Rip has found that clients ask for firm guidance directly, then freeze when the guidance turns out to be a people decision, often about someone who helped get them there.
He is blunt about what sits underneath it: if you don't want to be in the room, they probably don't want you there either, and they can feel it anyway.
He protected family time and vacations from day one, before there was any evidence the practice could support it, which is the habit most new Implementers drop in year one.
Two chains of clients, in wealth management and estate planning, arrived through referral rather than strategy. Doing great work was Rip's whole business development plan.
Rip's mother gave him the through line in seventh grade: people know. They can tell whether accountability comes from caring or from ego.
The thing that surprised me early on, and has kept surprising me for close to 900 sessions, is not something about the tools.
It is that a lot of my clients genuinely wanted firm guidance. They wanted to know how to implement EOS® more broadly, how to run their companies more effectively, how to get better results. They asked for it directly, and then they were petrified of making the tough decisions that would actually make it a reality.
Almost always, those decisions are people decisions. There are occasionally tough operating decisions, but the fact is, it is always all about the people.
I have watched capable leaders sit with that for quarters at a time. Not because they are weak, and not because they do not understand what needs to happen. They understand perfectly: it is a person, and the person is often someone who helped get them here.
I would like to tell you I watched all of this from a position of some detachment, but I did not. I have made these calls myself, in my own team and with clients, and knowing exactly what needed to happen has never once made one of them easy.
The ones on my own team
My business partner is Tim Thomas, who is also an EOS® Implementer. We have operated in parallel through the years we have been implementing EOS®, and we also have a separate leadership development practice together. We have never had a lot of employees, but we have had a few.
In a couple of cases we had to make tough calls about administrative assistants who just were not working out.
Both of them had come to work for us out of relationships from the past, which is exactly the trap I watch clients fall into, and it was difficult for precisely the reason it is always difficult. The problem was never their character, it was the seat.
We made the calls: we are in a better place for it, and we have other team members in those seats now who are great folks.
I do not tell that story to demonstrate resolve. I tell it because I sit in rooms every week asking leadership teams to do the same thing, and the honest position from which to ask is not from above it.
The clients I should not have taken
The same pattern showed up on the client side, and there it was tangled up with money.
Like everybody else, I faced the challenge of getting utilisation early on. I needed clients so I could get paid, so I took some non-target market clients, like most of us do. I wanted session reps specifically, and I wanted the invoices to go out.
Gino said from day one not to waste your time on non-target market clients, because they consume your time and your energy, and while you are spending both, you are not out finding the clients who would actually energise you. I agreed with him for years before I acted like I did. It is easy to say, not so easy to do when you need to pay the bills.
It was not a pure journey for me until I was five or six years in. Then there was the one that could not be navigated.
I was at a QCE with Gino, early enough that there were maybe 75 Implementers in the room. I described a client of mine: he was a crazy maker, pretending to implement EOS® but not doing it, and on top of that he kept making unrealistic requests of me about things he hoped I could help him do in his business that had nothing to do with the work.
I laid it out and asked Gino what he would recommend.
“Run”.
He was right, and I actually I fired that client. Some situations really are that clear, and the reason we keep them complicated is that the clear answer costs us something.
The number is smaller than you would expect
Across 90-plus clients, close to 100, I have had to fire client teams two or three times. Four or five over the whole span if I count generously.
That is a very small number, and it is not because I am unusually good at qualifying people at the front door.
Most of the time, if I am being loyal to the way we teach EOS®, if I am being pure in teaching EOS® with my clients, the ones who really do not want to do it will self-select out. I do not have to fire them: the discipline of teaching the method properly is the screening mechanism. You filter through the work, week after week, and the people who do not want the accountability find their own way to the exit.
And when it does come to a call, there is one thing I would say to anyone sitting on it, which has nothing to do with the client's behaviour. If you do not want to be in the room, there is a decent chance they do not want you in the room either, and they will get that vibe from you anyway.
That is the part that took me longest to accept. A people decision is almost never a secret you are keeping. It is usually a conclusion two people have already reached separately and neither one has said out loud.
The one I decided on from the start
There is one of these I handled well from the beginning, and the reason is worth being precise about, because the credit is not where it first appears.
I had a corporate life before I became an Implementer in 2009 and, in that world you tend to establish a pattern of regular vacations. You carve out time that is set aside for family, for being together. That pattern was already wired into me by the time I started my practice.
But having a pattern and keeping one are different things, and this is the part I would want any new Implementer to hear. Plenty of people come out of a corporate life with good habits and drop every one of them in the first year of building something of their own, because the pressure to be available makes the habit look like a luxury you have not earned yet.
I kept it up, and I kept it up deliberately. I made room for family gatherings and for travel with my wife right from the start, before there was any evidence the practice would support it.
So I never spent my early years running continuously until I was going to drop. That was a decision, made early, at the point where it was least obviously affordable.
Annual season found the gap anyway, once I levelled off at 20 to 25 clients, and fixing it turned out to require exactly the same thing as every other decision in this article: saying an uncomfortable thing out loud to people who had every reason to hear it well. I have written separately abouthow to reshape an annual season and the words I used with clients, because that one is practical enough to deserve its own piece.
But the underlying shape is identical: it was a people decision. It just happened to be about me.
What all of it produced
I never would have predicted, when I started, that I would end up with a chain of clients in a couple of different industries.
I got a wealth management client early on. We clicked, and I worked with them for seven or eight years. Along the way they talked about EOS®, and about me as an Implementer, to other wealth management firms who were not direct competitors of theirs, either because they were somewhere else geographically or because they served a different target market. Those firms became clients. I still have several today.
Then it happened all over again in estate planning, an entirely different specialisation, for exactly the same reason.
Neither chain was a strategy. The single most important business development practice you can employ is doing great work, and I did not appreciate how literally true that is until I looked back and found that most of my practice had arrived through a door I never built.
Which brings me back to where this started, because the two things are the same thing.
My mother gave me the best leadership lesson I ever got, and she gave it to me in seventh grade, when I was worried about what the other kids in middle school thought of me. She told me to relax, and said:
“People know.”
I asked what she meant. She said, don't you know the kids in school who are the good guys and the ones who are the jerks? I said yes. She said, well, why wouldn't people know that about you? Just don't be a jerk, be a good guy.
The same thing is true in the workplace: people know if you are authentic, they know if you really care about them. When you are holding them accountable with tough love in a session, they know whether it is coming from a position of caring about them or whether it is a performance driven by ego. It is not difficult for them to perceive, and they may never say it out loud.
Which means the hard people calls and the referrals are not two separate parts of building a practice. Making the call you have been avoiding, in your own team or with a client or about your own calendar, is what genuine looks like from the outside. And people know.
Seventeen years, and I still have not had a hard decision that was really about the business.
