seek out the cheese, which is the good thing, the result, the benefit, the outcome that we’re seeking from an interaction with a company but as soon as we sense whiskers or a sense that this could be a trick or a trap or somebody’s more interested in a sale than my outcome or my wellbeing, that we are wired to withdraw from that or to run away from that.
So the longer that you can keep your prospective customers view on the outcome and the cheese and that the collaboration with you is going to lead to that cheese with certainty, the better off you are.
Dave:Ah, so another way to think about this is that you could have say six really positive conversations with a potential customer but if you have one really negative conversation, like where they sense that you’re just trying to sell them something, that that-
Dean:That’s exactly right.
That that one negative thing in the mind of the customer will more than offset those six very positive conversations, right?
That’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s exactly right and it’s such a balance because part of the process is educating and motivating people and when they’re properly educated and convinced that something is the right course of action, there’s nothing … Their own momentum is going to carry them towards you and a lot of times people spend a lot of time trying to convince people when they’re not ready yet.
Dave:Right and that reminds me … Yeah, and I’ll just say reminds me of … So, just to be clear to the listeners, I’ve known Dean for a number of years because we’re both clients in the strategic coach program and we’re both big fans of Dan Sullivan and one of the interesting research items that I learned from you several years ago is around the percentage of people who ultimately buy, how many of them buy in the first 30 days. Can you walk us through that? How those numbers play out?
Dean:Yeah, because I had always been a student of lead conversion. When you start learning direct response and you start learning how to run ads that generate leads, then the next evolution of that ultimately is you start to observe well, why doesn’t everybody buy or what’s happening here and so that took me down a real study of it and realizing that I came across a company that does nothing but lead management at an enterprise level for all kinds of industries and they would do … They would generate millions of leads a year for big corporations like say Kohler for faucet people who go to home shows and inquire about faucets or they respond to magazine ads or on the website and request literature or request information about Kohler faucets.
This company would handle the fulfillment of those leads and then pass them onto the sales team and what they did that was very smart was they started doing something they called did you buy surveys. So they would call people up and take a sampling and people who had responded 90 days ago and people who’d responded 120 days ago and six months ago and they would do a survey that would just ask one question, they’d call you up and say, “Dave, you came to the home show, you inquired about faucets, have you bought any faucets?” And that’s the only question they would ask is whatever it was that they had inquired about, did you buy any faucets or did you buy a new deck or did you buy a washer and dryer or whatever people had inquired about and what they found in their research was that all the people that inquired about anything just over half of them would buy what it is they’ve inquired about in the next 18 months but only 15% of them would do it in the first 90 days.
So, that means that there’s five times more people … If we were to generate a bundle, a cohort of a hundred leads today and we were to march them out and I set up for my model, I always like to be conservative, so my model is to take a hundred leads today and march them out for not 18 months but two years and downgrade the expectation to 50%, so my model is that my expectation is that 50% of the people who inquired today will buy something in this category that they’ve inquired about, whether it’s a new car, a new boat, a new law firm, accounting service, whatever it is, they’re going to buy that within the next two years but the only time, the only thing is there’s only two time frames, there’s now or not now and that’s taken me … That’s a new realization for me in the last three years.
That’s the latest sort of iteration of all of this, that rather than trying to time a sales cycle like if they say it’s going to be six months that we call back in three months or that they say it’s 90 days, we call back in 45 days or whatever, rather than trying to stock pick, like to time the market via a stock picker, I’m taking more like Warren Buffet’s approach of being a value investor and stay invested in the market, that I’ve got these 100 leads, I’m going to stay in contact with them continuously for a hundred weeks. A hundred times a hundred, that’s two years of weekly … And weekly is the right cadence in most cases. In some cases, monthly or we can go less than monthly if you’re doing … Monthly, if you’re doing something by print, weekly if you’re doing something by email or biweekly, and email are biweekly and not trying to ever then time it and reach back out to people but to see who are the five-star prospects.
And what I mean by that is that at any time, in order for somebody to do business with us, they’re going to have to meet five criteria. First of all, they have to be willing to engage in the dialogue. Then they’ve got to be friendly and cooperative when we talk with them. They’ve got to know what they want. They’ve got to be ready to get it and they’ve got to want us to help them. Those are the five, so five-stars. I look at those as like the staged lighting at the drag races, right? First one goes on, the second one and then we bail out if at any point they’re not moving to the next level. We need to stay at that level until we determine that they’re ready to move to the next.
Now, what traditional marketing and what especially online marketing has really done is they approach it from the bottom up instead of from the top down. They generate leads online and then they start saying to people, here’s what you should buy and you should buy it now because I don’t know how long we’re going to keep this up or how … This is going away after midnight and this is the lowest price you’re going to get, they’re trying to induce people to buying now and so I look at it that if they have to be all five, then why not just start at the top and see who’s willing to engage in the dialogue.
Dave:Right, right.
Dean:So, when they respond, if we can just engage them and ask by email a simple question to engage somebody in a dialogue. Somebody comes to our real estate website as a buyer looking for a home in a particular area, we will send them an email the next morning and say, “Hey, Dave. Welcome aboard. Are you an investor or are you looking for a house to live in?” That would be a simple question that we can ask people that get a lot of response. The five star prospects, see this is the thing that people get confused about is that we’re not creating five-star prospects, we’re discovering the five-star prospects.
Dave:Yeah.
Dean:And so by asking a simple question, if they say … If they respond to that, then the odds are when you reply back to them, they’ll be friendly and cooperative and engage with you in a further kind of dialogue, which now we can steer to number three, which is do they know what they want? And do you know what they want? That’s the whole thing. So everything about the dialogue should be about determining what is it that they want and when you’re crystal clear on what they want and that it matches up with what you’ve got, then we move onto are they ready to get it now?
Dave:Right, and that’s where the…
Dean:Yeah, it never feels like selling-
Dave:Well, and I think my recollection is that although 15% buy in the first 90 days, I think it’s only like 5% that buy in the first 30 days.
Dean:Right, that’s exactly right.
Dave:But on the other hand, the average … I think you coined a term, so many companies put the prospect through the gauntlet. They just bombard them and after about two weeks, you’re sick of them and they think you’re a deadbeat, so they’ve passed up 95% of the opportunities by not recognizing that there’s only so much you can do to persuade somebody to change their buying timeframe.
Dean:That’s exactly it. It’s just discovering it. That’s the funny thing. Yeah, that gauntlet series was actually … That’s a term that internet marketers use that you got to send people through the gauntlet series and what I really … I was speaking at a Dan Kennedy event and I looked up the word gauntlet and found out that it’s actually a military punishment where a man was forced to run through a line of other men who were beating him with a stick until he got through the other side and that was your punishment. Once you ran the gauntlet, then you were considered disciplined kind of thing and I think that’s what we’re … That’s exactly how your prospects feel then. Some of them are going to feel…
Dave:Like they’ve run the gauntlet.
Dean:They’ve run the gauntlet.
Dave:How well would they do if they transparently said, “Hey, mister prospect, how would you like to go through our punishing, annoying gauntlet? What do you think?”
Dean:Right.
Dave:I’d say the takeaway would be low. So hey, I’d like to switch gears and talk about a couple … So, this is great stuff, I don’t want to minimize it but there’s a couple other things I want to talk to and there’s a couple concepts that I believe you either invented or at least you created a name for and so this is the quiz part of the podcast. I’m going to quiz you here, okay? So the first one is what is the alternative to the mainland?
Cloudlandia.
Dave:Ding, ding, ding. You are correct. That is the first one. And then let’s get to the next one and then I’m going to come back and go into more detail. So the second one is let’s say an entrepreneur gets an idea he wants to move forward on. He thinks it’s the greatest opportunity ever but if he’s not careful, he’ll get stuck and if he gets stuck, what’s the first question he should ask himself?
Dean:Okay. So my thing is I would say who can do this for me would be the question but I-
Dave:Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, who … And you have a shorter term for it, right?
Dean:Yeah.
Dave:Who, not how.
Dean:That’s exactly right, yes.
Dave:So, we’ll come back to that one. Let’s jump into the Cloudlandia idea here.
Dean:Okay.
Dave:So, the mainland versus cloudlandia. So tell us what this means.
Dean:Well, we’re seeing right now and this is before as we’re recording this, we’re in the midst of the quarantine. Everybody’s got to stay at home, nothing like we’ve ever seen before but up until this point even-
Dave:By the way, let me just interject, let me interject Dean, so we’re recording on April 8, 2020. So go ahead.
Dean:There we go. Perfect. And so everybody, up until this point, we were seeing already a mass migration of people into the cloud as the main world, right? That this was the thing, it’s happened over the last 20 years but 20 years ago, the main focus of our world was the mainland and the internet was a slight distraction from the real world and then overtime, as we got more and more into the decade that we’ve seen that the transition has happened that the main world is in the cloud now, online is the main thing. Cloudlandia is what we call it. We’ve all migrated to Cloudlandia and we have to really put things in place to carve out time to do things on the mainland, that we really are, our whole lives, moving faster and faster towards being sort of cloud dependent.
I remember in the 90s, there was a mainstream magazine that had a journalist lock themselves in a New York City apartment for a week with their only means of communication the internet to see if they could survive for a week on just the internet and he struggled and found a restaurant that was online and he was able to order Chinese food and have that delivered to his apartment and now, the daring thing would be to see if you could lock yourself in a New York City apartment and survive for a week without the internet.
Dave:Right.
Dean:That’s really where we’re at now is that it’s not just this little distraction from our mainland world, it’s the main world now and god forbid, could you imagine what the disruption would be like if they said we’re going to have to shut down the internet for the next 60 days.
Yeah.
Dean:I mean we are so fortunate that all we’re seeing right now is a mainland disruption but could you imagine the impact of having to shut down the internet for 60 days?
Dave:Oh, for sure. I was listening to a podcast this morning about a guy that specializes in ecommerce and he works with all these companies and these little companies who sell things through Amazon and he was talking about how their business … All of his clients’ businesses have exploded in the last 30 days.
And yeah, and so like a really simple example might be like say a movie, like 20 years ago, in theory, I mean assuming you were watching it like on cable, you had to go to a movie theater, right?
Dean:Yeah.
Dave:You had to get in your car and drive to the movie theater and wait in line and buy a ticket and then hope you got a good seat and then hope there wasn’t sticky popcorn on the floor, right?
Dean:Right.
Dave:And then you had to watch 30 minutes of previews and then when you left, you had to fight the crowd out to get out and now, you just sit down in your comfy chair and 30 seconds later, on Netflix, you’re watching a movie.
Dean:That’s exactly right, yeah. So, life’s getting better and even when you do go to the movies now, that’s elevated the … It still coexists but it’s elevated the movie experience.
Dave:Right.
Dean:Now, when we go to the movies, the movie theaters are much nicer. They’ve got reclining seats. They bring you food. All that stuff.
Dave:Right, and you didn’t wait in line for your ticket, because you bought it on Cloudlandia.
Dean:Bought it ahead of time, that’s right.
Dave:So, now let’s switch gears. I can’t believe how the time is just flying by. So let’s talk about the other concept I mentioned, the who not how and so what does this mean and what kind of … Is there a story you can kind of pop into this?
Dean:Yeah.
Dave:I think this came from a conversation that you had with Dan, wasn’t it?
Dean:Yeah.
Dave:Around procrastination?
Dean:Yeah, that that’s the thing that often when an entrepreneur is faced with a new idea, an idea, a what, this is … That’s really what an idea is, is a what and so what you want to do. Here’s an idea for you, this is what you should do and an entrepreneur sees it and says yeah, I should do that. I want to do that. Now, they’re at the crossroads. Now they’ve got a choice and they can go down the choice of how do I do that and now they’ve got to go down that long winding road writing a blank check with the only resource we have that’s nonrenewable. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for you to learn how to do whatever that new thing that you want to do is and then even when you learn how to do it, now you still have to then do it slowly and poorly because it’s your first time doing it until you get to done, right?
Now, if you are at that same crossroads and instead of saying how do I do that, you ask yourself who can do that for me?
Dave:Yup.
Dean:Now, the great thing is when you find that who, they’re going to bring the how with them and they’re going to save you all that time because anything that somebody anywhere has already done is just a technical problem that the answer is known and you just need to know how to do it or find somebody who does know how to do it and just describe your what, describe what you want and then you’re done. Once you articulate it and describe it to the right who, now you’re done and you get to stay on that high road of the high value thing is going out and discovering what else you could do because you don’t have to spend any units of time on how.
Dave:Well, and I have a perfect example of this that will, I’m sure, resonate with you about three years ago, I was quite a … I listened to a lot of podcasts and I’ve thought, it’d be kind of neat if I had a podcast and so this idea kind of … And then I’d maybe do a little research, how to do a podcast and it appeared I needed some kind of microphone and some kind of gear and there were all these things and so I had this idea, classic case, I’d like to do a podcast and then I started instinctively saying well, what do I need to do? Or how do I do this podcast?
Dean:how do you do that, yeah.
Dave:So this goes on for a couple years and I talked to other entrepreneurs, wouldn’t you like a podcast? Yeah. Nobody makes progress. Well, then about nine months ago, I get an email from one of your colleagues or maybe it’s from you and the question was, hey, how would you like to have a podcast? If you would like a podcast, just say yes and you’ll have a podcast and so the IC-DISC show is a product of that interaction and I said, yeah, I don’t have to know what to do to have a podcast or how to do it, I just need to know who and the funny thing about it is, when I launched this about six or eight months ago with your company, I was so excited and I shared it with other entrepreneurs who also wanted to podcast.
And I probably shared it with 10 entrepreneurs and they all said, “Well, that service is really interesting but I’m not sure it’s for me because I’m about ready to launch my podcast as it is. I’ve got my microphone, I’ve got this thing,” and I’m sure you’ll not be surprised, none of those other 10 entrepreneurs have a podcast and I have a podcast. Now, is it the greatest sound quality like in the whole world? Is it produced in a studio? No. But we cruise out-
Dean:It’s not NPR. Yeah, it’s not NPR quality but let’s face it, we’re not talking about NPR.
Dave:Right, right. I guess it’s a good enough solution. So, no, I’ve experienced this first hand and I find that so many of my life or business opportunities are so much easier by just asking that one question, who not how.
Okay, well, a couple other items I’d like to discuss because I could spend the whole time just delving into any of these, so what was … So, I think you referred to this time we’re in as the quarantine and I’ve thought about this and I’ve chosen … And I think this was influenced by Dan and when we talk about Dan, we’re talking about Dan Sullivan, the founder of strategic coach, the best coaching organization on the planet for entrepreneurs in my opinion and I suspect yours as well.
Dean:Absolutely.
Dave:And so some of this I might have gotten from Dan but I prefer to label this the pause and the restart. So we’re currently in the pause and then one day, we’re going to have the all clear sign and we’re going to have the restart and so Dan invented a question called the R-factor question as you are well aware and the question goes something like this, “Hi, Dean. If you and I were sitting down three years from now and looking back over these last three years, what needs to have happened for you to be satisfied with your progress both personally and professionally?” But I have a version of this I’ve been asking people lately and I’d love to get your reaction to it.
So, my version is Dean, if we’re sitting down three years from now and we’re looking back over those three years, what do you think the probability is that you’ll be more likely to say A or B? A is the pause and the restart destroyed my business and my life or the pause and the restart was the greatest opportunity in the history of my business. Which one would you be more likely to lean to, if you just had to guess?
Dean:Oh, for me?
Dave:Yeah.
Dean:Obviously, yeah, I’m already looking at it as a slingshot.
Dave:Yeah.
Dean:Yeah, no, it’s going to be one of the greatest things ever just because it’s opening up so many possibilities. The greatest benefit of all of this is that we, as a country now, are going to be familiar with and accustomed to virtual gathering and that is a big thing. I mean I can’t tell you how big that is. And this has opened up so many opportunities.
Dave:And if I could … Well, and to just interject, to give some context here, you have a program. I believe the name is The Breakthrough Blueprint, right?
Dean:That’s right, yup.
Dave:And you historically do what? About eight or 10 of these events a year?
Dean:That’s right, yup.
Dave:And you typically have, call it an average for easy math, 10 people at an event.
Dean:Yeah, that’s right.
Dave:And I think you’re … The investment for somebody to attend this event is about five grand.
Dean:Right, that’s right.
Dave:So, on the surface, you just do some quick math and you’re like that’s … And these are in-person events, right?
Dean:Yes, yes.
Dave:So, on the surface, you would think, one might wonder well, Dean, how can this because good for your business? Because one of the significant … Hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual revenue are now off the table for you-
Dean:Oh yeah, yeah.
Dave:But I know you have an answer to this because I know you had a Breakthrough Blueprint scheduled that you had to change. So tell us about it and what you learned and why you’re so excited about this opportunity. So tell people first a little bit about the event, how is it normally structured?
Dean:So, this is something that is a three-day event we do in a boardroom style, so 10-12 people at the event and it’s three days just going deep and applying the eight profit activators to all of the businesses that are there. So you came to one of those events and you got to see the model.
Dave:Yup, two years ago in Orlando.
Dean:Yeah, it’s a very intimate gathering. Time flies when you’re there but the ideas and the understanding that people leave with of the opportunities in their business is so rewarding to see it unfold. Now, this time of year, I am normally … Most of the events I do here in Florida but I also do a little world tour each year. So I’d go … I had five events scheduled between March, middle of March and July 4th, including Orlando, Toronto, London, Amsterdam and all of those events are off the table. So like you said, you do the quick math, it’s a swing of hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially because some of those people who attend those will also become consulting clients on the back of that.
So, you could either be distraught by that or you adapt and you start just thinking well, what is actually the outcome that we get from it? I mean the benefit of it is that we get to spend the time in depth, in the boardroom, having the conversations that lead to the breakthroughs and that is something that we could do virtually and so Zoom is a great environment to have a 10 or 12 person meeting in that everybody … It’s just as intimate as being in the boardroom and I did an event two weeks ago that we had exactly that experience and people from Las Vegas, from Canada … We had someone from Belgium, someone from Bangkok and we all gathered in the virtual boardroom and had an amazing experience and so I got a taste of what that’s like and I realized, boy, it’s so great to be at home too, because we were all then, at the end of the day, we’re in our own homes, which is just so much … So exciting.
Dave:Yeah, you’re sleeping in your own bed-
Dean:Well, I … Yes, but I’m super excited about the future here and it opens up a lot of new avenues for doing these kinds of events where you don’t have to necessarily get it all into three days because we could spread it out a little bit in that it’s not the … No travel, so you don’t have to kind of make it all batched like that-
Dave:Oh, you have a really good point. You could spread it out over like every other day for a week so people could have a day and then they could have a day to kind of digest it a little bit.
Dean:That’s it. So what we settled on was we did two days from starting at 10 o’clock and we would end by five with a lunch break and a couple of … A break in the morning, a break in the afternoon and then instead of doing a third day, I just set aside a 90-minute consultation for each of the participants to schedule, at some point after the event, after they started implementing some of the stuff, to do a followup and specifically help with their situation and so it works out tremendously. It’s a great … I think a wonderful experience and I’m super excited about doing more events just like that.
Dave:Yeah, I can see why. So, have you heard Dan Sullivan’s theory that this pause and restart, again this is the way I’ve chosen to label this from now on, is the pause and the restart, it’ll be like a game of Monopoly, because Dan says when you play Monopoly, you finish the game. There’s a winner, there’s a loser. Then all the pieces go back on the board and then you start a new game and you may not get the top hat or you may not get the horse, it’s a whole new game but it’s still the same game. It’s Monopoly.
Dean:Yeah.
Dave:And Dan says it’s like Monopoly except the pieces all go back in but when it comes out, it’s not even the same game anymore. That everybody on earth has had their game put back into the box and they take it back out and the pieces are different, the board’s different and the rules are different. What do you think of that?
Dean:I think that’s absolutely true and you’re either going to adapt or you’re going to pine away for the old game and in a lot of ways, the old game’s not coming back, right?
Dave:Right, right.
Dean:So, you adapt and I think that’s the thing.
Dave:Well, I know Henry Ford reportedly said, it’s one of my favorite quotes and he reported said, “Whether a man thinks he can or he thinks he can’t, he is right.”
Dean:That’s exactly right.
Dave:And I think this quote could be tweaked for our situation and here’s what I’m thinking and I’d love to get your reaction to this. So, if you think the pause and the restart will ruin your business and your life or whether you think it will end up being the best thing that ever happened to your business, you’re right, what do you think?
Dean:Yes, I agree, 100%. That’s the thing, when you focus on … When I had the event scheduled for March and then of course, I had these future events, I started seeing, okay, I could’ve focused on what I’m not able to do and that would lead you down a path of despair kind of thing, I think. It would be easy to do that or be victimized by it or I could set it behind, get through the grief curve and get on the other side and just start moving forward on what is possible now. What’s not affected is Cloudlandia, so let’s just jump aboard and realize that’s what’s going on.
One of the things that I’ve psychologically been kind of focused on is as a tennis player, the thing that was, I think, the greatest life lesson I got out of that was what a sports psychologist taught me, that every shot makes somebody happy. That’s really the reality of playing tennis, right?
Dave:Right, right.
Dean:We’re playing and I hit the ball out, that makes you happy but it doesn’t make me happy and the best position to be in is to take the view of the umpire who just sees the ball in or out without any emotional attachment to it. So, if you can do that and then do what you need to do, adapt, that’s the best win.
Dave:Yeah, it seems like it. The part that’s … Maybe discouraging is too strong but you hear about the numbers of people that are playing video games, you know how that’s just skyrocketing and streaming has skyrocketed and I’m like these same people are the ones in three years who are going to say this thing ruined their life and it strikes me that it seems like the majority of Americans have the ability to influence their answer to that question I ask three years from now, was the pause and the restart the worst thing that happened to you and did it ruin your life or was it the chance of a lifetime and it seems like most people, and there’s always exceptions, some people just got lucky like all the Amazon sellers. They just kind of got lucky with this, right?
Dean:Right.
Dave:Or maybe not quite lucky but things … They had a business model that was suddenly enhanced and I can appreciate somebody who’s been a restaurateur their whole life and they’ve got three restaurants and they maybe aren’t going to restart them and they’re maybe toward the twilight of their career and they’re just not up for a comeback but I think … It seems to me that the vast majority of Americans have the ability to choose which their outcome is going to be.
Dean:Yeah, I agree and that’s one of the great things of being in a free market country like that, that we can literally choose our path.
Dave:Right, it’s amazing. I was telling a friend of mine the other day that he said, you’re always so optimistic and you always see the glass half full and I explained to him that I’m not that way naturally, I’m really kind of a pessimist and I tend to see the glass half empty but when I chose to become an entrepreneur about 15 years ago, I realized those are mutually exclusive. You can’t be an entrepreneur and a pessimist. Like you have to decide which is more important to you, maintaining your affinity for being a pessimist or being an entrepreneur. So for me, one of the greatest things about becoming an entrepreneur is I had no choice but to change my mindset from one of all the things wrong to all the opportunities that it presents
Dean:Yeah, it’s so exciting. There’s so much opportunity.
Dave:Yeah, so what else, I guess in the five minutes we have left … Well, here, first of all, let’s get your website out, deanjackson.com, right?
Dean:That’s a good start, yeah.
Dave:DeanJackson.com and it’s a unique website because it’s just … How would you describe your website?
Dean:Well, it’s like a holding company in a way. It’s all of the different projects and companies that we have going on. A good place to start is there’s a free book there called Breakthrough DNA that explains the eight profit activators and everything that’s the foundation of what we talk about. So that’s a good place to start and from there, you get access to all the podcasts and everything from there.
Dave:And if they happen to download your free book, they can have confidence that if they’re not looking to engage further next week, you’re not going to put them through the gauntlet, are you?
Dean:Right, there’s no gauntlet series, that’s exactly right.
Dave:You’re a gauntlet-free zone?
Dean:That’s a gauntlet-free zone. Conversations only. That’s right.
Dave:Awesome. Well, Dean, is there anything else on your mind that you think we should have discussed but we didn’t?
Dean:No, I think this is … I think that the opportunity that we really have right now, while we’re in this sort of groundhog day situation, we have nothing but time to catch up on sleep and to develop the habits and the routines that we want to carry through and it’s a gift that we’ve got right now.
Dave:Yup, I agree. Well, Dean, I really appreciate you being on the podcast.
Dean:It was fun. That went fast.
Dave:Yeah, it sure did. I appreciate you being on here and I appreciate your friendship and great business ideas and marketing leadership that I’ve enjoyed over the last several years from knowing you, so thank you very much.
Dean:Awesome, Dave. Thanks.
Dave:All right, well, you have a great day.
Dean:You too. Bye-bye.
Dave:Bye.