031: Want to Be a Better Leader?

How can stepping back and letting go of control lead to more success? In this episode, Marc Thomas explores the transformative power of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and insights from the book Traction to reshape business dynamics. Hear real-life experiences of implementing these strategies, emphasizing the growth that comes from learning through mistakes and trusting your team to lead.

We delve into practical strategies like using EOS, ROCKS, and OKRs to align personal and company goals, build stronger relationships, and create a culture of collaboration. Learn how the team at IT for Scrubs fosters a supportive environment by prioritizing human connection and employee well-being, driving both personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur looking to scale your business or a leader aiming to build a thriving team, this episode will inspire you to embrace collaboration and empower your team for lasting success.

Nasser Nas Selo on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nselo

IT for Scrubs:
https://itforscrubs.com

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📒 Resources Referenced in this Episode: 📒
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Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear (Author)
https://amzn.to/3A9TBgt

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
by Jim Collins (Author)
https://amzn.to/3X2v0Dv

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! 
by Robert T. Kiyosaki (Author)
https://amzn.to/3WR4Env

**TIMECODES**
00:00:00 - Implementing Traction in Business Operations
00:07:09 - Building Relationships and Achieving Goals
00:22:12 - Cultivating a Supportive Company Culture
00:25:35 - P.S.

Chapters

• 0:07 Implementing Traction in Business Operations
• 7:09 Building Relationships and Achieving Goals
• 22:12 Cultivating a Supportive Company Culture

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Well, it was a very good book called Traction. I know you read it because I know you touched a little bit on that module and I was like, oh my God, this guy knows what he's talking about. And then it took. It's like, oh, I should start sitting with Mark and see what he does and how he does it. And then you collectively collect all these ideas and see what all people are doing and you share with all these smart people because you're not the smartest in the room.

Speaker 2: 0:40

We all know something someone else doesn't that we can share, and that could be an experience, right, that could be a I mean I want to say a trial and an error, or you know a lesson learned, or you, you know you learn through a mistake, right, I mean that you made and you came out the other side and you can share that experience. So, yes, we all have knowledge that someone else doesn't, that we have to share, and so, regardless of whether you think there're the smartest guy in the room or not, everyone else in there knows something you don't, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:10

And this is where, if people can, I see a lot of people, even in the business meetings and peer groups that I do. I'm in multiple peer groups and if we just can get over our heads and look at this beautiful company, take off. Just because you decided this is the right way is not necessarily the right way, but again, that's how you learn.

Speaker 2: 1:41

You learn the hard way. Well, we only have to get it right once, right. And a lot of people don't see all the things. They say, oh, look how successful. Yeah, but you know, define success, right, I mean, that's, that's different for everyone. And then you also look at the aspect of going hey, um, what they're not seeing is is all the things that you tried that didn't work, that you learn from to apply the next time is slightly different, right, um, all they're seeing is obviously this image of oh, look at you and all your employees and know what you're doing like, oh, you're, you get this raving success and, yeah, but what they don't realize? All the hardship you went through, all the trial and error, all the you know, the mistakes you made, uh, the the mental anguish at times, right, I mean, you talked about being lonely. Lonely comes up quite frequently when we're having conversations with the CEO, you know, as far as lonely in the business, lonely in leadership, lonely at the top, um, so that element of I just totally derailed there.

Speaker 1: 2:44

That, I got, I got.

Speaker 2: 2:44

I started thinking about EOS and then totally lost my train of thought Because I wanted to lead into that as far as you talked about traction and obviously implement EOS in your business, and that was something you had to learn right and learn to apply. And I'm sure you made some adjustments along the way I don't want to say necessarily mistakes. You made adjustments to make things work for you and your business. So what was some of the biggest things when you applied the traction and EOS concept to your organization? What was some of those things you applied that made the biggest impact?

Speaker 1: 3:25

I think letting go of the blind in general, just knowing that I'm not supposed to do this, I'm good at this, not that, just knowing that you know you can trust your people, let them fail Like that's the hardest thing. You're sitting in a meeting and I'm starting our sales department right now and I sit with a meeting and the new sales guy from a training. He makes a mistake in in in a meeting with a client or a potential client or a prospect, and you just can. You just really have to not say anything and just take a note of it, go talk about it later and sometimes that will cost you a potential customer, but you're going to have to embrace that you can't be in every single room and doing every single task in this business and that was the hardest thing. It's like, yeah, I would solve this. You know we get tickets because we're a service department, right, so I can solve this ticket in one minute.

Speaker 1: 4:34

This guy took him two hours, but what I didn't do before, let him take the two hours and next time he or she will fix it in one minute and they will become, they'll have the experience that I have today, because, of course, when I first did it 20 years, 20 plus years ago. It took me two hours, but I kept making a mistake, adjusting, making a mistake, but I kept making a mistake, adjusting, making a mistake. So, specifically, the new operating system for the business, if it's EOS or other than EOS, because we don't have for the EOS, we cannot do some adjustments, sure it, it's just you making sure that your people are there for the company as much as you are, and that was the hardest thing. It was hard, it's still hard.

Speaker 1: 5:34

I'm not gonna lie, I send a meeting and I try to shut up sorry no, no, no, I get it.

Speaker 2: 5:42

I mean, I'm firsthand, I know Yep.

Speaker 1: 5:46

That's so hard. I mean, you know your business, you created this from the get go. You know every single element of it or whatever. And something come up. I was like, okay, I'm going to be silent and let them handle it. And and that is beautiful Like when you see them solve the problem, they're over the moon, I'm like the highest person on earth. It's like, oh my God, they know how to. This is amazing, and sometimes it hurts because you know, especially with older clients they make mistake with or whatever you know what. Let's cut this because the clients might be listening to it, yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:28

No, that's okay, you know it goes back to going um. So you said you, you didn't fully implement eos. Obviously, um, but you put obviously some of the elements in place. You know we're we're not fully us either. Um, we implemented more aspects of okrss into the business and a little more digestible based off of our size In due time.

Speaker 2: 6:50

I have participated in some EOS with some of my peers in their organizations, but no, it's great. It's always. Once again, it's all things of. You are the smartest man in the room, but you didn't know anything about that until you read about that and then you were able to implement these things and letting go. That's very difficult Because you don't want to see them necessarily make those mistakes.

Speaker 2: 7:16

It's annoying. You could have prevented it, but you can't be there all the time and at the same time, you let them learn a little bit on their own. Call it micromanaging. Can't be there all the time and at the same time, you know, let them learn a little bit on their own and you know, call it micromanaging. Right, like you don't want to necessarily micromanage it either. You have other responsibilities to the other rest of your team when it comes to running your business and it's not necessarily fixing that thing, right? Yeah, that's on that ticket. And even though you might've had the exit that you could have solved that in 30 seconds, um, or whatever, three minutes, uh, and it took them two hours, um, you know, do you afterwards that kind of an after action kind of review, that, okay, what do we learn from this? And you know, the next time we, you, experience this, what are your, what's your action plan? What's that going to look like? Because we, once again, how do we know what we're doing? Well, we know it from our experiences.

Speaker 1: 8:10

So, speaking of that specifically, you've got to circle back and get to it. And the old me, the old ego, when I started this and just kind of started really taking off, I would say you said something about a 200 million dollar ceo running a business as a 12 million dollars company, and what you do is you get caught in a moment like you're. You're basically, oh, we're making it, we're making it. So last year we added 75, I believe, uh, uh, from the year before in business and revenue, popline revenue, okay, yeah, and what? The old me would just keep going Like it was just, oh, 2024, let's do another 75%. And then I was like, no, we need to restructure things, we need to actually pay attention, we need the right tools and, the most important thing, I need to sit down and talk to my people, I need to know their struggles, I need to know why you're not buying a house and that's your goal, right.

Speaker 1: 9:22

So we started the whole EOS thing, the ROCKS or the OKRs, the goal basically, we started putting it to our employees and we meet strategically to kind of follow up and scorecard it. We basically give you accountability on your life choices, just to kind of push you, like our peer group do. This thing is like, hey, go, work out. We call it, we have a group called let's go. So everybody's pushing each other's to kind of work out because you know you can, you easily can stay in the office till 8 pm. Then you can't go to the gym or wherever heck.

Speaker 2: 9:56

Yeah, what are you talking about? Usually it's like 11 12 o'clock before we leave the office, a lot. So I mean yeah, yeah, 100 yeah and yeah 100%.

Speaker 1: 10:03

Yeah, and just that it's again. This is what we are leaving a mark on in this world is just, you got to talk to your people. Make sure what they were happy with yesterday not necessarily going to make them happy and again, that's said in a lot of podcasts and a lot of books is not all people motivated by money. So if you think you're just paying your people enough, that's not enough. You're going to have to kind of sit down your department managers, your C-level or whatever the organization org chart is, to kind of sit down with their people. So we just made this as reasons like hey, you do one-on-one every single week. How many people in your department you one-on-one? You put time on your calendar. Your department, you 101. You put time on your calendar. You gotta have to. You gotta have to talk to these people because they're doing a grind, they're doing a work and we don't know what's going on.

Speaker 1: 11:12

Mental, physical, like we have. Right, we have an employee with, uh, with some back issues or whatever, and you don't think about it at the moment. But one of my friends had a back issue and at one point he was like I was thinking about suicide and you don't think about it. It's like back issue, suicide, why it was like it hurts so much. You don't understand medication is not killing that pain hurts so much. You don't understand medication is not killing that pain. And and you think about it like, oh man, do you know how many stories we have in our companies, in our communities, your door, your next door neighbor? You just kind of have to sit and talk to people after the story that I have in my family. I don't tell you how are you and just expect you to say I'm good and just walk away. If I'm asking you, how are you doing? I, I mean it. I just want to know how are you doing for real?

Speaker 2: 12:17

You don't want to ask me that question.

Speaker 1: 12:25

Well, we'll take it.

Speaker 2: 12:26

No, no, no, no, no, no, seriously it's not just, it's just not a polite, you're not just being polite, but you're generally asking and you talked about touching base with your, your team, on a regular basis, and we know that different things drive people differently and we also know those things change. Right, you talk about those goals. Change your life, changes like they're what's driving them. Change changes. So, um, I commend you on a connecting at that level. So what does somebody said you talk about week, weekly meetings, that you're doing weekly connections?

Speaker 1: 13:01

we do an o1 with the employees weekly now Okay.

Speaker 2: 13:08

What kind of feedback have you gotten from that?

Speaker 1: 13:11

It's amazing. You'll hear stories. To be honest with you, I'm not into those meetings but I read the reports for them because we're so small, we're nine people, but the department, the service, the man, the department, the service manager do it for the service team and it's it's unbelievable like you work with this person, like you're desk to desk with this person, you have lunch with them and everything. But you know there's challenging and there's also good news, like you'll hear, like oh really, uh, you moved, or whatever. It's just sad. It's just sad when I see companies just going at it without the human touch or the nature of it. Even with our clients, you don't know what they're going through. You're sending them invoices and just like you know if you have a smaller client, whatever that account receivable or account payable person that you're working with, you don't know what they're going through. It's just just. You know money, we talk about it money. When you do all the good stuff, you put your heart into what you do. You're basically your goal is to help or your goal is to be a good person and that's it right. You're gonna get money.

Speaker 1: 14:35

Because I'm a big believer in karma and we touched a little bit, you and I before this show on it, it's like, hey, there are certain things that happened to our retail business recently and basically we're going to lose that business. And I was telling my daughter, my 12 years old daughter, the story and she was like they can do that, is that legal? I was like, yes, it's legal, but maybe unethical. And the sweetheart child she is she was like you know, dad, what goes around comes around. Let karma take care of it. And we were going like lawyers and we're going to sue and whatnot. And as soon as she said that, dude, it was like you know what she's right. What goes around comes around we.

Speaker 1: 15:33

So many times I left my home country, my comfort zone, I own business, I know so many connections, I have bank customers, I built an ISP for a client. We were hitting home, runs grand slams and moved here. And how I am in this seat today is literally karma. We just help, help people. They'll come back at you.

Speaker 1: 16:06

Don't think about the reward momentarily. You're not going to lose weight in one day. Dieting, just diet, diet, diet, diet, don't diet. Change the way you think about food. Change the way you think about customer service, technical support. Don't fix the problem because you want to get the paycheck at the end of the week, fix a problem, because you want that happiness, because you actually solved the problem and maybe maybe nobody can fix that problem. And you went and you put it. We document, like the, the solutions that we have and you put it for the whole company to see. And, yes, we do lower rewards now in the office.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Uh, on, on every single ticket. It's uh, and it's just amazing, that little feeling like it's it's literally nothing. It's just amazing, that little feeling like it's it's literally nothing, it's just nothing. The reward, but it's just, it's just a feeling, is just oh, my God, I was able to do this. So we, we are human. We're driven by by actually success.

Speaker 1: 17:13

Unfortunately, not a lot of people are. But what drives you is different from what drives me and, uh, why I wake up in the morning. It's totally different why some people wake up in the afternoon, right, and just finding that little tune and finding that you're what. What you actually here for is just blessing. No, and it takes time. I mean, uh, I'm still learning, yeah, but what I was, what I was ten years ago, I'm not the same person. I've learned so many things and I still have a lot to learn. Sometimes I go on a book rally for like weeks and and I get depressed and I was like I get so many ideas and I get so many things and I can't limit any of them when I'm so tired.

Speaker 2: 18:01

But you can't let that get you down right. Obviously, you know, just again, the time will come right. The time will come that you can implement those things. And maybe it's just as you prioritize those things, hey, what's going to make the biggest impact on my life, the biggest impact on others' life, on our clients' lives, when you implement these things and prioritizing them? And I know that can be a struggle, because I want to do it all. I want to do it all right now, yeah, and slow down.

Speaker 1: 18:26

But that's not real. The slow down factor too. Man, it's like me rallying on book. Literally, it's like I want to get. Sometimes I start two books together. It's like, hey, I want to learn, I want to learn, I'm dead serious.

Speaker 2: 18:41

I'm reading three books right now. I can see that he's got a book he's reading a book and he's listening to Audible at the same time right Like oh, it's a hard time, he did it to work.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Not to for my morning walk on my watch, and then I have my night book and I have my during the day drive book on my phone. I do it. But I've learned and this came honestly, this came with age to slow myself down. I used to wake up. So let's say I have to be in a meeting at 7. Okay, I'll wake up 6.55. I click the coffee for one minute. I'm so fast I could boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm dressed and I'm already in a meeting at 7. And that was killing me, dude. I had to learn how to slow down.

Speaker 1: 19:32

I actually bought a machine where I have to make my own coffee so I have to grind it. I have to put my own coffee, so I have to grind it, I have to put it on a scale and I kind of craft my coffee to start my day slow so I can go tackle the world, but with, like, not rushing into it, it's just like literally weighing the options, thinking about it. I mean, you know I was reading US had 2,600 Olympic medal, gold medal. The next country, which is, I totally forgot who have 1,600. So we're 1,000 medal above any other country. Okay, and do you know what? That is? Why? That is no. Why is that? Because they're catching up to the US now, because they don't take things slowly and kind of like, literally give it the right time to think about it.

Speaker 1: 20:36

If you go to any other part of the world and you watch a game, all what's in the game, all what's going on TV, is like hey, goal or whatever. It's just here you know that this player has more three points than the percentage of other players. It's all numbers, statistics. It's a science. It's not just a sport, it's actually a science in the sport. So you cannot do that. When you're rushing into things, your decision making will be rushed into it. You're going to have to learn how to slow down, analyze the data.

Speaker 1: 21:11

Analyze the data and take your time. Nobody's dying today based on your decision, but you will kill yourself rushing, and I had to learn that the hard way. It's like, hey, what am I? What am I making that decision so quick? For what's the next book? What am I going to learn next? And that whole fire inside. You're just going to have to just like tweet, calm it down a little bit.

Speaker 1: 21:40

Think about it. It's. It's amazing what age does to you man. It's amazing. Like I was crazy guy, like I would run off walls, get business, jump here and there. It was like. Now it's like no, you gotta, you gotta slow down, you have family.

Speaker 2: 21:58

It's a marathon. It's a marathon, right, it's not a sprint.

Speaker 1: 22:01

Yeah, they're going to lose you. They're going to lose you.

Speaker 2: 22:06

Wonderful. So, Naz, we touched on a little bit of bringing your Syrian background right. Your culture you came to the US, started this business. Talk about the people and the one-on-ones. What would you say? Culture of your organization you talk about giving back and learning and growing. But what other elements has influenced the culture of IT for Scrubs today? Some of the things that make your culture unique, based off your experiences.

Speaker 1: 22:42

Yeah, that's an amazing question. Me running a big tale of the story running, running, running, running didn't pay attention for the people around you and I think the culture that we have now is like we literally just kind of listen, we kind of slow down. The whole company culture is like slow down, not, we're still like hey, you know, if a customer down or whatever happened, we're on fire for it for sure, sure responsive responsive the whole company if something, if a client goes down and it rarely happened but if it happens we're actually on fire, like the whole team.

Speaker 1: 23:40

But knowing that when not, we're actually very chill, we're very, we're very like, friendly between each others. We know each other's very well because it's again, it's a it's, it's a human aspect of it, it's not the business aspect of it. Yes, and sometimes, uh, giving somebody raise because it's essential for their existence, or you know, with this inflation, what's going on nowadays, and no one gives. Oh, back in the days, I would just somebody need, let's just help. And knowing now is like, no, we have a target, we have whatever. And it's still that culture of balance between what business is and what your people are. And this is the thing that actually built our company culture.

Speaker 1: 24:36

We were COVID before, were like, uh, working from home, right, and just going back to office and meeting. We meet twice a day, uh, morning huddle, afternoon huddle. I'm not in all the meetings, I just I'm, I'm trying to build the new, the new chapter right, but just just knowing that they have that connection, they knowing that you know, if Mark cannot solve this, I'm confident if I escalated to Nas, nas will take care of this, just trusting the team. Like a support team. They trust each other. Yes, I'm the best three shooters out there? Maybe, maybe I am, but I'm going to trust Mark to shoot it this time.

Speaker 2: 25:22

Hi, I'm Mark Thomas, founder and CEO of Current Tech Solutions and Cyber Guardians. If you, or so many know, could benefit from our cutting edge IT and cybersecurity services, we'd love to help. Our expertise in securing your business with AI precision ensures that you're protected and empowered to thrive. Reach out to us today to learn how we can secure and elevate your business. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.