Succeeding in Business Today: Shifting Perspectives and Strategies W/ Paul Dunn

0:00Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Cutting-edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. Wow. Deep and meaningful this week. But deep and meaningful in a way that means how success, getting a focus off of you and onto the impact you create in the world, and how that focus can bring the success back to you. How the purpose of where you're going. All these things are just so powerful. Paul's been my mentor since I was 20, I think 20 or 21 years of age. And I can't wait for you to listen in on this stuff.

0:43He goes so deep on some things of it. Just to give you some stats, I mean, so many books. His charity with his wife, Masumi, is phenomenal out there in the world. B1G1 based out of Singapore. But four times TEDx, sorry, four times TED speaker, not TEDx. building great companies, advising great people. Literally, the accountants in the UK nominated him with their Lifetime Service Award, even though he's not an accountant in any way, shape or form. Creative as heck. He's going to teach you so much in the next half hour. Dive right in. Paul Dunn. We have Paul Dunn. I can't believe it. Paul, how many years have we been together, working together?

1:241993. 30 years. Actually, 1992. 22, 31 years that I've been studying everything Paul Dunn is doing, and I cannot believe it. I get to interview you on my podcast. Paul, my first question is always the same to every guest. What is success to you? How do you define success? Well, first of all, thank you for the welcome, and it's just a privilege to be with you, Brad, and thank you for listening wherever it is you are as well. I think success is very different for different people. Success to me is the freedom to be able to do those things that are important to me. That's what success is. And, of course, then that builds up to the relationships that you have, the investments that you have, and all those kind of things.

2:07But it is fundamentally for me that, in other words, it's this interesting shift from instead of talking about I have to, it's I get to. Does that make sense? So I have this privilege of being able to do things as a result of all of the things that I do. And, yeah, and it's just a great feeling. It's great to get up every morning. And was that – have you changed, like, has your definition of success changed over your lifetime? Has there been different variations of it? That is a very good question. I think the answer to that is no, actually. I remember once being asked about failure, which I know we're going to talk about later.

2:44And if this isn't the appropriate time to talk about it, tell me that. But I remember I was sitting in this audience and I was mentoring this guy and I'm sort of, he said, you know, be in the program so that you can help me do things. And during the program, I'm sitting there and he says, oh, we need to talk about failure. And look, Paul Dunn's in the audience. Oh, Paul, you've really got something to say about, you know, failure. And I'm going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And he says, oh, Paul's just trying, playing hard to get. Let's give him some applause and all this other stuff. So I finally had to get up in front of this guy, whose name is Mike, by the way.

3:20His first name is Mike. And then he said, okay, talk about failure. And when I looked at the video back, the moment he kept saying failure, like I was this close to him, and then I just kept moving away and away and away and further until I hit a wall. I'm not kidding you. I was like 10 meters away from it. And he's sort of looking at me, what's going on? And then I realized that the difficulty for me was that I didn't, my brain didn't get onto the word does that make sense it was it was like in a weird place because I I never saw it as that I just see that and I know this is a cliche but that was like a very powerful learning experience for me just as quote-unquote failure is because I just I didn't process the word it was like no no it's just a reaction to something and everything has a reaction.

4:16And all the time we learn from those reactions, it just becomes a very different place. In fact, I was in London about a year ago in a pretty select group. If I could name drop for a minute, I'm sitting next to Elon Musk's business partner in Neuralink, for example, and David Attenborough's producer on my other side. Anyway, we're in this select group and it's at the Barbican and there's this opening thing and they're celebrating why we haven't been able to get together or not why we haven't been able to get it but the fact that we haven't been able to get together for three years and there's this musical thing and Brad oh the music was oh it's like ethereal and then this woman steps forward she's on the stage she looks like she's going to sing something and she steps forward and I subsequently found out that she's the UK poet laureate I had no idea that that was who she was and so she starts reading this poem and she gets into the third line and she says this in this beautiful voice and she says have you ever noticed when things break they open oh my god that is just such a brilliant thing right have you ever noticed when things break they open and then when you when you think about that even more you realize that but you can't put them back together the same way because that was what it was that made them break unless of course you're japanese and if you're japanese then what you do when you break pottery you it doesn't they don't go oh my god i broke the pottery they just look at it and go oh that was just a part of the history and then they build it back together in exactly the same way with one very subtle difference and that is they put gold in the threat.

6:03So, you know, so the whole, how can I say it, the trajectory, does that make sense? The trajectory is always the same, which is the definition of success, but then occasionally we might get some lumps along the way, but it doesn't change the, or in fact, it can amplify the trajectory, if that makes sense. Hang on, spend more time on that. What do you mean the bumps amplify the trajectory? Well, because you see things in a different way. It's like, you know sometimes for example uh you know you and i may be speaking and you say something and and the reaction is not exactly what you wanted right you go oh what happened you can live with that and say oh my god you know what what happened or you can go wow that was interesting how can i change that up and get better exactly so so it's just like a feedback mechanism which is leading us on this, what I hope is an exponential journey.

7:01In other words, we're all born to do that. The question is whether we believe that at every second of our life. So let's go back then, born to, when did success become part of Paul Dunn? When did you choose success? Was it a young boy? Was it you taught it? Is it a gradual thing? How did you choose to be successful? for? That's such a good question. I wish I knew the profoundly important answer to that. It's, it's, Brad, it's, it's, you know, when I say this, some people might say, well, you know, you're up yourself, because that's an Australian term. So the rest of the world doesn't care about that.

7:41Yeah. It is an Australian term. So it's just, I, you know, I really don't know the answer to that because it's always, for me, it's always been that trajectory of trying to get the most out of each moment. Who taught you that? Did your mom? Did your grandma? Someone must have given you that thought that that's the way the world works because a lot of people aren't brought up that way. Well, okay. If there was, I think I had it when I was a kid, when I left home and in a positive way, by the way. Yeah. um and uh there was uh you know i was studying in london i didn't have any money to do that at the time so i had to find a way of doing that and then finding that way took me into a particular place and then you know in my in my 20s i mean 21 uh when i was 21 i had the privilege of being headhunted and being one of the first 10 in hewlett-packard in in australia and you know you can't sit down with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard without understanding, oh, my God, you started it, Gareth?

8:54You know, that kind of thing. And the other point about that, I think, is that it's like when you live in that bubble and that's sometimes regarded as a negative thing, I don't mean it as a negative thing, then guess what? Other people of similar mindset and stuff like that are attracted to you and you're attracted to them. And so as a result of that, it just kind of builds. That's my experience anyway. So let's flip it over then, and I'm going to use the word failure. But how does failure teach success, or how do we learn success from failures? Well, if you're like a kid and the first time you put your hand on a hot stove, you go, oh, God, I'm not going to do that.

9:40So it's a similar mechanism to that. You know, it's the whole thing about when we crawl and we stand, you know, we stand up and then we fall over. We don't say, I think I'll spend the rest of my life crawling. We go, oh, there's something here that I need to master. And that still goes on. You know, yesterday, Brad, I was 29 ,100 days old. Okay. So all of the people listening now got their calculators out and saying, seriously? you know you're still around uh yeah and don't forget the leap years and all that kind of stuff and the year 2000 was not one um so and i'm reminded of uh of uh a um uh something that the great zig ziglar is supposedly uh uh is accredited him so he was 83 years old at the time and someone says to him and he's doing a presentation someone said zig zig you know don't you think you should slow down?

10:41And Zig looks at this guy and says, well, I've got it figured out. I've got less time left than you, so I think I should speed up. And that's kind of like where I'm at. You know, I mean, you and I were talking about it earlier. I just spent a couple of days with you. Just extraordinary learning, extraordinary learning. Now, it's possible to go into that and say, well, quote, unquote, I'm successful. I'm not going to take any notes. What the hell am I? And that's the end. I mean, when you get to that point, that's like the end, okay? And so some people say, well, you know, why do you keep on doing that?

11:22The answer is, for me anyway, it's a curiosity thing. I'm just incredibly curious. And if you have that sense of curiosity, then you're just looking at the world in a totally different way. you are on the big success podcast we're going to be back with paul dunn and we're going to be talking about the shifts in business right now how do you succeed in business today and what's working out there in the marketplace right now for building a target market to incentivize referrals to profit margins and everything in between brad sugars his book buying customers goes through the step-by-step process of building and growing a profitable commercial enterprise that works without the business owner and you're back it's big success Paul Dunn.

12:05Now, Paul, when you and I first met, you were teaching business in Australia. Now you're running the massively successful B1G1. What is it about you that you create, I don't know if I want to say a following, but you can build team. People want to join things Paul Dunn does. How do you do that?

12:30well i think the answer to that is you don't you you don't push it right because the reality is that when you push you ever notice people tend to push back uh so you you you you build you try and build something that has attractiveness or to put it another way you try to build things to which people want to belong and and and once you understand that it's like you know seth godin has that great quote that says, people like us do things like this. So whenever you create something, it's almost like you're creating this movement that people go, you know what, I would love to be a part of that. I would love, and not only would I love to be a part of it, but I'd love to stay forever.

13:11And when you have that mindset, when you think of it as, you know, almost like, how can I build a magnet kind of thing? What can I do to do that? Then it becomes quite different. And of course, one of the ways of doing that, and I've got to say, it took a while to figure this one out, because when you're first doing it, when you're first starting this thing, whatever it is, that thing that you're starting, you think that it's all about you. That's what you think. It's First and foremost, it's about the privilege you have to serve people who are part of that. And that's an interesting shift. And then you get another shift, which is that your outcomes, your quote-unquote success, right, are inherently tied to the success of the people that you're privileged to serve.

14:09So does that make sense? It 100 % does. it's about the people you're privileged to serve and when they get that there's a feeling that oh my gosh you really care now that doesn't mean you're nice and soft or whatever you know sometimes there's some tough love involved in all of that uh but it means that people just feel great it's like well maybe not feel great people understand that there is a place where they can go where they're respected where they cared for and where they can learn great things and share those great things with other people around them. So when we think about that belonging and that whole shift in business today to community-based, et cetera, we were talking the other day about the major points of that shift.

14:57Take me through how the world has changed in business. Yeah. Okay. So it depends which way you want to do it. You want to go from the top or the bottom. So let's quickly go from the top to the bottom. By the way, the bottom is what we just discussed. The bottom is it's not about you. It's about something bigger than you. But let's go straight to the top and work down from that. So what we have is a shift. This is a really major shift. Brad, if I look back over all of the stuff that I read and get in front of you, I think the big word of the last decade is purpose. Everybody says, you've got to be on purpose.

15:35You've got to be on purpose. You've got to have purpose, purpose, purpose. And that is correct. That's absolutely correct. But there's a level beyond that, right? And the level beyond that is to go from income-led to impact-led, right? There's a great book. It's called Cult Stalers by a guy called Tim Duggan, D-U-G-G-A-N. And he's a very successful Australian entrepreneur. This book was the book of the year last year, I think it was, in Australia. And he gives you seven key things. And the first thing he says is define your impact, define your impact. And what he means by that is that whereas we tend to look at things rather naturally, we have to do this, right?

16:20We do, you know, cash flow forecasts. We do all of that sort of thing. We do revenue forecasts. We do all of that, which is great. But he says on top of that, you've got to do this impact thing, which is essentially the number of lives you're going to influence, right? That's the kind of impact thing. So impact driven is a great one because it gives you, again, that something bigger. Next one down would be this shift from profit. Again, profit is really important, but a shift from profit to purpose. That is crucial, absolutely crucial. Next one is that whole thing that we talked about a minute ago, which is that shift from pushing to attracting.

17:00The next one, which I think is becoming so much more important now. it always was about value. You know, we had the value equation, right? Value is benefits divided by cost. We've had that around for quite a long time. And obviously that's still part of it. But what's more important now, which gets back to your belonging thing, is values, right? So people are looking at, you know, what do you stand for, if that makes sense? Is there some alignment? And by the way, this works in reverse, right? Because we all understand that bad clients drive out good clients. We all understand that. And that reason occurs because sometimes the values aren't the same.

17:43So what we stand for is critically important, critically, critically important. And then we get down to that whole shift that we started off with, which is that shift from self to something bigger than self. Or, to put that very simply, a shift from me to we. And so there's, if you like, five or six of the possible eight things that move us from thinking about a transactional business. That doesn't mean we're not very careful about the way we do the transaction and everything else, but a transactional business to a humanity-led business. And that sounds like, oh, wow, wow, wow. So it's like hitting the cloud stuff, but it works, right?

18:27Well, I'm 100 % in agreement. I started Action Coach with the vision of world abundance through business re-education. And I still, my foundation, the Action Coach Foundation, that's what we do. My venture capital fund, we only invest in companies that have a solid community build and purpose. I know one of the biggest awards we give out at Action Coaches for our coaches and partners around the world is how many jobs did they create and what was the revenue or the net increase in community impact of dollars to that community that they coach. So I believe that wholeheartedly. I want to go backwards just a little bit, though, because there's something that I think you're a little bit too humble about, and that is the vision factor and how you paint the vision so that people do want to be part of what you do.

19:21Talk to me more about that, because you and Master Me are amazing at painting a picture that gives people something to join. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, we, okay. So when we get into mission and vision and all those kinds of things, we tend to go back to, you know, great talks like, you know, like Simon Sinek's talk about, you know, start with why and all of that kind of stuff. And that is crucially important, crucially important. But where I think we sometimes fail on that is that we still make it about us. We want to be the biggest thing in Dallas or whatever it is. Yeah. And there are two simple words.

20:07One of the things I talk about a lot is the power of words, right? And there are two simple words that just change it. So when you've got something that you think might depend on you or might be all about you, just put the words so that on the end of it. So we're going to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so that and when you get to the so that you automatically are thinking about the people that you serve right yeah so that for example let's say you were you were quoting creating a restaurant so that people you might want to say i want to be the number one restaurant so that the people who come here have an experience that they remember for the rest of their life but that sort of thing.

20:46It's like everything before so that, just drop it off, right? Yeah, almost. That's exactly right. Exactly right. 100%. How often do you as a leader communicate that to your group, to your membership, to your organization?

21:06Well, fortunately, I'm privileged that sometimes Most people want to listen to what I have to say. In fact, just yesterday, we were talking about doing a playbook. You and I used to call that a workbook, but the trend these days is called a playbook. A playbook for how you create a great company. And so we did these 10 steps. And the first one, of course, was mission and vision and all of that kind of stuff. And so I'm doing that pretty much every day because also you're talking about, again remember that where you started out you know is is not necessarily you know a straight line thing hopefully it's an exponential thing they're going to be little bumps right and and frequently when you look at those bumps it's because you forgot that basic principle you just forgot it you you got so concerned about you right and if you're a guy here's what you did if you're a guy you go off into your cave and you say i'm not going to come out of there and all of that kind of stuff.

22:06That's what you do. And if you think about it, when you're in that cave, what you're thinking about is you, right? But the thing that gets you out of that is the freedom to go, oh, this is how I felt, right? And talk with others about it, and so on and so forth. So you just come out. And I think a way of thinking about it, which, again, it just is part of your day, you know, it's like, how do you begin the day? What do you do? Do you get up and be thankful for things? Is that what you do? Or do you get up and go, oh, shit, we're having to do this again. What do you do? It's okay to say shit on your podcast, by the way.

22:40I trust it is. Yeah, I'm Australian. That's just a natural word. It's funny. People say, excuse the French. I say, excuse the Australian. There you go. Yeah. So, and, you know, I absolutely don't want this to sound like Pollyanna and all of that kind of stuff, because it isn't. It's real. It's real. Someone said to me about a year ago, I love this quote. They said, hey, Paul, maybe we need to say to people that you were not born to break even. I love that quote, right? So we want to do great things. What we have to do is just remind ourselves every day. Well, not only remind ourselves, but just do those little things that you go, oh, this is why I'm here every day.

23:31You're on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars, and we have the great Paul done with us. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about how you actually go from good to great, from big to amazing and massive. See you in a moment. B1G1's co-founder, Paul is a hugely respected and admired business leader who has helped make B1G1 what it is today. He's a four-time TEDx speaker and frequently travels around the world educating businesses about B1G1 and sharing inspiring business insights. To learn more about Paul Dunn, please visit B1G1.com. And we're back, big success podcast. Paul, you've trained literally hundreds of thousands of people how to go from being okay to good, but then from good to great and amazing.

24:19What's the difference, do you think, between those who are achieving good and those who go to amazing? Well, I mean, language is so crucially important in all of this, right? So, for example, you would see organizations that have this sort of thing out there that says, we aim to satisfy the customer. You've got to be kidding me. You have seriously got to be kidding me that you think you could build an extraordinary organization on something that says we aim to satisfy the customer. No, no, no. We aim to delight the customer at every moment. We aim to create moments that really matter. We aim to create moments that are important for that person that we're serving so that they become moments that are important to us each and every day.

25:06And so the team really get that. For example, oh, Brad, yesterday is probably the best answer to that one. Yesterday, I was in a session and I was reminding people about the book that you and I talked about a couple of weeks ago, which is this really weird book from Thames in Wulibaka. It's called Teeming, and it's about termites and bees and all of that kind of stuff. And she was asked, and, you know, this is all about what's the management structure that they use and go to them to me, look at what they can build. So, and she was asked, what have you, so she studies nature. So she was asked, what's the most important thing you've learnt from studying nature?

25:50And her answer to that is just so, so crucial. She says this, I've learned that nature doesn't solve for problems. Nature solves for potential. Now, think about that for a minute. Think about how, you know, in a sales process, for example, we typically have, you know, what are called discovery calls. And a discovery call typically goes like this. What's the problem? Oh, we've got a solution. It's only this much. How many do you want to buy? On the other hand, a potential call is different because it's starting from, oh, okay, I see you have this little challenge. What do you see as the potential of solving that?

26:28So now you're getting more aspirational. But then, Brad, yesterday I was talking about this. It's amazing how things pop up. It's amazing. And I said, you know, think about when you hire people, right? What are you doing? Are you talking about the culture of the – are you spending time talking about what the person did? or are you talking about what the person might do? And all of a sudden this little phrase came out, which I think I'll build on. And it is, why don't we say that we have a culture of potential? A culture of potential. So that when we're hiring people, the first thing they hear is, oh, we have a culture of potential.

27:06That's how we build this great company. So let me ask you this. What's the potential you think you have in terms of adding to this potential that we have so that your potential gets even greater? It's a really interesting question, right? Yeah. And so I think there's something in that. I mean, I only thought of that culture of potential. I might copy my name or something yesterday. But what do you think? Is that a good way of thinking about it? Yeah, it is because, I mean, when you look at the person whose goal is to pay their bills or the business owner whose goal is to make wages, they're solving a problem.

27:43They're not going for the full market share or the full capability of, you know, you have the ability to be a person that makes a million bucks a year. Why not actually go for that instead of doing it the other way around? Well, let's flip that over then. You know, you've met some, I mean, you met a lot of billionaires, massively successful people. What do you think is the difference between that level of success and the person doing a million a year? Are millions still successful? What's the difference between the massive and the yes, doing good? Well, interestingly, yesterday I asked this question.

28:22I talked about potential. And I asked a – it was a relatively small group of eight people. And I thought, am I going to ask them this question? Because it was on the Zoom thing. And, you know, it's like put it in the chat, right? And I said, put it in the chat. What potential are you operating at right now? What is it? and to my amazement to my absolute amazement people saying oh 50 70 and so on and so forth and i was like stunned and and but what was so interesting was in discussing it uh you know discussing those numbers it wasn't necessarily that they were as it were criticizing themselves for being there they were just saying that they like for example let's say that we know Partnerships are a great way of building businesses, right?

29:09Let's just say we know that, which, by the way, is true. And so because we might be so sort of fixated on doing something else, we forget about something which has enormous potential to help us grow. So in deeper analysis of that, it was, oh, I'm not realizing, I'm not spending enough time in that thing right now, or alternatively, I'm not talking enough about that with my team. I'm not talking enough about their potential, right? And so sort of spreading the load, as it were, that way. So it's always doing these things. Again, it's all about rituals, right? It's like James Clear in Atomic Habits.

29:51He says, you know, most people don't achieve their goals not because they don't have them. It's because they don't have the rituals that drive them towards it. So that's the thing. Like, what do you do when you get up in the morning? What do you do before you go to bed? What do you do, right? It's all those things, right? And, by the way, it's also not beating yourself up. It's also saying, oh, shit, I missed today, right? That's okay, right? Yeah, I didn't do that. But as long as – yeah. So let's talk about – let's actually talk about B1G1 then. Most people, when they start a charity, would be happy with, you know, getting a few partners on board that helped build it and, you know, impacting 100 ,000 would be amazing.