Dan Coughlin is committed to gaining a deep understanding of his customers and customizing his message.
He feels that every keynote speech and seminar has to be built around an understanding of the customer's desired business outcomes. Once he clarifies those outcomes he then customizes his message through a combination of in-depth interviews with employees, on-site visits, being the customer and/or studying the organization's materials, website, and customers.
"When I first met with Dan Coughlin to talk about my team, I had no idea what I was getting into. I was surprised and ecstatic with the depth of research Dan used to plan our day-long seminar on leadership. The day flew by thanks to Dan's enthusiasm, willingness to listen, and the diverse plan of activities. Dan has a very simple approach to leadership and provided my team with some good, repeatable strategies to improve performance. The feedback I have received has been all positive. I look forward to working together with Dan in the future."
Greg Suellentrop Anheuser-Busch InBev North American Zone Director
"Dan Coughlin was a pleasure to work with and was very well prepared when he spoke to our group. Dan took the time to ask the right questions long before his speaking engagement and had several in-depth conversations within our membership educating himself on the challenges within our business. Our Broker/Owners are a tough crowd to please, but Dan connected with them immediately and most importantly held their attention and the group was deeply engaged during the entire session. Dozens of positive comments afterwards about a morning well spent. I look forward to working with Dan again in the coming years."
Pamela Alexander CEO Integra Enterprises Corporation RE/MAX Ontario-Antlantic Canada, Inc.
"Dan, on behalf of the Jack in the Box Franchisee Association and myself, we appreciate your full of energy and interactive presentation at our annual convention in Hawaii. I have seen and heard many keynote speakers, but your presentation and content were aligned with what we are facing in today's environment. We loved the fact that you actually worked in one of our Jack locations in order to prepare. You truly understood our culture and process. As a speaker, your back-to-basic and specific approaches to our daily challenges were perfect. You also shared many useful ideas on continuous improvement and reminded us all of the importance of collaborating in order to improve and sustain long-term business results. Our group walked away with a refreshed enthusiasm around how we can accelerate our impact as leaders."
Anil Yadav President National Jack in the Box Franchisee Association
Here are titles and descriptions of some of Dan's most popular programs. Each of these can be offered as a keynote speech, a half-day workshop, or a full-day seminar.
Accelerate Your Impact as a Leader
Organizations from large to small need effective leaders at all levels to achieve and sustain success. In this high-energy, high-impact session, Dan Coughlin explains the key leadership actions necessary to influence the decisions people make. Based on his 3,000 hours of on-site executive coaching in over 30 industries, he debunks the traditional myths of leadership and shows how any employee can impact the way other people think and drive better sustainable business results.
Customers don't care which department was most successful. They only care about the value the departments deliver collectively to them. Leaders create more value for customers by effectively influencing divergent individuals to support a common cause. Dan explains how every leadership style can be effective, except for the dreaded chameleon and the polite dictator. He shows how preserving your integrity supports long-term business success.
Learning Objectives:
Learn The 4 Critical Leadership Questions and how your answers can sustain high performance throughout your organization.
Learn seven ways to influence what other people think about.
Learn how to effectively give candid feedback to employees about poor performances and still maintain a strong working relationship with them.
Learn how to leverage your values, strengths, and passions as an individual to effectively create greater value for your organization and your customers.
Learn how to maintain the genuine, daily, and purpose-driven enthusiasm necessary to guide a lasting impact in your organization.
Learn how effective collaboration can become the highest form of business acceleration.
Learn the seven questions in The Performance Bar-Raising Process.
Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin's 30-Day Leadership Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.
Innovate to Generate Sustainable, Profitable Growth
A business innovation is the creation of additional value for customers that they will pay for at a profitable margin to the organization. It has to be both: new value that the customer does not already have and a profit-generator for the business. One without the other is insufficient.
Dan Coughlin demystifies the process of innovation, and makes it simple, clear, and practical. He explains that innovation is about creating and delivering greater value for other people with more appropriate values based on a better understanding of them.
He shows how every employee can generate breakthrough ideas to increase efficiency, improve execution, and boost the bottom-line. From scheduling thinking time to using the observation tower to using OPS (Other People's Successes), audience members will walk away with ideas they can use immediately to begin to generate powerful innovations.
Dan explains how successful business innovators boldly walk away from a lot of good ideas so they can focus on a few great ideas. He explains the importance of prototyping to save time and money. If you want your organization to propel itself beyond today's performance level to generate sustainable, profitable growth, this is a must-attend session.
Learning Objectives:
Learn the Five Myths of Innovation and why innovation is a necessary daily activity.
Learn the five steps in The Process of Innovation and how the creation of value is based on carefully studying your desired customers.
Learn why the most important step in business is to step back and think.
Learn how to master the four phases in The Cycle of Innovation that produce a steady flow of profit-generating ideas for sustained excellence.
Learn how to find the profit-generating gap between a customer's expectations and desires.
Learn to schedule thinking and non-thinking time and how they drive innovations month after month.
Learn how sacrifice accelerates innovation and why "N" and "O" are the most important letters in i-n-n-o-v-a-t-i-o-n.
Learn how to find organizations that have matching definitions with yours and how they provide a steady stream of ideas for improving your performance.
Learn to study Centers of Excellence and how to extract useful ideas from them for your organization.
Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin's 30-Day Innovation Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.
Your brand is your reputation in the marketplace. Your brand is the value that customers think they receive when they buy from your organization or potential customers think they will receive if they do buy from your organization. Your brand is not what you want to be. It's what customers and potential customers believe you are right now.
Dan Coughlin, who has worked with such great brands as Toyota, McDonald's, Marriott, GE, Coca-Cola, Prudential, Subway, Ace Hardware, Jack in the Box, Boeing, Kiewit, and the St. Louis Cardinals, provides penetrating insights into the dos and don'ts of building the brand you want. He explains the importance of defining and owning a performance category that matters deeply to customers and will generate the financial outcomes your organization desires.
He walks the audience through the importance of a brand audit and the steps necessary to complete it successfully. He demonstrates how an obsession with undisciplined experimentation can ruin a brand and destroy the sustainable, profitable growth of an organization.
Learning Objectives:
Learn to see the equity in value and values.
Learn The Wagon Wheel Approach to Strategic Planning that guides every spoke in your business into a central hub of value for your customers.
Learn the long-term financial strength in sustained, value-added relationships.
Learn what your brand is, where it exists, and how you can strengthen it.
Learn how long it takes to build a brand and why a sustained, consistent effort is critical to success.
Learn to leverage a brand audit to strengthen decision-making throughout your organization.
Learn the importance of staying true to what got your organization to where it is today and why good business leaders are good historians.
Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin's 30-Day Branding Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.
Free Demo DVD available upon request for trade associations and corporations.
Testimonials on Dan Coughlin's Keynote Speeches from Senior Executives
McDonald's
"Dear Dan, I want to thank you once again for your compelling presentation to our East Division leadership group of franchisees and staff at our 2011 Division Leadership Council meeting. All of us agreed that we walked away with a refreshed enthusiasm around how we can accelerate our impact as leaders. One of the most insightful concepts from my perspective was the idea of owning our leadership styles versus trying to be chameleons. It's not about trying to be everything to everyone, but instead it's imperative to listen, engage, be transparent and collaborate to drive results. In addition, the idea that 'great business leaders are great historians' - meaning we need to remember what and who got us to where we are today - really resonated with me and I think the reminder was key for everyone in the room. Your simple, actionable direction re-grounded us and reminded us to focus on what we're all trying to achieve. Thank you for sharing your insights and spending the afternoon with our leaders."
Karen King McDonald's USA East Division President
Prudential
"Dear Dan, thank you for your keynote speech at The Prudential Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona. I have received terrific feedback regarding your presentation based on our theme of Accelerate, Generate, Innovate as well as your follow-up workshop. We're still collecting audience feedback, but some of the comments were:
'He is one of the best presenters I have ever seen. Lots of 'steak' with the sizzle.'
'He really did his research and the audience was really engaged.'
'Great speaker ... very inspirational and it was helpful that he left us with tools to apply.'
"The extensive research that you did to not only tie your message to ours, but to make it relevant and timely to our audience showed in everything, up to and including the handouts that you formatted to support our secondary theme of Sustainability."
"Thank you again for sharing your boundless energy and insights with our audience… your presentation not only lifted spirits, but also provided focus to deliver results in a very challenging market environment."
Jim Mallozzi Chairman and CEO Prudential Real Estate & Relocation Services
GE Capital
"Dan, I want to thank you for the tremendous job you did presenting at our recent GE Capital Retail Finance HR Leadership meeting. Your session, "Accelerate Your Strengths: Practical Ideas to Boost Business Momentum", provided numerous insights for the team to work on personally, and actionable ideas for them to take back and implement into the organization. The extensive pre-session research you conducted into our organization prior to our June 16, 2010 meeting proved to be a great investment of your time. In addition to our conversations, you spoke with 12 members of our group on the phone, received e-mail input from more than 25 attendees, and spent five hours at our Merriam, Kansas site to learn more about the Retail Finance business. You were able to take learnings from those interactions and seamlessly weave them into your session, which made it all the more impactful.
As you know, we're big proponents of process and believers in simplification. Importantly, your session gave us numerous practical process-orientated exercises that will help us further develop our strengths to accelerate performance and deliver results for the business. Thanks to your pre-session work and your straightforward teaching approach, the presentation was tailored to our audience and business, and, as a result, the team was fully engaged for three-plus hours - no small feat.
Finally, I want to personally thank you for the help you provided after the session with respect to our forthcoming Develop U Week. Your willingness to sit down and be videotaped for an interview immediately following the session after a long day was greatly appreciated, as was your follow-through in writing a whitepaper article for use during our learning and development week. On behalf of the organization and our team, thank you again for helping make our meeting such a success."
Cynthia Tragge-Lakra GE Capital Retail Finance Senior Vice-President Human Resources
Abbott Laboratories
"Dan Coughlin took time to understand our needs and challenges through interviews and discussion prior to the meeting, then tailored his talk on accelerating leadership to us in a very engaging manner and gave us approaches that we could readily put to use to improve our leadership skills. He received the most positive and highest remarks on our feedback survey for relevance and engagement. One attendee said, 'I have already used the information that was provided to us by the Keynote speaker to accelerate the leadership of a new issue to help us move the business forward.' Thanks again for your excellent talk at our Global Regulatory Conference."
Cecilia Kimberlin, Ph.D. Vice President Abbott Laboratories Medical Products Group Quality, Regulatory, & Compliance
Toyota Financial Services
"Dan, on behalf of the entire Toyota Financial Services Team, I'd like to personally thank you for your keynote presentation at this year's National Sales Conference. You left an outstanding impression on everyone you worked with at TFS. Your passion, follow-up and attention to detail are tremendous and helped to make this year's sales conference a success. In fact, in the feedback survey from the conference attendees, we received excellent remarks on your efforts. Thank you again for your personal commitment to accelerating TFS to even greater levels of success! Oh yes, driven by the enthusiasm generated from the sales conference, we had the best all-time month in sales of both finance and insurance products! It was great and you helped 'accelerate' us to get there!"
Dave Pelliccioni Toyota Financial Services Group Vice-President Sales and Marketing
