Dan Coughlin is a keynote speaker, seminar leader, and executive coach on generating sustainable, profitable growth. His presentations focus on the role of a business leader in improving execution, innovation, and branding.

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.

His client list is a who's who of some of the world's best-known companies including McDonald's, Toyota, Marriott, Coca-Cola, GE, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shell, Subway, Abbott, RE//MAX, Prudential, Jack in the Box, Kiewit Construction, Holder Construction, Boeing, St. Louis Cardinals, and more than 150 other organizations. He has also worked with hundreds of small business owners in groups such as the Ace Hardware Platinum Performers Conference, National Automobile Dealers Association, National Tooling and Machining Association, and Restoration Industry Association.

Since 1998 he has invested over 3,000 hours on-site as a management consultant observing and advising executives and managers in a wide variety of business functions and in more than fifty industries. As an Executive Coach, he has provided more than 1,500 coaching sessions for presidents, vice-presidents, and senior directors in Fortune 500 companies, major privately-owned firms, and small businesses. He and his clients constantly work to hone simple processes that will improve performance throughout their organizations.

As a keynote speaker from Maui to Budapest and everywhere in between, Dan Coughlin is one of America's most practical business speakers on accelerating sustainable, profitable growth.


Dan Coughlin's Keynote Titles & Program Descriptions:

Title: Accelerate Your Impact as a Business Leader

Organizations from large to small need effective leaders to achieve and sustain success. In this high-energy, high-impact session, Dan Coughlin explains ways business leaders can influence how other people think so they make decisions that drive better sustainable results. Based on his 3,000 hours of on-site executive coaching in over 30 industries, he teaches in clear, practical, and humorous ways how to dramatically accelerate your impact as a business leader.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn The 4 Critical Leadership Questions and how your answers can impact performance throughout your organization.
• Learn a dozen ways to influence how other people think so they make better decisions.
• Learn to avoid the seven disastrous leadership approaches.
• 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 to avoid the emotional roller coaster created by the "psychology of results" and answer the four questions in The Raising Your Performance Bar Process.
  

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin's 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.


Title: Build Business Teamwork that Really Works

A team is a group of individuals who support one another toward achieving meaningful objectives. That's so easy to say, and so hard to turn into a working reality in a business environment. In this highly useful session, Dan Coughlin shares insights he learned from working with more than 200 corporate teams since 1998. He explains why true business teams are the exception rather than the rule and why teamwork is the crucial factor in delivering extraordinary organizational execution.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn the four types of groups and why three of them waste so much time.
• Learn how to clarify who is going to do what when and why that is going to happen.
• Learn the four critical elements of effective communication.
• Learn how to turn "mission, vision, and values" into statements that make sense on a day-to-day basis.
• Learn how to move from ineffective conflicts to effective collaborations.
• Learn the value of holding people accountable and providing negative and positive consequences.
• Learn the upside of providing freedom in tactical execution.
• Learn the power of the handwritten note and other subtleties of great teamwork.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin's Execution 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.
 

Title: Continually Innovate to Generate Sustainable, Profitable Growth

Business innovation means creating more appropriate value for customers and delivering it through a better experience for them. Companies that avoid continuous innovation put themselves at risk of becoming extinct. Dan Coughlin demystifies the process of innovation, and makes it simple, clear, and practical. He explains how successful business innovators boldly walk away from a lot of good ideas so they can focus on a few great ideas. He teaches 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 four steps in The Process of Innovation and how the creation of value is based on carefully studying your desired customers.
• Learn to search for hotspots of too much value or too little value in current products and services.
• Learn to leverage conversations, observations, experiences, and connections to create innovative products and services.
• Learn the power of iterating and eliminating.
• 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 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.


Title: Strengthen Your Brand for Long-Term Success

Your brand is not what you want it to be; it's the value customers and potential customers believe you provide right now. You don't own your brand. It exists in the minds of your customers. 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.

Dan Coughlin, who has worked with such great brands as Toyota, McDonald's, Marriott, GE, Shell, Coca-Cola, Prudential, Subway,Jack in the Box, Boeing, 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 power of making promises and keeping them.
• Learn The Wagon Wheel Approach to building a brand 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 great business leaders are great historians.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin's 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.


Dan's experience as a keynote speaker and seminar leader includes:

• McDonald's National Leadership Council
• GE Capital Leadership Conference
• Marriott International Sales & Marketing Western Region Conference
• Anheuser-Busch InBev North American Zone Brewery Support Conference
• Shell Retail Oil North American Marketing Conference
• Toyota Financial Services National Sales Conference
• Abbott Laboratories Global Regulatory Conference
• The Prudential Forum International Conference
• RE/MAX Broker's Retreat Ontario-Atlantic Region
• Ace Hardware Platinum Retailers Conference
• Land O'Lakes National Sales Conference
• National Association of Home Builders Annual Conference
• BMC Software International Sales Managers Conference
• Jack in the Box International Conference
• Denny's Association of Franchisees International Conference
• Prudential Capital Group National Team Leader Conference
• Jiffy Lube Association of Franchisees National Conference
• Kiewit Leadership Conference
• Essilor Labs of America Sales and Marketing Conference
• SkillSoft International Sales Conference
• SolidWorks International Sales Conference
• Boeing St. Louis Leadership Association
• Restoration Industry Association National Convention
• Many, many more