Piloting Through Chaos

As a young fisherman from Boston in the 2000s, Founder and CEO of Red’s Best Seafood Jared Auerbach worked on commercial vessels in Alaska and Cape Cod. 

When he started Red’s in the historic Boston Fish Pier in Boston, MA in 2008, he quickly discovered that chaos is the normal order of things.

“With the ocean, what draws us in is the unpredictability. We don’t have consistent supply as it changes with the tide, the moon, and the year in ways we can’t even understand.” 

“One thing about being in the seafood industry is there’s never a typical day,” he says. “You have to accept the chaos and you have to thrive on the chaos.”

Jared admits he is very thankful that he found EOS to help him reign in some of that chaos through the structure he and his team have been able to build into the business. A structure that has even touched on his personal life.

Getting Buy-In

Like most visionary entrepreneurs, Jared has a ton of ideas running through his head. Most of his are about putting systems into place.

Before EOS, he considered himself to be ‘manic’ about systems. He would write them out on paper and try to present them to his team. Problem was, he wasn’t getting their buy-in. 

“Getting the buy-in from the team and the structure that EOS puts around it really changed my life,” he says. “When we brought in EOS, it was a no-brainer for everybody involved. After implementation, from top to bottom, from the highest-paid employee to the person cleaning the office three days a week, everyone just knew what had to be done.”

”I am the biggest fan of EOS you’ll find,” he says. “I used to call Red’s Best a company. After implementing EOS, I can tell you it’s more like a living organism, an organization instead of just a company. It’s the structure that EOS brought to the business.”

Because of that structure, Red’s Best has taken on a life all its own with its own values, goals, Rocks, and brand where previously, it was based on whatever charisma Jared could muster up for the day. 

“It is no longer me running the company. But rather, the company is now running the company. I got a lot of support from everyone and I attribute that to EOS.” 

It was that empowerment that empowered him to make decisions during the COVID crisis so that when it hit, Red’s Best was ready.

Weathering The COVID-19 Storm

“I’m really proud of how decisively I acted, but I don’t take all the credit for that. I take less credit for that because I have built such a good team. 

It has been the strong team and structure of the company that gave Jared a unique take on the pandemic once it hit.

“When COVID came around, it was like the whole world was this huge snow globe,” he says. It just got shaken up. But for me, it was like a blank canvas for me to rethink. I always pride myself on thinking outside the box, not accepting the norm. Six months ago, all these ideas I had would have been received very poorly by the seafood community. But today, everyone has to rethink.”

For Jared, a lot of that thinking gets channeled into his Level 10 Meeting™. 

Navigating Visionary Waters

“I take my role as a visionary seriously and my creative process feeds on the structure that EOS gives me. It gave me permission to focus on only what I was good at, which is also what I liked doing while giving me permission to give up the other stuff.”

Like many entrepreneurs, Jared can find himself waking up at 2 a.m. with thoughts and ideas. But instead of firing off an email to a manager with that early-morning thought, he brings it up at the Level 10 Meeting. By creating a to-do, the leadership team can be counted on to act on whatever it was decided needed to be acted on.

“Before our Implementer introduced us to the Level 10 Meeting, the organization and structure of a meeting wasn’t intuitive to me. Now, we get this pulse, where me and these other guys go through our meeting and they go through their one or two or three items that they want to talk about and then I have a punch list of like fifteen items and I just fly through. We just bang through it all as a group.”

Passion For The Journey

Besides the structure that EOS has brought to Red’s Best, Jared has found an unexpected benefit from this journey.

“Implementing EOS has really changed my life,” he says. “Not just in terms of the business trajectory, but in personal happiness as well. I have a family which is really important to me. The structure we’ve put in place in our organization using EOS allows me to be a better family man, allowing me to enjoy my time with them more.”

Leading Red’s Best from chaos to order and from raw intuition to structure, Jared Auerbach’s ongoing journey gives him the opportunity to do what he loves best.

“I was born an entrepreneur and I started this company out of passion. There’s nothing else I would want to be doing with life right now. There’s nothing that makes me happier than being able to grow a company using a structure that empowers me. That’s what EOS has done for me.”

Red’s Best is implementing EOS with the help of Certified EOS Implementer® Eric Crews.

KEY TAKEAWAYS – LEADERSHIP LENS

“Chaos” can come in all shapes and sizes as a once-in-a-lifetime event or as a day-to-day reality. By using the tools and structure that EOS provides, entrepreneurial leaders can navigate the waters of chaos, confident that they’ll be forever on course towards successfully achieving their goals.