A little background:
From Daniel’s StrengthsFinder Profile:
“You tend to be a very good adviser to many individuals. When offering suggestions or asking questions, you are much more engaged, intense, and involved than others. By nature, you typically check and double check your work. You need to ensure everything is in order. You likely adopt a serious-minded approach when evaluating the accuracy of reports, research results, evidence, data, or facts. It’s very likely that you are an enterprising person.
You effortlessly launch new ventures. You are likely to measure your progress on a regular basis. This information probably inspires you to work even harder. Because of your strengths, you can mentally zero in on tasks for hours at a time when you have a goal to reach. Driven by your talents, you naturally resist being held back, restrained, or controlled by people or events. You much prefer to be in charge of situations, materials, schedules, budgets, human resources, processes, or decisions. Waiting for someone else to issue orders or level judgments certainly is not your strength.”
Daniel,
What is Enterprising Couples™?
“Let me first define ‘enterprising couple’. It’s a committed husband and wife with a ‘passion to accomplish’ - the ‘energy to achieve’ - the willingness to get somewhere else at all costs.
That said; the death of an enterprising couple is isolation. Enterprising Couples™ is a vehicle for tightening the “Tribe” as Seth Godwin writes. It’s gathering the collective wisdom using technology, and facilitating peer support, coaching/mentoring, education and adventure.
Why do this?
The first thought is that I’m in a great transition in life. I’m moving from Ambition to Meaning, and from facilitating leaders to facilitating individuals.
I didn’t want to lose my best friend, marriage and business partner, simply because I couldn’t find the right kind of help. I paid numerous counselors, and eventually I walked away from our relationship because I simply couldn’t find that ‘X"’ factor behind our challenges. Unfortunately, the PhD's I worked with weren't entrepreneurs, let alone in business with their spouse.
“All we had to do was be brave and transparent… I’d been practicing for forty years.”
Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t alone in my plight. And, just like the old sales story about the shoe salesmen, I concluded that “my God, nobody wears shoes!” Besides, it would be something Angelina and I could do together better than MOMtrepreneurs™.
Who are the best people to benefit from this?
Couples, young or old, that have a gnawing emptiness that there’s something amiss in their partnership. Maybe they once shared a dream, but the day-to-day pressures of business and relational challenges are slowly ripping them apart. Maybe they are dreaming of starting a business and they are finding out that the tensions are exaggerating their frustrations, or fears. They are already great people, but they simply don’t know where to find answers.
How is Enterprising Couples going to help?
First; they will discover that they are not alone. Second; they will gain tools that will transform their frustrations into greater personal growth because we start at the core – with the ‘x-factor’. Third; their business will reflect their successes, and so will their family.
What is your background as an entrepreneur?
My dream was to become Science Officer ‘Spock’ but my family was financially challenged, and I was too afraid to go to Stanford or Harvard on my own, so my formal training in nuclear power came from the US Navy during the Vietnam era. I quickly learned that I wanted to be creative, not destructive, and I realized that there were no jobs outside the military for my skills.
Soon after the Navy, I was transformed by a personal experience with a much greater power. On a crisp summer morning, I had a fall from St. Mary’s glacier in Colorado that left me a quadriplegic. Through a personal surrender, and a miraculous healing, I came to realize that nuclear fission was a candle compared to the power of God transforming lives from the human core. This led me to work with the Galloping Gourmet, Graham Kerr, in YWAM (Youth With A Mission) doing creative ‘bottom-up’ community development for eight years.
This experience led me to start my own design build firm, where my innovation, creativity and service to others could be monetized. I became an entrepreneur because I finally had the faith to take my creative passion into the marketplace.
nfortunately, I assumed I would have the support of my spouse. As a successful business owner with 17 employees, I was making money, raising a fabulous family and becoming respected in community, but I was becoming more and more miserable. I was certain that it was because my wife didn’t share my passion of “making a difference”.
I was devastated after 20 years of marriage to learn about betrayal, embezzlement, infidelity, bankruptcy, and worst of all, that being separated from my kids would be far more tragic and challenging than my fall from the glacier.
I kept looking for ways to impact people around the world, and had made a career change to develop the Internet. I decided that starting from the beginning, it could help me ‘impart wisdom’ to entrepreneurs on a massive scale.
Then, I met my ‘alpha geek soul mate’ Angelina online. This was unheard of at the time. It proved to my family that I was more than eccentric. That’s when I started writing Entrepreneurial Schizophrenia ®.
Why did you launch EP.com?
Four years after her devastating car wreck, I had emotionally detached from Angelina because I was disillusioned, and lost again. I couldn’t understand why God would let us both fail again when we were just beginning to be so powerful at helping people grow. I reasoned that her head injury had made her into someone else – someone too afraid to follow me. I listened to other people’s advice, and not to my heart.
“If we get separated, go back to the last place we were together” | For years, while snowboarding with my kids, I taught them that; “If we get separated, go back to the last place we were together”. I had to go find myself and start over I thought. |
I was certain that the answers to my problem, our problems, couldn’t be this hard to find. I had to go back to the last place I knew things were right. I moved back to the Pacific Northwest and crushed Angelina’s spirit and heart in Texas.
After we realized what we were doing, and that we were wrong. We committed to reconcile, and I took a 26 week class with an unruly bunch of guys that changed my life again from the core. Angelina and both saw the transformation clearly – and with that we had discovered our dysfunctional ‘x’ factor. We realized that there are couples like us all over the place.
What else could we do?
All we had to do was be brave and transparent – and find the ‘Tribe’ that needs our facilitation. I’d been looking for this opportunity for 4 decades.
So, here we are.
