HIGH PROFILE CLUB
Entrepreneur Interview: Dan Sainsbury
Founder and CEO of Dan Sainsbury Transformation
1.Tell us a bit about your background, roots and DNA!
I’m British in my heritage (you can definitely hear that in my quite plummy accent) but I don’t subscribe to nationalism or being “proud”. Just because I happened to have been born somewhere. In fact, I definitely feel I have some Latino in me as I’m quite outspoken and don’t hold back in expressing myself. Plus I speak Spanish fluently, and even when I am in Spain I have been asked which part of Spain I’m from!
In terms of my childhood, I was born and brought up in Surrey. My parents were very generous and almost crippled themselves financially by sending me to excellent schooling from the age of 4 which won me a scholarship to a great independent school in Surrey called Reigate Grammar School where I was from the age of 10-18.
2. What’s your passion in life and in business? Your mission and vision?
My passion in life and in business is helping people.
That sounds trite and clichéd but I get such great joy and pleasure by helping someone see something in a way that makes their life easier, that they can then use or that remains with then for the rest of their life.
I was not always that way: I come from a corporate sales background and I was, in my role, programmed simply to make money and see everyone as a potential deal. I did very well, generating about £5m by 29, but that modus ended up making me sick and tired and I saw, from swinging to that extreme, that actually what I wanted was to help others. If I can also be handsomely remunerated for that too, great!
So much of my passion in life and in business comes from the difficulties I faced while I was in the business world – the daily stress, the top-down pressure from bosses, the egregious environments, the financial targets we were forced to hit; the meaningless of the role, the anxiety that comes from being in these artificial, inhumane environments. All these factors that contribute to the malaise in people, and in some extreme unhappiness, and it is this I want to shine a light on, to say there IS another way. I want to free people from this malaise.
A few years ago I wrote a paper called The New Corporate Blueprint which reveals that you can still make a profit as a company, actually a lot more and over a longer-term, by optimizing 5 parts of the business, and one is putting benevolence as the heart of everything you do.
I’m happy to share that document if you contact me for it.
My true passion came to me in very strongly defined terms in a key moment in a particular hinterland in my life back in about 2011. I’d more or less left the corporate world but didn’t have the courage to pursue my dream of becoming a psychologist.
The defined terms that came to me from deep within myself were “I want to release people from the prison of their own minds”. That still stands but I’d like to add the implication which is to set them free so that they can enjoy all the best of themselves and of life.
Finite existence does not exist. We are eternal beings, in human form not for very long. So how do we experience that infinite nature here? That is a key question. One worth meditating on.
My mission is to help release as many people as I can whilst I am here, to reduce unhappiness in the workplace, to bring people to the awareness of their massive potential, and to help them break through supposed limitations.
My Vision is to help the most powerful and influential people on the planet (CEOs, government leaders) have the most benevolent visions and missions for their companies and governments etc. That way the vibration of the planet is very quickly uplifted and sickness in all its forms can be transmuted.
Comments