How to Survive Your First Years as an EOS® Implementer: Lessons From 1,100 Sessions

I had a fast start as an EOS® Implementer. Two years in, I hit the wall. And about eight years in, right around COVID, I was suddenly successful.

In the Implementer community, we listen to experience. It shouldn't always be this way, but if you don't have the numbers, people tend to assume you might not know anything. Nobody asked me anything until my numbers went up. Then they asked, what did you do?

I told them the truth: I really don't know, but I'll think about it, and I'll write about it. I like writing. I've probably had a thousand pieces published over the years. What I wrote was a letter to myself from the future, and it's the best tool I know for getting through the hard early years of a practice. Here's how I'd use it, along with everything else I wish I'd done sooner.

Mine opened like this: Ken, you've just graduated from boot camp. This is you from eight years in the future, and I want you to know what I've learned along the way so that maybe you'll believe me and do it.

Then I put down what I'd learned. I can't remember everything that was in it, but three things stood out.

1. This is going to be an emotional journey. You know the famous chart, the emotional journey of creating anything great. Get ready for it.
2. You belong here. Whether you belong here permanently is still to be decided, but right now, you're supposed to be here.
3. Comparison is the thief of joy. That's a quote I think is attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, and it's the one I'd underline for any younger Implementer.

The letter ended on this: if you're meant to do this, you're going to be successful at it. If you're not, it's going to be an important stop on your journey.

If you're early in your practice, you don't have eight years to look back on yet. Borrow them. Ask an Implementer who's further along what would go in their letter. I tell any Implementer I talk to that I'll give them half an hour, and we'll see what experience we can share.

When I hit the wall, Chris White put his arm around me. Chris came up in the Motorola world on the business development side, and he said to me, "The thing you have to think about is I woke up every morning with a blowtorch burning on my butt until I did something."

Nobody had ever talked to me like that. Then he asked, "What's your blowtorch?"

The question is about channeling the energy you need to do the hard, uncomfortable stuff of biz dev. Before you build a pipeline plan, answer Chris's question for yourself.

Right when I was doubting myself, Jonathan Smith, Chris White and others were forming a group they called the Honey Badgers. Mike Paton once told us, "You cool kids, stop talking." We all just went, yay, we're cool kids.

For a guy who'd been a loner since losing his dad at fourteen, that group was one of the first real clubs I'd ever been in. They helped me realize maybe I did belong.

There is definitely a club of rascals out there for you. You don't have to be the life of the party to find it. I'm very introverted. At a QCE, I'm there for a little bit, then I escape upstairs to get a breath, and I come back down. I might do that three or four times.

Our own clients do this all the time. Someone new to the room says, hey, I'm new here, I'm just going to sit here and be quiet. I tell them, please don't. You see stuff and you ask stuff, and if you're brave enough to say it, you'll probably bring up something good. In another two months, you'll be one of us and you won't see it either.

I didn't take that advice as a new Implementer. I stayed quiet. Don't make the same mistake. The fresh eyes you bring to the community have a short shelf life.

When clients ask me why we need to read Traction again, I tell them I taught it for 500 sessions and then read it again. I can't count the times I said to myself, oh, is that how that works? I'm eleven hundred sessions in, and I'm still thinking maybe I should read that book again.

The same goes for boot camp. I was on the coaching team from 2015 to 2020, and I coached three boot camp classes. Going back through boot camp three or four times was amazing, mostly because it showed me how much I thought I knew and how little I know.

You also need people who will watch you work. Lee Handley, out of Birmingham, and I have been trying a mentorship approach where he watches some of my 90 Minute Meetings™ and I watch some of his. And get both kinds of coaches. Chris will say something lovingly. Jonathan Smith will say, "You dumbass, don't do that." You need both.

The hardest thing for me to learn has been to stop talking, let them talk, and make them talk. I don't need to offer a solution. I need to create space for their solution. I'm still balancing that, and I'm working on it with my own coaches right now.

What's helped most is having the energy to prepare. When I had 130 days a year, I just did my sessions. Now I've settled at about sixty-five days a year, and it's perfect. I have enough energy to think about each client before the session: where they were, what their tools look like. And I have enough energy in the room to remember that this is their day, and my job is to make it a good one for them.

Counting on your existing network. I came in as a fractional CFO with fifteen clients and assumed I'd convert all fifteen. I converted five. Then I had to learn to win others.

Saying yes to everything. Like everybody, I wanted everything I could get. I topped out at thirty to thirty-five active clients one year, across seven states. I drove 50,000 miles a year, because you can't fly most places down here without going through three airports. It's been the richest fifteen years of my life, but at 130 days a year, I just did my sessions.

Measuring yourself against everybody else's numbers. If I had stopped comparing my numbers to everybody else's, I probably would have gotten a hundred extra nights of sleep a year. We're all on our own journey.

Staying quiet. Covered above, and worth repeating because I did it for too long.

Run this long enough and relevance stops depending on age. I came up in the CPA world believing you'd have clients about ten years older and ten years younger than you. It isn't true. I've got clients in their 20s and 30s who think I'm one of the coolest old guys they've ever met, and clients in their 60s and 70s I can put my arm around and say, yeah, I went through that.

This is a community where the OGs aren't in the way of the young people. Some of the OGs are going away now, and the Implementers starting today are going to be the future OGs, the ones who carry on the tradition. I still have the fear sometimes of speaking up. I'm telling you all this so you can do it anyway.