Ep 17 - Mike Abercrombie
"Learn, Earn, Return": Mike Abercrombie on the long game of building a practice
Key takeaways
- Mike maps the Implementer career to three phases: learn, earn, return.
- Learn can't be skipped or rushed: tools, biz dev, logistics and purity all take reps.
- Earning has a ceiling worth respecting: a near million-dollar year cost him his EOS Life.
- Holding clients past graduation stalls your rates and your learning.
- Once you reach return, the phases run at once: teaching and coaching sharpen your own sessions.
This issue's newsletter
The Idea
And then all three at once.
Mike Abercrombie is about to tick over a thousand EOS® sessions. On the episode, he shared a three-word framework for the Implementer career arc: learn, earn, return.
Simple enough to sound like a bumper sticker. But the way he mapped it to his own ten-year practice turns it into something more diagnostic than that.
The phrase came from someone in Mike's old industry, originally about life stages. But he applied it to his EOS practice and found it tracked.
Early on, the phases are sequential. Learn comes first: tools, biz dev, logistics, purity. "It's not only all the materials and the clients and purity, it's biz dev and it's logistics, it's like everything." That phase can't be skipped or rushed. Then earn: the model is healthy, and if client graduation and rate increases are handled well, the revenue follows. Then return: coaching, teaching boot camps, lifting newer Implementers through the community.
The part worth sitting with is what happened once Mike reached return. The phases stopped being sequential. Teaching boot camps forced him to re-learn foundational material. Coaching newer Implementers exposed him to situations and contexts he wouldn't encounter in his own client roster. Return didn't replace earning and learning. It accelerated them.
Every session there's more nuances and more discoveries. And I always try and take the time to reflect on that session. What happened, what didn't happen, what worked different.
The mistake Mike made along the way was treating the earn phase as if it had no ceiling. He hit close to a million-dollar revenue year and realized it came at the expense of his EOS Life.
I would take a clarity break and get out the EOS Life checklist. Time for other passions. No, no, not so good.
He pulled back. The framework helped him see that earning isn't the endgame. It's the middle.
The other mistake was subtler. He held onto clients too long because the relationships were good. That loyalty cost him twice: stagnant rates and fewer reps in unfamiliar industries. Graduation, it turned out, was the mechanism that kept the learning going even deep into the earning phase.
The framework's real value isn't knowing the phases exist. It's knowing which one you're underinvesting in right now.
The Steal
Name your phase.
Block out 20 minutes this week and ask yourself where you are in learn, earn, return.
If you're in your first two years, the answer is learn, and the priority is patience and reps. It will click. If you're past that and revenue has plateaued, check whether you're holding onto clients past their graduation point, because that's the most common earn-phase bottleneck: every seat held at an old rate is a seat not filled by a new business at a current one.
If you're earning well but starting to feel flat, you're probably ready for return, and the fastest entry is the one Mike took: start helping other Implementers, whether through MCEs, coaching calls, or boot camps. The multiplier effect of seeing other people's client situations sharpens your own sessions more than another year of the same roster will.
And if you've been at this long enough to run all three at once, make sure you actually are. The most common way to get stuck is running on earn alone and calling it a full practice.
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