2137 - The Transformative Journey of Implementing EOS with EOS Worldwide's Gary Leeman

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1:05With us right now is Gary Lehman. Gary, you are a professional EOS implementer. You're found on the web at eosworldwide.com slash Gary-Lehman. But to our friend that's listening, very easy. Just click on the show notes, click on the little information button. We just keep clicking on stuff and you'll find a direct link so that you can follow along. Gary, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. I've been looking forward to this. Yeah. Well, tell us about the work that you do. Obviously, there are a lot of professional implementers out there, but no two are the same. That's true.

1:43That's true. So as an implementer, I get to help business owners and leaders get everything they want from their business. That's what EOS is designed to do. And I was drawn to it because I grew up in a family business and I know how difficult it can be. So when I work with teams, my why, my lift that I get out of the work I do now is I actually improve people's lives. Their personal life, they can take time and take care of themselves. They're not working constantly. They spend time with their families again. They're engaged in their communities. that's the ultimate reward I get when I see those changes with, with the people I work with, you know, the, a system gets them there, but, but the reason that I show up every day is because I know there's a better way to run a company where you can have your life back.

2:45Yeah. Well, Gary, for someone that's listening and they've probably heard of EOS and they might I think, well, you know what? We're running things pretty well within the organization. Do you mind maybe sharing at what point or what might be the, so at what stage in business might they want to seriously consider, you know, an EOS framework? And also what might be some of the indicators, even though they might feel that things are running pretty well, what might be some of the things that they could look for in terms of pain points or that they might say, you know what, we probably need to give this a second look.

3:27Maybe they read traction back in the day. But at what point might they say, you know what, I think we probably just need to take a serious look at this. And here's the evidence why it's worth that consideration. Yeah. So Josh, EOS is the framework to run a better business, right? Right now. Almost universally, my clients, they realize they need to make a change because what got them here doesn't get them there. Right. It's it's a concept we call hitting the ceiling and hitting the ceiling can happen at the owner level. It just becomes too much for them. It could happen at a leader level or department level, or it can be the entire organization was just not built for the next level.

4:17Either that's scale and growth, or just as they continue to grow from a company that served 10 clients and now they have 100, the systems that worked well when they were building and helping 10 clients, they just don't work any longer. So if there's a universal moment in time in a company, it's when they're bumping up against the ceiling. They've tried lots of things. It's not working, but they want to progress. and it doesn't have to just be growth. Three of my current clients are family businesses and each of them has a different dynamic between the founder and their son or daughter. And so a founder who is there every day from the beginning has so much in their head and they just naturally assume, my kids know what's going on.

5:15When that younger person comes in to start to take the company on, you know, pass down through the generation, they're almost always overwhelmed to begin with. And the system really gives them a framework to get their hands on everything. So it shows up in so many different ways, but I'd say ultimately, it's you want to do better. You've hit the ceiling. That better could be employee retention. It could be customer service rating. It could be growth scale, what have you. For someone who might be thinking, oh, come on, what's so magical? Why do I need to work with an implementer? Why can't I just figure this out on my own?

6:00What's the difference there? Absolutely, I would say. I think the numbers now are eight self-implemented to every professionally implemented. EOS started with the idea that Gina Wickman wanted to share it with everybody. It was supposed to be just public knowledge. We give everything away. You can go to the website and go to my website and get to every tool, framework, and even guide on how to employ them. You can download them and you can try it yourself. But what I find is when somebody's hit the ceiling, that person and their team, generally, they're already overwhelmed. So if you're already overwhelmed, how successful are you going to be to literally change the entire model in which you're operating your business?

6:59It's not easy. It takes effort. So professional implementer, that's all they do. It's all I do. Right. So it's much easier for me to lead a team through how to start changing their behaviors and adopting new practices than any one leader in an overwhelmed organization. But there is no right or wrong answer to that. We want everyone that EOS can help to engage with it. And if that means read the book and try it, if that means go to the website, download free tools and try it, please, by all means. So help me paint a picture. I just don't want to feel like we're being too vague here. Would you mind maybe putting some meat on the bones?

7:41And like, what does this mean in a daily life? Like, say we have a fully implemented like EOS, like that's what we're operating our company on. Like, what's the difference? Like, how does it feel? Like, where do we see this? Like, how do things operate better? So I'm going to tell you the core of what we really focus on. And then I'll give you a couple stories. on what it looks like, you know, the change that I see in my clients. So EOS is a complete system of simple tools. They help my clients get three things that we call vision, traction, and healthy. Okay, so vision is making sure the entire leadership team understands where the company's going and how they plan to get there.

8:24You need to have everybody aligned to a vision. We understand that concept if we're all rolling in the same direction our chances of getting someplace is much improved. Traction means I work with leadership teams to create real discipline and accountability so that ownership, the founder, the leader, who have you, everywhere they look, they see daily activity driving towards the goal, right? Driving to achieve the vision and then healthy. Meaning I'll work with leadership teams to create a healthy, functional, cohesive team. Because unfortunately, sometimes really good leaders don't work well on a team.

9:05As the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the organization. So I stay with my clients until their entire organization's crystal clear on the vision, gaining consistent traction, advancing with discipline and accountability, and enjoying their job and the people they work with. So our three uniques, if you will, what sets EOS apart, is by concentrating on vision traction healthy. Everything you want from your business is achievable. Now that complete system of simple tools shows up across the board. So I'll give you an example. I took a client on that ran a home repair, not a home repair, a home inspection company.

9:49He didn't have previous background. He got into the real estate industry. He found his niche. He started growing and he decided, hey, I'm going to I'm going to create a company here. Not just I'm not going to be just an individual home inspector. He grew to about six home inspectors underneath him. And then he went out and self-implemented EOS. Hired somebody to run operations. They got up to 10. He was flying, but he self-implemented EOS. So he missed a couple of crucial parts. He wasn't reviewing the scorecard every week. And so while the team said everything was great, and while he was building new ideas, leaning into strategic relationships, the company was actually faltering out on the way down.

10:37And by the time he realized it, he fell all the way down to only having worked for two of his home inspectors. Nearly went bankrupt. And then had to start inspecting houses again. and growing again. By the time he got back to four, he realized it wasn't EOS that did that. It was his not great understanding of how everything's supposed to fit together because it is a holistic system. So we started working together. We got scorecard and within a week, by understanding the metrics that mattered, he found a huge problem with his call center that was killing his business. If you know anything about real estate agents, things happen quickly.

11:29They have a deal on the table. They want to get the inspection scheduled. They will call you. If you're not answering the phone or calling them back almost instantly, they're moving on. He was not aware of this happening at the call center because guess what? the call center was sending him the same reporting metrics that they sent all their clients, which essentially guarantees that they look like they're doing great. Right? They're going to send you a scorecard that says we're performing beautifully. Except once you start digging in and understanding the process of how it works, understanding the critical points, we started tracking two metrics.

12:05And within a week, it was, oh, now we know what's going on. Once that root issue was solved, you have no idea how much headspace that frees up, right? So that guy, he was spending so much time worried about how to keep increasing sales and not looking at everything else. How many sales he was losing? Sales that were already in the pipeline potentially. Right. That were just being lost. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Yeah. Yeah. And so you can imagine from there, not that it's ever easy to grow a business, but from there, solving that one root issue, right, started to allow him to engage in other things that he's already knew he needed to improve to continue scale, but he could not concentrate on an improved process.

12:59He couldn't concentrate on, you know, getting the right people in the right seats because he was consumed with trying to fix the sales problem. So that's the beauty of, you know, the holistic system is it addresses every part as required and we have a tool for it. So his life, you know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you the last time I talked to him, he paid himself back because him and his wife had to take some personal money to keep the company a float. And he took a vacation, a well-earned vacation. Right. And he's not, he's not losing sleep every night anymore. And he's back on the path of growth.

13:40Yeah. Well, Gary, we have just a few minutes left here. Do you mind sharing like when, when someone says, okay, listen, I, yeah, my curiosity peaked. What do you normally talk about on, on an initial conversation? And I guess, How do you figure out together whether or not there might be a really wise opportunity to work together with you? So everything I do, it's been a value of mine for a very long time. One of the things that really attracted me to EOS is a core value called help first. So when I engage with anybody, all I do when I engage is get curious about how I can help this individual.

14:25more often than not i will talk to a business owner and eos is not what they need right now right it's not either required at all based on the structure of their business or it's not the right time and so when i ask certain questions if i don't hear the typical pain points i know that eos does well to address and solve i keep going down the five whys, if you will, because I may undercover that, you know what, they need a fractional CFO. That's where they're stuck, or they need a fractional head of sales to build the system. And so I'd much rather be able to offer that resource to keep that company going.

15:07They may come back. They may want to implement EOS, but everything I do is through help first. So if it seems like EOS could be a good decision, I basically give a free workshop. I sit down for 90 minutes with the leader and the leadership team. And I explain the entire model. Everything is open book, right? They can take that 90 minutes. They could go by traction and they can self-implement. I explain how I implement my process when I work with a client, how I lay out the tools, how I lay out the concepts to build on itself, to let them master it. But my goal, if I do, say, gain a client, my goal is to get them to graduate as soon as possible.

15:54Right? Gary, what could other B2B consultants learn from that approach right there? Because obviously, it's an approach that works. But it was one that might feel a little scary to a lot of consultants out there. I think the best advice I can give is really ask yourself if you're being abundance-minded. A scarcity mindset

16:20makes one believe, oh, if I tell them exactly how to do it and I tell them there's free resources, I'll never get a client. So I have to hold back. I have to hold back something to be needed. That is a scarcity mindset. The more you give away, the more you help. my clients self-select josh it's it's it's you know somebody said that to me a couple months ago and i was like that is a brilliant way to think about it because that's actually what happens i'm happy to sit down with a team let them know how it can be done let them know here's what it looks like if i work with you and then make sure that i'm the right fit because maybe another one of my implementer friends in the area would be better to work with that team, right?

17:10So if I go in with an abundance mindset, the people who see the value in EOS and they see that I am a good implementer, they choose me. They self-select. It's abundance-minded because there's so many different people with so many different offerings and products and services. I can't tell you what an ideal process map looks like, but I can tell you that at its root, lean into abundance mindset. Gary Lehman, professional EOS implementer, your website, eosworldwide.com forward slash Gary dash Lehman. Or again, to our friend listening, just click in your podcast app, you'll see a direct link so you can grab some time with Gary.

17:58Gary, thank you so much for not only your wisdom that you shared, but also your example. I could not agree with you more about an abundance mindset. You know, those consultants who are struggling with consistency and predictability on new business, you're probably doing things old school and it's not working anymore. And Gary, exactly what you outlined, that's exactly what's working today. Gary, I love it. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation, Josh.

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