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What is Entrepreneur Success Psychology (ESP)? And much more importantly, what’s in it for you and your venture for you to take advantage of ESP?
Before I describe the 5 main solutions I provide as an Entrepreneur Success Psychologist, I’m first going to describe the two biggest failure traps I’ve seen entrepreneurs and leaders make during my 40+ year professional career. I call these failure traps “shiny objects” and “shiny experts.”
What I mean by “shiny objects” is this: Just as love is blind, entrepreneurs can often become blind as well. I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs fall so deeply in love with the product or service they’re bringing to market that they believe it will be profitable solely on its own merits. Over the decades I’ve watched from afar as products and services that I believe deserved to become wildly successful ended up failing because the entrepreneurs believed what they were selling was so valuable that their success didn’t centrally depend on them having to strategically develop themselves as entrepreneurs and their team as effective collaborators.
What I mean by “shiny experts” (I misspoke this as “shiny objects” in the video — oops!) is that entrepreneurs often allow themselves to be seduced into engaging experts or technologies before their business is ready to maximally benefit from them. Sometimes I’ve seen this happen because a resource provider is so good at manipulative selling that the entrepreneur doesn’t do due diligence before engaging them, or the entrepreneur allows him/herself to be talked into believing that they can’t live without what’s being sold. Far more often, though, entrepreneurs prematurely engage well-meaning experts or technologies because the salesperson genuinely doesn’t understand enough about business development sequencing to help the entrepreneur determine whether the resource they provide matches what the entrepreneur most needs right now.
The bottom line is that I’ve watched, over and over again, entrepreneurs build businesses at the level of their self-development limitations despite their highest intentions. That’s where Entrepreneur Success Psychology comes in. ESP enables you to achieve your highest intentions because your level of self-development as an entrepreneur enables you to walk your talk.
ESP focuses on the key psychological ingredients that help to make you part of the 10% of entrepreneurs who succeed instead of the 90% who implode. Those ingredients revolve around your “why,” your “what,” your “who” and your “how.” Entrepreneur-Life Integration is connected with your “why.” Viability Vetting & Master Planning is connected with your “what.” Entrepreneur Strategic Self-Development is connected with your “who.” And Culture Architecture and Compellingness Crafting are connected with your “how.”
I’ll next briefly describe each of these areas, along with what I provide as an Entrepreneur Success Psychologist.
- Entrepreneur-Life Integration: I help you transform your personal vision, mission, values, and ultimate life goals into your own customized frame of reference that helps you select YOUR best business, right-size it, and pace its development so you don’t sacrifice your life purpose, integrity, wellbeing, cherished relationships or social responsibility on the way to success.
- Venture Viability Vetting & Master Planning: I help you make sure that the business you decide to build has legs to stand on; that it’s sufficiently aligned with your life purpose to keep you committed to its success during the tough times, that it has sufficient profit potential to help you reach your life goals, and that it can be built in ways that won’t require you to sacrifice your life balance commitments in order to succeed. I then help you create a master plan for sequencing your venture’s development so you onboard the right advisors, implementers and funders at the right time for the right scope of work.
- Entrepreneur Strategic Self-Development: Entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful self-development paths ever created. When we step into entrepreneurship there are almost always big gaps between who we currently are and who our business needs us to become for it to succeed. I help you accurately identify and efficiently fill your unique entrepreneur self-development gaps.
- Culture Architecture: If you’re dedicated to building a high-performance company culture that’s high accountability, high collaboration, and high happiness — and that reflects your core values — I help you build that culture by assisting you in creating accountability-capable engagement agreements with culture-matched advisors and implementers, developing procedures to onboard them in culture-aligned ways, and ensuring that collaborative procedures are constantly used to upgrade best practices, repair implementation breakdowns, and conduct authentically meaningful performance reviews.
- Compellingness Crafting: Ethically effective messaging helps the right people say yes and the wrong people say no. This saves everyone an awful lot of grief, not to mention wasted energy and time. I help you make your messaging irresistibly compelling, but only to the right people — on your website & in your printed material, in your speaking engagements & media appearances, in your sales conversations, in your communications with your own team, and with your prospective and active investors. Combining Compellingness Crafting with great Strategic Self-Development and Culture Architecture helps you create employee and customer loyalty, which in turn helps you establish and maintain a deservedly stellar reputation.
- I was trained in Master Planning — which is 50 to 100-year plans — a decade before I completed my doctorate in clinical psychology and organizational development psychology in 1982.
- In addition to having been an entrepreneur, infopreneur, administrator, leader, trainer, and business consultant since 1980, I’ve been Co-Head of Faculty and a Board member for a large long-standing international entrepreneur development organization (CEO Space International).
- I’ve served on for-profit and nonprofit boards, in addition to having founded two for-profits and served as founding president for an international nonprofit that began in 1999 and continues to flourish to this day.
- Since the second half of the 1970s, I have consulted to a wide range of leaders, entrepreneurs, businesses, nonprofits, integrative healthcare programs, mental health professionals, academic institutions, and governance groups, all the way up to a group of World Trade Organization Ambassadors.
- I was the first recipient of a leadership award that was named in my honor, and my books have collectively won awards in an unusually broad range of categories, including: business & leadership, social change & politics, psychology & self-help, and health & wellness.
- I’ve combined my performance experience as an actor and musician, with specialized training I’ve received in curriculum design, to provide top-rated keynotes and training programs in 7 countries on 3 continents, on over 100 different topics.
- Radio & TV Interview Reports named me “America’s Integrity Expert” and the hundreds of radio, TV and print interviews I’ve given draw heavily on my background as a newspaper editor, columnist and radio show host.
Why do I bring my 40+ years of experience to you, an ethical entrepreneur, executive, or thought leader? Plain and simple, because you’re a social change agent who helps me fulfill my mission to make integrity profitable, collaboration productive, cultures healthy, and happiness sustainable.
Why Can You Believe Me?
My background check is publicly available at www.ClearBusinessDirectory.com.
A small sample of WORDS OF PRAISE I’ve received includes…
- “Dr. Gruder quickly understood my business, and how to powerfully communicate my purpose and mission in a way that touches and moves others. He helped me create such a powerful message that a bystander who heard it handed me his card on the spot.” ~ Carl Loop, Serial Entrepreneur & Platform Speaker
- “David is the BEST of the BEST for setting up integrity sequences, systems, and teams, in any size venture. I use him. You should as well in my opinion!” ~ BJ Dohrmann, Founder & Chairman, CEO Space International
- “David has defined simple steps to create a more functional work environment.” ~ Jai Hudes, CEO & Founder of eXperience Technologies
- “After a day with David, I have a far better grasp of quality management structures and dynamics, and I see how to help individuals share their unique talents and perspectives in ways that co-create productive cultures that are based on collaboration, integrity, and trust.” ~ V. Tyrone Lam, Healthcare IT Executive & Entrepreneur
- “I retained Dr. Gruder to mentor my switch into private practice. His accelerated processes helped me start living from my income by the end of our very first month of consultation. Since then my case load has exploded, and my income has rapidly become substantial. Two years later, I continue to utilize his wealth of wisdom to expand into lucrative speaking, training, and corporate consulting contracts, and with equally impressive results. I cannot imagine finding a more multi-talented mentor.” ~ Ubald Hullin, Germany
- “David was the best trainer ever. The two days never dragged. He was highly engaging, knowledgeable and warm. I came from a long distance and am so glad I did.” ~ Rich Weisberg, PhD, Psychologist
- “Excellent expertise and facilitation. Great balance between data/conceptual information and experiential learning. Outstanding presenter — a master teacher.” ~ Stephanie D’Angelo, Entrepreneur
- “David does what he does from a place of knowledge, experience, intuition, compassion, and an ability to connect deeply with others. I would hire him without reservation.” ~ Robb Braun, Founder & President, The Leadership Source
If creating life fulfillment and sustained profitability through personal integrity, collaboration, and social responsibility, is truly important to you, you’ll want an Entrepreneur Success Psychologist at your side. If you want to make sure that the way your venture runs matches your highest intentions, instead of inadvertently setting up your venture to flounder or fail because of your — or your team’s — self-development deficits, you’ll want an ESP at your side.
If what I’ve described is important to your success, I invite you to schedule an Engagement Exploration consultation with me so we can discover together whether my customized assistance in any or all of the ESP areas I’ve covered in this video are right-matched to what will best move you and your enterprise forward at this point in time: Entrepreneur-Life Integration, Venture Viability Vetting & Master Planning, Entrepreneur Self-Development, Culture Architecture, and/or Compellingness Crafting. If so, you and I will then review the ways you can engage me so you can decide which are best-matched to you: online training, as-needed consults, deep dive intensives, or ongoing implementation mentoring.
As “America’s Integrity Expert,” you can rest assured that during our Engagement Exploration, I will remain dedicated to helping you accurately decide what serves you best at this time, even if that means not engaging me at all, or waiting to engage me until a later time. And if we both do agree that now is your right time to engage me, I’ll then assist you in determining the level of my involvement that is right-matched with your venture’s current needs and budget.