Being an “Industry Transformer” means being in the best of all entrepreneurial worlds today — it results from harnessing one’s passion and creativity to break traditional boundaries and create a life of incredible freedom and fulfillment.

Recently, Dan Sullivan interviewed nine extraordinary entrepreneurs who have created such innovative and valuable businesses that they are transforming their industries or creating new ones. Their passion and excitement is infectious, educational, and inspiring. In these times when so many people are focused on disturbing events in the global economy, we offer you a glimpse of a kind of entrepreneurial experience that is both liberating and immensely rewarding. This experience is available to any entrepreneur who brings together eight crucial yet accessible ingredients.

No matter what is going on in your world, this will certainly help you set your sights on a bigger future.

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, Industry Transformers, by Dan Sullivan:

Lately, it has occurred to me that I live a charmed life because of the many successful entrepreneurs I know. Every day, I am in the presence of individuals whose lives and work combine extraordinary integrity, optimism, imagination, creativity, commitment, and value creation. The experience makes me happy to be alive. When I think of the nine entrepreneurs featured in this book, I always see them as having futures that are much bigger than their pasts. As successful and useful as they already are, the best part of their lives lies ahead. Each of them thrives on change, challenge, possibility, and opportunity. Each of them is passionate about making the world a better place than he or she found it. All of them measure their personal progress in terms of how much they contribute. They measure their professional success in terms of how much they have transformed the lives and conditions of other people. Being surrounded by these outstanding entrepreneurs, then, makes it much easier for me to aspire to the same qualities and results in my own life and business.

Making life more successful and enjoyable for others.

John Ferrell, when I asked him what motivates him, said, “I love entrepreneurs. I love the way they think, the way they create, and the way they are willing to risk their money, their security, and their reputations to create something new, better, and more useful in the world. I just want to use my legal skills in the best possible way to help them protect what they create, and to make it possible for them to be richly rewarded for their innovations.”

John’s comments are typical of the spirit that motivates all of the Industry Transformers in this book, and the many others who are in Strategic Coach®. They all want to make life more successful, enjoyable, meaningful, and rewarding for other people. Don Munce is equally passionate when he talks about linking up millions of graduating high school students with the colleges and universities that will be best for them.

Because I spend hours conversing with these Industry Transformers, it makes it very easy to be optimistic about my own future. It is also easy to be optimistic about the futures of many other people. As a result of the work that all of these individuals are doing, and because of the significant impact that their Unique Processes™ are having, the world is becoming a better place to live and work in for millions of other people. And in the case of each of these Industry Transformers, he or she considers what has been accomplished so far as a very small beginning.

Finding gold mines where others see nothing of interest.

David Allen sees a huge future for himself, his company, and his clientele: “So far, we have only scratched the surface. Right now we are only at the beginning of the era of private jet travel. Within ten years, the industry worldwide will double in the number of aircraft and people involved. Every one of these jets will need what we offer. All of these new owners will be looking for the peace of mind that comes from using our Unique Process™. And as good as we are now, we are still adding new levels of service and support to what is acknowledged as the best detailing approach in the world.”

One of the interesting aspects of the stories we’ve told in this book is that three of the examples come from an industry that many people think is mundane and unattractive: cleaning. Joe Polish with carpet cleaning, Tony and Mary Miller with janitorial services, and David Allen with the cleaning and detailing of private jets, are all in businesses that most people would describe as “dead end.” After all, how much creativity, reward, opportunity, and satisfaction can there be in never-ending worlds of cleaning up other people’s messes? It’s a very good question, and the answer is “not very much” if you are approaching these businesses in a conventional, commoditized way. These truly are dead-end businesses when they are operated by people with dead-end ideas and methods. They are very definitely dead-end occupations when they are performed by individuals with dead-end attitudes, capabilities, and aspirations. Yet to listen to the interviews with Joe, Tony, Mary, and David, you’d think they had all discovered gold mines. And they have. They’ve discovered an economic secret, more valuable than gold, about what makes all work and all areas of life interesting and stimulating in the 21st century: understanding the emerging needs, desires, and wants of clientele, and then creatively transforming these issues into new forms of service and support that provide the clientele with a greater sense of control over their future.

It doesn’t matter that the business and activity in these three examples involves cleaning. What really matters is that all of the clients and customers of these three Industry Transformers feel more confident about their futures. There’s a whole part of their lives that is now handled in a way that will always give them peace of mind — today and into the future. There’s a whole area of worry, frustration, and annoyance that now gives them a sense of confidence and capability.

This process of understanding and transformation is not just done once, but continually. It is not done as a one-time transaction, but as part of an ongoing creative relationship with clients and customers that continually improves. Gary Boomer, who started his professional career as an accountant, talks about the difference that the Unique Process makes: “Ask the average person his opinion of accounting and he will say it’s boring — and the same goes for the accountants who do it. I have to agree. When I was an accountant, much of the work was boring, but now I know that it is the accounting profession that makes it that way. It’s reactive and backward-looking. Since I created my Unique Process, the work has become increasingly exciting for me. We’ve taken a boring occupation and made it creative and proactive. And all of the accountants who use our process start to see their work as stimulating and creative, as do their own clients and customers.”

Philip Tirone reports the same change in his mortgage business: “Obviously, the mortgage industry is going through severe changes. Even during good times, the mortgage business is not the most exciting to be in. 7 Steps to a 720* Credit Score empowers those 50 percent of Americans with a credit score under 720 to change their credit score, which will change their life. Most people think that they are stuck with their credit score, which is not the case! I’m excited that my Unique Process can help people improve their life and, at the same time, make my work so much more enjoyable!”

Transforming lives and society.

Philip’s last statement, about changing people’s lives for the better and about making a societal difference, is probably the biggest difference that a Unique Process approach makes to the thinking and performance of an entrepreneur. Their sense that they are doing “big stuff” is what makes the Industry Transformers so different from their competition. It’s their sense that they are transforming the world around them that enables these Unique Process entrepreneurs to turn their occupations and activities into exciting sectors of the economy. The Unique Process approach says that there are no bad or boring jobs if they produce new kinds of value for clients. It says that absolutely any human activity or circumstance can be transformed into greater productivity and promise.

The big picture: Unique Processing the world.

At Strategic Coach®, we have been developing both the concept and methodology of the Unique Process for the past 25 years. The first Unique Process was Strategic Coach itself, which has become the world’s leading entrepreneurial coaching program. Over the years, we began to see that our underlying structure and model were transferable to every other kind of business. Our clients began to see that the way we organized and operated our business was the way they also wanted to organize theirs. Businesses from 60 different industries are represented in the Program, and all of them are able to adapt the Unique Process approach to transform their challenges and opportunities.

Over the last ten years, well over a thousand entrepreneurs have created Unique Process businesses that are thriving in ways not possible for them when they were commodity-based. Not only have their revenues and profits grown, they have also become increasingly immune to competition. Not only have their support teams and clientele improved dramatically, they have become immune to being commoditized. Their sense of personal direction, confidence, and capability has soared. As all of these improvements have occurred, these entrepreneurs have come to be seen as transformers in their industries. They are pioneering new concepts, tools, and systems that consumers love. Their more enlightened competitors come to them for guidance, hoping to become their students and customers.

In the early 21st century, we live in a general condition that is both scary and exciting. It is scary because it looks as if many of the large bureaucratic structures that were the bedrock of security for economic life are not dependable. This is true in both government and corporations. The introduction of microtechnology has brought with it a degree of rapid change and complexity that undermines bureaucratic approaches and methods. As a result, consumers in all sectors have become increasingly disappointed, frustrated, and angered by the treatment they receive from these large institutions. Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin in their book The Support Economy say that consumers in all sectors are looking for a new kind of “deep support” that provides them with a sense that they are in control. This is exactly how clientele feel inside of the Unique Processes created by the entrepreneurs featured in this book. Clientele feel that they are more in control of their present conditions and future prospects. Our goal at Strategic Coach is to teach tens of thousands of entrepreneurs how to transform their businesses into Unique Processes so the reality of deep support spreads throughout all sectors of the economy and society. This is an exciting possibility that the 21st century offers.

In closing, I leave the final words to Tony and Mary Miller: “We started on this path by trying to transform our business for ourselves, but it required that we transform things for our employees and our customers. When we saw what we had done, it became obvious that this transformation could go way beyond our own company. We’ve been at this for years, but it seems like we’ve just started. What lies ahead is incomparably more exciting than what lies behind.”  

*7 Steps to a 720® Credit Score is a trademark of 7 Steps to 720, LLC., 2008. All rights reserved. Used with permission.