Working in various leadership roles in the manufacturing industry throughout my career, I’ve experienced similar challenges to those that the leadership teams of the organizations I help as an EOS Implementer face. I started at a Fortune 500 company in Allentown. After eight years, I left to work at a small entrepreneurial business in southern York County where I served in several leadership roles—from market manager to global business division general manager to vice president of procurement and others—for the next 27 years. Then, a manufacturer of home elevators and other mobility devices in the Harrisburg area recruited me as President and CEO. They were losing money at the time, and they hired me in September 2014 to turn things around.
In my first week, I discovered the situation was even more complicated and dire than the business owners realized. I remember thinking, “What did I do? Why did I leave a perfectly good company with plenty of cash for this?”
To say it wasn’t easy is an understatement. But ultimately, the experience helped me become a better leader.
The first thing I had to do was reduce headcount because the company was spending more money than it was taking in. That was tough, but I told the leadership team we had to reduce the workforce by 10% then or everyone would lose their jobs by February of the next year.
We stopped the bleeding and started to turn sales and cash flow around. I started building a stronger leadership team, and we continued to make progress.
After a few years, the company was in a much better place, but I felt we could do better. I just couldn’t put my finger on exactly how.
I first learned about EOS while hosting a Vistage meeting in Lancaster in 2016. The speaker that day gave me a copy of “Get A Grip: How to Get Everything You Want from Your Entrepreneurial Business,” a book by Gino Wickman and Mike Paton.
I started reading it and a light bulb went off. I said to myself, “This is what we’re missing!”
I called EOS Worldwide and they referred me to EOS Implementer Hank O'Donnell out of Philadelphia—at the time, there were no Implementers in our immediate area.
So, Hank visited our company and gave us the 90-Minute Meeting, which is always the first step in the EOS Process® for learning what EOS is about and getting to know the Implementer.
I called him the very next day and said, “The team and I are in. Let’s do this.”
So we scheduled our first session day, Focus Day™, in September of that year.
Our next two years of implementing EOS were transformational for the company. Starting with the leadership team and then throughout the whole company, it essentially changed the business.
In the second year of the journey, we got really deep and identified the root cause of why the company was struggling to grow its sales. In-depth discussions about the problem in our Level 10 Meetings™ led us to discover the issue had nothing to do with the sales team—our business model was to blame. We were selling wholesale elevators to a national network of independent dealers while several competitors were selling directly to builders and undercutting our dealers’ prices.
It took a while, but we got the board of directors to agree to let us install and service elevators in the Philadelphia metro area and New Jersey and create a new division to support those efforts.
It wasn’t rocket science to figure out we were going to make a lot more money. Instead of selling an elevator for $13,000 to a dealer and about $1,000 profit, we could sell and install that same elevator for $28,000 and make significantly more profit per unit.
And so we bought a trailer, and we bought a van—and the rest is history. The division expanded to have a full fleet of trailers and vans and the company doubled in size.
I don’t believe we would have made the same decisions to position the company for growth nor achieved the success we did if we hadn’t implemented the EOS system.
In 2018, as I saw things were moving in the right direction, I basically went to the owners and said, “You don't need me anymore.”
They had a strong leadership team with a capable person they could promote to take on my role as President and CEO.
I was so impressed with EOS that I wanted to share my experience and pursue the opportunity to help other business leaders transform their organizations with the system.
In late September 2018, I went through the EOS Professional Implementer Boot Camp™ training and signed on my first client in January 2019, my second client in February, my third in March, my fourth in April, my fifth in July, and a sixth client in October.
To date, I have worked with 41 clients and completed 305 full-day sessions.
Generally, after about 10 full-day sessions over the course of approximately two years, leadership teams are ready to graduate from EOS. However, some clients continue beyond two years because they like having me in the room as an outside third-party facilitator.
Being an EOS Implementer has been an ideal path for me because I love to teach (I discovered that in grad school when serving as a teacher’s assistant) and I’m a good facilitator. I find it fulfilling to work with business leaders and help them dig deep and find the answers and solutions to their challenges. As an EOS Implementer, I’m not a consultant. I’m a teacher, coach, and facilitator. The answer is always in the room with the people—the leadership and team members. My job is to bring out that answer along the way.
As a part of the EOS community, I enjoy the culture of camaraderie and willingness to support fellow EOS Implementers. When I started, there were only two of us in Central PA and now there are seven of us locally. We all help each other, referring clients to each other if we believe they’re the best fit.
I also appreciate the continuous opportunities for professional development. We have regional and national meetings and calls where we sharpen our skill sets and newer Implementers can learn from those of us who are more experienced. It’s a special community with a mindset of abundance and love, not scarcity and fear. We view each other as colleagues and collaborators, not competitors, even when we work in the same geographic area.
When I started as an EOS Implementer, approximately 8,000 businesses were running on EOS with the help of an Implementer. Now, there are an estimated 25,000, and the goal is to reach 100,000 businesses running on EOS with an implementor by 2030.
Like all EOS Implementers, I am passionate about making a positive mark on the world by helping business owners and their leadership teams get everything they want out of their businesses and live better lives. That’s our contribution to society. It’s our “why.”
I hope you enjoyed learning about my experience with EOS—as a client and an Implementer. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to learn more on either front and explore how working with an EOS Implementer can transform your organization.
