Gino told me it would never work

The chaos that looked like success

From the outside, it looked like I had it figured out.

My brother and I had caught the entrepreneurial bug and gone all in. Between us we started twenty-three companies, nine of them made it. At one point I had multiple businesses on the Inc. 500/5000 list at the same time, four of them in a single event.

People saw that and assumed there was a system behind it, there wasn't. On the inside it was complete and utter chaos. We were succeeding in spite of ourselves, and I knew it.

I tried to fix it the way ambitious founders do: I hired a Gazelles coach, read Rockefeller Habits, set out to implement Scaling Up across the whole portfolio, so sure this was the thing that would finally make everything run in harmony.

But it didn't stick. My leadership team wouldn't absorb the tools. My brother, my business partners, one of them a guy named Brian Underhill, just didn't take to it. Half of them didn't even know I'd hired a coach.

That's the part nobody warns you about. The problem usually isn't the framework, it's that you can't drag people into something they haven't chosen for themselves.

You may also like Traction

So I stopped pushing and changed tack. I got my brother Tom to read (and by read I mean listen) Rockefeller Habits himself. And at the end of the audiobook, Amazon did the thing Amazon does: “You may also like…”.

The book it suggested was Traction.

Tom got to it before I did. He called me and said, "Mark, I found what you've been looking for."

I picked it up half expecting to be underwhelmed, and my honest first reaction was, "this is just like every business book I've ever read, but with templates." Timeless things, obvious things. But the templates were the whole point: they turned ideas I already believed into something a team could actually run.

I started self-implementing right away. I did it for about a year, and it was a case of doctor heal thyself. I was learning the tools on my own companies, in real time, with real money on the line.

It'll never work

The turn came at, of all places, the Pentagon.

I was part of the Inc. Business Owners Council, and there was an event there. I found myself having lunch with a three-star general, and at that lunch I met a man named Jonathan Smith. I had no idea he was an EOS® Implementer. We just got to talking.

Not long after, he did a VTH call with one of my business partners, who came back to me and said, “This guy Jonathan is doing EOS®, we're doing EOS®, should we talk to him?” We booked a ninety-minute meeting, hired him, and set our Focus Day for September 2014. I'd gone to boot camp that August. 

Somewhere in there I got my chance to ask the man who wrote the book. I was in Gino Wickman's office in 2014, and I put it to him plainly. “You wrote this. Can you help me get my whole portfolio of companies running on EOS®”?

He said, "It'll never work, don't even bother."

I said, "Well, I'll show you."

Then I went through boot camp, and something happened I didn't expect. I wasn't just taken with the tools, I was taken with the culture. I remember thinking two things at the same time: "I think I might have accidentally joined a cult," and "I'm with my people for the first time ever."

I still don't fully know which one it was.

“Go do a ninety minute meeting, dummy”

Here is what's strange.

Even after boot camp, I had no intention of becoming an Implementer. I graduated and did zero sessions, I was just running EOS® inside my own nine companies.

Then I got my first lead, and it came from Sue Hawkes. I sat there staring at it with no idea what to do, because words like abundance mindset were not in my lexicon back then. Why would another Implementer just hand me a lead? What was the catch?

I asked her exactly that. She said, "go do a ninety minute meeting, dummy."

So I did, and fell in love with the client work on the spot. I walked out of that room free as a bird, no to-do's, nothing hanging over me, just the clean feeling of having helped a leadership team see themselves clearly. 

I'd been a full-time Implementer from January 2015, even though I didn't sell my own companies until 2018: the portfolio guy became the Implementer.

Starving myself on purpose

Early on I realized something that reframed the entire job for me. Our clients want to become us. Not the tools, us.

They are living in chaos and fear and uncertainty, waiting by the mailbox for a check to clear so they can make payroll. And you walk in cool, calm, collected, disciplined, almost monk-like. You are, in that moment, everything they want to be. 

Once I understood that, I had a new bar to clear. If every client wants to become me, then I had better be someone worth becoming.

The problem was that I had a safety net, and it was making me soft. I was still taking distributions from my other company, so I turned them off. I chose to "purposely starve myself of cash." I needed the check from my sessions now, which meant I had to follow the process, do the work, and get it right.

It changed how I showed up: I stopped being afraid of getting fired, because "the person they want to become is not a wimp." There were plenty of early moments where "I didn't enter the danger where I should" have.

Starving the safety net is what pushed me to say the hard thing in the room instead of protecting the relationship.

We made it a game

I should be honest about the era I came up in, because it shaped everything, including what I later had to unlearn.

When I started, the EOS Life® did not even exist as a phrase. I remember around 2016, Don Tinney standing up at a QCE with a little three-by-five card and reading it out for the first time anyone had ever heard it. Before that, nobody was building an Implementer business to live some balanced life. It was about freedom, and freedom came from cash flow and serving clients well and following the process.

The standard was twenty clients in your backyard. Not an aspiration, just the baseline. Thirty, thirty-five, and you were overachieving.

I had thirty-four at my peak.

I ran in a competitive T-group we called the Honey Badgers, and we made it a game. It was help first, but underneath that we just wanted to win. We were aggressive winners, most of the community was back then, and I loved it.

That is the Mark who needed to change. Not by losing the drive, but by learning what to do with everyone else's success.

The change I never saw coming

If you showed the Mark of those years the person I am now, the thing he wouldn't recognize isn't the client count or the title. It's the abundance mindset.

I was trained in scarcity. I came up as an aggressive, competitive winner, and I would get worked up when a competitor won, feeling like I had lost, even when, as I can see now, "I wasn't even in that game."

That is the part that changed.

Not my drive, my relationship to other people winning. Learning to hold knowledge and leads and wins loosely. Learning to be the person who hands another Implementer a lead and says go do a ninety-minute meeting, dummy. It took years, and it is simply a better way to live.

Gino told me it would never work. The portfolio-on-EOS® part, maybe he was right about. The rest of it worked out better than the guy starving himself of distributions could ever have pictured.