Lee Handley describes himself as a “recovering accountant and a reluctant entrepreneur.” Listen as he describes his journey: running a marketing agency, consulting to marketing agencies, and being one of the founders of Trim Tab Brewery. Then a client mentioned “Traction” by Gino Wickham and that book set Lee on his path to being an EOS implementer in Birmingham, Alabama. The EOS Traction system can help business owners get their business on track by providing a common language and an “operating system” -accountability, vision, team health, and more.
Lee Handley: https://implementer.eosworldwide.com/lee-handley/
March ENRG meeting: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enrg-birmingham-chapter-march-meeting-tickets-1982037280862
Transcript (edited for clarity)
Gary Smith: Hey everybody, this is Gary Smith with Nectar Bridge. This is the Nectar Bridge Podcast, and I have a good friend and a special guest, Lee Handley on here. I do back office support for small businesses. We help with accounting, operations and software support. I met Lee a few months ago. He is an EOS implementer. I’ll let him talk about himself and what that means. But first, I wanted you, Lee, to introduce yourself, because I always think people do a better job of telling what they do than, than I can.
Lee Handley: Thank you, Gary. My name is Lee Handley. I am a recovering accountant and reluctant entrepreneur. I started out as a CFO in the ad agency space, and quickly saw patterns where they were getting underwater. I was basically brought in to do turnaround jobs and realized that I liked turning the businesses around more than I liked actually managing them. So that’s where I got my first entrepreneur bite, I guess we’ll say. I started a consulting company around 2008, designed to implement my best practices to ad agencies around the world. I worked with about 160 leadership teams during that time.
Second company I started was a local brewery trim tab that was more of the bootstrapping, typical entrepreneurial business that you think of – that’s when I really started shifting my mindset towards where I am today. I’ll get back to that, but that’s where I started noticing some patterns with how we were managing the business and how destructive a leadership team that is not on the same page can be. So – plant that seed. Around 2019, I had a client in Miami who asked me if I’d read this book called Traction, and I knew I’d better read that before I show up and try to help them with their business.
I read it and it stopped me in my tracks. I mean, it highlighted all the issues that I had with the brewery. It highlighted – it named for me all the issues I have with being a consultant, the guy with all the answers. I realized it was time to switch teams,
It took me longer than it should have to realize that you could actually implement EOS professionally.
Gary Smith: I wanna jump in and ask a couple of questions, sweep a couple of corners with what you’ve described so far. First, when you describe going into the brewery or starting the brewery, and I believe you had some partners with that as well, right? The other experience you described was, you know, service businesses, web agencies, and then doing consulting for web agencies. Had you done any retail or restaurant, you know, product business. Because the brewery obviously has a tap room. They do canning. They have trucks! You know, they have all kinds of physical product things going on. And had you had any experience with that before, or did some of your partners?
Lee Handley: Absolute zero experience.
Gary Smith (laughing) Okay.
Lee Handley: More of, to use the EOS language, more of a visionary mindset. I get focused on a goal and I see nothing else, and I just run towards that goal as hard as I can. Nothing gets in the way. I deal with the aftermath after. So, I had zero experience outside of professional services. I just knew that we needed to raise money. We needed a building, we needed a brand, we needed a product. And so that’s where my focus was.
Gary Smith: I gotcha. So my second question, which actually does kinda segueway -and you’re already laying the foundation for what got you into EOS with that client who mentions the book. And I’ll share my experience too. Both before and after I met you, I have also talked to clients who say “Have you heard of EOS?” Or, EOS gets into the discussion. My own first exposure to EOS, which was very fleeting and shallow, frankly – I met somebody who was an EOS implementer, I’ll just say around 2010, 2012, and we didn’t get very far. I actually recommended that the owners of the business I was working for talk to him, but they didn’t really take me up on the suggestion.
But I did read or at least scan the book. I was impressed and in my subsequent experiences I’ve found today that when somebody mentions EOS, it’s kinda like finding out you’re in the same church. It’s like, hey, we speak a lot of the same language. You still have to test this, but there’s a better chance that we’re gonna share some goals and priorities and so forth. And what I really love about it is, it means they’re serious about growing the business and not just growing it, but making it better. So that’s a lot of why I really wanted to have you on today. So to just, you know, ask the question – Well, I’m gonna ask this question next. So when the client in Miami said, “Have you read this book?” – I know I would’ve been tempted to say “yes” and read it on the plane on the way down there, but I don’t know. I won’t ask, I won’t ask directly. Did you do that?
Lee Handley (laughing): Did I lie?
Gary Smith (laughing): I hope you didn’t.
Lee Handley: Of course not, as far as you know.
Gary Smith: Of course not, as far as anybody knows. I may or may not have overcooked certain promises. I probably would’ve hedged it. Something like, “I have heard of that!” So with that origin story of a client or prospective client who says, “Hey, have you read about, or heard about EOS?” – take it from there. You obviously have studied it a great deal since then. Describe what EOS is in a little more detail and, you know, how has it helped you deliver value to your clients?
Lee Handley: Gary, I think you said it well. You said “speaking the same language,” and I think, on that trusty flight to Miami, as I’m reading the book, the “aha” moment was – it gave a common language to the things that were in my head, the things that are in every person’s head – the simple time honored tools of accountability, execution, vision, team health. It gives you a name for them. And when it does, when that happens, now you have a way it becomes portable. You have a way to transfer it, to delegate it, to teach it.
None of the things that we talk about in EOS are theoretical, they’re all practical. They’re not complicated. Anyone can do it. And I think that’s when I started falling in love with it for those reasons. You know – what is EOS? The other thing I liked about it is -it’s a complete system. This was giving me something that can cover any aspect of an ad agency at the time. I work with any type of business, but at the time it was ad agencies, and I was more focused on the operations, the back office, the tech side. But this covered everything. Now we’ve got a complete solution. And then, just as I mentioned, it gives a common language that we can all share for simple, proven, practical tools. And that really, really stuck the landing with me. From there, you start to see, well, why would you need that? Well, it’s to help you get what you want out of your business. I never really thought about it that way.
Gary Smith: Absolutely. I feel like Johnny Carson, you know, there’s a higher tech way of doing this. Like I could have put a graphic up on the screen. But Lee, show the copy of the book. Everybody’s probably seen this book in a bookstore. It’s extremely popular and a lot of people have simply read the book – you call it self-implementing. Basically the book provides the complete recipe. But I would like to talk about what happens, like if I as a business with say, 15, 20 people, million or so in revenue, and I come to you and say, Lee, how do I get started on this? What is Lee’s process for implementing EOS for a client?
Lee Handley: Well, I actually show the client how they can do it their own. We don’t have any secrets. Again, everything we do is super simple. I’ll show you exactly how the system works and how to implement it. It’s like a chef inviting you into the restaurant. I tell them it takes about 90 minutes. I need your team, the leadership team present, and we’re going to decide if this is a fit. The goal of meeting is figuring out – is this going to work? For you and your business, do you have the commitment and discipline to really, really drive and execute results? Then I show you exactly how we put the system in place step by step.
Gary Smith: Okay. Yeah, and you, as I understand it, if the client does agree to this and it is a fit, then sort of the architecture of EOS in a proper implementation cycle is a series of meetings that leadership has to buy into – talk about how some of those subsequent meetings would flow.
Lee Handley: Yeah, we meet about five times a year to help you grow in the EOS system to get you running on EOS. So the first commitment you’re making is just to the first day, we call it the focus day. This is where we lay the foundation for accountability and execution. So we talked about common language – we first start implementing that common language. It’s a concept called hitting the ceiling. We show you and the leadership team how to break through that ceiling using the five leadership abilities. Once that is in place, this is a building process. So once that foundation is laid, we build the structure of your business using a tool called the accountability chart.
This is something we talk about in that first preliminary free session. After you’ve laid that first structural element down, now you’re in a position to think as a team: what are the biggest priorities that are important to this business over the next 90 days. Those are called your rocks. So we’ll go through your first run of rocks. After that, we’ve got to make sure, well, how are we going to keep you on track?
Week to week I’m going to introduce the EOS meeting pulse to show you how to have a great meeting that actually matters and actually gets things done and you’ll actually look forward to. And then if there’s time, I tell the team we’ll do a first run at your scorecard. How do we know that we’re on-track or off-track week to week? I want everyone leaving the weekly meeting knowing “How do I win this week?” That’s the first day.
Now, we give you 30 days to work with those foundational elements before we come back for our second day. We call that Vision Building Day One. First part of the day is spent rehashing the focus day, making sure we answer questions, iron out the kinks or the bugs. Then we start to dive into the vision, getting you all on the same page with “Where are we going as a business, how are we going to get there?” We usually get through about three of eight questions that day, give you another 30 days to work in the business, come back for a session we call Vision Day Two. This is the last day in the foundational series of sessions that we have. Again, we look back on the first 60 days, make sure we’ve ironed out the kinks and the bugs, and then we complete the vision for your business. So at the end of 60 days, we’ve met three times. You’re ready to roll. After those first three sessions, we’re just meeting every single quarter. I’m your accountability partner. I’m your teacher, your facilitator, your coach. I’m helping you get stronger in the fundamental elements of your business.
Gary Smith: One of the things, and I’ll focus on that 90 day rhythm, once you’ve gotten settled in, once you’ve gotten through the first part of implementation.In our last ENRG meeting, which I’ll talk about that in a second, or get you to talk about that in a second. But the idea, which is so obvious and intuitive, when you at least stop and think about it, is that there’s kind of a bathtub curve of productivity that sometimes occurs. It’s just human nature. And we’re not entirely going to fix it. We can only, you know, work around it – is that motivation lags. We kind of forget our goals around the 90 day point. And so having that check-in point keeps us focused. Keeps your clients at a point where, for one thing they know that meeting’s coming, so what are the rocks? What are the things we said we were going to do? Even if productivity lags in the middle, well, there’s a check-in point, so we’d better get that ramped back up despite all of our distractions and problems. I want to kind of segueway into my own observation – This is why EOS kind of gets me interested in a way that a lot of books you could read, consulting frameworks and paradigms, et cetera, don’t.
I think that one of the really great things about it is that it really gives the person who’s willing to give it a try the nuts and bolts pieces to really operationalize it, and pulls from a lot of the best advice, from a lot of the books that we’ve probably all read, and actually puts some framework and scaffolding on it, so, hey, we could actually do it. We could actually get it done.
I don’t really want to name any of those books because I don’t want to sound like I’m being critical of them, but a lot of times you can pick up a book that everybody’s read and go, “This is great. I need to do that!” and a week later it’s just, “How do I do that?”
And I think that’s a distinctive difference of EOS is that it really shows you how. And as you said, you take people into the kitchen, and you show them how it can be done. I think the advantage of hiring somebody like you is simply that, number one, you’ve done it hundreds of times and or thousands of times, and that you know, pardon the pun, but you know where the rocks are, as in the rocks under the waves. And it’s also just outsourcing some of the work of doing it, because doing it right does take a lot of work.
But before we get to the ENRG meetings, I wanted to talk about something that you and I talked about before we started recording. And that is – your role is the Implementer. This is a little bit of EOS vocabulary, but there’s also a role “the Integrator,” and I wanna talk a little bit about that. The two leading roles that a company, and this tends to be true whether you’re in EOS or not, but EOS recognizes it. Most companies have a Visionary and an Integrator. So talk about that a little bit.
Lee Handley. You’ve got it. Something really unique about EOS is we name the relationship of Visionary and Integrator and see that they’re actually two distinct personality profiles. That was something that I had never heard of and it made perfect sense, especially when I applied it to my brewery and businesses that I’ve worked with in the past. What we try to see is you’ve got these two separate roles.
The Integrator is the boots on the ground. They’re the glue that holds everything together. They set the drum that everyone is marching to. They make sure that all the major functions of the business are working well together, and aligned towards the long-term, greater good. They make it happen.
The Visionary, by contrast, lives at 30,000 feet. They’re more responsible for creative problem solving, culture, big ideas. It’s not the best use of their energy to be on the ground, in the weeds managing conflict. They’re just not good at that. It drains them and it’s hard for them to keep kind of energy going for any extended period of time.
By recognizing those two different relationships, we solve a lot of problems, and we actually harness the best parts of each type of personality. We say together that the two components are extremely volatile, but if you mix them together the right way, they’re rocket fuel. We’ve got a book named just that to describe those relationships.
I would just add the Implementer is a separate role. That’s just your facilitator. A lot of times the Integrator is stuck managing an implementation, and what they find – it’s actually scientifically proven by one of Einstein’s contemporaries, Kurt Gödel – you cannot be a part of a system and manage a system, change a system, at the same time. So it’s really, really difficult to participate in the sessions when you’re actually facilitating them as well. So it’s really hard on your Integrator if they don’t have an outside Implementer. It can be done, of course, but it’s really hard.
Gary Smith: Yeah, that’s a great point, and it’s one of those things that – if you’ve ever been in a room where somebody who is qualified was brought in from outside to troubleshoot an issue, it is amazing how quickly sometimes things are resolved or become much clearer. “Well, why couldn’t we have figured that out with just the three or four of us who know and trust each other sitting in the room?” Well, I don’t precisely know, but those Einstein guys must have been right about that theory. Because you know, it’s just, I’ve been in that process so many times where basically, you know, the definition of expert, somebody from outside the county with a briefcase, comes in and, because of skill and also just that outside position, they are able to put their finger on: “Here’s your problem,” and you know, get people seeing it and agreeing on what the course of action is to be done.
Well, I wanted to talk about the ENRG meetings. Tell us about those sessions that you facilitate.
Lee Handley: ENRG, “energy” – Entrepreneurial Networking Resource Group or EOS Networking Resource Group. We designed this to have a EOS style meeting, a 90 minute meeting, to be a home for anyone that is on the EOS spectrum, from curious to self-implementing, to an Implementer-led EOS team. We need there to be a space – you know, anyone can be in this system. I want anyone that wants to be a part of EOS to have a resource that’s available to them. We come together, show them what a well-run meeting looks like. Every meeting has the same agenda, just like in EOS. And the main component, the takeaways are: First we’re gonna do an EOS tool, we’re gonna make sure you have an implementer-led teaching of an EOS tool.
But the large part of the meeting is peer advisory. The EOS term for that is IDS or issues solving, but I want the business leaders in a room, being open, honest, and vulnerable with themselves, going through the EOS process of solving issues. And there’s just so much power in getting it out of your head, out of your heart, out for the room, and then get different perspectives. It’s hard to stay curious about your own issues that you have, but when we get other people that share their experiences, you know, we usually get a lot better results. And then there’s just some therapy, right? In getting it out and realizing you’re not alone.
Gary Smith: I’ve been to a couple of your sessions and hope to be a regular, and it’s a great bunch of people, really motivated. And, you know, the benefits you described – they start with just saying things out loud sometimes. There’s a thing that is done in software development sometimes called rubber duck coding, where you put a rubber duck in front of you and you start talking about your problem. Like, “Why didn’t this work? It’s supposed to call that, and it – Oh…” So there’s sometimes some value in just talking out loud, but clearly the big value is talking to other smart people who have similar challenges, who also run businesses. So, I’ve personally gotten a lot of value out of that. I’ve seen others in that meeting do the same. When do those occur?
Lee Handley: Well, as you know, as a member, the scheduling – we’ve been playing around with different cadences to align the schedules, but you’re breaking the scoop on this…
Gary Smith: Lee’s being kind. I should have known that but didn’t. Okay, so we’re playing around with the schedule a little bit.
Lee Handley: We’re looking at the first Wednesday of the month. We’re going to see how that – we’ve got that aligned with another local group, Birmingham AI – we feel like bringing in that energy really helps our ENRG meeting.
Gary Smith: We will put in the show notes a link so that you can find Lee, hire Lee, find out when these ENRG meetings are as Lee looks at the schedule. And that may vary a little bit over the next couple of months, but it is well worth your time. A lot of my audience is Huntsville, so if you’re in Huntsville, it’s about an hour and a half drive to get to the meeting spot and all that will be in the show notes.
Well, Lee, what I always like to ask at this juncture is, is there anything you wish I’d asked you?
Lee Handley: Oh my goodness. Well, you covered a lot of great things that I didn’t even expect, and so it was really great. You know, you talked about the common language, you talked about the different levels of human energy that present themselves into the life cycle of an organization, the 90-day world. I thought that that was great.
I’m grateful. You do a lot of great work. I’m really glad that we’ve been working together over the past couple of months, and I’m really grateful for your participation and energy. You bring a lot to the table.
Gary Smith: Thanks, I appreciate that. Lee, thanks for being on. We appreciate it. I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Lee Handley: Can’t wait!