Entrepreneurial Leadership In One Of America’s Fastest Growing Community Colleges With Dr. Dan Walden

Today’s episode is a little different—and honestly, it’s one I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I’m joined by someone who really gets it. Not just the mechanics of leadership or the theory behind entrepreneurship—but the deeper stuff. The mindset. The attitude. The way of seeing the world that changes how we show up every day.

Dr. Dan Walden is the superintendent and president of Victor Valley College. But what makes Dan stand out—what really sets him apart—is that he doesn’t see entrepreneurship as just something you do. He sees it as a way of being. A way of thinking and acting that empowers people at every level—not just to do their job, but to take ownership, to lead, to build something that matters.

Dan’s entrepreneurial journey started at the age of ten, selling seeds and mowing lawns as a way to pay for new shoes. These early entrepreneurial experiences led him to transform a dying church into a thriving community. Today, Dan is using that same mindset to lead one of the fastest-growing community colleges in the country.

What I love about Dan is that he’s lived this. It’s not just theory to him. It’s who he is. And in this conversation, we explore how he’s bringing mindset-driven leadership into higher education, not just to drive institutional change, but to empower students, staff, and the broader community. Dan’s story is a powerful example of what happens when purpose, humility, and entrepreneurial thinking come together to create real impact.

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Listen to the podcast here

Entrepreneurial Leadership In One Of America’s Fastest Growing Community Colleges With Dr. Dan Walden

Our episode is a little different. It’s one I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I’m joined by someone who really gets it. Not just the mechanics of leadership or the theory behind entrepreneurship, but the deeper stuff, the mindset, the attitude, the way of seeing the world that changes how we show up every day. Doctor Dan Walden is the superintendent and president of Victor Valley College. What makes Dan stand out and sets him apart is that he doesn’t see entrepreneurship as just something you do. He sees it as a way of being, a way of thinking and acting that empowers people at every level, not just to do their job, but to take ownership to lead, to build something that matters.

Dan’s entrepreneurial journey started at the age of ten, selling seeds and mowing lawns as a way to pay for new shoes. These early entrepreneurial experiences led him to transform a dying church into a thriving community. Dan is now using that same mindset to lead one of the fastest-growing community colleges in the country.

What I love about Dan is that he has lived this. It’s not just a theory to him. It’s who he is. In this conversation, we explore how he is bringing mindset-driven leadership into higher education, not just to drive institutional change, but to empower students, staff, and the broader community. Dan’s story is a powerful example of what happens when purpose, humility, and entrepreneurial thinking come together to create real impact. Let’s jump in.

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Dan, thanks for being on my show.

Thank you, Gary. It’s good to be with you.

I’m excited to have this conversation with you. One of the reasons is that I’ve been around community colleges for a long time. I’ve never run into a community college president who seems to understand the importance of entrepreneurship beyond starting a business. You seem to understand that. You want to empower leaders. You want to empower your people to be entrepreneurial. How did you get there?

Entrepreneurial Mindset: From Childhood Hustle To Business Growth

Like most people, I thought about entrepreneurship as being somebody who started a business and wanted the business to grow. I joined a webinar that you were doing for another community college. When you started talking about the entrepreneurial mindset, I had lights come on in my head that said, “I get that. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life.”

I thought back over my life and all the different things that I have done. How I’ve seen the world and approached life is like, “Gary is right. You don’t just have to be starting a business to have a mindset.” It totally changed how I thought about the world in the sense of the entrepreneurial mindset. I had never heard that term before until I heard you. That was several years ago now, but it was very life-changing.

Can you break that down for me? How did you manifest entrepreneurial thinking in your life prior to that time?

I went back to when I was a ten-year-old boy. We were raised by a single dad. We had either a single dad who was at the house or was working, which was a lot of the time. Initially, we had a babysitter most of the time, but not all of the time. Sometimes we were what you’d call lock-key children, and we were there for a few hours. By the time we were twelve, he never hired any more babysitters.

I was the oldest child, so I watched after my younger siblings. I had a brother and a sister. I remember when I was ten years old, I got this thing in the mail, and it was about selling seeds. I signed up. I didn’t ask my dad. They sent me the seeds, and I went door to door selling the seeds. About the same time, I got one from Watkins Vanilla. I started selling Watkins Vanilla door-to-door. All in my neighborhood, we lived on a little horseshoe street.

My dad had a lawnmower that he paid $10 for. I’m doing all this when I’m ten years old, by the way. I said, “Can I use this lawnmower to mow people’s yards?” He said, “You can have the yard. You can have the lawnmower. It’s yours.” I would go around and ask the neighbors if I could mow their yards. That was probably in the fall of the year I was ten, and then when I turned eleven, we moved to another town, and I had worn out that lawnmower.

It wouldn’t run very well anymore. I told my dad, “I need to buy a new lawnmower.” He said, “Okay.” He was a carpenter guy. He took me down to the local lumberyard, and he said, “My kid here needs to buy a lawnmower, but he wants to finance it.” The guy said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “First of all, I want to trade this one in.” The guy gave me $10 for my lawnmower.

For the broken one?

On a trade-in. The lawnmower was $66. I’ll never forget how much it cost.

At the time, that’s $300, $400, or $500. It’s a lot of money.

It was probably $200 or $300. It wasn’t a fancy lawnmower, but it was a new one. It had a Briggs & Stratton engine. It’s crazy how that stuff gets in your head. I agreed to pay him, and school was still going on. I said, “I can pay you $6 a month,” something like that. It was summer payment until school was out, and then I could pay it off during the summer.

I got out there. He had me sign the paper. My dad knew the guy, and they were in business together. He was going along with my dad, helping me to learn responsibility. I paid for that lawnmower before school was out. I never had to worry about the summer. It’s those kinds of things. Later on, when I got into high school, I was Mr. Extracurricular. I got into a public speaking competition and went all the way to nationals.

I was in the band, marching band, stage band, ensemble, concert band, all the different bands. I won a bunch of medals for all that in grade school, high school, and middle school. When I got into high school, I joined Future Farmers of America. We were living on the farm in West Texas at the time, and I told my dad, I said, “I have a project for this. I want to raise hogs.”

He said, “What does that mean?” I said, “I need to buy some hogs.” There was a guy we knew who was connected to our church. He didn’t go, but his family did. He had a hog farm. I went out there and I said, “I want to buy some hogs.” He said, “What do you want?” I was fourteen and I said, “I want four sows and a boar.” He said, “They’re going to cost you $75 each.” We went down to the local bank.

You didn’t know anything about how to raise these things or how much you could get? You didn’t know anything about that?

It takes 20 to 1 to get a sale. Straighten your tie, put on that smile, and go to the next door as if the last customer had bought you out. Share on X

No.

Did you know the guy was not going to rip you off? Was that another friend of your dad’s or something?

I went to church with his family. He did not attend church, but I knew the family. I knew him because his son was a good friend of mine, and I would stay overnight out there at the pig farm.

It’s not a random stranger.

No. This was somebody that the family knew. My dad took me to the local Plains National Bank. That’s what it was. He said, “My son wants to borrow $400 to start a hog business. Will you let me cosign for him?” They did. I borrowed that money and went and built my own pens. I learned in FFA how to do the weld, and I got some rebar from my dad’s job from where he worked. He built a hospital at the time. They had a bunch of leftover rebar. I brought that home, cut it up, and made farrowing crates because female hogs or sows, sometimes when they’re having babies, they’ll eat one.

You try to keep them from that, or crushing them, or lying over on them. That’s why you put them in the farrowing crate. I built those as a fourteen-year-old kid by myself. I built the pens and did all that, and went and used my uncle’s tractor to take it down to the local coop. I got a trailer load of grain and brought it back and put it in our barn. We were living on the farm. That’s how I fed the hogs, and I sold their pigs for $15 a piece and paid back the $400 loan.

Dan’s Aquariums: An 11-Year-Old’s Fish Empire

Between the two stories I told, when I was about 11 or 12 years old, my aunt started a little aquarium business in her house, and she lived about 60 miles from us. I went there, and I was so intrigued by her tropical fish. When you don’t have a woman in the house, you get away with a few things. If we had a mother or a woman in the house, this would not have happened. My dad, being a carpenter, built me these racks of places to put the aquariums. I bought these aquariums with my lawnmower money.

I had the living room full of tropical fish aquariums. I sold tropical fish, their aquariums, and all the supplies, the pumps, the filters, the nets, everything. I got a business card for Dan’s Aquarium, which is what we called it. Here I am, 11 or 12, having my own business. We lived in a little podunk town, so there was no light. Business lasts probably a week. We probably couldn’t get by with any of that now. I have more stories I could tell, but not to get any more into that detail.

All these entrepreneurial things showed me that from the time I was a little boy, I had an entrepreneurial mindset. How can I make the world better? How can I provide the customer out there with something they need, something that I could be passionate about that they would want, that I could have an exchange over? That has been the story of my life.

I got into Christian ministry, and I ended up going out on my own without any invitations. My wife and I were young in our twenties, and we sold all our furniture and bought a travel trailer. We hooked it up to our car, and I started going down the road and started going to conferences, meeting ministers, and they started inviting me to their churches to come and consult or speak or whatever you want to say. When I was so young like that, they often asked, “Can you come work with our youth?” We lived off of their free will offerings that they gave us.

We traveled for seven years all over the United States and Canada. Sometimes, we even went to other countries, and I would speak there. That became a thing. I became very much in demand. At the time that I quit doing that, which was after seven years, I was booked out for 2 to 3 full years of back-to-back. I had no spaces. I did that on my own from scratch, going out and going from church to church or conference to conference until it became its own thing.

I stopped. I got tired of that. When I was about 28 years old, I found this church in Bell Gardens, California, which is in the middle of Los Angeles. It had seventeen members left, and they were going to sell the property, close the church, and they were going to go to another local church in the area. I said, “I’d like to be your pastor if you guys will stay here.” They had a meeting, and they voted me 15 to 2. Two said no.

You’re still angry about those two.

By the way, I’d never been to anything beyond high school. I never had a college class. I have never been to a seminary. I did all this by becoming this person. This church mushroomed to hundreds and hundreds of people. The largest crowd we ever had there was 1,200, but I stayed there for eighteen years. When I left, we had hundreds and hundreds of members. I had a pastoral staff of six.

I had started a parochial school during that time. That parochial school is celebrating its 42nd year. My own wife, Wendy, graduated from there. That school has been going for 42 years. I started that from scratch. That church became a thing, and my nephew now pastors that church. I finally did go to school at the age of 39. I went to my local community college.

The Journey To Higher Education: From Ministry To Community College President

Were you a good student in middle school or high school?

I was a B-plus student. I was an okay student, B-plus, A-minus. Sometimes just a B. I went to the college at my local community college. By then, I’m pastoring this church. We’ve got probably 200 to 300 people coming every single Sunday. We’re living off of that. There’s enough to live on. I thought, “If I’m going to be talking to these people, I should know something.” I had people coming who had gone to college, and here I am in this capacity of leadership with no college.

I went to the local community college, Cerritos College in Norwalk, California, and took a couple of classes. They were remedial in English and remedial in Math. I got A’s in those. From then on, I started going full-time. I went full-time for thirteen years, got my AA degree, got my Bachelor’s in Sociology, and went on to seminary. I thought, “If I’m going to be in ministry, then I should go to seminary.”

I went to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. I got a Master’s in Divinity. It was 144 units. I took 16 units of Greek, 8 units of Hebrew. Very intense. Lots and lots of history and psychology, by the way, because there are a lot of denominations. In order to be a minister, like a Presbyterian or whatever, you have to have a Master of Divinity. By the time I got my Master’s in Divinity, I had what Fuller talks about as a theological paradigm shift, which was how I see God works in the world. It changed so significantly for me. By then, I thought, “I don’t want to do this. I should be doing something else.”

I gave up and resigned at the peak of my ministry. I was an international speaker by that time, going all over speaking at conferences and camp meetings, and such. On the executive board of a 3-million-person organization. It was housed in Saint Louis, Missouri, and I resigned from all that in one day, and the church and everything in one day. Eighteen resignation letters were what I sent out.

I went into the world of not knowing what I was going to do, but I thought, “I’ll go into education.” I started on a second master’s at Claremont Graduate University, and got a Master’s in Education. During that time, while I was at Claremont, I worked a year for LA Unified in K-12 and didn’t like that world. I got a research assistant job at Scripps College, one of the Claremont Colleges, and also at Claremont Graduate University.

Starting a business is like having a baby. Your baby will die if you don't feed it. But if you feed, care for, and nurture it, your baby will mature, and what you've started will become something great. Share on X

I started putting my applications out, and I got hired for my very first community college job at Cypress College in Southern California as a research analyst. The world changed for me. At one year in that job, I went to the LA Community College District, went to LA Southwest College as a senior research analyst. Within a year, I was a dean. Eight years later, I became a vice president at another community college, LA City College. I was there for 6, 7, or 8 years.

Almost seven years ago now, I became the president of Victor Valley College. See how everything was new, entrepreneurial, and starting from scratch? I had to fill out 170 job applications in higher ed before I got my first job, and they averaged 10 pages long. I kept that stack of applications for a long time. 1,700 pages stacked up on it on my desk because it was like a memorial for me. This is what it took me to get into higher ed.

The “Next!” Mentality: Overcoming 170 Job Rejections

I want to back you up, but before I do, do you remember what’s the story you’re telling yourself? A hundred seventy 10-page applications. Most people will give up. How do you muscle through that?

One of the stories I left out was that after I was a newlywed and first got married, we moved to California. I didn’t have a job. I found out I could go to insurance school. I went to insurance school for two weeks. This insurance company was started by a man by the name of W. Clement Stone, who started during the Great Depression with $100 in his pocket, and he built this multimillion-dollar company.

At the time that I was working for this company in the early ‘70s, he was worth over $400 million. He was such an entrepreneur and had such an effect on my life. He wouldn’t allow anything negative into his environment. He liked plants. If he came into the office and saw that one of the leaves on his plants was turning brown, he would immediately call his assistant to get that plant out of his office. He didn’t want to see anything dying.

In those two weeks of sales school that I went to, they told us about the Fuller Brush salesman who got a yes for every twenty doors. Before they get a yes, they get twenty noes. They don’t happen necessarily in that sequence. Otherwise, you just go knock on twenty doors, and then you get a sale. That’s their average. It takes 20 to 1 to get a sale. They taught us this whole thing about people will say no, but you have to keep going.

I knew if I kept applying and kept applying, when you finish the door and the door stands in your face, what do you say? Do you give up? Do you go home? Do you become despondent? Do you get depressed? No. You say next, and you straighten your tie. You put the smile on. You go to the next door as if the last customer had bought you all out, like you hadn’t even heard the no. For 170 job applications, I got interviews, but I didn’t get any jobs. Finally, I got one. Once I was in, I’ve never had a problem since.

Let me roll backwards here, Dan. You grew up in a household with no mom. It sounds like there’s difficulty there, though. There’s no mom. Your dad is working. You have one brother, you said?

I had a brother and a sister.

How would you characterize that? Did you come up poor?

We were very poor. My dad worked hard. I remember one of our houses that we lived in. The stucco was coming off the house. The sewer was broken underneath it. It smelled so bad. I’d be walking home from school. This is when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I would be walking with my friends, but I would cut off. I was so embarrassed by where we lived. I would cut off on the side street before we got there, so they didn’t know what street I lived on.

I said, “See you guys.” I’d walk all the way around the block the other direction to get to my actual house. We were poor, and I remember walking to school because my dad would buy us one pair of shoes at the beginning of school and another pair, we’d get when we started the next. You’d go in the fall with a new pair of shoes, because we always walk to school. We didn’t have a school bus. I walked to school, I wore the shoes out, and I would only get one pair at a time.

It’s not like I had a pair of shoes and a pair of tennis shoes. I had a pair of shoes. Within six months, they would be worn out, and the soles would come off or they’d come loose, and so they’d flap like that. You’d hear this plop, plop, everywhere I went. By Christmas time, I was plopping to school, and it was always embarrassing because that’s all I had. That’s one of the reasons, once I got to be ten years old, because I was always embarrassed. He would buy us two pairs of jeans and two shirts, and we had to wear those the whole time.

He would actually buy us four, but we had to put two up until after Christmas. Every day, we had to wear one of our two pairs of jeans and one of our two shirts. I got so embarrassed because everybody else seemed to be dressing differently, that finally, when I turned 10, with all these entrepreneurial things in my lawnmower business and all that, and I didn’t tell you, I also went to my dad’s carpentry job, and he’d pay me a dollar a day and a penny a nail.

That’s another thing I did to make money. I bought all of my school clothes from the time I was ten on. Often, my teenage years, the rest of my life. In fact, I still buy my school clothes. Since I was ten years old, I have bought all my old school clothes. The first thing I did that first school year, when I had between the 4th and the 5th grade, I went down to the local store that was run by a Jewish man. I went in there, and I said, “I want five shirts and five pairs of jeans.” What was interesting was that all the jeans looked exactly alike, but they were all different.

They were a different pair. We bargained on the price because he was that kind of a guy. He would bargain with you. I ended up with five shirts. He sold them to me for $2 a piece, and he sold me each pair of jeans for $2. For $20, I bought myself my school clothes that year, five shirts and five pairs of jeans, and I wore a different shirt and a different pair of jeans every day to school. I thought I had made it to the big time. I was really bougie.

It’s so obvious to me that those early childhood experiences, which very often come from hardship, the adversity becomes an advantage in some way. What’s also interesting to me is what your brother and sister are doing? Are they watching you do this and thinking, “Dan is crazy?” Are they doing similar things? Where did you get the idea that you could go make money at ten years old?

Connecting Childhood Experience To College Leadership: The Power Of Mindset

I saw other people mowing yards, and I saw them going door to door. The first idea about making money on my own was getting those advertisements for seeds.

It’s funny. I wound up selling seeds in Boy Scouts. I had a very similar experience. There’s something about that when you’re a little kid and you go door to door, you’re talking to a stranger, and somebody pays you for something. I don’t know, it clicks in your head. How did this crystallize for you now as the president of a college? How did all those experiences crystallize into, “This is a thing. How can we spread this way of thinking?” Tell me a little bit about that. You said you heard me on a webinar or whatever it was that you had that moment.

When I heard you on the webinar talking about the entrepreneurial mindset, and then I was able to connect what you were saying to my life story. The entrepreneurial mindset gave me the words and the language to talk about what I had been doing my entire life. I didn’t become something different. I’m still the same person I was before your webinar.

I’m sorry to tell you that, but what you explained to me was, “Dan, this is how you express to the world how you’ve lived your life.” I got to thinking, “There are employees here at the college.” We have a thousand employees and 30,000 students this year, unduplicated headcount. Some of these employees come and they clock in and they clock out, so to speak. They come in and they’re an employee.

Entrepreneurial Leadership In One Of America’s Fastest Growing Community Colleges With Dr. Dan Walden Share on X

Like what an employee’s mindset is.

An employee mindset that I’m here for the money. I walk on. I walk off. I have no ownership. They have this little cubicle that they have me in our office. I come here, and I perform each day like a robot. There are other people who, when they come into a job, you put them in a position, and they take ownership of that. “This is my world. It’s what I make of it.”

Very often when we’re interviewing people, particularly program managers, to start a new program, we tell them, “The program doesn’t exist. We’re looking for somebody who is going to come in and wants to have this baby, feed this baby, nurture this baby, and create a life out of what doesn’t exist. It’s going to be what you make it. If you come in with an entrepreneurial mindset, like somebody who was starting a business, even though you’re working for a college, it’s your baby. The baby will die if you don’t feed it. If you feed the baby and you take care of the baby and you nurture the baby, the baby will grow up and will mature, and what you are starting will become something.”

When we see people who are able to take on those kinds of projects, even if they’re assuming someone else’s baby that they’re adopting, and they take the ownership. They adopt the baby. They give the baby their own last name, and they sell themselves to this cause with a passion. It’s what they make out of it. I don’t care if you are a secretary in a cubicle, and I don’t mean this in any demeaning way.

If you take that job and you come to work with an entrepreneurial mindset that you’re going to be the best damn secretary in the whole place, nobody is going to be better than you are. You make that office in that cubicle, and you become to your supervisor the greatest and the best, your life is going to be better. When you’re cashing your checks, you’re going to enjoy it. The check is not going to be the main thing.

It’s going to be one of the things you need to get through life, but you love coming to work. People talk about TGIF. I tell our college, “We should be talking TGIM. Thank god it’s Monday. I get to come to work. That’s how much I love my work. I love my passion. I love what I do. On Friday, I’ll see you on Monday and cannot wait to get back here.”

The TGIM Mindset: Embracing Work With Passion

I absolutely love that. It’s really a mindset shift. It could be the same person in the same job. What’s changing is your attitude, but I want to double-click on something you’re saying. I feel sorry for people who think of learning and work as drudgery, like the “Thank God It’s Friday” feeling. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. When I give talks at colleges, I say to people, “Entrepreneurial Mindset 101. Show up at your job fifteen minutes early, stay fifteen minutes late, and opportunity will find you.”

One of the people who had a great impact on my life was my grandfather. He was also a carpenter. His deal was that if you weren’t at the job ten minutes early, you were late. He would get there in the morning, and he thought everybody should come help and roll out the tools. We called it that they meant string out the electrical lines and put the saws where they’re supposed to be because you have to take all that up every night, put it in the trailer, take it home, or somebody will steal it.

You had to roll up the tools at the end of the day and then roll them out in the morning. When you were rolling them out in the morning, when 8:00 came, you were supposed to be working, like hammering. You didn’t show up at 8:00 and start, “Let’s get the cords out now.” It was about being excited to be there. My dad died at the age of 87. He retired at 65 officially, gave the business to my brother, the construction business, but he never did retire.

He kept a truck. The business kept him in a truck, and he would get up every morning until he was in his 80s. He would still drive to wherever the construction job was, and he’d say to my brother or my uncle or whoever is running that job, “Do you need anything from the lumberyard? Do you need me to go run something for you? Do you want me to build a set of plans? I can do it for you.”

My dad was living in Texas, and me in California. Every time I’d go home, he wanted to go riding in the truck and show me all the houses they built. He’d say, “We built this house.” Because of 50, 60 years of carpenter work in this one town, he could say, “See all those houses? We built all those houses in those streets.” He had stories to tell you about them. He loved the life that he had. That’s the man who raised me and my grandfather.

That’s a clue, though, Dan. That’s an important piece of the puzzle. You had a front row seat to somebody who was self-directed in their work, and they enjoyed their work. I think that’s an important piece of the puzzle. If you’re watching your dad come home from a job he doesn’t like every day, beat down, that’s going to limp.

My dad never understood the education world, since he didn’t finish the ninth grade. My mother didn’t finish the eighth grade. I told him, “You’re the man who taught me how to be the president of a college.” He said, “How did you do that?” I said, “You taught me on the carpenter job how to run a college.” I thought lately, if I were writing a book about my life story, one of the titles I might use is What the Nails Taught Me because I could tell you about all the things he taught. I’ll give you one little story, real quick, that he taught me.

We were putting up what’s called Cornish on the house, which is around the eaves of the house. He said, “I want to show you something about leadership.” I was probably 13, 14, 15 at the time. By that time in life, I would go every day after school to his job, every Saturday, and work all summer. I grew up in carpentry work. I had so much experience by the time I was 18. The carpenter’s union took me in as a third-year apprentice. Anyway, we’re working on the scaffold. I’m 13, 14 years old, and he says, “Let me show you how to do this.”

We would have long strips of plywood. It was probably about 2 feet wide and 8 feet long. He said, “Let’s put this up like we normally do.” He said, “I’m going to lead. You’re going to follow.” I’d hold it up, and he’d nail it and come and put the few nails, and then we would nail together the rest of the piece down. He said, “You lead alpha.” I would take it up. I put it up. He had held it for me, and I did the nails. He said, “Now let’s both lead.” We’re up on a scaffold. We’re probably 7 feet, 8 feet, 10 feet from the ground, whatever it was, especially if it’s two-story.

We’re wrestling on top, and he’s being a little dramatic there, and he’s pushing and shoving, and he says, “You see? That doesn’t work.” He says, “It doesn’t matter how good a carpenter I am or how good you are. It doesn’t work for both of us to lead. One of us has to say, ‘You take the lead. I’ll follow.’” I have learned that in being a president’s job and leadership, you don’t always have to be the one in the lead because some things don’t require that. They don’t require a decision right now. Somebody stepping up and saying, “This is what we’re going to do.”

Maybe they are a group of people you’re with. They got a hold of this, and I’m in a room of leaders or people at the college. You don’t have to have positions of leadership. They’re just there. They’re so engaged in what they’re doing. I step back and let them lead because it’s not the time for me to be upfront. It’s not the time for me to be doing the nailing. I’m holding the board. I’ve called a meeting, put them in a room, and let them talk. The brilliance is in the room. If you let it emerge out of that room and let them talk enough, they’ll start playing off of each other’s ideas to where they become the leader at that point.

They come up with the idea when people own things like that. I often use this saying that when they’re in the boat, they don’t tend to drill holes. I said that for years, and then it dawned on me, probably 9 or 10 years ago. There’s more to that than just the people in the boat, getting people in the boat, so they don’t drill holes. Why don’t you get people to help design the boat? “First of all, let’s have a discussion. Do we need a boat? Maybe we don’t need a boat. If we’re going to need a boat, then how should this boat be?”

You get people to design, and then, let’s build it together. My dad and I are working on that scaffold, one leads on one day and the other one is following, but it changes according to a person’s gifts and what the temperature is in the room. When people have come up with the idea, and feel like it was part of their thinking to create a boat, to build a boat, they will say, “To think that they’re not going to ride in it would be the last thing.” The last thing they’d think of is drilling holes in the boat that they themselves have ownership of and built. That I learned on the carpenter’s job. That’s what the nails taught me about leadership.

Entrepreneurial Leadership: Empowering People To Design Their Own “Boat”

I think you did a great job of describing what I would call entrepreneurial leadership. What excites me about that story and that example, and I’ve known you for 4 or 5 years now. I lost track, but you seem to be consistent in your belief in people. I don’t feel like I’m getting it. It’s like you know the talent is in there. You’re trying to introduce, letting them design the boat, build the boat, and decide if they want a boat. It seems to me that you’re trying to demonstrate that they’re capable. Am I getting that right?

Society could benefit if everyone had the entrepreneurial mindset. Share on X

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you get people talking and listening, the brilliance is in the room. You don’t always have to go find a Gary Schoeniger to come in and be the brilliant one. You get people talking. One of the things I’ll say, one that will compliment you in the middle of this show, is that you come in and you get people talking. I’ve had you on in some way or another here for the last five years, and one of your gifts is the ability to come in.

You say some very inspiring things, but once you get people talking, the brilliance emerges out of the room. You’ve never brought us anything in five years, Gary, where you said, “This is the answer for Victor Valley College.” You have never ever done that. In fact, you speak the opposite of that. What you do is you come in and say, “I don’t have an answer, but together, we can figure this out in so many words.” I don’t know if you intend to say it that way, but that’s exactly the way it works.

The brilliance is in the room. I understood on my first day here that I was not the smartest person on campus. No one is the smartest person on campus. The brilliance is in the room. It’s in the collective. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts because people working together can get things done that no one person can ever do by themselves. I’m honored right now to be the president of the fastest-growing community college in California and probably the United States.

That’s an honor, but Dan did not do that. Dan came in and woke up a group of people who really needed some direction, who needed somebody to set the tone, and got them talking and working together. The brilliance of becoming this college that we are today, like it had never been before, was in the room when I got here. I was just able to get them to wake up and talk.

I love that. That’s so consistent with my thinking about entrepreneurship. It’s not like some people have it and some don’t. I’ve come to believe that the entrepreneurial spirit is the human spirit, and it’s our job as leaders to create the conditions that will allow it out. I think not everyone wants to start a business. Most people don’t, but I think we’re hard-coded to want to use our gifts in ways that contribute to the people around us.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit: Hard-Coded Human Potential

Why should people who want to start a business have control over the entrepreneurial mindset? The only people who can have an entrepreneurial mindset are people who start a business. We don’t need everyone. Society does not need everyone to start a business, but society could benefit if everyone had the entrepreneurial mindset.

Amen. That’s a full stop, the whole idea right there. It’s a really straightforward concept. The subtitle of my new book is The Hidden Logic That Unleashes Human Potential. I wish I could have met you when you were twelve years old and interviewed you then because the story arc is so interesting to me. People don’t understand. What it comes down to is like selling seeds, mowing lawns, whatever it is, you realize you can make something happen in the world.

You’re not just living in the world. You can make something happen. That’s true for the secretary you said. “I’ve had this as my domain. I’m going to become as useful as I can become in this domain.” In doing so, she will benefit, and the people around her will benefit. If she doesn’t, she will suffer, and the people around her will also suffer because she won’t be able to express her gift. Does that make any sense?

Overcoming Negativity: The “Two Frogs” Analogy

The most miserable people on my campus are the naysayers. The people who sit back and criticize. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’ve been there for our college and service days, and we send those surveys out every time we have one to get feedback to see how we can improve, see how people liked it, and ask them what their ideas are for future events. Very often, you will see a limited number of people who participate in the survey, but you’ll see 4 or 5 answers straight through the survey that are always whatever the worst category is, and it stays consistent 4 or 5.

It’s not like it moves around to 20, 30, 50. You can tell from the qualitative remarks that they make because you give them a chance to talk about those answers later that it’s the same people. They’re sour on every single thing. I tell this story about the bullfrogs, the guy who moves to the country from New York, the big city. He’s always been in the high rises. He moves to a lakeside place in Arkansas, and he’s so excited to retire and have peace and quiet.

He builds his house right by the lake, and he is so happy with it, and he finally moves in. The next day, he goes to town to meet some of the people in the little town. A thousand people is all that live there. He’s walking down the street and starts meeting people, and they ask him, “How do you like it here? How was your first night?” He said, “I love it. It’s so wonderful, but I couldn’t sleep.”

They said, “Why?” He said, “It’s because of the frogs. There were so many frogs in that lake that were croaking, keeping me up all night long.” They said, “What you need is a frog digger.” He said, “What’s that?” “There are people who go out, and they have a long fork, and with a flashlight, they catch frogs, and they like to eat the legs.” He said, “Where do I find that?” They put him in contact, and he sets up the appointment, and the guy shows up around dusk at his front door. He said, “Now you go in and have a good night’s rest. I’ll take care of the frogs.”

Next morning, he’s standing on his front porch with two big old bullfrogs. Some of those frogs down there do grow really big. He said, “I got them.” He said, “Where are the rest of them?” He said, “There weren’t any others. There were just these two.” He said, “No, man. No way. There were at least a thousand.” He said, “Let me tell you something, sir. I know you come from the city, but let me tell you something. If you find two old frogs that don’t mind croaking, you might think it’s a thousand, but it’s just two old frogs.”

Every organization has two old frogs. You think that everybody is negative. Everybody is naysaying. No, it’s not. If you let yourself, they’ll keep you up at night, and you won’t be able to sleep because you think you got a thousand frogs, and you only got two. You go with what you know you have. I can tell you that after being here almost seven years, the momentum is in my direction. I’m out living, outlasting, and outstaying.

With the people that I got on board, we’re going to keep moving forward. Do we have frogs? Yes. My other analogy is people go in, they put their head in the trash can, and complain how dirty the place is and how much it stinks. If you take your head out of the trash can, you’ll see it’s not the place. It’s where you have your head. If that’s how you approach your job every day, and that’s what happens to these people who, even if they don’t become bitter and naysayers, they become depressed or they have no life in them.

They come home and watch TV and drink their beer, and or whatever they do at night, and go to work and go through the motions. Retirement annuities tell us that many people who retire from public jobs, if they literally spend their life there, their average lifespan after they retire is about eighteen months. That’s sad for public servants who spend their life working in public institutions, whether for the government, federal, state, local, college, university, and it’s public.

If you’re not careful, you’ll be one of those people that walk on, walk off, and die eighteen months after retirement that you really spent your life working for talking about how great it was, because one of the perks of this job is we have great retirement plans, but people don’t get to enjoy the twenty years with that because they haven’t learned. It wasn’t reaching a destination of retirement that made you happy. It’s enjoying the journey along the way. Retirement becomes a continuous part of their journey.

I got a front row seat. I’m going to switch gears. I don’t want to talk about the two frogs anymore. For the people tuning in to this episode, I wrote about you as a case study in my book as an exemplar of entrepreneurship in education, like creating an entrepreneurial environment. I’ve got a front row seat to the way you’ve given people the freedom to roll up their sleeves, decide if they need to vote or not, how to build it, when to build it, all that stuff.

I probably said it to a dozen or more of your top leaders that the thing that makes me so excited to work with you and share your story with the world is that part of you that believes in that individual and gives them the space. That to me is powerful leadership stuff. I wish more community college presidents could get to walk in your shoes or see the work you’re doing. It’s incredible.

Thank you for that.

I know we’re going to run out of time here pretty quickly. I want to back up to something that you said maybe fifteen minutes ago about the secretary being the best at whatever you’re going to do. There’s a guy in my book. We should probably bring him out to the college, Teddy Moore. Eleven kids, no dad, grew up in the Bronx. He said everybody around him was smoking crack and drugs and violence and gangs, and whatnot. He said it to me like this, “I knew there was another life out there. I couldn’t see it.”

Happiness is in the pursuit. Share on X

He became a construction laborer. His job was to sweep up the construction site. Now he’s got a construction site cleaning business. He’s a millionaire. He’s got a house. He’s reading at a third-grade level. He’s got a house in the Caribbean. He’s got a house in Philly. He said something to me. I’ll never forget it. He said, “If I ain’t nothing but a broom sweeper, I’m going to be the best broom sweeper there is.”

That’s the attitude I think that you’re articulating and trying to share with your leadership team and other people at Victor Valley College. This is fantastic. I feel like maybe we should do a part two at some time in the not-too-distant future, because there’s a lot more I want to dig into here. Is there any thought you maybe maybe we could wrap up? How do you connect your entrepreneurial upbringing or use to your ability as a community college president? Do you see how those things connect, or is there a final thought you want to connect there?

Happiness In The Pursuit: A Life Journey Of Growth

My life has been a journey. Our national documents that we love, I believe it’s in the Declaration of Independence about the Pursuit of Happiness. We’ve all heard this, but it’s for real for me, and that is happiness is in the pursuit. I’ve had fun in life. I’ve enjoyed life. The whole journey. The little boy who had the flopping shoes on the way to work, who started the aquarium business, or there was a carpenter with my dad, or the young preacher traveling around the country pulling my trailer and my wife behind my truck, or taking that little church and becoming something of value to the community.

Starting in higher ed and building a career in higher ed, and helping to change students’ lives and the colleges that I’ve been able to be part of. I am where I am because I’m supposed to be here. This was the trajectory of my life. I’ve never developed the habit of being caught in the past. I’ve always been able somehow, by the grace of God, to go forward beyond my mistakes, and believe me, there’s plenty of them, and some very dark times in my life, both young and old, and live for the life I have today.

If I give that up to negativity or to self-pity or to something, I never get that time back. I never get it back. Time is passing me by, and I’m on a journey. I don’t know what the next life is like. I don’t know if it’s streets of gold or if it’s white light. I don’t know what it is, but I believe you set the direction. I do believe in life after death.

I believe that we’ll live, but I don’t know where or what that’s like. I know that a lot of people got ideas, but whatever it is to me, whatever trajectory you are on in this life, that arrow is going to continue to go into the ceaseless ages of eternity. If you are going in a life that’s headed toward light, knowledge, understanding, and becoming, I think you always become that.

If you’re headed in the other direction and everything is sour and you wake up in the morning, you’ve got a dark green headache and a dark brown taste in your mouth, and you see the world in that way, you’ll probably keep going on. If there’s a hell, it would be to continue to live in that negativity and that despondency for the ceaseless ages of eternity. That would be worse than any fire you can ever build or any burning or anything, whatever it is that people have out there. That to me is hell. Hell is that. Heaven is the other. It’s the trajectory of your life.

We got to leave it there. That’s a beautiful ending. I’ll leave it there. I’m not going to try to add to it. I’m grateful to spend this time with you, Dan, and I want the world to know more about Victor Valley College and the work you’re doing there, the culture you’re trying to create there. It’s amazing. Thanks for being part of this.

Important Links

• Dan Walden on LinkedIn
• Victor Valley College
• The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage: The Hidden Logic That Unleashes Human Potential