Episode Overview
In this episode of Real Talk with an EOS Implementer, Mark O’Donnell, Visionary at EOS Worldwide, sits down with EOS Implementer Anthony Wood to trace how a civil engineer became a longtime business builder across multiple industries, and why he ultimately chose to help other leadership teams implement EOS.
Anthony shares how his fast-growing IT and telecommunications company in Australia climbed to major recognition before a series of decisions pushed it to the edge of collapse. He reflects on the moment he and his business partner brought in outside leadership, why that “professional manager” hire created a Core Values misalignment, and how the resulting command-and-control culture nearly became fatal for the organization. The conversation also covers founder burnout, the myth of compartmentalizing personal hardship, and how leadership energy impacts the health of an entire company.
As the business was rebuilt, Anthony describes the early EOS breakthroughs that changed everything, starting with Focus Day and the immediate shift created by running a disciplined Level 10 Meeting. Mark and Anthony also discuss the power of the Visionary/Integrator relationship, why it shows up behind nearly every scaling company, and how clarity around Core Values, Core Focus, and the Three-Year Picture can reset momentum across an organization. Anthony closes by explaining what made him want to become an EOS Implementer, and why the “simple, not easy” disciplines of execution are what create lasting results.
Key Takeaways
- A leadership hire can solve one problem while quietly creating another: Bringing in outside management during a crisis may feel necessary, but if that leader’s style conflicts with the company’s Core Values, the cultural damage can outweigh short-term gains.
- Unwritten culture does not scale: A business can thrive for years on shared instincts and informal norms, but without clearly defined Core Values and direction, growth exposes misalignment and makes the culture vulnerable.
- Structured weekly meetings restore clarity and momentum: Implementing a disciplined Level 10 Meeting eliminated hours of unproductive discussion, reduced repeated conversations, and gave the leadership team a focused forum to solve real issues.
- The Visionary and Integrator partnership stabilizes growth: When bold ideas are balanced with steady execution, the business avoids constant pivots and builds consistent progress instead of volatility or stagnation.
- Simple disciplines create measurable financial results: Accountability, clear ownership of responsibilities, and consistent attention to the numbers may feel basic, but over time they produced a dramatic swing from significant losses to record profitability.
Full Episode Transcript
Anthony’s Journey to EOS
0:01
Mark: We’re on the same day, but he couldn’t be further away in time zone than I am. He’s about 12 hours ahead. So welcome to our little show here, Anthony. It’s good to have you.
Anthony: Thanks, Mark. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Mark: And we’re just going to jump right in. We have so many entrepreneurial stories inside of the EOS Implementer community, and not many people know, as we sit here today, there’s over 850 EOS Implementers that do business in about 40 countries now. So we’re all over the world, and you would be one of those Implementers that are outside the United States and North America. So why don’t you just jump right in and tell us your story? How’d you get here? Why are you an Implementer? Start there.
Anthony: Sure thing. I’ve been running and growing businesses for probably about 30 years now. I am a civil engineer by qualification, but quite quickly realized I’d much rather be working with people than working tensile loads on bridges or hydrostatic flow in sewer pipes 35 meters underground. So I made a shift and headed off overseas, out of Australia, off to begin what was going to be a five-year, five-continent odyssey. It ended up being a three-year, three-continent odyssey because within a couple of weeks I met the guy who would become my business partner in a series of ventures, and the woman who would ultimately become my wife.
They say that international travel changes you, and it certainly did, and that all first three weeks, so it was quite strange. So whilst I was overseas, I bounced around a variety of different industries—retail, hospitality, building businesses—sometimes for other people, sometimes for myself and a couple of partners. But ultimately found that I was doing more people-focused things than what the engineering background would lead you to believe.
In spite of that though, regardless of the business, I did tend to be the person that was trying to put in place some tools and some systems to help the people I was surrounding myself with get on and do the things I was asking them to do. So I guess, in spite of my best efforts, the engineering in me was still coming out regardless.
So I ended up back in Australia after about three years of bouncing around Canada, the UK, a bit of time in Europe, and founded a business that was an IT and telecommunications business, which was kind of the core of then several other technology ventures. Also, it sped off into indoor vertical farming, so there was a couple of software businesses in there as well.
And it was in that IT and telecommunications business about nine years ago now—we were coming off the top of some absolutely stellar growth. So that business was founded in late 2000, and so we’d had a really good run for quite a while. We actually qualified for the Fast 100, so the BRW Fast 100, so I guess that’s kind of like the Inc. 5000 from the North American perspective. And we thought we were pretty good. We thought we’d really got our act together, and we were rolling along really well.
Unfortunately, through a series of decisions that in hindsight were like, “How could we possibly make those calls,” but at the time it seemed like the right thing to do, we ended up basically sending that business off a cliff—borderline bankrupt. We had to tip a couple of million bucks into the business just to keep it afloat. We made some pretty significant staff changes. My business partner and I had kind of fallen out of love with the business, and that was certainly creating huge tension between us as well.
And so we kind of woke up two years later after we’d gone down this horrible path going, “What are we doing? We love this business. It was a great thing. Let’s fix this.” And so we set about rebuilding it. One of the first people that we called was a guy by the name of Daniel Davis, who we had worked with in the past putting in place some other tools and systems.
We called up Dan and said, “Mate, we need your help. We need to fix the business. We need to put in place that other stuff that you’d helped us with previously,” because it had been totally dismantled. And he said, “Yep, yep, we could do that, or have a read of this,” and handed me a copy of Traction and said, “Have a read. I’ve just come across this. I’ve just met this guy, Gino—pretty crazy guy out of Detroit—very similar, both bold, juvenile entrepreneurs.”
So I was like, “All right, I’ll have a look at this. I’ll see what it looks like.” Couldn’t help myself, grabbed the book, read it over the course of the weekend, called him on the Monday morning and said, “Dan, when can we get started?”
So along with Dan helping us, Tim, my business partner, and I set about rebuilding that business. And so over about 18 months into that journey, I realized I’d actually fallen in love with the journey, with the process. We’d fix the business, we’d stop the bleeding from a money perspective, but way more importantly, we’d really got our mojo back as an organization.
All the people that had been leaving—we totally had a huge volume of staff turnover and that was causing significant problems for us. Our reputation was getting really damaged out in the marketplace. Our clients were unhappy with us. Our business partners and suppliers—and some of those are pretty significant businesses here in Australia and across the Asia region—they were getting just gritted with us. And I was like, “No, no, no, no. This has to stop.”
That was kind of like the catalyst for us to start fixing things. So it was great when we actually got everything back on track. We had gone from our worst losses to our highest profitability. But also, we’d stop the bleeding from a people perspective. Our reputation—our business partners were loving us again. Our clients were stoked that we’d finally got our act together.
And I was like, “Wow. This is extraordinary.” Not only can I sleep at night now knowing that the business is working, I don’t have to worry about selling the house and making myself, my wife, and my two very young kids at the time homeless, and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, pretty stressful being that entrepreneur, that business owner.
Unfortunately, Tim and I were totally on the same page about wanting to fix the business, so we were just able to tap into everything EOS-related, the help of Dan as well. And ultimately that led us to a point where one day during a session—we’re actually, probably a bit too much sharing, but we’re on the way to the bathroom in a break, breaking the session—and I turned to Dan and said, “Mate, I want your job. I want to do what you do. How do we go about that?”
So I spent six months then extracting myself out of the day-to-day running in the business. I was the Integrator, and Tim is most definitely a card-carrying member of the Visionary Club. And so, you know, we kind of accidentally, but very naturally, fell together in the whole puzzle piece conversation that we talk about. We had unintentionally worked that out several years ago.
So when we started to read Traction, read Rocket Fuel, I was like, “Have these people been bugging our meetings, phone calls? Because this is us.” So it just all came together beautifully.
The business was humming along. We built a team that I knew that should I step out of the business, Tim would not be left high and dry. And so that was really important for me to make sure that my business partner and friend of 20 years was being supported, and I wasn’t leaving him in the lurch whilst I was running off chasing something new and exciting, and he was left holding the bag, as it were.
So it was awesome to see that the team stepped up, and that business has continued to go from strength to strength. So almost seven and a half years ago now, I made that leap out and became a full-time Implementer.
And that organization is continuing to go from strength to strength. We’ve just won some awards within the industry that we’re in, and we’re getting a really good reputation. We’re making the most amount of money that we’ve ever made. And so from a personal perspective, I love that because it’s testament of the tools and the process and the systems we put in place. Give the right people the right tools, and wonderful, magical things can happen.
Mark: Yeah, I mean, such an amazing story. Congratulations on that journey, and I know it’s a never-ending one. Boy, do I have questions. All right, let’s go.
I’m just wondering—you said that you were running the business and you kept making really bad decisions that essentially ran the business to the ground. Can you take me back to a very specific decision that you made that turned out to be absolutely horrendous, that did more damage than anything? And then what was your justification for that at the time? Because I have a sense that so many entrepreneurs are probably making that same decision and making the same justifications for it in this very moment, and I think people probably benefit from that.
Anthony: Yeah. We were in the middle of a very deep funk. And what caused that funk—like everybody has a sort of up and down—what caused the funk: Tim was in a pretty dark place mentally, emotionally. Some stuff was happening in his family. Some things from a professional perspective were happening to his wife, which was just completely reprehensible.
And as hard as he tried to compartmentalize that out of the business, it was seeping in everywhere. It affected absolutely everything, which was absolutely appropriate. And as hard as he tried to just say, “No, no, no, it’s cool. I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” it just kept showing up.
So we had to do something about that. So we made the decision to bring someone else in to run the business, and that single decision—as valid and as justified as it was because the situation that we had wasn’t tenable—we couldn’t keep going the way we were.
And when we brought that person in, we gave them a mandate to grow us as an organization. Unfortunately, the way in which that person went about doing that was completely at odds with who we were as an organization. So as a result, people that—we had phenomenal staff retention—and all of a sudden, people that had been with us five, six, eight years were just leaving overnight, because it was just totally—we weren’t the organization that we were.
So this person believed that the ends would justify the means of how they were going about doing the things that they were doing. They were completely out of sync with who we were as an organization. On reflection, that shows that’s a clear Core Values misalignment. But they were technically good at the things that they thought they had to do being the CEO of an organization that had hit a ceiling and wanted to grow.
Unfortunately, the way in which that all panned out, it was nearly fatal for the business. So, yeah.
The “Professional Manager” Hire & Core Values Misalignment
11:55
Mark: Yeah, go ahead.
And what comes to me there is that when we were writing the People Book and we were observing different cultures over time, and you’ve got some founder-led businesses that bring in, quote-unquote, “professional management,” and/or even starting to hire at scale, I would classify your business prior to making that decision as a happy accident.
And what I mean by that is you were healthy, aside from—you kind of came to this decision point where you had to hire someone new because you were becoming unhealthy. But because you didn’t have a high degree of intentionality on Core Values and culture, it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t grow, and it does cause tremendous amount of turnover.
Now most people decide to stay in there and they just say, “No, we’re going to just stay with our small company. We’re not going to grow. We’re not going to break through the ceiling,” because we understand and know that culture change. But often times, like yourself, we don’t understand why our culture was good.
So you bring this new person in. They start to push. Now, did they go to command and control? Did they go to a chaotic culture where we had some pockets of good? Or was it—it sounds like it was more moving to command and control.
Anthony: Very, very much. Centralization of decision making. So removing layers and capability across the organization. It definitely kept coming back to the individual, which would be a high degree of intentionality around, you know, sort of people are replaceable parts. There’s, “You do a job. Shut up and do the job.” So it’s not very healthy, but it is intentional.
And if we can do it cheaper—not from an outsourcing perspective or offshoring perspective—but if we can reduce the skill that’s required to do that particular job, we can get it cheaper. And let’s see if we can squeeze the lemon for as much as we can to then, you know, maybe sell it, maybe just say, “Hey, look what I did. I increased the profitability 10 times. Aren’t I wonderful?” But unfortunately, you’re left with this wrung-out husk of an organization. The people are totally worn out. The reputation of the business is no good. The products are probably suffering. The services you provide probably aren’t there.
But for the sake of hitting a number once, it’s just this—you descend, you know, behind you, right? Can’t keep it going over any period of time.
Mark: Yeah. And that’s such a common story. I mean, you had wrong person—maybe right seat in terms of making the right decisions as a CEO, maybe not. Would you say it would be wrong person, wrong seat, or wrong person, right seat?
Anthony: I’d say wrong person, right seat. Because from a technical skills perspective, yeah, they had what it takes. They could do the things. Unfortunately, the motivation behind it and the desired outcome were completely at odds with who we were as individuals, and who we later discovered we are as an organization.
And so because there was that totally splintering of the business—of, you know, how the people were working together, how they were being led, how they were being managed, how they were treating each other—it just, yeah. We had the train wreck that rolled through over the course of several years.
And whenever I share the story there’s always a bit of—actually there’s a lot of guilt around, “How can I possibly, how can we possibly allow it to go on for so long?” But it was those series of little decisions that you start off thinking you’re heading in this direction, but slowly over time we’ve headed off in a completely different direction of who we are, how we go about doing the things that we do.
And then it’s kind of like, thankfully, something happened two years later that enabled us to go, “Yeah, you know what? No, we’re done.” We wanted to be a different organization, but we definitely didn’t want to be this organization—different, just not this one.
Mark: Yeah, yeah. Definitely not. Definitely not.
Well, that—I mean, we hear so often with our clients, obviously having worked with 26,000 or so now, and we get all those stories coming in, and we have the other almost 300,000 who’ve used our tools and we get some of those stories too.
You do hear when a Founder Visionary/Integrator partnership who’ve started the business and they sort of reached this point of burnout, we’ll call it, because they really haven’t figured out how to manage their own human energy and protect their confidence.
And I think you mentioned earlier that, you know, you can’t—when you have stuff going on in your personal life, it doesn’t really stay. You’re just one person. And the idea of compartmentalization of your psyche, of your human energy, is not really valid.
I mean, the way I like to explain it is imagine you just ran a marathon, and you spend all that time running. I used to run, do triathlons and things. So you start off swimming, and if you spend all of your energy swimming, the idea that you’re going to start back at 100% once you get on that bike is not a reality, right?
Yes, you’re using some different muscles and things like that, but if you spend it all in the water, you’re not going to be coming out on that bike at 100%. And then if you spend it all on the bike, the idea that you’re going to jump and run your marathon now at 100% just doesn’t happen.
You cannot compartmentalize your human energy. It doesn’t work that way. You’ve got 100% of your tank, and you got to spend it the way you spend it.
Now what I also see amongst entrepreneurs, myself included, is that most of the time we spend 80% or maybe 90% of the tank on our businesses, and we spend 10% of our tank on our personal life and our families, which causes it to crash and burn. And then you’re forced to flip it where 90% is spent on picking up the mess you made and then 10% can be devoted to the business.
So I think it takes a little while for people to understand how to manage their human energy as an entrepreneur. And so we see this so often. And then when you came to that decision to hire someone else, I’m wondering if there was any justification like, “Hey, we’re going to go hire professional managers.” Like, “Oh, we’re just civil engineers.” I’m an electrical engineer myself, so I get it, right? “We’re not people people. We’re not really entrepreneurs. We’re engineers. And we should go hire someone who knows how to run a company the right way, the real way.” Any thoughts about that?
Anthony: Yeah. So Tim’s background was definitely very different than mine in that he came from more of a sales background, having hustled across a variety of different industries. But, you know, tech kind of came into it when I met him. You know, he’d just come out of a retail environment, hospitality, worked in tourism and stuff like that. So he was definitely a very different person than I was. So that was one of the things that really attracted me to wanting to work with him.
So when we met in Whistler in September ’96, pretty quickly I identified, “I’ve got to find a way in which we can do some stuff together.” Not only were we working for Whistler Mountain at the time—guest relations and things like that—whatever we could do to get a pass so we could live there and then ski as much as possible. But also then, you know, we ended up in a couple of other jobs outside of that business, and we looked at a couple of things where we could possibly think, “Oh, can we take this back to Australia? Can we take this back to Sydney and do some things together?”
So we were already beginning to have the conversations back there. He then came back to Australia, and I took another three years before I got back to Sydney. So it’s while I was like early 2000 that I really reconnected with him and I said, “Mate, what are we going to do?” So we had come from a different perspective, but neither of us had had a real extensive professional training of being a large business and very much we’re going to hustle, we’re going to work out how we do this.
You know, I’m on the tools doing tech stuff. He’s selling stuff. Quickly as he’s selling stuff, I was then doing network installations or spinning up servers and things like that, putting in phone systems. So very much the two of us. And then as we expanded out, it was adding in more technically capable people, great customer service, a reputation built.
But at no point was there formal management training. We did try a couple of different tool sets over time, and the one that we had had in place working with Daniel prior to us going, “Yep, cool, we’ve got that. We’re actually going to step away, we’re going to run our own show,” and probably within about six, maybe nine months after that decision, things began to go pear-shaped for us.
So we didn’t have the formal background of, “Yes, we can grow to be a $50 million business because we’ve got this experience.” So let’s bring in someone from the outside who’s done that to be able to help us.
So we felt we’d hit the ceiling, and where we wanted to get to, we figured we couldn’t, based on the people as well as the other circumstances that were there. It’s like, “Yeah, you know what? Let’s do this.” Rather than just try and chip away at this, let’s bite this bullet.
And so we made the call: let’s get someone technically competent and able to manage, lead a significantly bigger business. But as we learned the brutal and honest truth, unless their values aligned, they can be the most talented person in the world and it won’t work.
Mark: Yeah. It doesn’t matter. And I think that that’s definitely a story that many, many of our clients are telling themselves now is, as a Founder, where do I start, where do I stop?
And there’s definitely truth to that. You might be hardwired as a startup person. And once there’s processes and things. But I think for most, we see that the most successful companies on the planet are still founder-led because those founders just continuously learn and grow, and they do share the culture. They’ve created the culture, and it just works out much better ultimately.
So let’s move forward. I want to talk about some of the processes that you began to use. You go through this journey, you make the realization that this isn’t working, you kind of take over the business again, and you call Dan Davis. What were some of the moments in your session room with Dan that was like total epiphany and you went back to work and it had immediate results? How long did that take?
EOS Tools That Created Immediate Change
24:42
Anthony: Yeah. Well, pretty much from the first session—the Focus Day. My favorite tool out of our entire toolbox is the Level 10 Meeting because it pulls absolutely everything together. I think it’s the—it just holds everything together, and I love those so much.
So to give you a little bit of context, prior to learning about this magical thing called the Level 10, we would get together with a team of seven of us that was our Leadership Team every Monday afternoon, 3:00 p.m. We’d go, “Yep, right. Today’s management meeting. We’re going to get done in two hours.” Absolutely. You know, we lock it in. There’s no way we’re going to get lost again.
Unfortunately, sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m., we’d wander out at the end of the meeting going, “Oh my God, it happened again. We got lost.” Vortex. Yeah. Tim picked up the first thing that someone said, and we ended up 45 minutes down a rabbit hole, all that sort of stuff. And we were just totally all over the place.
So not only were we wasting time there, we would then have to have subsequent meetings through the course of the week where we were actually meeting to discuss the things that we needed to talk about and do. Completely inefficient. Huge waste of time.
So when we were introduced to the Level 10, the first of the epiphanies that came through from implementing EOS in a business was getting that. So straight away we said, “Well, there’s no way. We can’t even get the meeting done in two hours, so this whole 90-minute thing, not a chance.” It’s the opposite. “There’s no way we’re going to be for 90 minutes. We can’t do it that long. That’s not enough time. Team, that’s not enough time.”
But we said, “Okay, we’ll do 90 minutes.” And we talked with Dan and he said, “Well, can we possibly tack on an extra half hour for the first quarter, just to bring us into that two-hour window? Significant improvement on where we were.” He said, “Yeah, if you need to, let’s make sure that we’re rolling through and doing things.”
And so we thought, “Great. First quarter, we’ll do that.” Within four weeks, we dropped the extra time because the meeting was focused. We were talking about the things we needed to get done, and it just completely revolutionized the way in which we were talking as a Leadership Team about the stuff that we needed to talk about.
And so that then meant the rest of the business could actually get on and do things. So that was straight out of the gate. It was the, “Wow, that’s awesome.”
Mark: And so you had seven people on your Leadership Team. How big was the business in total? How many employees did you have at that time?
Anthony: At that time there was 35.
Mark: 35, yeah. So probably a little heavy on the Leadership Team, but that structure stayed the same, and it’s a 90-person organization now?
Anthony: Yeah. We figured out what the major functions are of the organization, and we’re in a fortunate position to be able to have a Visionary and Integrator separate from sitting in the major function seats. So that was because we had the people that were able to step into those seats from the get-go.
Mark: So we have a lot of conversations around the Visionary/Integrator relationship, and one of the—kind of my working hypothesis here, and I’ve done deep dive research into all the great companies around the world over very long periods of time, and here’s what I find, and I’m curious on your opinion on this.
I can find very, very successful businesses that do not have really a documented business operating system. Now, we know that there’s systems inside of all businesses, but whether they recognize them as such or not is all over the place, right? But what I cannot find is a single successful business that has gotten lots of press, lots of growth, and products that we know where there is not a Visionary/Integrator relationship.
And to clarify, obviously, the Visionary is typically the CEO, and they’re usually the household names that we know. The Integrator, sometimes we know who they are and sometimes they’re co-founders. Sometimes they’re called president, sometimes COO. And sometimes it takes a lot of digging to find out if that person even has a name. But every single successful company that I have found, there is always that second person.
Like take, for example, Elon Musk. Obviously he’s very out there, and people know who he is. There’s a great biography by Walter Isaacson that’s a relatively recent book. And there are so many great Visionary/Integrator relationships in every single one of his businesses. Do people know who Gwynne Shotwell is? Do they know who she is? Proving the point. Like she’s there, she’s at SpaceX, she’s crushing it, and has the Visionary/Integrator relationship that is very clear to me.
So my hypothesis is that if you’re going to have a fast-growing, scaling organization, it’s almost more important to have a great V/I duo than it is to have a business operating system, which since we are people who Implement business operating systems, which does include a Visionary/Integrator—what are your thoughts about that?
Anthony: I totally agree. I totally agree.
As I think about my own business, as well as the clients that I’ve helped over the years, having the parts, having the ingredients is one thing. The operating system is one thing. But unless you’ve got the ability to actually bring it together well—the way in which the Visionary can orchestrate that and really pull together that recipe—that’s what actually turns it from just a pile of stuff into something tasty, something that’s awesome, something that grows, and something that becomes the thing that was always meant to be.
So yeah, you can have a whole series of processes and documentation and products, services. You can even have people, but if they’re just sitting around unclear on what’s important, why you exist as an organization, you’re bringing the heart to it. And that’s what the Visionary and the Integrator do. You’re just going to have a whole bunch of parts and nothing whole.
Mark: Yeah. I totally agree.
And if you have that Visionary, the classic Visionary, without the stable Integrator force—whether they have any of those titles or not—if they’re just simply not present, I think you end up with this very herky-jerky business that you—like for me as a Visionary, I stop doing things for two reasons: they work and I’m bored now.
And it’s just like, “Okay, that works,” so I abandon things that work just as often as the second reason is I find out very, very quickly there’s no way this is going to work, and so I bail on it very quickly. So whether it works or doesn’t work, I just run it to the logical conclusion and I’m out.
But having that Integrator is like, “Hey, we’re going to continue doing the things that work, and we’re going to push the envelope. We’re going to experiment with the things that don’t, and that do, we’re going to keep all the good stuff and we’re going to toss all the bad stuff.” That’s sort of this filtering mechanism, that refinement that occurs throughout the operation of the business that I think is just really healthy, and keeps all the best parts and gets rid of the things that doesn’t work.
Anthony: Yeah. And it’s that culture or that ethos of iteration, continuing to just keep improving.
Now, when we’re in the room, we talk about the Integrator’s there to make sure we’ve got good, solid, consistent growth, and then once every year or two, the Visionary will come out with this absolute game changer, and all of a sudden there’s this step change in the way in which the business can run. And we’re able to implement that in the business.
And then the Integrator continues to roll along getting that consistent, but not as spectacular, growth. And so together we get great things out of the business. But if you don’t have both, as you said, you’ve either got this wild and crazy roller coaster where just people are chopping and changing every 90 days, nine days, nine hours, or you’ve got this great organization that has all this amazing potential, but nothing actually happens.
And so from a personal perspective, that’s what drew me to working with Tim, because of his Visionary zeal and just the stuff that he was constantly coming up with and the hustle that was there. And it’s like, “Man, that’s really exciting.” I know that the success that that business has had would not have been anywhere near as much if it was just either of us doing stuff, but together we built that fantastic foundation.
Obviously, I’m now out of the day-to-day running the business, but we replaced me with an equally awesome guy, and Kieran is continuing to go help drive the business forward in leaps and bounds. So now Tim and Kieran are doing the running from a day-to-day. I’m a director shareholder, but really not involved in that at all. The organization continues to grow because of that combination of people helping them get all of the wheels in.
Mark: So going back to your 35-person company, you hire Dan Davis as your EOS Implementer. From your estimation, the business is basically in shambles. You don’t like the business. I think you said you hated the business pretty much. It wasn’t the dumb thing running my life.
And you’re like, “Hey, we’re going to turn this thing around,” and Dan starts to help you. Level 10, you start making progress almost immediately, right away.
How long did it take until you felt that EOS, in its totality, was not only worth the time, effort, energy, investment, but you started to see actual business results through profit and growth?
Results Timeline: From Losses to Profitability
36:11
Anthony: Yeah. So the timing of our journey meant that we started a couple of months into a new financial year. So the end of that financial year—so nine, maybe 10 months later—we saw at the bottom line concrete proof that we’d had a huge transformation of the business.
But in order for us to get to that point, you could clearly see across the rest of the business things had changed. The feel—you walk into the office, the energy, the dynamic was different because we were talking about Core Values. We were talking about who we were, why we exist as an organization, what’s our Core Focus, what’s the passion behind getting real great clarity.
Without sharing that with everyone, everyone across the entire organization was buying in and saying, “Yes, that’s awesome. How can we help?” So that was the tangible, physical things we were seeing and feeling, which spat out a far healthier set of numbers.
Within 10 months was the end of the first financial year. And then three quarters of the way through that next financial year was when I was then having the conversation with Dan about, “Hey, how do I do this?” Because we were continuing to see every month the numbers were getting better and better, and we were well on track for—at that time—so I finished at the end of a financial year, and that year was our highest profit ever, even prior to the stuff that we had been doing.
So it made a massive difference to the financial viability of the organization by us working together as a Leadership Team, Tim and I being on the same page, surrounding ourselves with great people, giving them the tools, having that alignment, and everyone consistently working towards the same thing.
We’d got some things right previously. We had great revenue growth, which led to the Fast 100 Hall of Fame accolades and things like that, but ultimately we weren’t spitting out the profit at the end of every financial year.
But as a result of putting in EOS and when we really seeing things happening, that’s where our revenue had basically stabilized at around 10, 11 million, but our profitability went from losses in the more than a million to almost a million in profit.
So we’re basically adding a million dollars a year to our bottom line, which was just phenomenal changes in the way in which the business was running, keeping in mind that we were essentially stagnating from a revenue perspective, which was okay because we’re completely changing the mix—how we were operating, the value of stuff that we’re doing, the gross profit, the operating expenses, all that sort of stuff.
We had a far greater handle on the business, and all that stuff was getting spat out as a result of looking at our numbers every week in the Level 10. People having accountability for things, you know, removing the ambiguity of, “Oh, is this my thing? Is this Tim’s thing? You know, who’s going on?” And even better, stopping the conversations where if someone didn’t like an answer I gave them, they’d go to Tim and say, “Hey, Tim, I want to go do this thing,” and many moons earlier he would go, “That’s a great idea. Let’s go do that,” right?
So they stopped—you know, we were able to stop the kids trading Mom and Dad off against each other again.
Mark: Oh, for sure. For sure. That’s such a great story.
And 10 months to go from minus a million to positive a million—that’s a $2 million swing in a very short amount of time—is just extraordinary results. So that’s awesome.
And then you obviously felt like, “Hey, I did my job here. We turned this thing around. Tim is back at it, in love with the business.” And what made you make the decision to become an Implementer? What was it about what Dan Davis was doing that you’re like, “I want to do that”?
Why Anthony Became an EOS Implementer
40:35
Anthony: Yeah. So the environment in which he had helped create in the business—we had a good friendly team, but through the process we went a lot deeper.
And even doing the Three-Year Picture as part of a Vision Building process, that sparked some great conversations. So there was even seeds getting planted even in the first couple of months of beginning our process of putting in place EOS and transforming the operating system of our business, where two members of the Leadership Team both said, “Anthony, I want your job three years from now. I want to be doing what you do.”
And so straight away that began to plant these seeds about, “Wow, this isn’t just about me being able to sleep at night, get the business sorted, protect the family. This is actually about helping other people’s families as well, other individuals.”
So as we then roll on a year later, it’s then, “Okay, I can see there’s going to be some natural ceilings here for people in our business that if we don’t make some space for them, they’re actually going to leave because they know that Tim and I are tapping things out, right? There’ll be nowhere else for them to grow.”
And so that began to get into my head like a little worm, and going, “Yeah. And I’m loving the process. I’m enjoying the conversations with Dan. I’m loving the reading and the education, seeing, yeah, there’s actually something pretty phenomenal happening here, and I would love to be able to help other people go through and get what I’ve got: that peace of mind, that surety, that belief that, yes, that I’ve done the right thing here by spinning up a business and risking everything—potentially my family’s future, or potentially having a future family—all that sort of stuff.”
It’s like, “Yeah, this is a big thing.” And entrepreneurs—people have had the guts to set up a business and go, “Yes, I want to do this.” We should be applauding them. And not just in the hustle of, “Hey, look at that person, they worked seven hours today,” and all, you know, “Well done,”—on having the guts to actually go, “I want to make a difference.”
Mark: Yeah. And so that was seven and a half years ago that you made the leap into becoming an Implementer. You really did what we talk about when we teach about leadership and management and creating the opening. So you create an opening for team members to grow in their position. You started to grow, yeah.
And you mentioned all the reading and all the books. What I find is that most Implementers—probably 90% plus of the community based on my polls—is that in StrengthsFinder, the StrengthsFinder is 34 strengths, Learner is usually in the top five about 95% of the time for us Implementers. Is that true for you?
Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. That would make sense, and I totally agree with that because we’re a community of people that want to grow. And learning comes in reading, comes from experience, shares with other people. It’s in doing, trying things out, and learning that way. So, but yeah, I can definitely believe that basically all of us have got that in the top five.
Mark: Yeah. And what’s the last book that you have read and why?
Anthony: Well, I’m a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. I’ve just rolled through both People and Diary of a CEO. In addition to that, I’m currently in the middle of The Storyteller—Dave Grohl—that’s an awesome book. And I’ve got two others that are completely left field: Redefining Medicine and Reversing Heart Disease.
So I like to read a lot at the same time. The medical ones because I had a heart attack eight weeks ago, and I’m now the proud owner of four stents. So there’s a bit of focus on doing some things there.
But yeah, love People Book. I think it’s a great combination and pulling together of a whole bunch of stuff that we’ve had in our community for quite a while, and builds really, really well on the existing library.
And Diary of a CEO, I enjoyed not so much because I learned a bunch of different things, but it was great to see something that has such huge hype across the globe totally reinforcing everything that we talk about. Basically, it uses different words and he’s got his 34 rules and all that sort of stuff. But if you look at the threads that are there, it’s consistent with what we talk about and how and what we help people get their head around.
So I loved that, and I loved the slightly different perspective on a couple of things. But the overall takeaway for me from that book was most definitely, “Yeah, we’ve got it.” And Gino and everyone who has come before me, including you, has paved this path for us to be able to do extraordinary work in a deceptively simple way.
Mark: Yeah. It’s interesting. I have been doing a lot of reading as I normally do, and I usually, in between on any given year, it’s between 50 and 130 books that I will read. And interestingly, same as you, I naturally will read many at a time.
And I actually find that if I read a bunch at a time, I will read more books per year than if I do it in a linear way. So last year I read like 52, 53 books or something like that. And what I did was I said, “I’m going to finish every single book in a row.”
So what would happen is I’d start reading one. It was a little dense, a little boring, didn’t really like it, and I just didn’t read at all. And I forced myself to read. So a week or two would go by. Still averaged one a week, but at the same time I was like there’s two, three weeks that go by like I just don’t want to read The Brothers Karamazov this week. It is dusty. It is so heavy. Like I just can’t do it.
So now I’m doing like five, six books at a time and I’m just finishing three books a week pretty much. But some of them I started at the beginning of the year, but because they’re just a little bit more dense and things like that, I’ve given myself a pass.
And I think the more parallel version of reading, you actually can get more from it. And of course, it’s not about the volume. It’s about what you take away from it.
But you mentioning about sort of these simple concepts, and through my reading I keep thinking about first principles. And I think it was Aristotle maybe who talked about first principles first—like there’s just these timeless things that have been around forever. And it’s the same throughout all of history.
And what that led me to was just a deep dive in a lot of ancient writings, okay? Like going back to 200 BC all the way through. I’m like, “Oh, we actually teach a lot of these things.” And we as humans, I think, just have this never-ending propensity for complexity and thinking we’re smarter, thinking we’re better. We’re going to hack this or hack that.
But it turns out that the humans before us kind of had most of all this stuff figured out already. And you could—you know, Traction sort of did a good job. Gino has done just an amazing job of trying to find those first principles of how teams work, how businesses work.
But even you can take the construct of a business out of that and just say, “Here’s how a team functions and makes progress to accomplish something.” And if you tear it down to just the first principles of what that looks like, you kind of end up with EOS in a lot of ways.
So it’s not surprising to me that you would find so many commonalities between all the recent business books and things that are popular online, like the things that everyone’s like, “Oh, this is a brand new thing. This is amazing. We should go do this now.”
And you can go find some Greek philosopher who already talked about that 2,000, 3,000 years ago.
Anthony: Yeah. I’ve been really enjoying reading all of Ryan Holiday’s books, all the stoic stuff. So I’ve got my copy of The Daily Stoic kicking around here somewhere, so I’ll glance on that.
And yeah, it just continues to reinforce and totally comes back. The simplicity and the clarity that comes from that simplicity, it’s just—it’s beautiful to behold.
The challenge is actually embodying it and making sure that not trying to make it fancy and adding extra stuff, because the real simple stuff can actually be really hard.
Like when we talk with our clients, EOS is simple. What needs to be done is simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. And there’s a whole bunch of blurring between, “Well, if it’s simple, it must be easy.” No, no, no. That’s not the case at all. Sometimes the simplest stuff is actually the hardest stuff to do well.
Discipline, Habits & the “Simple, Not Easy” Reality
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Mark: Yeah. Because most of it is disciplined and habitual, right?
Most of it is just, “This is a discipline that I need to go and do every day.” It is easy to discover what it is you need to do, but it is not easy to actually go and do it on a consistent daily basis. And it has a compound interest to it, right?
You know, I think Einstein said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, and it truly is. But most people, when they hear compound interest, they just think about money, right? They don’t think about those simple disciplines that aren’t easy to stick to and have that uninterrupted compound interest effect take hold on those daily, quarterly, weekly habits.
And because they don’t have the patience to stick to it, they kind of, “I’m looking for a shortcut.” I want, you know, kind of the disciplined, get in shape, get healthy, get family, get relationship, get whatever, without any work. Or the ability to be bored.
Anthony: Yes. Yeah. Well, that’s a whole another thing—the dopamine addiction and all that sort of stuff. It’s actually a good thing to be bored because that’s where extraordinary things happen.
But you’re absolutely spot on about that desire for instantaneous results. And you know, someone wants to go for a run and then they’re wailing about not being able to run a four-minute mile and stuff like that. “I’ve gone for a run once. Surely I can do it now.”
You know, James Clear talks about it in Atomic Habits—it’s about the way in which really small, imperceptible stuff, add a bunch of that together over time and you’ve completely transformed the way things work.
That, at its heart, is the execution that really makes EOS and what we do when we’re helping our clients, and then what those people in those teams, those Leadership Teams, are then doing across their business. It’s a series of little things that, in isolation, you look at one of those things and you go, “What’s that? That’s nothing. There’s nothing to that.”
But we pull it all together—that’s what then creates that transformation across the community, across the business, across the world.
Mark: Yeah. Couldn’t agree more.
And I think that is a great place to end our conversation. And I know for a fact that people listening to this are going to get a lot of value out of your story. It’s such a tremendous story of using the tools, sticking to those simple disciplines, getting the results, and then falling in love with helping getting people with the same results that you had.
So congratulations on your journey, and I know that it’s going to continue. You’re going to make a big impact as you go forward. So thank you.
Anthony: Thanks, Mark. I’m seven years in, and I feel like I’m still just getting started.
Mark: Yes. As we all are. As we all are. All right, we’ll see you.
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