In this blog post, Jeanet Wade talks about the warning Gino Wickman gave her on day one: that she would deviate from the EOS process, just like everyone does.
She shares how she customized the system three or four times to please clients or avoid friction, and how each time the client ended up quitting.
She explains why bending the process isn't flexibility but people-pleasing, and why it quietly undermines the results clients are paying for.
She reframes process purity not as dogma but as respect for what actually transforms a business.
She reflects on what changed once she stopped deviating, and how her retention, referrals, and income grew because of the rigor.
I've spent more than thirteen years in this system, and if there is one thing I've learned about human nature, it's that we have an incredibly hard time listening to proven advice. It's a lot like parenting; we desperately try to tell the younger generation not to repeat our dumb mistakes, but everyone seems determined to do it anyway. We all secretly believe we're going to be the unique ones to figure it out on our own.
Looking back, I think you actually have to go through your own pain to learn the lessons faster. I know I certainly did.
The room that overlooked a parking lot
When I think about my early days, I remember sitting in a modest session room up in Livonia, Michigan, that overlooked a parking lot near a Holiday Inn. I was in the first fifty implementers, and our boot camps were led directly by Gino Wickman and Don Tinney. Back then, we didn't get any of the fancy pre-boot camp dinners or accoutrements. We were pioneers and entrepreneurs, and the room was packed with high Kolbe Quick Starts.
I am a nine Quick Start out of ten, with a career background as a marketing strategist and innovator, and Gino looked right at me and predicted exactly how I would mess things up.
He knew that because of my past consulting habits, I wasn't going to follow the rigid process. He told me I would try to rearrange the order, put vision first and traction second, and only work on the tools that felt fun and engaging. He told me to go play and prove him wrong.
Sure enough, on my very second client, I completely flipped it. They asked to work on their strategy first instead of tackling the Accountability Chart, and because that chart can be a terrifying, high-pain experience where people fight and cry, I chose to be a people-pleaser. I wanted them to like me, and I wanted to do the fun stuff that fueled my own soul, so I gave them what they wanted instead of what they needed.
That client fell right on their face and quit.
I didn't even learn my lesson the first time. I made that exact mistake three or four times before the pain finally sank in. Every time I tinkered with the system, I ended up doing a massive disservice to my clients. I was losing accounts because they weren't getting results.
That failure was the ultimate turning point that brought me back to what we now call purity: delivering the process in its clearest, most foundational form. I realized my job is to give clients clear, clean water. Once they have that stable foundation, they can customize it and add whatever flavor they want, but the core water must remain pure.
When I stopped experimenting and stuck to the proven process, an incredible abundance opened up, and my client retention skyrocketed.
The "convince the boss" trap
Lately, standing in that sense of abundance has completely changed how I handle new partnerships. Not long ago, I was having a conversation with two people who were the succession plan for an organization. They were desperate to bring in our system, but they looked at me and said:
"You're going to have to convince the owner that this is for us and that we need to do this."
Years ago, my inner people-pleaser might have jumped through those hurdles, providing endless testimonials, stats, and pitches to make the sale. But this time, I just looked at them and said:
"I'm not gonna convince him. It's your job to convince him if you're the succession plan and he's counting on you to lead this business in the future."
I told them that the owner either trusts them to make this decision or he doesn't. One of the guys went, "Ooh, that hurts." But I wasn't trying to be cruel; I was just being direct. That particular owner personality set is completely unconvincible by an outsider anyway.
They went back, had that tough internal talk with him, and when we finally sat down for our meeting, they introduced it by saying, "We've already decided we're doing this, we just want him to hear it." We booked the day and moved forward.
Going straight for the truth and entering the danger right out of the gate is incredibly refreshing for people. They are used to consultants who sugarcoat everything and presentation-heavy marketing firms promising the world. Sometimes I tell people bluntly, "I don't think you're ready for this, or I'm not your person because my intensity will be too much for you."
Paradoxically, because I'm completely willing to walk away and give them raw reality rather than a sales pitch, clients who have told other implementers they can't afford the fees will turn around and pay double to work with me.
Overcoming the hump and entering the matrix
Getting to this point required me to overcome my own entrepreneurial traps. When the business finally started working for me after those early struggles, it became intoxicating. I got addicted to the adrenaline rush of business development, and a lingering scarcity mindset made it impossible to say no. I ended up driving the car way too fast, pushing my workload up past thirty clients and hitting massive burnout.
I had to learn Dan Sullivan's concept of entrepreneurial time management to block out genuine free space and learn to refer business away to hit my true sweet spot of eighteen to twenty-two clients.
Protecting those boundaries gave me the mental capacity to break through the notorious three-hundred-session hump. Every practitioner hits that wall where they think, "Here we go, another quarterly," and the work starts to feel repetitive. But pushing past that ceiling made me realize just how much deep science and psychology is built into these simple tools.
I started studying the source materials like an Olympic athlete preparing for a sport, hunting for tiny phrasing nuances and facilitation skills I had missed.
Now that I am close to twelve hundred sessions in, I feel like I've finally entered the matrix flow: the ones and zeros where everything moves effortlessly. When a leadership team is talking, my brain doesn't go on autopilot. Instead, I can instantly see how multiple tools overlay, catch the subtle nuances they are missing, and navigate them to a high-value outcome much faster.
A plea to the community
This journey has also changed how I view our internal community. There can be a lot of sensitivity between the newer generation of operators and the older pioneers, but my passionate plea to anyone building a practice is to completely embrace raw, unfiltered feedback loops.
If we answer shortly on digital channels, it isn't out of cruelty; it's because we love this community and want to keep people from putting their hands on a hot burner. The same courage it takes to receive that feedback is the courage you'll need to model for the companies you serve.
True mastery isn't reaching session 1,200, it's being willing to fail enough times to trust something bigger than yourself.
The one thing
The system works because it works. Not because it's perfect, not because it's the only way, but because hundreds of companies have walked it, failed at it, succeeded at it, and proven over and over that when you stop rearranging the furniture, that's when transformation happens.
Your clients don't need a consultant who makes them feel good, they need a coach who gives them what they actually need. And sometimes, that looks like telling them no or walking away. That looks like entering the danger with them, not around it.
If I could go back and tell my twenty-five-year-old self one thing, it would be this: Trust the process more than you trust yourself. Not because you're not good enough, but because you're good enough to deliver something proven instead of something original.
The abundance comes after, not before.
