In The Thick of It

What I challenge teams to do is to look at the

outcomes that they're measuring over a year, over a quarter,

however long, and ask yourself this question

If that number comes in lower

or higher than I wanted it to,

what will I wish I'd done differently along the way?

Welcome to In the Thick of it Toolbox,

the special series where inspiration meets implementation.

Here, we don't just share success

stories, we equip you with proven

tools and strategies from seasoned founders,

turning entrepreneurial dreams into actionable plans.

Prepare to be enabled and empowered on your journey.

You're not just listening to a

podcast, you're gaining access to an

essential toolbox for your business success.

Let's dive in.

I'm thrilled to have Curt Swindoll on the show

to unpack the entrepreneurial operating system for EOS.

As an EOS expert and implementer, Curt has

guided dozens of leadership teams in implementing this

comprehensive system of tools and disciplines designed

to help businesses gain traction, including my own.

Over the past two years, we partnered

with Curt to roll out EOS.

It has structured how our leadership team

clarifies vision, solves problems, and achieves alignment.

I've seen firsthand the tangible growth and team

health benefits EOS delivers when fully embraced.

In our discussion, Curt explains the EOS system and

framework, including roles like visionary and integrator, leadership team

meeting rhythms, and what it means to get 100%

of the people in the right seats.

We also swap stories of the impact of

EOS, like how it enabled me to take

a month long sabbatical, confident that the business

would thrive without me there day to day.

If you lead a small to midsized

business and have struggled to gain traction on

your big vision, this episode is for you.

Let's jump in.

Welcome back to another episode of

In the Thick of It Toolbox edition.

I am thrilled today to have Curt Swindoll

with me here in the studio.

Kurt, thanks so much for making the drive over.

Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Little background.

I've said this before, and I will continue

saying this, all of our guests are special.

Some of them are special in different ways, and

Curt is special in that my firm, we've been

working with Curt for the last, I guess, two

years now, rolling out something that we'll talk more

about here in a minute called EOS.

We'll expand on that.

The desire and the idea behind this special toolbox

edition is to help further equip founders with tools

that they can use to carry their organizations further

beyond just kind of the inspirational stories that we

share with other founders and I know how much

I have benefited from eos and working with you,

and I know how much our team and our

organization as a whole has benefited from eos.

And so I'm really excited to share

this idea, this concept, with our audience.

So, again, thank you, Curt, for coming down.

My privilege. I hope. I'm just not special.

Like, all my kids are special, but I

don't even know how to respond to that. I don't know.

Yeah, just throwing that out there. You love me.

Like, I don't know.

Funny enough, in the last week, my

older two, we've got three kids.

My older two made a comment that led me

to believe that they think that my wife and

I love our youngest son the most. So I don't know.

Now, see? Isn't that interesting?

I don't know where that came from.

Yeah, so it's not true, guys. Yeah.

All right, well, Curt, let's just

start with kind of some background.

So, prior to doing what you're doing now, what

kinds of things have you done throughout your career?

Yeah, a lot of different things.

I think I'm, by nature, really know.

I grew up reading curious George. Right.

So it's like, that resonated with me, the idea

of this monkey that gets into all kinds of

trouble because he's trying to satisfy his curiosity.

So, I've been in multiple sea

level roles through my career.

I pursued an MBA mid career.

For me, it was just learning to really

master the art of leadership and management, understanding

the way businesses work and what makes them

successful and those kinds of things.

So I've done a lot of different things.

I've been in multiple different industries.

And for me, every change was another opportunity

to grow and develop as a leader and

a manager and a human being.

What was kind of the highlight of your

career prior to doing what you're doing now?

I love it you asked that question.

We didn't even prompt this. Right.

But if I thought about one story I

wanted to tell here, it was this.

That in 40 years of my work as an executive

and in my career spanning all these different industries and

all of that, I've had exactly one experience, one where

I was surrounded by people who not just loved each

other but excelled in their roles.

As we say in our operating system, we had 100% of

the right people in the right seats, and they excelled.

And, man, we got stuff done, and we just had a

blast doing it, and that was just a career highlight.

And I've had people that were sitting around

the table with me back in those days.

Come to me 20 years later and say, boy,

we really had something special then, didn't we?

Which is obviously code for, I

haven't really experienced that again either.

That's how rare it is.

It's amazing when you get to operate

in your sweet spot alongside other people

that are operating in their sweet spot.

I'm telling you, there is nothing like it.

And when everyone is operating in their sweet spot,

everyone loves each other, cares for each other, has

each other's back, works hard, puts in the effort,

focuses on what they should be doing.

I don't think there's anything like it.

I was talking with a leadership team the other

day, 30 mid managers in the room, and I

started to break down, telling that story.

I mean, that told me how deeply meaningful that experience was

and how much I desire other people to have it.

What led you into what it is you're doing today?

Yeah, I had been consulting for

the better part of 20 years.

As I said before, kind of mid career MBA.

I taught at the master's level at a university.

I was really a student of business.

And I think the focus for so many

years has been on tools and disciplines.

You can use this tool, the balance scorecard,

but here's a great tool for you.

The annual review process or quarterly meetings

and conversations and interactions with people and

tool after tool, strategic planning, tools and

processes and all that.

But all of this was kind of individual pieces.

And when I was on the board of a company

that was implementing eos, I looked at this thing and

I said, where has this been my whole life?

Because all of a sudden, it elevated the conversation

from individual tools and disciplines to a framework of

a complete system of tools and disciplines.

And I was hooked immediately.

Having benefited from this, I

can totally relate to that.

And we'll unpack eos more here in just a minute.

But first, something you said jumped out at me.

You talked about, you did your MBA mid career.

Most of the people I know that have gone

through that, they got their undergrad, they went and

worked for a little while, and most of them

did it in their mid to late 20s.

What caused you mid career, as you

say, to go, you know what?

I need to go back to school and do this? Yeah.

I just had an inward urge to

feel like I had mastered something.

I suppose in some ways, Scott were all kind

of products of the way we were raised and

who our parents were and what their successes and

failures were and all of that.

And I have a dad who's fairly successful, kind of

in his own right, and for me, I wanted to

have a domain where I could feel like I had

achieved some kind of success or mastery.

And for me, the experience of going back and studying business

after I knew what some of the questions were that I

had, that was, and I'm a lifelong learner, so the idea

of more education is compelling to me and interesting anyway, so

I think that was a lot of it.

And a supportive wife along the way that helped a lot.

Supportive spouse is a theme that has come up in

almost all of our episodes, regardless of the type of

guest, whether it's been a toolbox or founders.

I was in school with, a guy in my cohort I

was in school with told his wife he was going to

do it, said, hey, I'm going to go do this.

And midway he realized the

limitations of that approach.

I tell people all the time, you're

going to go back and do it.

You need to have a conversation with your

mate, and they've got to be on board.

I sat down with my kids before I did it and

I said, listen, this is going to take better part of

a couple of years here, and dad's not going to have

time on the weekends like I've had in the past.

It's going to be a sacrifice that

we're all going to wind up making.

I think it's going to be helpful

for us in the long run.

But I got to know you're on board with this.

And so I went in with the support of wife and

kids and I would recommend everybody do it that way.

I don't want to turn this into an exhaustive conversation

about an MBA, but I do think that this is

something that a lot of people in business do.

Think about it at some point.

What advice would you give to somebody who may be on

the fence about whether or not they should do it?

Well, I suppose it begins with, what

are the questions that you have?

What are you looking to accomplish?

I think I wanted to first have a sense that

I was closer to mastering, or at least more completely

understanding the art and science of business and the way

companies work and what makes them excel and what are

the important factors and those kinds of things.

I wanted to be able to understand things outside the industry

that I was working in or that I had worked in.

I probably wanted advancement opportunities and the

chance to grow and expand my career

options and those kinds of things.

So I think you just got to go into it knowing what

you're ultimately looking for and want to get out of it.

I think that's a key part of it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. All right.

On to eos Os operating system. Yeah.

Most people, when they hear that, they think

about it in the context of a computer.

Talk to me about what that means in

the context of a business or an organization.

Yeah, I get questions all the time.

So you help companies implement

a computer operating system?

It's not quite that. Yeah.

A business operating system is a system

and a framework of tools and disciplines

that help businesses run successfully, efficiently and

effectively in doing what they do.

Like I said earlier, I think many

times the conversation is around a tool.

It's an approach, it's a way to engage employees.

It's a way to understand finances, to

set priorities, to do annual planning, all

kind of individual pieces to it.

And anybody who's read Stephen Covey, Jim Collins,

Pat Lynchione, the list goes on and on.

Malcolm Gladwell, all of these people, you're going

to read those books and you're going to

wind up with ten more things to do.

And they're great things to do.

And many of those things we do in an operating

system, but we do them in a way that captures

an approach to using those tools and disciplines effectively.

So I think that that's the

distinction about an operating system.

It's a complete framework of tools

and disciplines that help leadership teams

clarify their vision, create traction around

that vision, and cultivate healthy relationships.

At least that's what eos does.

Over the years, I've read a number of books that

I would say outline some sort of operating system.

I've read scaling up by Vern harnish,

which is great clockwork by Michael McCallowitz.

And then you said the word traction a minute ago,

which that's kind of a key part of this. It is.

This idea of EOS is really

laid out in the book traction.

The thing that I have liked so much

about EOS is just what you said.

It's this all encapsulating thing with rhythms and,

you know, each week, each quarter, each year,

how these things are supposed to work together.

And I personally feel like of all the business

operating systems I've had exposure to, it is the

most cohesive, it is the most well laid out

and structured, and it gives you the whole, but

it gives you all the little individual building blocks

in a very easy to digest manner.

Yeah, I think Gino Wickman nailed it.

He's the founder of EOS,

lifelong entrepreneur up in Detroit.

Had folks approaching him saying, help us run our

business as successfully as you run your business.

And while the tools and disciplines

themselves are not anything new.

They're things that we've been reading about

and understanding for a long time.

He figured out a way to kind of get it all done.

We were talking a few minutes ago about the MBA.

I remember we'd come out of our

strategy class, and everybody was hyped, right?

You don't get an MBA unless you like strategy and all.

So we were all excited about that.

We were going into implementation was the

next class we were going into.

And I remember our implementation Prof.

Said, first day we were meeting, you

know, guys, you've come out of strategy.

You're pretty excited about all of, you

know, strategy without implementation is worthless.

And he's right. And all of a.

Like, the whole class was like, okay, now I

think I understand why I need this class. Right?

And so what is it?

Gino says, vision without traction is hallucination.

And so, unfortunately, that's what a

lot of companies have, an hallucination.

They'll be able to achieve their vision.

But when there's no traction and execution in place,

those pieces in place, and that's the hard part.

The hard part isn't vision.

The hard part is getting it done.

And in my career, I just saw company

after company, organization after organization, struggle to move

their people forward in this cohesive, aligned way.

And with the OS, I saw a way to do that.

You talk about vision being the easy part.

I think that to some degree, every

business leader has some amount of vision.

Some people, it may be bigger than others.

Some people, it might be more

well thought out than others.

But one of the things that I so appreciate about

eos is that it does give you a framework to

lay out that vision in an approachable way. Be.

Yeah, I say that eos

isn't a strategic planning process.

It's a strategy execution system. Right?

So we're familiar with strategic planning in that process of

maybe you go away, maybe certainly you allocate time in

your calendar for the team to sit down and think

about where do we want to go?

What does the next three years or

five years or ten years look like?

And to execute those kinds of things.

But when we get back to the office, we

get hit with everything that we've been doing and

everything that's been taking up all of our time.

And so how do you get a toe in

the door to being able to do something different?

Is it just working harder? Right?

Is it trying harder?

Like, what is it that causes the team to operate

any differently going forward than they did in the past?

And so this is why we're really stuck

doing the same things we've always done.

So I think that that's the key to it.

How do we integrate our vision into the fabric

of what the organization does day in, day out?

When we first started talking, we started this journey

with what y'all call the 1 hour meeting.

I don't think we're going to do a full

hour here, but could you take a few minutes

and just kind of unpack at a high level

what the EOS structure and rhythms are like?

Yeah, you bet.

So at a high level, EOS is, as I said

a minute ago, a complete system of tools and disciplines

that help leadership teams do three things, clarify their vision.

Where are we going and how are we going

to get there to create traction around that vision?

So everywhere you look, everybody is rowing

in the same direction, we're pursuing the

same goal and then creating healthy relationships

through open and honest communication.

We can't deal with issues if we don't know

what those issues are, if we're just kind of

thinking about them, but we're not talking about them.

And there's something that is really magical that happens

when a team trusts each other to tackle and

attack problems and not people, not each other.

So as the leadership team comes together around that

vision and those traction elements and around the relationships

and all of that, then little by little, the

tools and disciplines of Eos cascade into the organization

and ultimately have an impact on departments and divisions

and work groups all the way down to the

individual at a little more granular level.

What Gino found is that healthy companies are really

healthy when they're strong in six key component areas.

Vision.

Where are we going and how we're going to get

there and making sure everybody is on board with that.

Vision, people, what does it mean to have everyone

on the team that really fits the culture?

They're the right person for our team, and they're

in the right seat, they're in the right role.

Data having a handful of measures that

give us an absolute pulse on the

health of every part of our organization.

Give you a quick aside, I worked for home savings of

America a number of years ago and the CEO of Home

Savings had said, listen, if you'll create a system that gives

me these 21 charts and graphs, I'll tell you about the

health of our business in every key area.

It was a $50 billion company at

the time and that convinced me.

If the head of a $50 billion company can figure it

out with 20 numbers, we ought to be able to figure

it out in most cases with five or six or seven. Right.

So, data, objective set of measures.

An objective set of measures that give

us the pulse on the business with

clarity around vision, people and data.

We've got some issues that we need

to solve, and so healthy, strong organizations

are strong in the issues area.

When they're calling those issues out and they're

solving them as they arise in a way

that makes them go away forever.

The fifth area is process.

Healthy companies are healthy when they've documented the

most important things they do so they can

make sure those things get done the right

way and the same way every time.

And then finally, the 6th area is traction.

How do we wrestle that vision to

the ground and execute on it?

With focus and accountability and intention

and alignment, those kinds of things.

So we help through eos, companies get

strong in those six key component areas.

And when they're strong in those six areas, boys, there's

a whole lot of fun that starts happening, maybe talking

about it kind of where does it all begin?

It does start with that vision, and we

start with our ten year vision, right?

And then we start working our

way backward into smaller chunks.

It's, how do we eat that elephant?

It's the one bite at a time.

The elephant is that ten year, and then we

go down, walk us through kind of that progression. Yeah.

I think the interesting thing is that theoretically, it's about

understanding where are we going to be ten years out,

and then how do we walk back from that?

How do we deconstruct that until we're figuring out

quarter by quarter what we need to be doing?

But the implementation process is

completely opposite of that.

It doesn't start with vision.

It starts with a foundational set of tools and disciplines

that help us create traction so that when we pour

that vision in, there's a place for it to go,

there's a way for it to be executed.

Otherwise, we'd begun having clarity around our vision,

but we'd realize nothing's really changed around here.

So the process of implementing eos is one that

starts with, let's get some foundational tools in place,

let's get our meetings better, let's get more clarity

around how we're organized, who's responsible for what and

to whom are they accountable, those kinds of things.

Let's start setting up a cadence

of setting quarterly priorities that we're

really diligently working on addressing.

Let's draft a scorecard that's beginning to give us

a sense week by week, not just month by

month or quarter by quarter, but week by week.

How healthy are we?

And I think once those traction building tools are

in place now you can go clarify that vision.

Where are we going to be ten years from

now, three years from now, one year from now?

And you've got a place for that to go to be executed.

You said a word that jumped out

at me for very personal reasons.

So I'm going to tell a quick story. Great.

You said meeting. Yeah.

I actually was exposed to eos, probably at least two,

if not three or more years before we started working.

A man named Randy McDougall, who.

Randy, thank you.

I cannot thank you enough.

Randy's a great guy, good friend, great guy.

Randy was in town and he said, hey, I want to come

by and talk to you about this thing that I'm doing.

And he takes me through it.

We had that 1 hour meeting years and years back.

And at the time I didn't think that we were at a

place where we could really use it like it should have been.

And in hindsight, in retrospect, yeah.

I was going to ask in retrospect, in retrospect, had we

done it then I think about where we might be. Yeah.

Yeah.

But Randy walks me through this fast forward.

We've grown, we've got the beginnings of our

leadership team and we are trying to meet.

Although I will tell you, it was hazard both

in the cadence and frequency with which we met.

And the meetings were an absolute disaster.

And that was 100% on me.

We would start our meetings with a very loose agenda

and we would find ourselves all over the place.

We'd get to the end of the meeting.

We didn't even know what we talked about.

We didn't know who was supposed to

go do what and by when.

And after several months of these kinds of meetings, I

had to look at myself in the mirror and go,

I don't have the tools to do this. Well.

And I remembered that meeting with Randy. Yeah.

And scheduling wise, his calendar was full

where he had gaps, I didn't.

And so that actually ended up connecting us.

And so the meeting pulse, honestly, if somebody were to say,

I'm only going to do one piece of this, the l

ten meeting, I think is where this is really at.

It's a winner. It's a winner.

So would you take us through the idea,

the concept of an l ten meeting? Yeah, you bet.

People don't hate meetings.

They hate bad meetings.

I find people are energized through effective

meetings where really solving some great issues.

In a nutshell, the l ten

meeting is for a leadership team.

It's usually a 90 minutes weekly meeting

that everybody makes a real commitment to.

We talk about the importance of starting,

of scheduling at the same day and

time every week, and it's a priority.

You don't miss more than one or two.

You only miss if you're on vacation or if you're dead.

That's like what we like to say.

That's how important it is, because everybody's

got a priority that will beat having

that meeting in any given week.

So we need everybody there.

But if they can't all be there, we still meet.

The show must go on, right?

So same day, same time every week.

We always start on time.

We need to end on time, and then we want to

make sure that we use the same agenda every week.

And people can look at that and

say, that doesn't make any sense.

The issues change and all that.

Well, there's flexibility built into the

structure, the agenda of the meeting.

We always start with what we call a segue, where we

share a personal and a professional bit of good news.

And on that real quick. Yeah.

Most people spend more time with their coworkers

than they do with their own families. They do.

And I think in a lot of organizations, people

may not really know their coworkers all that well.

They pass each other in the hall, they

coming and going in the parking lot.

But I love starting our weeks off with the segue,

because it gives you the opportunity to get to know

that person across the table a little bit better and

know not just what's going on at work, but some

idea of what's going on at home.

Yeah, there's a real practical reason for it, too.

Neuroscience has shown us, I don't want to get

all technical, but neuroscience has shown us that when

people share joy and celebrate with each other, that

it really knits our hearts together.

There's some things that happen in the synapses of

the brain that just really, truly connect us in

a very deep way, a meaningful way.

And so that segue.

Yeah, it's a way to get into the meeting, and

certainly it's a way to understand each other in ways

beyond just as colleagues, but as human beings, as people.

But I think at a real pragmatic level,

sharing those highlights from our personal and professional

life help us understand and know and really

come to love each other more and more.

When I love someone, man, I'm going to

give everything I can to make sure they're

successful, and they'll do that for me, too.

So it's an important way that we start the meeting

right, then we move into a series of reviews where

we review the scorecard, we review the quarterly priorities that

have been set, what EOS calls rocks.

We review highlights that have come out of the customers that

we work with and the staff that we work with, see

if there's anything there that needs to be addressed.

And all of these reviews are not intended to

highlight issues that we're now going to immediately solve.

We're going to just put them on our issues list of

things that we're going to address a little bit later on.

We review some action items from the last week, what we

call to dos in EOS, and then we're going to complete

all that review work within about 25 minutes, which gives us

a full 60 minutes for doing what I call the most

important work that a leadership team does all week.

That's solve problems, work on issues, talk

about opportunities, address challenges, give updates, all

of those kinds of things.

And so we spend the lion's share of our

time, what we call idsing issues, identifying the root

cause of the issue, discussing it, and then identifying

what action are we going to take that will

solve that issue, really make it go away forever.

And then with 5 minutes left, or once we run

out of issues, kind of either way, running out of

time, running out of issues, it's time to wrap up

and we go through a process of evaluating the meeting,

even deciding on a one to ten scale.

How did we do today?

How can we get better and better at this?

That's part of what I really love about EOS.

It's not just about the execution

and the work of the business.

It's about learning about getting better

and better all the time. Right?

Was it Michael Jordan that was talking about

if I can just get 1% better, or

Tom Brady talked about getting 1% better. Right?

Every game, every week, if I can just get 1%

better, and I am a lot better over time.

And I love that idea of using the work of the

organization to improve the organization and each person in it.

That rating at the end, you said scale of one to ten.

So the l ten meeting level ten meeting. Exactly.

The idea and the goal is that every

meeting, everybody should be rated as a ten. Yes.

We're trying to get to nines and tens, and

when we get an eight, we get a seven.

Then we should be asking a follow up

question, how do we do better next time?

And we're asking that in a

way that's not an attacking way.

We're asking it in a way

that says let's learn together.

We didn't start, we weren't

sharp, we weren't all present.

Some of us were on technology.

Let's put the technology away.

Let's really be present with each

other, focused on each other.

We're just asking you to do this 90 minutes a week.

Could we just do that for 90 minutes?

Show up for each other each week?

Yeah, that's what I love about it.

For people who may be getting into this now

or have tried it and maybe stumbled, I want

to just give a little personal story here.

When we first started this, you sat in on our

first l ten and maybe even a couple of them.

And when we had to do it on our own for

the first time, I remember that first one and probably the

first few of them just being kind of clumsy. Yeah.

And it took us some repetition to really feel the flow.

And now I think everybody on the leadership team would

agree, even though we don't have a level ten every

time, we know what the meeting structure is going to

be, we know what the flow is going to be.

And that clumsiness that I talked about those first few

times, while the content may not always be exactly what

it needs to be, the clumsiness has gone away and

we've gotten much better at how we run them.

Running a business is like learning

to play a new instrument.

It's going to sound pretty bad at the beginning, right?

We're learning new ways of doing things.

I play the electric bass guitar, and after years of

kind of self teaching myself, I got some lessons.

I remember sitting down the first time and

I remember my bass teacher saying, "So, Curt,

play the C on the A string."

And I'm going like, why are you fretting like that?

I have no idea.

Why are you holding your hand over there?

Like, I don't know.

Okay, we're going to have to do the John wooden thing.

Gentlemen, this is how you tie your shoes, right?

And so learning how to run a business

in a truly effective, efficient way is going

to feel a bit awkward at first.

But seriously, in no time, you start

understanding that cadence, that structure, the rhythm

of it, and it begins to flow.

And it's just like, I can't

believe we ever operated without this.

A couple of things I want to just tack on to that one.

Having an implementer sit in on a couple of those

l ten meetings to help get you started is invaluable.

Something that we've been incredibly blessed to be able

to do is us has grown in popularity tremendously.

In fact, it's rare that I talk to

another business owner these days that isn't at

least familiar with it, if not doing it.

And when we first got started, some other

people I know were also doing it.

And we have actually traded and allowed them to

sit in on our meetings just as a shadow.

They're not actively participating.

It's kind of a listen only thing.

And conversely, we've had some of them that

have allowed us to sit in on theirs. That's great.

And I think that there's so much value

in watching how other people do it, even

though the structure and the framework is there.

I don't know.

There's just little subtle things that you pick

up on by watching somebody else do it.

Eos quotes a german philosopher and mathematician who says,

you can't be a part of a system and

understand that system at the same time. And that's it.

Right.

When you're in the middle of it, it's

hard to really understand it from the outside.

So you're running these meetings pre eos and

they're crummy, but for the life of you,

you can't figure out what's wrong.

I think I'm doing the right things.

Certainly my heart, my intention is to be doing the

right things, but it's really hard to see it.

So I think that's why being a coach and having

a coach who's able to stand on the sidelines and

see it from a different perspective than the players see

it is really valuable to the process.

I've talked about this a bunch before, and I will continue

beating this drum for as long as we're doing this.

Independent of eos, you need a coach, you need

a mentor, and you also need a peer group

of other business leaders, owners, executives that you can

bounce ideas off of because you can get really

myopic when all you see is your own stuff

and hearing from them what they're going through, giving

them some insight into what you're going through.

And the advice that you get the ability to bounce

things around is so key, so independent of eos.

Find your tribe, find your coach, find your mentor.

Well, there's nothing like learning.

You're not alone in this, that this is hard work.

This is hard work. It's not easy.

If it was easy, everybody would be

doing a great job of it. Right.

But when businesses fail in the order of, what, 50%?

And within a few years, it takes no time at

all, you realize that the business of business is not

something we were just kind of born to do.

It's something that takes a lot of effort, and being able

to sit with others who are in your same situation is

a great way to be reminded that we're not the only

ones out there struggling with this to figure it out.

Yeah.

What you talked about just now about

the business of business, it got me

thinking about the growth of our organization.

And it started as me doing this thing by myself.

And little by little, it grew and grew and

grew, and you don't know what you don't know.

And you also have to be willing to set aside

pride and say, I don't know what I don't know.

And so if anybody listening is like, I don't have this

all figured out, but I don't want to tell anybody that.

I'm going to say, get over yourself and pick

up traction and start putting these things into place.

I think the broader point about that, Scott,

is just the tremendous value of humility.

And I think it starts with, know we've got some

things that are kind of screwed up here and we

don't have it figured out, but we want to.

And if we can begin from that place of humility.

Like I said before, EOS

starts with the leadership team.

If the leadership team is not reflecting the humility

it wants to see in its staff, it's never

going to see it in its staff.

And so that first step starts out by asking for help

and saying, there's a better way to run this business.

Why wouldn't we do that? Right.

What's the benefit of saying, yeah, we learned

how to do it all on our own?

I think let's take the shortcut and learn from

what thousands and thousands of other businesses have proven,

that there's a way to do this.

And the way you do it isn't what's important.

What's important is what it is that we're

actually trying to accomplish here in this business?

I shared my story about how we

decided to go on the CoS journey.

You've worked with dozens of organizations helping

them get this up and running.

What are some of the other, outside of

the fact that everybody can benefit from this?

What are some of those warning signs?

Or what are those things that you hear from people

that cause them to call you in the first place? Yeah.

So I start with, are you having fun?

I mean, life is just really short.

We spend an awful lot of time

at this, in the workplace, right?

Are we having a blast at that?

Like, did it used to be fun?

It's not fun anymore.

Let's get back to having joy in our work.

So I think that's a starting point, right?

And then I think there are a

lot of other kind of symptomatic areas.

We're hitting our head against the ceiling.

We were growing for a while,

but we just stopped growing.

I can't figure out why.

What changes do we need to

make in order to move forward? Right.

I just can't seem to nail our leadership team.

I think it's good, but I'm not sure about

one or two slots or I'm not sure how

we should be structured, organized, those kinds of things.

Our meetings are a joke.

We're struggling with accountability like we talk

about it, and it's not like I

think our people are working hard.

I don't think it's that.

I just don't know that we're

really owning the point of accountability.

We like to say that we want to

create an environment where accountable people thrive.

And if we're not thriving and if we don't

have accountability, if we're struggling with the humility piece,

maybe we're implementing tools like core values.

Jim Collins wrote about that in the mid ninety s.

It built to last.

It was a great idea. What in the world are we

supposed to do with those things?

Are we creating wall art or are we actually

using them and embedding them in a way that

makes a difference in the team that we're creating?

All of those kinds of

things, people issues, issue issues.

Inconsistent execution, a struggle

with implementing vision.

A lot of visionaries have got vision for days.

They've got lots and lots of ideas, and maybe

even they're drowning in that too many ideas.

What are the ideas we should be executing on?

Which ones really should be put in the parking

lot to see whether or not they stand the

test of time and that kind of thing.

I mean, those are some of the kinds of issues that

we see teams struggling with and wanting to get better at.

And some of them, they just want to

be as good as they can be.

They think they have a mission, a purpose, a cause

that's worthy of being great, truly great at what they

do, and they want to excel at it.

And eos is a mechanism for helping them excel.

Let's do some eos vocabulary for a minute. Yeah.

You used the v word visionary.

Talk us through what that means in the context of eos.

It's probably one of the greatest elements

of eos and something I've benefited from.

I'm not a visionary, but my wife is a visionary.

My wife has all kinds of great ideas. I don't buy that.

Yeah. No, yeah.

And it's true.

I'm an integrator at heart, which is the

complement to the visionary in the eos world.

So, first of all, we issue titles.

Let's get rid of CEO, COO, CFO, CAO CIO, CTO.

Let's get rid of all that kind of stuff,

because they mean different things in different environments.

So that's a big part of it.

We're not going to get stuck on.

Is it defined as mission?

Or is that values or mission or vision or objectives

or let's get rid of all of that stuff.

And let's speak clearly and plainly.

So there is the role in an

organization of a visionary, and that visionary

loves big relationships, solving big problems.

Typically, their ear is to the ground.

They've got a feel for the market.

They know what it needs.

They could see around corners.

They know where they want to go.

They know what.

They have a sense of what they need to do to get there.

They just have vision.

And we find that great visionaries are complemented by someone

who works in an integration role, a role of an

integrator who helps that vision come to life.

So it's the old Disney story that we've

all heard, Walt Disney and Roy Disney, and

how those two work together, right?

It's Steve Jobs and Wozniak.

And you see it over and over and over

again in business, the companies that really succeed have

somebody who reflects that vision, the culture of the

organization, that sensibility about that, and they are coupled

with somebody whose focus and joy in life is

to come alongside them and make things happen.

So, for 40 years, my wife has said, I got this great

idea, but I'm not really sure how we can pull it off.

I said, oh, that's the easy part.

The idea is the great thing.

She thinks the great thing

is actually getting done right.

And so we complement each other that way.

So, in a way, our relationship as a

couple is much like the relationship of a

visionary and integrator in an organization.

The idea here is that the visionary says,

we're going to go take that hill. Right?

And it's the integrator's job to say, okay, well, it's

this far away, so we need this much gas, and

it's going to take us this long to get there.

So we need to make sure we've got rations for.

And once we get there, we're going

to need shovels and pickaxes and dynamite.

And it's their job to not figure out

the what, but figure out the how.

Yeah, it's mustering all those resources to

get everybody focused on taking that hill.

And that's what they love to do.

They love that.

They love being somebody who comes alongside a

visionary and helps to execute that vision.

It's the way God made them.

It's just kind of what is put in

their heart, the way they love to operate.

They can't stand the idea of having to be a

visionary any more than the visionary can necessarily stand the

idea of dealing with all of that detail and internal

stuff that's needed in order to make all that work.

So that integrator works on the collaboration and the

communication, the systems, the process, the people, the finances,

all of those elements and resources that are required

in order to make that vision a reality.

When you have that right visionary integrator, pairing

the freedom that that creates is just unbelievable.

The idea that somebody can say, like I said

a minute ago, take this hill, but be overwhelmed

with the logistics of how to do it.

They can see it, they can picture themselves

standing there, but it can wear on you.

Yes, my wife is a visionary, as I said a

second ago, and she was a visionary in her organization,

a nonprofit we started 1214 years ago, and she didn't

have an integrator, and she was trying to serve in

the role of integrator, and it burned her out.

She finally threw up her hands year and a half

or more ago, and she said, I think I'm done.

So she exited the organization.

We found somebody else, and in the

meantime, we brought eos into that organization.

We started understanding it, implementing it.

And when the executive director of that nonprofit resigned

unexpectedly this last May, Debbie came along and said,

you know, I think if I had an integrator,

I might be interested in getting involved again, but

just breathing fresh life in her.

And so we didn't make the decision until we

identified is there somebody who would be her integrator.

And once we identified that, boom, away they went.

And she said to me the

other day, I'm really having fun.

I'm loving life right now.

And I said, what's behind that?

Is it like contentment?

Like, what is it?

And she said, well, I think that's a part

of it, but I just love what I'm doing.

And I think that that's what I long

for all visionaries to ultimately experience, and all

integrators, too, for that matter, right?

Is to be able to love what we're doing, because we feel

like we're able to focus on doing those things that we were

put on earth to do something you said about your wife stepping

away for a while and then more or less being kind of

thrust back into it, but now enjoying it.

It takes me back to something else that was

going on around the time we first started talking

with you about helping us roll out eos.

I was traveling, and I met up with a guy

who runs a firm very similar to ours, roughly the

same size, been around roughly the same amount of time.

And he told me about a book.

In fact, it was clockwork, that I referenced earlier.

And in this book, Clockwork, he lays out this framework

for how to run an organization, and he challenges the

owner founder to go put these things in place.

And you need to take you as the owner founder,

once you've got these things in place, you need to

take a full month off of your business. Wow.

And not take a week here and take a week there.

And over the course of a year, you've taken a month.

No, it's first to 31st.

And the idea behind it is in

a month, it's a full financial period.

And most businesses are going to

do everything that a business does.

You're going to bill for work, you're going to

collect for work, you're going to run payroll, you're

going to pay vendors, you're going to do whatever

it is, deliver whatever it is you deliver.

And so you've got this full cycle.

And the idea is that this month long

break is a test to see if you

have what he would call a clockwork business.

So we're at this inflection point in our

organization, and we're going, man, I think we

need to do this EOS thing.

And at the same time, I get pointed to this

book, and I thought, wow, we really should do this.

And we're implementing this eos thing.

And in January of 2022, I told our leadership

team as we were doing our annual planning, hey,

guys, we're going to spend all of this year

and some part of next year creating clarity, accountability,

structure, figuring out where I'm a bottleneck.

And to test this all, I'm going to take a month

off sometime in 2023, which I did this past June.

I bring all that up to say, I could not have done that.

We could not have done that as

an organization were it not for eos.

But let's talk for a second

about what that did for you. Scary.

Initially, yeah.

But the idea was back in the beginning of 2022,

the idea was terrifying and exciting at the same time.

And I'm somebody who struggles with control.

If you told people on my team five years ago,

hey, someday Scott's going to take a whole month off.

They would have just. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

And so the idea that, okay, now really, really given

up a lot of control here, that was really scary. Yeah.

And so what was the experience like?

Obviously, you did it when you felt

the organization was ready for it. Right.

You don't just go read the book

and go, okay, cool, here we go.

In three months. Yeah. We're going to take off. Right.

You've got to take the time to build out the.

So you prepared for it.

What was that experience actually like?

It was life giving.

And what started as a, here's how

we're going to test what we've built.

It didn't start out as, man, I

want to take a month off.

As we got closer and closer to that last day

in the office, the idea of that extended break became

more and more appealing with each passing day.

And when I got a couple of weeks into it,

it takes me a while to really mentally unplug. Unplug.

And so a couple of weeks into it,

I was like, wow, this is pretty amazing.

And I'm going way deeper on this than I

intended to, but one of the things that I

had planned to do during my sabbatical was take

some time to not work in the business.

I'm not checking email, and that's against the rules, but I

wanted to take some time to work on the business.

And I had this long list of things I was going to do.

I had this stack of books that was taller than

I am, that there was no way I was going

to get through, but I'd planned to go and take

some time each week to really think about the business

and look back at some historical reports.

And what if we did this, and what if we did that?

And I didn't do a minute of any

of that that I had planned to do.

And I felt this weird consternation, this weird guilt.

And about a week before I came back

to the office, I had this realization.

The fact that I didn't do that was not only

healthier for me, but for the organization as well, because

it allowed me to come back with a completely fresh

set of eyes that I would not have otherwise had.

It allowed me to separate myself from some of

the emotion that's attached to certain things in the

organization, and it allowed me to be much more

objective in how I looked at things.

It was almost as if I had stepped into

somebody else's business and was able to take the

advice that I would give to somebody else.

I'm not good at taking my own advice, but this created

an avenue for me to be able to do that.

Yeah, that's really wonderful.

I think we think of sabbaticals as kind of the

domain of academics or clergy, and I highly recommend it.

I've had three or four times in my career where I've

had two months, three months off, four months in one situation,

and on one of those, I went on a retreat of

silence and solitude for three weeks, saw a therapist and nobody

else five days a week for three weeks in a row.

And I just highly recommend those kinds of experiences, because

we start looking at life differently, and we begin to

realize how much identity we get from our work.

That's a pretty tough place to look for one's identity,

because then your identity is great when things are going

well, and it sinks when it's not going well.

People are people of worth, regardless of

whether or not they're running and involved

in successful or unsuccessful companies.

How could we come to that place where we

understand our unique worth and identity and value without

it being connected to what we do?

And I think getting away from what we do

becomes a mechanism for being able to come to

grips with where our true identity really lies.

As you say that, interestingly enough, one of

the books that I did, I started it.

I need to go back and finish it.

Book I started on while I was on the

sabbatical was actually on the topic of identity.

And I will confess that for really, the last

nine years, I have really put so much of

my identity in being Scott, the business owner.

And I didn't make the connection until just now.

But in the last couple of months, I've

had this realization that I'm actually not fixated

on that like I once was.

And it was the sabbatical that did that for me.

That's a healthy thing, man.

There's a life changing thing right there.

Yeah, it's valuable. Good for you. Good for you.

All right, let's get back to some terminology.

And there's a little bit of Alphabet soup.

We've got eos, rprs. Yeah.

Right person, right seat is what it stands for.

And it's really how we evaluate whether or not we've got

the people on the team that we should have and whether

or not they're in the roles they should be in.

So right people is a factor of evaluating.

Does every person on our team reflect our core values?

Each of our core values, most of the time,

because that's what we want we want a culture

that's cohesive and a reflection of the values that

we kind of hold near and dear.

That's what it means to have the right people.

They're in the right seat when they understand

and are capable in their role, and it's

something that they want to do.

And this is where another Alphabet comes in.

GWC.

Yeah, they get it.

They were born to do this work.

It's in their nature to do it.

They want to do this work, and then

they have the capacity to do this work.

They've been nurtured in how to do this work.

Background, education, experience, expertise,

those kinds of things.

The GWC, their job.

This is Alphabet soup.

But it becomes a shorthand way of

talking internally and evaluating really quickly, do

we have the right people or not?

And I could give you story after story just

from experience with clients about places and parts and

pieces where somebody was in the right seat, they

understood their job, they did their job well, but

they were a cancer to the culture.

This was not the right culture for them, wasn't a

fit for them, and conversely, where they really fit the

culture, this is someone I love to work with.

I love working with them, but we

just can't find a seat for them.

All the seats are filled, and we've got to have both.

And so I say that it's possible us identifies.

You'll never experience the kind of life you want

to experience in your work until you've got 100%

of the right people in the right seats.

And the only way I've had teams

ask me, is that really possible?

I mean, really 100%?

And I said, it is.

If you really do two things every quarter, you show up

knowing how many of the folks on your team are not

the right person or not in the right seat.

And then, second, you prioritize solving those

issues, really make it a point.

Doesn't mean you will solve it that quarter, but

you are prioritizing, working through rprs issues until you

get to the place where we've got 100% rprs.

Are there any other tools within the EOS

toolbox that you want to highlight real quick? Sure.

All told, there's probably 30 in them.

Not 30 I want to highlight, but 30

of them that help from everything from evaluating

the sales organization to a scorecard.

We'll talk about the scorecard for just a second.

EOS's twist on the scorecard idea is that

we're not just measuring outcomes, monthly outcomes, quarterly

outcomes, but we're actually measuring weekly activities.

So we're not just looking at lagging

indicators, we're looking at leading indicators.

Why do we want to do that, you might ask?

Well, the early warning sign is

like the bumps on the freeway.

It gives you a warning before you wind up in

the ditch, because it's a lot easier just to twist

that steering wheel a little bit and get realigned back

into the road than it is to get your car

when it's all of a sudden in a ditch. Right.

So I find teams really struggle with

identifying what activities should we be monitoring

here at the leadership level?

I'll echo that. You bet.

It's a tough thing for virtually all

of my clients to figure out.

I had one of my clients say,

it happens to be a nonprofit organization.

They said, we measure progress.

We measure outcomes in tenths

of a percent over decades.

You think there's some things that we could actually measure

here that are going to make a difference, and so

we're working with them to figure some of that out.

Right.

When you see such marginal gains and change

over time, what in the world can we

be measuring actually on a weekly basis?

So a key thing that I challenge teams to do

is to look at the outcomes that they're measuring over

a year, over a quarter, however long, and ask yourself

this question, if that number comes in lower or higher

than I wanted it to, what will I wish I'd

done differently along the way?

There's something that we might be able to measure on

a weekly basis, maybe not every time, but it certainly

is an indicator of something to look at.

So the scorecard is something we encourage

teams to really try to dial in.

You said earlier we started practicing the l ten,

the weekly meeting, a little bit differently, and we

didn't do it real well at the beginning.

It feels kludy and all that.

It kind of takes time to get it into shape.

Same thing's true with the scorecard.

And in fact, a lot of things in eos are like that.

The key isn't to master it from the beginning.

The key is to get started.

People say, should we start at the beginning of the year,

the middle of the year, the end of the year?

It doesn't matter.

Just start.

If you're waiting for the leadership team

to get in place, you're waiting for

things to slow down in the schedule.

If you're waiting for the magical two or three days to

open up, will you be able to really give yourself holy.

It's just not going to happen.

Eos works with entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs, almost by definition,

are really busy people.

It's never going to slow down.

How do we get this thing rolling?

How do we get it started?

And I find with the scorecard, you draft that initial scorecard

and now we're off to the races and we'll tweak it

and we'll improve it and iterate on it over time.

I wish we had kept track, but I don't

know what version number of our scorecard we're on

and we're still tweaking it and asking ourselves semi

regularly, hey, is that still really important?

Is that still telling us what we think it needs to.

It's great.

And to your point, you don't have to

have it perfect out of the gate.

No, it's just important that you start

somewhere and tweak it as you go.

Perfection is just the enemy of greatness and

we want to nail it the first time.

And when we don't feel like we can do

that, well, I'll wait to do this until I

feel like I can really get it down.

And so we talk over and over again about

we're drafting this, but we're going to come back

over and over to it, we're going to tweak

it, we're going to iterate on it.

It's going to get better and better and better.

I was working with a team where the CEO

said after a year of working together that he

finally felt like, here's another Alphabet soup.

His vision traction organizer, his one page strategic

plan in eos was really dialed in.

And he loved it.

He was ready to share it with his board.

Took a year to get it there, but it would have

never happened if he hadn't started the process to begin with.

We had a project, actually.

Guess it's still an ongoing project.

And talking with the person heading that up, one

of the things I said to them was, v

one is good enough for day one.

And I love it.

You've just got to start somewhere. I love it.

I love it.

It may not work for software systems fair,

but it works great for operating systems and

management practices and tools and disciplines. Right.

Let's just start somewhere.

Let's start figuring this out and we'll get there.

We didn't create these problems overnight.

We're not going to fix them overnight.

It's going to take time. 1%.

Yes, it's going to take in the long run.

You're going to wind up saying it took longer than I wish

it had, but it went faster than I thought it would.

And I think that that

combination is a great combination.

You realize a year or two and this has flown by.

We're so much better than who I thought.

I wish it hadn't taken two years to get

to this place, but considering how far we've come,

oh, my word, we've been able to make huge

mileage in such a short period of time.

I'm going to get the book wrong.

I feel like it was atomic habits and it probably is

wrong, but a book that I've read sometime in the last

year and a half, it talked about this cycling team.

I think that it was out of the UK,

and for a long time they were dominant.

And for decades they just fell off

and couldn't win to save their life.

And they. No, no.

They put the stake in the ground and said, no,

we're going to get back to greatness by x date.

And they dedicated themselves to their craft.

And day by day, week by week, they would dial

the knob in one direction or another on some variable,

whether it was the type of clothing that they were

using, or the kind of tires or the brakes or

the diet or the workout program.

And they didn't go from last

place to first place overnight.

It was all right, we're going to test these different

variables and see if that moves the needle at all.

And then when we feel like we've got that

one dialed in, we're going to go do the

next and the next and the next.

That's a great metaphor, isn't it?

It's just such a great metaphor for business.

And there are lots of dials to be turning

and twisting and trying different things in different ways.

Right.

Some are going to help, some are not going to help.

But you don't know until you try. You don't.

You're going to figure it out over time.

It's one of the things I love about it.

And every business is different.

You mentioned something a minute ago that I think

is worth talking about for just a second.

My business is a for profit.

You talked about you're working with a nonprofit.

This is applicable across all kinds of organizations.

And if this is too personal, we can cut it.

But you and your wife actually

have eos in your household?

We do, yeah.

We run our business off of it.

And so there are EOS implementers that actually use it

for their private lives with their husband or wife, and

they use it to identify what are the quarterly priorities

we want to set the rocks we want to set

as a couple, as a family.

So Debbie and I aren't using it quite that way.

But since we're running our business

with it, it feels really personal.

And there are times we branch over into some

personal priorities that we want to set that we

know will have ultimately a business impact.

But, yeah, eos says it works

in any business that has people.

So last time I checked, that's pretty much all of them.

And so as a result, we've seen vertical after

vertical take advantage of it and benefit from it.

We did a study recently that showed,

on average, companies employing and implementing EOS

well are growing by 34% a year.

That's on average.

So I feel like I'm the investment guy who

has to say, your experience may be different. Right.

But overall, we see pretty tremendous growth out of

organizations that get all these parts and pieces right.

How long would you say it takes for

an organization to start seeing value from EOS?

We see it pretty quickly in areas like the flow

of meetings and the structure of meetings and setting priorities

and beginning to really focus on those priorities.

Those kinds of pieces begin coming together right away.

Within two or three months, they're beginning

to see a cadence to this happen.

The flywheel, to use Jim Collins'term is beginning

to turn, and it's beginning to roll.

It doesn't feel normal yet.

It doesn't feel natural yet.

It still feels forced.

Like we've got to focus and concentrate on

it more than we would like to.

So I would say to get to that place where

it becomes just a more and more natural piece is

probably about a year to really nail those pieces down.

And certainly then growth is happening through that

process, and you're beginning to really address issues.

And listen, not all of my clients are growing.

Some of them are struggling for one reason or another.

We'll take our quarterly session and

really dive in deeply into that.

I've done that recently with a couple of

my clients that are saying, you know what?

The market has changed, our situation has changed, the

demand for our services changed, whatever it might be.

And so we'll really diagnose.

What do we need to do to put the full court

press on from a marketing and sales standpoint as an example?

And they leave that process feeling like

they're energized and focused to make something

different happen over the next 90 days.

So while the long term change is certainly

something that will take some time to put

together, we see some pretty quick and immediate

response from folks that are implementing it.

Thinking about how people can get started.

One of the first things I would say is you should

read traction, or if you want the cliff notes version, there's

a shorter one called what the heck is EOS?

If you want the super short.

So that's one way to do it.

I think there's even a two minute video you might

be able to find in YouTube or something, right?

You can find anything on YouTube. You can.

Now, there are different ways to

go about rolling out eos.

Some people will choose to read the books and self

implement, but others, and my firm being one of them.

Another confession here.

I know myself well enough to know that I

probably do not have the discipline, especially with all

the different things that I've got going on.

I didn't have the discipline to be able

to really roll this out on my own.

And so we looked to an implementer

and gratefully glad we found you.

Talk to us about what does it mean to

work with an implementer on setting up EOS.

I was talking with a CEO yesterday, and they're not

running on EOS, but most of the people in his

peer group, we talked about peer groups earlier, right.

Are running on it, and lots

of other people that he knows.

And he goes, I think it's time

for us to make that jump.

And he said we had to realize, we tell

our clients all the time, we're the experts here.

You ought to hire us to do that work.

You could do it yourself.

Is it something you really want to do?

And same thing I was talking with another

client yesterday was about employing a marketing partner.

For know, it feels like this

is something we really should understand.

And I said, is that something you really want to do?

GWC, right?

Get it, want it, have the capacity.

Is that something you really want to do?

She sat back and she goes, oh, my goodness.

I don't know that I really do.

All right, well, maybe you ought to think

about hiring an expert to actually run that

for you instead of trying to figure out

how you become an expert in it yourself.

Listen, we're thrilled when any company makes a

decision to employ EOS as a part of

their operating system, and making that happen.

We're even happier when they choose one operating

system and choose to run with it.

But in our experience, we figure there are a couple

hundred thousand companies that are running on EOS today.

Many of those self implementing many of those will

find that they implement a couple of the parts

of EOS where they feel the most pain and

they get some benefit from that.

But the real benefit from EOS comes in

strengthening all six of the key components.

Vision, people, data issues, process and traction.

And not just the traction piece and the data piece or

the people piece and the issues piece when all six of

them are being worked on together, I was calculating out.

I've spent hundreds of hours preparing for

the job of facilitating the conversations that

teams need to have to implement this.

Hundreds of hours.

And then on top of that, I've

spent hundreds of hours in session rooms

with many different kinds of organizations.

I think that's the benefit that you get when

you hire a professional implementer to help you implement

it versus when you're doing it on your own.

The tools and resources are out there from

eos to be able to self implement.

I have two clients now that started

self implementing, and they got to a

point where they realized, you know what?

We want something more out of this.

And I know there's more to get out of it.

And so we're now working together to more

fully implement eos without getting into numbers.

For an organization our size, it's not a small investment,

but it's an investment that has been well worth it.

I don't think that we would be where we are

today with eos had we not brought in an implementer.

But there's also one of the things that went through

my mind early on as we were considering whether to

self implement or bring in somebody was writing that check.

Creates some accountability for what we do with this.

So as we're wrapping this up, I cannot highly recommend

this enough to anybody and really doesn't matter what phase

of your growth you're in, where in the organizational lifecycle

you are, whether you're a few people or you're a

few hundred people or a few thousand people, this is

something that can benefit anybody.

And as we've talked about, it can

benefit nonprofits for profits, everything in between.

So, Curt, I just want to thank you for

all that you have done for our company.

And like I said earlier, I don't know what

things would look like today were it not for.

Well, thanks. Thanks. It's been fun.

It's been a lot of fun working with you and the know.

I'm having more fun than I've ever had in

my life, more fun than ever in my career.

And it's because I see such a

tangible change happening with my clients.

I see them loving their work more.

I see them enjoying what they do

more, they're enjoying the team more.

And it's very much like I talked about at

the beginning of our conversation, once in 40 years.

Once in 40 years.

And I think that eos gives us an opportunity for

more and more people to actually experience what it looks

like to look around the room and to see people

they love and to be doing work that they love

and having a lot of fun doing it.

Well, cheers to that.

Cheers to having fun at work.

Thanks for joining us. Yeah, you bet.

My privilege.

That was Curt Swindoll, certified EOS implementer.

To learn more about EOS, you can connect

with Curt on LinkedIn or visit eosworldwide.com.

Curt Swindoll, that's S-w-i-n-d-o-l-l.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of It,

email us at intro@founderstory.us.