In this episode we unpack the topic of: How do you tame a visionary CEO? with Rob Liddiard, B2B SaaS Founder (acquired 2022); Reformed Lawyer.

Bethany and I discuss the following: 

• Forecasting in 2024
• Simplifying performance management
• Surfacing issues in leadership
• Documenting the processes of the company

We then discuss the following with Rob: 

• Is the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) just another OKR styled book? 
• How do you tame a visionary founder? 
• What are the components of EOS? 
• What are the two principal roles in EOS? 
• What can experienced operators learn from EOS? 
• How do you achieve an L10 meeting? 

References

https://www.eosworldwide.com/rob-liddiard

Biography: 

I previously founded a software company called Yapster. Although we had 100,000 licensed users, amazing customers like Next plc, Brewdog, Krispy Kreme and Caffe Nero and the business looked healthy to outsiders, we secretly struggled internally to execute plans and hit our financial goals. I worked and stressed 24/7. I was a qualified Corporate Lawyer and experienced Businessperson, but I didn’t feel a success. All I could feel was the underlying tension in my leadership team and investor base.

Then I read Gino Wickman’s Traction and it was like someone turned a light on. I realised that I hadn’t been leading my organisation to its potential. By adopting EOS’s simple habits and frameworks we quickly achieved Traction. Suddenly I was more successful at work and more relaxed at home.

In late 2022 I sold Yapster to a company backed by Google. I’ve since qualified as a Professional EOS Implementer® and now my personal Mission is to help other UK business owners achieve their goals more quickly, with less frustration.

Summary: 

• Golf inclusivity and personal experiences with the sport. 0:06
• Bethany Ayers and Brandon Mensa discuss golf and inclusion with guest Rob, with Ayers sharing her experience at a virtual driving range and appreciating Rob's proactive approach to inclusivity.
• Bethany Ayers shares personal experiences with golf and her grandfather's intense passion for the sport, despite exclusion of women in the family.
• Entrepreneurial operating system and vision alignment. 4:18
• Brandon: Book provides a prescriptive set of steps for non-experienced companies to run their businesses efficiently.
• Bethany: Book offers a structure for strategy days, with exercises and time allocations for each area, saving time and effort.
• Bethany Ayers discusses the importance of aligning to a vision and creating a three-year plan, with regular revisions to ensure accountability and profitability.
• Ayers highlights the challenges of budgeting in a changing world where cash is no longer free, and the need to focus on cache management across multiple years.
• Simplifying performance management systems. 10:21
• Brandon and Bethany agree that the "right people in the right seats" framework is simple and effective in evaluating employee performance (10 words)
• Traction recommends using a scorecard and weekly pulse to track leading indicators of KPIs (20 words)
• Bethany Ayers emphasizes the importance of tracking key metrics, such as ticket clearance times and pipe Gen, to identify and address issues in a timely manner.
• She believes that having a weekly scorecard with 5-10 metrics can help the team stay disciplined and proactive in addressing problems, leading to better customer experiences and overall success.
• Leadership, processes, and accountability in a business setting. 15:09
• Bethany Ayers highlights the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of different functions within a company, and how this knowledge can help resolve issues more effectively.
• Brandon emphasizes the value of documenting processes between functions to avoid siloed thinking and improve collaboration.
• Brandon and Bethany discuss the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg, which emphasizes the importance of meetings for accountability and using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to set goals.
• Rob Leyard, CEO of Eos, shares his "come to Jesus moment" when he realized the importance of operations after almost failing due to neglecting it.
• Challenges with global rollout of software product. 20:50
• Rob struggles to explain why his company's global rollout failed despite initial success.
• Entrepreneurship, leadership, and managing visionary CEOs. 22:30
• Rob shares his personal story of struggling with his tech startup, including not getting paid for 7 months and experiencing marital problems.
• Bethany Ayers commends Rob for his honesty and openness, and shares that many entrepreneurs can relate to his challenges.
• Rob recognizes that working with visionary CEOs can be challenging due to their unique perspective and potential lack of clarity on their company's identity and goals.
• Rob's approach to taming visionary CEOs involves recognizing the problem, understanding their perspective, and using practical tools like EOS to help them achieve their dreams while aligning with reality.
• Business strategy and operations for startups. 26:35
• Rob is frustrated that his business is not growing despite his charisma and support, and he suspects that he may be doing something wrong.
• The book "Excellent Entrepreneur" provides a framework for businesses to run coherently, with six components: vision, data, process, traction, issues, and people.
• Brandon and Rob discuss the importance of a clear vision and traction plan for startups, including creating a one-page business plan and setting quarterly strategic initiatives.
• They also emphasize the need for data-driven decision making and consistent processes across the organization to drive accountability and good habits.
• EOS framework for entrepreneurs and operators. 31:51
• Rob emphasizes the importance of identifying and solving root causes, rather than just discussing them.
• Bethany Ayers agrees and adds that there are two roles in EOS, and taming comes into play.
• Rob: EOS model requires visionary to identify integrator, who is CIO and essential for success.
• Bethany Ayers: Using EOS playbook can help find common language between operator and visionary, elevating professional operator to center of organization.
• Entrepreneurship, EOS, and the role of operators. 36:07
• Rob, a passionate advocate of EOS, shares insights on how individuals can help visionaries in stuck organizations by taking control of their own careers and self-esteem.
• Rob suggests creating a personalized explanation of EOS components and how working with Brandon can help organizations move forward.
• Rob is open to creating his own operating system after finding success with EOS and reading other business books.
• Rob believes that finding a system that works and elevating operators to their rightful place in the entrepreneurial community is enough for him, and he now preaches the gospel of operation excellence to others.
• Effective meetings and organizational alignment. 41:13
• Brandon and Rob discuss creating an L10 meeting, which involves starting with a segue, reviewing rocks, looking at the scorecard, and addressing issues.
• The meeting agenda includes a fixed agenda, and issues are reviewed and prioritized for solving in the next week or quarter.
• Rob emphasizes the importance of finding a workplace where you are appreciated and implementing a system to manage growth and issues effectively.
• Rob encourages listeners to explore different systems and not settle for a company that is happy living in chaos, and to give them the opportunity to come meet them where they are.

Brandon 0:06

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the operations room a podcast for CEOs I am Brandon Mensa joined by my lovely co host Bethany Ayers. How are things going Bethany?

Bethany Ayers 0:17

There? Okay. I'm

Brandon 0:20

gonna give you the big blind up and then I get the softball back. Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. It's okay.

Bethany Ayers 0:28

I went out last night and played golf for the first time. I don't know if it counts is playing golf, like, hit golf balls with a golf club for the first time. That's not mini golf. So not petting, but driving.

Brandon 0:41

Okay, it's human to like a driving range. We have like a bucket of balls, and you hit them as far as you can, except

Bethany Ayers 0:47

that it's a virtual driving range in the middle of Soho.

Brandon 0:53

That really counters golf. And it's quite the same as it. Well,

Bethany Ayers 0:56

I think it does. I kept getting distracted and freaking out because it was so loud. And it was like rockets whizzing by of sound. And I was like, what is that every time it's just somebody driving. And so it's a combination of like the whoosh sound, and then it hits a wall. It was fun. But I was doing it with Rob, our guest today.

Brandon 1:20

All ties in.

Bethany Ayers 1:23

Brandon 2:54

Wow, this feels like golfing for survival. Yeah.

Bethany Ayers 2:58

And then also he was a grew up on a farm. And so his whole life woke up at five in the morning. And so when I'd spend the night at their house, his golf practice room was next to the room that I stayed in. And so then I just hear like, thunk, thunk, click thunk from five o'clock in the morning, which is like practising putting Jesus. Okay, yeah, cuz what else would you do? And you wake up at five in the morning and start practising your golf. Yeah, okay. And all of the men in the family had to learn how to play golf. And there was a requirement for golf. And all of the women were actively excluded. So, despite that, being my grandfather, you know, this intensity of golf in my childhood, I had never picked up a golf club until yesterday. So there's like a lot of emotion around golf for me. So when Rob put that post up, I was super keen to give it a go. My swing was not impressive. I was kind of afraid of hurting my back. And so I didn't go for a full swing, but I was able to hit the ball regularly and consistently. And now we have decided to do another golf day in January, and start the unprofessional Golfers Association and try and get more women involved. That

Brandon 4:17

is an amazing story. You're right at first glance, it wouldn't have occurred to me that an invite for virtual golf by potentially have an exclusionary element to it. In any event, it is lovely to see that you are super jazzed up for a second round of golf. So that's fantastic. And that is a nice segue into our episode today, which is how to tame a visionary CEO with the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS for shorthand. We are joined by your now golfing partner, Rob Leyard. He is a professional EOS implementer and former co founder and CEO of Yep, stir. And before we get to that, Bethany a bit of a mini book review from us on traction, which is the EOS Bible. by Gina Whitman, we'll go through the book chapter by chapter. But first off, general impressions. What do you think about the book? First

Bethany Ayers 5:08

of all, I just felt like, Why did I not know about this book earlier, because instead of my 20 years of experience and learning and failing, and iterating, I could have just gotten a lot, there a lot faster, because it's most of it is stuff that I do know, is common sense, but with a lovely structure to it. And what I also really liked was, there are meetings to have exercises to do, and the amount of time we should allocate for each area. So you could just take somebody else's experience and just start to roll it out. So it's like, here's the vision section, I can't remember exactly. But you know, this should take you no more than half a day. This is how you should get started. These are the activities everybody should do. And it just saves so much time versus like, How many times have you sat there thinking about okay, we're doing our strategy day? What should the agenda be? How are we going to cover it? What would a call activity be? Oh, that activity worked? Oh, this would work? No, this ended up not working at all. And to just not have to have those conversations anymore.

Brandon 6:17

Bethany Ayers 7:21

you should start with the vision. But how many times people not start with a vision because they feel like they already have a vision. And they've already done that work. But yet, actually, nobody's aligned to the vision. Like, I just think it's good to sometimes go back to basics and make sure everybody's aligned. What is the business going to be like in three years? And how are we going to structure it what it's going to feel like? And what does that mean for your organisation and for who you need to hire and for your next level of leadership? And I feel like I've done these things, but not necessarily by design, you know, is it more of luck rather than design, and this is just a way to make sure that you actually do the right activities meaningfully and don't forget them. What I liked in this was that you hold on to your three year plan until the last year of it, and then you create the next one. So it's not what we tend to do in SAS businesses is you create your three year plan. But Brandon, to your point, everything's moving, who knows what's actually going to happen, we'll just read budgeted 12 months, it's not real. And I think there's something around the accountability of multiple years. And also the fact that cash isn't free anymore. That means that you need to be much more focused on your cache management across multiple years. I think it maybe this is just my experiences is we do a three year plan. But we re budget every year. And we're not held to account to how close to reality we were in years two and three. The only thing that ends up mattering is whether or not we hit year one's target. And then actually don't know because we never go back and revisit it. I suspect your TOS target when it's now year one is different to what your TOS target was a year previously. And so it means that like your cash out date changes how much money you need. When money was free. It meant that you never really cared about profitability. And you were always like just chasing that top line number. And profitability was always 18 months away, no matter how far away it was, it was always another 18 months because you're like pouring more cash in. So I think just in this new changing world, we don't know when how expensive cash is going to stay. Going back to some of the basics of year two and year three actually mattering because I don't know how many budgets where you're like we're going to do 10 million this year, 20 million next year. And 120 million the You're after because everything's going to align is going to be amazing. And we're going to be just like throwing off cash. I exaggerate, but you know, similar. And everybody looks at that last number, or let's say it's a five year plan or whatever. And nobody really is thinking that that's gonna be it or like, that's just so much tomorrow's problem. But that's where suddenly the business looks interesting.

So we're in to part two for the people side, the book talks about the right people in the right seats. And this nomenclature is something we all believe in, I think, the way that they determine this, according to the traction book, number one, right people side is to look at their core values, which is do they adhere to the core values of the organisation? And they rate that with one of three things? Either? The answer is yes, they do. No, they don't, or there's a bit of a middling score. And that's the core value side, then the right hand side of it is the right seat in this case, and the right seat, they have an acronym, it's called G, WC, which means and get it wanted and capacity to do it. And the good part is, do they get their job? Do they get the role? Do they understand the context of the business and know how to get stuff done? The what it is, do they want the job inherently? And capacity is, you know, do they have the right skills, the right intellect, the right curiosity, then in the book, at least it says, this is either a yes or no. So without a little setup, what do you think, Bethany?

So this was one of those examples of something that I really liked and could just short circuit, how much time we've spent rolling out performance management, is it too big is it too little, it always ends up getting way too detailed to a point where you just don't know what people are being measured on, and which parts matter and how to change behaviour. And so I just love the simplicity of it, you're looking at up to five values and PwC. So eight attributes. And it could be less than that if you have fewer company values, super clear, rather than on a score to five rather than this rather, you know, just how many I hate this term. And yet here I go saying it, how many cycles I've wasted at work, trying to agree how we're going to rate people and the debates and the versioning. And then we roll something out and it's not good, that I loved, you could just start with this. So this

is a traction is reframing. What is a performance management review system? They don't call it that. But that's exactly what it is. And I think to your point, I like this because it's deadly simple. And it covers off the core stuff that actually matters in this case, and I think you are right, people get lost in performance review systems, and they end up being very ineffective in a lot of ways. So we are in violent agreement on number two. Number three data. So on the data side, traction talks about the leadership team using a scorecard and the scorecard is the weekly pulse, which is the leading indicators of bigger numbers that actually matter in terms of KPIs going forward. What do you make of that?

I already do it. So I guess this was that was one of those like, tick, done. What I thought was interesting is the meeting management. So you just say on track off track. And you don't give loads of excuses or rereading like, first of all, assuming that everybody understands how to read the numbers, instead of I don't know if you've been around where like, people just walk through and go, it's a seven, seven is good, because what what were you just like we see this every week, why are you waffling? So I like that, it's like we're all on the same page. And then either if it's on track, cool, we don't need to talk about it. If it's off track, we stick it on to the issues list. And then we talk about it. And that level of discipline, I have not been great at or if not seeing being greyed out. But having a weekly scorecard that is reviewed, where you understand how you're tracking, have always done like 100% behind it, I just think I could do it better by being more disciplined. So it's maybe five, maybe 10 metrics. And quite often, it will highlight the areas where there's problems. So help desk ticket clearance time, for example. And if that falls off, if there's a massive issue with that, and we have to look at it, it'll end up being because the bugs aren't getting addressed and bugs aren't getting addressed because dev don't have time to address the bugs. And they don't have time to address the bugs because the sales team has sold something that doesn't exist, that the development team now has to desperately build. And so from that one number that's off, you uncover everything that led you there, and how can you start to solve it? And so even though ticket clearance times is very much a customer success issue. It is a number that's quite nice to understand. How are we treating our customers? What kind of experience are our customers getting in a leading way? So that's why I do think that you have to agree the most important numbers for me another one is pipe Jen because it's the few All that feeds go to market, you need to understand when pipe Gen is completely off where it should be and what's gone wrong, and be able to address it that week and not later. Maybe

the question back to that is, you know, think because the sales leader or the commercial leader is going to be sitting there with our functional team looking exactly at this and also the ticket, the customer success team, they're in the best position to think it through and solve it either as a functional group, or to really populate it up to the other leader of the other group or whatever other groups that they're thinking about in this case, and working with those individuals to make it happen. The question at a leadership level is what is leadership really doing in that case? Because if the stakeholders aren't in that meeting to have that discussion, it's almost pointless in some way, all you're really doing at that point is saying, hey, you know, there's a problem sales do what you should be doing? Yeah,

they could be, but at least you are aware. So if suddenly pipelines gone away. And then like week, two pipelines gone away, week, three pipelines gone away, finance is going to want to know that because it's going to change and adjust forecasts. So it gives you a nice understanding of the entire system, and how it's all interconnected. Even if you're not all solving every problem together, everybody should understand what's going on and how that might be affecting your area, or how you've unwittingly hurt somebody else. The one thing I really liked about the issues chapter was that the reason why issues don't get resolved is there almost always people issues, and the require making hard decisions or having hard conversations. And I read that and I was just went, that is so true. For me, that was probably like the biggest moment of truth in the book. And I think that will change the way I resolve issues going forward.

So let's move on to Section five, which is process and the point of the process chapter really, is to document the core processes of the company at really kind of a high level, which is fundamentally, what is the marketing process in the company? Fundamentally, what is the sales process in the company HR, etc, etc? What was your take on this chapter?

So I guess this was a bit like, what was the other chapter? Oh, the data chapter, I'm like, yep, do that. Except does have a printed and laminated,

it is important for the functions to have their processes documented, it's equally important to actually document the process between the functions, we get into this silo situation where marketing doesn't know how to interact with sales as an example. And very simply, they can decide on what that is between them, which is you take the leaders together and prompt stakeholders from the teams and they sit there in a room, and they whiteboard out, what are the 10 ways in which we interact or want to interact? And then how do we actually do that and then capture that on paper, or in a laminated fashion.

And something that's really interesting to do is to pull together everybody involved in the customer journey and do that same thing. So from marketing, all the way through closing, onboarding, upselling and invoicing and figuring out and making sure all those interconnects are good. Under

the last chapter, which is called Traction. I found one sentence in particular, I think that's actually the most powerful quote from the book, to be honest, at least it resonated with me, which is, well run meetings are the moment of truth for accountability. What was your thought?

I agree. And I would love to give this meeting structure ago, I'd love to be the one running the meetings in this meeting structure and see if it works. I also think in many ways, I was, as you know, I think we both were pretty resistant to reading the book, very sceptical, who can tell us what to do no one. And he actually is philosophically quite aligned with what we've talked about in the past, like with a radical candour not shying away from tough conversations, you get accountability, because you hold people accountable. And you're not afraid of that. I think doing traction properly actually gets pretty hardcore, where you are openly talking about your team and who's in the right seat and who's not the right person. There's a lot of dealing with people in kind, but honest ways throughout the book that I was surprised by. And I wonder if that's actually what makes rolling it out the most difficult, like, if you take this book and just literally follow all of it, you're not going to be successful. You'll only be successful if you also bring the bravery and courage to it.

And now let's move on to our conversation with the Master of Eos. Mr. Rob Leyard.

I'm really excited to have Rob on because he's the visionary CEO so the bane of most of our existences and also just thought it might be worth sharing how Rob and I ended up getting in contact So, Rob is a fan of the operations room and so much of a fan that he dropped me a message on LinkedIn thanking us for the show. So first of all, Rob, thank you very much. Clearly, flattery will get you everywhere. Welcome on. Thank you for having me. So, when Rob said that he liked the show, I asked him what he liked in particular, and if there were any topics you'd like us to cover, and Rob said he liked I think was the OKR episode, and asked if we could cover getting operational excellence wrong or understanding the import of it possibly a bit too late. And I was like, Hmm, sounds like there might be a story there. So can you tell us a bit about your come to Jesus moment, when you realise that operations matter after all,

so super Group plc bought our software yapstone rolled it out globally, when it was extremely nascent, like first year, like wasn't ready to the notifications were not configured in a sensitive way. So like you had people all over the world 5000 people in every light in 44 countries, getting pinged everybody posted to a the equivalent of an Instagram feed. Imagine that imagine if you got a push notification with summary preview, every time some random on your Instagram posts a picture of their cat, which was quite cool. If I'd have thought to go to a VC, they probably would have said, well, that's mad that you've just rolled that out in the way you have. But it's probably a signal that there's something there. But we rolled the product out, we didn't go and raise institutional capital, we sort of knew it wasn't quite ready. And I'd never done that before. And then after a couple of years, the initial enthusiasm for the idea had started to weigh in the internal sponsors, I think was starting to lose confidence that that we'd be able to execute the vision that had been sold. So consequently, you start losing some customers. And at that point, your now your original Financial Assumptions now ceased to be quite so believable, right? Because you're, you haven't cracked Product Market Fit quickly. And now there's some evidence that you don't have the traction that you imagined, even though there's enough there to keep you going like a global rollout from super dry and other customers coming on. So basically, we started losing customers, and rightfully so although it was hard to accept at the time. And we're struggling to kind of tell a story about why we were the next zillion dollar company. And so we just ended up in that in that trap. I didn't want to give up. Because I felt like I owed it to the customers that we did have that were with us, the people that we'd employed the people that invested. So there was a period where me and my co founder didn't get paid for like seven months, we're not independently wealthy. And at that point, it's pretty easy for your life to start unravelling. Because, you know, I'm I'm a fairly sort of happy, friendly guy, I was married and married again, now got a kid, I'm very happy. So no one cry for me. But it basically comes from my marriage, because my first wife married this happy sort of excitable guy that, you know, it was like she had been mis sold. Because I start this company. And every night she comes home, and there's this sort of sad bloke sat moping on the sofa on his laptop, trying to figure out how to fix the business falling apart. So I ended up divorced, I wasn't getting paid starting to get out of sort of HMRC debt collectors calling. And thinking Christ like this is this is actually pretty bad. And I don't know how to get out of this and sort of the will to keep going is no longer enough. And at that point, thank god, somebody introduced me to the book traction and the Entrepreneurial Operating system because I'd already been maniacally, reading everything I could to try and work out how to fix my many, many operating problems. It's just this one book simplified everything I'd previously read into a structure that I could then implement.

Well,

first of all, thank you for your honesty and your openness. Like it's not easy. We don't tend to talk about the mistakes we've made, particularly when they lead to divorce, I think, Oh, really, we're not alone. Lots of us have walked these types of challenges. So although I don't really want to move into Eos, I feel like you've primed us. And we have to just to be open myself maybe not quite as open, no divorces being laid out here. Never read the book, read a lot of blogs, read bits of the website. And for whatever reason, kind of thought like, oh, not another process, not another OKR book can't be bothered. There's probably

an interesting point here. Right? So one of the humbling things I learned going from lawyer sales guy to tech CEO is going to meet customers where they are not where you want them to be. So I would suggest that superb operators, if you're going to work with visionaries, and not all companies have them you sort of have to meet the visionary where he or she is because they're going to see the world different to you things that are easy to you might be hard or confusing to them. And so probably the reason that you and I daresay many of your listeners either haven't heard of us or have not been drawn to it is because it might feel like painting by numbers or like you know, colouring in with crayons at the local pizza restaurant. But from an operating perspective, that's the level that your average visionary type founder is going to be starting out because if they I saw all the pitfalls that you see as World Class operators, they probably wouldn't have started and none of the companies that you can go run would exist. And so I think the thing to think about from any OS perspective is that it is the first step in the journey towards understanding you, for a very, very different type of person. That's what I love about it. The great tragedy is there's lots of brilliant operators that work with like, mad visionary founders, and they can't find the language to talk to each other in such a way that they can get on the same page. Yeah.

Which is why the title of this episode is how to tame a visionary CEO. So come on, Rob, I guess we've made everybody wait long enough. How do you do it? Okay,

so first, I have to recognise that there's a problem, like, in a way, if you're working with me, you're lucky because like, my life's fallen apart, so you don't need to persuade me of anything I can see I, I just need somebody to pick me up and help me put it all back together again, before I have a heart attack. So that the way the book traction starts, or there's another book called greater grip, which is a bit more of a sort of practical narrative on how you might implement the system, basically starts by describing a business that's not performing very well. EOS is not really designed for companies that don't know who they are like, I wouldn't recommend it for a company that's younger than two years, we've got less than half a million quid in revenue. So assuming you've been around long enough to have some sense of who you are, what the customers you you can serve might be, it starts by sort of speaking to the visionary and saying, Why is your reality? So far away from your dream? You think about nothing else? You've been probably unsuccessful in other things that you've done in your life, you're not a loser. And yet, it's not working? Is it like and how can it be that you've got all of this willpower and charisma and support and you're giving it every single ounce you've got? And it's not going anywhere? Right? Like, it's probably not you and it's probably not EFA, it's probably something you're doing or not doing? That's creating a block. Okay. And so when you open the book, and you read that, you're like, okay, okay, tell me more. And then it goes on to you know, it's very flattering, it calls the Mad founder of visionary, which is quite often British, I think there's a reason that it sort of originated in America and is bigger in America than it is here, because you feel like a fucking idiot, calling yourself a fish. I mean, he wants to be a visionary. Nobody wants to be a visionary if you're, unless you're, unless you're the sort of person you don't want to get stuck next to at a dinner party. But it is still a positive term. So it says you're a visionary, your million ideas a minute, you know, the future of civilised society depends on people like you. Okay? And that it's like, but you know, but you can only help a gazillion people, if you can actually make your dreams real. And making your dreams real requires typically six components. And so many as they talk about vision data, process, traction, issues, and people. And Beth rocks sit in the traction components. So it's like there's six components, pretty much all businesses can run coherently using the six components, and then the rest of the book just goes through to talk you through them. And then what the visionary is, starts to experience something not totally dissimilar to what I think the average excellent operator might think they're like, we're already doing most of this. You're not like, you know, if you're doing like most of it, you, there's still quite a good chance, you'll get no traction, got to do it properly, which visionaries are not very good at generally, just again, and again, takes you through the book, talking about what excellence looks like, and each of those six components and just consistently simplifying, and coming back and bringing the visionary back to this place of if you're not doing something wrong, why you're not getting what you deserve. And that's very hard to escape for a founder, you know, like, if it's not going that, well, I actually think the harder, it would be much harder to be an operator, trying to keep up with a visionary that is running a shit show. But for some reason, all the metrics are going in the right direction, like that business will one day run out of steam and implode spectacularly, but it will be after the CEOs given up probably because they just won't have the purchase on the visionary to correct course for them.

So then maybe just from there. So now that we have the high level, can you take us down a level in terms of the tactical side of it. So you talked about five or six pieces of a puzzle that you just described, and rocks being a component as part of traction in this case, gave us give us a bit of a sketching of if you had to describe three or four things coming out of that block or out of those pie shaped elements where if you implement these three or four things, here's what I would suggest in terms of what those things are, how I would actually do them.

Yeah, so a vision requires you to create something called a vision traction organiser. It's basically a one page business plan where you start by saying, who you are and what you're trying to achieve, who you are being your sort of core values of the organisation where you see the organisation in 10 years, what's a three year milestone to plausibly be able to get there what's a one year milestone to plausibly be able to get to the first milestone? And then what are some quarterly strategic initiatives that need to happen, organisation wide and within the leadership A team rolls in order to be able to credibly hit the one year plan. Not complicated, but it forces you to break that down very common that angel investors, directors, leadership teams have actually never really agreed on that. So that's your first source of dysfunction. Then it talks about data driven decision making. So if you were stuck on an island, and you couldn't call and harass your colleagues, what numbers would you need to see as leading indicators of the performance of the organisation because again, lots of founders are sort of, they know they need to be numbers driven, but they've never seen really what that looks like. Even if they worked in a big company, the numbers would have been so sophisticated, driven boot by revenue ops are something that they get totally swamped in the big, and they can't succinctly describe on one sort of 1020 Row gap, what good looks like on a sort of 13 columns looking at sort of rolling quarterly numbers presented in a time series. So you have to do that for data, then process is just recognising that if you want consistent outputs, you need consistent inputs across you know, most companies break into a handful of core processes as to how you recruit and retain good people how you deliver the product or service, how you bill and manage finance and supporting functions. Traction is the kind of rhythm by which the organisation runs that drives accountability and good habits. So there are weekly meetings, where you're designed to rate the meeting attend, they call it a level 10 meeting that's based on the fact that most meetings that we all attend in poorly run companies, if you asked everybody at the end of it to rate it, there'd be like two, three, maybe four, right? So like very few startup people have ever felt what it feels like to be in meetings that you constantly rate nine or 10 for effectiveness. And enjoyability issues are the issues in any company, more often than not startups, actually companies of all sizes, but very much startups they're very good at talking around issues. They're not very good at identifying root causes, and then solving them. So in traction, they have this this system again, which sounds too easy to be credible, identified, discuss, solve, you'd think that everybody just does that anyway. But it turns out they don't. There's lots of discussion, not a lot of root cause analysis or solution. And then finally, people so how do you make sure you got the right people in the right seats? There's talk called the people analyse that. Yeah,

I can see why I picked up the book and then put it down again. Because it does seem like I think this is like comes back to my OKR problems. Like I just rebelled against frameworks. And I'm like, Yeah, I already do it. Don't tell me what to do. You don't know me. And I feel like this one is like, Oh, somebody's taken everything out of my brain and put it into a book. Like that makes sense.

So maybe just in that breath, why would you not just hire a COO that's experienced? Who knows what they're doing? Because I feel like when I when you realise six elements off to me, I'm like, Okay, that sounds like my job. Like in terms of what I actually do for a living, when I just hire somebody to come in to do this? I

think you should, I think if you can, you should. I'm most interested in founders trapped between half a million in revenue and 5 million that find themselves in the position that I was in, at which point, you probably wouldn't want to join me. If you've got a very hot company, you're well funded. It's exciting for folks like you guys, then. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you can get a co founder that knows how to operate, awesome to, for me, this is very specifically about visionaries that get going, get themselves into trouble, and then don't know how to get out of it.

And then also, rather than we were talking, before the episode, you made a point that I thought was really important, and you have not made it yet today, which is in the Eos, there are two roles. And this is where the taming comes in. Yes,

absolutely. So just thanks both because you're absolutely right. So just to continue Brandon's point, I think the other point is, I get the impression and I sent you've experienced this. So your community, when a seasoned operator comes in, if they come in later than co founder, I think sometimes there can be an authority challenge where particularly visionaries are enjoying a little bit of success, where they don't necessarily want to eat their vegetables to take their medicine, you can opine on that better than than I can. But that's right, both in EOS. The model does require a visionary to be or identify an integrator. And it's the system's quite rough on visionaries that think they can integrate when they can't. The integrator is basically CIO. And at that point, I think you find a great many people in my position suddenly become ops evangelists and sign up to ops podcast to do all the things that I'm now doing. Because they do really, really respect your role and understand that there's no way that they can be successful with their skills and limitations without partnering up with someone like you. The challenge then is whether they can get you on the bus whether they can afford you or persuade you. Cool thing about us is you can actually blood new future CEOs by giving them a playbook that gives them vicarious experience, right because you integrator when you use a system like you So which I know is very nerdy for you guys is a playbook is a system. So it's more a state of mind and a set of skills and a set of experiences, because you replace the lack of experience with the framework.

Yeah, I really get it. For that reason, I suspect I'm being a bit snobby. And I will now actually buy the book, and we'll learn 400 things from it and kick myself and have to like, come on and explain how I was completely wrong. So I suspect that's my future. But also, the ability of using it as a way of finding a common language between an operator and a visionary seems massively valuable. And something that means that pretty much everyone listening should go and read the book, just to help start to speak a common language.

That's certainly my conclusion. I've never met an entrepreneur that believes in Eos, that doesn't cherish an operator, I cannot think of a single instance, and I'm a fairly passionate member of this community, it really elevates the professional operator to the very sort of centre for the organisation. So

everybody now has their Christmas present list for their CEOs for December.

Exactly. That's what I was going to ask actually, which is, so if you're an organisation where you have a visionary, and the visionary is stuck, like you described, but they're not coming 20 revelations or conclusions as to how to proceed, and they're just doing what they do, and you're an individual that works within that company, what is it that you can do as an individual to help encourage and nudge that CEO in the right direction,

that's a really difficult position to be in, I acknowledge that because if the organisation doesn't have culture of feedback, doesn't really know where it's going doesn't know what the what a person's a great fit versus support, it looks like, it's sort of it can be easy for a visionary type person to dismiss someone who's just not getting it, even though they very much get it. So what I would do is you can't control unnecessarily how the visionary is going to react, but you can take control your own life and your own career and your own self esteem, self respect. So if you buy the book, and you believe in it, and lots of other operating systems, by the way, I just have one, I like CEOs, I would buy the book, and I would give it to the visionary, probably with a note. And you can only do this if you feel it sincerely. And I think you would say, I think this model would really help us and I actually want to work in a company that's running this model or something like it. And I feel so strongly about this, that I'm gonna go look for companies that run on this because I'm a professional operator, I want to work at the very top of my game, and I am not going to be able to achieve that in an organisation that doesn't understand really what I do. And I think a lot of visionaries, if the operator integrator is good, I think that will scare them into reading it and taking it seriously.

And then just getting back to Bethany's question earlier, but I are seasoned SEO professionals that have done this for quite some time. And I'm just curious now, is there any now that you've experienced EOS? And you've done it for quite some time, and you're really a passionate advocate of Eos? Is there any learnings from that experience that you can share with us that you think will be interesting as for us to understand, especially our audience being sued, as in this case that we may not be familiar with EOS? I

think it would be immensely helpful. If you as a community got better at explaining your philosophy, your process, I would imagine, like it might not be what you're gonna do write an ebook working with Brandon, I totally like what I'm saying might not be practical, but humanly I'm a quote visionary. You probably could write a notion page that explained your version of the components what it means to work with Brandon, like what energises you were the type of organisation that you're proud of like how you think that's gonna help the organisations that you come into move through the gears. And that's really inspiring the book traction makes it very clear that EOS is just one operating model created by this guy, Gino Wickman, with no more experience than you, I suspect, so you easily could author your own operating system. And I suspect many of your audience could as well. It's not fair on visionaries to make them, force them to try and understand your value and your system like in advance. Like they just they're just different languages. So that would probably be my my suggestion, advice, definitely for experienced people, because your founders otherwise are not really going to understand the value until they experience it. And it can be really hard to find chemistry between you and you. They don't understand your value and you don't know if they're going to appreciate your value allow you to be yourself and implement your system. So I don't know if you've read the high growth handbook. But I think Eli Gil in that book actually talks about a great manager at Google that wrote a like guide to working with so and so. which I suspect is a version of what I just suggested.

So you've really come full circle, like now all you do is read ops books. You were listening to our podcast on OKRs I'm assuming you've read a lot of Lencioni you're reading growth books. Are you still an EOS 100% Or have you created your own?

I'm very open to actually I want to be world class at whatever I do. I'm never going to be a world class operator. I can be a I hope I can be a world class quote, pure visionary and be successful by working with a world class operator integrator. If she or he has a playbook system methodology they believe in that's the right fit for our organisational goals. And people I would follow that probably one of the things I've realised, though, and by finding EOS and how simple it was, I now read business books, because I just love reading and learning. I don't confuse my enjoyment of reading and learning with that necessarily, in enhancing my art as an entrepreneur any further, you know, it's a bit like these very studious musicians that just can't write a good song. There's a level of learning scales and music theory, after which you basically lose most of the music listening public. And it becomes more like practising science than music. And I think it's probably the same in entrepreneurship. So for me, it's enough to have found a system that works, elevated operators to the place where they rightly should be in the entrepreneurial community, and then preach the gospel like I am now on your podcast to make sure that people that are operationally excellent know, frankly, know who I am.

Now, that makes tremendous sense. Actually, just one deep dive question. Now pique my interest, the L 10. Have a level 10 meeting, because I think we all struggle with meetings to be effective, consistently. So just on a deep dive basis, when you look at this l 10. Concept, can you maybe describe how do you create an L 10? meeting was an L 10. Meeting look like? And how

do you make it happen? Okay, so if you remember, the principal and l 10, is, when you think about implementing the OS, you generally get asked a few questions. And there's a tool called the organisational check, you can look it up on Google and you can get your leadership team to complete a questionnaire and it will say how aligned or misaligned your organisations are, one of the questions is like, How effective do you find the average meeting and as I say, people say 234. So Eos, the book traction recommends, you just try to stick strictly to this weekly meeting where it has a fixed agenda. So you start with what they call a segue. And a segue is like, say something good that happened from your week, it takes only five minutes, it's not allowed to take more than five minutes, there are some principles of this meeting has to start in time. Start with that. Everybody says you know what was good for the week, it creates like a sort of calm, friendly tone for the meeting, you go through and talk about your rocks. So no commentary just on track or off track. That's your quarterly initiatives. You look at the scorecard, any numbers that are off track, make their way down to an issues list, you review your two dues from the prior week. There are two types of to dues in ers basically, if something can't be accomplished in a week, and it goes on to a list into the vision traction organiser I talked about earlier. And when you do your quarterly review, you pull issues off of there to say, is this so important that it needs to get solved in the next week? It's great for visionaries, because I've always visionaries come in with a new problem every day and totally like derail the organisation? So it's like, can it be solved in a week? Can it be solved on a quarter. So things that should have been solved in a week obviously, should have been solved since the last level 10 meeting, you quickly go through that. And then you're into issues, basically. So you've got your issues list, people typically have thought of those during the week, they might have put them on the agenda. And then you pick very quickly, you don't analyse it to death, but you go around the room and say, Okay, what issues do we want to tackle you pick them in threes? So you'll say what are the top three we need to solve? You run IDs, you get through them, you solve them, you then pick the next three, until you run out of time on the level 10. You then do a quick wrap up, you make sure the to dues are allocated for the following week. Everybody rates the meeting, and you absolutely finish on time. That's it again, nobody you guys would already know to do this, but visionaries don't.

We did a very similar one. How long is it?

90 minutes, generally, they can be quicker. Remember, I never experienced hyper growth. So for me, my business went from crazy to calm. We ended up with happy customers some really big customers doing well. I actually didn't tell this my sob story at the beginning that our business was ultimately acquired. So yeah, had a happy ending. And actually, although we weren't growing like a weed, it was a company I was really proud of happy customers happy colleagues like growing, growing modestly. We just needed to be a part of the bigger company to realise the full potential. So that's what we did. And so our issues actually stopped expanding. I think if you're growing really fast, then obviously your issues would continue expanding with breakneck scale. But that isn't something I've experienced.

I'm sure you have many years ahead of you. I fully intend to rob we'd have more questions, but unfortunately running out of time. So the final question is, if our listeners are only going to take one thing away from today, what is it,

work somewhere where you are appreciated, and explore the system that I've just talked you through, there are many others. And don't settle for a company that is happy or founders that are happy living in chaos. But before you throw your toys out of the pram, give them this book or another one and give them the opportunity to come meet you where you are.

Thank you Rob, for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please subscribe or leave us a comment and we will see you next week.