Episode Overview
What does it take to redefine your identity after building and selling successful companies? In this episode of Real Talk, Mark O’Donnell, Visionary at EOS Worldwide, catches up with longtime Implementer and record-breaking coach Scott Rusnak to explore the discipline of focus, the role of failure in growth, and what it really means to become the architect of your own life.
From elite cycling to SaaS to EOS, Scott shares how athletic grit, business setbacks, and relentless coaching shaped his journey into mastery. He reflects on the ego hits of identity shifts, the myths of self-implementing, and why hitting rock bottom may be the best thing that ever happens to a driven entrepreneur. If you’ve ever struggled to let go of “what got you here” in order to step into your next phase, this one’s for you.
Key Takeaways
- Focus is a superpower: Great results follow when you get clear on the one thing you’re best suited to do.
- Failure as fuel: Falling short can be a turning point toward clarity, alignment, and reinvention.
- Self-implementation ≠ mastery: EOS isn’t a solo sport; you still stand to benefit from external perspective and guidance.
- Identity is fluid: The hardest (and most rewarding) shift can be moving from founder to coach or from success to significance.
- Push with purpose: The best coaches challenge their clients because they care too much not to.
- Design your life: If you’re not the architect of your future, someone else will be.
Full Episode Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and a better reading experience.
Early Days & Finding Focus
0:06
Mark: So I have with me today Scott Rusnak AKA Roger Bannister. And Scott, I would love to dive in and tell us your story. How did you become an expert implementor? What are you passionate about—which I know is a lot of different things. So if you could just dive right in and give us your story.
Scott: I’m gonna start with this thing called “expert,” because you guys allowed me to take that title. I guess you put enough reps in, you’ll get there, right? I don’t think there is such a thing as truly… I mean, it’s all relative. You’re expert compared to someone just starting. But mastery is probably a never-ending journey.
Let’s go back to putting in the reps—trying to become an expert—and Roger Bannister. I was a kid growing up in western Canada. I ran a lot, rode my bike a lot, played hockey a lot. But I just wanted to be fast at everything, Mark. And as you know me pretty well, I like to get a lot of stuff done.
1:30
Growing up in western Canada, I had a pretty cool running coach. I was good at the 800 meter, and in seventh grade I competed against the high school kids. He’s like, “Look, Rusnak, if you got focused, you could probably do a four-minute mile.” I remember saying to him in seventh or eighth grade, “Yeah, I go to Vancouver every summer with my family, and there’s this picture of Roger Bannister at Stanley Park. And it’s still there. Every time I go, I see it.”
But I kind of lost focus. No shock—I started racing my bike and playing hockey. It wasn’t until a really great coach grabbed me at the end of high school and said, “You’ve got to focus on one thing.”
And for me, I was like, “What do you mean one thing? I’m really good at these things.” He’s like, “No—just one thing. And figure out how you can become world-class at that one thing.” So I had a coach named Dez Dickey in cycling. He said, “Focus on this type of circuit race, with this type of hill, 200 kilometers. Make it a four- or five-hour race, and let’s just train for that.”
I was lucky enough—I went to Worlds, got a top 10, missed the finish line by this much. Should have been on the podium. But that’s another story.
Mark: It’s like the opposite of a fish story.
Scott: No, it’s the same. “I missed by this much.” Actually, truth be known, if I was a one-arm cyclist, I missed by this much. Could have been a mile, probably.
From Bikes to Business
3:30
Scott: The funny thing is, I took that coaching lesson into my entrepreneurial journey. I got out of college, worked at a corporation for a couple of years—this is when software was just kicking in, like dinosaurs were just starting to become something.
My soon-to-be father-in-law, a superintendent of schools, said, “You know Max School has developed this product. Maybe you should develop one of those.” I was lucky to know some guys who were pretty good at coding—as we called it back in the day—and we just focused on one thing. We took on Apple in our own little space. I moved to the States. I immigrated. You guys shouldn’t have let me in.
Mark: Well, as you know, people sneak in all the time, so you’re not alone.
Scott: Oh no—now this is public. This is not good. If someone knocks on my door, this whole thing’s over. So yeah, we built the same thing and got to 3,000 schools across North America and Europe. And get ready for this one—I’m coaching tee-ball with this guy who is starting an online tee time thing that became GolfNow.
Brett’s like, “Hey Scott, you know about software. You’re involved in the software business—why don’t you join me?” Right place, right time again. I got involved in GolfNow in the early days. But again, I wasn’t focused on one thing.
My mentor grabbed me by the throat and said, “You gotta pick one. You gotta focus like crazy.” So I exited GolfNow—which was fantastic—and just focused on SchoolLogic. We brought in all these teachers and coaches and different programs. But it wasn’t until the end when we focused on one thing. People can guess what that one thing was—it has six key components. We finally got what we wanted.
Discovering EOS
Scott: As we were doing this, I realized I was more suited to be a business coach. I always wanted to be a sports coach. But working with a ton of entrepreneurs—there was just so much value in it. That led me to EOS.
Mark: With SchoolLogic, did you hire an implementer? How did you find EOS? Did you self-implement?
Scott: I was in Detroit and there was a guy named Gino doing a talk. Like 90% of people, we did it ourselves. And we did okay. But my staff started to say, “This isn’t EOS—this is SOS. The Scott Operating System.”
Mark: Save Our Souls.
Scott: Whichever comes first. We did okay, but it wasn’t until a really good friend of mine—Ted Bradshaw—poked me in the nose, hard. After I’d been trying to coach and build on my own for five or six years, he said, “Look, just join us in this community.” And I guess the rest is history. You haven’t kicked me out yet. You gave me this extra-special badge, so I’ll stick around.
The One Thing
7:00
Mark: Tell us about doing one thing. You’ve mentioned it a few times. People kept telling you—you could do a lot of things well, but if you focused…
Scott: You can ask my wife. But the truth is, most people don’t focus on one thing until they’ve had a pretty significant failure. We didn’t fail at GolfNow, but I couldn’t punch through. When I stepped out, they brought in the smart money, they got focused, and they did really well. Congrats to Brett on that.
At SchoolLogic, we had a couple of rough years. Then we got incredibly focused. Said, “Here’s where we’re going—jump on the bus.” The right people joined us. It took failure—just like in sports. I’m really glad we failed. So we could focus.
Mark: We always say you learn way more from failure than from success.
Scott: Absolutely. I don’t think there’s any learning outside of failure. You can see someone in a terrible car accident and say, “That’s a bad idea.” But until you’ve got road rash, until you’ve been knocked out, lost your teeth, or blown money on some shiny object—it doesn’t click.
You hear about so many incredible entrepreneurs who reset, learn, and evolve. I’m glad I failed. It’s given me fuel to help others succeed. And, frankly, it makes for way better stories.
From Self-Implementer to Community Member
Mark: So talk to me a little more about your self-implementation experience. You hear Gino talk, you think, “This could help us.” What was that like?
Scott: I’m going to try not to insult anyone listening to this, but self-implementing EOS is like learning to fly a plane on Xbox.
You think, “This is cool, I’ve got VR, maybe I can use a flight simulator.” But when you’ve got your entire team on board that plane, and you need to take off, avoid turbulence, or land during a storm—who’s your air traffic control? Who’s your copilot?
We didn’t have any of that. Just me, being pigheaded, patting ourselves on the back, saying “We’re doing great.” But we really needed a third party to come in and show us what we were missing—because we had a lot of issues.
Mark: So Ted Bradshaw says, “Hey, Scott, you’ve been messing around trying to build your own thing. Why don’t you just join us?” Why didn’t you join earlier?
Scott: Just stubbornness. Like most entrepreneurs—”I’ve got this. I can beat my chest.” I keep a surfboard in a lot of my Zoom backgrounds because I used to surf by myself for years. Then one summer, I hired a surf coach. My wife was appreciative—so were her friends. That guy out-surfed me, out-coached me, out-everything’d me.
It taught me that learning the intricacies of something is what gets you there. But entrepreneurs think we can do it all alone. I was coaching six or seven businesses at the time, and with two of them, we just couldn’t make progress.
Ted met me on Vancouver Island. He’d just played golf, I’d ridden my bike, we had a couple drinks, and he finally said, “When are you going to do this the right way?”
I took it as a bit of an insult. He said, “Tell me about your biggest failures. Tell me what’s going wrong.” And then he said, “If you just do this, and dig in as a coach, you’ll get everything you want—and the teams you work with will respect you. I think you can pull it off.” That was the beginning of my journey. A polite poke on the nose from a good friend.
Starting Fresh with EOS
Mark: You went to boot camp in Denver, right?
Scott: Nope. Straight from heli-skiing to Detroit.
Mark: What year did you start?
Scott: Eight years ago—so 2016. A couple years after you.
Mark: When you came to boot camp, did you already have clients from your coaching background?
Scott: I had a few. I was in YPO, connected in the sports scene. I had one bite at the apple with a lot of people I knew, so I held off telling them what I was up to. I wanted to achieve some level of mastery first. But when I was ready, they all found out—on the ski lift, the mountain bike trail. That opened the door.
The cool part is, I’d already been a coach. So I may have had an easier entry than others. And if you’re standing on the shoulders of giants, those giants can help open doors. That helped a lot. My first year really took off.
The Identity Shift
14:30
Mark: I’ve been thinking a lot about identity. It’s a transition many new implementers face.
When I became an implementer, I was known as the pharma/biotech entrepreneur. Once I committed to doing EOS full-time, my network disappeared overnight. I wasn’t that guy anymore.
So I had to start from zero—rebuilding who I was, in the hearts and minds of the people I wanted to serve. I wanted to be the guy who helped people get what they wanted from their business.
What was that identity transition like for you?
Scott: Can I swear?
Mark: You can.
Scott: It was really f***ing hard. I lost my identity. You get to the top of the hill as an entrepreneur, have a couple exits, ring the bell, and say, “I’m great.” You look in the mirror—“This is not my beautiful wife, not my beautiful car…” But it is. And it gives you nothing.
That moment is fleeting. The two years it took me to become a coach were brutal. When I was a kid, I was a paperboy. I’d knock on the door in -20°C weather and people would give me hot chocolate. Selling myself as a coach? Totally different.
People have to experience who you are. They need to see your brand, your style, your energy. That was really hard. “You’re a cycling coach, right?” Or “You’re a SaaS guy.” I was both—and I wanted to bring those worlds together.
We had this thing we called MAP—My Accountability Plan—which later became the V/TO. We had metrics, we had rocks, a basic plan. And I’d ripped off and duplicated a lot of the EOS stuff. But it was really hard—because there was no legitimacy behind it.
Mark: Yeah. And people don’t give enough credit to how hard that identity work is. We’re often known as something else. And when we transition to coach, people don’t see that right away.
Scott: Exactly. You’ve got to earn that new identity. You can’t just rebrand overnight.
Doing the Work the Right Way
Mark: Did you get formal training as a coach before EOS?
Scott: More the “figure it out as you go” method. I did some stuff with Scaling Up and Rockefeller Habits, and I liked it—but it was too much. I was looking for something simple. Clear. EOS made sense. I wish Gino had poked me in the nose in 1996.
Mark: In 1996 I had just gotten my driver’s license.
Scott: That was the year we immigrated to the U.S. SchoolLogic was cranking. It was hard. But that challenge helped me persevere. When you’re transitioning from SaaS to coaching—or from anything to coaching—you can’t just dabble. You can’t watch a couple videos and think you’ve got it. You’ve got to immerse yourself. Be vulnerable. Admit what you’re good at—and ask for help on the rest.
What Are You Known For?
Mark: So Scott, what do your clients actually know you as?
Scott: A dyslexic, leisure-studies athlete who will jam his head through a wall to get what he wants—and drag them with him.
Scott: They may not always love my methods, but they love the results. I push hard. I don’t let them miss rocks or drift from their one-year plan. If they start acting against their values, I pull out the People Analyzer. “Are you walking the talk?” Because if your behavior doesn’t match what you’re saying, we’ve got a problem. I’m intentional. I push hard.
Mark: So you’re The Pusher?
Scott: Visionary Pusher. If they want a tequila after, I’ll pour one.
Strength, Purpose & Rhinos
Mark: One of our board members, David Mann, recommended the book From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks. Are you familiar?
Scott: Yeah—I recommend it to all my clients who are in transition. The audiobook is fantastic. He narrates it himself—great voice. I’ve listened to it on many mountain bike rides.
Mark: The gist of the book is that our technical skills often decline earlier than we expect. But our wisdom, our coaching, our storytelling? That increases. We can go from being performers to guides—and stay in our purpose for life.
Scott: I’d add another book—Rhinoceros Success by Scott Alexander. Dutch Bros uses it to train their managers. It’s hilarious and sharp. Talks about charging through the jungle, having thick skin. You’ve got to write your own story. If you’re not doing hard things, not charging like a rhino, there’s just not much to it.
Final Word
Mark: Okay, Scott. You’ve got a direct line to every human on Earth. What’s the one thing you want them to hear?
Scott: Who is the architect of your life? That’s it. That’s the question I ask when I’m on stage, when I’m coaching, everywhere. You’ve got to design your own story. If you can become the architect of your own life—this whole thing becomes really cool.
Mark: I love that. Scott, thanks for the conversation. I know others will get value out of this too.
Scott: Thanks, Mark. See you at QC.
Related Resources
