August 28, 2025 • 39 mins
I encourage you to listen to this week's Chatter That Matters, featuring my guest, Dan Monaghan. Dan is a trailblazer, and his energy is infectious; his storytelling is excellent, and his approach to life, as well as his zest for it, is something we can all learn from.
Dan shares his journey from humble beginnings in Canada to building international ventures, including the innovative digital agency network WSI World. We discuss Dan’s creative approach to franchising, the transformative impact of AI, and the importance of curiosity and lifelong learning in managing rapid change.He is also a popular speaker around the world.
Dan offers many words of wisdom for individuals, businesses, and Canada, drawing on his own experiences as someone who radiates positivity and optimism.
I give you my personal guarantee that you will not be disappointed. Please share this with anyone who could use a boost of positivity and practical advice in their life.
And my special thanks to RBC for supporting small business owners and Chatter That Matters. https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/business/index.html
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Everybody said you can't franchise the Internet.
I've always admired trailblazers, the rare
individuals who choose to make things happen versus watch and wonder
what happened. They're sort of wired to step off the
beaten path. They head in uncharted territory, knowing
full well that risk and reward walk hand in hand.
(00:30):
They grab a torch, but not just to light their way, but often to light
the way for others. If the Internet existed back then, the
ability to learn anything from anyone,
anywhere in the world is unprecedented in human history.
Some travel solo, savoring the challenge and coming home and saying,
look what I've uncovered and discovered. Others are more collaborative.
(00:53):
Really, the question comes down to if you want to grow.
And today's guest is one of those true trailblazers. Serial entrepreneur. He's
a futurist, a venture capitalist, and if that's not enough, he's a also on a
mission to end child poverty. He's someone who's lit the way for
thousands of entrepreneurs to follow. And he continues to
chart new frontiers. And metaphorically speaking,
(01:15):
there are hidden Rembrandts within many
businesses.
Hi, it's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter that Matters, presented
by rbc. If you can please subscribe to the podcast
and ratings reviews, well, they're always welcome and they're always
appreciated.
(01:39):
Dan Monaghan, welcome to Chatter that Matters. It's great to be here, Tony.
Very often I start with what are the roots, the foundation of
the individual that chooses to follow this path in life? And when I looked
at the pedigree of your family, it was interesting. Your dad was a janitor and
your mom was a part time nurse. Very often people
sort of accept that as the status quo. What was going on within that
(02:02):
family that said, blazing a trail versus
maybe the predictability of those jobs was going to be how
you're ordained. In many ways, you know, scarcity is a
good restraint that helps drive desire
or innovation. And I think that that was a part of
what was meaningful to me when I was young. I mean, I had to have
(02:24):
a paper route if I wanted to buy myself a tape recorder, if I
wanted to buy some gadgets at the store, I had to
figure out a way to make that money. So it was either a paper route,
it was two paper routes. It was a Globe and Mail, a Kitchener Record, then
it was selling popsicles on the street. Like this
concept of being able to sell something and make a
(02:46):
profit was kind of, I think, unlocked a world of possibility
for me because I knew that that could ultimately be unlimited.
You and I are patterned. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of wired
that way that came from nothing and wanted to make something. But do you think
that's missing in society? Do you think that's missing? Even the narrat
of a Canada is this sense of the need to earn
(03:07):
our way forward versus feel that we're going to be taken care of no
matter what. I do think that there's a softness whether it's in our
life or whether it's in our society. Sometimes prosperity
and success can lead to softness. You know, people
are just not used to the striving, used to the grind
and really takes away the flame from a lot of people
(03:29):
that it's not just that they're not working hard, but they're missing the
joy of what working hard can do. Laugh. Because here you are, I got
two, you know, selling popsicles and two paper roots. But you're dreaming of
something bigger even as a 13 year old, that you think that owning a Dairy
Queen franchise would be something that would really help serve
your financial needs. But was it also just your appetite needs? I mean,
(03:52):
I've always loved ice cream. That's something my mom and I shared. We were both
ice cream fanatics. Still am. But you know, after the
baseball games, it was a bit of a tradition every month
or so like the team would go to the Dairy Queen
and I saw the lineup outside of Dairy Queen and
it was just like it was always there. And I just thought, whoever owns
(04:14):
this thing is making a ton of money. So that's where I set my my
sights on owning a Dairy Queen as my future vision for myself.
As a kid though, a lot of people would just go and just be, you
know, am I going to get the banana split or the milkshake? You're looking
at the traffic outside. Do you think entrepreneurship is
something that is just within individuals or it was again
(04:35):
the kid that said, yeah, I got my tape recorder, but here's what I want
next. Well, I do think that the external constraint around
not having things and then all of a sudden you see this path, that
entrepreneurship can actually help me get those things. I do think that was
a really important connection of dots. But ever since I was a kid,
I was always like building gadgets. I mean, if you asked
(04:57):
me when I was in second grade what I wanted to be when I grew
up, I'd say an inventor. What I didn't realize at the time
is that an entrepreneur is really an inventor. You're just an inventor
of businesses. You're connecting dots and Applying innovation, but
it's to serve the customer. So it's really. Today,
I think I'm still an inventor. And where did that switch go
(05:19):
from? I'm inventing something that's kind of cool for me to. I
want to invent something to solve an unmet need or to create a
better mousetrap. I think most of the businesses that I've
created over the years all began with me solving a problem
for myself first. And then in solving that problem, I
recognized, wow, how big is the total addressable market
(05:42):
here in terms of others that have that same problem? So speaking of
beginning. And I don't want to lose your passion for ice cream, because at
19, you started Dicky D franchise. It's funny because I
remember being 12, 13 years old, I used to drive
my bicycle to a used bookstore and I'd always buy the entrepreneur
magazines and I'd lay in bed reading them. And there was
(06:04):
the entrepreneur franchise 500. And I would always look at
like, where is Dairy Queen on those. On that listing. Little
did I know that someday I would actually start a franchise company that
would be listed in the franchise 500. But it just
turned out that putting myself through university, I needed to have some money
to do that. And I was at the job fair at University, Wilford Lawrence
(06:26):
Laurier, and they had. It was basically College Pro,
a franchise, or a Dicky D ice cream
franchise. And I chose Dicky D. Ultimately, I ended up buying
College Pro the franchise or the company. But I
was an ice cream bicycle franchisee. You know, we
went full circle with ice cream to Dicky D. You're saving for a
(06:48):
tape recorder as a kid, and next thing you know, you're producing your own content
and cassette after university. So unpack that. It was actually
shortly after university, I started a publishing company with
my younger brother. And one of the things that I did is I
would go into the studio every month. I would consume
as much content as I can. Back in the. This was before the Internet. CD
(07:11):
ROMs were around then. So I'd read magazines, I'd devour CD
ROMs. I'd pull together everything that's going on in society. You know,
technologies, you know, politics. And then I'd go into the
studio and I would record this 30 minute or
45 minute audio cassette. We called it the Inside Edge.
It was really a podcast before its time. We had a
(07:33):
list of subscribers and we would then put the cassette in the mail every
month. And then thousands of these people would get this kind of
accelerated learning thing. And what I Was talking a
lot about this would have been around 92, 93. I was talking a lot about
the information superhighway. It was in all the news,
but nobody knew if it was gonna be a satellite network,
(07:54):
microwaves. Some people thought it could be this
Internet thing, which was far too slow at the time. And then in
93, when Marc Andreessen and a team of researchers
invented the World wide Web, I said, this is going to be
the information superhighway. So the first thing I wanted to do is build a
website for our publishing company. And what I
(08:16):
found is that the people who knew how to code that website, it
looked terrible, and the designers who could make it look really
good, it took forever. And I'm kind of dating myself here. But, you know, we.
Pages used to download on the screen very slowly. And even if
I could get those two guys on the same page, neither of them knew anything
about Internet marketing, how to drive traffic to that site. So I had to figure
(08:38):
all this stuff out for myself. And then once I did, I thought,
other companies are going to need this. And that was what gave birth to
wsi, which has become the world's largest digital agency network.
Talk to me about wsi. Once again, you're looking at solving
your own problem, looking at an unmet need. And in this
case, you couldn't have had any possible idea how big that need would
(09:01):
be, but you decided to go all in. We thought about growing it through
franchising, but I knew that this was going to be an international
phenomenon, and it's not something you could just be Canada's leader. It was kind
of a bit of a winner take all. We just went
global with it pretty quickly. In fact, back in those days, British Airways
had a ticket where you could. For $6,500, you could buy a
(09:24):
ticket and you could go around the world, stop as many times as
you wanted, as long as you kept going east. And so we would go from
country to country, city to city, evangelizing this thing called the
Internet and speaking to business audiences. And I
remember I tried to, you know, make something complex, a
little bit simple. And I said, how many of you had a fax
(09:47):
number on your business card five years ago? And most people would just
kind of, no, no, didn't have one. How many have it today? The room,
everyone raises their hand. I say, in the next five years, everyone's going to
have an email address on their business card. And I get these blank
stares like people just didn't get it. But obviously, in
time, the world Started to get it, you know, back to that
(10:09):
Entrepreneur magazine. It was probably about four years later
that I pull out Entrepreneur magazine. And there we are, not only in the
franchise 500, but we're the number one Internet franchise in the world. But
let's talk about the friction points, because again, another part of the DNA of an
entrepreneur, you must have had dozens, if not hundreds
of people say, dan, you cannot franchise this concept
(10:32):
of a digital marketing agency. Everybody said, you can't franchise the
Internet. Back in those days, we actually had a very strategic decision we had to
make because there were a lot of franchise companies that were
ISPs. They were basically setting up, you know, pods
to connect to the Internet. And we decided to not do
that because we believed at some point that was going to be
(10:53):
commoditized. And so instead we would create the content that would be
on the Internet. But people would say, you can't franchise the Internet. They didn't
understand what we were trying to do. But there were still a lot of complexities.
I mean, when we sold the master franchise for Saudi Arabia, like,
just, you know, being able to show, you know, skin or shoulders or things like
that, like the content where our eyes are being opened, it was
(11:15):
emerging at that stage. So all these kinds of issues are starting to come up
that had never been dealt with before in terms of copyrights and
patents and all kinds of privacy. So there was a lot of things to
figure out kind of in real time. How old are you when you're doing all
this? I was 27. Did you ever think you were an imposter?
I mean, you're getting on this plane, you're traveling around the world, you're sort of
(11:37):
establishing the future, getting people to try to buy into it?
Or were you just sort of wired in a way that this is my calling,
my destiny? And I couldn't care what age I. Was
rolling the clock between university and when I started
wsi, I was in a direct selling organization and
I was doing a lot of recruitment of salespeople.
(11:58):
That's when I really felt like I was an imposter. When I was 21, 22,
I was still getting asked for ID. Like, I remember sitting on a plane,
going to a company conference, and I'm like, 22 at the time. And the
lady comes up to me and says, how old are you?
And I said, I'm 22. Why do you ask? She's, oh,
sorry, you have to be 16 to sit in the exit row.
(12:21):
And so, like, I've always looked at least when I was a kid, I
looked younger than I was. So when I'm like 22, 23, and I'm
recruiting these older people, I really felt like an imposter.
And my manager took me aside one day and he drew a
half circle on the blackboard back then, and he said, what is
that? Is that concave or convex? I knew it was a bit of a trick
(12:43):
question. I said, if you look at it one way, it's concave, the
other way it's convex. He said, exactly. If you think you're too young,
you're right. If you think you're not, you're right.
Interestingly enough, a couple of years later, myself and my younger
brother became the top national marketing directors in
that company in the country. Everyone
(13:06):
started coming up to me saying, oh yeah, you can do this. Cause you're young,
you've got energy. And so I'm thinking in my head, I can't
do it because I'm young. Next thing I do it and everyone says, oh yeah,
you did it because you're young. So by the time I started wsi, I was
looking at youth as an asset. It was part of my identity,
really. The early days. And so whatever you're saying
(13:28):
is the essential truth. But the world changes. I mean, with
decades of tech shifts, lots of just changes and dynamics,
how did you keep WSI relevant, Authentic,
Something of value that franchisees would say. I'm glad
I have this relationship with you because I am in turn bringing value to my
clients. Imagine you're a fast food restaurant, and every three
(13:49):
years, your entire menu board changes. It changes from
hamburgers to Mexican and then from Mexican to
sushi. So I'm not talking about changing a few products. I'm talking about entire
changes to the menu board. And now you've got to figure out your supply
chains and you got to figure out your marketing systems. That's what it's
like in the Internet because we go from building websites. I mean, in the beginning,
(14:11):
this was before Google. It was two years before Google. There was no search engines,
so people used to buy the Internet Yellow Pages. It was a book like a
couple inches thick. And that's how you'd find websites. Then
SEO comes along, and now it's like a whole new business. And then
E commerce comes along and then social media, et cetera.
And so what we've had to do from the very beginning is build a
(14:34):
learning organization. The business is, is very
agile. And the way we learn from our franchisees, because
we've got hundreds of data points on the front lines around the world.
The question is, are we learning from them? And so the way I'll explain
this to people in franchising is I'll say, don't forget that the Big Mac,
the Filet o fish, the quarter pounder, Ronald McDonald, the breakfast at McDonald's,
(14:56):
the Egg McMuffin. I can go on and on. These were all franchisee ideas.
And McDonald's had the wisdom to listen to their franchisees.
So we learned so much from this knowledge network of our
franchisees. We've had 43
major franchise organizations that were at one time one of our key
competitors at wsi, usually about three at any given time,
(15:19):
and some of them publicly funded. They're all gone. But
I attribute that to the fact that we've been able to be agile
and as a learning organization, continue to reinvent ourselves.
Dan, I mean, you could just run this trap wire forever
succeeding, it's populating, it's a learning organization. But you again,
take another move on the chessboard when you create
(15:41):
CSG in this sort of sense that I now understand the
franchise world. Therefore, instead of just helping people market,
I'm going to start buying some of these models. Is that fair in terms of
the move? I mean, it was a bit of an arbitrage strategy because
I thought, like, I'm creating so much value for so many companies
as their digital agency within wsi. What if I was
(16:04):
actually able to do that within other organizations as well? Like
lead generation is what we do really well. So I
launched Clear Summit Group with the vision of acquiring
additional early stage franchisors and then developing
them. And the first company we acquired was tutor Dr.
It was an in home tutoring company and they needed to generate
(16:26):
leads. When we acquired the company, this was
2007, 2008, they were still
generating their leads in the yellow pages, right? So we just applied the
latest of, you know, Google paid search, advertising, and all of a sudden the business
exploded. And so that was part of the thing is, you know, acquiring
additional franchise systems, partnering with those
(16:48):
founders and then help them scale the business. What we
brought to the table was obviously capital, a blueprint for
how to do it, but also a team of Navy SEALs, you
know, that we are shared service, the best in each of those different
sections or categories to help professionalize that
business. How do you know you're picking the right founder? Because for you to
(17:10):
come in with this Navy SEALS approach, they in turn also
have to listen generously, much like you said McDonald's did to their franchise.
Whereas they have to listen to you and say, this makes a lot of sense
versus fight you because you're now wandering into what they view to
be their baby. If I could talk to my earlier self, I would
basically ask myself that question, because it is. You've
(17:31):
nailed it, Tony. It is the toughest thing. Can they
shed their skin? Are they willing to grow? Are they willing to evolve?
Or do they believe that they've actually already nailed it? In the same
way that if I was hiring a CEO or a president, we
go through a very comprehensive psychometric process. I've got a whole
framework for how I interview them. Like, it's not about buying the
(17:53):
companies, really about, I'm partnering with this founder.
So in most cases, it's worked out. Not always.
It's interesting. You know, in Silicon Valley, they have this venture capital
fund called Founders Fund. And what made them so unique is that
they would say, we don't fire the founders because in venture capital, they almost
always fire the founders at some point in time. And these guys are
(18:15):
like, founders. And they said, we know how to work with founders because we were
founders. And it's been a very successful fund. We think of ourselves
that way. For franchising, we are founders working with founders.
But it's easier said than done. And in terms of the impact
you've made, I mean, you mentioned moving up to that, moving up on the list
of the top 500. But you were acknowledged with the William
(18:36):
Rosenberg Leadership Award, and from what I understand, that is the
MVP of mvp. So tell me a little bit about the award,
how it cemented your legacy in franchising. And did it matter
to you, given the fact that lifetime achievement awards for someone like you is.
It's way too early to be thinking that way. The International
Franchise association does an incredible job
(18:58):
of sharing best practices and learning across the entire
franchise ecosystem. Franchisors, franchisees,
suppliers, they all work together for the betterment of franchising.
And the education foundation within the IFA is where
a lot of that learning is inculcated. And. And just over time,
you know, I spent a lot of time working with that, the foundation
(19:21):
lecturing at Cornell and Georgetown and all kinds of
universities on franchising. And so every year
they have an award that they recognize for people that have made an impact. The
William Rosenberg Award was named after the founder of the International
Franchise Association, William Rosenberg, who was the founder of
Dunkin Donuts. So some of the legends in franchising have
(19:43):
received this award over the years. So for me, it was more humbling than anything
else to Say, like, how can I be in the, you know, in the same
room with these guys? But it's really opened a lot of doors for
me. The opportunity to learn at the feet of some of these legends.
That's what's been especially rewarding, is how I can learn from the
teaching is part of it. I think it was Stephen Covey who once said that
(20:04):
the best way to learn is to teach.
We come back. Dan and I take our conversation
about AI and its impact on the world to the next level.
We talk about fears, implications, and also the
exciting possibilities it will bring.
(20:27):
Hi, it's Tony Chapman. I want to give a big shout out to RBC for
everything they do to support small business owners across Canada.
Starting and growing a business is tough, especially in today's world
of uncertainty. But when I had the idea idea to launch Chatter AI,
I turned to rbc. They didn't just open an account for me, they sat
down, they listened and gave me the guidance and tools I need to turn my
(20:49):
vision in reality. Today, I rely on RBC Small Business Solutions
to navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Whether it's banking,
financing, or expert advice, they're there every step of the way
because ideas happen at rbc and small business matters to you
and me. Visit RBC and turn
your dreams into reality.
(21:14):
Imagine you're a fast food restaurant and every three years, your
entire menu board changes. It changes from hamburgers
to Mexican and then from Mexican to sushi. So I'm not talking
about changing a few products. I'm talking about entire changes to the menu
board. And now you've got to figure out your supply chain and you got to
figure out your marketing systems. That's what it's like in the Internet
(21:37):
today. My special guest is Dan Monaghan. And the more I
spoke with him, the more impressed I am at his brain power,
his appetite for life, his understanding the business of doing
business, how quickly he adopts to new technologies like
AI. And he's one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs
that I've ever met.
(22:01):
Before we move into AI because I really want your point of view on that.
Tell me a little bit about make child poverty history and
in turn, what you're learning from that to help prepare all
youth for what's coming. We partnered many years ago, I don't know,
maybe 15 years ago with World Vision. We came up with a program
across the world with our franchisees where we said, for every
(22:23):
child you sponsor, we'll sponsor one. And then we expanded that
beyond that to our customers as well. So We've
sponsored tens of thousands of kids over the years corporately, and
then that's multiplied through all those that our franchisees and customers
have sponsored. It's kind of leveraging the global nature of our
business because many of these areas where they have the ADPs, the
(22:45):
area development programs for World Vision, are areas where we have
franchisees. So we've really partnered in all those markets
with our franchisees. We've had golf tournaments that. Where
the sun never goes down in the WSI tournament because it just, you know, keeps
moving around the world. So it's a way of, you know, how we can kind
of move from success to significance, not just us, but our
(23:07):
franchisees. And it's been super rewarding and meaningful to everybody. But
when I look at South Africa, with youth unemployment
possibly 40%, I think Canada is being generous and
saying it's only 16%. What can we do with
all that? You've learned to prepare our youth
for a future that's going to be so different than the future that most
(23:29):
parents thought was guaranteed with a university
education and some semblance of hard work. I see that really
from two perspectives. And the common thread across
both perspectives is education. There is a world
that was not really anticipated, you know, easily anticipated
for those that are in those developing markets where today, with access to
(23:51):
information, access to education, we can literally level the
playing field around the planet. So there's such a brighter future
for these kids. If they can get Internet connectivity, they can learn
anything. And we have a global workforce. WSI and our
various companies are around the world. So we're giving
jobs to these people everywhere around the world. Now, I get
(24:14):
the sense that your question was geared towards, like, you know, the
uncertainty of our youth today in North
America, because the world's gonna change, right? And that's
just because we're now moving into this global playing field. While that creates an
opportunity for kids in South Africa or the Philippines or wherever
else, it also means that we're now competing with the best of the best of
(24:35):
the planet, not just our city or our country. And again, the common
theme is education. I mean, I remember when I was
putting myself through university, I delivered pizzas and I took out the back
seat of my car and I built. Built a little library. So we used to
have those milk crates back in the day, and I filled them up with all
these books. And so I'd sit there waiting for my pizza, but I'd be reading
(24:57):
a book. Think and Grow Rich or the Magic of Believing
or whatever. Norman Vincent Peale's books. So I'd be reading all this
stuff while I'm waiting for the pizza. If the Internet existed
back then, the ability to learn anything
from anyone, anywhere in the world is
unprecedented in human history. Really, the question comes
(25:18):
down to if you want to grow the learning, the knowledge
is there for you, whether you're in Canada or you're in South
Africa. But there is an element of
initiative that if we don't like, if we don't reach for it,
then someone else will. Let me take it back to one of the first comments.
You meant prosperity often leads to softness. My
(25:40):
experience. I was on the board of my kids schools when they were still in
high school. I have young nieces. I'm seeing a lot of softness
in schools. We're spending a lot of time apologizing for our past. We're spending
a lot of time learning what was the status quo 20 years ago, 50
years ago, 100 years ago. We're still, our school calendar is still on an
agricultural cycle where the rest of the world's moving on.
(26:02):
What's it going to take for North America to recognize that
these kids are going to compete for jobs in the cloud, globally
and against machine learning, which we're going to get to in a minute. We have
to completely revamp the way we inspire, motivate,
teach, celebrate success, celebrate winners in
competitiveness. Oftentimes there's a correlation between the
(26:24):
industries that are most regulated and the ones that are
the most inefficient and the least likely to
innovate with technology. And education is one of those,
obviously, healthcare is another. A number of years ago I had
an opportunity. I was at Harvard, sitting in a room with the dean. There was
maybe eight or ten of us. And he was just saying, he was admitting, kind
(26:46):
of like education has not changed in over
a hundred years. He said we're still standing at the front of the room
with a blackboard and a piece of chalk. We've got to come to terms with
that. And I don't know, the education world
has really come to terms. I almost think there's going to be this leapfrogging
right over the present day into the future. There's an opportunity for
(27:09):
us@tutor Dr. But there's also a risk and an element of
disruption because today AI can
effectively tutor kids in some subjects more effectively than
tutors, right? So we now have to level up. Just like the
programmer has to level up to become an engineer, the tutor
has to level up and become an academic coach.
(27:31):
As humans, our roles have to change and level up.
And the same is the case for educators. And I don't know that that's going
to happen under the government run system. I
think it's going to be entrepreneurs and then parents that recognize that there's just
a better way. I looked at how many of the developing countries
went and said, why put copper in the ground when we can go wireless? And
(27:53):
they leapfrogged legacy. And to me, the question,
as you said, how is that leapfrog going to happen? Is it going to be
to the point where we can no longer afford to subsidize
institutions that teach an old way because parents
and dollars must go to prepare our kids a different way. And it'll be interesting
to see how far we have to go before that
(28:14):
inertia becomes. There's enough energy against that inertia that it
evokes change.
What I loved about researching you is the different tightropes you've been
on. But even as a thought leader, somebody that was, was without question
world renowned as an expert on franchising and digital marketing,
(28:38):
very quickly you manifested that to saying, I'm also a thought leader
in AI, what I'd want to do is get a sense of what does
that mean? What do you bring into the audience? And I want to begin with
one quote which I think is your superpower, which is metaphors.
And one of the things you talk about is comparing unused
data to hidden Rembrandts. Imagine you're
(28:59):
purchasing a home as is all contents included.
And you walk into the home, you look around and it's
$200,000 and you think, you know, it's not a bad value. You walk
up to the second floor and then ultimately to the attic and you see lying
against the rafters is this painting. And you got a little background in art history
and you look a little closer and you see it's actually a Rembrandt.
(29:22):
Now all of a sudden, the value of that house goes from 200,000 to 200
million. And so simply because we found a hidden
Rembrandt in the attic. And metaphorically speaking,
there are hidden Rembrandts within many
businesses. And data is an example of one of those hidden
Rembrandts. It might also be processes. You know, there's other things that can be hidden
(29:44):
Rembrandts. But I'll give you an example. It might be a company that
has thousands of tickets from
service inquiries that people have sent in asking questions.
Well, they could take that data and instantly feeding it into
AI, instantly create vast amounts of content could create
FAQs and could create a thousand pages of content in the
(30:06):
click of a few buttons. And now all of a sudden they're driving a lot
of SEO traffic, new customers, new leads into
their business. No one else could do that because no one else had the data,
but they had the data about all the questions and answers that
they've given to customers over the years. That's just one example of a
hidden Rembrandt. But one of the things we do when we speak to business
(30:28):
people is we want to learn about their business and find out where
are the hidden Rembrandts within their business. You know, and the other thing you talk
about is much more positivity versus what a lot of
people that are calling, you know, the, the end of jobs. With AI,
you're saying it replaces tasks, but not necessarily jobs. So I'd love
you to unpack that. That is changing very quickly. One of the things
(30:51):
that people, very quickly, once they really understand
AI or they, they begin using it, the first thing they do is they start
cranking out con, tons of content, Right? Remember, you know, it used to
be that if you had an employee that came, you know, you're the CEO or
president and they present you with a, you know, a 75 page
document, a strategic plan, you'd go, wow, they work
(31:12):
so hard on this document. Today people can crank that out in
seconds. And it's a lot of it is what I call AI slop.
So there is this tendency to create
very low quality useless garble that AI
cranks out. So we believe, you know, our tagline at WSI is
embrace digital, stay human. And we believe in
(31:34):
this premise of a human in the loop is critical to
how we use AI because we need to be discerning in how we
write the prompts, discerning in our assessment of what
comes out of that. And so we're not really going to replace a
job. We might replace the research task. I mean, it's
incredible what, you know, with OpenAI, deep research or Google has their version,
(31:57):
anthropic has their version. I mean, we're talking about days or
weeks of researching that could be done in minutes. But
what do we do with that? How do we as a human use that?
Ultimately, you know, as we move into an agentic world with
agents, it is going to replace. I mean, companies
will reorganize their work. So there might be some jobs that go
(32:18):
away, but we still need humans to run the agents, at least
at this point. And talk to me about one of the articles I read where
you talked about the coming search quake. You know, Gartner says that
by the end of 2025 that Google will have lost
25% of its traffic. By the end of 2026 it'll
have lost 50% of its traffic. And whether
(32:41):
they've got the year right or not or the percentage right, directionally this
is hugely disruptive to the way people find
answers, right? I mean my 822 year old mom,
you know, I put ChatGPT on her phone and I just said use
whenever you are using Google. And just to begin to build that behavior,
a lot of people don't realize you can call 1-800-CHATGPT
(33:04):
and a voice just now you're communicating with Voice AI for free.
So the way people answer questions. So what that means is
that a lot of the traffic coming to clients websites is
just evaporating because traditional informational
searches, which used to make up about half of companies traffic in many cases
is gone. So there's really three phases of this, what I call a search
(33:28):
quake. Number one is people are now creating
AI based content and it is a lot of AI slop,
but it is attracting search engines. Number two,
what we call zero click, where people aren't even clicking
anymore because Google is answering the question up top in their
AI snippets or people are going to ChatGPT or
(33:49):
other large language models. But where we're really focused on
is that, that third phase and that is when people are
now wanting to get ranked in ChatGPT, when people are looking
for best roofing companies in Toronto. How are you
being ranked or referenced in ChatGPT in
anthropic in Gemini and it's a different
(34:12):
methodology for how. So traditional SEO people,
they're like history unless you're following the new
way. And that's really where we've got a huge, we've got a new book coming
out, SEO in the Age of AI and it's all
focused on this total shift. I want to wrap up the interview
with your advice to my young listeners
(34:33):
or parents that have young listeners at home in terms of how do
they stand for and stand out going forward
given all that you know and all that you see so that they
have an opportunity to get the kind of purpose and passion you found in your
life. So one of our businesses, it's called codewiz
and where we teach coding and robotics to kids
(34:55):
generally 7 to 13 years old. And while we
teach things like Unity and Raspberry PI and you
know, Roblox and Different Python, different
platforms and technologies. What we're really looking to do is
inculcate the more important the
drivers of success in life. So things like
(35:16):
resilience, things like teamwork, things like
curiosity. And I think as parents, it's not
so much about teaching the kid math, because a
lot of that's going to change or teaching them. I mean, it's embedding
those broader values around. And curiosity being a huge one,
because if we can ask the
(35:38):
question, the answer is out there, whether that's on
YouTube, whether that's in AI, whether that's through a mentor,
the world is in our pocket now. We're one click away from the
answer to anything. So how we breed that
adaptability and curiosity in our kids
is really, I think, most important. You know, Dan, I always
(36:00):
wrap up with my three takeaways. The first one is one I just
mentioned. I think you're a master of metaphors. I think this world is incredibly
complex, chaotic, and it's very easy to just try to turn it
off and to scroll to the latest TikTok or something that kind of just
amuses you. But when you use things like hidden Rembrandts,
AI Slop, Search, Quake, it creates that itch.
(36:23):
It makes people want to know more. And I think that's a great lesson for
people to frame the path they're blazing
in life, the things that they're interested in, into metaphors,
because it creates that curiosity, but also reminds people that it is possible.
The second thing that I really like is just from the very beginning, whether it's,
you know, fashioning your car so you had books in it, going to a Dairy
(36:45):
Queen after your baseball game and looking at traffic, you are one of the most
curious people. It's not just curiosity in the sense of
why is this happening? It's curiosity in the sense of how can we do it
better? And I think that if every minute of every day that people went
through life and just looked around at what is the status quo as
it's presented and saying, is there a better way? Can I shorten?
(37:08):
Can I improve? Can I find an unmet need? I don't think
it's just the skill set of an entrepreneur. To me, it's a necessary skill set
going forward, because the status quo as it is is not going to
create the opportunities that it might have created in the past.
And then I guess the third thing is just every time I introduced a new
tightrope that you went on in your life, and I go back from
(37:30):
the franchise to the cassettes to digital marketing, to
franchising digital marketing, to the businesses you bought. You always have a smile on your
face. It is a smile that we all want on our face
throughout life and even someone of your age. And I mean, I'm not saying that
presenting you as old, but you're ceasing in experience and you're not resting on your
laurels. You're still looking at the next tightrope and AI presented itself
(37:52):
and you couldn't wait to jump on and figure that out and go across the
world and speaking on it. And I think that's another thing that as you said
that prosperity often leads to softness with you.
Prosperity didn't lead to softness. It created an insatiable
appetite for more prospect prosperity. But I don't believe it was
financial prosperity to you. I think it's that intellectual and emotional that you're wired for.
(38:13):
And for all of that and more, I just think you're so many lessons you've
unpacked today that I've learned from and I think my listeners will benefit from as
well. I don't know that there's ever been a more exciting time to be alive.
The world is going to change massively in the next number of years
and it's going to change very quickly. So speed and magnitude
are really what's before us. And if you're approaching the future with
(38:35):
curiosity and a desire to learn and connect dots
again, I don't think there's ever been a more exciting time to be alive. What's
the best way for people to find out more
about you and some of the things that you've written
or some of the things that you're doing? They could connect with me on LinkedIn.
Just Google me and you'll find my LinkedIn connection. You could go to
(38:56):
danmonahan.com, any of our websites,
but those would all be great places to connect with me.
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter that Matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening and let's chat soon.
Everybody said you can't franchise the Internet.
I've always admired trailblazers, the rare
individuals who choose to make things happen versus watch and wonder
what happened. They're sort of wired to step off the
beaten path. They head in uncharted territory, knowing
full well that risk and reward walk hand in hand.
(00:30):
They grab a torch, but not just to light their way, but often to light
the way for others. If the Internet existed back then, the
ability to learn anything from anyone,
anywhere in the world is unprecedented in human history.
Some travel solo, savoring the challenge and coming home and saying,
look what I've uncovered and discovered. Others are more collaborative.
(00:53):
Really, the question comes down to if you want to grow.
And today's guest is one of those true trailblazers. Serial entrepreneur. He's
a futurist, a venture capitalist, and if that's not enough, he's a also on a
mission to end child poverty. He's someone who's lit the way for
thousands of entrepreneurs to follow. And he continues to
chart new frontiers. And metaphorically speaking,
(01:15):
there are hidden Rembrandts within many
businesses.
Hi, it's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter that Matters, presented
by rbc. If you can please subscribe to the podcast
and ratings reviews, well, they're always welcome and they're always
appreciated.
(01:39):
Dan Monaghan, welcome to Chatter that Matters. It's great to be here, Tony.
Very often I start with what are the roots, the foundation of
the individual that chooses to follow this path in life? And when I looked
at the pedigree of your family, it was interesting. Your dad was a janitor and
your mom was a part time nurse. Very often people
sort of accept that as the status quo. What was going on within that
(02:02):
family that said, blazing a trail versus
maybe the predictability of those jobs was going to be how
you're ordained. In many ways, you know, scarcity is a
good restraint that helps drive desire
or innovation. And I think that that was a part of
what was meaningful to me when I was young. I mean, I had to have
(02:24):
a paper route if I wanted to buy myself a tape recorder, if I
wanted to buy some gadgets at the store, I had to
figure out a way to make that money. So it was either a paper route,
it was two paper routes. It was a Globe and Mail, a Kitchener Record, then
it was selling popsicles on the street. Like this
concept of being able to sell something and make a
(02:46):
profit was kind of, I think, unlocked a world of possibility
for me because I knew that that could ultimately be unlimited.
You and I are patterned. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of wired
that way that came from nothing and wanted to make something. But do you think
that's missing in society? Do you think that's missing? Even the narrat
of a Canada is this sense of the need to earn
(03:07):
our way forward versus feel that we're going to be taken care of no
matter what. I do think that there's a softness whether it's in our
life or whether it's in our society. Sometimes prosperity
and success can lead to softness. You know, people
are just not used to the striving, used to the grind
and really takes away the flame from a lot of people
(03:29):
that it's not just that they're not working hard, but they're missing the
joy of what working hard can do. Laugh. Because here you are, I got
two, you know, selling popsicles and two paper roots. But you're dreaming of
something bigger even as a 13 year old, that you think that owning a Dairy
Queen franchise would be something that would really help serve
your financial needs. But was it also just your appetite needs? I mean,
(03:52):
I've always loved ice cream. That's something my mom and I shared. We were both
ice cream fanatics. Still am. But you know, after the
baseball games, it was a bit of a tradition every month
or so like the team would go to the Dairy Queen
and I saw the lineup outside of Dairy Queen and
it was just like it was always there. And I just thought, whoever owns
(04:14):
this thing is making a ton of money. So that's where I set my my
sights on owning a Dairy Queen as my future vision for myself.
As a kid though, a lot of people would just go and just be, you
know, am I going to get the banana split or the milkshake? You're looking
at the traffic outside. Do you think entrepreneurship is
something that is just within individuals or it was again
(04:35):
the kid that said, yeah, I got my tape recorder, but here's what I want
next. Well, I do think that the external constraint around
not having things and then all of a sudden you see this path, that
entrepreneurship can actually help me get those things. I do think that was
a really important connection of dots. But ever since I was a kid,
I was always like building gadgets. I mean, if you asked
(04:57):
me when I was in second grade what I wanted to be when I grew
up, I'd say an inventor. What I didn't realize at the time
is that an entrepreneur is really an inventor. You're just an inventor
of businesses. You're connecting dots and Applying innovation, but
it's to serve the customer. So it's really. Today,
I think I'm still an inventor. And where did that switch go
(05:19):
from? I'm inventing something that's kind of cool for me to. I
want to invent something to solve an unmet need or to create a
better mousetrap. I think most of the businesses that I've
created over the years all began with me solving a problem
for myself first. And then in solving that problem, I
recognized, wow, how big is the total addressable market
(05:42):
here in terms of others that have that same problem? So speaking of
beginning. And I don't want to lose your passion for ice cream, because at
19, you started Dicky D franchise. It's funny because I
remember being 12, 13 years old, I used to drive
my bicycle to a used bookstore and I'd always buy the entrepreneur
magazines and I'd lay in bed reading them. And there was
(06:04):
the entrepreneur franchise 500. And I would always look at
like, where is Dairy Queen on those. On that listing. Little
did I know that someday I would actually start a franchise company that
would be listed in the franchise 500. But it just
turned out that putting myself through university, I needed to have some money
to do that. And I was at the job fair at University, Wilford Lawrence
(06:26):
Laurier, and they had. It was basically College Pro,
a franchise, or a Dicky D ice cream
franchise. And I chose Dicky D. Ultimately, I ended up buying
College Pro the franchise or the company. But I
was an ice cream bicycle franchisee. You know, we
went full circle with ice cream to Dicky D. You're saving for a
(06:48):
tape recorder as a kid, and next thing you know, you're producing your own content
and cassette after university. So unpack that. It was actually
shortly after university, I started a publishing company with
my younger brother. And one of the things that I did is I
would go into the studio every month. I would consume
as much content as I can. Back in the. This was before the Internet. CD
(07:11):
ROMs were around then. So I'd read magazines, I'd devour CD
ROMs. I'd pull together everything that's going on in society. You know,
technologies, you know, politics. And then I'd go into the
studio and I would record this 30 minute or
45 minute audio cassette. We called it the Inside Edge.
It was really a podcast before its time. We had a
(07:33):
list of subscribers and we would then put the cassette in the mail every
month. And then thousands of these people would get this kind of
accelerated learning thing. And what I Was talking a
lot about this would have been around 92, 93. I was talking a lot about
the information superhighway. It was in all the news,
but nobody knew if it was gonna be a satellite network,
(07:54):
microwaves. Some people thought it could be this
Internet thing, which was far too slow at the time. And then in
93, when Marc Andreessen and a team of researchers
invented the World wide Web, I said, this is going to be
the information superhighway. So the first thing I wanted to do is build a
website for our publishing company. And what I
(08:16):
found is that the people who knew how to code that website, it
looked terrible, and the designers who could make it look really
good, it took forever. And I'm kind of dating myself here. But, you know, we.
Pages used to download on the screen very slowly. And even if
I could get those two guys on the same page, neither of them knew anything
about Internet marketing, how to drive traffic to that site. So I had to figure
(08:38):
all this stuff out for myself. And then once I did, I thought,
other companies are going to need this. And that was what gave birth to
wsi, which has become the world's largest digital agency network.
Talk to me about wsi. Once again, you're looking at solving
your own problem, looking at an unmet need. And in this
case, you couldn't have had any possible idea how big that need would
(09:01):
be, but you decided to go all in. We thought about growing it through
franchising, but I knew that this was going to be an international
phenomenon, and it's not something you could just be Canada's leader. It was kind
of a bit of a winner take all. We just went
global with it pretty quickly. In fact, back in those days, British Airways
had a ticket where you could. For $6,500, you could buy a
(09:24):
ticket and you could go around the world, stop as many times as
you wanted, as long as you kept going east. And so we would go from
country to country, city to city, evangelizing this thing called the
Internet and speaking to business audiences. And I
remember I tried to, you know, make something complex, a
little bit simple. And I said, how many of you had a fax
(09:47):
number on your business card five years ago? And most people would just
kind of, no, no, didn't have one. How many have it today? The room,
everyone raises their hand. I say, in the next five years, everyone's going to
have an email address on their business card. And I get these blank
stares like people just didn't get it. But obviously, in
time, the world Started to get it, you know, back to that
(10:09):
Entrepreneur magazine. It was probably about four years later
that I pull out Entrepreneur magazine. And there we are, not only in the
franchise 500, but we're the number one Internet franchise in the world. But
let's talk about the friction points, because again, another part of the DNA of an
entrepreneur, you must have had dozens, if not hundreds
of people say, dan, you cannot franchise this concept
(10:32):
of a digital marketing agency. Everybody said, you can't franchise the
Internet. Back in those days, we actually had a very strategic decision we had to
make because there were a lot of franchise companies that were
ISPs. They were basically setting up, you know, pods
to connect to the Internet. And we decided to not do
that because we believed at some point that was going to be
(10:53):
commoditized. And so instead we would create the content that would be
on the Internet. But people would say, you can't franchise the Internet. They didn't
understand what we were trying to do. But there were still a lot of complexities.
I mean, when we sold the master franchise for Saudi Arabia, like,
just, you know, being able to show, you know, skin or shoulders or things like
that, like the content where our eyes are being opened, it was
(11:15):
emerging at that stage. So all these kinds of issues are starting to come up
that had never been dealt with before in terms of copyrights and
patents and all kinds of privacy. So there was a lot of things to
figure out kind of in real time. How old are you when you're doing all
this? I was 27. Did you ever think you were an imposter?
I mean, you're getting on this plane, you're traveling around the world, you're sort of
(11:37):
establishing the future, getting people to try to buy into it?
Or were you just sort of wired in a way that this is my calling,
my destiny? And I couldn't care what age I. Was
rolling the clock between university and when I started
wsi, I was in a direct selling organization and
I was doing a lot of recruitment of salespeople.
(11:58):
That's when I really felt like I was an imposter. When I was 21, 22,
I was still getting asked for ID. Like, I remember sitting on a plane,
going to a company conference, and I'm like, 22 at the time. And the
lady comes up to me and says, how old are you?
And I said, I'm 22. Why do you ask? She's, oh,
sorry, you have to be 16 to sit in the exit row.
(12:21):
And so, like, I've always looked at least when I was a kid, I
looked younger than I was. So when I'm like 22, 23, and I'm
recruiting these older people, I really felt like an imposter.
And my manager took me aside one day and he drew a
half circle on the blackboard back then, and he said, what is
that? Is that concave or convex? I knew it was a bit of a trick
(12:43):
question. I said, if you look at it one way, it's concave, the
other way it's convex. He said, exactly. If you think you're too young,
you're right. If you think you're not, you're right.
Interestingly enough, a couple of years later, myself and my younger
brother became the top national marketing directors in
that company in the country. Everyone
(13:06):
started coming up to me saying, oh yeah, you can do this. Cause you're young,
you've got energy. And so I'm thinking in my head, I can't
do it because I'm young. Next thing I do it and everyone says, oh yeah,
you did it because you're young. So by the time I started wsi, I was
looking at youth as an asset. It was part of my identity,
really. The early days. And so whatever you're saying
(13:28):
is the essential truth. But the world changes. I mean, with
decades of tech shifts, lots of just changes and dynamics,
how did you keep WSI relevant, Authentic,
Something of value that franchisees would say. I'm glad
I have this relationship with you because I am in turn bringing value to my
clients. Imagine you're a fast food restaurant, and every three
(13:49):
years, your entire menu board changes. It changes from
hamburgers to Mexican and then from Mexican to
sushi. So I'm not talking about changing a few products. I'm talking about entire
changes to the menu board. And now you've got to figure out your supply
chains and you got to figure out your marketing systems. That's what it's
like in the Internet because we go from building websites. I mean, in the beginning,
(14:11):
this was before Google. It was two years before Google. There was no search engines,
so people used to buy the Internet Yellow Pages. It was a book like a
couple inches thick. And that's how you'd find websites. Then
SEO comes along, and now it's like a whole new business. And then
E commerce comes along and then social media, et cetera.
And so what we've had to do from the very beginning is build a
(14:34):
learning organization. The business is, is very
agile. And the way we learn from our franchisees, because
we've got hundreds of data points on the front lines around the world.
The question is, are we learning from them? And so the way I'll explain
this to people in franchising is I'll say, don't forget that the Big Mac,
the Filet o fish, the quarter pounder, Ronald McDonald, the breakfast at McDonald's,
(14:56):
the Egg McMuffin. I can go on and on. These were all franchisee ideas.
And McDonald's had the wisdom to listen to their franchisees.
So we learned so much from this knowledge network of our
franchisees. We've had 43
major franchise organizations that were at one time one of our key
competitors at wsi, usually about three at any given time,
(15:19):
and some of them publicly funded. They're all gone. But
I attribute that to the fact that we've been able to be agile
and as a learning organization, continue to reinvent ourselves.
Dan, I mean, you could just run this trap wire forever
succeeding, it's populating, it's a learning organization. But you again,
take another move on the chessboard when you create
(15:41):
CSG in this sort of sense that I now understand the
franchise world. Therefore, instead of just helping people market,
I'm going to start buying some of these models. Is that fair in terms of
the move? I mean, it was a bit of an arbitrage strategy because
I thought, like, I'm creating so much value for so many companies
as their digital agency within wsi. What if I was
(16:04):
actually able to do that within other organizations as well? Like
lead generation is what we do really well. So I
launched Clear Summit Group with the vision of acquiring
additional early stage franchisors and then developing
them. And the first company we acquired was tutor Dr.
It was an in home tutoring company and they needed to generate
(16:26):
leads. When we acquired the company, this was
2007, 2008, they were still
generating their leads in the yellow pages, right? So we just applied the
latest of, you know, Google paid search, advertising, and all of a sudden the business
exploded. And so that was part of the thing is, you know, acquiring
additional franchise systems, partnering with those
(16:48):
founders and then help them scale the business. What we
brought to the table was obviously capital, a blueprint for
how to do it, but also a team of Navy SEALs, you
know, that we are shared service, the best in each of those different
sections or categories to help professionalize that
business. How do you know you're picking the right founder? Because for you to
(17:10):
come in with this Navy SEALS approach, they in turn also
have to listen generously, much like you said McDonald's did to their franchise.
Whereas they have to listen to you and say, this makes a lot of sense
versus fight you because you're now wandering into what they view to
be their baby. If I could talk to my earlier self, I would
basically ask myself that question, because it is. You've
(17:31):
nailed it, Tony. It is the toughest thing. Can they
shed their skin? Are they willing to grow? Are they willing to evolve?
Or do they believe that they've actually already nailed it? In the same
way that if I was hiring a CEO or a president, we
go through a very comprehensive psychometric process. I've got a whole
framework for how I interview them. Like, it's not about buying the
(17:53):
companies, really about, I'm partnering with this founder.
So in most cases, it's worked out. Not always.
It's interesting. You know, in Silicon Valley, they have this venture capital
fund called Founders Fund. And what made them so unique is that
they would say, we don't fire the founders because in venture capital, they almost
always fire the founders at some point in time. And these guys are
(18:15):
like, founders. And they said, we know how to work with founders because we were
founders. And it's been a very successful fund. We think of ourselves
that way. For franchising, we are founders working with founders.
But it's easier said than done. And in terms of the impact
you've made, I mean, you mentioned moving up to that, moving up on the list
of the top 500. But you were acknowledged with the William
(18:36):
Rosenberg Leadership Award, and from what I understand, that is the
MVP of mvp. So tell me a little bit about the award,
how it cemented your legacy in franchising. And did it matter
to you, given the fact that lifetime achievement awards for someone like you is.
It's way too early to be thinking that way. The International
Franchise association does an incredible job
(18:58):
of sharing best practices and learning across the entire
franchise ecosystem. Franchisors, franchisees,
suppliers, they all work together for the betterment of franchising.
And the education foundation within the IFA is where
a lot of that learning is inculcated. And. And just over time,
you know, I spent a lot of time working with that, the foundation
(19:21):
lecturing at Cornell and Georgetown and all kinds of
universities on franchising. And so every year
they have an award that they recognize for people that have made an impact. The
William Rosenberg Award was named after the founder of the International
Franchise Association, William Rosenberg, who was the founder of
Dunkin Donuts. So some of the legends in franchising have
(19:43):
received this award over the years. So for me, it was more humbling than anything
else to Say, like, how can I be in the, you know, in the same
room with these guys? But it's really opened a lot of doors for
me. The opportunity to learn at the feet of some of these legends.
That's what's been especially rewarding, is how I can learn from the
teaching is part of it. I think it was Stephen Covey who once said that
(20:04):
the best way to learn is to teach.
We come back. Dan and I take our conversation
about AI and its impact on the world to the next level.
We talk about fears, implications, and also the
exciting possibilities it will bring.
(20:27):
Hi, it's Tony Chapman. I want to give a big shout out to RBC for
everything they do to support small business owners across Canada.
Starting and growing a business is tough, especially in today's world
of uncertainty. But when I had the idea idea to launch Chatter AI,
I turned to rbc. They didn't just open an account for me, they sat
down, they listened and gave me the guidance and tools I need to turn my
(20:49):
vision in reality. Today, I rely on RBC Small Business Solutions
to navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Whether it's banking,
financing, or expert advice, they're there every step of the way
because ideas happen at rbc and small business matters to you
and me. Visit RBC and turn
your dreams into reality.
(21:14):
Imagine you're a fast food restaurant and every three years, your
entire menu board changes. It changes from hamburgers
to Mexican and then from Mexican to sushi. So I'm not talking
about changing a few products. I'm talking about entire changes to the menu
board. And now you've got to figure out your supply chain and you got to
figure out your marketing systems. That's what it's like in the Internet
(21:37):
today. My special guest is Dan Monaghan. And the more I
spoke with him, the more impressed I am at his brain power,
his appetite for life, his understanding the business of doing
business, how quickly he adopts to new technologies like
AI. And he's one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs
that I've ever met.
(22:01):
Before we move into AI because I really want your point of view on that.
Tell me a little bit about make child poverty history and
in turn, what you're learning from that to help prepare all
youth for what's coming. We partnered many years ago, I don't know,
maybe 15 years ago with World Vision. We came up with a program
across the world with our franchisees where we said, for every
(22:23):
child you sponsor, we'll sponsor one. And then we expanded that
beyond that to our customers as well. So We've
sponsored tens of thousands of kids over the years corporately, and
then that's multiplied through all those that our franchisees and customers
have sponsored. It's kind of leveraging the global nature of our
business because many of these areas where they have the ADPs, the
(22:45):
area development programs for World Vision, are areas where we have
franchisees. So we've really partnered in all those markets
with our franchisees. We've had golf tournaments that. Where
the sun never goes down in the WSI tournament because it just, you know, keeps
moving around the world. So it's a way of, you know, how we can kind
of move from success to significance, not just us, but our
(23:07):
franchisees. And it's been super rewarding and meaningful to everybody. But
when I look at South Africa, with youth unemployment
possibly 40%, I think Canada is being generous and
saying it's only 16%. What can we do with
all that? You've learned to prepare our youth
for a future that's going to be so different than the future that most
(23:29):
parents thought was guaranteed with a university
education and some semblance of hard work. I see that really
from two perspectives. And the common thread across
both perspectives is education. There is a world
that was not really anticipated, you know, easily anticipated
for those that are in those developing markets where today, with access to
(23:51):
information, access to education, we can literally level the
playing field around the planet. So there's such a brighter future
for these kids. If they can get Internet connectivity, they can learn
anything. And we have a global workforce. WSI and our
various companies are around the world. So we're giving
jobs to these people everywhere around the world. Now, I get
(24:14):
the sense that your question was geared towards, like, you know, the
uncertainty of our youth today in North
America, because the world's gonna change, right? And that's
just because we're now moving into this global playing field. While that creates an
opportunity for kids in South Africa or the Philippines or wherever
else, it also means that we're now competing with the best of the best of
(24:35):
the planet, not just our city or our country. And again, the common
theme is education. I mean, I remember when I was
putting myself through university, I delivered pizzas and I took out the back
seat of my car and I built. Built a little library. So we used to
have those milk crates back in the day, and I filled them up with all
these books. And so I'd sit there waiting for my pizza, but I'd be reading
(24:57):
a book. Think and Grow Rich or the Magic of Believing
or whatever. Norman Vincent Peale's books. So I'd be reading all this
stuff while I'm waiting for the pizza. If the Internet existed
back then, the ability to learn anything
from anyone, anywhere in the world is
unprecedented in human history. Really, the question comes
(25:18):
down to if you want to grow the learning, the knowledge
is there for you, whether you're in Canada or you're in South
Africa. But there is an element of
initiative that if we don't like, if we don't reach for it,
then someone else will. Let me take it back to one of the first comments.
You meant prosperity often leads to softness. My
(25:40):
experience. I was on the board of my kids schools when they were still in
high school. I have young nieces. I'm seeing a lot of softness
in schools. We're spending a lot of time apologizing for our past. We're spending
a lot of time learning what was the status quo 20 years ago, 50
years ago, 100 years ago. We're still, our school calendar is still on an
agricultural cycle where the rest of the world's moving on.
(26:02):
What's it going to take for North America to recognize that
these kids are going to compete for jobs in the cloud, globally
and against machine learning, which we're going to get to in a minute. We have
to completely revamp the way we inspire, motivate,
teach, celebrate success, celebrate winners in
competitiveness. Oftentimes there's a correlation between the
(26:24):
industries that are most regulated and the ones that are
the most inefficient and the least likely to
innovate with technology. And education is one of those,
obviously, healthcare is another. A number of years ago I had
an opportunity. I was at Harvard, sitting in a room with the dean. There was
maybe eight or ten of us. And he was just saying, he was admitting, kind
(26:46):
of like education has not changed in over
a hundred years. He said we're still standing at the front of the room
with a blackboard and a piece of chalk. We've got to come to terms with
that. And I don't know, the education world
has really come to terms. I almost think there's going to be this leapfrogging
right over the present day into the future. There's an opportunity for
(27:09):
us@tutor Dr. But there's also a risk and an element of
disruption because today AI can
effectively tutor kids in some subjects more effectively than
tutors, right? So we now have to level up. Just like the
programmer has to level up to become an engineer, the tutor
has to level up and become an academic coach.
(27:31):
As humans, our roles have to change and level up.
And the same is the case for educators. And I don't know that that's going
to happen under the government run system. I
think it's going to be entrepreneurs and then parents that recognize that there's just
a better way. I looked at how many of the developing countries
went and said, why put copper in the ground when we can go wireless? And
(27:53):
they leapfrogged legacy. And to me, the question,
as you said, how is that leapfrog going to happen? Is it going to be
to the point where we can no longer afford to subsidize
institutions that teach an old way because parents
and dollars must go to prepare our kids a different way. And it'll be interesting
to see how far we have to go before that
(28:14):
inertia becomes. There's enough energy against that inertia that it
evokes change.
What I loved about researching you is the different tightropes you've been
on. But even as a thought leader, somebody that was, was without question
world renowned as an expert on franchising and digital marketing,
(28:38):
very quickly you manifested that to saying, I'm also a thought leader
in AI, what I'd want to do is get a sense of what does
that mean? What do you bring into the audience? And I want to begin with
one quote which I think is your superpower, which is metaphors.
And one of the things you talk about is comparing unused
data to hidden Rembrandts. Imagine you're
(28:59):
purchasing a home as is all contents included.
And you walk into the home, you look around and it's
$200,000 and you think, you know, it's not a bad value. You walk
up to the second floor and then ultimately to the attic and you see lying
against the rafters is this painting. And you got a little background in art history
and you look a little closer and you see it's actually a Rembrandt.
(29:22):
Now all of a sudden, the value of that house goes from 200,000 to 200
million. And so simply because we found a hidden
Rembrandt in the attic. And metaphorically speaking,
there are hidden Rembrandts within many
businesses. And data is an example of one of those hidden
Rembrandts. It might also be processes. You know, there's other things that can be hidden
(29:44):
Rembrandts. But I'll give you an example. It might be a company that
has thousands of tickets from
service inquiries that people have sent in asking questions.
Well, they could take that data and instantly feeding it into
AI, instantly create vast amounts of content could create
FAQs and could create a thousand pages of content in the
(30:06):
click of a few buttons. And now all of a sudden they're driving a lot
of SEO traffic, new customers, new leads into
their business. No one else could do that because no one else had the data,
but they had the data about all the questions and answers that
they've given to customers over the years. That's just one example of a
hidden Rembrandt. But one of the things we do when we speak to business
(30:28):
people is we want to learn about their business and find out where
are the hidden Rembrandts within their business. You know, and the other thing you talk
about is much more positivity versus what a lot of
people that are calling, you know, the, the end of jobs. With AI,
you're saying it replaces tasks, but not necessarily jobs. So I'd love
you to unpack that. That is changing very quickly. One of the things
(30:51):
that people, very quickly, once they really understand
AI or they, they begin using it, the first thing they do is they start
cranking out con, tons of content, Right? Remember, you know, it used to
be that if you had an employee that came, you know, you're the CEO or
president and they present you with a, you know, a 75 page
document, a strategic plan, you'd go, wow, they work
(31:12):
so hard on this document. Today people can crank that out in
seconds. And it's a lot of it is what I call AI slop.
So there is this tendency to create
very low quality useless garble that AI
cranks out. So we believe, you know, our tagline at WSI is
embrace digital, stay human. And we believe in
(31:34):
this premise of a human in the loop is critical to
how we use AI because we need to be discerning in how we
write the prompts, discerning in our assessment of what
comes out of that. And so we're not really going to replace a
job. We might replace the research task. I mean, it's
incredible what, you know, with OpenAI, deep research or Google has their version,
(31:57):
anthropic has their version. I mean, we're talking about days or
weeks of researching that could be done in minutes. But
what do we do with that? How do we as a human use that?
Ultimately, you know, as we move into an agentic world with
agents, it is going to replace. I mean, companies
will reorganize their work. So there might be some jobs that go
(32:18):
away, but we still need humans to run the agents, at least
at this point. And talk to me about one of the articles I read where
you talked about the coming search quake. You know, Gartner says that
by the end of 2025 that Google will have lost
25% of its traffic. By the end of 2026 it'll
have lost 50% of its traffic. And whether
(32:41):
they've got the year right or not or the percentage right, directionally this
is hugely disruptive to the way people find
answers, right? I mean my 822 year old mom,
you know, I put ChatGPT on her phone and I just said use
whenever you are using Google. And just to begin to build that behavior,
a lot of people don't realize you can call 1-800-CHATGPT
(33:04):
and a voice just now you're communicating with Voice AI for free.
So the way people answer questions. So what that means is
that a lot of the traffic coming to clients websites is
just evaporating because traditional informational
searches, which used to make up about half of companies traffic in many cases
is gone. So there's really three phases of this, what I call a search
(33:28):
quake. Number one is people are now creating
AI based content and it is a lot of AI slop,
but it is attracting search engines. Number two,
what we call zero click, where people aren't even clicking
anymore because Google is answering the question up top in their
AI snippets or people are going to ChatGPT or
(33:49):
other large language models. But where we're really focused on
is that, that third phase and that is when people are
now wanting to get ranked in ChatGPT, when people are looking
for best roofing companies in Toronto. How are you
being ranked or referenced in ChatGPT in
anthropic in Gemini and it's a different
(34:12):
methodology for how. So traditional SEO people,
they're like history unless you're following the new
way. And that's really where we've got a huge, we've got a new book coming
out, SEO in the Age of AI and it's all
focused on this total shift. I want to wrap up the interview
with your advice to my young listeners
(34:33):
or parents that have young listeners at home in terms of how do
they stand for and stand out going forward
given all that you know and all that you see so that they
have an opportunity to get the kind of purpose and passion you found in your
life. So one of our businesses, it's called codewiz
and where we teach coding and robotics to kids
(34:55):
generally 7 to 13 years old. And while we
teach things like Unity and Raspberry PI and you
know, Roblox and Different Python, different
platforms and technologies. What we're really looking to do is
inculcate the more important the
drivers of success in life. So things like
(35:16):
resilience, things like teamwork, things like
curiosity. And I think as parents, it's not
so much about teaching the kid math, because a
lot of that's going to change or teaching them. I mean, it's embedding
those broader values around. And curiosity being a huge one,
because if we can ask the
(35:38):
question, the answer is out there, whether that's on
YouTube, whether that's in AI, whether that's through a mentor,
the world is in our pocket now. We're one click away from the
answer to anything. So how we breed that
adaptability and curiosity in our kids
is really, I think, most important. You know, Dan, I always
(36:00):
wrap up with my three takeaways. The first one is one I just
mentioned. I think you're a master of metaphors. I think this world is incredibly
complex, chaotic, and it's very easy to just try to turn it
off and to scroll to the latest TikTok or something that kind of just
amuses you. But when you use things like hidden Rembrandts,
AI Slop, Search, Quake, it creates that itch.
(36:23):
It makes people want to know more. And I think that's a great lesson for
people to frame the path they're blazing
in life, the things that they're interested in, into metaphors,
because it creates that curiosity, but also reminds people that it is possible.
The second thing that I really like is just from the very beginning, whether it's,
you know, fashioning your car so you had books in it, going to a Dairy
(36:45):
Queen after your baseball game and looking at traffic, you are one of the most
curious people. It's not just curiosity in the sense of
why is this happening? It's curiosity in the sense of how can we do it
better? And I think that if every minute of every day that people went
through life and just looked around at what is the status quo as
it's presented and saying, is there a better way? Can I shorten?
(37:08):
Can I improve? Can I find an unmet need? I don't think
it's just the skill set of an entrepreneur. To me, it's a necessary skill set
going forward, because the status quo as it is is not going to
create the opportunities that it might have created in the past.
And then I guess the third thing is just every time I introduced a new
tightrope that you went on in your life, and I go back from
(37:30):
the franchise to the cassettes to digital marketing, to
franchising digital marketing, to the businesses you bought. You always have a smile on your
face. It is a smile that we all want on our face
throughout life and even someone of your age. And I mean, I'm not saying that
presenting you as old, but you're ceasing in experience and you're not resting on your
laurels. You're still looking at the next tightrope and AI presented itself
(37:52):
and you couldn't wait to jump on and figure that out and go across the
world and speaking on it. And I think that's another thing that as you said
that prosperity often leads to softness with you.
Prosperity didn't lead to softness. It created an insatiable
appetite for more prospect prosperity. But I don't believe it was
financial prosperity to you. I think it's that intellectual and emotional that you're wired for.
(38:13):
And for all of that and more, I just think you're so many lessons you've
unpacked today that I've learned from and I think my listeners will benefit from as
well. I don't know that there's ever been a more exciting time to be alive.
The world is going to change massively in the next number of years
and it's going to change very quickly. So speed and magnitude
are really what's before us. And if you're approaching the future with
(38:35):
curiosity and a desire to learn and connect dots
again, I don't think there's ever been a more exciting time to be alive. What's
the best way for people to find out more
about you and some of the things that you've written
or some of the things that you're doing? They could connect with me on LinkedIn.
Just Google me and you'll find my LinkedIn connection. You could go to
(38:56):
danmonahan.com, any of our websites,
but those would all be great places to connect with me.
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter that Matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening and let's chat soon.
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