Your Trainer

Dan Cruz

Marine veteran. Chicago real estate. Founder, NOD Academy.

I built a protocol instead of a keynote, because I needed something that worked on the days I wasn't inspired.

🎖 Marine Veteran 📘 Published Author 1,000+ Sessions 🔴 TikTok Live Daily

The Short Version

How I got here

Five years active duty in the Marine Corps taught me that composure is a trained skill, not a personality trait. That single idea is the foundation of everything I teach.

Then: Chicago real estate

Real estate is where I learned that most negotiation advice collapses on contact. The books tell you to build rapport. They don't tell you what to say to a seller who's just been told their house is worth $80,000 less than they've spent two years believing.

I've closed deals where the other side had more leverage, more lawyers, and more time. Not because I out-charmed anyone — because I had a sequence and they were improvising.

Then: a thousand sessions

Since 2024 I've run over a thousand live practice sessions — most of them public, on TikTok Live, two hours a day, six days a week. That's an unusual way to develop a methodology and I'd recommend it to anyone: you cannot hide a weak tool in front of a live audience. Anything that only worked in theory got found out fast and cut.

A thousand sessions in public is a thousand chances to be wrong where everyone can see it. That's the fastest edit process I know.

Now: the Protocol

What survived became The Cruz Protocol — four stages, in order, with drills and a scorecard. Plus a 33-chapter manual, a 31-tool catalog, 25 word-for-word real estate scripts, and a free practice app so a team can rehearse without me in the room.

The Honest Part

Why not just do the motivational thing?

Because I tried it, and it worked — for about three weeks.

I'm a genuine fan of the personal-development world. It got me moving at a point when I needed moving, and I won't pretend otherwise or take cheap shots at people whose work I've benefited from. Standing in a room full of people deciding to change their lives is a real thing.

But I started paying attention to what happened after. I'd watch someone come back from an event transformed, and by the following month they were negotiating exactly the way they had before — because nobody had ever given them the sentence to say when a buyer went quiet. They'd been handed a state and told it was a skill.

The FBI's crisis negotiators had already solved this. Their people had to perform on a phone line where the stakes were somebody's life, and they couldn't rely on being fired up. So they built a repeatable order of operations and drilled it. That's the missing half. Not a replacement for energy — the structure that energy is supposed to be pushing.

So that's the whole thesis of my work: keep the intensity, add the scaffolding, and measure it on tape so nobody has to take my word for it.