The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 445: Gino Wickman - Do You Have What It Takes To Be An Entrepreneur?

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Text LEARNERS to 44222 for more... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12    https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Gino Wickman is the author of the award-winning, best-selling book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, which has sold over 1 million copies, as well as five other books in the Traction Library that have sold almost 2 million copies. Notes: Keys To Sustaining Excellence: Fanatical about excellence Stamina Endurance to stay with something Drive - a desire to succeed, to win Gino believes that entrepreneurship is nature, not nurture (you are born with it) What's usually missing in someone who thinks they're an entrepreneur, but they're not? The ability to take a big risk. Gino's dad was an entrepreneur. His two brothers are not. Gino set a goal to be a millionaire by the time he was 30.  He achieved that goal... And then went broke two years later. It took more than five years to create Traction. He worked with more than 50 companies testing the ideas. He eventually found patterns and trends. Delegation -- Gino obsesses over delegating at least one task for the last 30 years. This has helped him scale his business. The difference between a visionary and an integrator: Visionary - Wild and crazy entrepreneur Integrator - Run the day-to-day operations. Sometimes called the Chief Operating Officer. How to run better meetings? Use the Gino Wickman Level 10 Meeting format: Segue – Spend 5 minutes sharing one personal best and one professional best from the previous week. No discussion; just an announcement. This helps move your team from working "in the business" to working "on the business". Review your company scorecard. This is a 5-minute high-level review to make sure your most important five to 15 numbers are on track. The person responsible for the number says whether it is "on track" or "off-track". If the number is "off", move that measurement to the Issues List portion of the agenda. Rock review. Take 5 minutes to review your company and individual Rocks to determine if they are "on track" or "off track." Again, if the rock is "off", move it to the Issues List portion of the agenda. Customer/Employee headlines. This is a 5-minute opportunity to announce any news, positive or negative, about a customer or employee. If the announcement is an issue, add it to the Issues List portion of the agenda. To-Do List. Review the seven-day action items from the previous meeting, and report whether each task is "done" or "not done." This should take no more than 5 minutes Issues List. Your leadership team now has 60 minutes to identify, discuss and solve your company's biggest issues in order of priority. Solving an issue usually requires someone to take action, which becomes a task for the to-do list for review at your next meeting. Conclude. Use your final 5 minutes to bring the meeting to a close, recap the to-do list, and discuss any messages that need to be communicated to the rest of the organization. And rate the meeting on a scale of 1 – 10; this helps your team self-correct. Establish the practice that anyone who rates the meeting below an "8" must explain why, and "because I never give high marks" is not an acceptable reason. Leadership teams should get together in person every 90 days What is EOS? EOS™ is a holistic management system with simple tools that help you do three things we call vision, traction, healthy. Vision from the standpoint of first getting your leaders 100% on the same page with where your organization is going. Traction from the standpoint of helping your leaders to become more disciplined and accountable, executing really well to achieve every part of your vision. Healthy meaning helping your leaders to become a healthy, functional, cohesive leadership team. The six key components to your business that Gino's work helps you improve: Vision. Build your V/TO™ within Traction Tools and keep it easily accessible to everyone in your company. V/TO content is integrated throughout the software so that you always have the right information at the right time. People. Our People Tools™ add-on (currently in Beta) bundles everything you need to manage the key People component of your business—including the Accountability Chart, People Analyzer™, LMA™, and Quarterly Conversation™ tools Data. The Traction Tools Scorecard makes it easy to record and measure your company, departmental and employee numbers. Everything is located in one place, and many metrics can be automatically updated. Personalize the Scorecard according to your viewing preferences. Issues. Manage and IDS™ all of your company and departmental issues in the Issues List. Flexible features make it easy to add and solve your Issues or move them to other meetings. Process. It's quick and easy to attach your company's core processes to notes within Issues, To-Dos, or Level 10 Agendas Traction®. With Traction Tools Rocks, you'll take your company's vision to street level, and make it real. The Level 10 Meeting™ Agenda will help you keep your Meeting Pulse™ EOS-pure. Life/Career advice: "Let your freak flag fly." -- Be yourself. "It took me until I was 45 years old to learn this. Do it now." "Know thyself. Be thyself." Spend time understanding your strengths and weaknesses.

So when we say visionary, it's interchangeable. True entrepreneur, visionary one and the same. Well, it gets to a point where that visionary can't do it all. And a true visionary really is terrible at managing people, terrible at holding people accountable, terrible with details, terrible at running the day-to-day. So they're better with big problems, focusing on the customer, ideas, the culture, the vision, growth.

And so true visionary needs to be counterbalanced with a role that I call the integrator. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 4422 to become part of my book launch team. You can receive an early copy of my latest book titled The Pursuit of Excellence. I've compiled the best of the best of what I've learned. over the past decade

and put the most practical, useful stuff into this book The Pursuit of Excellence, and I'm very proud of it. You'll get a chance to get an early copy if you text learners to 44222. Now on to the night's featured leader, Gino Wickman, created EOS, which is the entrepreneurial operating system,

a practical method that has helped tens of thousands of companies thrive. He's also the best-selling author of multiple books. Some of them are rocket fuel, traction, and the entrepreneurial leap. During this conversation, Gino and I discuss the importance of doing regular leadership off-site meetings and how to implement this for your business. Really good. And then the mistake most leaders make when running a meeting and how to correct it immediately.

And then why you should let, quote, your freak. flag fly and what gino wishes he would have done earlier in his career i think you'll really enjoy this story near again ladies and gentlemen this one's so good it's gino wickman all right gino i told you before we started recording uh when you asked how i initially found out about you um that i've been trying to get a hold of you for many years man so it's really good to have you here on the learning leaders show thanks for being here i appreciate that i'm really looking forward of this, Ryan. I really value excellence. And the reason that I've wanted to talk to you for a long time is because I think you're one of the definitions of somebody who has sustained excellence over

an extended period of time. If you had to deconstruct the qualities of a person who sustains excellence over an extended period of time, what are some of the qualities that they possess? That's interesting. You know, so all I can do is speak from experience. And, you know, so I can just kind of share how I tick because, you know, you have me nailed. I mean, I am a fanatic about excellence. I have incredible stamina. And I have incredible endurance to stay with something for a very, very long time until the goal is achieved, you know, which is evident with what I created with EO.

and EOS worldwide. It's 21 years in the making. And obviously here we are with 500 people all over the world making a huge impact on hundreds of thousands of leaders and entrepreneurs. So, you know, I think one is a little bit of perfectionism. So I'm constantly battling my OCD and my perfectionism. I'm constantly reminded of Dan Sullivan's discipline to just get it 80% right the first time. I struggle with that. But so there's a perfectionism there, kind of an OCD. There is a tremendous drive. So I am incredibly driven. You know, I want to succeed. I want to be great. I want to be the best. And then I think the third thing is, you know, with what I've said so far, it sounds very selfish and egomaniacal and all about me when the reality

is it really isn't. What I obsess about is the entrepreneurial leader. I mean, that is what I wake up every day. That's what I've obsessed about for 30 years. And so I just think about them every minute of every day in terms of my work time. And I try and understand them better every day. I try to serve them better every day. And I try and solve their problems every day. And so it's all about them. But so when I talk about wanting to be great and I talk about being driven, I want to be great for them. I want to be, I want to provide them incredible value. And I'm driven to succeed. from a standpoint of being recognized as a person that helps those entrepreneur leaders. I don't need to wear the crown. I don't need to thump my chest. I'm a hermit. I prefer,

I'm a hermit inventor, mad scientist. So I don't need to be out on the stage, although I am occasionally. I don't do a lot of podcasts. I am for this new project. But so there's some of the things that come to mind. So you've written that entrepreneurship is nature, not nurture. Yes. What makes you think that? Well, for one, I am convinced of it. And in terms of what makes me think that,

I'm not a incredible researcher from a standpoint of this hyper-analytical person trying to figure out how and why everything works. What I do is I spend decades. So going back to my obsession and this endurance that I have, so for 30 years, I've obsessed about what makes entrepreneurs great, how they succeed, and then firsthand help them do that. And so with the, you know, many thousands of entrepreneurs I've worked with, I've discovered that there are six

essential traits. And very quickly, they are visionary, passionate, problem solver, driven, risk taker and responsible. And that's been validated more times than I could ever count and then validated by them as well. And with those traits, the realization was then that you are, are born with them and that they can't be taught. That's the nature over nurture. And so one fun example and the easiest example to explain it is the responsible trait because many people are surprised when they hear that six essential trait of a true entrepreneur is responsible. The other ones really makes sense. It's that one just kind of hitch out of left field. But it is absolutely one of the six important traits. But so think about responsible. You can literally look at the world. And if you think

about everyone in your life, so everybody listening out there, you can literally put each one of those people into one of two camps. When something goes wrong, half of the world take responsibility, and half the world blame everyone else. Now let's go into a family of four kids, a family of two kids, a family with multiple kids. And so think about your brothers and sisters out there. In the same household, four kids, something bad goes, happens for one of the four. Literally, you can put them in two camps. Half of those kids take responsibility. Half those kids blame everyone else. Same house, same parents, same upbringing. How on earth can it possibly be nurture over nature? So I'm convinced. And it's so it's just my obsession and I see patterns and trends and I spend

a ridiculous amount of hours on all of my content. I will have to make it personal then. So my, Gino, my career. My backgrounds in sports went to college on a football scholarship, played quarterback, played a little bit after college professionally in the Arena League and briefly in Canada. And I didn't know what I was going to do.

And I got a job working in sales like a lot of former athletes do and actually went really well and went from rep to manager to director to VP. Started my podcast along the way while I had a full-time job. So I had this little, maybe this little bug in me. I don't know. and then left corporate America four years ago. And this is what I do now full time.

Now, I partner with great companies, especially number one, Insight Global right now. And they're absolutely amazing. But that's why I wonder for somebody like me, and there are others like me, who move up the chain within a corporation and maybe start something. And then that, it goes much better than I would have expected.

And it created so many opportunities where it's like, I'm going to leave. What is that, I don't know if I was born with this or not. I'm not really sure. What do you think about that? Yeah, so I'm going to, I'm going to say three things to that. And they're big and heavy things. So I'm going to do my best to try to ultra simplify these three things, okay?

Okay. And so the first is, you know, I always, like I said, I obsess about the end user. And so right now I'm obsessing about your listener out there, okay? And I assumed right when I checked you out a little bit before this podcast. And your audience is, you know, majority are leaders. And like you said, Fortune 50 companies, mid-level managers, things like that. So the first point I would say is I want to make sure that the message is landing for the audience out there because the typical podcast or interview or talk I'm doing, it's an audience of pure entrepreneurs

and entrepreneurial leaders, which is where your audience starts to come into it. But what I want to say is, as I get to the second and third point, so that they're still leaning in is with these six essential traits, there's this term intrepaneur. A lot of the listeners and the leaders out there are entrepreneurs. And a lot of times, in my humble opinion, they're missing one of the traits and they have the other five, which is why they make great entrepreneurs and why they never really take their leap. So the audience that's listening, I would suggest most are going to get some great leadership principles, learn to be better entrepreneurs, and really understand the entrepreneurial spirit.

Number two, there are listeners that are leaders in large organizations that are about to take their entrepreneurial leap and I'm about to motivate the hell out of them to take their leap. And hopefully that's okay on your podcast. Of course. Real quick, if you're okay with it. So I've learned, after receiving a lot of feedback over the past seven years that the listener, the avatar, seems to value when I follow my own curiosity and passions with great rigor when it comes to these interviews. So sometimes the questions are more selfish, but they're the genuine question

I would ask you if you and I were having lunch and it wasn't being recorded. I've learned to lean into that as opposed to thinking strictly about somebody else. If I lead with my curiosity, that seems to resonate by far, I mean, by far the most with a person listening regardless of their job title or what they're currently doing. So I think that's kind of why I've leaned towards this after getting so much feedback over the year. So I just wanted to kind of put that disclaimer in there because I do think it matters to think like that. I think it's great. And I love it. And that's why, you know, when we started, I said, I mean, you're capable of hands, take you where you want to take me.

And so, you know, so that's points one and two. Point three is there's something I teach in the book called the entrepreneurial range. And so very quickly, if you picture an arc or draw an arc, left side of the arc, it says self-employed, right side of the arc, it says true entrepreneur. And so anybody that owns their own business is somewhere on that entrepreneurial range. And the point I'm talking about is people that have those six essential traits are the people on the right side of the range. And so far right red line are the greatest entrepreneurs of all time.

The left side of the range are one person shows. Somebody that has a side hustle, one person show, whatever it is, you know, sole proprietor. The point I'm making is you could still be self-employed and not have the six essential traits. You're just typically not going to build an organization. And that might be more of what you are or a lot of thought leaders are. Well, you have a test, right? You can take this test on e-dashleap.com. I took the test to prepare for this.

And you get a score, a percentage score. I'm looking at mine right now. And my score was 78%. So, I mean, for those who haven't taken the test, I would encourage people to take it regardless of your job. I think it's a good test to take. And I scored 78%. Can you share the ranges and what this means?

Yeah. And so what I believe, so it's online e-dashleap.com, free assessment. You're going to answer 25 questions about yourself. Please be totally honest with yourself. And you're going to get a score. 90 or higher odds are really good. good that you're a true entrepreneur. Anything less, you're probably not. And so again, if we go back to that entrepreneur range, you're just not going to be on the right side of the range. It doesn't

mean you can't go start a business or buy a franchise or be a one person show or have a side hustle. You're just probably not going to build an empire. And so for me, I can't help myself, but to keep building stuff. It's just my nature. And so it's not like being an entrepreneur is the ultimate destination in life. So it's not a death sentence. It's just helping you decide who you are. And then I want to go all the way back to the that first point. If you're missing one of those traits, that's probably what's going to make you a great entrepreneur and a great entrepreneur leader inside of that organization that you're in. And typically it's the risk taker that's missing. You're not comfortable, you know, leaving that

$150,000 a year leadership, you know, safe gig to go jump off a cliff and start a business and risk everything where it's just second nature for me to jump off the cliff. Where do you think that comes from from you. What were your parents like? What was your upbringing? Like, where did you grow up? What would your parents do? What was it like? Yeah, I love that. So, so where does it come from? Again, nature over nurture. I know. I'm going to keep hammering you on this, man, because I'm, but I want to answer your question. But yeah, I've been jumping off cliffs since I was three years old, you know, but what's interesting, I'll tell you about my parents and then I want to give you another example so that it's not tainted, but my dad is a pure entrepreneur. So you would assume that

that means that's where I got it from, you know, but my two brothers are not. You know, so it's, it's not that I got it from my parents, although my dad is a wilder, crazier entrepreneur than I am. And my mom is not, you know, and so my mom pretty much stayed home and raised us most of the time, but then had some jobs when she was getting itchy and wanted to do stuff, but she certainly was not an entrepreneur. But there's countless stories about a true entrepreneur that was raised by, you know, a doctor and an attorney or a teacher or an engineer and they were brought up in this very conservative household and they wanted to explode because they just wanted to go be free. And when they finally broke through, because sometimes

they were forced to take the path all the way through college and they finally took it until they were 22, 23 years old so they can finally go be themselves and get away from their parents that were a little too constricting. It's another powerful element of this book. If you think you have an entrepreneur in the making in your life, your son, your daughter. This is a great book to help them realize what they are, but also help you realize what they are because we entrepreneurs, we are odd ducks. Did you ever have a real job? I did, actually. I did not go to college. So right out of high school, went to work. And I worked in a machine shop. So I made the natural progression from machine shop to entrepreneur. So worked in a machine shop for three and a half years.

almost went in the military. My now wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, talked to me into going and swearing in. That's a whole other story. And then I took my entrepreneurial leap at 21 years old. I saved up $8,000 and went to go become a millionaire and was broke by about 24 years old. But you did become a millionaire, a multi-millionaire. How long did that take? The lightning fast version is my goal was to be a millionaire by 30. I was worth one point. million by 31. So I missed it by a year and then $200,000 in debt and flat broke by 33. So when you set a goal to be a millionaire by a certain age, you have to follow up the goal by saying keep the million. So I hit the goal, but I forgot to add to the equation that you're supposed to literally like keep the million dollars.

Why was that a goal for you? Well, to be a millionaire. Yeah. Because I like money. I like freedom. I believe money gives you all sorts of freedom and lets you take care of the people in your life. And I wanted that freedom and I wanted that financial security. So how did you become a millionaire and how did you become broke? I took very big risks. So what happened is I took over a family business at 25 years old, did a big turnaround, ran it for seven years. We successfully sold it.

That's where I got probably half of it. The rest I saved it up. So there I was. I stayed on for a year and a half, transition and leadership team, moved on to go do my next thing, which is what I'm doing now. And so 1.2 million, nice little safety net to go do this next thing. I made some crazy investments. It was during the dot-com crash. So every stock that I own went to zero, every company I invested in went to zero. While I was for two years building this new business burning 100 grand a year. So, burning cash and just everything that could have went wrong went wrong in those two years. And it was an incredible lesson. And I was convinced I was going to turn that million dollars into $15 million by 35. And that certainly didn't happen. But where you start, did you start EOS and was the traction kind of getting going at that point too?

Exactly right. Yeah. That is when I took the leap to go help entrepreneurs. So yeah, that's when I was creating EOS, helping entrepreneurs. and it probably took me about three years to get to a point where it was fully supporting my lifestyle and where I wanted to be economically. But in those first two years, I lost everything. So it was a very scary period with a five-year-old and eight-year-old and thank God a very

supportive wife. And I pulled it off. So let's talk a little bit. I'm going to get to, we're bounced around from entrepreneurial leap, which is the most recent thing, but your name first became widely known to me from multiple friends in different areas because of traction. Traction is the title of one of your books. EOS, entrepreneurial operating system is something, is it a patent or trademark or how does that work? Yeah, very much so. Both. Like you said, it's EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, and it's a copyright and

trademark. You unfortunately cannot patent that type of a process. Okay. Okay. And so you built this, this IP that you built and you owned. And then the book traction among other books that you've also written absolutely explodes. And basically it felt like anyone who owned a business, they, like traction was just kind of part of them. Like they just embodied this. I mean, everybody I talked to that, that seemed to be the owner. They all talked about traction for years and years. So can you share a little bit about that EOS and in the traction story? Because this is, at least for me, this is where you absolutely just took over. Yeah. Now, I appreciate that. And it's so funny to describe what it is now the way you described it. You should have seen it in the first 10 years.

First how many years? Well, it's been 21 years. Right. But the first 10 years were brutal. So the reason I say this is because it makes it makes me feel good. All right. I just have to admit this. It feels good when, because you see traction in EOS now and I heard about it from so many people and I can't even imagine the money you made on this thing, but I know it's a lot. But, but to know that for 10 years, you're grinding away and it's not like, it's not getting traction yet. I mean, that's pretty wild to me. So I love it. I love the beginnings of things. Yeah, I'll give you the high level and you can pick at whatever you want to drop you on. But the first five years was creating it. And it was brutal because remember that first three years,

I was broke, thought I had a safety net. But what I did for five years is I worked with 50 companies over that period of time. I would bring on about 12 new clients every year. And I tested and tried and honed everything I learned, the books that I read, great thought leaders. And what I would do is we'd be in a full day session. They'd tell me their problems. I'd help them solve their problems. And I have this ability to see patterns and trends. And so over five years, I was able to put the finishing touches, about 500 full-day sessions. And once I started getting the same result every time from my clients, I knew I had created something, rebranded. It used to be called the business accelerator, rebranded it to be called EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system.

It's the original operating system in terms of managing human energy in an organization. I then wrote traction, and then I decided I would to leverage it. So I was torn because I had this amazing life being a solopreneur on the far left end of that range, but I couldn't stop myself. I decided to build another organization. And so I decided to leverage it to the world, found an amazing partner in Don Tinney, told Don, if you can go out and produce my exact same results over the next year and a half with your clients, so he went out and found his own clients with EOS. I will join forces with you and we will build a company together. He did that. And so six and a half years in, we started EOS worldwide, failed horribly for another two years, kept trying to recruit

implementers, and we had about a 30% success rate. It was brutal. But, and then we reinvented the model two years in. But then once we reinvented that model, I had an aha moment to Starbucks. That's when it really took off. And so that's the first messy 10 years. And then boom, the flywheel was turning. and here we are today. Don and I sold the business three and a half years ago. I still own 12.5%. I still own all the books. I'm still the EOS guy.

I still do sessions with clients. It's my number one love. But now the company with 450 implementers and a staff of 70 people, and it's too big, in other words, it's not interesting to me when it's that big. But I'm so proud of the impact that it's having on the world. And there are leaders that are running that company now. Most of the original ones that were with Don and I are doing an amazing job growing that company at the next level.

So you sold it because you kind of did it, right? You did the thing and you're like, I need to start something else. I also imagine you wanted to take some money off the table for your hard work. No, so here's, you know, it's this, you're going to find this hard to believe. And here's a, I want to be conscious of the audience and a lesson here. So I'm obsessive about delegation. I am a master delegator. And so for 30 years, my discipline is to delegate one thing per quarter. And if you do the math on that in 20 years, you know, you'll delegate 80 big things. Well, I got to a point where the company was a distraction.

And so I had to delegate an entire company. And so the way you do that is to sell it. So, you know, I didn't even know what it was worth. I knew it was worth a lot. And so it wasn't to take chips off the table. I had no intentions on selling. We got approached. They made us an offer.

I'm like, wow, it's really worth that. I was thinking about my energy and my time. And then this passion project, Entrepreneur Elite, when I was 40, I said when I turned 50, this is what I'm going to do. This freed me up to focus on that project. So just the stars kind of aligned. It was the perfect time. There were about 200 people in the organization. That's too many for me because I don't know them all personally anymore.

And so, you know, there are eight reasons. I wish I could remember them all. But it was time to sell. Okay. Who bought it? A private equity firm called Firefly, and it's been awesome. They're just great, great people. And so you're still on 12%, you still are still doing a lot of that. Okay. I got you. By the way, you said you had an aha moment in a Starbucks. What was that? So the model wasn't working and we were struggling and we probably had 20 implementers at the time. Don and I were not making any money. What's an implementer? What's an implementer? So an EOS implementer is a person. like me back then that works directly with a client helping them implement EOS in their business. Okay.

And so we had about 20. But we weren't making any money. And the model was that it was a revenue share where they'd pass 15% of what they generated. Well, when they don't generate anything, 15% is zero is zero. So we flipped the model. You know, I'm sitting in a Starbucks. I read two books, Tribes by Seth Godin and Starfish in the Spider by I can't remember the author. and it was this open source model and it just was an aha moment.

It was that in literally 50 other data points. Like I said, I have this ability to see patterns and trends. And the aha was to flip it to an open source, abundance-based model, a membership model, a fee-based model. And then I went in within 90 days did the presentation of my life to those 20 implementers, told them that they're going to start paying a monthly fee to pay to play with us. And the whole thing took off from there. And that financial model is very similar today as to what it was back then.

So it really, really worked out. Gotcha. So they had a monthly fee and they could just go wild, go do your thing, but you're going to pay us a monthly fee. And we opened it up to the whole world and the whole world fell in love with it and told all of their friends. Thank goodness. So this, I think, helps with people who are creating things. Maybe somebody who does have one of those jobs. But they're kind of a builder in a way.

And I think it's helpful to hear from a guy like Gino Wickman who built this thing that now we see kind of the end result and you're like wow that guy just must be a genius when no doubt you have high levels of intellectual wattage but it's also the the as you called yourself before we're recording like you're a scrappy dude like you get after it so that that process of iteration took a massive amount of work with companies learning from leaders testing iterating till you finally got to the point and you're saying that took a decade yeah and and a decade, you know, 21 years, but when I say a decade, that's 11 years ago. Another thing that's really important to know is that, you know, 20 years ago, I said, we are going to have 10,000

companies running on EOS. Okay. And that means that we EOS implementers have taken 10,000 companies through the process. Literally 20 years ago is like 2001 when I set that goal. And the goal was to hit that number by end of year, 20. 2020, and we literally hit it end of November 2020 last year. And back then, when we had our first five or 10 implementers, and I said, we're going to have 10,000 companies running on EOS, they would laugh at me because they'd say, well, how many do we have now, Gino? And I'd say, 50, 60, 70, 80, whatever the number was. And they said, well, how are we going to do that? And I said, we're going to figure it out one quarter at a time.

So, you know, the obsession was that that was the overriding goal. how we got there, you just figured out one quarter at a time and you just, you get scrappy and you focus and you get your ass kicked and you have some wins and it's just messy. But I wouldn't know how to do anything else. It's so much fun. Who's EOS for? It's for the perfect target market is a 10 to 250 person privately held company. That's the sweet spot. 80% of our clients are in that sweet spot. 10% are smaller, 10% are larger. You know, we've got some billion-dollar companies, you know, with thousands of employees. But it's the exception. You have to remain entrepreneurial. And most of those companies are incapable of remaining

entrepreneurial, but 10 to 250 people is the magic number. One of the things you've talked about is the difference between a visionary and an integrator. How do you see these two roles? And what does what does a visionary do versus an integrator? Yeah. And so let's go back to that pure target market, a 10 to 250 person privately held company. What's typical there is you have this true entrepreneur with those six essential traits that built the company, startup, grew it to a certain point. Well, what happens is that wild and crazy entrepreneur, which I call a visionary. So when we say visionary, it's interchangeable. True entrepreneur, visionary one and the same, well, it gets to a point where that visionary can't do it all. And a true visionary really is terrible at managing people,

terrible at holding people accountable, terrible with details, terrible at running the day-to-day. So they're better with big problems, focusing on the customer, ideas, the culture, the vision, growth. And so a visionary, true visionary, needs to be counterbalanced with a role that I call the integrator. And the integrator is the person who harmoniously integrates the major functions of the business. They run the day-to-day. They manage and hold the leadership team accountable. And so in the corporate world, this would typically be called CEO and president or CEO and C.O or general manager, but we call it visionary and integrator in this entrepreneurial small business, 10 to 250 person world that we live in. Gotcha. Okay. And then on that, for what it's worth, so that all the resource materials out there,

that's a book that I wrote with a co-author, Mark Winters, called Rocket Fuel. And that teaches that whole concept, helps those two people find each other because that's the other reality with your audience. There are a ton of integrators in that audience. And if they're sick of the corporate world, there's a wonderful opportunity in the entrepreneurial world because there's a shortage of integrators in this world that I'm talking about. There's more visionaries than integrators. And so you have the pick of the litter out there if you put yourself out there as an integrator. And that's another one of my dreams is that that world uses that term. and gets out of the corporate lingo.

And so I'm thrilled to say there are recruiting firms that do nothing but recruit integrators. The term integrator is now a household name. And so again, if you think you're an integrator out there, read Rocket Fuel and put yourself out there to the world because there's a visionary waiting for you to help them take the business to the next level. What if there is a visionary that is working currently within a business and they have an idea and they've had ideas and maybe they've even tried some things?

in the past that haven't worked because, you know, these things don't all work the first time. What are some pieces of advice or I guess a better way to say is what are some ways for that person to make the leap? This is a big thing you're writing about and you're talking about and people that you're helping now. One, because I think one of the things you said is like you're not afraid sometimes to upset people because maybe they think they are that or maybe they think they can do that, but they're not. So maybe you also share share some of that. But for that person who's there, they have a really good job. They're making good money, but they have this itch and they have this idea and they are thinking about it. What do you say to them?

Yeah, well, I would say a couple of things. First of all, in the corporate world, you know, I strongly believe the CEO, regardless of the size of the organization, is a visionary. Yep. It just gets really tricky when it gets big and publicly held and bureaucratic. It's, you can't be a pure visionary in that world because a pure visionary has the freedom to fully run and doesn't have to worry about 10,000 eyeballs watching them from every direction. So they're a bit restricted. But again, a CEO is a visionary, regardless the size of the company. If you're a leader in a company and you realize, let's pretend you take the entrepreneur in the

making assessment and you score 90 or higher, you're a visionary, you're an entrepreneur in the making. It's the reason you just don't feel quite comfortable in your environment and you're going mad. So there's a couple ways to do it. you know, the one way is to save up enough money that makes you comfortable and take your leap. I mean, that's obviously one way. And another way, which is very, very common now is to just start with a side hustle, you know, just tinker, sell a few things, make sure your product or service is viable if you don't have a very high risk tolerance. But, you know, those are the two ways to do it. But if you really think that

that's you out there, and again, I don't pitch my books, but buy the book. Worst case, go to the website because the tools are all free. Just start interacting with these tools. There's something we call a one, two, three roadmap where you literally fill out three tools. One is that entrepreneur in the making assessment. It takes an hour and you will literally have a plan to start a better startup. So just start interacting with these tools that were designed for you. You also have written about these eight disciplines for increasing your odds of success when you're taking your entrepreneurial leap.

And I might hit a few of them not going to ask you to please. Yeah, that'd be great. So I'm going to read some of them and then maybe actually expand on some. Clarify your vision. Decide if you are a partner person. Know that the bigger problem you solve in the world, the more successful you will be. Interesting. Get feedback from customers and clients early and often.

Know that your first plan will not be your final plan, as we've already discussed, worked hard, work hard, really hard. Take criticism and doubt from others with a grain of salt. That's number seven and eight is see it every night. Can you talk about taking criticism and doubt from others with a grain of salt? Because when I see that number four is get feedback from customers and clients early and often, but number seven is take criticism and doubt from others with a grain of salt. There's some, maybe there's that seems like a dichotomy there. What do you think about that?

Yeah. Well, they're very different for one. And certainly you'll get some criticism from customers and clients. But the customer and client feedback is all about improving upon your product or service. Criticism and doubt is typically coming from the people closest to you in your life. Okay. And so the conservative people in your life are scared to death for you and aren't saying things that are helping your cause in a lot of cases. And so you got to take it with a grain of soap. Number two, the criticism that you get, you're going to get a lot of it. People have

opinions. And the way I always like to describe it is if you got a thousand opinions and you internalize those thousand opinions, you're going to be depressed. You're going to go out of business. And then what I always say is whenever I get a little cocky, I go read my one star reviews on Amazon and that humbles me. So the point is it's all just data. Like literally, I could see a thousand five star reviews and one one star. Like I get obsessed. So it's, you got to take it with a grain of salt. You got to take it with a grain of salt. And this is the last thing I'll share there. Well, I'm going to share two things. Because the other thing I like to say is if you go read a hundred business books and you apply all of the advice from all hundred business books, you will be

out of business in six months. Okay. And so the whole idea, your job is to glean from all that you're hearing, what is true and what is not true for you. The advice, the criticism, the feedback is you have to run it through your individual filter and every entrepreneur's filter is different. Number two is a great story. I cannot disclose the CEO very, very, very. very well known because I can't validate the story. But the story is, I can't validate that it's him in writing. I've had fact checkers look into it. And so it's all word of mouth. But what he did is he had a board of what he called 10 very smart people. And every idea he had, he would present it to his board of very smart people. And if seven out of 10 hated it, he knew he had a winner. And if 10 out of

of 10 hated it. He knew his idea was revolutionary. So the point is people are going to give you their opinions. And most of it is awful. People's advice, it's awful for you and your filter. And so you just take it all with a grain of salt. It's, it's a discipline you have to master or it will mess up your brain. Oh, wow. Okay. I struggle with this one because I agree with kind of the outside noise, but I'm a big believer in creating a mentor board of advisors, the people you can go to to seek advice, wisdom, and help and ask questions that you don't feel any judgment and they've done some things perhaps that you'd like to do, and so you admire the way that they've done those things, and so you can go to them. What about that? Like, how do you separate the criticism and the

critics as well as those people who may are on the board of very smart people versus having a core group of your who, as I would call it, that you can go to for a sounding board, for advice, for thoughts on your ideas. What about that? Yeah, no, I have lots of those, but watch this. I'll hopefully make the point through this. So how many people would you guess is in your advisory council? You know, is it like two people, 10? How many do you typically go to roughly? It's under 10. under 10, right. Okay, so let's call it nine. And so those nine people, have they ever given you bad advice that you didn't agree with? Sure. Yeah. And so my point is, the advice wasn't bad. It was just bad for you. And that's the point I'm making because the nine that you went out and sought and found know you so well and were handpicked that there's going to be a higher degree of great advice, but there's still going to be a bunch of bad advice. And at least one piece of.

bad advice, which you just admitted. What I'm talking about is someone who doesn't formally create a board like that and literally has their mom, dad, brother, sister, spouse, cousin, best friend saying, oh, my, you're crazy to do that. That's not smart or even worse. Sometimes they're saying, what a great idea. Your mom, everything's great with your mom. So it's just bad advice and you just got to take it all with a grain of salt. That's the point. You got to be careful not to internalize all of it because you will get in trouble. And And then with this particular CEO example, you got to understand the ideas that this CEO brought to this, these 10 people, every single one of these ideas were revolutioned. This is an incredible entrepreneur.

We all know the name who made such an impact on the world and put a huge dent in the universe. And it's not Steve Jobs. It's not Steve Jobs. I was trying to say it before you said it. So these ideas, it wasn't like he was going to them and saying, you know, hey, should I, you know, put yellow drapes in the window. He's like hitting them with revolutionary stuff. And, you know, with revolutionary stuff, most of the world thinks it's crazy and impossible.

And so that was just his way of making really big, tough decisions. So for what that's. I remember, I remember when I left, I had a VP of North American sales at a big company, and we were responsible for about half a billion in revenue. And people who were not all, but some people who were close to me. he said, what are you doing? Why would you? Because I took a significant pay cut to do this. And it's taken a while to get back to even just that level of income. And I think in a way, though, I get it, but that was more of a projection from them. And these people that,

the ones who would say that typically, while they've done well, were very conservative in their choices of what they've chosen to do for a profession of like a job where it's hard to fire somebody, a job where you get the three and a half to four and a half percent raise every year job that you're probably going to have a job every year. Whereas me, I struggled with the thought of doing that. And there are other things that go along with it when the opportunity was there and it got started as a side hustle to where, hey, I could probably get a job if I had to. But man, how cool is it?

How cool is it to go out and I'll give you two personal examples for me is when I decided I was going to leverage this as an EOS implementer. I can't tell you how many of my clients told me, Gino, no one else on the planet can do what you do. Okay? So they didn't think it was possible. And now there's- You mean like you were good at it, but they didn't, they thought it had to be Gino every time. They didn't see how somebody could help them implement EOS the way that I was helping them implement EOS. And now there's over 450 people around the world doing it as good or better as I did. Same rating, same results, same everything. The other thing is when I decided to leverage it and showed the business model to several people, they absolutely thought I was crazy and that it wasn't

possible. And then when I presented the idea to a forum of, I want to spend my life, I called it being a virtual CEO helping entrepreneurs, when I presented the idea, all but once said I was crazy. So, you know, again, you just got to take all that with a grain of salt. Those were some of the closest people to me telling me that it's not possible. All that does is motivate me, but that's, That's what this discipline is all about. Take it with a grain of salt. Interesting. I want to get into some practical things for a leader that apply both as an entrepreneur as well as someone leading within a business.

Can we let's drill down for a second on meetings, okay? Because there is someone who's listening to this on Sunday night and they're getting ready for their Monday morning team meeting and they're running that meeting. And we've all sat through them. there are some really poorly run meetings. And usually it's, or almost always, it's the fault of the person leading the meeting. What are some tactical things that you would give as advice on how to run better meetings? Yeah, well, you're hitting me right in the sweet spot there because most meetings in America are terrible, as we all know. And so I created what I call a meeting pulse, a weekly meeting for a leadership team.

team. And so this applies to everyone listening. And it's called a level 10 meeting. It's a 90 minute meeting once a week. You pick the time and the day, but it must always be start on time, end on time, same agenda, same day, same time. It's got to be that pulse. And you can watch this YouTube video. So it's me teaching it. And I believe it's how to have an effective meeting. But if you just put in Gino Wickman level 10 meetings, it's a seven minute video, show it to your people, and just apply it. It's also written in traction, but the YouTube video will give you what you need there. But the point of it is, after those five years of working with these 50 companies, I would actually go in and run their weekly meetings to see what they were doing. And I just real time figured out a way to create, you know, I try to be humble with saying this, but 20 years later with 130,000,

companies following it and raving about it, it's pretty damn good. It's probably the best meeting on the planet, okay? The best meeting agenda on the planet. But in a nutshell, what it forces you to do is start with some good news. So you're bringing a human element. That's five minutes. It then forces you to focus on the three most important things in your business. Are your priorities on track? Are your numbers are on track? And are your customers, employees happy? Five minutes, five minutes, five minutes. It incorporates a to do list that forces everyone to confirm they got everything done from last meeting that they committed to, it brings accountability. And then it's an hour, literally 60 minutes of the 90 minutes, solving all of the issues, the team's issues from the previous week and for the

coming week. And I teach a very specific issue solving track called IDS, Identify, Discuss, solve, and you will get through five to 15 issues every single week and just keep knocking down barriers holding you back. And then you conclude, you conclude the meeting with quick feedback. You rate the meeting one to 10, you should be getting at least an eight every week. Quite frankly, you should be getting nine and a half or better. You then discuss any cascading messages, and then you give, then you recap your to-dos. Very, very powerful and over 100,000 companies are using it, and it absolutely works. You mentioned there are now, love it.

Thank you. There are, you see, 400 plus, 450 plus people as consultants that are running this, right, as their primary business. Yeah. What is it about those people? Like what makes them as good or better than you at implementing this? Yeah. So we, you know, in the first two to three years of recruiting implementers, you know, we made all the mistakes you could possibly make.

And that led to criteria. And I can't remember. I think it's like 12 criteria now, but there's 12 very specific criteria. You know, you have to have a network. You have to have an entrepreneurial background. You have to have a passion for. entrepreneurship and working with entrepreneurs. You've got to be a great coach. You've got to be a great facilitator. You've got to be a great teacher. So again, there's 12 criteria. And if you meet all

those criteria, then you're going to be great. And if you don't, you're going to struggle. And so it's just evolved over time. And then as new implementers come to us, wanting to join us, which is roughly 30 every quarter now, you know, we're forcing them to do a self-discuss. because we can't tell them if they have all these things. But we're saying, listen, if you don't, you're not going to succeed. So don't pay the big bucks to come join us. But if you have this, by all means, you're going to make an incredible income and make a huge impact on the world. And so the ones that meet the criteria, it's a match bait in heaven.

And then the organization, it's one big love in. I mean, it's 450 of the most amazing people you've ever met. And we see each other every quarter. And it's freaking awesome. do you do like off-site retreats and stuff like that well we so from the very beginning it's just a discipline that I learned from the family business is every 90 days we come together we lock ourselves in a room for nine hours we solve the problems of the world and we connect and then we go back for the next 89 days and perform our craft and then come back and do it all over again

just to stay connected and bonded and sharp and trained and cutting edge and all that wonderful that that's a um brings up a good point especially with more hybrid-type workforces, Gino, I've found, and I've had requests for this type of thing, where people, especially if some are at home and some are all over the country, and some have moved and, right, that the all-site leadership retreat seems to be skyrocketing.

And they also want somebody to come and kind of help run these that I'm hearing about, and I've done some of these, not a lot yet, but it sounds like this will become part of the regular. what are your thoughts on any business of any size leadership teams going off site it sounds like you're a big believer in doing this at least four times a year but going off site and what and if someone's hearing this and they're saying oh we don't do that god we should do that especially now when they're a real hybrid what are some ways to make sure that one that they do it why they should do it and then how to get the the most out of their time when they leave and go and do it yeah so again uh you know

So please read traction out there because you're getting into the full meeting polls. So I created something and a discipline called the 90 day world. And if you understand the 90 day world and how it works, as we human beings at best have a 90 day attention span. And so picture yourself locking yourself in a room. I discovered this in my family business and getting on the same page with your team and then setting out to go execute, you will find right around the 89th day,

you don't even recognize each other anymore. And you're so off the same page. and you're frustrated. And so I call that the fray. And so you'll start to fray right around 89 days. And so on the 90th day, you've got to come back together. And so that's one of the secret ingredients to EOS is we make our clients get offsite with us every 90 days and we get them in a 90 day world.

And then what makes that meeting great? Again, an agenda I created after doing it over and over and over again, starts with a check-in, review last quarter's priorities, review the vision and make sure you're all on the same page and don't move forward to you are. smoke out all the issues and build the issues list, set your priorities for the next quarter, and then spend a half a day tackling all of your issues and then wrap up. It's magic. And so we call that the 90-day world.

And that's the quarterly. It has a specific objective and a specific agenda. And again, it's all in the book traction. And that could be for any business. Any business. Any business, any size. And what about the building like the, I feel like the camaraderie aspects, the breaking bread, the getting off to the same location together?

All of that seems like that plays a role, too. Here, here. And a couple other really important things. You know, number one, EOS is a system for managing human energy. Okay. And so that's all it is. So that's why it works for any organization. It's just our focus is on entrepreneurial speedboats, you know, not 10,000 company,

thousand foot freighters. So you can turn a speedboat a lot faster. And again, they're entrepreneurial. Number two is the, power, let me say it this way. EOS Worldwide was built as a virtual company from day one. So for 15 plus years when I joined forces with Don, we built a virtual company. And so the pandemic was irrelevant for us. And we didn't miss a beat because it was always virtual. But we still always came together live every quarter. It's vital. And so that's what we do with our clients.

Well, when the pandemic hit and we had to go virtual with all of our sessions, there was a noticeable difference, at least for me and my clients that met face to face, hugged, high five, touch, felt, said high, shook hands, you know, that was missing. And so it did have an effect. And fortunately, we're back to all live sessions now, at least for my clients. Some still aren't. But the point I'm making is that human connection, that ability to be in the room, the ability to see all the body language and the facial expressions. You know, I am convinced, you know, at the end of the day, we are human beings first. And I think it's vital.

Gina, the stuff's so good, man. You mentioned there's a video that there are 10 lessons you learned from your mentor that we talked about prior to recording. And this is maybe an offshoot from that. Maybe for somebody who's a bit earlier in their career, and I bet a lot of people in this range reach out to, what are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to somebody maybe in their early to mid-20s? So you're saying career advice, and I'm wrestling with, are these one and the same? Because it's just kind of general life advice.

But you know, you pick the perfect age because somebody in their young 20s, so here's the way I always say it. And this applies to business or personal for you out there, that 22-year-old, but it's to let your freak flag fly. Okay. And so that's the way I like to say it. But what it means, because that may be off-putting the way I say it, is to be yourself. And it took me until I was 45 years old. And at 22, I just hope you don't wait that long. And so what it means is, and I write a whole chapter on this in Entrepreneur Elite, I call it Know Thyself. But ultimately what I'm teaching is for you to be yourself, be thyself. And so the only way to be yourself is to know yourself.

And so spend time understanding your unique being that you are, your personality, your traits, your strengths, your weaknesses, be proud of your weaknesses, flaunt them, capitalize on your strengths. I don't like details and I don't pull any punches. And so I have OCD, ADD. I'm an introvert. I know all about myself and I'm just freely that. And I share a story. I feel like I'm throwing out way too much content,

but I just launched a new book called the EOS Life. And in there, I share 10 disciplines for managing and maximizing your energy. And this is one of those. But the story I tell is how when I was 30 years old, my wife threw me a third. 30th birthday party, surprise party. And so I show up and there were a hundred people there from six factions of my life. So there were my employees, there were my business partners, there was my family, there was my wife's family, there were my high school friends, and there were my new friends.

And I looked at these hundred sets of eyeballs. And I try not to swear on podcast, but when it's a direct quote, you're allowed to swear. I don't know if you ever knew that, Ryan, but I look at these hundred eyeballs in these six factions. And I go, who in the fuck am I going to be today? Because I was a different person for every faction. And it was like, oh, my God. So let your freak flag fly, be you. Don't apologize for it. The world's going to judge. They're going to judge you whether you pretend or be yourself. So you might as well just be yourself. And so just let your freak flag fly. Is it possible when you're 25? Yes, absolutely.

I feel like we can all say this now that we're not 25 anymore. And I get it. And I thought about that. I get it. But I do believe it's possible. And here's the worst case. Let's pretend I'm wrong. And it's not possible.

Here's what I know. If this message continues to spread, it took me to 45. Just by sharing this now, I know that it's going to happen by 44 for that person. And if we can move it to 43 and then 42 and 41. So maybe not 22, but certainly sooner than 45. It took me way too damn long to ultimately get kind of. And maybe it was 40 for me. Why did it take so long?

Let's move the needle. Insecurities, all these factions, I try and be all things. Who knows? But, you know, I was a mess. Well, then there had to be like an inflection point, a compelling event that you're like, you know what, let's go. I'm just going to. Well, the biggest compelling.

event was that surprise party. That moved the needle in a big way. Really? So when you're 30? Oh my God, yes. But it was the aha, but I didn't fully go there. And then, you know, through some good therapy, I'm a big believer in therapy. I did my seven years in my 20s, through great advisors and coaches. I mean, I just keep learning about myself and I keep learning and I go deeper. I describe it as getting closer to my soul and just ultimately living from my soul. And I finally got there. Just, uh, wow. Start to self-reflective work earlier.

That's what I would say. Started earlier. And that could help you like truly understand yourself. And I think as you get to know yourself better, the insecurities can kind of start going away a little bit. The book, I encourage people to get beyond traction, which we talked about. So traction is one of them. Um, entrepreneurial leap, though, which, which, you know, is his most. recent work and there's so much that goes with it. I took the assessment. I encourage people to take

it regardless of of your job, which is at e-dashleaf.com. I scored 78. Let me know what you score. I'd be, let Gina know what you score. I'll be curious to hear what we got as our makeup of everyone listening. But, Gino, this is really good. I had high expectations because I waited a long time. And you somehow still kind of exceeded a man. I really appreciate that. And certainly would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. You're good at this, man. This was a fun hour. Thank you. Is there anywhere else, by the way, you would send people to go to learn more? I just feel like I covered so much content. And so, you know, here's what I might suggest. And maybe you can put it in the show notes,

but what I reference is rocket fuel. So the book Rocket Fuel about that visionary integrator concept. So if that was appealing to you, go there. I shared my new book that I just launched called the EOS Life. it's how you can live your ideal life, doing what you love, with people you love, making a huge impact, making a lot of money and having time for their passions. Entrepreneur Leap, if you think you're an entrepreneur and want to take a leap or you have someone in your life who's an entrepreneur, and then Traction is the book that teaches EOS and helps you run your organization on that system like a Swiss watch as 130,000 companies do. And so usually it's just one book we're talking about entrepreneur elite, but I love we just covered the whole gamut. But it's so perfect for your audience,

because hopefully we hit most people where they are and gave them lots of resources. One piece of advice that I've gotten for people who don't do podcasts is you got to focus. You got to focus. And sometimes I don't listen to that. And I didn't listen to that today. Because I follow my curiosity. And sometimes that takes us all over the place. And I prefer that. I enjoy that. I enjoy you. I also admire the fact that you relentlessly sell. And I'm a born and bred sales guy. My dad was a sales guy. his whole life. And so you're just not afraid because you know, and the best salespeople, I think think this way, you know that what you're selling will help people. And that's ultimately what

the best sales professionals in the world do. They understand the current state and the future state, or the desired state, and that there's a gap in between there and that what you're selling can help them. And that's what professional salespeople do. So to that, to anyone who's like, God, man, Gino's talking a lot about his stuff to sell. Hey, man, I love it personally because that's, The world would come to a screeching halt if sales professionals didn't exist. And so that's why I think it's a beautiful profession. I appreciate you, like putting all your stuff out there and letting people know about it, man. Yeah, appreciate that, brother.

Thanks so much, man. I love Gino's enthusiasm and energy and passion for what he is doing. You could tell he's doing exactly what he was born for. And I'm inspired by that. And the fact that he is not afraid to sell. As I mentioned to him at the end, I think that's an admirable quality, and it shows that he truly believes in what he's doing. Few of the takeaways from my notes. Let your freak flag fly.

As I told him, I do think this is a little bit easier as you get older. And I think that's because age gives you wisdom because of experience. And usually as you mature, I guess I'm speaking for myself, so maybe I'm projecting. I feel like as you mature or as I mature, I start doing more work on myself. And this helps me get more comfortable in my own skin and having an open mind to learn and realize what I'm good at and what I'm not. And I think this is what Gino means by letting your freak flag fly, by being yourself. And the only way you can do that is if you truly do the work to understand yourself. And I think that just takes time.

But I do like the sentiment. And then off-site meetings every 90 days. Love this. I do see it becoming more common, especially now with people working in hybrid workforces where some are in offices, some are not, some are there some of the time, but not all of the time, whereas we used to pretty much all be in an office five days a week. I think this is something that people will start implementing if they're not already. But every 90 days, you can tell this was a big part of.

of why traction in EOS has become so helpful for companies and for Ginos. And then it took him a full decade. And that part for, I don't know how it is for you, but when I hear that somebody has built something that's really impressive, like EOS and traction, he sold that for a ton. But I didn't realize the full backstory that he had to work and work and work and iterate. And he learned from his clients, and he was in the thick of things all the things.

all the time and he did this for a decade. I mean, that's kind of a long time when you think about it. So I think it's inspiring to hear the backstories for how things get built. And if you are right now in the middle of that, know that that is part of the process. And again, I'm probably projecting, but I certainly enjoy hearing stories like that. And the fact is, excellence takes time and lots of consistent effort showing up each day. and having this willingness to learn and evolve and iterate. And I think that is, it's just good to hear.

I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. I certainly would love it if you would tell a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Gino Wickman. It'll help you become a much more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and continue to write reviews and rate the show on Apple Podcast, hopefully five stars, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.