← Confessions of an Implementer
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- [00:00]
A
You know, as long as we're talking metaphorically, like in motion picture terms. Indiana Jones. Right. I love that thing. Stepping off right into what looks like this abyss. But he closes his eyes and he does it anyway. So you got to have three or four people in your foxhole who agree with you that the next step will be, you know, a living step, you know, not a dying step.
- [00:37]
B
Welcome to Confessions of an Implementer. I'm your host, Brian Hogan. We share unique stories of EOS implementers and the companies they've transformed to give you a rare glimpse into the successes and challenges of the system in action. Let's jump in. Okay, so I'm trying to figure out how to go back now because. Because I. I guess they call it the green room, but in the green room, I was complimenting your guitar stack. I was trying to think of the. Who is it? Dan Wallace. I think Dan Wallace also has guitars. And. And my comment.
- [01:08]
A
One of my. One of my dear mentors. Yeah, Love Dan. I'm not. So, you know something? He and I haven't actually gotten into the guitar conversation, so I'm gonna have to have to reach out.
- [01:18]
B
He's. He's got. He's got either one or two guitars, and then he has a. A really funny stuffed animal behind him as well. So we. We were saving that for. For the next conversation, but we got a little bit into the guitars. I. I wanted to try and come back to some of the stuff that you were talking about. So you said that. That you got started as guitar kind of very early on in life.
- [01:41]
A
Well, you know, I just. Well, I apologize for bringing you and anyone unfortunate enough to have tuned in today to my inner sanctum, because this is not someplace that I normally have guests. Right. This is kind of where I work. And my version of art on the walls is this. So my dear wife calls it, my music store. It's kind of an alternative to an office. But, yeah, I started playing when I was a kid, just fell in love with it because I was forced to take piano lessons from the time I was 6 or 7. And I kept playing, and I got invited in to join bands and stuff. I guess by the time I was 12 or 13, I realized very quickly that the guys who played the keyboards did not get any dates. So I switched to guitar. And I probably spent every waking moment when I wasn't in school or playing sports or doing chores around the house, kind of locked in my room, trying to dig the music that I so desperately wanted to be able to play out of the grooves in the vinyl, because, you know, back in those days, you just couldn't watch YouTube videos and, you know, and have people teach you where to put your fingers. So, you know, it was. It's interesting that it stuck with me because, you know, what I found early in life is that stuff that really lasts is hard to learn, right? The stuff that really sticks with you and becomes a part of who you are requires just an inordinate amount of passion and discipline and just quite crazy. When I say crazy, I really mean crazy. Dogged persistence to master and, you know, people. Most people who start about 1 out of 10 people who buy guitar are still playing it after end of the year because it hurts. It literally hurts. You don't have. You have to create calluses on your fingers to be able to learn how to play. So, you know, it can discourage a lot of people. But you know what? So does the act of starting a business. So, you know, there's a. You know, when I look back, I didn't think there was anything to do with music and EOs and what we do with entrepreneurial leadership teams. But, you know, if you haven't personally experienced something that you're passionate enough about to ignite your willingness to embrace structure and process, then you'll never get what we do, and you'll never, you know, truly be happy. Because happiness usually is at the end of some journey, right? And it's not, it's not the destination, it's actually the journey of getting better. Right, that makes for a fulfilling life. And this is just kind of one dimension. There's a lot of stuff that, that I like that, that I'm passionate about. You know, I like golf. I'm not nearly as good at golf as I am at this, but the two have a lot in common, right? They, they, they, you know, every. Everything that you do exposes your weakness, right? And when you play guitar, what you sound like is who you are. And when you post a score in golf, you know, what you shot is who you are, right? So there's just no avoiding it. So I don't know, I kind of came to EOS because I do have this masochistic love of structure, in a way. And it's one of the things that I see in some of the clients that I work with. They are intensely curious people, and curiosity is what built their business, and curiosity fuels their innovation. But without any structure that burns the house down. Right?
- [05:26]
B
Yes, yes. I went through, like, I'm a living proof example of that. Like, EOS literally changed My life, I still distract the organization, but I was like, I was, yeah, it was not going all that great. And between Vistage and having a, a peer group that I could lean on and then eos, a framework that I could bring into the business, just a complete game changer. Do you think that this was always today's theme? Like I already know what it's going to be like just off of that conversation and looking at your background and your journey, like your, your life has to me, from the outside looking in has been this like constant improvement, constant learning in everything that you've done. Do you think that that was inside of you like originally, like you picked up the guitar and like you already had this, this like tenacious thought, desire to like grow and, and get better? Or do you think that like those things coming together kind of activated something inside of you?
- [06:28]
A
Oh boy. That, that's a couch question for a better shrink. But. Not, not, not a better shrink than you, but certainly a better, you know, a better practitioner of self therapy than I've ever been. I'll try to tell you, you know, the most self aware version of an answer is first of all, I believe birth order is a big deal. You know, I was a first child and first child's first children love to get the approval of everybody. You know, we seek it, were driven by it. And you know, I saw my heroes playing guitar and making people happy and I, you know, I wanted to do the same thing. You know, I, I saw, you know, whatever it is that I've been inspired to do, it's because, you know, I wanted a piece of that, you know, for myself. So my, my career. What was, I don't know. I think the way I characterize it is that I have been running from a, from burning buildings most of my career and looking for, you know, building that wasn't on fire, you know, And I say that with great respect for the industries that I've been in and for the people that I work with. But you gotta kind of embrace your professional journey is one that's not going to be a straight line. I mean, we teach our clients, you know, the hitting the ceiling metaphor and how, you know, in the session room I talk about how every road on a map looks like a straight line, but when you drive it, it's crooked as hell. And you know, my career was the same way. You know, I was in an industry that employed, you know, about two and a half million Americans, the American textile industry. And you know, the American government basically traded it away in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. And, you know, the whole business just kind of went away. It went offshore and I'd find something else to do. Without taking you through my entire career, just about everything that I did, I had to do to continue being a good provider for my family. So there was some combination of fear of failure, curiosity, opportunity, and, you know, maybe some, you know, just plain good old fashioned ambition there. But, you know, you never know what opportunities you're going to get served in life. And when you're also, when you're in a business, you know, you probably see more opportunities that you think are ripe than really are. So I had a bit, just a quick story to kind of tie this together. One of the last gigs I had was doing a restructuring of a firm who had a. I was kind of in a COO role. And I had a brilliant, brilliant, visionary founder who, you know, could come into any of our meetings and just kind of spontaneously, you know, decide that there were three new strategic imperatives that, you know, everybody had to do. And after a couple of years of this, my team felt like they were all playing this, the childhood game of crack the whip. Did you ever play that? No. Where there's a. There's. There's a. There's a kid, usually a bigger, stronger, faster kid. And everybody joins hands and the kid at the lead starts to run, and then everybody has to follow, and then he starts zigging or she starts zigging and zagging. And what happens is everybody holding hands turns into this big human whip. And if you're not one of the first two or three people at the front of that chain, you just feel like you're just swinging. It's everything you can do to just hold on. And I realized that the emotional cost of my team just trying to keep up with what the flavor of the week was and just trying to stay in the political good graces of the owners and the founders. It was just exerting an emotional toll on them. And I'd heard about Gino's book. I just went out and grabbed it. I took an X Acto knife because there was no real website or anything else. I started slicing pages out of traction. I took them to Kinko's and made like hundreds of copies of the vt. And I started just kind of very imperfectly trying to implement EOS in my own business. And as imperfectly as I did it, because there were not, maybe there were a couple of professional implementers, but I didn't know anybody doing this. It was fantastic for me because what I found was that most of the dysfunction in my business kind of stemmed from the founder and key leaders not really being aligned. And so we learned about, you know, today I call it the paradox of curiosity. Right? The paradox of curiosity is that visionaries are wired to be really tuned in. They've got a huge radar system, they understand trends and opportunities in the industry, they're really good at networking, and they're just kind of natural funnels for newness and opportunity and innovation. But absent structure, what you wind up is this buff. You wind up with a buffet of ideas and they tend to graze on them endlessly while the team is trying to figure out, okay, how do we finish what we all thought was a priority last week? This dilemma of choice is something that Eos helped me reconcile. And at 10 years into this work, it's still one of the most rewarding things that I've ever done because it shouldn't be that painful.
- [12:49]
B
All right, quick break, friends. Do you find it impossible to hire and retain top sales talent or worse, are you paying insane recruiter fees who are all using outdated hiring processes? Yeah, I was too. At Hunt a Killer, we were spending hundreds of thousands on recruiter agency fees. And after I sold that company in 2025, I started Talent Harbor. And the whole vision here was to make sales recruiting accessible to small and medium sized businesses. Because the organizations that can hire and retain world class people are the ones that ultimately win. Most organizations rely on things like Z ZipRecruiter or LinkedIn and they get hundreds if not thousands of resumes. But we find that the best salespeople are already perfectly placed somewhere else. And that's why our approach is to go after them. And we do that through a business model called recruiting. As a service, we do not charge commissions, we do not have success fees, we don't have contracts, we don't have long term engagements and we become an extension piece. Your team as expert sales recruiters. If you're tired of the same old recruiters and want to actually grow your sales team, check us out@talent harbor.com that's Talent Harbor. T A L E N T H A r b o r.com let's get your next sales superstar hired. One thing you said was looking at a lot of business ideas or looking at a lot of business opportunities and there's very few good ones. Like what, what type of discernment like do you have like this, this framework that you use to be able to say like, this is the good one. This is the Bad one. Like, how have you been able to discern the good opportunities from the bad opportunities throughout your career?
- [14:35]
A
Well, in my career, it really came down to getting enough failure behind me to know what I wasn't good at. I mean, the biggest for me professionally has been whether or not the opportunity was best realized with the skills that I could bring to the party. And there have been some opportunities that I wanted to pursue. I'll never forget that. One of the most painful job interviews I ever had as a musician. I was early in my career, I thought a perfect job would be working in some aspect of the music industry. And out of college, I was running a stereo store for a couple of years. And, you know, I got to meet representatives of a lot of the big, you know, stereo equipment manufacturers. And I got invited to Framingham, Massachusetts to have an interview with the executives of the Bose Corporation. So Bose speakers back in the day were a big deal. And so I kind of made it through the interview. I finally got in front of Dr. M.R.G. bose, who had a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from MIT. He was a brilliant guy. And I was nervous. Oh, I was. I was just dying. But I couldn't wait to tell him everything that I knew. And, you know, after about. It was probably an endless monologue where he was just so patient. He looked at me and said, Mr. Williams, have you ever heard of the word. Do you know what the word pedantic means? And I said, no, Dr. Bose, I don't. He said, that's okay. Continue. Oh, my gosh, I couldn't wait. I couldn't. You know, there was no. I didn't have a phone back in those days, right? So I had to. I rushed into some drugstore and I got a paperback dictionary, and I looked up, you know, the word pedantic means. You know, it means, you know, overly verbose, you know, wearing your expertise, you know, in public or being preachy. And I thought, oh, my gosh, no way I'm getting this job. And sure enough, I didn't, you know, so, you know, they wanted quiet, technical people, you know, who could. Who could be very sober, kind of rigorous, you know, people who could carry their message out into the marketplace. And I was just this wild, crazy, you know, passionate guy who just, well, you know, just wanted to talk to everybody that I met. That was not a good fit. So that was not a good opportunity for me. And Dr. Bose was good to save me from myself.
- [17:28]
B
Was there a certain point in your life because you talked about, like, the failure and that specific Example, like, was that a turning point? Was there like a phase in your life where you were like, I need to just go into. No, because you, you were doing the guitar, so you were always in learn mode. When did you realize that you had to put enough failure behind you to like be able to excel or be able to, to navigate or discern, you know, the different opportunities that were in front of you?
- [17:57]
A
Well, you know, some of them hit me on the head with a hammer. It wasn't that. You know, when you're trying to figure out, okay, what's my life strategy going to be? You know, most of us aren't prescient enough or self aware enough, you know, to make great choices. But you know, I've, I've always been pretty curious myself and I was running a large organization that kind of managed Ralph Lauren's international licensing and I was flying around building supply chains, you know, working with big international retailers and products. And you know, I saw the consumer products industry start to hit, you know, economic headwinds with, you know, with trade, with consolidation of retail and primarily online shopping. And I thought, my goodness, you know, if I don't figure out a way to make the Internet part of my life professionally, if I can't get a dot com somewhere in my resume, it's going to be hard for me to take the next step because this is changing everything. A lot of people are thinking about AI the same way right now. Right, right. How do I adapt to a new reality that includes tools that I don't know how to use? And here I was, you know, this was the late 90s or early 2000s. You know, I was in my mid-40s at a time when a lot of people think that they can't change and they can't learn new things. And I was recruited because I did have a bit of a tech background. I'd done some things that at least made me credible as someone who could do this. But I was recruited to run an online business in Boston that was building one of the big search engines focused on the home furnishings industry and in home products. Everything that's not construction material, basically everything from your knobs and cabinets and flooring to windows to furniture and rugs and that kind of stuff. So we built a, a taxonomy that was able to create different search characteristics for over a million stock keeping units and make it findable. So we went out and sold that to big companies. I had no background in programming, but all of a sudden I had 20 Java programmers who were working for me and I Had to quickly learn how to speak their language. Not, I didn't have to program, but I had to be able to kind of organize a company that, that was an engineering company. So, you know, you got to be able to learn on the fly and you got to be curious enough about something to. You want to steep yourself in it like a big tea bag. So every new job I've ever was in a, I had to run a cosmetics company for, for a while, company that manufactured cosmetics. I knew nothing about the ingredients and compounding. I had to be a big teabag and just kind of throw myself into the hot water until I'd acquired, you know, enough working knowledge to be able to be effective in the business. And it's, it's okay if you don't know the details. People running the grassroots of a business will forgive you if you don't know all the technical details about the business. But you have to be able to understand strategy, customers, markets and money. And that's something that I was always interested in. So that stuff is portable, that and people, which is the most important part of any business. Right. You know, if you've got some, a little bit of emotional intelligence, you know, and you're willing to shut up long enough to listen to what people want, then sometimes you can help pull together teams. And that's something I've always liked to do.
- [22:00]
B
You talked about these massive inflection points of innovation and the dot com today. AI it sounds like your approach has been a certain sense of self awareness and intentionality of a career track. How, what are you telling you? Obviously you work with a ton of business owners nowadays. Like, how are you, how are you telling them to like, think through the adoption, the understanding, whatever it may be in relation to the inflection point that we're in today with AI One of
- [22:38]
A
the things that we don't do is tell our owners what to do. That would be consulting. And we don't do that. I hired some really great consultants from all the big firms and have a tremendous amount of respect for them. But we work with private businesses and private business owners and we presume that they have an intimate knowledge of their market vertical, the competitive landscape, and the kind of tactical ability they've got to solve a problem or fill a need. So EOS does not, we don't address questions of strategy, misalignment or need to pivot head on. What happens is that in the session room, after they've exhausted a lot of the initiatives that should have yielded success, we eventually have to start Idsing why none of this stuff is working. And then that becomes a very serious question about positioning and strategy. So we don't tackle issues of strategy as consultants. We tackle them as a conciliary and someone who can listen and provide some professional perspective. Having seen literally over a hundred different business models or different approaches to similar markets, I think a lot of my value in the session room, other than helping them implement EOs, is to give them some perspective and real world examples of other companies who have struggled solving problems, their own strategy issues. And it's really common these days. You know, what worked for years and years or maybe generations in multi generational family businesses, all of a sudden hits a wall. And sometimes we don't even like to acknowledge that. So sometimes my job is to simply ask the question, is it going to get better even if we execute perfectly?
- [25:01]
B
That's a powerful, a powerful statement. Is that question or these like internal transformations for organizations, Is there like a frequency in which, in which that they should be either asking themselves this or thinking through like, is a transformation needed today?
- [25:24]
A
That's a great question. What a great question, Ryan. Thank you. The reason it's great is because the timing is perfect. We are right at the beginning of annual season, right. And the EOS annual always does a deep dive through a SWOT analysis that we update every year. And I take it one step further. I send kind of a one page thought starter document that one of my colleagues created and I edited a little bit. But I try to get them into a 30,000 foot mindset going into the annual meeting knowing that they're going to do a SWOT analysis. And you know, I asked them to think about, you know, successes and failures, you know, what we would do differently if we knew now, if we knew then what we know now. So this retrospective, this postmortem on the ear is a really powerful opportunity for them to take a look at strategy alignment. I encourage them to talk to their customers because your customers will be the canary in the coal mine if there's a product or service fit misalignment or a pricing misalignment, or if what they're doing is becoming commodified either through, you know, AI or through just kind of propagation of more competitors. You know, that's the time of year where we have to look at that. So yeah, there's a cadence for that and it's, it's one of the most powerful elements of the annual, you know, if we were to make a decision today about starting a business that looks exactly like ours. Is it something that we would do?
- [27:26]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [27:27]
A
If our kid. If our kid. If my, if my son or daughter wanted to start a business in this industry, in this market, would we advise them to do that?
- [27:39]
B
What if the answer is no?
- [27:41]
A
Sometimes it is, sometimes it is. So then we have to IDS all the different opportunities to pivot. And that has happened to me in the session room with companies who literally find themselves in a competitive cul de sac or in a market where either technology, foreign competition, or kind of lack of resources has put them in a box. And, you know, our job is to help them figure out how to take what they have and repurpose it in some ways. I had a, you know, I had a client one time that we had to. We had to do emergency triage in 2020 because they were a huge travel agency. Really, really big. And great, great kind of mission led organization that worked with colleges, universities and faith based groups, churches to send students and parishioners and folks overseas. So that was a big part of their travel business. And they did this nationally. Well, in 2020, the plane stopped flying. Right. So they made all their money based on aviation commissions. So how do we pivot? How do we keep the people that we need to keep to restart the business? Can we add value in other ways? So we had to do a reverse accountability chart. Okay, who are the people at the core of this organization who have skills that we can repot? How do we take our network and kind of extract some additional value that we can provide? How do we monetize that? These were really tough questions, but they came out the other side and they're hugely successful today, and I'm really proud of them. Not very many companies are willing to really look at their business in the mirror and say that this isn't working anymore. But you got businesses on the other side too, who can't capitalize on getting the surfboard on the crest of the wave in time. You know, they're paddling furiously, but, you know, lack of money, people, organizational resources, or structure, which is what we bring to the party, helps them, you know, get the board on the wave, you know, so they can ride at home. But if their board's not big enough or, you know, they can't paddle fast enough, you know, they're going to miss it. So I've got businesses who could scale a lot more rapidly. I'm thinking very specifically about several that I've had over the last 10 years who could have grown a lot faster and a lot more successfully if they had kind of prioritized getting some strategic partnerships, some additional funding, or really cranked up a recruiting engine. And that's something that a lot of my clients struggle with right now. Getting the right people is. It's not a cliche. It's a reality in every single business. But so many organizations that we work with have not built a recruiting engine because recruiting is something that they do ad hoc.
- [31:13]
B
My last company, Hunt a Killer, we spent a lot of money on recruiting, and when we could afford to spend it, you know, we. We did, and it was better than our. Our internal processes. And. And I think there's this. This misnotion that just because someone's an incredible sales leader or operations manager or whatever the case may be, that they're automatically a great recruiter, a good recruiter or a great recruiter has honed and crafted their skills just as much as that person in operations in some of these other areas. I hear you. And that. That was, like, for most organizations, expert recruiting is kind of out of reach, especially when you get to 20 to 30% success fees. I've been through. One of the reasons I was. I was smiling as you were. You were telling your story. I've been on both sides of that equation that you mentioned earlier. So my first company, run for your lives, ultimately bankrupted. But we were. We were paddling as hard as we could. So we. We saw what was happening in the industry. We had this obstacle race where people were chased by zombies. We knew that. That it was starting to come down and people were looking for other things to do. The color run and rock and roll marathon. People were finding other events to explore at that point. And so we were paddling, paddling, paddling. We were launching new events, and just nothing was sticking. And that ultimately failed. My next company, Hunt a Killer, we started off as a live event, but we hit the ceiling. I think we made like 60,000 for the first event. We couldn't bring 10,000 people to this campground and have a good immersive murder mystery experience. And so we could only get 600 people on the property compared to 15,000 people on the run for your lives property. So right after that first event, we used the little capital we had to create a different business model using the same engine that we had to get into subscription space. So we started sending out subscription boxes each month, and that one ultimately worked. So we were able to make that pivot. And I looked at that. We were literally leaping off the lily pad, because the one thing or I like to think about, Jack Sparrow in the scene in Pirates of the Caribbean, where he's hanging on in the ship sinking, and right at the last minute, he steps off right onto the dock. And like, sometimes there's a dock there and sometimes there's not. You have led multiple turnarounds. You have been an implementer while other organizations are going through pivots and turnarounds and things like that. Like, is there. What are some lessons learned, best practices, so that there is a dock when they step off of that other ship?
- [33:44]
A
Well, I'll tell you what, the most important thing that I've learned is that you gotta have a core. You gotta have. You have to have a core of a handful of people who truly believe that the next step is the next step. You know, as long as we're talking metaphorically, like in motion picture terms, Indiana Jones, right? I love this stepping off right into what looks like this abyss. But he closes his eyes and he does it anyway. So you got to have three or four people in your foxhole who agree with you that the next step will be a living step, not a dying step. Because what happens in most organizations is that somebody gets a wild hare or the founder gets an idea or a conviction that a certain pivot is imperative. And this is the one, right? This, this is the one. And because they work for the founder, most people are like bobbleheads. They say, okay, Ryan, yeah, right, we're right behind you.
- [35:05]
B
Yes.
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A
Huh. So what I've learned is that it doesn't really freaking matter what you pivot to, right? As long as everybody links arms when they do it, you multiply your odds of success exponentially. Because if there's a lot of backbiting or I told you so's, when things start to unravel, and they will, then it's doomed to fail. I've seen organizations make pivots to niches that I personally was doubtful about. But they did it with conviction and they made it work. They carved out room for themselves. So that, number one is making sure that you got the right people around you and that they share a conviction that this is something that they can make work. You know, number two, they got to be realistic about the fuel in their tank, right? So if, if, if they're under capitalized in any way, shape or form, you know, they can be the three musketeers and, you know, they got no horse. Yeah, right. So you got to have, you know, alignment on the mission. You, you, you got, you got to have the funding or the network to get the funding, or at Least to get it to the first milestone. And then the third thing is that you've got to have some real data to underscore and validate your gut, because you could have three people who say, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And if they have no data to support the commitment that they're going to make in time and cash, then it's just going to be a tragedy. And I was having a conversation with one of my dear founders and his integrator last week, and I started the conversation by saying, this is going to sound brutal, but. And then about five minutes later, they said, yeah, Dale, that sounded brutal. I felt so bad. But they're at an inflection point, right? They've got to decide whether they want to be a very small, tight, highly focused, profitable company or if they want to pursue some big and exciting but expensive opportunities that are going to require more money and more resources than they have. So part of my job was helping them do a reality check. Not as an advisor, but as someone who has seen a lot of breakdowns on the bridge, and there's not always somebody you know coming with a jack.
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B
Yes. I also, by the way, it is not lost on me all the movie references that you've pulled in so far after the Three Musketeers. Loved it, loved it. What you, you talked about the people. By the way, this is. This is brilliant team fuel data. And so, like, a successful pivot requires all three for the team. Does it have to be the slt or could it be a tiger team that's put together to go validate some hypothesis based on data points and other things?
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A
Yeah, Well, a good SLT will form tiger teams to make sure that they have the recon that they need. The reason I mentioned, you know, a handful of people in the foxhole. Yeah. That's a senior leadership team. There may be other points of view with operating folks or department heads, but they can be hugely valuable to help kind of peel back the layers of the onion and have the conversations with key accounts, key vendors, key influencers in many cases. I've got a lot of companies who are in construction, in development, who have a quasi political risk, and they need to know what the environment is going to allow them to do because they make assumptions about market needs without really vetting market constraints.
- [39:53]
B
What if everybody's not on the same page? Is that. Is this like it's time to terminate? Is this. It's time to generate more data to be able to convince them that this is the right path? Like, if you can't get the full senior leadership team. And I agree with you, by the way. Like the hunt, a killer went through several pivots in all shapes and sizes and kind of at all phases in the company. So not just that first one where it was like, we either have something or we don't. Later ones where we were 50 million bucks and like, life, critical decisions had to be made in order to figure out a path to go down that would be viable. If you can't get someone on the senior leadership team on the same page to go down that path, what. What do you do?
- [40:36]
A
You should wish them well. But there's two. There's two types of that, though, Ryan. You know, they're people who. They're people who are intensely loyal, connected to either you, the founder, the organization, and, you know, would pledge their heart and soul to a new path without reservation. And there are people who will harbor unspoken reservations and then forever exude kind of passive aggression. Yeah, right. And you got to know, if you can't tell the difference, then you shouldn't lead a business. Right. Because those are things that if you don't have the emotional intelligence to pick up the cues about whether or not somebody is truly committed to something or not, or they don't have the interrogatory skills. I just read a book by a guy named Warren Berger, who's not the, you know, former chief justice of the Supreme Court. This. This guy wrote a book called the Book of Beautiful Questions. And it was kind of life changing for me, you know, not only professionally, but from my marriage, too. But, you know, you've got to be able to kind of get to the heart of people's motivations. And if you don't know the questions to ask, then you need to get a coach or you need to get, you know, do some reading to get better at that. Because business is a series of professional marriages which have to have some foundation of trust and mutual understanding. And a lot of people pick up on the wrong cues and they think folks are aligned, particularly when they're hiring those folks. Because when they're hiring those folks, they spend most of their time selling and not asking. You know, Mike Peyton, my wonderful teacher Mike Peyton, who was my boot camp instructor 10 years ago, talked about the interview process, and he said, you know, when I found when I need people bad, that's what I get.
- [43:04]
B
That's. I'm going to steal that one. I'll quote you and him on that, but that's a. That's a really good one.
- [43:09]
A
Yeah. Well, that's, that, That's. That's Peyton's. But I've used it. If he had a royalty on that, he'd be getting a nice check from me. But it's true. You know, most of us, we desperately need help, and we look at somebody's resume and kind of tactically, we think that they're, you know, they're capable. They check all the boxes. When in fact, resumes are the worst form of misleading advertising ever created.
- [43:42]
B
It's true. How do you counteract that? Like, are you of the mindset that you should always be recruiting or, like, always building relationships or hiring when you don't need to hire? Because when you don't need it bad, you're actually doing the diligence? Like, how do you think through that?
- [43:59]
A
You know, I was terrible at doing it. The accountability chart really helped me get better. The accountability charts, one of the tools at EOS that is kind of a Rosetta stone, because it really does force everyone to think of their organization as a design project, right? I mean, think about it. Most of us, somewhere around nine years old, people start telling you, don't stop. Stop dreaming. Right? Or that's not realistic. So what the accountability chart does is it kind of reactivates that childlike brain, like, okay, if we're going to do this, what would the organization look like? And it creates this roadmap for succession planning that I really love. Some of my clients have used that to come up with sets of priorities for building a bench. And building a bench simply means knowing who you would call. Right? Having the relationships. Whether it doesn't have to be recruiting firms, Right? It could be professional organizations, it could be peer boards. You know, it could be your local chamber of commerce. But, you know, knowing people who know people is a leader's job, right? You've got to. You've got to have a really great network. Because most recruiting doesn't happen on Indeed or LinkedIn or even through professional recruiters. Now, it comes from like minds, you know, sending folks to connect with other like minds. And that simply requires some elbow grease. So on a leadership team, you know, we try to set rocks periodically. Where I make the SLT commit to having a kind of a talent review meeting, which is not a pure EOS meeting, but they have financial reviews every month. They look at their. They look at their financials, but they never look at the state of the organization and what the development path is. So, yeah, part of it is recruiting, but part of it is also internal development, because growth companies are training companies and if they don't know what the next path for everyone in the organization ought to be in terms of acquiring mentorship certifications, professional skills. What does Ryan need? What does Dale need to get him to the next level? If they're growing their organization like the good gardeners we teach them to be, they know where to put the water and the fertilizer and the sunlight so that they're talented people who blossom into the roles just as the roles mature to represent something that's impactful. So you got to look at both sides. And most of my teams find if they've got good cultural fits, good chemistry in the organization, it's much easier to just. Yeah, it's hard, but you got to have processes for bringing people along. But if you do that, it's easier and cheaper than recruiting and the people stick because you're not accidentally infecting the organization with a virus. Because every time you hire somebody, you're literally giving yourself a virus. Because their mental model of the way things should work at your place was created somewhere else. Right. So your training and orientation and development program is a way of kind of fascinating, you know, the organization, because most of the time when I hired somebody, I hired them off the resume. I thought they were plug and play. You know, I gave them the job, and then three months later, I realized when my back was turned, it retrained everybody.
- [47:33]
B
Yeah. Do you think it's better? We've. We've been thinking about this quite a bit. We've been sending all of our. All of our folks to great boss workshops, and we've started to put our department head levels in key executive groups for VISTA so that they can start to get the exposure. And so we're looking for ways to continue to invest. And one of the things we've been thinking about is if the organization grows faster than the humans. And that's been like, both a blessing and a curse throughout my career, which is my organizations have grown very fast, and it's forced us, or at least it's a forcing function to go externally. I agree with you with the virus. Like the. And that's not. That's not to say that it's negative that that person is bad. It's just that they have a different way of thinking. And one thing that we always talk about is hiring for culture. Fit is one of the most important things you can do, but it will never be perfect. Like, there's going to your. Your organizational culture just ever so slightly, like you can. If you get it really good, then it'll be ever so slightly, but there's never a 100% mirroring. And so there's always a shift in the culture. And then there's the, the kind of, the biases that they've, they've had with the, with all of that. The question that, that we've been pondering a lot lately is do we continue to train and put somebody in a position that's a little bit ahead of, of where they are from, a capacity issue, but because they fit kind of everything else, we can grow them into that role or do we go find somebody that already has that experience and expertise, bring them in and put them over top? How do you think through that?
- [49:15]
A
Yeah, you nailed it, Ryan. That's balancing on the knife edge for every leadership team. How much effort do we want to put into training and development, mentorship versus plug and play? You know, can we find somebody in the marketplace? And you know what? There's not a pure answer to that. I think every position is going to emerge at different points in time. And sometimes the opportunity to get someone who seems to be a pretty close cultural fit, but is perfect in terms of GWC and tactics. Sometimes serendipity happens and you can acquire someone faster than you can grow someone. There are, I've got clients, though, who've got jobs that are almost impossible to hire outside. And they've had to take the long view that it's going to take a while to cultivate these people. But part of that cultivation effort has got to be time constrained, right? You've got to say, okay, great. You know, reasonably, we think this, we think Dale's a fairly intelligent person. We think he's got 50% of what he needs and he's a good cultural fit. We can grow the other 50%. You've got to be able to lay that path out and you've got to be able to say, you know, at some point in time, we're going to take off the floaties and he's going to have to be able to tread water and then eventually do the Australian crawl. So you got to be able to time stage what that looks like because, you know, you can't give someone forever to do it. You know, at some point, you know, they just got to play in the orchestra. As a musician, I think 5th grade, 6th grade orchestra instructors should get automatic passage into heaven because, you know, what they first hear is pretty terrible. But at some point they have to figure out, you know, who's got the talent, who doesn't. If you're growing Somebody, you got to be able to map out what that development path looks like for them. You got to set the expectations for them to do some of the work themselves, because they've got to want it, too. Sometimes I see organizations spending a lot of time on folks with huge potential but little ambition. There's got to be some balance there. You can't want it more than they do.
- [51:57]
B
Do you think if you put them in that position and they sink instead of swimming, like, do you think that's an indicator that maybe they weren't the right fit?
- [52:07]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [52:08]
B
No matter how much you put in, because they, like, like you just said, like, anybody can learn. If you've got the ambition and you've got the care and you've got the effort, like you, you can figure out anything. So in, in your mind, like, if that happened, it's like, okay, well, that was a clear. And they needed to be able to move into this role in order to succeed at this organization.
- [52:29]
A
Well, you know, I think I'm a big believer in what, you know, what we teach our clients. Thank goodness, because if I wasn't, I shouldn't be teaching it. But we talk about nature of wars of vacuum, right? So one of the leadership abilities that we talk about, one of the leadership practices that we talk about in LMA is creating the opening, right? So oftentimes, if you simply create the opening for somebody who's resourceful and a good learner, they don't need a lot of training, right? Because they are literally pulling every string and asking everybody who'll sit still to answer their questions to try to figure out what's going to make them effective. So if you have the right person and they have the intellectual curiosity to seek out the experts, then you don't have to train them. They literally train themselves.
- [53:28]
B
Love that. I feel like we could really keep going down this line. One, I want to be respectful of your time, and two, we haven't even gotten to the standard questions so that people can find you. Number one would be, what do you look for in a client today?
- [53:44]
A
Well, I'm a big. Some of my heroes are my fellow implementers now. And, and one of those has been a guest on your show, Jill Young. And I've learned so much from Jill, you know, and she, she drew a Venn diagram years years ago that I, I still use as my filter for clients. You know, I love to work with people who, they are chronic visionaries, right. They have the ability to dream big as, as Jill said. So that, that's number One, number two, they have to demonstrate at some point in their history that they have the ability to get stuff done. It's not exactly the way Jill puts it, but so they got to be able to dream big, get stuff done. And third, they got to be fun. Life is too short. One of the things that we try to do in our kind of 90 minute discovery meetings is really have an interaction with the leadership team to find out a lot of things. But one of the things that I'm looking for is do they have a sense of humor at all? Because if they don't, I'm going to go over like a lead balloon. Because I like to laugh, I like to have fun. Often it's at my own expense because I'm a 70 year old man standing up, trying to deliver eight hours of content and really young people most of the time and I'm going to screw up. So if I can't laugh at myself, it's going to be a long day. But I also want to feel like when things get tough, when we're stuck in IDS or when they have a really painful people issue to discuss, that their sense of fun and adventure is strong enough to kind of see them through the tough times. So yeah, dream big, get stuff done and have fun are my filters.
- [55:45]
B
Love it, love it. And Jill was on last weekend and I can attest it's probably not get stuff done, but it's get something done, that's for sure. Are you one other clarifying question for that. Do you still hop in planes nowadays and you're like I'll come to you or are you focused geographically now?
- [56:03]
A
Well, I've got a lot of grandkids and I try to carve out enough time to do what's really important to me at this stage in life and that's really watch them grow and blossom and my kids too. So I try not to get on planes. I have clients in, not currently, but I've had clients in probably 12 states or so. So yeah, yeah, I do get on planes. What I find is that a lot of teams are fairly virtual nowadays too. But I always like to do, like to do focus days and annuals in person. I'm a little old fashioned that way. I'd say two thirds of my clients are, you know, quasi local. They're kind of southeastern and I can drive to most of them. But recently had a client in California. I went out there for their focus day. We'll go back for their annual. I've had them in Montana and Colorado and different Places. So the good news is that I've got family in different parts of the country and sometimes I connect with clients who are close to them. And you can kill two birds with one stone.
- [57:08]
B
I love it. I love it. Okay, last, last question. Someone just listened to this whole thing and they're like, I, I need Dale. Like, Dale needs to be my implementer. What is the best way for them to get a hold of you?
- [57:23]
A
Call my social chairman, Mrs. Williams.
- [57:28]
B
That's hilarious.
- [57:31]
A
I wish I were. I wish I were. It's kind of true. You can certainly reach out to me over LinkedIn, obviously part of the EOS community, love meeting people, love making sure that they're connected with the right implementer. I do lots of referrals. If I'm not the right guy, we can find you a terrific woman or man who's really tuned into you, but dale williamsosworldwide.com dale.williams osworldwide.com is my email address and I also respond to LinkedIn messages pretty quickly. So oftentimes people will just kind of check that out. And then you can go to usworldwide.com find an implementer, and if you are zeroing in on Charleston, South Carolina, I am one of a growing group of happy gangsters here down in the Charleston, South Carolina area.
- [58:35]
B
Love it. Love it. I realize this is a week where everybody's reflecting and they're starting to, to go into a different mode. And so I just, I appreciate you taking the time on a Monday, taking an hour to come on, share some wisdom. I've got, I've got a whole page of notes that I was taking the whole time and follow ups. But yeah, thank you. There was a lot of great information that came out of this.
- [58:59]
A
Well, you're, you're very generous to say so. I want to thank you. I think the work that you're doing is great. And it's been so much fun for me to follow so many of my other great colleagues. It's always intimidating when you're doing that. But what I've learned is that each of us kind of look at the whole EOS journey through a very personal lens. And I think you're doing the kind of larger universe of entrepreneurial crazies, a big service by giving everybody an opportunity to share a little bit about their personal perspective about this work. Because one thing that we all have in common is that we sincerely love people who put their own skin in the game and who create value in this world, who create jobs in the American economy, and who put their fortune and family and sanity at risk to pursue building a business. So love hearing how my colleagues have approached that and love how you're such a great catalyst. So thanks for having me today.
- [60:10]
B
Awesome. Thanks so much, Dale. I appreciate it.
- [60:13]
A
Thanks, Ryan.