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Dan Coughlin        

Management Consultant, Executive Coach, Author

Dan Coughlin works with senior-level executives and managers to improve their impact as business leaders, focusing on leadership, teamwork, branding, innovation, and execution. A recognized authority on leading an organization for sustainable, profitable growth, his extensive client list includes not only McDonald’s, Toyota, Marriott, Coca-Cola, and GE but also Anheuser-Busch, Shell, Subway, Abbott, RE/MAX, Prudential, Boeing, and over 200 other prominent companies. Since 1998, Coughlin has dedicated over 3,000 hours on-site as a management consultant observing and advising executives and managers across more than 50 industries. As an executive coach, he has facilitated more than 2,100 coaching sessions for key leaders such as presidents, vice-presidents, and senior directors in various high-profile companies.

Coughlin is known as one of America’s most practical business teachers. He delivers actionable insights that attendees can immediately apply to foster sustainable improvements in their business performance and results. Audiences particularly value the relevance of his advice, his ability to tailor his presentations to their specific needs, and his straightforward, engaging delivery style. He has offered hundreds of customized presentations on business acceleration throughout the United States. His keynote speeches cover a broad range of topics including leadership, teamwork, branding, innovation, sales, and strategic planning.

An accomplished author, Coughlin has penned several influential books on management and leadership. His titles include "The Business Leader's Impact: Five Critical Drivers of Sustainable Profitable Growth," "Accelerate: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum," which reached No.4 on Barnes & Noble’s business best-seller list, and "Beat Yesterday: A Business Novel." His work has been featured in major publications like USA Today and The New York Times, underscoring his expertise in linking theoretical business concepts with real-world application. Moreover, Coughlin is a meticulous and organized speaker who emphasizes the critical relationship between purpose, strategy, execution, and branding in building an effective organization. Through careful research and deep engagement with his audience’s industries, he ensures that every keynote, seminar, and coaching session is profoundly aligned with the client’s business objectives and unique situational challenges.

Speech Topics


Learning Objectives:

  • Learn the Five Myths of Innovation and why innovation is a necessary daily activity.
  • Learn the five steps in The Process of Innovation and how the creation of value is based on carefully studying your desired customers.
  • Learn why the most important step in business is to step back and think.
  • Learn how to master the four phases in The Cycle of Innovation that produce a steady flow of profit-generating ideas for sustained excellence.
  • Learn how to find the profit-generating gap between a customer’s expectations and desires.
  • Learn to schedule thinking and non-thinking time and how they drive innovations month after month.
  • Learn how sacrifice accelerates innovation and why “N” and “O” are the most important letters in i-n-n-o-v-a-t-i-o-n.
  • Learn how to find organizations that have matching definitions with yours and how they provide a steady stream of ideas for improving your performance.
  • Learn to study Centers of Excellence and how to extract useful ideas from them for your organization.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s 30-Day Innovation Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.

Strengthen Your Brand for Long-Term Success

Your brand is your reputation in the marketplace. Your brand is the value that customers think they receive when they buy from your organization or potential customers think they will receive if they do buy from your organization. Your brand is not what you want to be. It's what customers and potential customers believe you are right now.

Dan Coughlin, who has worked with such great brands as Toyota, McDonald's, Marriott, GE, Coca-Cola, Prudential, Subway, Ace Hardware, Jack in the Box, Boeing, Kiewit, and the St. Louis Cardinals, provides penetrating insights into the dos and don'ts of building the brand you want. He explains the importance of defining and owning a performance category that matters deeply to customers and will generate the financial outcomes your organization desires.

He walks the audience through the importance of a brand audit and the steps necessary to complete it successfully. He demonstrates how an obsession with undisciplined experimentation can ruin a brand and destroy the sustainable, profitable growth of an organization.

Innovate to Generate Sustainable, Profitable Growth

A business innovation is the creation of additional value for customers that they will pay for at a profitable margin to the organization. It has to be both: new value that the customer does not already have and a profit-generator for the business. One without the other is insufficient.

Dan Coughlin demystifies the process of innovation, and makes it simple, clear, and practical. He explains that innovation is about creating and delivering greater value for other people with more appropriate values based on a better understanding of them.

He shows how every employee can generate breakthrough ideas to increase efficiency, improve execution, and boost the bottom-line. From scheduling thinking time to using the observation tower to using OPS (Other People’s Successes), audience members will walk away with ideas they can use immediately to begin to generate powerful innovations.

Dan explains how successful business innovators boldly walk away from a lot of good ideas so they can focus on a few great ideas. He explains the importance of prototyping to save time and money. If you want your organization to propel itself beyond today’s performance level to generate sustainable, profitable growth, this is a must-attend session.

Learning Objectives

  • Learn The Four Critical Leadership Questions and how your answers can sustain high performance throughout your organization.
  • Learn seven ways to influence what other people think about.
  • Learn how to effectively give candid feedback to employees about poor performances and still maintain a strong working relationship with them.
  • Learn how to leverage your values, strengths, and passions as an individual to effectively create greater value for your organization and your customers.
  • Learn how to maintain the genuine, daily, and purpose-driven enthusiasm necessary to guide a lasting impact in your organization.
  • Learn how effective collaboration can become the highest form of business acceleration.
  • Learn the seven questions in The Performance Bar-Raising Process.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s 30-Day Leadership Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.

ACCELERATE YOUR IMPACT AS A BUSINESS LEADER

Can one person make a real difference in a business? In this highly interactive, high-impact session, Dan Coughlin explains why the answer is a resounding yes. Leadership is influencing how other people think so they make decisions that improve results. He demonstrates practical ways to lead in any size organization. Based on his 3,000 hours of on-site observing and advising of executives in more than 50 industries and on the more than 2,100 executive coaching sessions he has provided, he debunks the traditional myths of leadership and shows how any employee can impact the way other people think and drive better sustainable business results.

Learning Objectives:

  • See the enormous impact of value and values

  • Answer the “Four critical leadership questions” and how your answers can sustain high. performance throughout your organization.

  • Understand 10 ways to influence how other people think.

  • Realize the 10 disastrous leadership approaches that ruin your impact as an influencer.
  • How to effectively give candid feedback to employees about poor performances and still maintain a strong working relationship with them.

  • How to leverage your strengths and passions as an individual to effectively create greater value for your organization and your customers.

  • How to maintain the genuine, daily, and purpose-driven enthusiasm necessary to guide a lasting impact in your organization.

  • Retain your ability to choose how to deal with major changes.

  • Answer the four questions in “the raise your performance bar process.”

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