EOS Didn't Work for Us: The Alternatives we Like for 2025

Welcome to the first episode of 2025. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about why we ditched EOS at Guru, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I know we have a ton of listeners that use EOS. I'm gonna talk about some new AI tools we're using to help streamline some manual processes internally, what I am currently reading and why I do or don't suggest that book. And talk about the 2025 planning process I personally use to create an amazing year. And yes, I know it's already 2025, but I can promise you it's not too late to follow through with a lot of these things. So I'm going to discuss that and more. Welcome back to Payrollin'. Welcome to Payrollin'. The show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now here's your host, Matt Vadie. Let's go. All right. Well, I'm so happy to be back and have a few minutes here to record another episode. I am often apologetic and making big promises about how I'm gonna record more episodes in this period of time or that period of time. So no promises today. I did 12 episodes in 2024. I definitely plan on doing more in 2025. And starts out right here, January 3rd, 2025, going to get one in for you. Got so much to get caught up on, so many different things to share. And we're going to start it out with one big thing. We started off here as we looked at our 2025 planning process for Guru, not necessarily personal planning process, which I'm going to talk more about here in just a little bit, how I plan for the year on a personal level. But at a company level, we decided it was time to ditch EOS. So we've been using some bastardized version of EOS really almost since inception. You know, I remember being around using it back when, before they went into their whole licensing thing and you could actually buy their toolkit and you could self-implement and you could, you know, pay $400 or $500 a month and get access to all the tools and things they did and have somebody on your team implement it for you. So we've come a long way with it. But, you know, there were several aspects of it we never really either agreed with or fully got up and off the ground. As I look at their wheel of things, you know, they have the vision, the data, the process, the traction, the issues, the people. I think the people one was one of the first ones where it's like, yeah. And if you're not familiar with EOS, let me take a step back. So EOS is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's based on a book book called Traction by Gino Wickman. It is really gaining a ton of popularity because it's just a simple framework to help you run your business. And let's face it, there's not one framework or way of going about running a business. There are many different ways. And so it can be hard and challenging. And that's one of the biggest challenges we all face if we start and run a business is like, the heck do I do? How do I manage this thing? There's not one simple single way to go about it. And EOS, gives you some variables, but just gives you some tent posts. And it's been beneficial to us over the year, over the years. I've had no issue with the process as a whole, but I do think it's starting to get to the point where it is detrimental. This whole, especially in smaller organizations, this whole labeling of visionary versus integrator, I think it has many people a little too, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs are associating themselves as visionaries, which means they're then not rolling their sleeves up and getting dirty in the business because they're a quote unquote visionary. A visionary who can't get down in the weeds. And, you know, honestly, if I see one more self-proclaimed visionary, I'm going to throw up. It's like the— I don't know what that moniker is about. Like, you're— I just— the people tagging themselves as visionaries are not seeing any new thing as far as I'm concerned. So, so in my perspective, it's like, yes, do you have a clear vision for your business? That is imperative. You must have a clear vision. I like their process for sharing vision. I just don't like that it goes 10 years into the future. None of us can predict what is gonna happen 10 years into the future. And so unless you have a moonshot that is like, hey man, we're gonna put a man on the moon inside of this decade, it's really hard to paint a clear picture of what the vision is for 10 years down the road. And let's face it, our team wants a clear, as clear as possible of a vision. And 10 years, none of them are rallying around where we're going to be 10 years from now because let's face it, they're not planning on being with you 10 years from now. 99% of your people do not plan on being here 10 years from now. So why are you basing all of your vision around what's going to happen 10 years from now, and then 3 years from now, 1 year from now, etc.? Now I do like that process where I back into it from 10, 3 to 1, and then 90-day increments. And we've, you know, when I talk about what we decided to do instead, I'll talk about how we're positioning that. But you know, that was one where, you know, we already had to modify that. We had to move that down to 5 years a couple years ago, because again, just the team going, Yeah, that's blurry. That doesn't really make sense to me. And, you know, they would never come out and say this, but again, like, do I even plan on being here in 10 years? Do I really care where the company is going to be in 10 years? You know, some, a couple people might, but in reality, most of your people don't plan on being with you in 10 years. Let's just get real about the situation. But then the people analyzer piece was another one we could never, you know, they get into this whole like checklist of do they abide by your core values or do they buy into your core values? And then do they get it, want it, have the capacity to do it? I like this as like a high-level checklist of like, hey, if somebody doesn't get it, they don't understand the job, they don't want it, they don't want to do the job, and they don't have the capacity to do the job, then yes, you should not have them on your team or in the seat that they're in. But in reality, I mean, that's such a high level, okay, yeah, like, all right, great. So every person that doesn't get it, want it, have the capacity to do it, should they be on the team? That's an analysis we need to go through. But then beyond that, like, You need some actual performance management processes in place, which is where EOS falls very short, in my opinion. Most of you listening to this work in some form of HR organization, payroll organization. You probably would never suggest to your clients only to do the EOS People Analyzer. It's just not in-depth enough. You know, it doesn't have the right cadence in terms of how to grow and develop your people. So we've just got a better mousetrap there. So there's no point in, you know, using one section of EOS and not another. And some people do that and we kind of were, and that's fine. But, you know, the next piece is, so that's vision, people, issues, their issue tracking. You know, it's basically, hey, every week during our Level 10, we're going to try to solve one of our main issues within the business. It, you know, we block 60 minutes for it every week. Well, for us, I mean, this just got to be one of those things where it was creating a ton of work around every meeting. Hey, did we We're like creating issues that didn't exist and aren't really big issues for us. And we're then spending an hour talking about them. It's spinning off a ton of work for people when we have a bunch of other priorities that we're trying to work on. Then we're like seeking out issues to try to solve when, you know, the primary issues we've already surfaced in our planning process and understand what our goals, where we're trying to go as a company. And so therefore, like, all right, now we're creating more issues every single week. Again, might work for you, just didn't work for us. Traction, which is the rocks and the meeting pulse. This is probably the best piece and the piece we kind of created our own variation of, and I'll talk about what that looks like in a minute. They have a process, you know, documentation methodology. Again, it's kind of like the People Analyzer. It's like not super well-defined, not super great. I mean, I'm sure if you pay your implementer $20,000 a year, they do a great job of implementing the process for you. We never did pay an implementer. We always self-implemented. So some of you out there are listening to this and shaking your head and go, man, EOS is the way. There's no other way but EOS. And that's fine. That's just not the path that we are going down. Because again, we just have our own internal way of documenting processes. It's working. We have a really well-defined batch of processes and great, you know, KB and Jason, shout out to these guys as team leads. They just, as leaders of the company, they just do a really good job of helping their team to document processes and do that in a way that's easy to find and replicate. Um, and then finally, the data piece, scorecard and measurables. Yeah, obviously everything has some form of KPIs with it, so that's not really novel to the EOS process. So what do we do? We basically just put everything I just said to you inside of ChatGPT. Here's what we like, here's what we don't like, here's what we would change already, here's what we think we want to keep from it. Now help us to create our own cadence for managing the business going forward, because the biggest things we wanted to replicate where the weekly meetings were, the quarterly, you know, assessment of our goals, the annual planning process. And so basically it spit out a process pretty similar to the, uh, you know, the Traction process from EOS where we just got together with the team and review, or excuse me, we're getting together Monday with the team to review all of the goals and priorities that we had that the leadership team put together a couple of weeks ago. And then we will work together as a unit to help, you know, it's basically more of a cascading goals type of system, which is similar to EOS, but again, you know, we just found one that worked for us and we modified it slightly and we're going to continue to modify it, which I think is the other piece of just having that flexibility to take the plan and modify it for what works for us in our business. And, you know, for some of you listening, again, you're going to say, hey, how dare you, man? How dare you? EOS, it's the cult, baby. It's weird. I'm in it. We love it. Our business wouldn't be the same without it. And I'm never going to try to convince somebody to do it. But I do think it is starting to get a little played out in terms of the effectiveness of it. And there are other options out there. I think Small Giants, Vern Hardish, if I'm not mistaken, is that book. And they have a process very similar to EOS. And there are multiple ones out there. And I know people have spun out of being EOS consultants and then they, you know, they don't want to pay the licensing fees. So they go develop their own process that's really similar to EOS. Just have a process you follow for how you manage and run your business and follow it. I think that's the most important part for us in for anybody listening who doesn't have a great process in place. So Ditch the OS, that's the latest in what's new at Guru. Insert catchy sound effect here to migrate us to the next segment. That's going to be a big goal for me in 2025 is to figure out how to use— I got this panel over here with a bunch of glowing buttons on it that I think could make noises if I press them. I'm 100% sure they could make noises if I press them. I just have no idea how it works other than providing great audio so that if you go back and listen to some of the early episodes, you will notice a drastic improvement in the audio quality, which is what this board does over here. But man, if I could just figure out how to get that cool transition noise, go from segment 1, what's new at Guru, to segment 2, pew pew pew pew, industry news and new technologies. All right, so what's new with us on the tech front? So I am very interested in and continuing to research, test, and play with AI agents. So this is going to be the next step of AI and it's starting to take form and we're seeing agents start to do work, but basically it's autonomous AI. So if I tell this agent, you know, hey, do this task on a repeated basis for me, it's going to do that task at the time and way that I tell it to do it. So right now, a lot of what I'm seeing is just, you know, workflows with a little bit of infused AI. So it's not really agentic yet. This is a term you're going to start to hear more and more as agentic, agentic. And so what can I program an app or system or AI bot to do that we were doing repeatedly? One low-hanging fruit process that we automated was the reviewing of our inbound leads. And so, you know, every week we get I don't even know, man. I think we get like on average 100 leads a month from the website. Those are downloads of assets and they are, you know, everything from a contact us of, hey, reaching out, I need payroll and I want to start next week to I just downloaded a South Carolina new hire form and everything in between. And so we have this system called Bardeen AI, B-A-R-D-E-E-N, Bardeen AI. That is helping us to review those leads the same way a human would. So we put in the criteria of here are the things we're looking at with these leads. Do they have a business address? Which fields did they fill out? Do they research their name on LinkedIn? And it's basically just going through the scrubbing process that we had a human doing before and looking at the quality of the leads as they came in. And so we set that up between Zapier, a zap that takes those out of our CRM, puts them into a sheet, and then Bardeen starts to do the scrubbing every time a new row is added to that sheet. And so really, this is taken— I mean, this could take anywhere from 1 to 2 hours a week depending on how many leads we got the previous week. And now it's just automatically doing everything we already did. So it's scrubbing down the information, seeing if it's a legitimate lead, sending them a LinkedIn connection request from me, and then putting them into an email sequence if they fit certain criteria. So Bardeen AI, we have a long way go with it. It's not a super expensive subscription. I wanna say it's like $60 a month. So, you know, as soon as it started creating 1 to 2 hours a week of ROI, boom, that's an easy one, right? $60 a month for 1 to 2 hours saved per week. And that's with one workflow we have set up. It does a ton of other things, and, and we're gonna start to get into using more functionality from it. But so far so good on Bardine AI and just keeping an eye on that agents theme in general. Probably get into— I, I, again, like the maturity there is from a consumer perspective. I think most of you listening are like me in that you want to be able to log into something like a Bardian, click some buttons, and get it to do the thing. You don't want to have to do a lot of programming, setup, understanding of how the sausage is made. And that's where we're headed. But right now, a lot of the agentic stuff requires some level of, of, you know, at least technical knowledge to be able to set them up properly and have them run through workflows. But Also just opening your mind to what are some of the possibilities of things that could be automated inside our company. I often tell my team, anything that's taking you longer than an hour to do repeatedly, you do it more than once a month and it takes more than an hour every single time, let's talk about it and see how we can possibly automate that one particular function and use some tools like this, or at least make it easier for you. Or if nothing else, how can we properly document it so that we can have somebody who is either an intern or an offshore teammate go ahead and do that for you as assuming it fits that criteria. So that's the latest tech we're using, working with some Bardian AI, and tons more AI stuff coming. I mean, we're really, really focused this year on automating as much as humanly possible. All right, next up. Oh, did I press the button? No, I didn't press the button. That was just me with an amazing sound effect. Am I one of the best at doing The bum, bum, bum DJ noise, some will say. What am I listening to right now? So I am listening to Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk. I was a little on the fence with getting this. Gary Vee, in some respects, I think a lot of his stuff, it's kind of the same thing over and over again, which is good. We talked about content on the podcast in the past. One of the things you really want to get good at is saying the same thing 1,000 different ways, which I think Gary is fantastic at. Nobody does it better. Nobody creates more output. Of content than him. If you're not familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, just give him a quick search. Tremendous content creator and just authority on what it takes to build out a great content strategy. In his book, Day Trading Attention, his latest book, I want to say he's got 4 or 5 now. He just talks a little bit about how to put yourself in a position to get more attention for your brand, how to test platforms. And he's a, he's big on you should be on every single platform. I think one of the most obvious examples that we can all point to, I remember we had somebody on to talk about TikTok. Took a year or two ago and kind of made the point of like, hey, look, it's growing in the audiences 30 to 40, 40 to 50, 50 to 60. That's just continued to happen. Now, look, TikTok is a strange example. It could possibly be getting like shut down in the United States. It's, you know, there's speculation about whether or not, you know, who's got access to the data or whatever. So that one's a little bit unique. But when you look at all the different platforms that come up, like Threads by Facebook, Blue, I want to say it's Blue Sky or something, the new thing that Twitter, original Twitter founder created. Like his argument is you should be on all these platforms and test them and learn them because in the case that they pop off, then you're an early user. So, you know, if you were one of the early people to figure out LinkedIn, you know, maybe you have hundreds of thousands of followers now versus, you know, thousands of followers or whatever it is. So just understanding how to write, how to create, how to put your message in front of people on multiple platforms. So you guys know I'm a marketer. This stuff, I love it. I think it's a good book. I think it's worth your time and energy to— especially, I mean, I'm listening to it on Audible, so it's easy. Does talk a lot about— I do like his concept of strategic organic content, SOC. So what is our strategic organic content? That's, you know, we just had recently— probably give a shout out to this. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to get the signup link out yet, but we did a Monday Marketing Mastermind 2.0. 2 weeks ago now, we're in the holiday season here, where we just walked through a content strategy. I shared the exact content strategy we use at our marketing agency to— with our clients. And obviously, it's the same one we use at Guru and for my personal accounts. And so having a strategy around your content is imperative. Like, what are the pillars? Where are we starting with the content? Where— what is the first place that this content gets created for? Where are we repurposing it? How often? What are we talking about? Like, people just tend to walk into a year and just start creating a ton of blogs and social posts and all these things about every topic under the sun. And then you just really have no idea what to expect from them as a brand. You can get better. You have the unique opportunity, most of you listening to this, to put your founder in front of large audiences with ease, which is something that, you know, a few, just a few years ago was hard, harder for small businesses like ours. And definitely a distinctive advantage. Somebody hearing from Lori Brown over at Pay Northwest and having access to her direct voice versus, you know, the CEO of ADP, who is somebody that they could never meet in a million years if they become an ADP customer. Can't even tell you who the current CEO is. Whereas not only can you be a voice and somebody that's in front of them, but you can create value before you ever even walk in the room and meet them. And that's something that those of you that are creating consistently on social will recognize that when you go to a local event, you bump into people, they're going to talk to you about, oh, hey, I loved your post the other day on this thing. And oh, I love the way you think about employee onboarding or whatever the topic is that you're talking about. So Day Trading Attention by Gary Vee, good book. And if you're going to create a lot of content in 2025, I would suggest it for sure. All right. So let's talk about my personal 2025 planning process. And this is, again, you know, is it sitting here January 3rd? You know, this episode might go live in the next couple of days here. So how do I go about planning my year if the year's already started. It's fine, dude. Like, I would rather— if you didn't put a good plan in place, like, it's better to hit pause for a couple weeks in January. And I know it's year-end, we're, we're all dealing with a ton of stuff, but like, we've all got time, man. We've all got the same 24 hours in a day. And like, if you're wrapped up in the weeds and you can't get around to planning your year, like, you need to plan more than anyone. Let me just stop here and say that again. If you're the person listening to this who thinks you're too busy to stop and plan out your 2025, then you're the exact person who needs to hear this more than any other listener. And so, take a few minutes. And now, look, I'm not going to lie to you. This is more of like a 2-week process because, again, to your point, like, you don't have 16 hours, 2 straight 8-hour days to sit down and do this. But you can fit an hour in here, half hour in there, some time over the weekend, whatever. So this is meant for you to fit in. Certainly you're going to want some scheduled time because there are some things in here that take a little bit more time than others. But this is a wonderful process. I stole most of it from Jesse Itzler. Those of you that were at IPPA a couple of years ago, remember Jesse Itzler, one of the part owners of the Atlanta Hawks? He sold a couple of companies for, you know, one for hundreds of millions, one for a billion. There's a ton of really cool, fun things now. And married to Sarah Blakely from Spanx, but just a really fun guy to follow. And so a lot of this comes from his process. And then I mix in some of my own things just to simplify it because I got a family who wouldn't fully buy off on the way that he went about it. But if I kind of modified it a little bit, then I could pull them into this process as well. All right. So let's talk about how I closed out 2024 and plan for 2025. And if any of this helps you, please just drop me a note, man, and let me know, because it's, it's really good to know when you guys message me and say, hey, love the episode on X, or I talked, you know, I've been sharing this episode of, on, you know, your demo is one I get a ton of feedback on of like the sales demo. If you're in sales and you want to learn how to create, continue to make better demos for your clients, definitely go back and search for that episode. Get a ton of great feedback on that, but always love to hear it and it helps to inspire me to create more. Sometimes if I'm over here in a vacuum, you talk about only 12 episodes in a year. It's just, you know, the feedback loop can be a little strange when you're podcasting. Uh, you know, I'm sitting here staring at a camera talking to nobody and And so sometimes you're like, oh man, does that resonate or what? I don't freaking know. But all right, let's talk about it. Step 1, close out 2024. And, you know, the way that I went about this was to declutter everything. And this isn't even entirely done yet because I still have in this office a little bit of decluttering to do around me. But at home, I did a fantastic job of this. Went through the closet. I donated all the clothes I haven't worn in a year or more. And then, you know, it's funny because I, there was some stuff I was just holding onto, man. I got all these old, not old, they're not old is the thing, like button-down shirts. They're just not the style of shirt I wear anymore. I'm just holding onto them because they were not cheap. And so I'm sitting there going, man, do I get rid of these? And some of them are going on 2+ years of not wearing them. And so finally, as I came to a realization, as I started putting a bunch of them in a bag, I thought about the homeless shelter that I'm going to bring them to. It's the same homeless shelter I volunteer at every single month. And I was like, I was like, man, these dudes could really use these shirts a lot more than me just holding on to them for no reason. So just think about it. If you come up with a really good place to donate them, makes it a lot easier to then go back and like anything I was on the fence with, I was like, man, I could literally picture some of the guys who would want to wear this stuff. So that, that helped make it a lot easier. Got rid of a ton of clothes, had bags of stuff coming out. And for those of you, the family, I mean, I had everybody, we all did it. We all decluttered our closets. One of my kids, I just gave him that simple thing. Hey, if it doesn't fit and you haven't worn it more than a year, just put it in this pile over here and we'll talk through it all. And some of those things, you know, you know, guys and gals out there, like Mama and me wanted to keep some of the shirts that were from like Camp McCall, which is a lad and dad camp that we went to that means a lot to us. And it was hard to throw away, but there were 3 of them. So got rid of 2 and kept 1, you know, some of those things. All right. Next up, the desk. Clear the papers, bills, get the clutter off there, get the workspace clean and inspiring. Again, I did it at the house. I got a little more work to do here at the office. My office is— yeah, I mean, it's messier. I'm not going to sit here and say it's not messy. It's pretty messy right now. Uh, emails, get it to inbox zero or as close as you can. I got mine down to about 18 in total. Organize the important ones into folders, get the responses out to the things that have been sitting there for a while. Unsubscribe from unnecessary lists and Put filters in place, man. This is one— if you don't have an assistant who is in your inbox, I've had— I can't recommend having a virtual assistant in your inbox to help keep this clean enough. I've talked to some— Sean recently talked to several people recently that, that I know are listeners to the show that have asked about getting a virtual assistant. I'm happy to connect and talk through that, but it's not really the topic here. And also, I think we did some old episodes on how to best work with a virtual assistant. If not, I can dive more into that. But getting somebody in there who filters things for you, setting up automated filters, you know, you've got tools like Superhuman that can help you to also better organize your inbox as well. Apps— delete the apps off your phone you no longer use. That's an easy one. Get rid of all the old photos that, you know, do the hard clear on any photos that are already backed up somewhere else. Go into the car, remove the clutter, get rid of the unnecessary items. Close out the current year from like a visible mess perspective. All right, next up, write handwritten notes. So write thank you notes to 20 to 30 people who impacted your life this year. This one was, was fun, you know, talking about mentors, teachers of your children, contractors, friends. You know, for me, I had people that coached my kid, guys that coached with me. I coach multiple sports. So this was fun just sitting down and surprisingly easy. And, you know, it's funny, as I was putting together the stack of notes to put them in the mail, I was like, how'd you get all those addresses? And I was like, you know, it was surprisingly easy. And there were like 4 that I couldn't find, and I just texted the people. And some of you listening may get thank you cards in the mail because you're an important part of my life and just people that I, I think highly of and have influenced me in a positive way. I've tried to send them a quick thank you. All right, so next up, reflect on the past year. This is one ironically we haven't finished yet either, is reviewing your photos in your calendar from the year. Take stock of your wins. Where did you go? What did you accomplish? We did a good job of this at work. This was part of our, you know, process that we replaced EOS with. But at home, man, we had did so much last year. Uh, we were going through our Google Photos and like, I think we're in March and we just, it takes so long to go through them because you stop and you have a laugh about that thing, but it's nice. Tony Robbins calls this flooding, where you sit down and flood yourself with memories from a specific time or place. So for example, if you went on a really fun vacation, we went to Italy this past year, like, you know, sitting down and flooding with the memories from Italy and just going through literally every one. You know, if you're like me, you'll take some random pictures, just knowing that one day that'll spark a cool memory of the thing that you saw when you were there. So definitely go through and review and reflect on that past year. And then the next step in reflecting on the past year is a self-audit. So as you look at each area of your life, and I have put my life into 6 areas: faith, so growing closer to God; fun, my hobbies and activities I do for fun; fulfillment is my giving back and personal growth; family and friends, my relationships with others; finance is my work and money; and then fitness is my health and wellness. And if I give a score of 1 to 10 on each of those on how I felt I did in 2024, that it helps to, helps you to put together like, what are the 2 to 3 areas in 2025 that I really need to put more time and energy into? Because all those things require time, energy, and most importantly, intention. If I don't have intention around it, then there's, there's just no possibility I can ever get close to a 10. And each of these things requires us to get as close to a 10 as possible because they're life, right? Our fun, our fulfillment, our family and friends, our faith. These are the bedrocks of a beautiful and wonderful life. Spend time investing in these things and you will see dividends. So I picked out some of those things where I needed the opportunity to improve. You know, family and friends was one for me that my, my relationships with others, I have a tendency to be selfish. And so I just want to make sure that I'm really putting others first. And that is one where I gave myself a low grade for everybody, my family, my friends. Again, I'm just so focused on myself at times that I really needed to make sure that I was putting others first. Fitness, health, and wellness, I, I have a high grade there, but I have an even higher bar that we'll talk about here in a minute for 2025. So that was one I was focused on as well. All right, so we have closed out the current year, step 1. Step 2, reflect on the past year. And now step 3 is plan for growth. So this is where we want to make sure we're doing fun and cool things in the new year. And I did buy Jesse Itzler's big Big ass. Am I allowed to say ass on here? Big ass calendar. This was a bit of a— the big ass calendar came and it says big ass calendar at the top. And I have an 11 and 13-year-old. And as I mentioned in the faith part, we are a Christian household. And so we weren't really trying to put the word ass up on our wall. And he's got a, you know, like hashtags through it. So it's like blocked out, but we like put a big sticker block over it, just wrote Vady on top of it. So the big Vady calendar for 2025 and Jesse has And this is where we really stole from him a good bit. Talks about Kevin's rule, which was an old friend of his who says, hey, every 8 weeks I want to have a mini adventure. So whether that's a weekend camping trip, a day-long hike, trying something new, like if you've never stand-up paddleboard before, go stand-up paddleboard. If you've never been to a nearby city, just getting away and going, go see an old friend. So like making sure you've got those mini adventures throughout the year. This is where that big calendar really paid dividends because we put a, you know, he gives you little stickers with it and we put a specific color for our adventures, there were not that many planned. We have a lot of trips, we have a lot of things planned, but they're not adventurous in a lot of ways. So that gave us the opportunity to be focused on it. It was really neat to hear my wife say, oh, hey, I'm thinking about maybe doing this thing as an adventure because she's, she's not, she's a super planner, but she's not a planner the way that this dictates. And like, I want to plan some interesting new stuff. She's the type of person where when, you know, we've got a trip planned to Sedona, Arizona this year, and she will, she's got the agenda. I've already seen document from like for every single day, you know, 80% of that day will be planned, even if that plan is for us to chill out in the room for 3 hours. And so I'm incredibly blessed to have a planner because that's not my strength. Uh, things like this where, hey, bigger higher-level plans so I can see my year, that's a strength of mine. But I would not, you know, get so, so micro on something like that. So, all right, so let's talk about the unique mini adventures throughout the year. And then you want to have one big challenging goal for the year, AKA a misogi, which is a Japanese term for— I don't even know what is the actual definition of misogi. Let me look this up before I butcher this. Japanese Shinto purification ritual that involves washing the body and cleansing the mind. It was remove impurities and negative elements from the mind, body, and spirits. Yeah, the way he describes it is a big hard challenging goal, The definition I just found doesn't match. So that's interesting. But the Masogi big challenging goal for the year, this year, you know, you want to have one major challenge for the year, something outside your comfort zone that is hard. So running a marathon, taking a solo trip abroad, commitment to a significant creative project. You know, maybe you're painting a mural on your wall, or maybe you're just doing some big professional project that, that mean is meaningful to you. For me, I, I'm going to attempt. To run a marathon in the first half of the year. I say attempt mostly because, well, A, I don't run a ton as it is, and so I'm jumping right into running here. But B, I only get my— I like— it's actually a lot harder to find marathons close to you at the times that you have available than you might expect, right? So there's only so many marathons, you only have so many weekends available if you have kids that are active and a family that's active. And ironically, there's one the day after the IPPA Spring Summit. So I had exactly 12 weeks to train when I decided I wanted do it, but it will require me to fly from Vegas to Asheville, North Carolina, which is not where I live. I live in South Carolina. And then just go straight into running a marathon the next morning. So it's not the best setup, not enough training time, and not the best week to be going into, to prepping for the final week of a marathon. But I'm gonna give it a couple more weeks here, see how my training's going, see how my body responds. I didn't have much of a base going, but if I can, if I'm still surviving and it looks like I can finish in a couple weeks, then I'm gonna go ahead and sign up and divert my, my leg home to, to drop me off in Asheville instead of Columbia and go ahead and knock that out. If not, I'm gonna do a Spartan Beast in November. There's one here in South Carolina. I've done it before. It is a great, great time. And it's kind of same thing. It'll take you 3 to 4 hours. It's a real beast. Uh, but so yeah, so added those. We added all these mini adventures that we came up with, like taking kids camping in the spring and just a few other things to the big calendar. And then we also saw we've got gaps. We've only got a couple of the big or a couple of the mini adventures pinned down. So we've got some ideas on things that we want to do and that we can add to the calendar. Next up, again, another one I stole from Itzler, build quarterly winning habits. So choose one new habit to focus on every quarter, 4 habits per year. And you know, that will help you. So his whole thing is this, right? And I agree with him wholeheartedly. If you take 8 mini adventures per year, you build 4 new winning habits per year, and you have one misogi, one big hard thing every year, like you are going to have a pretty amazing life as that stacks up. And going back to the misogi thing real quick, like if it's a physical challenge, I, I like to the way I heard him on one podcast talk about it, like should have about a 50% chance of accomplishment. If your, if your chance of accomplishment is higher, maybe you're not thinking big enough. And, and so that's why I pushed for the marathon. I've never done a marathon. The furthest I've ever run run in a race is 13.1, a half marathon. I've run in a relay for I think 30 miles in a 24-hour period, but none of those were longer than 10 miles. So, yeah. So, definitely something that was pushing me above and beyond my, you know, I figured I could couch that with, hey, I don't do a marathon every year and this year I'm just throwing one in for my misogi. This is a big deal for me. I actually never intended on doing a marathon. Time. It's just the more you age, the more you think about, hey, can I do this thing? 45, can I run a marathon? We'll see. All right, so for me, for Q1, uh, stretching for 15 minutes every day, kind of a necessity for the marathon and something that when I'm doing it, I feel a lot better. So as I just want to add it into my routine, and I'm also doing it with my son who's an athlete, so that he needs to stretch. So it's just a great winning habit to add to the year for Q1, and I have not pinned down what my Q2 habit will be just yet. And then finally, like, now you just are ready to start the year with momentum, right? So now you've got everything in order. You've got your calendar plan, you've got the— you're starting the year with minimal baggage, fresh plans, clear vision for success. And now it's just time to get that cadence in place to make sure that you review that as the year goes on. Like I said, if you take all through January and maybe even into February to plan this out, it's a lot better than looking back and going like, dang, like, I didn't have a plan and the year just kind of happened. And so this is not the type of plan that requires you to plan every little thing, but it does set you up for success on some of your more macro goals in life. Well, that's it for today's episode of Payroll, and we covered a lot. I hope it was beneficial to you. If it was, drop me a note. If it wasn't, also drop me a note. I love to hear the critiques as well. I hope that you have a blessed day, and thank you for joining me on another episode of Payroll On.