Self Implement EOS or Pinnacle? Tips (and Traps) from a former EOS Implementer / Pinnacle Guide.

Most businesses approach rocks from an operational efficiency perspective. What are the things that bug us? And let's fix those things. But they still fail to recognize the rocks that truly make the business move forward. That frees up cash flow or frees up sales objectives and allows you to bring in delegation sources so you can do more rocks. Because rocks are a function of your time, really only going to be able to spend 15 to 20% of your quarter working on rocks, let's be honest. And that number should grow as time goes on. But if you've got a small team, one rock, two rocks, really being well done and well defined is really a limit.

So Kyle, you were an EOS implementer, your Pinnacle guide, and a scrappy entrepreneur from way back. Like way way back. Like high school way back. There's even a story there, if I recall correctly, we're talking today about what makes businesses work in terms of a business operating system. That words out there, people get really intimidated by it. People get really bound up in knots about creating or using a business operating system. And we're just going to riff. And so if you can start from wherever you want to start, man your history, the thing that's on your mind, what's happening at Empath, etc.

Wow, there's a lot packed in there. It was funny because we were before we're on the call, you're like, do you like roofing? I think you do. And I'm like, I don't know if anyone does because it's that cortisol effect in your brain that that overcomes and put stress hormones and it prevents it get that fight or flight response. So you're more worried about survival rather than just answering some typical podcast question. I think that's a good segue because where my story started really was not as an entrepreneur, but as an entrepreneur in a way. And I know that word is different to a lot of different people, but I was 16 and I got hired by this little company called Geek Squad who got acquired by this big company called Best Buy and they wanted to roll out 1200 locations in a matter of a year. And what'd they do? They recruited a bunch of 16 year old kids that were okay, working crazy hours. And I learned real quickly the art of a turnaround. Because one thing that I found being a young egotistical confidence kid was I had no problem taking the playbook and just telling people they need to do what the rules tell them that they need them to do. And it's similar to a business operating system, right? It's hey, here's a framework and here's how you need to operate that framework. And don't pass go, don't collect 200 if you haven't done anything in that framework. And what I recognized was the other peers that I had that were doing this, they were failing because before they implemented that framework, they tried to modify it right away, or that they tried to be too fluid in the way they implemented it. Because sometimes it required getting rid of some people, sometimes it required having to convince people they need to change their ways. Because Best Buy had this. They called it like Best Buy techs or technical people before Geek Squad was purchased and you had to go in there with the goofy shirt and tie and short sleeves and tell them, yeah, that don't exist anymore. I don't care what your process was, it's going away. So they had me become a turnaround guy. So I had to go redo a lot of the implementations, which is funny. Later in the story with when we get to business operating systems, I've had to redo a lot of business operating systems, actually, because you only know what you know. And Scott, you and I have talked about this before. You don't know what you don't know and you know what you know. So if you try to modify something before you truly have an understanding of the problem that you want to solve or the direction that you want to go, how can I really make the best modification possible? And as I started to go into the entrepreneurial spirit and start some IT companies, and I was a hired CEO again at one point, I always realized that you needed to start with a foundation. You have to start with a base, like. And I need to build upon that base. And around 2016, 2017, yeah, I read the book Traction just like everybody else, and I said, hey, I want to figure out more about this EOS thing. And unlike a lot of implementers, I just started off implementing, not even knowing. It was a coaching thing, man. I did the implementation for free for a few of my peers in my peer group back in my IT days. And what I found was I had a really good understanding of the operating system and the business model because I was also doing what they did. When I went to do modifications, I could do it with an aspect of where the direction was or where the goal post was actually going to be. And that was my journey into really developing kind of some of my own frameworks and my own methodology. Not as a I want change for the sake of change, because I just want to put a new Coat of paint on it. By the way, most of these business operating systems are just coats of paints on old ideas. Right. A lot of them are Jim Collins, a lot of them are Michael Gerber, a lot of them are Jack Stacks and all these other business theorists that have been out there for years. Hell, right. How many people still do? How to Win Friends and Influence People. Right. The Dale Carnegie book, that's all Sandler is really based off of. From a sales methodology perspective, I'm not afraid to say that. So if we're going to make an iterative improvement, my, my big overall thing with this is really understand where you're going in the whole landscape of things and don't be afraid to give an honest try and understand that it's going to fail and that iterative improvement perfection's going to be in progress.

We're diving into why are business operating systems valuable and implied. There is at each step you found you got value from it. You're outperforming your peers because you're focusing on a disciplined way of executing which will let you iterate and improve things. We've talked about this offline a bunch of times. There's so much acrimony among the different systems about whose is what, where. Everybody's drawing from the same principles. And yeah, there's some incremental improvements and occasionally the breakthrough. But I haven't yet seen anybody where I go, okay, wait, I need to drop everything and just learn this. On the other hand, to your point, tons of respect for EOs, but there's a couple areas where I feel like they can improve, and I'm open about that. But if I'm helping somebody implement eos, we're going to run it and I'm going to let you know where those guardrails are and where I believe you're running up against the way it's designed to be done. Because there are reasons behind a lot of those things. And until you know it and until you've really given it a go, it's hard to say, oh, yeah, we just.

Don'T want that part or it's not attractive. Now, there's a yin and yang to everything. And I think there are worlds in which doing things in a very frameworked approach could always be the wrong prescription. The founder of Pinnacle, Greg Cleary, great friend of mine, he always used to say some you have to meet the client where they are. But he would also talk about when you do these business frameworks, sometimes you do have to do things out of order. And the problem with some of these business operating systems is. And he would use this analogy, which would be, you go to the Mayo Clinic and your shoulder hurts and you're like, doc, dude, shoulder's killing me. And he goes, cool, here's Lipitor. And go, dude, that's for heart medicine, that's for blood pressure. And they go, yeah, but we start everybody on that. That's malpractice in the medical world. So some of these people that get certified with business operating systems, they, they have their own business to run, they make a big investment. Sometimes they, they don't meet the client where they are. So I want to make sure that there's caution in this conversation as well, that sometimes these business operating systems are not a fix all cure many cases they're not. And I've seen countless, I've had countless businesses come. Most of my clients are in the IT or software business come to me and say, dude, I implemented eos. And we're still as unprofitable as we were when we started it. Because you said, I want to implement a leadership framework and a communication framework, which really these platforms are an accountability framework to fix my sales problem or fix my spending problem or my forecast and modeling problem. And the coach that sold a meos or scaling up or Pinnacle, whatever the platform is, didn't have the wherewithal to tell them this is not going to fix your problem. Because again, the malpractice analogy, I start everybody on vision, I start everybody on your org chart.

It makes me think of a. I just got off of a call with one of our customers and I, I gotta give a shout out to my friend Depesh. He quoted, I think it was Stagan that you get the business you deserve. I was like, I really like that. It's scary true. It's scary true.

I have real problems in a lot of cases with some of these models and I guess I don't want to put EOS on blast because it's a fantastic model and they've done a lot for me in my own career. But a lot of businesses, the visionary seat shouldn't exist to me. There's a lot of businesses, like you said, your friend Depeche said, the business is got an outcome of your input and the visionary seat to a lot of people when they read it or they're sold on it, right? Sometimes reading something sells you on something. They think, oh, I need to hire an integrator to fix all my problems in my business. In a lot of cases, that owner doesn't have the discipline or motivation to get their business where it's going to be. And that's not going to change by just hiring an integrator or hiring a CEO.

I think that we call that like the magic unicorn hire. You know, it's like a fallacy. Oh, I'll just hire somebody and help fix it all. There's a lot of ifs around that it could happen if you're willing to empower them, if you're comfortable giving up some of that control. If you're delegating. There's like a long list of those ifs, right?

And that, that always ruined me because I'd get into a business and they'd be like, I'm the visionary. And I'm like, okay, tell me more. And they would go on these diatribes on how I create this framework and this vision and this direction. And I'm like, okay, so you have a hired CEO that makes all those decisions and just reports profitability and growth to you? No. Okay, so it sounds like you're still the integrator. No, I have someone else to like. There becomes this blurriness at the top on who's truly making the decisions in the business. And if you look at any research and this will probably get some flack. Co CEOs statistically don't work.

That I believe.

And when you get into this position where the visionary doesn't really become the visionary or doesn't have the capital to truly become the visionary, right? Like you still need to be probably of $20 million business to hire a CEO to have that cash flow. Now you have a guy trying to make decisions and create accountability and create a reputation in the organization of when I say, shit, we got to do it. But then the visionary just comes behind them and changes it all or says, no, we're not going to do that, or undermines their authority. Authority.

So you think of, you're thinking of the integrator as the CEO versus the CEO, because I'll usually think of it as a COO or president type of role.

I don't think it matters. Right. If you look at, if you go back 20, 30 years and you look at what a CEO was in a business that actually could have a CEO, the CEO, they reported to the board. What did the board do? The board created direction in the vision of the company, right? We need to grow 5% year over year. We need to make sure we look at these markets. Right? They created the permission to either have a deficit for growth or let's tighten the reins to make profitability. So that was a CEO like in the 80s and early 90s before the dot com thing happened. This whole I'm going to have a CEO that's this marketing guy that everyone knows and has a personal brand. That really is a post.com era concept. Right. This is the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs, they really created this Persona. So to me, I don't really care what the title is. It's who's responsible for the company's outcomes. Like to me it's always a financial exercise. What's the revenue going to be, what's the profit going to be and what's the growth need? What's the growth component of that? That's what a traditional operator's KPIs are. So that could be CEO, that could be COO, but to me there's just an ego thing there.

Yeah, I can see that.

And by the way, here's a fun tip or fun thing. I got obsessed with where some of these business operating systems got their foundational exercises from. So like I, I went through, I was Indiana Jones man trying to find the lost ark.

We're similar in this way. I have gone down that rabbit hole. I'm can't wait to hear the learnings you're about to share.

Oh man. And the reason I did this was a couple fold. One, some of these business operating systems for people that don't know are very litigious. They love their IP and their trademarks. So if you decide that I want to do my own thing and be a business coach, really that's in a bespoke manner like I do where I'm actually going to help you with your financial planning. I'm going to help you figure out what your valuation needs to be your exit strategy. Like an actual full blown business coach. I can't use some of those terms because some of these companies want to come after me and sue me because again that's how they maintain their IP and their valuation. So right this, there was some self serving aspects of wanting to be this archaeologist of business tools. And one of the things on this topic of integrator CEO is I was like where did this idea come from? Where did it come from? And I had some friends that had also been on this hunt. So I didn't find this myself. This was handed to me where in the 60s and I have the article, Harvard Business Review actually created an article called the Integrative Business Model. And I don't know if I sent this to you Scott. I think I might have Done it, but I'll send it to you.

But send it.

Yeah, send it. Yeah. And what's crazy is it's 20 pages written again. This is predating most of even the Gerber stuff in the 80s. And it no joke talks about the integrative business model. It has the an org chart in there that shows sales, marketing, ops and finance as integrative business units. But the interesting thing that I found was they don't talk about the integrator as the role or as a person. They talk about integration as a department. It's an integrative business unit. And it was fascinating to me because obviously where some of these ideas came from were iterative improvements of this article. And this came around the time of, this is post World War II. This is a lot of manufacturing. This is a lot of industrial revolution or post industrial revolution. This is. Right. We're getting into that 60s and 70s era of, of really consumerism. And really what they were talking a lot about in this article was someone needs to be the interfacing between the three departments. But it had a dotted line to a fourth department that none of these other business units talk about or none of these other business operating systems talk about, which is the R and D department.

This is super interesting.

Oh, when I read it, literally, I went through a snowball. I went through a total oh my God, everything I've been told is a lie to me type phase, right? Not that it was a lie, but that's just the epiphany I had. And when I started to build out my preferred business model for IT and software companies, I started to have this perspective. Okay, who does R and D? Because if I'm a business that's quickly evolving or a channel that's quickly evolving, like technology, I always need to have something for that customer, right? Whether that's a new service, whether that's a new product, or I have to sell a new product, build a new feature if I'm in software, because I'm always trying to keep up. But I can't bog down my operations team, I can't bog down my sales team or my marketing team because they need to continue the cash flow engine of the business so that someone else can figure out, hey, not only are they being integrated, but let's have this R and D do a Kaizen type approach with those three departments. But they still are responsible for the product. And if you look. And if you look at Agile frameworks, right, for software companies, they always have a chief product officer. It's very much the same idea.

Yeah. And if you're a product company, that CPO has a ton of latitude and.

They'Re the ones that typically report directly to the CEO or directly to the board. Right. Because they might have to make big changes. If you're trying to go like a hypergrowth company, 40% year over year, I'm usually not going to do that with just sales and marketing or land and expand. And if you're a service business, by the way, challenge a lot of you to think of your service as a product because your product does need to evolve. I heard the other day of a. Of a handyman in Tampa that's now starting to do handyman work, but as a service. So he charges people 50, 100 bucks a month and they get all of the handyman work that they can get.

Like it's still traditional with appliance repair and things like that. Everybody, even H Vac is. Has gone to that model.

And it's one of those things where if you don't think of your service as a product, you'll never be able to have the brain cycles to evolve your product that way or look at the market.

Yeah, yeah. There's a book, I think the guy's name is Harry Beckwith. I think I have it back on the shelves. Is selling the Intangible, I think is the name of it. But he makes a case for these ideas. And this is early, early. This is back like an 80s book, 80s or 90s book of how important it is to make any service feel like a product. I really like that idea. We're going, we're very much into the philosophy and anthropology of these systems. I want to drill in a little bit to the ground level because I spend a lot of time talking with, coaching, discussing ideas like what makes a good rock, for example, or a good objective. And I don't know if you've seen this or not, but typically people will say we have these so that we can focus. They're going to help us focus and align. And then they'll show whether it's rocks or objectives or whatever framework you're using if they're there to create focus and alignment. You can't create focus and alignment by having a bunch of them. Like just becomes a wish list. I know you're big on accountability. I've seen the stick. I've seen the spicy posts. What's the hot take? There it is.

Oh, okay. What's the hot take on that, man? Am I getting noticed? The hot take guy. So for those of you don't know. I created this hashtag called Spicy Monday about four or five months ago with my buddy Dean Trempellis. And we didn't build it as like a hot take or a clickbait type thing. It was more of let's just say things that everyone says in private, let's just say it publicly and let's just see what happens. But when it. Okay, so what's funny about this whole rock thing and this accountability battle come to it, is I can't tell you how many people think that it's a construct of one of the business operating systems we've been talking about yet. I'll send them this video from the late 80s of Stephen Covey literally doing the rock exercise and putting them in a. If you haven't seen it, go to YouTube, type in Stephen Covey rocks. It'll click a little bit more. But to your point, go ahead.

I have to tell you. Or you can go to the Result Maps website. We have that one.

Okay.

Put that up. As soon as I heard about rock.

Yeah.

But yeah, totally from YouTube.

And a lot of these have come off of this idea of you need to tackle the big objectives first and the little objectives just fall into place. And I used, when I did a lot of business operating systems, heavily, I only do four or five clients a year now. But what I found was I'd always make the joke that, hey, the first quarter you do rocks, you're going to bite off way too much. You can choose, I'm telling you now, take as many as you want. We are going to meet in the second quarter and you are probably going to get 50% of them done. And they don't every single time. No, Kyle, we're dedicated to this. We're going to get it done. You don't need to worry about any of this. We are different. So I'd show up the second quarter. Let's check in on your rocks. By the way, I've already know that they're all. They've all failed. And you can just see the look on their face of, yeah, you right, we got half of them done. And why I say this, Scott, and I agree with you, is it most businesses approach rocks from an operational efficiency perspective. What are the things that bug us and let's fix those things. But they still fail to recognize the rocks that truly make the business move forward, that frees up cash flow or frees up sales objectives and allows you to bring in delegation sources so you can do more rocks, because rocks are a function of your time really only going to be able to spend 15 to 20% of your quarter working on rocks, let's be honest. And that number should grow as time goes on. But if you've got a small team, one rock, two rocks, really being well done and well defined is really a limit.

And when I completely agree with that, by the way, like, I can't tell you how many times I tell people that they're like, really? Yep, one or two.

And here I've started to wonder why I've done the same thing. Paul, you have asked the question, why is this the case? Those businesses have leaders who don't know how to manage their time. And what I've recognized in building my education company Empath is no one practices time blocking anymore. Everyone has lost the discipline of reoccurring meetings. I have a hatred for tools like calendly Microsoft bookings now because it gives someone the freedom to tell me that they're more important on my schedule tomorrow than whatever I had there or lacked thereof.

So now not if you put a placeholder and block it.

Not if you put a placeholder, which is where I'm going. Exactly. Where I'm going with this is so we have to now being in this world of we have to evolve our time management process to go, hey, I need a block once every Thursday at 2 o'. Clock. That's an hour that all I do is work on my rock. And businesses that are just starting these frameworks, they're chaotic. In a lot of cases, they I don't have time. I don't have time. Like I've done my last three LinkedIn posts. I've been handling here's ways to fix I don't have time excuses. But you have to learn that it's going to take time. You might have a bunch of client calls Thursday at one that you have to combat or get through before I can have that recurring block every single Thursday at 1 o'. Clock. It's going to take time. Your employees are going to have to get used to you telling them, no, I will not have that meeting with you tomorrow. And those cultural things and those behavioral things are some of those components that cause rocks to just not happen or not being there or not existent. And that's defeating, right? Because a lot of people want everything yesterday. But the idea is, if you can do right, and this is going back to the Stephen Covey video, is that the idea is you need to chip away, just do one accord and what you're going to find is you're going to get it done and it's not perfect or the person that made the rock, they didn't have a full understanding of the solve. I hear a lot of coaches go, oh, the rock needs to be smart. If I don't know what I don't know, I have to get started. I have to do a version one to even know what I now need to get to. And I think that gets lost. And what I started to do was, if I'm doing a rock where we don't have full understanding, okay, let's do one quarter of. Let's do what you do know. Let's do the improvements that and let's put another rock 2/4 down the road for an incremental improvement. So every rock is really two rocks. Say, for example, right. I want to reduce my turn time on any client request in a service business. Okay. You're gonna have to go through a lot of research. You have to go through a lot of data. You're going to have to go, hey, how are we going to dispatch our team faster? How are we going to get the client request faster? How are we going to get the parts for manufacture? You're gonna have to try some things. But what you don't want to get in the habit of is knee jerking and saying, oh, it failed, so throw it away. Right? You want to let it sit for a quarter or for a few months. I'm also not a huge fan of rocks always being stuck into quarters, by the way. That's a topic for another day. But I need to get to a place where I let it breathe, let people try it, let people get good insight on it, and then have that second phase of refinement a couple quarters down the road. But you need to make sure you don't forget about it. And that's also what ends up happening, Scott, is when you have this. When I found out when I started doing this is, yeah, rocks were getting better because people would look back on and go, oh, it actually had impact on our business. Let's see if we can double down on it. But two, when that two quarters came up and it was ready to do that refinement, that's taking place of one of our five possible rocks. Now I can only do four.

Yeah, I like that. So you negotiating for what those tops are? I feel like I've worked with companies that are 20 million, 30 million getting to 50 million, that struggle when they've got five goals. Much larger companies like Bob Iger from Disney said, three is the max. Three's max. For our strategic goals. Now, it doesn't mean there's not priorities, maybe departmentally to enable that. But from a company wide perspective, if the empire that is Disney can only get three things done, that was a big aha for me. It's in his book if anybody wants to go check it.

But I think even his master class is really good. As much as he gets flack, he is a pretty successful guy. From a business perspective, he's a successful guy.

He came up through the ranks too. If you look at his history, he's somebody who was on the front lines of what he was doing for a very long time before he rose.

Well. Disney was going to go out of business in like the early 90s, right. There's a lot of stories where the parks weren't doing so well. But one thing you've said in there that I want to comment on, and I know I talk a lot, so I apologize.

That's why I got you here, man. Go for it.

In order to figure out what your three strategic goals are, to build smaller rocks for departments underneath them, I truly need to understand what the rocks for the year are. And I see a lot of people not understanding yearly goals because I see a lot of businesses that don't have financial goals. When you go into your annual, you should have your budget ready. You should have your models and forecasts ready. Because the conversations we need to have are if we're going to grow 30% this year, let's talk about the problems that 30% growth is going to to cause. Need more leads, need more people. We need to be more efficient because maybe there's also a margin component in there. If we're going to spend more on sales, the margin of our product needs to go up. Product or service. Okay. So we need to be able to achieve more economy of scale. How do we do things with more revenue with less cost. Right. There might be some cost reduction. When you see it happen. Where you literally in the, in your annual, are talking about your forecast and budget for the majority of the time now. Honest. And I've seen this before and I've done this actually many times now, you can literally build all of your rocks for the year in your annual. Because now they're all aligned with the goal of the year and now they're pertinent to what the board or the ownership team wants. Probably what Iger was referring to. If they're going to grow 8% year over year. And they need to also make sure that they pay off some strategic debt, which means they need a little bit more profitability. I'm sure those were the two objectives. Growth, increased profit. Now all the teams have to go. How do we contribute to those two goals? It's a theory of constraints. Right. Give them very little to work from so that they have to be creative in their solve the kink in the chain exercise.

Yeah, I think Igers were digital. They were going to go digital. They were going to recommit. I'm not getting the wording right. To fantastic content. And I believe there was something about the parks maybe taking them international. I'd have to go look. But when you look at what they did, the acquisitions of the Star wars franchise, the Marvel franchise, looking at things they televised Hamilton, which was on the Disney Channel, like, sorry, the Disney streaming service. You can see the effects of these decisions all the way down the chain.

And I guarantee you those directives came out of Netflix is kicking our ass and we can't sell VHS and DVDs anymore and the parks have lower attendance because of COVID or something like. I guarantee you when you have those directives. And that's truly where we get to the visionary conversation. Right. This is why I'm not totally against the visionary ideas. They went cool. I am telling you what the solve is this year to hit what our board is telling us we need to achieve. I got the data from our market analysis. I researched the data from why we might be slipping in DVD sales or eyeballs really. Right. It's attention. But again, you can only do that with understanding where your business needs to go.

So how do you think of issues which are. Is it is. Are the issues in your mind the issues that come out of looking at that budgeting and planning process? Is that what helps generate your rocks?

I go back and forth this one and I don't know if I'm the best person at the whole issue portion of managing a business because everyone does them a little bit differently.

But it's problem solving ultimately. If we take away the terminology TMS for a minute, it's problem solving, which you clearly have a mind for.

Maybe it's incremental failure or decremental failure. I guess it would be a better way to phrase that. I love this question and it's making my wheels turn. So when it comes to problem solving, again, I love the guy to death. Greg Cleary. He said something to me and I don't know if he came up with it, but he always said Kyle Acker would wage an actor age problem.

Or is this an act? Your wage problem act your age or which.

Act your wage.

Act your wage. Got it.

And I loved it. Because when you, When I was if either while I'm facilitating a meeting or I'm in a meeting and people are coming to you, what do they do? They bring you the problem, they don't bring you the solution. And I remember in running my own businesses, I loved asking the question of, okay, what research have you done? What have you tried? What have you theorized about who have you called? And I hate to say it, a lot of times when I see issues discussed in a business, no one's done any research. They have all this discussion on things that they know nothing of. No one's bringing data, no one's bringing options. Everyone hopes that someone else will come up with the answer to their problem. And I used to push back when I was in eos, even in my own business, where they do ids, identify, discuss and solve, I like to flip it around, Identify, solve, and then let's discuss it. Because what I didn't want was people to just bring problems and us to go around the room a thousand times on what we think the solution is. I don't want to see this on the list of things that we discuss unless you've done your research and you've done some trial and error, you've done some MVPs to try to fix this problem.

So adding a little bit of the bezos to the conversation, like, be prepared, be prepared.

I can't tell you how often in meetings, I've literally sat in hundreds of leadership meetings, maybe even thousands at this point. A lot of them are a waste of hot air.

That's true statement. But I think, I don't know if it's always because people haven't thought like I, I am. Yeah, I'd rather you bring the problem forward than wait until you have it all figured out. Because in my experience and in my younger days, like that led to problems because the problem goes untalked about because we haven't figured out the solution at the same time. I've been in tons of meetings where one voice just dominates it. You're not collaborating at all and you're not surfacing. Like I found there's folks on our team, sometimes they're not necessarily the best problem solver across the full stack of a problem. If I can use that terminology, like they need help framing it or carving it down, then they're great if you can give them a paradigm. So people have these different strengths. Because when I was younger, I used to be don't bring me a problem. There's no problems. Just go solve.

Let's go.

And that doesn't. That can lead to some issues.

Well, everything comes with a little bit of gray area, right? Everything has a little bit of meat in the middle. I hate talking in absolutes. And I, even though I do it right, it's easy to talk in absolutes. Oh, no, you're right.

Absolutes, man.

Only the sith dealing absolutes. No, man, I love you to death. I can't. I mean, the fact that you just pulled that out, good on you. But no, you're right. There are moments where you do need to weigh in as the expert, as the, the executive, whatever title you give yourself. I just want to see effort. I want to motivate people to succeed. Right. Google does a lot of research on the whole 8020 thing, right, where everyone kind of gets their own project to try to fix on their own. Because you really build a good culture of problem solvers when they have the opportunity to fail. I have this mantra that I've used religiously called dare to suck. And I built my consulting firm off of it. We hit 60 people. We were 60 million or 6 million in top line revenue with 40% on the bottom line. We were making a ton of money. And I always told them, like, don't be afraid to fail. I'm never going to fire you for trying something, just winging it. What we're going to have a conversation about is if you wing it and do the same thing four, five, six times over again and don't learn anything. And we built some great products out of it, some great service offerings, some great standardization and templates. No. 1. People like to be able to try their own things and I'm a firm believer in that. They like to be able to say, I did this. There's a sense of pride and accomplishment. I have the honor of a few employees, even, that have worked for me that now own their own businesses. Because going back to my initial statement at the very beginning of this conversation where we had the cortisol, what happened? Do you like riffing it? No. In the initial time when I first started, I'm an introvert at heart. Riffing it was terrifying for me.

What?

Yeah, I'm an introvert.

It must be the mic that brings it out of you, man. I don't know, dude.

I go to events, I do big talks. I am exhausted by the end of it. I am mentally spent and. But it's this court. If you look into risk management and Risk aversion. A lot of this happens because if you believe in it, as we evolved, you had to learn to get the hell out of the cave or the lion's gonna eat you. So your brain is trying everything it can do to survive. Still to this day, if you believe in this, well, what happens if I don't wanna run away from something? I need exposure. I need to be exposed to that stress multiple times. Like a lion tamer, they can get in a cage with a lion and they don't run. They might have adrenaline a little bit, but they have learned how to handle the situation. So if I'm able to deal with a little bit of stress and be presented with a little bit of stress, more and more, I'm willing to take more risks. Now. Some people are risk adverse where they just run. Some people are risk seeking where they just literally always want to be shit. Just scared to go look at daredevils and people on X Games and crap like that. Right? Travis Pastrana doing triple backflips on a motorcycle. But the objective is really to become risk neutral where I can look at a situation and go, cool. It might be risky, we might stab ourselves in the back, shoot ourselves in the foot. But I'm okay with that because I've built enough experience in this to try something. So if you can get your team a little bit further from either risk seeking, which is your sales guys, a lot of times they're just selling people shit and hoping that we deliver. Or your ops team where they're just all about knowing things need to be perfect. Things need to be perfect. Things need to be perfect. If I can get them both into the middle now my company can innovate.

That reminds me of a great book, I don't know if you've ever checked it out, called It Takes what It Takes by Trevor Moad and Russell Wilson. So he's a sports psychologist. He's done work with one of the Williams sisters, Alabama football team. Russell Wilson in his prime. But his whole thing is neutral. He calls it neutral thinking. He's got this great mantra. He says, I can't promise you that positive thinking always works, but I can promise you that negative thinking always does. And his whole thing with coaching isn't that good. His whole thing with coaching athletes was you've got to get to neutral. And the follow on book is called getting to neutral, where you're just like, you're just focused on executing. It's not what did that last play mean? Or what did that failure mean? It's what is the. How can I be present in this moment and deliver my best?

Yep.

All about the ethical thinking.

Well, and it's accepting failure. Right. Dare to Suck came out of me reading a book about Aerosmith, right? It was literally how they wrote a song. They had a Dare to Suck meeting where they would just put stupid ideas on the table and say, can we make a song with this? Right. Think of some of the songs. Aerosmith had. Love in an Elevator, Jenny's Got A Gun. Like, there's some things in there that they were just comedic about, but they turned into great songs. If you remove, like you mentioned the idea that failure doesn't exist. Failure is just a step in the process. Well, now my team doesn't feel like I'm behind them with the accountability bat just because they're making that attempt. So I know we're coming full circle into this entire conversation, but this, again, now goes into business frameworks and business operating systems, because there is a point where you do need to modify whatever.

Framework you adopted from being around a lot of people who are pure or say they're pure.

I was just going to talk about the word pure.

I don't want to. Again, lots of respect for all the systems. I get to see how people are really doing these things.

Very.

I don't think I've ever seen anybody that's just running it perfectly. They have one aspect or another that they're very into, and then they've got their customization because it's like martial arts are this way. So I practice Taekwondo. It's a system just like that. Like, here's how you behave in Taekwondo, but it's martial art. So if you look at 20 black belts, you're going to see 20 different expressions of the same forms and the same movements and how they get put together. There's really never, like, the one true way.

If you go back to the 70s, right before that happened, and if you did kung fu, you did kung fu, right? It took Bruce Lee to go, what if I do multiple martial arts? Now, I know there's a lot of controversy, or even the Gracies, like in the 80s, right, they decided this whole Brazilian jiu jitsu thing was, no, let's do some slight modifications or bring some different aspects of different martial arts, because you can learn a lot from a lot of different things. No, I love that. I love bringing in that area in this entire conversation. Like, we did it even in my current business. Our quarterly start with a budget review. We look at revenue, we look at profit, we look at everything in between. Did we hit our quotas? Did we hit our growth goals? And I can tell you right now, even in my consulting business, there were no rocks. If we weren't to budget. I don't care what operational efficiency we want to work on, I don't care what tool in the toolbox that we want to implement or go buy. Right. It's very easy these days to want to go buy a SaaS platform, to think it's going to fix all your problems and they all go 80%, 70% unimplemented. You use that really good feature of.

The one unless you're using result maps.

Which is really, unless you're using results map. And it's how you hold people accountable. And I don't disagree because it's an accountability tool. First and foremost. It's a memory tool. Do I remember to tell somebody to get this done in a fast moving business? But yeah, no, I'm right there with you. It's, you're going to have to unbe pure because at some point your business is going to either innovate or come up with something different or you're going to have a different need. And this is why I started to look at other operating systems. Honestly, I went, hey, I did eos. It was great. I know, like the back of my hand. But what other things are out there? And I was, I met Vern, Vern Harnish scaling up was fantastic. He didn't have his whole coaching platform refined, so I didn't really ever dive into it. And then I met Greg with Pinnacle, Jack Stacks with all that stuff. Right. I just became obsessed with what are other things that are out there now in all of this. There's an answer for everything. And where this thing came from, this baseball bat with accountability written on it, this really came out of at some point you got to do the work. You can do the theory all day long, but at some point you got to give it an honest try. And I used to joke that my title at my businesses were always Chief Accountability Officer because I don't care how much OPS or executiveness that you do, are we doing it.