Make A Bigger Impact On The World, with Daniel Moshe

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset podcast.
 
I'm going to introduce you to a man who I think has really discovered the secret of being a great entrepreneur. His name is Daniel Moshe and Daniel comes from the Twin Cities, Minneapolis–Saint Paul. He's in the IT business, which by the way is the fastest growing industry in the world. And that's interesting because the second fastest growing business is coaching. IT only works if there's a coaching component to IT that actually creates teamwork.
 
And what I love about how he recounted his experience with us is that he's so matter of fact about when he's doing things wrong. And so, a number of things that he discovered that he was doing not right is that he was trying to run two companies inside the same company. So he had a partner in the business, they wanted to do different things. Well, that doesn't work. You got to be wanting to do one thing.
 
And so, Daniel coined for himself, which I'm certainly going to use in future coaching sessions, he said, "I want to do a few great things better."
 
Daniel Moshe: Daniel Moshe, four years Strategic Coach client, proud, and I share it with everybody that I can. And I've got a IT services business, a customer success company around monday.com. We help people set up monday.com. And I help companies implement EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. So those are the three things I got going on right now.
Back in the day, I was riding my bicycle to people's homes, basically, and helping set up their printers and their computers and their Wi-Fi. And it was a lot of fun. Today, Tech Guru is focused on IT for accounting firms. That's our main focus.
 
But I think particularly in the tech space, there's maybe an error of confidence, or maybe we're different than everybody else. I certainly thought that years ago. That "Oh, you know, I need to just figure out my own way because none of these tools apply to me, because technology is so different. It's not like a traditional industry." But at the end of the day, we're still working with people, we still have teams, we have clients we serve. And it's very applicable to everything that we're doing.
 
So I share with every entrepreneur that I work with, that they will benefit from these thinking tools, from this community, in that it's been a complete game changer for me. I can trace back almost every major breakthrough in my kind of growth as an entrepreneur in the past few years to a day at Strategic Coach.
 
Here's the thing, it's time to just think about our thinking and that's when all the things that I've been so busy running around and dealing with the day to day, they finally are able to surface and able to do something with them and turn it into action. So that's essentially what led me to start this Lucid Day. We do coaching and consulting on monday.com. Honestly, I realized if I had all the ingredients there, to make this happen, like "Okay, let's do it." So Impact Filter led to this, led to that. And today, it's a successful growing company almost two years in.
 
Not that long ago, we were really seeing in the IT space, compressed margins, price pressure, increased competition. We just weren't winning when we were trying. And so, the breakthrough was asking the team the question, "Hey, if somebody moved in next door and put us out of business in a year, how did they do it? Let's put ourselves out of business." And that led us down the path of becoming an IT managed service provider specialist in the accounting space. It's kind of like what got you here won't get you there. And so, we were an IT generalist, we worked with any type of business all over the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
 
And it was continuing to become a struggle. So we embarked on that journey of becoming a specialist. And initially, it was very difficult and the accounting space is a little bit esoteric. We didn't have a lot of connections. But you know what was cool, is just we kind of set our sights on being that specialist. And today, we have, and we continue to grow, we have over 70 accounting firm clients that we work with all over the U.S.
 
All of my other people in Minneapolis that had an IT company, everybody looked like competition. But now, we really don't because we have a unique positioning in the marketplace, that we do something that nobody else does; IT strategy, IT security, IT support specific to the small accounting firm, between five and 30 team members. Nobody's really doing that. There's other solutions for IT and sure, sometimes it's the brother-in-law who's doing it or they've got a local provider, but nobody has the value proposition that we do.
 
I think the other game changing thing, it kind of just hit me over the head one day, I realized that this is the secret I'm keeping to myself and my leadership teams aren't benefiting from it as much as I would like, because I'm not as much as I'd like, spending the time to teach them the tools. And I'm just reflecting on how much I've been benefiting from it. And as a result, I was like, "Okay, I got to sign up my team members for Team Tools and Team Leader." And that has been a game changer, because now we're communicating using the same language.
 
And when I say Impact Filter, they know what I mean. And then, they can make an Impact Filter. When I say strategies for building, they know what I mean. All of it. We're all communicating using the same tools and I'm seeing each of them delegate and elevate and level themselves up to do even bigger and better, greater things, making a bigger, brighter future—to borrow Dan's terminology—bigger, brighter future for themselves, for all of our team members, for our clients. It's been magical. So that was another really big breakthrough. And so now, it's just like, "Okay, standard protocol for all the companies that I own, for all the leadership teams that I serve, they need to do Strategic Coach."
 
I went from one assistant, now, I have three assistants. When I share that with people, they are usually pretty surprised. But that just goes to show, I've had breakthrough after breakthrough on delegate and elevate, things that I never thought I could delegate and elevate. Well, I just put Impact Filter together for that. What do you know? The right person appears. It's amazing.
 
That has happened with my most recent assistant hire, where I put together the Impact Filter, started recruiting, and she really stood out in the application process. Interviewed her, she said, "I have been looking for this kind of a position for nine months." And I thought to myself, "Yes. That's great." She didn't know what Impact Filter meant, but she knew what she wanted. Had she written an Impact Filter, would've been very much aligned with mine. So I needed to interview one person because I was so clear on the impact that I wanted this initiative to have. That's one example.
 
But all the teams have grown significantly; Lucid Day, the professional coaching services around monday.com. It was just myself and our integrator. Well, we have I think seven or eight people now. And that's in a year and a half. Tech Guru has grown as well, significantly.
 
For me, it's always making sure that we take good care of the team member and good care of the client. Always trying to be predicting capacity needs and maintaining a high level of customer experience is really important to me.
 
Again, to borrow Dan's terminology, I'm a very good student, I guess, but $15 to $20 an hour work... When I'm freed up to do what I love, I'm making a bigger impact in the world, I'm helping make other people's lives better. When I'm running to FedEx to ship something, I'm not having that kind of impact. Or when I'm trying to schedule my calendar or book flights, I always book them on the wrong times and dates. Or I put the right time, but the wrong date. I'm off by a week. Like "Oh, it's just a week." And things I'm just not good at. And I'm not changing people's lives by booking flights. For me, I'm changing people's lives when I'm having a conversation one-on-one, or working with a leadership team, or coaching one of my leadership team members. That's where I see tremendous growth in people and in myself, frankly.
 
Because when I'm coaching somebody, I'm learning at the same time from that experience and from their experiences. And I'm always thinking how I can go to the next level. When I'm learning, both through coach and other programs that I do, I am able to upgrade myself and then help share those additional learnings and insights with others too. And so, for all those reasons, for my own wellbeing, I need to always be kind of delegating and elevating.
 
And I got to tell you, I think the head trash that I had early on was like, "Nobody's going to want to do my mail. Get the mail and go through the mail." I kid you not, if I go through my mail, my assistant gets upset. Like, "Hey, what are you doing? You got a full schedule. You need to be preparing for those calls, getting your speeches put together." So for me, it's been a complete game changer. You can have it. And just because it's not something you love doing, doesn't mean it's not something somebody else would love to do.
 
So this was another Coach breakthrough, but I decided to and embarked on buying out a business partner. And we are actually spinning off into two separate companies, and it empowers our team to focus just on accounting firm clients. And then, my soon-to-be former business partner to focus just on the existing clients we had previously. And then, he can use that as a launchpad to create another vertical, industry focused, go-to-market strategy. So that was a coach breakthrough, I think two workshops ago, that I needed to make this change.
 
I can't tell you how freeing it is to not try to run two different companies in the same company, where you've got clients that are in town, they have a different set of needs, they want you to come on site, and so forth. And you've got clients that are all over the country, they're just accounting firms. They have a different set of needs. It's all remote. They want to talk about their accounting firm software. So that’s very different.
 
Over the course of my 20 year entrepreneurial journey, it's been doing less, better, fewer things better. And we've always made these big leaps every handful of years, of doing fewer things better. And so, that is almost a dream kind of coming true for me, which is that we are 100% industry focused on the accounting firms. We're going to be able to upgrade our level of service to all of them, because now we don't have the distraction of trying to manage a depot and a facility and product coming and going. And, oh, by the way, also trying to do this other thing well. We're really going to just do one thing really, really well, be laser focused, and be truly the best in the world at it.
 
So that is giving me a tremendous amount of energy right now. And although it's not been fun necessarily to have to go through such a big transition, I'm really grateful for the Coach tools that I use to help me get clear on my thinking and with defining success look like. And that just helped guide me on the path to making sure that even when the distractions and the deviations seem to arise, I'm able to stay laser focused on what's the impact and what's the outcome that I'm looking for.
 
I had some initial head trash sometimes about "I'm not good enough," or "I'm not worthy," or "These people are way smarter than me." And fortunately, after just talking to other members, I realized we're all the same. We're just humans. We just are trying to frankly make people's lives better. I do feel like I found my people for the most part.
 
Anyway, so as you can imagine, I get very excited leading up to a workshop. In the workshop, the closest thing I can think of it is a brain trust with open, honest, vulnerable conversations. I walk out of there with inspiration, ideas, insight. I put ideas directly on our various leadership team issues lists. I come out with usually some interesting piece of technology, like the [inaudible 00:12:44], you know what I mean? It's like some health technology. I don't know why. It just seems like there's always something like that I walk out of and I probably have ordered the thing before I even leave. So I walk out of there with really great ideas and inspiration.
 
And I think the best thing is that when I show up the next day or days, to the rest of my team, I maybe have a little bit of lightness to my step and I have more energy, because I think that I've in some cases have sorted through distractions and the details and the noise and have been able to really get down to the things that matter the most and have much more appreciation and gratitude for the progress that we've made.
 
I don't know where to begin. All the game changers; “Who Not How,” game changer. It just changes how I talk, how I relate to people. But all of those type of mindset shifts, my team recognizes it, they appreciate it, and I coach them to help them do the same thing, and see their progress measured from backwards versus forwards. It's changed how I implement EOS with my clients as well.
 
It's just sort of woven into who I am and has impacted my kids. I come back from a Coach thing and I teach those ideas to my kids too, and they love that too. I'm like, "Hey, do you want to go on a vacation? All right, let's do an Impact Filter for that. All right, here we go. Fill it out."
 
And the great thing about it, I love this, if I have an issue on my leadership teams issues list and I'm like, "Oh, let me pull up my Impact Filter," they're like, "Oh, whatever, we're going to just do it. We know we're going to end up doing it." Because they know I'm sold on it and they know that I'm going to help them become sold on it. They know because I've thought it through. It's not like, "Here we go again." It's not that. Well, it's more like, "Yes, we can go through the motions. We know you've put the thought into it and that this is likely going to be a positive thing for us, because you've organized your thoughts in such a way," and that I can just hand it off to them and they can make it happen.
 
I feel almost a debt of gratitude for Strategic Coach. It's just so obvious to me that everybody, all the coaches... Shout out to Kory Simpson, my advisor. I had this insurmountable project that I had no idea how I was going to get it done, insurmountable. And I was so in the bottom half of my quadrant and delegate, elevate. And she just said, "Oh, well." She asked two questions. I'm like, "Huh, how? Of course."
 
Anyway, so I think that'd be the last comment, is there's such a passionate team, caring team, who care about us and feel so grateful and supported.
 
Dan Sullivan: So you can just see the enormous simplification that went on in Daniel's thinking here. One is that he only liked doing one thing, he only liked doing it with one kind of client. He wanted to go national, not local. And he wanted to take himself out of all competition, because what he does is very specialized, and the word goes out among accountants that this is a unique approach that he has.
 
I just love these stories because I have a phrase that, "The smaller the niche, the bigger the market." I think in the United States they say niche, niche, but it's the same thing, that you just focus on one type of client, totally understand their issues, and then you master one. And if you master one, you know can master 10. And if you can master 10, you can master 100. And that's how you grow your entrepreneurial company.
 
Daniel, with his goals in the industry, his partnering up with Strategic Coach, is just the perfect recipe for a constantly growing future.