How EOS Transforms Business Growth with Chantel Beck

Mark Osborne talks with Chantel Beck about EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and how it helps businesses scale. They cover implementing operating systems, building ideal customer profiles, founder-led sales handoffs, and leadership team dynamics.
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Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue strategies and their 10x ROI B2B growth guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. Today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Chantelle Beck. Now I'm going to read Chantelle's bio to make sure I get this right. Chantel is a member of the board of directors for the Boardroom Mastermind. She spent the better part of a decade mentoring entrepreneurs across the nation. She also invests as a realtor and leads the coaching department for Real Estate Worldwide. Her dad was a general contractor who wanted to teach her every part of the business, and her mom taught her office, office operations. So that combination led to her understanding of construction and operations. provided her with an exceptional foundation of project management, compliance, and professionalism. She earned her degree in business administration with concentrations in marketing and social sciences, and she's traveled the country training and creating business development standard operating procedures. She uses her business as a platform to help other entrepreneurs succeed, and when she's not working, you'll catch her boating, hiking, or playing with her dogs. So, Chantel, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation. So tell us a little bit about your background. So sounds like your dad was in the construction space, maybe it was a family business, and then that led to you working in real estate. Talk to us more about that.
Yeah, I was the typical young woman, was hell-bent to not get into the family business. Okay, I'm gonna go to school and be corporate America and prove everybody wrong. And then, you know, what I ended up finding out was, um, in corporate America you also get laid off. And so I was much more comfortable creating my own reality than I was depending upon other people. So I was in my 20s when I opened my first business, bought my first house, did a lot of really cool things. Actually, I think I was in my low 30s when I bought my first house anyway. But what's really cool about that journey is when you're that young and you're struggling to make it, you can eat Top Ramen and you're really cool with that.
That's right.
That's right. And then as you age, and you learn and you keep going and you grow, you just begin to understand what's really important to you personally in life. So what I found in my journey of entrepreneurship is while I was decent at doing the flips and wholesaling and doing real estate, and we still own rentals, but what I found was that my passion is really in helping people, to be honest. And so when I became a coach for the Boardroom Mastermind and Real Estate Worldwide, I really had a fulfillment on a different level that I didn't even know existed. It really fed my passion, which ultimately led me to EOS, which answered so many questions for entrepreneurs. And so, as you mentioned, I have now spent the better part of, you know, 10, 11 years coaching, mentoring, leading, guiding entrepreneurs, and I absolutely love it. I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.
That's fantastic. Well, and kudos to you that you were able to sort of find and then pursue that passion through your process, because so many people, you know, just sort of struggle through for an entire career of being unhappy without sort of pushing to find that thing that really inspires them.
Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, and I find so many times I ask people point blank, what brings you joy? And they can't answer it. It's so hard to witness. And then, you know, through time I get them to start thinking about little, little things here and there, and it really is impactful.
So that's great.
That's great.
So for those of the, those in our audience that aren't as familiar with EOS and EOS Worldwide, tell us a little bit about sort of what EOS is and what you do in your role working with companies there.
Yep. So for those of you that aren't aware of EOS, it's designed and based on the book Traction by Gino Wickman. And Gino Wickman and his business partners I don't know if you call them partners or buddies at the time, but they really looked at what would it take to make a company successful. And they took 136 core components or issues or things to solve and broke it down into— wait, there we go. This EOS model, right? And so what the system solves are 6 things, the vision and foundation. And we go through a series of questions for that. The people component, the data component, your issues component, which is any opportunity, issue, challenge, or discussion that you have to have with your leadership team, your process component. And then finally, what everyone's actually really looking for is the traction component. How do we move this company ahead the way that we really want to? And so for a lot of entrepreneurs, what we find is that we know how to hustle, we know how to get the deal across the line, we know how to make money because a lot of us are in survival mode, especially in the beginning, right? So we know how to get it done. What we lack is the ability to actually run and operate a business. And this system puts into motion real accountability and real traction within your organization. And so it It solves all of those things when followed consistently.
Yeah, that's right. And, and, uh, for anyone that hasn't read the book Traction, it's a must-read whether you adopt EOS as an operating system for your business or not. It just brings so many great things to light and provides the answers to a lot of questions that, uh, a lot of folks are trying to figure out on their own. Uh, you don't have to reinvent the wheel when, uh, there's something that already exists out there.
Yeah. So what's really cool about Traction is that you can self-implement. You'll see I have tabs here.
Yeah.
You can use it as a manual, a reference guide. You can self-implement. There's tons of resources online, or you can hire an implementer like myself. There's over 868 of us, I think, nationwide, worldwide actually now. And so it's your choice, but whether or not you use part of it, all of it, it's great information. No matter what.
Yeah. And so we were chatting a little bit before the show about, you know, some of the common challenges you see businesses facing as you come in and you help them, you know, implement an operating system. And one of the ones that you talked about was sort of this kind of deep understanding of the customer, which is one of the sort of core premise of EOS's, you know, marketing strategy is sort of knowing the customer. Tell us a little bit about what you see and what one of the main challenges that a lot of businesses are struggling with there?
Yeah. So you had mentioned, you know, when we're entrepreneurs, we have a great idea and we know how to solve it and we know what our competitors are doing or not doing in most cases. And I find that to be really accurate through the, all the people I've worked with. What they sometimes and most often lack is a unique understanding of who their customer really is. Like who we actually going after in targeting, what are the ideal core things about your customer. And so when we in EOS, when we work on your vision, we spend a couple days on that. And when we do that, we put together a marketing strategy and we look at who is your ideal client, right? What are the psychographics, the geographic? Are you business to business? Are you business to consumer? Where do we have to target to go after that person? And then what are the 3 uniques about us? That solves a problem for your customer, right? And then ultimately those discussions lead into strategy, and that strategy becomes a proven process that you can actually use to sell with. You can use to talk about your organization with. It gives not only you and all of your employees a better understanding of who you are and what you're solving, what your mission is, but it also tells your client we have a proven, proven excuse me, a proven success. Protocol, a track record for our clients. And this is our proven process to help our clients get from point A to point B. We know what it looks like and we know how to get you there. And it instills a great deal of confidence for consumers.
That's right. Well, and when you really know the customer and we, you know, sort of help folks think through that sort of knowledge of the customer through a couple different lenses and we're focused you know, pretty much exclusively on B2B. But within that, there's the companies that you work with. And so we define that as like an ideal client profile, which has all those firmographics, but also like the business context that they're operating in. Are they growing or are they shrinking? Are they in a highly competitive market or are they first movers in a new market? Like all of those things about your customer help you really understand the business context that they're in. And then also in B2B, oftentimes we find that it, you know, it's a complex sale. So there might be, you know, an ultimate decision maker. There might be an influencer from a technical side. There might be a champion who's gonna be the end user of the product. And all these folks are working together to evaluate and to then select solutions in the B2B space. So when you really take the time to detail that ideal customer profile and then to detail the different buyer personas, avatars of the decision makers, the influencers, the end users, and then think through not only their professional context, but also their personal context.
Yeah.
What's the personal win that they're looking for out of it? Do they think it's going to advance their career? Do they think it's going to make their life easier? Do they think it's going to, you know, allow them to spend more time with their family? Really understanding that then gives you a lens through which you can talk about your proven process, which just builds that credibility and trust, which is so vital. In the B2B space.
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up because I'll work with— because my experience, I work with all companies in a lot of different fields. However, a majority of my clients are real estate-based, and it's funny to me to hear them say, oh, I don't have clients. I'm like, what are you talking about? But what in their mind, they're like, I have partners, I have lending partners, and I have You know, construction partners. And I have, you know, so if they're not on the retail side, their brain has to do this little switch. You still have customers. It's business to business instead of business to consumer. But you have, I would argue that you have multiple layers of customers now, right?
Right.
And you have to think about what's gonna benefit each layer of that customer base. And so you're exactly right. It's, it is a challenge sometimes to kind of think through that. Through it, but when you do, there's gold.
That's right. Well, and when you really understand them, you can then think through from their perspective of what's in it for them. And so that you're not talking about we have this expertise or we have this proven process, but instead, this is the problem you're experiencing and this is how we can solve it for you. And that shift really makes, you know, all of your messaging so much more compelling and more powerful and then starts to, you know, help you to really understand what's the journey that they go through from first becoming aware, hey, maybe this is a problem we should solve, to then evaluating, well, what are the different ways we could solve it, to then thinking about, well, who are the different providers of that way of solving it. Once you know that, then you can create the content that helps impact that journey at each of those stages, but through their lens, in their voice, from their perspective, Which makes it so much more compelling.
Exactly. I couldn't have said it any better. It's great.
Well, and one thing that I see too, and I'm curious your perspective on this, you know, early stage companies, you know, founder-led sales is the name of the game because no one, you know, is as passionate about the solution as the founder or knows as much about, you know, sort of the landscape. But sometimes we see, and I'm curious your perspective on this, that Founders sort of feel like they can't let go of some of the sales when they'd like to. Uh, and so they start to become a bottleneck, uh, on that process. Do you see that much with the companies that you work with?
All the time. You nailed it. So in EOS, you'll, you'll find in the book Traction, we really focus on what are the functions in the business that must be in place for a company to thrive, right? And so a lot of times when we have a founder in the organization, it's the visionary. sometimes the integrator, but usually we'll have a visionary and integrator. And then on that leadership team, we have sales and marketing, split it into 2 or keep it as one.
Yeah.
We have operations to some extent, and then we have finance. When I'm talking with a visionary integrator duo or a leadership team, most of the time they're like, well, I do sales too. So we talk about when you're in the sales role, you are on the leadership team, you are no longer the visionary. And when you are in the visionary seat, you are the visionary and you have roles and responsibilities that go with that. But what's interesting to me is that 9 times out of 10, that visionary, the very last thing they will ever give up is that sales component because they believe nobody can sell it as good as they can sell it. Nobody can talk about their vision or their dream or their process or their solution better than they can. And so until you get somebody else that is performing just as good, if not better than the visionary, the visionary a lot of times has a struggle letting go of that role. That's the last seat they will allow themselves to come out of in most cases, which is both good and bad, I think. But it's, uh, it's true. They, they have this, um, I don't want to call it a syndrome, but they do have a thought process where they think that nobody else can do it better than them. And it's the last seat that they'll, that they'll give up.
Yeah, it's, it's interesting because that's definitely true. And there is actually a fair amount of research that indicates that should be one of the last things that they give up, partly because, you know, marketing and sales sort of serves as the nexus with the customer. And so the customer's feedback helps guide how you innovate and what you're building for the marketplace. And so that's really valuable for setting that vision. But oftentimes we see that, that those, you know, visionaries or those CEOs, they hold on to the marketing and sales stuff, either more of it or longer than they would like to because they don't have it all sort of distilled down. It kind of just all lives between their ears. But when they take the time to really put down on paper who is our ideal customer and when they take the time to put down what is the different personas or avatars of the buyers that are making these decisions and what does their journey look like and how does Our proven process and our uniques differentiate us from the competition. When you get all that distilled down, then it becomes a lot easier for other folks to start to have some part of that process and not have it be totally dependent on the entrepreneur or the visionary.
The more you can distill down, as you call it, put to paper, pen to paper, all of those thoughts, those processes, those strategies, the selling points, the talking points, The more you can video, the more you can put pen to paper, the more you can— the bottom line is you are creating tools for your leadership team and everybody else in your organization to emulate the really cool things about you, your product, your business, your company. And when you have a crystal clear vision of where your company is going and you've Shared by all, SBA that to your entire team. You will be amazed at the amount of energy and effort that everybody starts to put forward in that forward momentum to gain traction in your business. You are no longer the only one making traction and making progress in your business, and it is an amazing journey for people to go on. It's—
Yeah. Well, and you raise a really good point there too. Like, you know, I've seen some research that says, you know, something like, you know, 40 to 60% of the population is sort of primarily visual. So like, I'm primarily auditory. I talk my way through life, or, or I read things, and that's fine. My wife's a graphic designer. She's primarily visual. She sees her way through life. And so if something like half the folks out there are primarily visual, we see that just Making a visual representation of what does that customer journey look like, making a visual representation of what is our proven process for delivering results for our clients look like, visual representation of, well, some competitors are positioned over here and we're positioned over here against these, you know, sort of aspects. By creating those visual systems, you get so much more out of your team and enable them to do a much better job of collaborating and coming up with new creative solutions. For how you bring things to market.
Yeah, and, and to your point, extract that even further. The more you identify how your leadership team operates, how your leadership team learns, the more leverage you will have to effectively and efficiently communicate on a higher level so that so many more wonderful things can happen in your organization. So When we do a 2-day annual for EOS, we talk about our Kolbe Index, right? Team Architect is also a great system to use. We talk about what their profile is and how they learn because oftentimes I did it just a couple months ago. I was in a session and I was explaining something and this gentleman just kept coming back to me with more questions and more questions and more questions. And as a facilitator coach, I was in my brain, not out loud.
Yeah.
But in my brain I was like, I've answered this like 3 times, like, what is going on? And on the drive out, it was actually Brandon with Team Architects. He was like, well, what kind of learner is he? And I was like, crap. Like, we forget sometimes too, right?
Right.
Like, okay. And so, you know, I went back and looked at some things and I was like, he's so visual. And in standing in front of somebody in a session room, I was like, you know, it goes like this. Like, he was not getting it. Had I been able to point to the visual that went with the topic, he would have gotten it in a split second, right? So it was, it was, uh, it was a humbling moment for somebody who's trained and facilitated for well over 20 years. All of a sudden I was like, oh yeah, I forgot, right? So it's a great point. It's a really strong point to really hone in on how your leadership team learns. It's important.
Well, and it's funny too, this sort of triggered a memory. The other thing that we do with that kind of knowledge is think through what our customers are. Because when you build out that buyer persona or avatar, we actually see that certain roles within certain industries wind up being certain types of decision makers. Like they're either, they're always trying to mitigate risk and move away from bad things versus other folks are always trying to go towards a goal and and go towards the things they want. And if you understand what your typical buyer is, you can shape all of your language and all of your visuals and all of the sort of experience of evaluating and purchasing your solution through that lens. And then if you really want to go to the 401 level, you have multiple different versions and then you can understand what that individual customer is and then contextualize it to them in the moment.
Yeah, absolutely, 100%. I couldn't have said it any better, really, because it's so true and it's so applicable when you just stop to think about it.
That's right, that's right. Yeah. So why don't you tell us something that's on the horizon for you or, or the company? What, what's, uh, what's on the horizon for you that you're really excited about?
Well, for, uh, the Boardroom Mastermind, we're going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina in May. And so we offer a seat deposit day where if you want to come check it out, you can come check it out. If you guys are interested at all, I don't know how, if you want them to contact you or me or whatever, but I can send information on it if you're interested.
Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes.
Yeah. And so it's absolutely amazing. The Boardroom Mastermind I've been a part of for about 12 years, and it has over Speaking of business to business, has well over 250 business owners across the nation that come together 4 times a year to really hone in specifically and talk about what's going on in our businesses, right? What's the good, the bad, the ugly of it all? And what's really cool about it is we nurture an environment of contribution. We want you to speak from your experience to help other people solve those things. And so it's a really healthy environment to be a part of, and it is one that I've seen so many people gain benefit from. So on the Boardroom Mastermind front, I strongly encourage you, if you're interested at all, to come attend that. On the EOS front, I am expecting any day now to hit my next level of certification. So that's amazing.
Congratulations.
Thank you. And I am looking to get a local session room. So I have local session rooms that we have on a temporary basis, but I think a permanent session room here locally would be great. People can come check it out. Right now I'm traveling to my customers, and that's a bunch of fun too. But, um, I think being local is going to be amazing to be here in North Carolina.
It's funny you talk about being local because, you know, one of the things that I'm seeing just as a trend overall in business is this sort of real, you know, sort of the pendulum has swung, you know, all the way to virtual everything everywhere, and now it seems to be swinging back to more and more people are really sort craving that local, across-the-table-from-each-other interaction and, you know, getting that expertise from those local businesses and see that as a premium for them instead of, you know, working with someone that's 100% remote or that they never see in person.
Yeah. You know, there's, there's a lot to be said for putting down the electronics and being face-to-face, especially on a leadership team, right? When you guys start looking at traction and you start looking at how can we be successful, It is pen to paper, it's pen to whiteboard, it's face-to-face interaction. It's, hey, let's talk, let's brainstorm, let's figure out ways to go after this amazing opportunity or to solve this frustration that we have. And so many times people just forget to communicate in a day and age when we're like this all the time.
Yeah.
It's amazing. And I fulfill virtually, but I can tell you my teams get far more benefit out of a face-to-face when they're in the room without their electronics working a day on the business instead of in the business. It's amazing what frees your mind for creative thinking and strategy. And there's a lot to be said for just being people again. That's right. That's right.
That's right. Chantel, I, I, we could talk about this all day. We're obviously both really passionate about it, but I got to be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, so for our audience that's been listening along, interested in, you know, learning more about the mastermind, we'll put some of that in the show notes. But if they just, you know, are really sort of jiving with what you're saying and are interested in learning more about working with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
So I have a web form on my website. It's eosworldwide.com/ Chantel, C-H-A-N-T-E-L hyphen Beck, B-E-C-K.
Got it. And we'll put that in the show notes as well so that folks can get there. But thank you so much for joining us today. I've really enjoyed our conversation.
I have too. Thank you so much. I know it took us a while to get lined up, but I appreciate you.
Yeah, talk to you soon.
Okay, thanks.
Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.
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