Henry Daas is a serial entrepreneur, author, coach, screenwriter, avid golfer and international traveler. He is currently studying to become a licensed real estate broker. He resides in rural Connecticut.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Henry Daas about helping others gain financial intelligence.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How writing a book can help pivot an entrepreneur’s business.
- Why one on one coaching has more value than group coaching.
- How the number one characteristic to look when coaching someone is desire.
- How writing a book can help someone reach new audiences.
- Why writing a book allows people to differentiate themselves in a market.
Connect with Henry:
Links Mentioned:
henrydaas.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@DaasFQ
Facebook
facebook.com/daasfq
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/henrydaas
Rob Kosberg:
All right. Hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of our Publish Promote Profit podcast. I have a great guest for you today. We’re going to be talking about business, we’re going to be talking about financial intelligence. I think you’re going to love Mr. Henry Daas. Henry is a serial entrepreneur, business coach, a well-rounded person, self-described ordinary guy, screenwriter. What haven’t you done? I just found out he drove across the country and just got back home yesterday. I’m really glad that he’s taken some time to be with us. You of course have written a book on personal finance, which I’m very, very excited to talk to you about, FQ: Financial Intelligence, What You Really Need to Know About How to Manage, Invest, and Grow Your Money Now. Henry, thanks so much for being on the podcast with me today.
Henry Daas:
Thanks for having me, Rob. Glad to be here.
Rob Kosberg:
I made a little pun, but you’re a well-rounded individual, business coach, serial entrepreneur. What in the world is up with writing a 400 page finance book? That’s not something that you just decide one day to do, I wouldn’t imagine. Where did the motivation come from to do that?
Henry Daas:
432 pages if you want to get technical. The origin story, and I’ve told it on a bunch of different podcasts, it’s kind of interesting. I was at a conference in Bangkok with about 300 location independent entrepreneurs, digital nomads, and I’ve coached a lot of them in my coaching business. There were about six or seven of my clients there, because my clients are all over the world. One guy from Australia, one guy from Tokyo, and a few folks from Europe. Part of these conferences a day of masterminds. They match you up with people in similar vocation, so I ended up on a table with folks who coach. A lot of people coach. No barriers to entry to coaching. We went around and we talked about our Jim Collins’ BHAG, our big, hairy, audacious goal. I said, “I always wanted to write a book, and I wanted to write a book about my experiences of 40 years as an adult. Even more than that, 62, or at that time 59 years of experience growing and managing money. Everybody at the table was half my age, they were like, “You might want to get on that dude, because you aren’t getting any younger.” It was pretty funny. They were a little more politic than that, so I said, “Yeah, I will,” but I created it as a course. I went back home, I immediately started, I wrote 18 chapters. I started at chapter one and I went straight through to chapter 18. I wrote about a hundred thousand words, and then I got a dozen people to test the material as a course. I set up a Slack channel, set up weekly Zoom calls. They made some really, really nice suggestions on stuff that I missed. It’s like, “You should cover flank theory,” I’m like, “Okay, what’s flank theory?” Something I hadn’t heard of, and it’s like, “Okay.” I dove in and did research. Then when it was all said and done and I’m ready to launch, folks are like, “You know what? This is a book. The book is your lead magnet.” In fact, my friend Chris said to me something that I’ve quoted very often, he said, “A book is the new business card,” and I thought, “Wow, that’s really profound.” Although I’ve updated it now to say, “A podcast is the new business card,” because everybody now has a podcast except me, but I’m a guest.
Rob Kosberg:
A podcast is easier to do than a book.
Henry Daas:
It sure is, and I like being a guest on podcasts, and people say, “Henry, when are you going to do a podcast?” It’s like, “I don’t know, a week from never? It seems like a lot of work.” Being a guest is great, I show up, and then I leave. That’s how it evolved. It took like a year to round it into a book, because I didn’t go into the endeavor with the intention that I would ever publish it. I have 250 infographics that I just grabbed off the internet. I hired a designer to lay it all out in InDesign, because I wanted it to be really professional. He’s like, “These are not going to look good,” so I had to find a guy. I found a guy in Serbia on Fiverr who, for 10 bucks a piece, would convert all the infographics and defectors, and he was great. I went through all of that and then I had to get permission. You have to get permission for stuff. It’s like, “I’m not going to publish anything.” People throw anything in the world up on the internet and they think it’s just there, like there’s no intellectual property. I can just do whatever I want to do. No, this is going to be a book that’s going to get published and it’s going to be on Amazon or Instagram or wherever it is. I can’t put anything in there that I don’t have permission to do. Some people were actually shocked that I asked permission. Some guy who had a little diagram that I found, I dragged it, and I liked it, and he’s like, “No one’s ever asked me for permission to use any of my work, you’re the first one. Good luck and Godspeed. Have at it.” Yeah, it entailed a lot. It was probably like a solid year. I never knew what a copy editor was, so I had to interview a bunch of people to be copy editor and hire one of them. Then the layout guy. There’s a lot to it, a lot of moving parts.
Rob Kosberg:
Tell me about the metamorphosis into this, because from your background, obviously business guy, entrepreneur, you’re a business coach. You just mentioned that you were in Bangkok because of the number of clients that you had there in the event that you went to. Maybe talk a little bit about what your magic is, what your expertise is, who you serve as a business coach and then the metamorphosis into the financial piece of that?
Henry Daas:
The genus of coaching has all these different subspecies. In fact, at that very same conference, someone who was a coach did a presentation about growing your coaching business. I walked into the room and there were like 40 different people in there. There’s fitness coaches, and food coaches. There was even a Pinterest coach, I didn’t even know there was such a thing. She coaches people on how to use Pinterest. Podcast coaches, you name it. The barriers to entry to coaching are illusory, they’re de minimus. Anybody can hang up a shingle, anybody listening to this tomorrow could say, “Well, my specialty is repairing transmissions in British Leyland automobiles.” I could, all of a sudden, coach people who wanted to do that. Maybe a little too nichey, but I bet you there’s more than a few people who would pay a couple bucks for your expertise. I really made an adjunct, I’m still coaching people, but instead of the discipline being entrepreneurial, growing your business, I just switched over to personal finance. It really wasn’t too much of a change from a mechanical standpoint, but the people you’re reaching out to are different. I’m marketing to a different subset of people. Actually, a much broader set of people. Because my book is designed for anybody. Mainly Americans, because the model that I use when I talk about things like social security and such, those don’t really apply to people overseas, because I’ve coached a lot of people, and they’re like, “Henry, we don’t have the healthcare issues that you have in the U-S, or the social contract. What we have are really, really high taxes compared to the U-S. A different problem.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting to me, one of the things that I talk to my clients about is the idea of using a book to pivot from the thing that you’re doing right now into something else. Not everybody wants to do that. What many people want to do is expand on the thing that they’re doing, they want their book to bring them more clients, better clients, more speaking, better speaking, but it seems like you took the other course, which I actually love. That is, you’ve written a book, and now you’re using book to pivot into this newer market for you. You’re certainly an expert on it, but it’s a market that you haven’t been focused on. Was that the idea from the beginning?
Henry Daas:
Yeah. Actually, the real impetus was to do group coaching, because that was the topic of our little mastermind group. People were struggling with scaling. I coach people one-on-one and there are other people there, and it’s not efficient for me to coach people one-on-one. I want to be able to do group coaching. I actually wrote this book with the idea of morphing it into a group coaching situation, and then I ultimately wanted to do it as a weekend seminar thing where people would come to a hotel. Sort of like the rich dad, poor dad model. That was the goal, but what I discovered is, I liked doing it one-on-one and the value that people get on one-on-one is definitely significantly greater than doing it in a group setting. Group setting, you’re always going to dilute things. I like to do a deep dive into people, I did that in the entrepreneurial world, and I do that in the financial world. It’s a model that works for me. I also realized that from a business perspective, at 62 years old now, I don’t really need to scale it. Even to today, I’d always kept my entrepreneurial coaching between eight and 12. I’ve had as many as 15 clients, it’s too much. It’s too much of a workload. Most of my career is in the rear view. Even though I never plan to retire, I’ll die with my boots on. As long as there’s somebody to pay me, I’ll be in business, but I’ve been able to manage and follow my own F-Q, my own financial intelligence to get to a point where creating a large monolithic business that I’ll one day sell is not that important. That’s not really what the BHAG is. It’s more of being able to impart my wisdom to people and change their lives. Just like when I coach entrepreneurs.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s interesting. You talked about the impact that you’re able to make one-on-one as opposed to group. You said that you’re focusing primarily on one-on-one even in the FQ financial coaching business. If that’s true, tell me who your ideal client is. I know anybody can, but who was the people that you find yourself that they’re being attracted to you, that you’re working with one-on-one in, and what their needs are and what your expertise is with them?
Henry Daas:
The number one characteristic you’re looking for in any sort of coaching relationship is desire, wanting to do this. Number two would be coachability. That comes into play a lot with entrepreneurs, because they tend to be headstrong and envision themselves as masters of the universe. Sometimes the coachability just isn’t there and those relationships don’t really last. The other thought that really comes to mind is the idea of commitment, I don’t need you to be passionate about it. I wrote a thing, it’s a free PDF that’s on my Daas Knowledge website. That’s five reasons small businesses fail. Number five is confusing passion with commitment. It’s okay to be passionate about it, but you really going to need to be committed, because if you go through this whole 20 week course, go through my book, really do the deep dive, and all the work that’s involved, there’s a lot, a lot of work involved, then you got the rest of your life to implement this stuff. There’s no magic elixir, there’s no bullet, there’s no pill that you can take. You have to want to do this and be committed to doing this for the long-term, even when it sucks. Even when your investments start to blow up on you, even when you forget about managing risks for five minutes and all of a sudden things go sideways. Many people would just say, “You know what? I’ll just buy an index fund,” or, “I’ll just hire a professional to do it.” It’s like, “If that’s your attitude, do that, but don’t come crying to me when this stuff blows up in your face.”
Rob Kosberg:
Right. Tell me a little bit more about the demographics of that individual. Let me explain why I’m even asking that, because I know one of the prerequisites of working with people one-on-one is, they got to be able to pay you. Obviously when you’re working with somebody one-on-one, generally that’s a much larger financial commitment that’s going to be asked of an individual than if you’re working in a group, because you have no scalability as a coach in that regard. With that in mind, who’s the person that’s coming to you for help? Is it someone that is a business owner, that’s already making 3 million bucks a year and now they need to figure out how to take that business revenue and turn it into a lifelong passive income? You know what I mean? I’m trying to understand, because they’re having to write you a pretty good sized check, I would imagine, every month to work with you. This isn’t the Dave Ramsey clientele that’s coming to you, that is in credit card debt and broke and they’re wondering what to do.
Henry Daas:
That’s a different animal. I even say it in my book, “if you’re drowning in debt, I can help you.” At five grand for the course, I couldn’t, in good conscience, take your money if I know that you’re just going to go deeper into debt. The original title for the book that I came up with was, “Financial intelligence for the sandwich generation.” I pitched it to my wife, she said, “Oh yeah, I like that. What’s the sandwich generation?” I even wrote that in the foreword of the book, but it really is. The sandwich generation are people who are sandwiched between young school aged children and aging parents. They’re getting hit with everything financially. They got to worry about paying for Junior’s college, they got to worry that grandma and grandpa put away enough money and don’t have to live in a trailer park somewhere, and they’ve got to fund their own retirement, they got to worry about their vocation, when they’re going to get social security, will there even be anything left in social security when the time comes. They are sandwiched between it; they get hit with everything. All the stuff that I covered within the book is really for that sweet spot, you would figure 35 to 55 has some assets. I created a model family that I use throughout the book, and I had them at a net worth of about $500,000. I did all the research to look at where the sweet spots are. The guy who’s making 3 million bucks a year, certainly they could learn a lot about it, but they probably have enough money at that where they could hire a financial advisor, lose a whole bunch of money and not really care about it. Conversely, like you talked about, to someone who’s drowning in debt. Sure, absolutely, go to Dave Ramsey. He’s got great stuff. I talk about snowball or avalanche. How do you want to get out from under all of this? That’s tough, because that’s facing some really inconvenient truths, which are, “This is going to impact your lifestyle.” One of the theories I have is something I called a hundred hour week. In a bridged form, there’s 168 hours in a week, once you take away sleeping and all the basic biological functions that every human has to do, bathing, eating, brushing your teeth, you end up with around 100 discretionary hours in a week. How are you going to spend those? If you are working 40 hours a week and commuting an hour each way, now of course the world has changed. I wrote this before the pandemics, a lot of folks are working from home, but even if you’re just working 40 hours a week, that’s 40% of your life. The reason I came up with this was, years ago I read a statistic that said the average American watches 35 hours of TV a week, millennials actually watch more, so I started doing the arithmetic in my head. You work, you commute, and then you do this, you got 10 discretionary hours left to do everything else that you need to do. That’s absurd. You’re wasting your life. Time is the one asset that you will never get any more of, you can get more money, you can get more clothes, you can go on more vacations. There are a million things that you can do that you can get more of, you’re never going to get more time. You’re going to get what father time gave you, and that’s it, so use it wisely.
Rob Kosberg:
Yep, I love that. So many people feel like if they could trade between time and money, they keep the money and use their time, and I think that they’re dead wrong. That’s the biggest mistake that people can make.
Henry Daas:
It’s a huge, huge blunder. I had a doctor’s appointment this morning and I made a mistake realizing that it was a half an hour drive away. I’m thinking it’s local, because now I live in the boondocks in Connecticut. I called them to cancel it, and then the person said, “You want to reschedule? She’s only taking telemedicine clients from now on,” I said, “That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, because there’s no way I’m going to take an hour out of my life to drive down there, then wait for her in a waiting room as we’ve all done, and waste two hours of my day. Are you telling me that we could schedule an appointment for 9:30 next Monday and we’ll Zoom? Let’s do that.”
Rob Kosberg:
I love it, I love it. Good. Let’s change gears a little bit. As you know, Publish Promote Profit, like we spoke about, is certainly about your expertise and your book, but also, it’s about what your book has done for you and for your business. It’s not easy to write a book, certainly not easy to write 432 pages either. You did it with some goals in mind, you did it with some purpose. Tell me, are there any stories or examples that you could give of how your book has helped you to make more money, grow your coaching business, get speaking engagements, whatever it is that you’ve seen come from that great effort?
Henry Daas:
The idea that a book is the new business card, that’s a real thing. The opportunities to market that are myriad. Some of them have been colored by COVID, but certainly having a book out there, I’m on a podcast talking about my book. I’ve now reached a new audience of people who otherwise may not be able to reach me or aren’t going to find me, remember the internet is a gigantic place. I describe it as seven and a half billion people screaming, “Look at me,” all at the same time. How are you going to differentiate yourself out there in the market? I’ve had people sign up for strategy sessions, I have one tomorrow, directly from the book. I don’t really paper the earth with it, I have a VA who put stuff out on Instagram and does all that stuff, LinkedIn. Very small, incremental little bits. Again, I don’t need a lot. As I said to one of my clients a while ago, “Look, there are seven and a half billion people on the planet, I need like eight of them to be my clients, and I’m fine.” I like those odds, but still, finding them in the morass that’s out there is very difficult. When I first published the book and I put it on Amazon, you couldn’t find it. Amazon search engine is not optimized for even search terms, unless you are selling dozens and dozens or hundreds of books, you’re invisible, and that’s okay. I actually give my book away for free, so if you go to my website, I’ve sold a bunch of copies, but I finally said, “No, I just want people to read it.” Read it if you think it’s valuable and you want to learn this as a course, learn it from the master. Because originally when somebody suggested turning it into a book, I said, “Am I not eating my own seed corn?” They’re like, “No, Henry, you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. If people read the book, even if you give it for free and they like you, and they like what’s in it, they want to learn it from the master.” I’m like, “Okay, I buy that.” Certainly, that is a good thing. Here’s the caveat that, and again, this is just me talking. I had a client a number of years ago who hired a guy to write a book in eight weeks, and there’s a whole bunch of guys out there who do that. You don’t have to Google very far. There’s book in a box, you can spend a $100,000 if you want to do a book in a box kind of thing, and have somebody ghost write it for you. He wrote this book, it took him a lot longer than eight weeks, because he kept dragging his heels on it. It’s work to write a book. Then I read it when it was all said and done, and I said, “This is a pretty good first draft,” but you don’t want to put a pretty good first draft out in the world, because it’ll be there forever. My wife is a voracious reader and she read a book about a billionaire whose name I won’t mention, and she shook her head, because she’s actually met the guy. She said there were typos. There are typographical errors in the book. There’s one typographical error in my book, I mentioned Usain Bolt, but I think I misspelled his first name. Somebody sent me a note. I said, “If there’s only one in 120,000 words, I’ll take it,” but still it bugged me. Even today it bugs me that there is a mistake in there. It’s okay, I acknowledge it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be professional, because it’s a business card. When you get a crappy business card from somebody, what does that tell you? What did you do? Go to Kinko’s and then you printed them out and you cut them out with a pair of scissors? You’d be better off sending me something on Facebook, and dispensing with business cards altogether, which most people have done. If you’re not going to do something professional, because it’s a reflection of you and it’s a reflection that will live forever. That’s something that people miss. Don’t put junk out there, first drafts are fine. I went through I don’t even know how many drafts with my book. I had two different proofreaders, I had my copy editor, and then I had my design guy making suggestions to me. I had a lot of cooks in the broth, but each one of them made it incrementally better. The dozen people who did my beta tests for me, they added suggestions. They said, “Oh, you misspelled this, or you did that.” I think that’s really important just from a professionalism standpoint.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, yeah. Well said, my friend, I agree. I haven’t read your book at this point, but I did download it, because you are giving it away. I just downloaded it before the podcast, so you got to give me some time. It’s 432 pages.
Henry Daas:
When I first published it, I sent it to all my clients, and I said, “Did you read my book?” He said, “I skimmed it.” I said, “All right, here’s a little note for you. Never tell an author that you skimmed their book. Lie to them, tell them, “I read the first chapter, I really enjoyed it.” That’s it, that’s it. Just lie.” The only time in my life that I would ever suggest to someone that they make a bold face lie, but never use the skim word.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Why don’t we do this? Obviously, thank you for your time and the things you shared. Where can people get a copy of the book for free? Or what links would you like to give them to where they can learn a little bit more about you, what you do, and of course the book as well?
Henry Daas:
What I call my vanity site, which is Henry Daas, H-E-N-R-Y-D-A-A-S dot com. People misspell my name all the time, so if you spell it with one A and two Ss, you’ll still get there. I have a redirect on a bunch of different stuff, because people misspell my name. That’s my vanity site, there’s a link right on the right on the front page. It has links to my Daas Knowledge website, the FQ course. It has links to even my personal stuff, my golf trips, my screenplays, my Roberto Clemente baseball cards. It’s a catch all for everything. Yeah, and if they want to talk to me, you can go to the Daas Knowledge site, or the Henry Daas site, click on, “Talk to Henry,” and schedule a call. I don’t charge anything for introductory calls. Like I said, I’ve got somebody who, while I was on vacation, all of the sudden they popped up on my schedule to talk about FQ. Talk about taking the course. That happens all the time, which is great. I’ve met people, I won’t enroll someone in the course if I don’t think they will be successful, nor do I take on somebody as a coaching client if I don’t think they will be successful. That’s just how I work. That’s the old school boomer in me.
Rob Kosberg:
Henry, thank you. Thanks so much for being on the podcast today, great to have you on. Obviously people know where to go to learn a little bit more about you, get a copy of your book, and look forward to hearing more about how FQ does.
Henry Daas:
Thank you so much, Robert. I really appreciate it.
Rob Kosberg:
Thank you, my friend.
