How Gui Costin Turned Two Scribe Books Into Dakota Greatest Authentic Hack
Gui Costin is the founder and CEO of Dakota, where he has spent more than fifteen years building two companies on the same sales and leadership principles. He turned those principles into two Scribe Media books and calls the result the single best thing he has ever done for the business and its people.
The Playbook Was Written Long Before the Book
Costin runs Dakota, a sales and fundraising firm he built around a set of principles he first wrote down in 2011. For years those ideas lived in Word documents and in the way he coached his team every single day. He had the material. What he did not have was a book.
At 59, he is by his own account the oldest person at his company by a long shot, and he wanted to prove something to the younger team around him: that the ideas he repeats constantly were worth putting on paper, and that anyone, at any age, could do the same.
The Fear That Kept the Book on the Shelf
Costin did not start with Scribe. His first book, Millennials Are Not Aliens, came out with Forbes in 2019, and getting there meant getting past the noise in his own head. Being public, he says, creates all sorts of noise: What are people going to say? Would anyone ever read it? Would they care?
That fear followed him into his first Scribe book, The Dakota Way. He blew off meetings, pushed the work down his list, and skipped chapter reviews. It felt, in his words, like walking through thick mud, until he decided he was either going to do it or not.
“It’s two of the greatest things I’ve ever done is writing the two books and doing it with [Scribe] because I happen to have the most world-class ghostwriter.”
— Gui Costin, Founder & CEO, Dakota
Why He Could Not Have Done It Alone
Costin is blunt about going it alone: he would not recommend it. What got the book across the finish line was a partner with a system, a professional process, and a ghostwriter who kept him honest and kept him on point. His second Scribe book, Be Kind, went far more smoothly because they set up timelines, structure, and interviews immediately after the first, and his ghostwriter simply interviewed him about the lessons he had learned in leadership.
“Having a group like Scribe that’s done it before and has a whole professional process for how to go about it and keep you honest and keep you on point, that’s what really got it done. I would have never been able to do it on my own.”
— Gui Costin, Founder & CEO, Dakota
The Real Return: Authority, Not Book Sales
Ask Costin for a dollar figure and he pushes back. The return, he says, is like billboard advertising: it shows up in the qualitative building of brand, awareness, and authority. He is emphatic that you do not write a book to sell books or products. You write it to become the recognized expert in your field, and to give your team, your customers, and your growth a credential that keeps working.
“You write a book to become a subject matter expert and an authority.”
— Gui Costin, Founder & CEO, Dakota
The books now run through everything Dakota does. Every event is a book signing. Costin sends signed copies to anyone who asks. Readers reach out on LinkedIn, and one recognized him on a plane after reading both books. The book widened his surface area in ways he never could have predicted, and it became a forcing mechanism too: once your belief system is in print, the whole organization can hold you to it.
“It’s absolutely the single best thing I’ve ever done for the business and for people is to do the two books.”
— Gui Costin, Founder & CEO, Dakota
His Advice to the Leader Still Sitting on a Book
Costin closes with two of his Dakotaisms, the phrases he uses to get his team past their own mental barriers: turn your brain off, and throw your hat over the wall. Both mean the same thing. Stop the paralysis by analysis, take the first concrete step, and let the rest follow. Figure out what you are genuinely passionate about, then get a partner who has done it before.
“If you really want to talk ROI, it’s going to be in the qualitative of building your brand, building awareness, creating something to give back, to share with people.”
— Gui Costin, Founder & CEO, Dakota
For Costin, the proof is in his own team. When a 26-year public-school administrator on his staff saw what the books did, he decided to write his own, to pass on everything he had learned to the people two years into the job. That, more than any revenue number, is what Costin means when he calls the book the greatest authentic hack of all time.
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