How To Find The Right Business Coach
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Summary
Dan Martell has been my coach for the past 3 years and has helped me become a better entrepreneur. In this episode, we talk about how important it is to have a coach, why you should have one, and what a good coach looks like.
Transcript
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hi everybody this is liam martin from running alone and in today's video we unfortunately
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have bad news for paulo my video editor because i don't just have one video view today i have
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three videos and i'm here with dan martell this is also why i'm wearing all of this crazy
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merch i've got a phone case this is not how you dress every day liam no unfortunately not if you
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send me about 20 of these maybe that i'll keep them fresh and clean you can you can give them
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to homeless people and we'll be good so we are talking today about having a coach entrepreneurs
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have coaches. Some do, some don't. And this is something that I've had a coach actually for
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probably the past six to seven years. Dan has been my coach for the past two years,
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going on three years now. And I would really say he's one of the core components towards my
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success. So in today's video, we are going to be getting into, do you need a coach? Why do you need
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a coach? And what can a coach do to be able to make you a more successful entrepreneur? First
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question, Dan, who are you and why are you here right now? Who am I? My name is Dan Martell. I'm
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here because this is my studio. No, I'm just kidding. Why am I here? I guess because I have
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the privilege of coaching you and Rob and I absolutely love working with entrepreneurs to
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help them level up. That's very exciting. I have been an entrepreneur for many years. So people
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like you bring me joy uh in ways that you don't even know so let's get into the first question
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here i have five of them and i may not answer i may actually not only answer ask a couple of them
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why do you think it's important to have a coach um well so just so everybody knows like i've always
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had a coach um my two failed companies kicking it off i've built five software companies first
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first two were failed, uh, start at 17, again at 21. So like, luckily I was just young when I
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started them. Otherwise that I'd be like probably the average age of most entrepreneurs starting
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off. Uh, but I hired an e-myth coach when I was 23. Okay. Uh, paid him a lot of money every month
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before I even had a business. Wow. I just didn't want to, I didn't want to fail. I read, I frigging
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read the e-myth and Gerber sold me on Sarah's pies and, um, and, and I've got to give a hundred
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percent credit to Bob, my E-Myth coach, like 16 months of working with him to really do
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fundamental business things that I just didn't know any better to do because I'm a software
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developer, like, you know, vision, mission, you know, financials, like just these really
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core business stuff, uh, marketing, uh, business development, et cetera, is the reason I'm
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So I think that if you're the type of person that wants to move quickly, right, I just think it's kind of just naive to think that to be a top performer, like it would be weird if you met an Olympian that showed up at the Olympics that said, I came by myself.
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Yet, if you're trying to play this entrepreneurial game at the highest levels, I think it's just par for course.
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Hmm. So inside of the coaching industry, there's honestly a lot of inside of the coaching industry. And you are not one of those people. And I know that because we've known each other for almost 10 years. I've built that type of relationship with you. And then also me being your client, I understand that you are doing it for the right reasons. And you are also putting out a really good product.
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but i want to know for people that are watching this right now what is a good coach like what
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does a good coach look to you and then maybe what are some of the red flags that you can look for
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inside of the coaching industry because i think like i get a lot of people that talk to me they're
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just like oh yeah i got this coach and i kind of i'm just like oh man this this person's trying to
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take your money uh and and i think there's a lot of um ethical issues that that work into that i
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it's something that you are truly focused and committed to.
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So I'd love to be able to hear your thoughts.
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You know, the crazy part is the crappy coaches
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So I think like, and I had a hard time with even the word
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I think it's like in the same vein as real estate agents and social media experts and all these industries where they have a low barrier of entry.
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Two things, if you said like look for these two things, one would be the coach talks about the client's results more than their own.
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So a lot of the best coaches, my coaches, they don't talk about themselves at all.
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right they talk about my the client the people they've actually they have like you can go to a
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page it says like testimonials case studies right and and it's real people it's not like
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i doubled my business in three years jane from saratoga or wherever like it's real like you can
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click on their page go to their facebook page real people got it and i think if you that's a
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good starting i can talk to them i can literally say like well here are three referrals that you
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you should have a bunch of success stories and.
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me and Rob have directly referred two or three people.
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and they were like, I'm thinking about doing this Dan thing.
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Yeah, because I, I pretty much like we have a page
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and it's like, here are all the companies we've worked with.
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you know, you've given me permission to put your logo. I always ask, but we get testimonials. We,
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we, I send my videographer on site to go do these like cases. Like I'm, I don't want you to hire me
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because of what I've done. Cause I actually think that's not interesting because you're not me.
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Right. What I think is more interesting is, um, who are people like you or whatever individual
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that I've worked with that you can talk to and say like, for the type of coach I'm looking for,
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this person will solve the problem. So that I would say that's one. And then the second thing
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I would say is, and maybe I'm biased towards this, but when I look at my coach and many others
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is they give away a hundred percent of everything they know. Okay. And they don't think they don't
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say like, I've got this like secret magical. Why wouldn't a coach do that? Oh, some of them,
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place no most of them it's like hey i know this thing that you don't know but if you pay me i'll
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teach it to you okay got it right you've seen these people yeah okay yeah so my whole thing is
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is if you want you can go on my youtube and i give away 100 of everything i know right it's free
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yeah go nuts 300 plus videos and i add a new one every week and i will for the next probably
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another six years i gave myself a decade okay but if you want to have a more personalized experience
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you want to work with me directly then we can have that conversation so i think that if you did
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those two things you found a a coach that like literally gave away the strategies on everything
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they know how to do and not just like look how cool i am as their content marketing because i
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think that's what you see and that you can point to a page that has all of their real people
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testimonial results and case studies and you can verify that there's a guy out there right now i'm
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not gonna throw him under the bus because that's just not my nature um but he has uh he has a video
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ad running uh for you know sass founders and here's case studies okay right the people in his
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case studies um that he doesn't make it easy to figure out who they are but they end up reaching
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out to me and when i talk to them about their experience they you know what happens sometimes
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is people have these like these these like like blips of success but it's not sustainable so like
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this guy helped them get a micro result but it's not the full picture got it so i think that even
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that I would want to dig in if you even found them to make sure like it's not enough that they
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publish it but talk to the person to make sure that like did they do the thing long term because
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I think it's too easy yeah I call that do they have an arrow or do they have a quiver exactly
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right it's like is there one thing that they do that is giving you some type of result and they
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can't replicate that long term or is this someone that I can work with for a very long term yeah
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um engagement and no okay I'm gonna have I'm always gonna get the best stuff yeah yeah okay
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So in terms of SaaS entrepreneurs, OK, because I'm a SaaS entrepreneur, I do this thing on Fridays called Running Remote YouTube Channel.
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But the rest of the week, I work in Time Doctor, which everyone probably already knows.
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What are the positive signal identifiers for a successful SaaS business?
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If you had to give me three, I know we actually talked about this about 45 minutes ago, but we didn't talk about it on my YouTube channel.
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Well, A, a lot of people may not know what SaaS stands for, funny enough.
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Lee and my best friend asked me, software as a service.
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And just because you have a subscription business, does that mean you have a SaaS business?
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I don't know why people think, well, people pay me every month.
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So if the question is, is it data points or is it individual characteristics of teams?
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If you had a gun to your head and you just said,
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to yourself, okay, let's reword this in an interesting way. Let's say you wanted to,
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out of all of your clients, okay, because you've interacted with tons of them, you've
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got hundreds of people right now, and your job is to put together a trillion dollar SaaS
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business, okay? And you can basically choose any of the type of personality types or even
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the individuals inside of your group that you've had experience with, how would you
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Technical lead, marketing lead, operational lead.
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Okay, so this is even funner because I'll even tell you about like, you know, price point,
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So technical chops, marketing, salesmanship, and then operational.
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who's the ceo out of that group typically the sales and marketing leader only because they're
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gonna not not for any importance reason other than the fact that they're inherently going to
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be the person on stage communicating so it only makes sense um whereas the operational person is
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more interested in like the internal team dynamics and the technical person's obviously more product
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focus on the engineering so like a rocket fuel integrator guy and then you've got the yeah yeah
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And then I would say mid-market, I would do freemium or at least free trial.
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And I would probably go into farming as an example.
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Yeah, it's got to be like, it's got to be a market that I don't have to worry that any, like Stanford graduate, MIT, like I want time to innovate because once I figure out the-
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Lock it because all those white collar guys, they're going after that market.
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I want to be the smart guy that says I'm selling to the farmer.
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Yeah, super unsophisticated but still has a need.
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Because I think the best companies are ones that have enough time without having competitors show up.
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So you can decide by just picking a big enough TAM, a total addressable market, in an unsexy, you're not going to get covered on TechCrunch kind of process.
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And the mid-market, because I want customer financing.
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I want to be able to self-fund this without getting super diluted and build the structure
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where if I can, I can get the customer to pre-buy for annual contracts and use that
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Now, on the reverse side, who are the people that you see that do not succeed?
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Maybe the people that don't make it to SaaS Academy, because pretty much everyone in that
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At SaaS Academy, I definitely work with successful revenue-generating high performers.
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So what do you see as the teams, or the product,
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No, you don't let them in, but do you see them?
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are listening right now, or watching right now,
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and thinking to themselves, OK, well, is that me?
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If you are selling a dream that your product can't deliver on,
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What can we currently offer now is different from what we could
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And in the SaaS business, it's a very simple economic model
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of if I can't get more customers per month than I'm losing,
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And typically, that's a byproduct of having a one-trick pony
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So I mean, a lot of it is very product market fit.
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But I think some of them are doing it to themselves
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It's like some dev agency that they pay $100 an hour
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So if you can't actually improve your product quickly,
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So those folks, I'm like, go find a co-founder,
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it's more vitamin than painkiller, which again, I guess
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But I mean, there's something systemically wrong
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are you solving this because you have the problem,
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or you just, your cousin told you that people would buy?
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It was like management software for tattoo parlors.
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And I said, oh, well, do you manage a tattoo parlor?
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do you have friends of yours that manage tattoo parlors?
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And he's like, Oh, I'm getting one next week. And I was like, dude, you need to not be in this
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business. Like you're not experiencing that pain. Right. Uh, with time doctor, it was a direct pain
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from one of my other businesses where I could not measure how long it took for a remote worker to do
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a task. And I needed to solve that problem. And I knew that it would at least solve my problem.
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So that's, that's what I'm saying. That's hit on. Yeah. Okay. So to end this out, um, I want to get
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to the coaching industry because it is something that's really bugging me uh and whenever i have
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the opportunity i really want to pull people in the right direction there's so much information
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that's out there and people can get so distracted by like the shiny lights of i'm going to make you
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a millionaire if you only buy this 17 thing from me if there was one thing that you could change
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in the coaching industry today what do you think it would be what a great question um
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Like maybe for me, it would probably be, um, I would love to be able to know very clearly
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if you are a coach and you generate all your revenue from being a coach, tell me that versus
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And at some level, everyone's kind of that coach and I'm so successful at accomplishing
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x yeah but actually 95 percent of my money comes from the coaching yeah it comes from y it's super
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disingenuous and something that like i i want to call that out but i'm also canadian so that's a
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major problem for me yeah you know like i used to be that way as well um my coach is a coach's coach
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you know so he coaches other coaches so but i mean i know that so i know that his revenue comes from
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Well, he's being genuine about where it's coming from.
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He's like, this is how I, and he's not telling you,
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I'm going to coach you how to build a remote team.
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I'm like, well, how would we build a policy around this?
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But I guess if you just say, like, one thing I wish people
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It's like my wealth came from building software companies,
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you've seen the growth of SAS Academy over the last few years.
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I treat my coaching business like a SAS company
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So I can't help but scale and try to create the best product
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I wish there was, well, see, this is tough, too,
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because I would say that I wish there was a mandate
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But the same token, when I was 20-some years old,
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ready to finance 50 grand that they don't have to get them
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like five of them that are going to do something
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Actually, it was needed at that point, so it's tough.
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It's like saying we shouldn't give credit cards
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She was about a quarter million dollars into programs.
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Like literally we would joke, you know, if somebody got on stage, it's like, all right, somebody take her credit card.
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She's going to run to the back of the room.
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It's like, no, I kind of see that as like lottery tickets versus a plan.
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Do you have a plan or do you want to just buy a lottery ticket?
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Makes you feel really good to buy a lottery ticket because you can dream about what you're going to do.
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But like, let's actually get down and do the work.
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And I've found, at least in the coaches that I've worked with personally, I've been able to detect that quite easily.
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But I'm constantly surprised by how many people can be successful in that industry, but yet cannot produce any value or very little value.
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Well, I think that's one another thing I would look at is if the person, especially in the business category, are they business?
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Because a lot of these business coaches don't even have an assistant.
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They're just they're they're actually not good businesses.
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Like, that kind of, to me, is kind of a weird one.
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Like, no judgment, and there's no body shame in here.
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But if you're trying to help people get their lives together,
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and you're obese, like, let's go look in the mirror first
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And, um, and there are some incredible coaches out there and like every industry from the
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jewelry industry to dance studios, to, you know, real estate, there are some incredible
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Just don't, I think if you're interested, don't jump at the first Facebook ad you see
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Like if you're like, Oh, I want to, um, you know, I'm a software entrepreneur.
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I want to coach, go check out my stuff, but go check out everybody else's stuff.
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Like go look at the, the, the universe of potential coaches and make a decision versus
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Does feel like you, you know, let anybody pressure you into making a decision today?
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I mean, I think for me, um, with running remote, we, we seem to have a very unique opportunity
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where the last two running remotes were in Bali and we got a lot of kind of, and I have
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nothing against spiritualism whatsoever, but like these spiritual chakra based coaches
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that are going to will money into your pocket automatically.
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But for some reason, you had to make three easy installments of nine ninety seven, you know, over the next six months to be able to make it happen.
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And it's just so frustrating. That's the result in advance.
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I think that great coaches have an abundance mindset and they're like, look, I'm going to I'm going to teach you stuff.
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You're going to get results before we ever work together. And I think that's that that should solve that.
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So you heard it from Dan, a.k.a. I'm going to call you the sass whisperer.
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If you are interested in learning more about Dan,
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and probably down in the description down below.
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because I think this is interesting about coaches
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is you're like, and I know this with all my new clients.
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My first event, they're all like, is he the real deal?
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Where you're like, I wonder if he really is that way.
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There's very little bottles and models that I see.