Implementing EOS and Achieving Your Vision with Dean Breyley

Hey, as we're diving into today's episode of Agency Journey, let me tell you real quickly about our sponsor, Aribi. Aribi is a super cool on one marketing analytics tool. They've got Google Analytics squarely in their sites right now. And I can remember setting up Google Analytics as a sophomore in college and thinking this was just the coolest platform. And as it's matured, it's still super powerful, but it's become so complex to deal with. And Aribi has a value prop totally aside from this. But what I absolutely love about my experience plugging Aribi into zenpilot.com is I didn't have to mess around with setting up what events I wanted to capture and tracking all my changes. And if I messed up a view, then it would. It would delete all the data that I had. I just plugged it in, it crawled, it captured all our. All of our events, made it super easy to see our funnel, and it just works. I love being able to see, for example, how many people read the definitive guide to click up for agencies, a blog post that I wrote, I don't know, six months ago. See where those folks come from, how that influences the buying process, the funnel, the way that it works out. So super excited to have Aribi as a sponsor. You check it out. Go to Aribi IO AgencyJourney. It's all one word. If you spin up a free trial there, use the coupon code agencyjourney. Same thing, all one word. That'll give you 20% off any plan, which is super generous of them. And remember, they can track all of our conversions, so check them out. That's at Rebi IO. We appreciate their sponsorship. Let's get on with the episode. All right. Welcome into another week's episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie here from Zenpilot, and today I've got Dean Braley from Grow or Die on the podcast. Dean, thanks for joining me.

Hey, no, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Gray.

Hey, let me give you 30 seconds here. We're going to dig deep into Eos, but tell us a little bit about your business and what you do so well.

I'll give you a little bit of background on the history, really. So I used to have my own marketing agency with a business partner. We weren't a great cultural fit for running a business together. So after kind of four and a half years, our relationship just dissolved and I ended up going back to work for the competition. So I went to work for a competing marketing agency, and it was like frying pan to fire. So that was where I was introduced to EOS through the book Traction, which most people come to EOS via Traction, fell in love with it, self implemented for eight and a half months and got the bug, decided I wanted to be one of the, kind of the pioneers of bringing it to the uk, helping establish it and then grow it and scale the awareness of it. And that was back in 2014. Ever since then I've been working with entrepreneurial leadership teams all across the UK and Ireland to help them implement EOS and get great results out of their business and help them get what they want. So it's been one hell of a journey. Everything from startups to private equity backed organizations, large, small, and some crazy business models inside of all of that. And then I kind of have the position with our worldwide community as community leader for Europe, which is all about helping the other implementers in our community to get what they want from EOS as well.

And the phrase, if anyone's been listening to the podcast for any length of time, the phrase EOS isn't going to be a new phrase. But just real quickly to recap, EOS stands for the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Do you want to give just a quick overview for anybody who's new and is not familiar with EOS already?

Certainly. So, you know, it's a very simple set of tools, very simple process that we help businesses implement to help them run a better business. So more effective, more efficient, more peaceful, more harmonious, ultimately more profitable, real proven, time tested tools that have been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for 100 more. So they kind of were compartmentalized and put together into the model as we know it today by the founder of EOS Worldwide and author of Traction, Gino Wickman. After watching many, many, many talented leadership teams kind of get stuck with the same kind of issues, and that was kind of where EOS was born out of.

Do you remember your first time reading Traction? What you.

Oh yeah.

Was it like. Because I hear two different things from people. One is like, oh, this is a light bulb moment for me, it all is just clicking. And the other one that I hear a lot is this is really simple stuff. Like this is, it's cool that they've packaged it all together, but none of this is like unique stuff, which is kind of the magic. Like that's the, the whole reason for it. But what was your impression first time you read the book?

So just epiphany after epiphany after epiphany So I was annoyed when I read it because I wished someone had given it to me five years earlier. Kind of like all of the stuff that was going on in my business, just, yeah, I would love to have had EOs back then. But, yeah, it's really simple stuff. And I think that's the thing is you end up kind of slapping yourself in the face. Oh, man, this is simple stuff. And there's a bit of a thing in our community that when someone tells Gino, oh, I'm sorry, I think this is simple, he's like, thank you. Anybody can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make something simple, according to Einstein. So Gino has spent years tirelessly removing stuff without losing value to get down to just the fewest things we can do that take the least amount of effort to create the biggest return, the biggest results. And on first impressions, it looks simple. That doesn't mean it's easy to do. Otherwise everybody would be doing it for sure.

Well, and that leads into the whole reason I wanted to bring you on, which is I'm talking to agency owners every day. I've got at least five or six agency owners that I'm on calls with. And you'll go back to back a call where somebody is. The EOS changed our entire lives. Like, we're two and a half years into using it, and I can't imagine how we would have gotten here if we didn't have it. And the next week, talk to someone who says, yeah, two and a half years ago, we tried eos. It didn't work for us, so we moved off of it. Well, what are you doing now? Well, we don't really have anything in place to replace it. Like, some of those things we stuck. And so it's interesting to hear some people like anything. You're going to have people who try it and succeed and people who struggle with it. And I always go back to, I coach high school baseball here in the US or coach lacrosse. Previous to that, I think one of my favorite phrases during college playing lacrosse was, you know, don't blame the soul or don't blame the sword, blame the soldier. And so a lot of it comes back to do we. How. How are we actually implementing it and using the tool that's been given to us.

Yeah.

So high. Let me start with that high level. And then we're going to unpack a bunch of the specifics here. As. As we go deeper today, what are. Are there consistent commonalities that you see if someone says, hey, we've Tried it and we're struggling with it versus the people who are having success with what makes the people successful with it.

Great. I love this question, right? When a team asks me, why won't EOS work? I love that question. It's almost like the perfect setup because I feel confident enough without any arrogance. After implementing EOs for 60 plus businesses, I always say, it'll be you if this stuff doesn't work. It's the people. It's always the people. The tools are just the tools, right? And, you know, you can give me a chisel. Doesn't make me a carpenter, right? So. But the chisel in the right hands can do amazing things. So, you know, I've seen the tools work often enough to know that the tools work. And I always like to say, you know, you give me two agency owners and two agency leadership teams who serve the same customers in the same market with the same products and services using eos, they'll get two different sets of results, and the only variable in that is the people. So, you know, it has to come down to the people. And it's lots of things, right? If I. If I look at the kind of the key pointers, it might be the fact that this team isn't leaning into the tools. They're kind of, you know, like dipping their toes or just kind of practicing with it, relying on the tools to do the work, not them. Which is like going to the doctor and thinking that's the cure, right? You have to take the medicine. So it's the taking the medicine bit, like misunderstanding a tool, like an implementation of a tool that goes wrong because they've just misinterpreted or not really understood the principles or the foundations behind why we do things the way that we do. But then, in all honesty, sometimes people just aren't prepared to look in the mirror. And so EOS gets the blame. We tried eos. It wasn't for us. Well, actually, what EOS does is create this wonderful world of transparency. And sometimes we don't like what we see in the mirror. And so sometimes you stop looking in the mirror, right? So it's one of those things, like if you're not prepared to change it, you just stop looking at it. And so I've seen quite a few times where, you know, like, it's OS doesn't work for us. But like you say, when you look under that, it's not EOS that doesn't work, sometimes it's the people. And again, not necessarily with bad intent, just like the commitment wasn't there. The discipline, the focus, the want to really create and hold accountability in the company wasn't there. So there's a quote I use a lot with my teams, which is you incentivize what you tolerate and then what you tolerate, you become. So I use that a lot with teams when looking at whether EOS is working or not.

Right, right. Yeah, that quote, you get what you reward or you also get what you tolerate. Both different versions. I'll just speak from the little bit that I've seen in conversations around EOs. I'm curious if there's specific pieces where people, where EOS is more challenging. So my experience has been the VTO kind of people getting their vision and high level stuff that every agency does that they'll go off site, they'll do two days together. It's an awesome experience. Everyone's excited coming back and the disconnect happens. Going from the vision to the actual granular traction, like what are we, what are we doing in the day to day that's different today than when we left the office three days ago? Is that. Or what are, what are like, are there specific areas of the. Your six different key components inside eos? Are there specific areas that you see people struggling the most with?

Yeah, and that kind of comes back to why the model is the way the model is. The model's been through several iterations from Gino and he kind of started off by saying when you take a vision, and in all honesty, like you said, the vision's the exciting bit, it's the easy bit, which is why we don't generally do it first, because to use the quote, vision without execution is hallucination. It doesn't matter if you've got the best shiny vision out there in the world. If you don't have a system of execution, accountability, discipline, focus, team health, communication, that vision's going nowhere. So yeah, when you take a vision and use a bunch of people to execute that vision, you're going to come up with issues. And again, that's usually issues with the people, issues with the data or process. And again, the fact that most people just don't solve the issues that they know they have. So those components, going back to why the model is the way the model is, is that those six components are the root of all evil. All of those other 136 things floating around are symptoms of just those few root causes. So we always go deep into those components. And again, generally it's around process, data, people, where you find the biggest issues that makes Sense.

That makes sense. Mind if I ask you a couple specific questions around agencies in the U.S.

Yeah, far away, mate. Yep.

The first one, this is fresh in my mind because we're working on this with a number of agencies right now, but is the scorecard component of it. So obviously we've got a system for things that we like to look at on the delivery or client services side of the business. But then people ask, well, what are we measuring on the growth and operation side of the business as well? What are you seeing? Or do you have a specific recommendation or maybe lessons that you've learned as far as, here's the key metrics that you should be measuring in an agency environment.

Yeah. So I'm not sure if you're going to like the answer I'm going to give you because everybody wants a shortcut, right? Everybody's like, you work with handfuls of agencies. Just give me, give me the scorecard, tell me what it is. And there is actually no shortcut to success with the scorecard. I've seen enough agency scorecards and they're all unique. There are a few commonalities it would be untrue to say some numbers don't show up on most scorecards. But when you give teams the answers, you rob them of the chance to really learn and figure out their scorecard. It's almost like you have to go through the pain of discovering and figuring that out. I can certainly help shortcut that because most teams just spend five minutes googling a few key metrics for agencies. Right. And you don't know on a scorecard. And then you measure them because that's what you, you think you should be measuring. But actually you don't really do anything or it doesn't tell you a story or, or you don't find that you get great value from measuring those. So, yeah, we, we do make teams. Go right the way back to why are we scorecarding in the first place? You know, and it's not about catching people screwing up or using data to kind of be Big Brother. It's about a certain amount of activity is going to generate a certain amount of results. So for us, we're using data to deliver the vision. So then we go back to kind of deeper than the scorecard. Right. It's really looking deeper. What are we using the scorecard for? Well, it's just to tell us whether we've had a good week or whether we've had a bad week and whether actually this week is going to help deliver on our financial future. And success in where we're going. So you start going back down to the principles of it. And so they're going to be leading indicators, activity based numbers for sure. We're not looking to measure those kind of big laggy things. And one of my principles is you can't change the past, but you can influence the future. So all of our data should be able to help us navigate in the future into a better position. So we start going, well, what does a great week look like for us as an agency? And you could start breaking that down into the multiple major functions. Marketing. How do we know that for us we've had a great week in marketing? What is it? Is it a certain amount of opportunity created, a certain amount of awareness and then you move into the sales function? Well, how much of that opportunity and awareness have we closed down, turned into business? Right? Value and orders to deliver with operations. Again, depending on the type of agency you've got, you know, what are our operations? And it generally is about delivering on time, in full, with no waste, no errors, and then making sure from a back end business kind of operational and logistical, a facilities point of view, we're getting paid on time and all. So it really is kind of breaking down the business into its fundamental parts and looking at success. And then collating 5 to 50 numbers on your scorecard, which really paint that picture of health. Hey, we've had a great week because it looks like this. So I always go back to look underneath the scorecard, right? Look to the principles of what we're trying to use the scorecard to tell us and then paint a picture using that. So when teams get stuck, we do go to the end, you know, like, well, we want to take on one new client a month, but we wouldn't use the scorecard to measure that, you know, that either happens or it doesn't. So we start breaking it down and saying, well, what is the activity that we know we can control that creates one new client a month? And we start working the process back, you know, and even right the way back to, you know, might be just adding a certain amount of opportunities to our pipeline because we know that with our conversion, our gearing, our ratios, right, if we do X amount of these, we'll generate Y amount of those. So for us it really is about what story are we trying to tell, what are we using data to achieve, Breaking right down to those fundamental what are the things people do. And a certain amount of that activity generates the right results, right? And that's how we build a Great scorecard.

That makes sense. I think if you look at, in a normal agency business, whoever's leading the client servicing side of the business, the things that you're looking at are what's the growth of those accounts, what's the retention of those accounts. Those two things obviously combine to make. Here's the lifetime value of each account. But if you throw LTV on your scorecard, that's obviously as laggy as leggy gets.

Yeah.

From, from an indicator.

So you know, we go, go ahead. I was going to say, you know, it is exactly that. It's looking at the purpose of each function. You know, the purpose of our customer service function is to keep them happy, retain them and grow them. And then we're looking, you know, so you might start off with some really lumpy laggy numbers and then you break that down into what is the weekly activity that we know is going to generate that.

Right.

And there's perfect, perfect, you know, numbers there for the scorecard.

Yeah, yeah. Internally, just for a couple specifics. So we use, I'd be curious if you have a favorite one for this. But we look at both internal what our team, how they feel about relationships and those aren't just to some degree, it's feel but we give them clear definitions on here's what this account. So account health scores.

Yeah.

One to five. One is things are trending in the wrong direction. We're not hitting goals. Clients upset. 5 is not only are things above goals, but they're continuing to trend up. Clients thrilled, couldn't be happier.

Yeah.

And define those. And we'll look at that on an average across all clients. And so we've got our internal scoring on a weekly basis. That happens. And externally we use Net Promoter Score back feedback from the client. So those are our two. If we're looking at the lifetime value of a client and our retention numbers and our account growth, those are our two kind of leading indicators to that. Now those are lagging indicators on did we. Everything's a lead and a lag to some degree where those are lagging indicators on did we get our work out on time? Did we. You know, sales is the promise made and then deliver is the promise kept and so are we keeping our promises. From a delivery perspective, do you have a favorite way to measure the client input or feedback? Are you seeing many agencies using Net Promoter score or are they using something else to get their customer CSAT surveys or some type of customer feedback?

So Net Promoter score is one of the ones that comes off the shelf a Lot just like say it's one of the most easily accessible and easy to build a system to get your. Net promoter. But I think you touched on a really great point there that, you know, the scorecard is only limited by the people that use its creativity. So, you know, like a number is. A number is a point of data that you can measure whether it be qualitative, quantitative. You know, I've seen teams build some really clever measurement systems in order to get a real handle this kind of pulse on their business and understanding where they are. So yeah, as long as you have a calibrated system that you know whether you've built it qualitative, quantitative, you know, internal, external, that's all that matters because they're early warning indicators. Going back to your point that everything's lagging to some degree, but you know, we're trying to avoid teams wait until the end of the month, end of the quarter before they start looking at how did we do? You know, we're saying that just within the last seven days has it been a good week for us. Right. You know, and so therefore those early warning indicators, there's like little flashing LEDs is where we should be paying attention, right? What are the, what is the signs of smoke before the fire and then we pay attention to those and we just verify and make sure. So like I say, even if you've got a qualitative number, which is a feeling, that's still data, right? Still information that we can act upon and then we can dive deeper when we're solving issues to figure out is there actually really an issue there or not? So there may not be, but at least we've double checked sense, checked it and made absolutely sure, not just kind of crossed our fingers and hope for the best.

Right, that makes sense. I think I've heard this from implementers, I've heard this from agencies who look back and say, man, I wish we learned this earlier. Probably one of the most common mistakes is we don't know how to rate rocks and then way too ambitious with what we can get done over the course of a quarter. Quarter feels like a long time at the beginning, by the end of a quarter it's like, wow, where did that go? Yeah, who should be designing in rocks for anybody who's not familiar yet, feel free to clarify, since my poor explanation, but basically your quarterly what are the key movers internally, the key things that we need to get done, or major objectives internally, who should be, feel free to clarify that and then who should be setting that? How do Those get set. Any advice that you have for agencies who are trying to do this and not get frustrated that we keep missing rock?

So anyway, so, yeah, I mean, I've seen loads of people make rocks far too complicated. And then when you make something complicated, it becomes really tough to break that back down. So a rock is simply a priority, one of the most important things, biggest impact, most pressing over the next 90 days. And that's our timeframe. It's in the next 90 days. This is one of the most important things. Then we call it a rock, because if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. So we give it a different name, it becomes a different thing. And so we're setting for the company first. We always look at with the leadership team, specifically, what are the most important things for this business to achieve in the next 90 days? And we pick three to seven. We turn them into smart objectives. So we make sure they're specifically documented, they're measurable, so we can be absolutely crystal clear whether we got it or whether we didn't. And then we check the attainability of it within that timeframe. Like, can we get it done? If we put all the right time, effort and energy into doing it. So as long as we're getting really crystal clear on what done looks like, that's a mistake most people make. Their rocks aren't smart or they just don't take the time to truly understand in that kind of first week what done looks like. How do I know when I've gotten what I wanted from it? And then are we as a team on the same page with what done looks like? Generally, expectations are different with the outcomes or the deliverables from a rock. And then teams start falling out. Right. So we get the leadership team to set the company ones first. And generally that's kind of with that board of directors style hat on. You know, like, the company has these rocks, and then the leaders will take ownership, but they are the company rocks. Then we get crystal clear on the 3 to 7 for each of those leaders in terms of their priorities. So there's a difference of focus. You know, the three to seven most important things for the business. And then each leader has their set of their three to seven most important things, which will include the ones we've set from the company perspective. And then we go back and we kind of cascade that out into the business. So each of those leaders will go back to their department, their function, and then they repeat the exercise with their team. They might have a team of three, five, seven, and they sit down, they go through exactly the same exercise for us, for our department. Let's just say it's, we've got a development function in the Agency for Development. What are the three to seven most important things that we need to get done? And that becomes the departmental rocks. And then each person in that team gets clear on their rocks. But again, we would always say that for the leadership team, it's three to seven, hopefully closer to three. We wouldn't expect anybody inside the business who spends most of their time executing to be taking on any more than one to three. Hopefully closer to one rock a quarter. Now, in terms of the alignment, because we cascade that from the leadership team down, everybody should be focusing on how can they help the leadership team achieve. The company rocks and then their leaders rocks and then we're setting rocks. So priority wise, we're always focusing in on the vision and the plan. But there's always stuff that for me, this is important for me this quarter, therefore, I should set that as a rock. People generally tend to trip up on the whole, well, it's got to happen or it's going to get done this quarter anyway. So I won't set it as a rock and it might work. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, if it's going to take a significant amount of your time, effort and energy in the next 90 days, don't you think we should wrap a rock around it to make sure it gets done rather than trying to get that done? And then another three to seven other things. It's like we only have 100% of our own capacity, so there are definitely some common trip hazards in which people will fall into. And I suppose one of the other things is, is it business as usual or is it a rock? Like, if it's just part of the day job and this is something that's repeatable, that happens like once a quarter, once a month, or once every six months. There is that gray line between if it's going to take a certain amount of your time, effort and energy, then it's worth setting as a rock. But business as usual should be taken care of as kind of the process component. Right. That just happens as part of doing the work rather than being a specific rock. That's generally what causes people to trip up as well.

Yeah, I think that's a helpful distinction. Could you maybe give a quick example of rocks and what it would look like cascading down from, hey, here's a leadership team rock. Here's what that would look like when it gets translated to client Services team.

So leadership team Rock. Maybe we figured out that we need to overhaul, say, one of our core processes. Let's just say our. I'll use development, because I mentioned the development team earlier on that our development function. We don't have a clear set of processes. So actually, one of the most important things that's going to benefit the company this quarter might be to get that core process documented, simplified and followed by all, you know, that might be a company rock because it impacts the business so much over the next 90 days that it's worth setting as a company rock. Now, it's very likely, right, that the development team leader is going to take that rock as the owner, the best person to own it. They would then take that back to their team and say, hey, we've got a company rock this quarter to get this done, I own it. Then the development team would start kind of triaging and setting rocks based on, well, I can take this part of that rock. I can take this part. And then individually they might set a rock, which is to help the leader get their rock done. So we cascade it up. So it really is about breaking the rocks down into smaller rocks, you know, and then. And then breaking that down as we go through the business so that the alignment is there on delegating as much of the work to everybody who can, who can help.

Yep, that makes sense. And then for the case where we bit off more than we could chew, we all took seven rocks, we got five done, which is impressive. But we all have leftover rocks. What, on a quarterly basis? Then we're reevaluating whether those are an accurate priority. And resetting rocks, do they automatically roll over?

Yes. So we would always do a bit of a tidy up of last quarter's rocks and sit down and learn and get better from it. So we would kind of analyze that. What was it? Was it the right rock to set in the first place? Was it truly one of the most important things that mattered most? Because if not, we shouldn't have set it in the first place. If it was the right rock, then we have to check its attainability. Well, was it truly attainable? On reflection now, using the power of hindsight, was it attainable within the last 90 days? Because like you say, sometimes we've bitten off more than we can chew and actually we need to learn from that around understanding our capacity. But if it was the right rock and it was attainable, it's likely we've got an accountability issue with that person. Right. Like, I didn't plan it I didn't manage it, I didn't prioritize it. I let other things get in the way. And so then we have to really start looking internally to the people to say, well, you have to own not getting that rock done if it was the right rock and it was attainable. So when we have something that's kind of like half done or 75% of the way done or even 95% of the way done, we just need to figure out what we do with may be that we just pick it up, carry it into the next quarter and set it as a rock and we go again and we just then have to understand what we're going to do differently this quarter so we don't get the same results. It might be that it evolves and changes shape. You know, if we've got half of it done, we're going to change the definition of what done looks like and stretch it out for the next 90. Or if it's 95% done and there's just like a week's worth of activity or a couple of to dos. We just don't set it as a rock because we know that that thing is in motion enough to see itself out. It doesn't need the, the spotlight, the focus or the intensity of a rock to carry it on.

Right, that makes sense. I'm going to pivot over here a little bit to the people component in the org chart side of things. Yeah, we've been really fortunate to work with a lot of pretty high growth agencies. The last two quarters we're recording this well, I guess early in Q2, 2021, so end of 2020 and beginning of 2021 have mostly across the board been really, really good and had a strong tailwind for agency growth? Yeah, we've had a chance to help a number of those agencies get their systems and processes in order as they're growing really quickly and the market demand is very high. But as you're working with those same agencies who are growing quickly, are there common mistakes that are made on the org chart? Not necessarily. Everyone's going to have, you're going to have your rockstar hires, you're going to have your bad hires, you're going to have your people who are just fine. That's going to be a piece of it. There's certainly stuff that you can learn and figure out how to hire and are you hiring the right type of people? But at a higher level, from an org chart perspective, are you seeing any consistencies where teams are teams who are doing really well get this role filled and handed off well. Or teams that are struggling didn't make that hire and they chose this hire instead. Any commonalities that you see there?

So I would say first it would come down to structure in terms of the teams that do really well are looking ahead. When I compare them to the teams that are tripping over themselves, it's generally because they're looking at their feet and they're actually chart. So it's that slight change from an org chart. And their accountability chart represents who they are now, not who they are going to become. So the key differentiator for us is your accountability chart should always be designed to get you to the next level. You're always thinking ahead. It is a proactive structure for what you're able to do is to really. We talk about creating an opportunity, define the seat, define the roles that that seat would be accountable for, really understand the measurable definitions of success. And then you go out to the market and hire a right person. So again, right person for us is a great cultural fit for the organization based on values. And you put them in the right seat, which is a seat that, you know, you can never guarantee a great hire, but you can certainly really greatly reduce your chances of making a bad hire based on truly understanding that role that you're bringing them into and their ability to prove, using our kind of terminology of gwc, that they get this role top to bottom, inside out. They want this role in terms of their intrinsic motivation and passion and they have the capacity, right mental, emotional, physical and time capacity to deliver everything that this business requires of them in that role. So the companies that do really well look ahead next level, six to 12 months. And they're bringing people into a predefined role. The ones that tend to trip over themselves are retrofitting people into the accountability chart. Hey, we just hired this great new person. Now we need to figure out where they sit and what their role is. So again, they're hiring for people rather than designing the team based on structure first, people second. That would be a kind of a commonality thing. I see.

That makes sense. And then from us, as people are building out their vision, Traction organizer, vto. Are you seeing this is another. I'm just trying to throw as many objections to the eos as I can at you.

Please do, mate. I love the challenge.

So this is, this is kind of a smaller thing, but here, man, we're in a space that's evolving. Like I have no idea what to think about 10 years even three years. It's farther than I can that I can possibly think. Do you modify kind of the standard timeframe at all when working with agencies or companies in this space or is it less about. Yeah, obviously we don't know where we're gonna be in 10 years, but let's just think about where does this go. That specific point in time maybe matters less than directionally. Are we aligned?

So yeah, we have the ability in EOS to change that core target. Right. The kind of the 10 year target. So for those familiar with Jim Collins. Right. The bhag, the hairy audacious goal. We always give teams the flexibility to choose and yet there are some constraints. It has to be between 5 and 30. This is our guide. Anything less than 5, it's not going to have the energy to get us where we want to go. Anything more than 30 and like you say, we're so long gone by that time that we're not going to have that kind of emotional tie and connection. But somewhere in there is roundabout or roughly maybe this team has a big anniversary which just happens to be seven years away, like it's their 20th anniversary or you know, the founders are 50 and whatever year. So generally they might want to tie it to some big event, but five to 30 years, which gives them the ability to not have to know how they're going to do it yet. And that's a really important part is we don't have to know how to get there yet. We're going to figure that out on the journey. So everything else we do in EOS is about making it a reality. And so you are almost making the future up as you go along, right by, by deciding we want to be this company by then. And so I'm always asking them, what is that thing that drives you? That one overarching, energizing, aligning, exciting business goal that if we got there by X date would be success. I like the analogy of if we're climbing a mountain over the next five to 10 years, what's at the top? What has it all been for? Right? What's on that flagpole? What's at the summit? And again, qualitative or quantitative, sometimes you can measure it with a stick and sometimes it's a feeling. So it really is about just helping them understand what are we trying to achieve here? What is the thing that we know when we get there, we've done it and then we go again. So it's not the end, it's just a mile marker on a larger journey.

Right. Have you had a chance to work with anybody who said that. I mean, that's really tight. I mean you'd have to have worked with someone at the very beginning of doing EOS who said a five year target or whatever. Have you had a chance to work with anybody who's. Or maybe they hit their goal early. It's kind of been, we got to recalibrate.

So we did it at EOS Worldwide. Right. To use our worldwide organization as a good guide. When I joined in 2013, 14, there were a handful of us as implementers and a handful of companies running on EOS. And they said that by 2020 they wanted to get it to 10,000 companies using EOS. And everyone was like, you're crazy. Right? That's nuts. And they got there early. And so we were part of the journey a couple of years ago when they realized they were on track to do it, that they reset their target for another 10 years. And we're now working towards 100,000 companies running on EOS. And when everybody asked Gino, how do you expect to do that? His response, which has proven to work and be true based on our story, was we're just going to figure out one quarter at a time. And it really is that we're not in control of the future to that degree where you can say 10 years down the line we're going to be this. But you can certainly figure it out one quarter at a time. That is just about as much of the world as you can control the next 90 days. Even in the last 12 months, that's been pretty nigh and impossible given everything that was going on with Coronavirus. So we're just about getting back to that horizon level of 90 days. I would say probably six to 12 months ago, people were thinking 90 minutes ahead of them. So now we're able to get kind of 90 days again.

Yeah, that makes sense. So this might be EOS specific, this might not be have anything to do with EOs. But among your agencies you're working with or have eyes into, who are growing the most quickly, any common themes that you're seeing, like what's keying the fast growth.

With EOS specifically or just.

No, well, yeah, it might be an EOS thing. It might not be though. It might be all these agencies have somebody focused on sales or they've got.

Whatever that EOS aside. Right. Because again, eos, which is the holistic model for helping them run the organization, is going to help them run a better business. Without doubt. But I would say that the key things as well as eos, one is the culture. And I'm not talking about pool tables and beanbags and slides. I'm talking about people. Real, healthy, functional, cohesive cultures where everybody's aligned, everybody wants to go the same place in the same direction at the same time. There's no politics. Right. So you've gotten rid of all of that. For those familiar with, like Simon Sinek, he talks about this circle of safety and I always say to the teams, look, if you're worried about the external world eating you alive, perhaps you should stop eating yourselves alive first. Right. And it really is that. So teams with a great culture internally, where everybody is acting, behaving, thinking aligned the same way, they're going to do great things. And I suppose the second would be something that kind of underpins everything, which is their business model. They've got a really rock solid business model and clarity in who they serve, the value proposition and how all of the key parts of their business model are orchestrated. But they're not just trying to sell anything to anyone and service everything and that kind of jack of all trades.

Yeah. So I look for any common traits wherever big into baseball and specifically the pitching aspect of baseball. So what are all the people who are most successful? What are the common things that they're doing? And now this is crazily analyzed by people world smarter than I am saying, hey, they consistently get to this position or this is how they get the spin rate that they get or whatever those things are. But I think that's. I am kind of hunt for commonality, which is why I asked about scorecard numbers. Are there metrics that. The easy answer is it all depends. Everything's different. And certainly people need to understand the reason behind it. But I think at the same time you also have. There are people who do things excellently. There are consistent patterns between those from a culture perspective, especially as people have been forced to go remote. So from a EOS rhythms perspective, you get weekly L10, your leadership team meeting or your level 10 meeting, depending on the team that you're in. Are there specific pieces outside of that that you're seeing teams with the healthiest cultures doing, whether that's a daily standup or they're doing a every other week of all hands meeting, or they don't use slack. Or they do use slack. Any, any consistency that you've seen there?

So yeah, I mean it's, it's that you going over and above in the virtual world, you know, because like we can still run the business the same way. We did. But you are losing things that you, you weren't even necessarily consciously aware of. Like, even when teams turned up for a level 10 meeting face to face in a room, there'd be banter and talk and everything that happens for five minutes before and maybe five to 10 minutes after. And that's the social kind of, really kind of trust building team health that's just got lost because Now a level 10 meeting is pretty functional. Everybody's on Zoom on the dot right of the time. You run through the agenda, you check out, you're gone and you're into the next meeting. There's just all of that human interaction stuff that isn't directly related to work has gone. So the real healthy teams are doing other stuff to compensate. And I think, you know, in the early days of lockdowns when people were doing Zoom quizzes and all, you know, that that was a way of trying to figure it out. And I don't think it had longevity because people very quickly got bored with zoom quizzes and, you know, zoom treasure hunts and that kind of stuff. But yeah, I've got some teams doing lots of great kind of again, it's additional stuff that they weren't doing before virtual to really help their team still feel connected and, and not just in terms of the role, but as a group of human beings just checking in, how's things, how's the family?

Right.

And a lot more tolerance for things like kids running in or the shopping being delivered when you're in the middle of a. Before lockdown, we wouldn't have considered those things acceptable. But now I think it's just they're really understanding of the blend between personal, professional that was easier to separate when everybody was in an office. I think the real healthy teams are doing stuff like that.

Okay, makes sense. So I'm going to switch gears here completely and want to learn a little bit more about how you work with folks. But generally. So you are an implementer of eos. Maybe briefly talk about what the role of an implementer looks like. If an agency's saying, hey, we should obviously first step, I think for most agencies winds up being read the book, maybe check out the site. But most agencies at some point will read Traction as the initial book, not the only book necessarily they read from eos. But then what does an investment look like to work with an EOS implementer? I'll throw that pile of things. Where should people start all of that stuff.

So there are three things we say we do for the leadership team and that's we teach, we coach, we facilitate for them. You know, we're not there to be the guru or the strategist or tell them where their business should be going. Sometimes we're the dumb guy with a marker, right? Because we know that that's not helping create this healthy, functional, self sustaining leadership team. If we just go in there and provide the answers, right, that's creating dependence on us. We want to create this really kind of independent leadership team that only needs us for a very limited amount of time before they can go on and solve their own issues with the right toolkit. So we teach a very simple system and our goal is to give them everything we know about EOs and EOs in its purest form from the facilitation standpoint. Once we've created a context around what their world should look like with eos, then we facilitate all the smart brains in the room into that and help them get these tools that work for them and really add value to their business. And coaching is that when you're in the game, you can't see the game. That kind of quote from Kurt Godel cannot be in a system and at the same time see the system that you're in. So because we do play this game all day, every day with different leadership teams, we're able to help speed them up, help them avoid some of those stumbling blocks and the trip hazards and coach them to play a better game. That's what we do. In terms of how we do that, then, yeah, they can certainly read the book. We'll quite happily send anybody a copy of Traction, although we can also shortcut that. As a community of implementers, we commit to share 90 minutes of time with anybody who wants to learn more about eos and take them through kind of a learning and teaching session, which we call the EOS 90 minute meeting. So they could reach out to an implementer. That implementer would take them through this kind of. Again, at the moment, most are virtual, right? But it'd be lovely to do them face to face one day again where we just sit with that leadership team and give them the whole experience of eos. And for the teams that want to work with us directly, we spend full days working with the leadership teams, probably around about five or so times a year, although in between the physical sessions, we're on the journey with them, so we're there around to help and support as much as needed. But investment wise, I mean, you're looking anywhere, because we have kind of professional implementers, we have certified implementers, and in the UK especially, we're talking probably around about 12 and a half thousand a year to kind of 30,000. And the difference is kind of length of service and experience with EOS. I've done 60 cycles of EOS with different teams, so my fee is towards the top end of that bracket.

Because.

Again, there isn't an eosi, as we call ourselves, who hasn't been there, done that, worn the T shirt. You know, we're all entrepreneurs in our own right who just want to help and give back and have a passion for helping other people, you know, get what they want out of their businesses. And so for the newer ones into the community, you know, their fees represent the experience with the tools. So that's why there's kind of a range of different costs for an implementer.

And professional versus certified implementer. What's the distinction there?

Distinction, length of service. So, you know, like it's for the professionals, it's about number of times they do EOS a year, so a certain amount of sessions. And so that's really the only distinction is certified is just a designation that states, you know, you're longer in the tooth, you've got more battle scars, for example. But you know, everybody, whether that's professional or certified, if they're inside the official community, has the EOS seal of approval for teaching the staff. So, you know, nobody's better or worse. Right. We're all, we're a very abundance minded community. But it is worth knowing that, you know, we don't hold any kind of long term contracts for teams or we don't get to sign up for any kind of lengthy agreements. Our commitment to our teams is to work one session at a time and to fully guarantee every session that we do that, you know, if that team don't feel they've got value for the work we delivered, there's no obligation for them to pay for that session. So everything we do is about making it as risk free for the people that we work with as possible. Which also helps keep us on our toes. Right. Which puts the focus on us delivering a massive value for the teams in the work that we do.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Dean, I appreciate you coming on. Thanks for being willing to answer so many questions and go deep on EOS stuff here with us. For folks who want to learn more about you or reach out, what are the best places for them to connect?

Absolutely. So they can find me on LinkedIn. Dean Braley is my name and best thing to do. Drop me an email. So deanrodi.com so D R-O-W-I-E.com or they can give me a call. I'll answer the phone to anybody who wants to talk to me about eos.

Awesome. Good stuff, Dean. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

It's been a pleasure. Grave thanks for having me.

It.