How EOS Transformed a Stressed CEO’s Business from 6% to 34% Profit: Will Watrous on the Entrepreneurial Operating System

From hospital to 34% profit will waitress on EOS success. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Pearl, and today we’re sitting down with Will an EOS implementer who learned about the entrepreneurial operating system the hard way. He had a stress induced health crisis that landed him in hospital that led him to learning about how EOS.

Can make a major impact on a business. He took his marketing company from chaotic and overwhelming to a high performing team that increased its profit from six to 34% and now functions without him. So he just focuses on EOS implementing. In a business there are 136 simultaneous issues that are happening, and six components that actually solve them all.

That is some of the gold that you’re gonna learn from Will in today’s episode. It’s one that if you are running a business that has a couple of million dollar profit to a hundred plus profit, then this is perfect for you because you no doubt have teams and you no doubt have issues and blind spots that you don’t even know about yet.

So stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And once again, we are traveling to the other side of the world and I’m delighted to say we have Wheel Tres joining us today where it’s well as we are recording this, it’s evening your time. It’s middle of the day my time. Welcome to the program.

Thanks Anthony. Great to be here with you today. So we’ve got a lot of topics we’re going to cover today, I just know, but why don’t we start by asking you just to introduce yourself to everyone. Sure. So currently I am an EOS implementer. That’s the Entrepreneurial Operating System. There’s a book out there called Traction, which is pretty well known in the business community, but how I got here is an.

A whole nother story. It’s very interesting. I own a company. I started it about 15 years ago and it grew rapidly to the extent that I had some health issues come up. The stress of that chaos and so many moving parts just really took a toll on me and the leadership team, in fact, and I found myself in the hospital and they thought it was pretty scary actually.

They thought I was having a stroke, and so they did all these tests. Ultimately, they determined that it was all stress induced. And after that incident, I set out on a mission to create a healthier business and a healthier life, and I came across that book Traction. Reddit made a lot of sense to me, so I hired an EOS implementer and worked with him for a couple of years, and it was transformational.

The business continued to grow, but morale improved. We used to feel like we were herding cats every day. We turned into this high performance, healthy functioning team, and net profit went from 6% to 34%. And needless to say, I fell in love with this whole EOS thing. And along the way it also created a lot of freedom for me as the owner of the company.

So about three and a half years ago, I stepped away. I still own the company passively now. I meet with the CEO once a month. Run through financials and support him as I can. But all I do now is help other business leadership teams implement EOS in their companies, help them gain traction in their companies, create companies that are aligned and healthy and moving toward their clearly defined vision.

Super thankful to be where I’m at today doing what I’m doing. And and you’re part of that story now too, just spreading the good word, that there is hope, that there is a way to wrangle this crazy thing we call business. Yeah. There is so much that goes on in a business and you are absolutely right that it’s hard with so many different things coming at you from multiple different angles.

And it’s sad in a sense that you know the story of. A health crisis is often what we see as what. Is the determiner of making a significant change in a business. And I was actually just leading a forum just before we spoke, and one of the big things that we were talking about in that forum was around the ability to break habits and the fear that’s attached to making change that really comes to the fore.

And I think that’s the one thing when you have a health crisis like you did, it makes you, it forces you to stop. But I’m just interested as well as how often when you encounter businesses, are they really ready to make that significant change? That’s a great point, Anthony, because the reality is that we’re all on our own journey and business leaders, entrepreneurs we’re all on our own individual path toward.

Success or fulfillment or whatever it is. And what I, my experience has been that some people are very goal oriented. They’re very driven. They have a clear picture of where they’re trying to go, and that drives them forward to making whatever changes are necessary. And I would also say this, that I think we all function at times in that manner.

However, there’s also. Times where there is so much pain, there is so much pressure and stress that we know that we come to this place of, let’s call it disgust. We just realize that something is going to change. I’ve had it and I am going to make a decision. And so that pain inst insti, instigates, if you will, or inspires or initiates a change or a willingness to make change.

And so in, in my instance, it was the pain that drove me to make significant changes in the business and the way I was running the business. But you’re right that so often I think that’s the reality for a lot of people. It’s just they get to a place where they’ve said, I’ve had it and I’ve gotta do something different.

And I’ll say this too, that until people reach that point, it’s really hard to help ’em. They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And if someone’s just determined to just keep trying, to figuring it out on their own and just keep hitting their head against the wall or trying different things, I get it.

There’s power and persistence and perseverance. That’s real. That’s important. But when something is not working and you’ve tried everything, to do. At some point, you have to be willing and open to look at things in a different way. And until you’re ready to do that, I don’t, I’m not sure that there’s much hope.

Yeah. And, but it is, as I said it’s sad that sometimes it’s something outside that crashes, outside of your control, at least that crashes that causes that. And so how many of the people that you are dealing with that, that have become clients or that you’ve helped along the way?

Have had some kind of external forced, we need to take a look at this. Yeah. So I’d. I would say all of them in one way or another. Not all of them, certainly not a health crisis, but there is enough pain in the organization that they’ve realized we need intervention. And that’s really, in a way, what I do.

I am intervention. I, this is someone stepping in and helping them to figure this out. Help equip them, teach them, show them a better way. All of them have come to their, to that point, or honestly, they’re not a good fit. I, I. Would not want to work with someone who feels they’ve got it figured out and they don’t want or need help.

That’s just not a win-win situation. And so I would say all of my clients in one way or another, what, whatever has happened. So I’ll give you a few examples. So one, one client he has a family. He’s got family in the business, family on the leadership team. He’s getting older and he’s in his.

Mid sixties and he’s thinking, you know what? I wanna step away and spend more time with the grandkids. But he and his wife are a little concerned about what’s gonna happen to the business. He’s the source of knowledge. He’s the one who started it, let’s say 25 years ago. He’s a little worried about what’s gonna happen to the company when he steps away, becomes less involved and hands it all over to his kids.

And so he’s wanting to institute some framework, some foundation, some structure to the organization that ensures his legacy. And so that might not be a pain in the sense that the sky is falling, but he’s recognizing that his. Priorities are shifting and he has concerns about what’s gonna happen, how do they navigate that?

So that’s one example. Another client had cash flow issues. A great company been around for a long time, but they’re working their tails off and just don’t have enough profit at the end of the day to show for all of the work that they’ve done. And so that’s a very real pain point.

And and I’ll give you one more client example. One, also another gentleman in his. Late sixties it was working just 70 hours a week. And at that stage of life, the 70 hour work weeks get old. And so he’s just wanting to create some. Space, some margin, some freedom of time and what he had been trying to do or trying to handle whatever he was trying to do to handle that wasn’t working.

And so that’s, he’s bringing in EOS to help him manage that. So those are just some examples of the, you’re talking about the pain what maybe triggers someone or inspires someone to want to use something like EOS? Those are a few examples. Suppose the important thing for people listening in now is to recognize.

When they might be in pain or that they’re heading towards it. I think that’s the thing is you don’t actually want to have to wait for that pain to come. You want to recognize that it’s coming and and try and get in front of it because it, I imagine for you it was a lot harder to react when you go, okay, I have a health issue now.

And so now I need to respond, but now you are managing the health issue and managing a significant change in a business. So two significant changes in your day-to-day living that’s hard to manage. Yeah, it compounds and the body’s keeping score, whether you realize it or not, in the background. It’s paying attention to all the stress and.

And all of the chaos, sometimes it goes into the business. So yeah, that it’s much better to see it coming and hit it off at the pass. It’s so much better. And I’ll say this I love entrepreneurs. I love the entrepreneurial spirit because they see an opportunity and they just figure it out.

They just jump in headlong and try to add value to the world. And I love that entrepreneurial spirit and. Part of the reason they’re successful is that they do just figure it out. They just grab a piece of this and a piece of that, and they’re just bringing it all together, creating this business, and that is a wonderful thing.

It’s a beautiful thing. Honestly, the issue is that as we say, what got you here won’t get you there. And so you cannot continue to grow a company in that manner. At some point, you need to have a business operating system, and I’m not talking about software. I’m talking about how do you function as a business and if you’re not intentional with that, you’ll wind up with this Frankenstein.

You’ve got multiple operating systems all trying to work together and communicate different languages. Different approaches, different words that mean different things. And so having a single business operating system is what really allows you to create simplicity, because prior to that, you’re just at piling on complexity.

As the business grows, as you add people, as you add services, whatever the business becomes more and more complex. So simplicity is. Is very valuable. It’s a very important thing. And so having a single business operating system that’s simplified allows you to grow and create the freedoms that you’re seeking in the business.

I wanna delve into that in a moment, but I do wanna ask you just first, how important do you think it is for you to have gone on your own journey and discovered not only EOS, but. Discovered how to implement it in your own business and the impact that it makes, how different is that approach to someone going, oh, here’s a great tool I’ve never actually implemented on my own business, but I’m gonna.

Implemented on lots of others, which without denigrating a lot of coaches, a lot of coaches have, the only business they’ve ever known is a coaching business. So they’ve not actually had an opportunity to build something for themselves and show how it’s being delivered. And you’ve done that, so how important do you think that has been in the success of what you’ve had?

Yeah, so for me it was the price of admission. Meaning that that was my path. And I’ll say this, I would never want to knock someone who did it, the whole that’s a wonderful story to tell is that I saw other people’s mistakes. I learned from other people’s mistakes, and I decided to do it the right way from the beginning.

And that’s a wonderful story. And an example, although I’ll say there is also a lot of value and just. Empathy. I think people feel when they see that, okay, someone has learned the hard way and they’ve paid some prices of admission and learned some lessons that I can now benefit from and learn from.

And so to answer your question, I’d say it’s very important. It’s been very important to me. I think it’s relatable. Most business owners and leaders have made mistakes, have, done some things that have been. Really painful, and they can relate to that and they understand that. And it’s been a big important part of my story.

With that in mind, let’s give everyone a little bit of a background to the business that you had, that you were involved in on. Say you, you’re still involved with it to, to a lesser extent today. Give us a paint, a little bit of a picture about that business at and at the time, what it was looking like.

Yeah, so it’s a marketing company that specializes in emerging franchise brands, so multi-location businesses throughout the US and Canada. And at the time I have had a wonderful, I’d call him a right hand man a real executive, like a operations executive. His name is Bruce. And he is just been a wonderful aid and a help in managing the company.

The problem though was that he and I were often not on the same page. And in retrospect, I see now that I’m more of a visionary type leader. I have great I come up with the ideas and I chase shiny objects and one month I love this, and the next month I love that I’m making all the promises.

He’s finding himself having to fulfill all the promises that I’m making. And so there was a lot of just stress around not being on the same page with basic things like the organizational. We call the accountability chart. In other words, who ex who is doing what in the organization? What’s the right structure for our company?

What’s the simplest and best way to arrange all of these people? Who is responsible for which area? You would think that would be obvious? But at the time it was not clear. And so balls were getting dropped. And deadlines were getting missed, and I would continue to try to sell, and he’s trying to do, create efficiency and processes and account profitability.

And so it was not great. And the staff could feel that tension as well, because they weren’t really, I would say one thing and he would might say another thing because the, I would have a great vision of something, but he would have the more realistic version of that. And so there was not a lot of alignment across the organization.

So that’s what it, that’s what I was dealing with at the time prior to us embarking on our EOS journey. So you discover EOS, how do you go about implementing? What did that journey look like? So as any entrepreneurial spirit would probably do. I read the book and tried to do it all myself. I just, nobody’s ever done that before.

Surely not. Yeah. Yeah. It’s I like tos, a couple of YouTube videos. And then it’s all fine. Exactly. Exactly. I, it’s like learning how to play golf by watching YouTube videos and then picking up a golf club and expecting to go out there and hit the ball just perfectly straight after you’ve watched a dozen videos.

Doesn’t quite work like that, sadly. And so I realized, sadly, I wish it worked. So I, I realized that. There was a lot of value in having someone walk us through the process, and so we, we worked with an US implementer at the time and he walked us through the exercises and coached us and trained us and.

Watched what we were doing, gave us feedback and really helped us hone and lean into the EOS process, adopt the tools. And the further that we went, the more clarity that there was, the more alignment there was. We’re all on the same page at a clear picture of success. Looks like. We knew who exactly was accountable for what we were using.

The scorecard at a leadership team level, paying attention to the handful of key numbers that the leadership team needed to be looking at every single week to know what was going on in the business. Just as a few small examples. So that was a, it was a great process for us, a great learning. And I realized, this is funny.

I was actually talking with someone earlier today about this. As a marketing company, some of our clients were in the medical industry and so talking with doctors, very smart, very intelligent people, and at the same time, while they were brilliant in their field, they were. Maybe sometimes very ignorant as it came to marketing.

We would be just surprised, wow you’re really good at what you do, but you’d really have no clue how this marketing thing works. And so the point is that we had blind spots. Everyone has blind spots. Business owners as well. So what I’ve found is that even great entrepreneurial leaders and leadership teams have blind spots.

They’re in the weeds, they’re in the forest. There’s so much going on in the day to day, and they don’t have enough perspective. They don’t have just a simple tool set, some very simple things that can help them and they don’t realize that they’re missing these very simple things. And yeah, that, that’s been very funny to watch.

It’s I’ll sometimes I’ll work with a leadership team. And this is what’s interesting. I actually don’t need to know a ton about their specific business because what I’m working on them is how they run their business as a business operating system. So they might be talking for 10 or 15 minutes and all this jargon.

That’s internal language of these, but I’m not paying attention to that. I’m paying attention to how they’re talking together, how they’re working together as a team. I’m paying attention to some simple mechanics that are really. Foundational, they sit below their area of expertise. So anyways, it’s just interesting how all of us have blind spots.

It’s interesting how a simple set of tools that help you run your business better can be so obvious but many teams are just unaware that take an external person to recognize the blind spots. Yes. Yes. That was my point. Thank you. I had kinda lost track of what, where I was going with that, but yes.

An external perspective that can look on, look in and say, Hey guys, what about this? And what about that? And go, oh yeah, that’s a great idea. Why didn’t we think of that? Yeah. It’s a big thing for business to actually realize the, where the, that they have a blind spot and where that actually is and.

That they may not also be the best people qualified to fix it either. I think that’s the important bit. It’s all very well to, I’m sure you experienced as a marketing company to point out that hey, you don’t have a clue around marketing, but you can’t just give it to them and expect that they will then be able to implement it themselves.

You actually, you actually have to get in and get your hands dirty. Yes. And with EOS there’s a lot of what we say put in the reps. In other words, it’s using the tools. You’ve got to get your hands dirty. You’ve got to use the tools, get the practice using those tools for you to really understand.

And even once you start using the tools, you need some feedback. Ev. Every great athlete has a coach, sometimes multiple coaches, and I would say high, all of the high performers of the world have some coach in their life that’s giving, offering them an objective perspective, helping them see things that they can’t see when they’re in the game.

And and so that’s a big part of EOS is getting some feedback are we doing this right? The, and it feels messy. It feels awkward to them. It’s a new tool set. It’s a new language they’re adopting. Within their organization and it feels awkward. And so to have someone say, yep, that’s right here, watch this, watch out for that is, is really valuable to them.

Tell me at a high level, someone’s going, okay, what is the CEOS thing at a very high level? What am I going to get out of it? Yeah, so EOS is a simple. Tool set. It’s a complete system and it helps people get what they want from their business, which could be different things. But the three main things that I like to say are vision, traction, and healthy.

So number one, it helps them get on the same page with where is this company going and how do we plan to get there? So a clear vision. Traction means instilling discipline and accountability first in the leadership team level so that they’re executing really well on every part of your vision. And then healthy means helping the team to become a more healthy, functional, cohesive leadership team.

Because leaders often don’t function well as a team. And what we found is as goes the leadership team, so goes the rest of the organization. So we get to the point where everyone in the company is crystal clear, all aligned with where we’re trying to go. They’re gaining consistent traction. Everywhere you look in the company, people are making progress toward that vision and they’re doing it as a group of people who enjoy the work they do and the people that they’re around.

And so vision, traction, healthy is really what EOS delivers. The way it delivers it is just with a complete set of really simple, practical tools. So let’s talk about then going into a business in the first instance. What are you looking for to start things off, to know where you’ve gotta go?

Do you mean in, in terms of a perspective eeo, so is someone ready for EOS or Yeah. Someone you as an EOS consultant going into a business, how do you, what are you observing? What are you looking for that is knowing what are the directions you want to go? Because I understand that someone, can look at their business and go, we have some pain points here.

We potentially have some blind spots. We have things that are not working as well as they would like. I understand that an, this system can deliver for us, but they probably don’t know where to go. So how do you know where to go? Gotcha. So I’ll come at this from a couple of different angles.

First of all, at the very beginning, I’m looking for a leadership team that’s growth oriented, that is more afraid of the status quo than they are of change. They do want to grow and change, and they’re willing to be open and honest and vulner vulnerable with themselves and the people that are around them because it takes a leadership team being open and honest with one another to really grow and go where get where they want, where they’re trying to grow to go.

So with that said, EOS, the process is very prescriptive, it’s very defined. There is a set of meetings and agendas and the, it’s, there’s, I don’t know how many, there’s, I think 34,000 companies working with an EOS implementer now around the world. So it’s, there’s actually I think a couple hundred thousand companies using the tools.

So it’s. It’s proven. My point is that it’s a very proven process. The results have been seen over and over again. And over time they’ve, EOS worldwide has been very intentional and careful to curate and find the best way to implement EOS inside of a company. So with that, we have a really clear process.

There’s a journey mapped out. Here’s what we do. The first step is a 90 minute meeting. I have a very clear agenda what happens on the 90 minute meeting, and then there’s focus day, and then there’s vision building day one, and then vision building day two, and then there’s quarterlys. All of these meetings have very clear agendas, very, we introduce a tool at, in a certain meeting in a certain way and assign certain homework after and so all that to say.

What we found is there’s a foundation that has to be built regardless of what the pain points are right now today. There’s a path to get there that requires a foundation to be laid and so that you can solve that problem. So us. What Gino Wickman, when he started creating Geo Us, he saw that these entrepreneurial leadership teams tend to struggle with 136 issues simultaneously, but to the degree you can strengthen the six key components of your business.

All of those 136 issues tend to fall into place because they’re actually symptoms of a true root cause rooted in one of those six key areas. And so the EOS journey is a journey to strengthen those six key components of your business. That’s what gets you everything that you want from the business. You want to focus on all of the noise and putting out all the fires, and that’s fine.

You’ve gotta do some of that. But what has to happen is we must go to the root. We must lay a real foundation so that you stop having the fires to begin with. So going to, from fire, fighting to fire prevention take some time and due diligence. And so the journey you asked. How do I know where to start?

We started the same spot with every single client and get them a firm foundation built upon which they can then build the rest of their business and solve all of those pain points that they’ve been working through. Imagine for many businesses. The dilemma here is that we’re working on some foundations, but yet.

We want to be running at the other end of things. We want more business. We want it to be growing at a faster rate, and this potentially slows it down because you’re reexamining the base, which can lead to other things. I’m sure as a, from a marketing perspective, branding can be a an outcome of all of this.

Because if fundamentally the vision and many of the. Those base components have changed. It may change how you market the business. And branding could be an impact of that, which is inevitably gonna slow down what they want to be doing and running at the other end. So how do you balance those two?

Because it’s not a, this is not a, you’re not talking about something that is a, couple of weeks process here. It is not a quick fix. It, I, most of my clients work with me for about two years. So it’s about a two year journey. To get those six key components strong. So it is not a quick fix, and that’s hard for some entrepreneurs that are fast paced and to live in this microwave world that we live in.

We want it right now. We want everything right now. But I’ll tell you that while it takes a couple of years and while it is a bunch of work, the payoffs are worth it. It is amazing to have a company that’s healthy, clear vision, strong team, energized team, healthy culture. It’s worth the weight.

All, some recipes you throw it in the microwave and it comes out. Two minutes later, other recipes, you cook all weekend. And I guarantee the meal that’s been cooked all weekend is much higher quality, much more enjoyable than the one that came out from the Wake av. Great analogy, isn’t it?

And it’s funny too because you often look for, you watch any of the cooking shows always fascinates me. The amount of preparation and thing that goes into this meal and people consume it in. A minute or two when you go, it just took three, four hours, sometimes longer to prepare this thing.

And that’s by someone who is an expert. So if you’re not an expert, it probably took you a day or two you say to get there. But the feeling that you have at the end of it is significantly more joyous. And the and in part that’s because of the quality of what you’ve turned out as well. Yes. And they say big shirt, big ships turn slowly.

Sometimes companies have a lot of bad habits, and when you’re changing culture, when you’re changing who the company is at the fabric, the core of who they really are, that’s not something that happens overnight. That’s, that takes a process. Yeah. And so what’s it like for the businesses that are dealing with you over that period of time?

Do they, do they fall into that routine and respect the fact that it is a two year process? Or is there that tension of can we go faster? There’s so two years is the average. Some do it faster, some do it slower. And that’s fine there. Each one is at their own pace. It’s funny, I’ll say within a leadership team, typically the founder of the visionary is saying, oh, can we just speed this up?

Can we just move faster? Why are we still talking about this? They wanna move on. And there’s other key leaders on the team who are going, whoa, wait, we just made a decision. Hold on. We need to talk and do all this due diligence and research. And so there’s tension even within the team. Some feel we’re moving too fast, some moving feel, we’re moving too slowly, and my encouragement to them is trust the process.

Tens of thousands of companies have gone through this exact same process, stick with me, and it doesn’t take long for them to see, by the. By the second session they’re realizing, oh, okay. There’s a lot more going on here than I might have realized. And so it takes time to practice. It takes time to put in the reps to make fundamental shifts in the organization.

And I think they respect that. And I do have to encourage them to trust the process along the way, but it’s not a, usually a big battle. I think more of the tension happens maybe within the team. Some as I said, feeling we’re going too slow, some too fast. Let’s maybe look at some of these six different areas that you go through.

What are some tips across each of those that people might be more or less to look out for? Because we say we are not telling people that they can do this themselves, but what are some things that they might be looking out for to recognize if they’ve got problems in those six key areas?

Yeah, so there’s actually a fantastic tool. It’s called the organizational checkup, and if you were to just Google it and just do a search for EOS organizational checkup, it’s 20 questions and you just, and those, there’s those are designed and that’ll reveal to you how well you’re doing in each one of those six key areas.

That would be a great. Just exercise or tool for really any leader to go through. The six key areas are the vision component. Is everyone crystal clear on where we’re going and how we’re trying to get there? The second one is the people component. Do we have the right people in the right seats?

Right People or people who fit the culture like a glove. You love having them around. Having them in the right seats means they excel at their work. They have the. Excuse me. The God-given talent, the drive, the desire, the capacity to do the job well. That’s the second one, the people component. The third component is the data component that’s running the business on facts and figures, making so sure that we’re using objective information to make our decisions versus in most entrepreneurial companies make decisions based on hunches and egos and subjective feelings.

The fourth key component is the issues component, and that’s just making sure that your people are really good at solving problems as they arise. You can’t really grow a great company if your people aren’t great at identifying issues and then knocking ’em down, making ’em go away for good. The fifth key component is the process component, which is.

Making sure that all the important stuff in the business is getting done the right and best way every single time. That’s what creates scalability, profitability, makes the business a lot more fun to run and manage when everything’s being done the right and best way. And then the last, the sixth. Key area is what we call traction, and that’s bringing the vision down to the ground and executing on it day in and day out.

And within each one of those six key areas, we’ve got a couple of tools or disciplines that we use that helps strengthen those areas in the business. But the starting point that the assessment I would say or the. Best way to understand how you’re doing is to start with that organizational checkup and it’s free, it’s online.

It would take probably less than five minutes for any leader to, to fill that out. Typically, what kind of businesses are you working with? They are privately held, typically two to $50 million US dollars in annual revenue. Typically 10 to 250 employees. And as I said their leaders are growth oriented.

They are willing to be open and honest and vulnerable with themselves and the people around them. And they want to grow. They are seeking change. They know that there’s a better way to run their business. We start to wrap things up a little bit. I wanted to get some insights on a couple of different levels from you.

You’ve talked about some of those six different areas. Is there a a note for people that are listening in now saying. I think I should, you know that says that they should look at EOS as something they should be doing. Is there a trigger point aside from the ones that we talked about at the beginning, which are the crisis points?

Is there something where you can say, you need to get in advance of this. It’s better to move now rather than wait a year or two when something might happen. Yeah, so a lot of the issues we see are people issues. So whether that’s turnover, a lot of turnover sometimes it’s drama, just a lot of tension on the leadership team.

Sometimes it’s accountability when it comes to people. You feel like you come together, you make a decision, but then it just never gets executed on fully. You don’t see things being finished out completely. And so people. Is one area profit. I mentioned earlier, sometimes you’re working really hard, but there’s just not enough profit at the end of the day to show for all of your hard work.

Other times there’s a lot of stress or chaos because things are not being done the right way consistently. So I mentioned that process component. It’s funny when. When I was running my marketing company, I read a book, I forget the name of it, but I got really excited about processes.

I thought, man, if we just created a process for every single area of the business, everything would be done the right way, and all these problems would go away. And I had the right idea, but my way of executing on that was very poor. I. I wound up creating hundreds of pages along with a team, hundreds of pages of processes, and by the time we were finished, the first ones were outdated and nobody was using them to begin with, and they were in a Google Drive folder.

So within EEO s we’ve got a really effective way, an entrepreneurial approach to systemizing a company. And so anyway if you feel like there’s not consistency in the organization, the customers are not getting the same consistent experience or product or you just know internally, there’s a lot of inefficiency in the way things are getting done that’s another symptom or pain point or a tip that someone might realize, okay, we might need to adopt something like EOS to help us become more consistent.

I wanted to ask you, and this is a probably a significant topic that we can only scratch the surface on, but I’m intrigued about the role of technology. There’s a lot of chatter about ai of course, but that’s not the sole piece of technology. How much of a role is technology playing both in the, building up to a crisis point of needing to change and also EEO S’S intersection with that in terms of how is it using technology to help improve the business?

Yeah so what’s so interesting about US is that it’s industry agnostic, first of all. So it doesn’t really matter what the business does, it sits below your area of expertise. We all mentioned, we mentioned earlier we have these blind spots in these areas where unaware of. But secondly, I would say that technology is.

Neither good nor bad. It is how you use it. It is what’s done with it that matters. And so AI is great. I use AI every day. The marketing company, every role within that marketing company uses AI as a tool every day. But within EOS, it’s what I would say EOS is a people management system. And so AI can help, technology can help with that, but at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of people working together to accomplish a goal.

Technology will change, but how people work together, having a clear aligned vision, having clear accountabilities, having discussions to solve issues together as a team, those things aren’t so dependent on technology, and so I encourage my clients to use ai. We in the session room when I’m meeting with them, we don’t use technology at all.

In fact, we’re using paper and pen because of the distraction that it tends to be. We put the cell phones away, they’ll close the laptops, and we’re just fully present, fully engaged with one another. And that’s important. It’s been interesting to watch AI unfold. AI can help you create processes in your company, for example.

That’s a great tool, but AI is not going to call John out when he shifts in his chair a little bit. When Sarah says something, that’s my job as an EOS implement. John, I saw the look what’s with the look. Sarah said such and such and now we’re getting some, now we’re getting to the root of some real things.

That’s a team health issue perhaps, and that’s what us really helps teams do is get clear aligned, open and honest and measuring progress, those types of things that technology’s a merely a tool that can enhance that. So much stuff in everything that you’ve talked about there. I wanna ask you the question that I ask all of my guests on the program, what is the aha moment that clients have when they come to work with you that you wish more people would know They’re going to have?

I wish leaders realize, realized that. Regardless of what their business does, they’re ultimately in the people business, and especially as leaders, your job is to get work done vicariously through your team. You’re less a technician now and more a people person. Your job is the people business and. When you realize that you’re in the people business, you see your job differently, you realize how important it is that we clearly communicate that we have an aligned vision, that we’re aligned with the vision, that we hold one another accountable, and that we have open, honest conversations.

How we work and function together as a team is so important because most companies. Focus on strategy. They focus on how we can deliver the product better. They don’t often work on the health of the company. They focus on the performance, but not on the health. And so if leaders realized how important and how simple that can be, it’s.

It doesn’t have to be complex, doesn’t have to be complicated, but it has to be a priority. They have to be very intentional as to designing a culture and a team that is healthy. And Patrick Lencioni, in his book, the Five Dysfunctions of Teams, and he’s written several other books that are wonderful, is a great read.

I would recommend that to anyone. But that at the end of the day, what I think most of these teams realize is the power of being open and honest with one another and being a healthy team and how that gives them a tremendous advantage in the marketplace. Thank you so much. Will there is so many great insights that people will gain from listening to this conversation.

I know I certainly have. It’s a process I think is the most important thing that people need to understand and that EOS is something that you should jump on. Sooner rather than later for your business. ’cause if you see any of those warning signs at all, it’s never too early to get on board and do those things.

So thank you for enlightening everyone about EOS and about sharing your story as well. And I really appreciate you being part of the program. I know it’s been a privilege to talk with you and just have a great conversation. I learned as I talk sometimes just, fleshing things out. So I really appreciate your questions and the way that you phrase to those.

And it was a great to have great to have a good conversation with you today. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being part of the program. And of course, we will include in the show notes all the information on how to get in contact with Will, and we remind everyone, of course to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

And we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for thought leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

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