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[Music]
welcome to scaling up the podcast for water treatise by water treaters where
we’re scaling up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems everybody trace Blackmar here and as you know I
love business it’s just something that I was never taught in school and I had to
get out here in the water treatment community to learn all about business
and as we learned with the episode with Tim Fulton episode 22 you don’t know
what you don’t know so how do you start to learn what it is you need to know
when you don’t know you need to know it well one of the ways I do that is through reading and I love reading
business books I’ve had the opportunity on scaling up to bring many of the authors of books that I’ve read and
really appreciated on the show so that does a couple things one I get to meet
them and thank them for their collective works and you also don’t have to read
all the books that I do to find the good ones well folks I have found some good
ones there is a program out there called the entrepreneurial operating system and
I don’t mind telling you I am an exceptional water treater I was not the best business owner that I
could be and one of the tools that I use now is this system called a OS and the
gentleman who wrote the book and the book is called traction his name is Gino
Wichman and I was introduced to him through this tidge and it really changed
how I ran my business I don’t have anything to do with water treatment but
imagine if you had a software program and you were going to run it on your
computer so basically it’s the windows I excuse me all you Apple fans out there
but it’s the Windows platform that you would run your software or your business
on well with that came several follow-up series of books and
the second one in the series was a book called rocket fuel and rocket fuel
deals with how you deal with your number one partner on your team we’re going to
talk about terms the visionary and the integrator but it’s an entire book about that and I have today on scaling up Mark
C winter who is the author of rocket fuel so I hope you enjoy my interview
with Mark C winter my lab partner today is Mark winter and Mark wrote a book
called rocket fuel it was the follow-up to Geena Whitman’s book traction and
folks you’ve heard me in a scaling up nation talk about that my company has gone through a program called traction
or iOS the entrepreneurial operating system well today we have one of the authors of those books with us how are
you today mark I’m doing great Trey’s great to be here well we are very glad that you are here we’re gonna talk all
about iOS and traction and of course your book rocket fuel but before we do can you tell us a little bit about
yourself sure so my background is I started off in in big corporate out of college and
somewhere along the way I got some exposure to some things that led me back to to business school and while in
business school caught the entrepreneurial bug which led me to leave big corporate and go off on my own
adventure which I think now I’m up to 14 different companies that I’ve either started myself bought shut down or or
sold and so all different types of industries everything for a manufacturing to professional services
and and everything in between and in that process I I really got exposed to
the idea of how much an operating system could help early in my career I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants
later on I used an operating system in my businesses and the experience was vastly different for me and vastly
different for the folks that that were part of my teams and so I really became a believer so later on in my career when
I moved really out of the operator role into more of an advisory role I began to help people to implement an
operating system in their in their own business which is out of course I met Gino and and really how we got to where
we are today and Gino Wichman of course the author of BOS in traction I gotta
tell you I think I’m pretty good as a water-treatment is what my company does but I didn’t know what I didn’t know
about running a business and that’s what I just found so incredibly awesome about
having a system the EOS system I’m able to fill in the gaps of how we do
business but now we have a platform in order to do that so I want to thank you
guys for coming up with that I can’t tell you how many successes that we’ve had because you came up with that
program which you know well Gino gets all the credit but I tell you it warms my heart to to hear people taking the
the work and taking the system and doing something with it because I’m all about helping the entrepreneur be successful
and you know realize the the freedom that comes with the entrepreneurial dream instead of just getting stuck in
what something they thought was going to be great but turns out to be basically the worst hourly job they could have imagined well it’s funny you mention
that because I always thought that there was something wrong with me because I am really good and you’re laughing at that
I’m sure you get that all huh I’ve always thought that I was really good at coming up with ideas and all of these
things that the company could be doing and given people pep talks and sent him in the right direction but the day to
day plotting of making sure that everything’s coming together I was never good at that and until I read the
traction book I thought that there was something wrong with me and I was not a good business owner do you find a lot of
people feel that way for sure and and you know I think what’s going on there trace a lot of it is people who start
companies and go through the early part of the journey they become great at things out of necessity and and so they
they’re able to do a lot of things just because they have to and nobody’s there to help them but then later on you know
they they can get the opportunity or create the opportunity where they can begin to hand some of those things off
to folks who are naturally great at them so that they can focus on the things that they’re naturally great and the
difference is energy you know for example something like marketing early in my career I did a lot of marketing
stuff and you know I could do it and and eventually I could kind of get there and get done what I needed to get done but
later on when I saw somebody who was great at that and how easy it was for them and how quickly they could come
with to really you know fantastic solutions like wow you know huh why why would I want to be trying to do that and
you know denying them the opportunity to do it when I can you know let that go let them handle it let someone who’s
great handle whatever and let me focus in my sweet spot where it’s something where I don’t feel like something’s wrong with me but I feel like all the
things that I’m working on are the things that I’m great at that I love that really nobody but me can do well
we’re going to get into specific terms specifically the visionary and the integrator which is what your book rocket fuel is based on if we can back
up for a second and talk about traction at a OS for somebody tuning in today that have no idea what those terms are
how would you explain that to them so I would say that a OS is the entrepreneurial operating system and it
is a system for running your business that helps you do three things that we
call vision traction and healthy where vision means you really are crystal clear on where you’re trying to go and
how you’re going to get there and everybody in the organization side to side top to bottom is all a hundred percent on the same page about what that
looks like then traction is about you know stepping off to the real world every day and
beginning to see a reality that looks more and more like that picture you have of the future and so the picture the
reality getting closer to the picture gives you a sense of hey we’re making progress that progress gives you more confidence that confidence gives you
more energy to tackle whatever challenges you might be facing day today and then finally the third thing healthy
is about the team so when you’re sitting there on the you know the leadership team of the company you’re looking across the table into the eyes or the
other folks that are on this team with you you should have a real feeling of confidence that you know what we have the right folks here to do the stuff
that we need to get done there’s nothing we can’t talk about we’re not afraid to bring things up we bring it up put it on
the table and we talk it through and we use it or we figure out how to use it to get closer to this place we’re all
trying to go it’s not that we’re all buddy-buddy necessarily but it just feels good to work with these folks because we’re
all getting so much stuff done so vision traction healthy a OS is an operating
system you can use to run your business to help you achieve that state do you
find that people have trouble talking with their leadership team and letting go of some of these decisions that
they’re making solely with themselves when they first get started in this system yeah for sure and I thought for a
long time that more often than not that was about you know control issues and and it’s just people you know wanting to
have control and people who just are just kind of wired like that more and more I see and particularly at the top
of the organization what I’m learning is that it’s more about trust and you know
I’m willing to let go of something to someone who I can trust to take care of it who I can trust to treat it with the
same care and concern that I would if you know if I was doing it myself and
you know once you’ve got that trust established which is hard work and takes time but once you’re there and you can
really hand it off and you’ve got great people that are that are very capable you know then it it frees up a whole new
world and I can speak that it definitely does well let’s get into some terminology so specifically when we set
up our accountability charts and the course that’s all in the book but there are two roles at the very top called the
visionary and the integrator what are they so the visionary is sort of what you
would traditionally think of is like a founding entrepreneur they’re normally the one who is full of ideas and they’re
spitting out maybe 20 new ideas a week now some number of those ideas may be crazy but in there somewhere are the you
know the goal the moonshot the kind of thing that can really move the needle and take you to the next level they’re
they’re thinking about the future they’re looking at where things are headed and trying to figure out how to best position the company to take
advantage of trends in the marketplace and they’re great at talking to external you know big relationships or whether
that’s big customers or big vendors or people in the community or strategic partners or whatever that might be
they’re great at all of that kind of stuff the integrator on the other hand is much more execution and
follow-through focus they’re great at getting stuff done through others they’re great at
leadership and management and pulling together all the different other leaders and departments of the company to get
them aligned and working in sync and coordination with each other when those leaders tend to get you know crossways
with each other and are unable to agree you know if we don’t have some way to break through that a lot of times the
organization kind of gets stuck when you’ve got an integrator there they can sort of step into that and hear all sides for the greater good and in
alignment with the shared vision and and make a decision so that we can we can get the the company unstuck again and
moving forward always being decisive and always making progress and executing so
for someone that’s just hearing these terms today how do they know if they are a visionary or an integrator well the
first suggestion I would make is on our web-site rocket fuel now.com we have an
assessment and so just go on there and there are actually two assessments there’s a visionary assessment and an
integrator assessment and I encourage everyone to take both because you want to find out how much you are of each of
those and you might surprise yourself now know in caveat you need to be really honest with yourself don’t try to game
it but really you know answer truthfully and if you will do that it will point out just kind of where on the on the
scale you are in terms of being you know more of one than the other and it kind of specifically where you’re high and
low and that’s really really an important first step to understanding you know yourself and where you fit into
that equation I took that assessment and I am i horrible integrator it told me do
you remember what your number was it was it was very high with visionary it was
very low with the integrator and I remember my facilitator was well that’s
interesting I really haven’t seen them that far apart before but I don’t remember what the numbers were I’ll have to look those up and get that yeah so
that’s that’s good though it’s easier in in some ways when you are you know just kind of purely one or the other
sometimes that helps you let go easier right because you know you’re not strong in that other stuff but some people who
are closer together it can be it can be more difficult because they are capable well weather naturally or just through
you know the reality of the experience they’ve had to go through you know sometimes it can create a little little confusion they got to kind of work
through what are some of the best ways that a visionary and integrator can work together yeah so that’s a that’s a great
question so if you think about just these folks are very differently wired
you know to begin with so if we don’t put some structure around that the tendency is gonna be for them to really
butt heads and to some degree the greater that polarity so the stronger wired the visionary is and the stronger
wired the integrator is to be what they what role they’re playing you know that polarity is a is a powerful charge so
that can actually make the relationship even more and more powerful but it can also make it subject to you know the
risk of more and more friction so we talk about what we call the five rules which are five ways to work together to
take that natural friction and really blend it into something that helps us you know move the company close to where
we want to go that the first of those rules is what we call simply staying on the same page have you heard of that one
I haven’t and we do same page meetings very regularly excellent how often do you do them oh we do that every two
weeks every two weeks and how long do they typically last we’ve had some that have lasted the entire day we’ve had
some that have lasted through lunch and then we just go about our business we try to get take care of everything
that’s on that page perfect so so trace what I will tell you and in my experience working with you know tons of
these visionary integrator pairs almost always the root of whatever problems
challenges they’re having is they’re not doing a good job of staying on the same page so that’s why that’s rule number
one and the fact that you’re doing that and the way you’re describing it sounds like you’re doing a great job of it but
you know the same page meeting is it couldn’t be a simpler agenda basically you check in with each other on a you
know a human level you know this is a very important relationship I’ve got some clients to leave and refer to their
their visionary integrator counterpart is their business spouse you know so I mean you really want to check in with
these folks and understand what’s going on in their world and and connect with them so that’s the first part from there you collectively generate your
choose list which can be anything that you’re you know concerned about being on the same page on thinking you need to
get on the same page on you know that they’re doing that’s tripping you up and making it difficult for you or something
that you’re concerned you don’t want to trip them up and whatever it is you just lay it all out there you prioritize it
and then you start working through it IDs in those issues in in terms of most important things first and take as much
time as you need sometimes you know it doesn’t take a long time other times you know you like you said you might end up spending the whole day but if you’ll
commit to that discipline at least once a month the the dividends are tremendous
in terms of how powerful it will make your relationship so that’s one so there’s five of these rules the second
one we call no end runs and it has to do with you know playing and behave inconsistently with the the
accountability chart structure in terms of making decisions and giving direction so you know a common problem that we’ll
see out of the gate is in an organization that has not previously had an integrator the leadership is very
well trained to go directly to the visionary with everything and so you put an integrator in place sort of in
between there and all of a sudden people still want to go past the integrator and go directly to the visionary and the
problem with that is if the if the visionary lets that happen and so they entertain those conversations and they
do answer the question and make the decision and give the direction then it
really has the effect of cutting the integrator off at the knees in terms of their ability to be effective right and
so we we want you to commit to not let that happen as the visionary and ask
what we call the question so if somebody’s showing that kind of behavior and coming around the integrator to you we want you to ask them you can listen
but stop short of making a decision or giving direction and in fact tell them
you know that’s great I’ve heard you but now you know the question I have for you is you know who’s gonna tell the
integrator you gonna tell them or am I gonna tell because somebody needs to tell them and you direct that back to
that integrator and what we see in practice is with if you’ll do that you know within about thirty sixty days you
will completely drive that end run behavior out of the organization now
there’s another kind of in I’ll be curious if you’ve ever been guilty of this one this is when the
visionary goes around the integrator into the leadership or even further into
the organization and begins to make decision and give direction down there jumping over you know one or more levels
of leadership that you have in your structure you ever done that so because my integrator listens to the show I have
to answer that honestly and and yes I have I will tell you as a missionary I try not to
iiiiii I do I do get a little bit impatient with how long things take sometimes so I want to speed them up a
little bit I know I’m hurt in the process yeah you are and in the way that she hurt the process again is you you know
it basically it inhibits their ability to be effective and you can again you’re kind of training people to come back to
you so you know it’s better in the long term when you can work that through the leadership doesn’t mean you don’t talk
to people I want communication to be happening all over the place so go talk to people ask questions get information and then that stuff you know in your
case should feedback into you know your weekly level 10 with the whole leadership team the same page meetings
you’re having with your integrator so that they’ve got the information the urgency the whatever that’s coming
through your head or in through your sense to make you want to nudge that make you want to push that and let them
do that make that clear that that’s what you need you’ve got something that still needs to happen so between the two of
those if we can eliminate the end runs that goes a long way to making this relationship more powerful a third one
on the list is the integrator as the tiebreaker so you know the integrator has to be able to sit in the middle of
those those disagreements that will happen on the leadership team where you know marketing says we need to go one
way an operation says we need to go to the other and they just can’t seem to work it out and we need an impartial
person to sit between and listen to the whole story and listen to all the moving parts and ultimately be able to make the
call so we can get unstuck and moving forward again you know whether it’s the best decision or not you know what we
believe is that making the decision is the most important thing you know sometimes you’re not going to get it quite right but we’re not stuck we’re
not just sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting which so many organizations will fall into that trap that make sense absolutely it does the
fourth one is them playing as an employee when working in the business you know so this is we call
it the owner employee rules of the game and this is really challenging in partnerships where you may have three or
four or five different partners or owners in the business that may play in a variety of different you know seats in
the accountability chart and a tendency a natural tendency again is for them to want to play the owner card when they’re
just you know in a meeting or making a decision or or whatever they want to
take their employee hat off and put their owner hat back on and sort of get special treatment and when you do that it really blows the integrity of the
whole system and so the discipline here is you know owners have a right to their share of the profits they have a right
to their say in the owners decision making process whatever that’s you know limited to and however that works they
do not have a right to employment so you know their rights as an employee are the same as any other employee that we would
want to put in there so we need them actually if they’re gonna play as an employee to be the ultimate employee and
really setting the example for how we want all other employees to play so they should be great and not trying to you
know throw down the owner card but you know really set in a stellar example and playing consistently by the rules as an
employee just like all the other ones too and then they’re gonna be able to deal with any owner specific issues you
know information they want concerns that they want to express you know different ideas they want to bring up they can do
that in a mechanism that we call the owners box and so there’s a place for that to happen and then decisions come
out of the owners box into the leadership team and then they flow through the organization in a systematic
way that’s very structured and consistent and aligned and has integrity so that everybody can really be playing
the same game question on that one yeah let me ask so I can honestly say I I’m
sure I’ll get corrected if I’m not correct but I don’t think I’ve ever said no we’re going to do this because I own
this company but I know I joke around with it I say well you know if we do this what’s the worst thing happen I own
the company it’s my decision I saw I joke around a little bit I’m not forcing anything but I do bring that up just in
a joking manner and i hurting the team by doing that yes so I would just be aware of that so when
I’m working with a leadership team I’ll frequently ask the question how many owners are in the room today and it’s kind of a trick question because you
know some people will want to say well we’re all owners we’re all thinking like owners some people will literally give
me the answer for you know the two or three that have an ownership stake that happened to be sitting in there the answer I’m looking for is none so when
that group is playing as a leadership team they are their stewards on behalf
of the ownership of the company in their specific role on the accountability charge so they’re playing as a
leadership team and we want that unit to really work together as a unit you know with clear direction and a clear vision
that they’re trying to execute execute on and make happen so you know just be I don’t want to be careful of it now and your structure is there more than one
owner are you the only owner I have the majority ownership and then my integrator has some ownership as well
okay so you know this becomes a bigger issue when I’ve got multiple people playing at different levels of the
organization so you can imagine if a salesperson was an owner so they’re not
on the leadership team you know but they’re having to take direction from the Sales Leader and be held accountable
for sales results and whatever but they’re they’re an owner right so you can see how that they might feel like
they’re kind of out of the loop or you know they’re not they’re not right so so that’s the situation where it can become
really really tricky and so that’s why we want to have that owners box mechanism for them to get in the loop
and and be fully informed and again access to their rights as a you know should to share the profits and I was
saying that than the the owners decision-making process but at the same time they are held just as accountable
for sales results as the other sales person that’s sitting next to him right so there’s no difference for them they
shouldn’t be paid any different they should be held the same level of accountability you know and really if they’re an owner they like I’m saying
with the emphasis is we want them to be set in the ultimate example of the you know how we want great employees to show
up in the organization it’ll make sense absolutely and so then the last last one of our five rules is to maintain mutual
respect and that’s just about the level of the relationship you know the integrator is not the the lackey of the
visionary you know it’s an eyeball to eyeball relationship and you’re you’re mutually invested in it it’s got
to work for both of you you know you’re gonna spend a lot of time and effort getting on the same page that’s what’s gonna make it be
successful and you know if it’s if it’s that level of a you know a partnership approach you know and you’re mutually
respectful of each other neither one of you should be saying anything critical of the other one anywhere else you know
if you’re in block together in your same page meeting that’s the time to air all that stuff but when you come out of
there you don’t don’t criticize and complain to the rest of the organization that’s just gonna diminish the whole thing for everybody that’s it so if the
if the visionary integrator will commit to and play consistently by those five rules they are gonna fully maximize the
power of that relationship that’s a great outline of the five great things
to do and I’m gonna make sure I think we’re doing all those but I’m going to make sure that we are let me ask you a question on our same page meetings
because we’re a smaller company and in addition to being the visionary I’m also
in charge of the sales department and in addition to my integrator being the integrator he’s also in charge of our
operations department and we we try to have our meetings where we’re talking
about just high-level visionary integrator items but we always seem to
bring departmental issues into that meeting is that okay so I would say it
depends you know I would want to partition so that you don’t compromise
one for the other you know there’s gonna be a tendency just because it convenience you know
when you’re together to kind of bounce around and kind of cover all this stuff so I would want to partition it so that
you make sure that you do all your same page stuff and if we’ve handled all the same page stuff okay now we’re basically
changing hats now I’m putting my sales hat on and you’re putting your integrator hat on or whatever and you
kind of go into that mode because the tricky thing for you trace is you know you as the Sales Leader it sounds like
you know your integrator should be holding you accountable in that seat right and that’s a little different conversation a little different meeting
than what’s going on in your same page meeting as the visionary and the integrator that’s an excellent point I will tell you I am accountable to the
leadership team for the sales that I bring in however in the same page meeting we really don’t talk about that that’s
really not not brought up so but but I hear what you’re saying and I’m excited to make sure that we are doing some of
these things that you’re mentioning yeah and you and you have a lot to do with that because you can understand its it’s difficult you know when you put an
integrator in the middle like that where they’re holding you know the visionary accountable you know you’ve got to give
a permission to do that absolutely and and then you’ve got to be okay with it or it won’t work it’ll be problematic
but you know if you give them permission and you know convince them that you mean it and then react positively you know
when you’re being held accountable and we all need to be held accountable right I mean we’re all human and we’re all prone to you know procrastinating things
and over committing and you know all the silly kind of things we do as people so that’s why we need somebody that you
know we care about and trust and respect sitting on the other side looking us in the eyeball and going did you do what you said you were gonna do absolutely
mark you have already mentioned a couple but what are some of the big pitfalls that you found where visionary and
integrators aren’t working together well yes so so the number one thing you know
again just for emphasis is that staying on the same page they get out of the habit they don’t fully commit to the
discipline and so they drift and they they get out of sync and that always
leads to trouble and it leads to trouble quickly and it can lead to big trouble so that’s really the number one thing
really the trace the answer to this question all goes back to if they’re breaking any of those five rules they’re
gonna end up stumbling now here’s an idea you you said you were gonna kind of you know recommit to going back and
making sure that in your relationship you guys are doing that there’s another tool I’ll point you to that may be helpful we call it the rocket fuel power
index again you can find that on the site rocket fuel now calm and just in
the resources and basically there’s eight questions on there that are all about the mindsets or the disciplines
that you need to be great at and we’ve got them divided out into levels and so you can look at one of those you know
like you know how aligned are you on the vision or how well are you staying in sync and we described different states of development and what
I encourage you to do and for your listeners all of them to do if they have a counterpart like this is each of you
should fill that that scorecard out the rocket fuel power index on your own so
you should look at it read through it fill it out on your own have your counterpart fill it out on their own and
then both of you bring that to your next same page meeting and here’s what it’ll show you you’ll see some where you’ll
both have scored yourselves really high and you’ll be like good we’re doing a good job we just need to keep it up you’ll see others where you both have
scored yourselves really low and you’d be like alright there’s our opportunity there’s our thing that we can do better
that’s gonna make this relationship more powerful and then you’ll see some other situations where you have scored them
significantly differently and that’s a perfect thing for you to be talking about is to you why do you think it’s
like that you know I saw it like this and you guys are clearly not on the same page about one like that
so that’s topic you need to spend a little bit more time on to dive into and figure out you know why you’re not on the same page and then and then get
yourselves back on that make sense it absolutely does and it just went on our agenda for our next meeting
awesome love that it’s a successful call just because you did that absolutely well I know you work with a
lot of smaller businesses and and there are a lot of small businesses that listen to this program in some cases
they don’t have a payroll to have a separate visionary and a separate integrator so there’s one person that
does both how do you do that so a couple different responses to that so so one I
still want you to call them out as two seats on the accountability chart I want you two to have that awareness that
there’s two different functions going on here that are really different and if I’m doing both of them out of necessity
I want to begin to understand which one I like more which one I’m better at right and so the other one I’m just kind
of fighting through for now because I’m not big enough yet or I don’t have the money yet or I’m not ready yet for
whatever reason okay so so get clear on that at the beginning the next thing is I want you to entertain the possibility
of a fractional integrator okay so since we wrote the book really before we
publish the book we started to see a pretty good movement in the market towards people offering fractional
integrator services and what I would tell you from from watching this a number of times is in many cases if you
can’t afford a full-time integrator you’re still gonna be better off if you have somebody come in one day a week or
a couple of days a week that’s really a good integrator that can begin to show you what you’re missing by not having a
great integrator and help you make some progress kind of moving down the path because the reality is if you’re doing
both you’re probably not doing one of them very well either because you’re
just not good at it you’re not capable of it or because you naturally keep gravitating back to this thing that
you’re just more naturally wired for and so the other side is what gets neglected
so you know splitter Mountain accountability chart be aware of where you’re at and what’s going on with an
eye toward you know what I’m not giving one of these the full attention it deserves next step might be looking at a
fractional integrator and sometimes those relationships grow from one day to two days to four days to a full-time
relationship some people like it as a way to kind of try before you buy or kind of dating to make sure that they
really like the person and the person fits in there in their team so a lot of good things to consider there as an
option if you’re not yet at a place where you feel like you can pull the trigger on a full-time integrator mark
what are some of your success stories with businesses that you’ve worked with there’s one I’ll give you where it’s a
technology company with what I would call a you know raging visionary man this guy way way out there and you know
tons of good ideas sort of classically trapped in the inability to execute on
all of them has a person come in initially as a consultant just kind of
helping them with this and that that that position evolved into a full-time integrator and really was able to
harness the best of the great ideas that the visionaries had and and for a change
really have a world-class leader and manager that’s that’s directing and and and
guiding and and pulling together the leadership team so they really got a ton of focus from the time that I first
started working with these guys through the implementation of EOS through this individual becoming a full-time
integrator you know what I’ll tell you is at the beginning they were getting you know kind of sniffs and offers at
one level to acquire the company and by the end about three or four years later
they actually got a cash offer that was 80 times that Wow and it was it was
frankly too good for us to pass up and it all went back to their discipline
around you know structure and having a great integrator and implementing a OS
that they made this thing you know a high-performing machine and you know the market reflected and and recognized that
value so is that is that a success I think that is a success and after
hearing that I’m sure their listeners out there that want to learn more how can they do that yes so if you want to
you learn more about the the visionary integrator the stuff that we’ve talked about rocket fuel now comm is the place
to go you got tons of resources on there the assessments are on there the rocket fuel power index is on there there’s
other resources that we can point you to you can get a hold of me on Twitter or
LinkedIn at-at Mark C winters or is the handle on pretty much all of those so
either of those would be the first places I would recommend that you go for more information excellent and I’ll make sure to have all
of those on my show notes page great well I hope my audience enjoyed this I know I did I’ve got about three pages of
notes that I’m takin that we’re gonna make sure that we’re doing in our meetings so it was successful for me at
least for that reason but if you’ve got a couple more minutes left I would like to ask you a couple lightning round
questions and these are questions that I asked all of my guests just to see how they’re different now they’re the same love it let’s do it all right so I am a
huge Back to the Future fan so if you will put yourself into that movie we are climbing into the DeLorean we are
setting the flux capacitor in the circuits back to the first day you became a business consultant what have
you learned throughout your career that you’re going to give advice to your self on the first day of when you started as
a consultant what advice is that so the first thing that comes to mind when I hear that question is to never stop learning so
you’re never going to know it all there’s always more to learn you know mastery is a very long path
it’s an endless path and you know things change and every interaction every opportunity to learn you know just
embrace it and and and soak it in the other thing that that I would tell
myself is that don’t underestimate how much someone else values the experience
that you’ve had you know a lot of times stuff that we’ve done where we think you
know everybody’s done that stuff that we think is is easy we think everybody thinks it’s easy and the reality is you
know we’re all unique and we’ve all been down a one of a kind you know pathway
and other people can really find tremendous value in that and if and if
there’s something you can tell them something you can teach them to help them not step in that hole that you
stepped in or helped them get there faster because of this this and this and they don’t have to take the time to
learn the lessons the hard way that you did there’s tremendous value in that so I think that’s that’s a that’s the other
big one it’s just don’t take that for granted there’s it there’s a lot of value in what you know and what you’ve done great advice what are the last
three books that you’ve read last three books so let me give you three recent
ones on out there exactly the last three but fairly recent so one is leaders eat
last by simon Sinek great book yeah so I love how that kind of breaks down actually the chemistry of
the brain that’s that’s something that I thought was very interesting in that
another one would be essentialism read that one I have not read that one yeah
so basically that just drives home the point of the power of focus and the power of really kind of getting to your
you know your your one thing that you that you do and your trying to focus on instead of trying to
do everything and how that can dilute your energy and and spread you around and then the the third one I would give
you is is The Millionaire Next Door so someone recently you know kind of I’d
read that one before a long long time ago and I guess they’ve reissued it or something and kind of reuptake it some
of the statistics but it’s just a really interesting look at the landscape of you
know financial success or wealth and and you know some of the patterns and habits that are are really there are different
than the things that we hear or may may be conditioned to think just through the
media awesome well if they were to make a movie about you who plays you and this one is hard
this I don’t know why with this one this one I answer a lot of these different questions and I haven’t heard that one
before I haven’t thought about it for some reason so I’m gonna go with this
sounds crazy but I’m gonna go with Harrison Ford for fun why well you know
I just a number of different characters that he’s played course really love the Indiana Jones character absolutely and
and just the the adventure I I like to think about life as a series of
adventures so that’s what pops to mind for me perfect I will tell you that is a
popular answer on scaling up so you join quite a few that that have said Harrison Ford could play them so my last question
if you could talk to anybody throughout history who would it be with and why
alright so this is I wrestled with this one too and I scratched out a couple of
answers here before I’m gonna tell you this one but the one I landed on was Moses do you want to guess why um
actually no I don’t want to guess how about you tell us Moses lived a really
long time and and he saw a lot of stuff and experienced you know some some
amazing things and so you know it’s really just that it’s kind of the the breath of of insight and knowledge I
would hope to be able to get from talking to somebody that that lived through and experienced all the things that he did great answer
well mark this was a great interview I’ve learned a ton I think people in the scaling-up nation have learned a lot I
know there are a lot of people that are on the EOS system in the scaling-up nation so thanks so much for coming on
and chatting with us thank you trace I’ve had a great time so for all you business owners out there I hope that
this has blown your mind you’re thinking you know what there is a better way
there’s nothing wrong with me that I can’t do every single job to perfection
and I can let go of certain things when the right people are in place so I can’t
say enough good things about the entire series in the EOS platform so if you want to read the book that Mark wrote
it’s called rocket fuel so go to scaling-up h2o dot-com forward slash rocket fuel one word and that will take
you to an affiliate link where you can purchase that now the book that started at all by Gino Wichman talks about the
EOS system if you’re interested in that that’s scaling up h2o comm forward slash
traction and that will take you to an affiliate link for that I am NOT going
to do questions today because I hope that this has blown you away and you are
now thinking outside of the box and how you can run your business you can
actually make things easier not only on yourself but with your people as well if
you read traction you’ll see that you can describe your vision to everybody on
your team making everybody involved and when people get involved in their own
destiny magic happens now for those people out there that aren’t owners you did not waste the last
45 minutes to an hour of your time I want you to think about you are a team
player so what are all the things that you can do to elevate your team so everybody has a
homework assignment I hope you enjoy today’s show and I look forward to talking with you next time on scaling up
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