Why the Loudest Voice Stopped Winning - Bart McCollum (EP. 14)

Bart McCollum has spent his career as the operator founders call when a business is ready to grow up. He started as an attorney, moved to a bank bond desk, helped build a health savings account startup into a national brand over 14 years, and four years ago joined Lime Media Group, the largest mobile experiential marketing company in the country, to help founder Heath Hill scale it. Lime builds custom vehicles, LED trucks, and brand experiences for the Super Bowl, Coachella, and South by Southwest, work with seven-figure budgets and deadlines that never move. In this conversation with Christine Watts and Kris Snyder, Bart explains what he calls corporate puberty, the awkward stage between startup and enterprise, and why a company built entirely of problem solvers had to learn to become problem preventers. He talks about running EOS® when the loudest person in the room used to win every argument, using AI to pressure-test quarterly goals, and a concept he calls wildebeesting: the way anxiety propagates through an organization and quietly makes everyone worse at their jobs.

In this episode:

• Corporate puberty: the awkward stage between startup and enterprise
• Moving from problem solvers to problem preventers (the "self-cleaning oven")
• Why the highest-volume person used to win every debate, and how they fixed it
• Self-implementing EOS® vs. hiring an implementer, and when each makes sense
• Using AI to write better rocks, track milestones, and spot lost momentum
• Wildebeesting: how anxiety moves through an organization

About Bart McCollum:
Bart McCollum is the President of Lime Media Group, the largest mobile experiential marketing company in the United States. He is co-author of You Before Me, a book on the behavioral science of leadership, and a Managing Partner at Adlerian Capital. Learn more at lime-media.com.

Mentioned in this episode:
The Anxious Organization: Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things by Jeffrey Miller
You Before Me by Bart McCollum and Gerald Hannah
Oak Hills Retreat (oakhillsretreat.org)

Impact Moments is produced by ninety. Learn more at ninety.io.

🔗 Check out our episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@90xEOS

🔗 Learn more about Ninety: https://www.ninety.io 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Impact Moments Powered by 90. Today we're joined by Bart McCullum. Bart is the COO of Lime Media Group, which is one of the largest mobile experiential marketing companies in the United States. They build custom vehicles, LED trucks, brand experiences for things like the Super Bowl, Coachella, some of the biggest brands around the world. So four years ago, founder Eve Hill brought Bart in to help scale the company from what Bart calls corporate puberty into a real enterprise. So in this conversation, Bart talked about what happens when a company full of problem solvers learned how to prevent problems instead of fight them. He also introduces a concept called build-beasting, which describes how anxiety really moves through an organization and explains why the lattice person in the world stopped winning. So really interesting conversation talking about the evolution of the business that's happened. And so I'm excited for you guys to get into it. Welcome to Impact Moments. I'm Christine.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

I'm Chris Snyder.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Great. And today we're joined by Bart. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

And we are in Dallas today. We 90 has our quarterly planning meeting this week. And so we've got a new setup, a new vibe in the Virgin Hotel in Dallas. Lots of personality we were talking about earlier.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

We've surrounded ourselves some plants for making it happen. Some real, some fake. I don't want to conjecture.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Awesome. Well, Bart, tell us a little bit about yourself. Um, how you found Lime Media and the EOS journey of the company.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Sure, sure. So I started my life as an attorney, which is probably not how a lot of people get to EOS. Um, and then I was in a kind of in a finance role. So I was on a bond desk at a large bank. Um, ended up working on a healthcare project that became a health savings account, which was a thing that happened in the early 2000s. And ended up going to work for a company that was essentially kind of like a startup in that space. So kind of a healthcare benefits and payments space. And uh went in to essentially help a founder grow and scale a business. Um, that's become kind of my MO from a career perspective.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Team member, how early were you in that journey?

SPEAKER_03 2:23

Uh we had probably at that time about 35 employees. It was a regional, it was growing very quickly. Technologically, it was kind of on the frontier, but like a lot of startups, you know, a lot of problems, a lot of growing pains, those sorts of things. And uh over time I learned how to lead, manage. When I got dropped into the business, I didn't know how to do either of those things. Um, we ended up growing the company significantly, making it a national brand, and won multiple awards, um, and uh became kind of a national player over the course of about 14 years. And um I learned about EOS uh probably, I don't know, nine or ten years into it. So 2016, 2017-ish. Um and being the scrappy people that we were self-implemented EOS. And so that's kind of been a little bit of my journey. So uh stayed with that business for quite a period of time. Um, I was in a kind of a peer group with a bunch of founders, and I find myself in rooms with founders and entrepreneurs all the time, and I'm kind of like the operations and scaling guy. I'm kind of like the operator that you stick into a business, regardless of what kind of business it is, and I'm the guy that helps you get to the next level. It's kind of what has ended up happening. And so uh a guy that I had made friends with, Heath Hill, um, has this wonderful business called My Media Group. And like a lot of uh founder-led businesses, uh had done some really incredible things, had a lot of growth, and got to a point where he had realized, well, if I really want to get to the next level and achieve what I really want to do, which I'm happy to go into detail about, um, I'm gonna need to uh become a different kind of person than I've been before, and I'm gonna have to bring some talent in. And so four years ago, uh he persuaded me to join the team. We built out a leadership team, and I would say um we've kind of uh since that point gone through what I would call kind of corporate puberty, um, you know, very awkward stage, going from kind of call it startup to much more of an enterprise. Heath found EOS, I think around 2020, started implementing it, had the wherewithal and the foresight to um to see that this is kind of what I need in order to be able to take the business where I want it to go. Um, it also requires a lot of humility. And yeah, um, so I came two years into that journey. And so one of the things that you hear with EOS is it takes a couple of years to really get it into a business. And uh what we found is we had kind of the base kind of install layer of it in the business by 2022, but really getting it cascaded up and down the organization and then dealing with what happens to the people in the organization after you've implemented it and you continue to implement it is really a much longer journey. And so um, so I came in 2022. We recruited uh really kind of what I would call our first real leadership team, um, you know, people that weren't wearing multiple hats. Let's call it that. And so since then the growth has continued, it's accelerated. Um, and uh the overall vision of the business really is um uh we're a for-profit business, obviously, and we're an experiential marketing company. We're the largest mobile experiential marketing company in the country now. And um, a lot of folks that do what we do get into that kind of a business because they're very passionate about building super cool things or they like vehicles. We're vehicle-based, although we have lots of things that are not vehicle-based as well. Um, those are artists, they're artisans, um, there might be brand people or advertising or creatives. Um, we are much more about systems and processes, and even our founder isn't is that that way as well. Um, he's about um solving problems, and our company solves problems for people. That's really what we do. We have this thing called pace and peace, um, which is kind of our brand promise. Uh at the end of the day, we are helping one of our clients, and our clients are brands. They're some of the biggest brands in the world, uh, but they're also agencies that represent those brands. Um and at the end of the day, they're trying to do something. Um, usually it's extremely visual, usually it's extremely uh public. Um, they need it to go extremely well. And like there are lots of logistical things that are happening in order for that to be the case. And so it needs to be there on time, it needs to look amazing. The experience that they're trying to deliver with the brand, uh, with the people that they're trying to engage with needs to go extremely well. There's weather issues, there's physical issues, there's mechanical issues, there's people issues all the time. Uh, you're in the physical world. And being able to do that and do that at scale is something that's very difficult to do. We've managed to achieve that. Um, in I would say uh significant part because of EOS and other things that we've been able to layer on top of it. Um so the ethos of the company was we solve problems. We deliver pace and peace. We are there on time. Um, the deadline isn't moving. Um, the deadline might be South by Southwest, it might be Coachella, it's the Super Bowl. We hit five things at the Super Bowl. Like that date isn't moving. Um, and there's oftentimes seven-figure budgets for these things. And so we've got to hit that date. And there's lots of creative elements that we're bringing together. Um, the other side of our business is what we call out-of-home, so out of home advertising. And so uh a lot of people have seen kind of those mobile big LED trucks that drive around. They're like big billboards, they have giant screens on them. Right. Um, we have the largest fleet of those in the country. Um, we have a national platform of mobile LED trucks and uh hundreds of assets on what we call the experiential marketing side of our business. So those are the vehicles that we customize for these big brand experiences. Um, we're the only company that has a national platform for that. But at the end of the day, we're solving problems. And so the ethos of our founder, Heath Hill, and the feet the folks at Lime Media is we gotta solve a problem, we gotta solve it right now. It's running from one fire to the next. Um, that's what happens. And so the big turn for us uh when I came on board and then the rest of our leadership team came on board was how do we truly actually work in the business? Um, you know, that's something that EOS preaches. And we were really good at that time, we were very diligent with our level 10 meetings. We have people come to our level 10 meetings. We openly allow people to come attend them because we're very much about evangelizing outside parties. We let outside people come to our level 10 meetings. Um, we track it. One of our kind of our big vision is to help uh 10 million people essentially. Um, the overall vision of the business is very missional. Uh, it's a very kingdom-oriented business. Um, we're a for-profit entity. We work with secular brands all over the country, but at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is we're trying to fund the kingdom. And so we have a retreat center called Oakhills. Um, that a lot of the profits of the business go into this foundation that funds this retreat center, Oakills Retreat. There are inner city kids having retreats there. There's marriage counseling, there's executive offsites. You guys should do an executive offsite there. It's this beautiful property. It's got a golf course, it has beautiful cabins, we're building a hotel on it. And uh, at the end of the day, that's the overall goal of the business. Um, again, outside the business. It's the goal of the profit-making part of the business. And so, in order for uh Heath to be able to focus on those things, he needed to be able to scale it and not run from fire to fire to fire all day long every day. And when you've been doing something at that point, the company was founded, I think 2005. And so he had probably done 20,000 experiential marketing projects and LED campaigns. You've seen everything at that point. And so you and a handful of people who have been with the company for a very long period of time become the experts. Well, that doesn't scale extremely well. And so being able to get to a point where, again, putting the framework in place and then not only building a leadership team, but building a management team behind them that can go and actually work on the business every single day, deal with all of the issues that happen, and improve along the way has been a big turn for us.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

What do you feel like was the biggest thing you had to focus on tool-wise when you first stepped in? Because they'd already been doing EOS, you said, for about two years. So when you got there, what did you feel like you really needed to lean into more in your role?

SPEAKER_03 10:15

Yeah, it's it's a great question. So I kind of went into it very eyes open because I have kind of a model for kind of how I do things and I have policies and procedures and I know how EOS works, and we have scorecards and we have rocks and all those sorts of things. Um it wasn't necessarily that those things needed to be implemented because they were already implemented, but um it was what is the quality of those things? So um we were very good at getting quarterly goals in place, um, having milestones, having accountability. That was a the culture was already extremely accountable. They had already gone through the point where the folks that didn't want the accountability that EOS brings to an organization, a lot of them had already kind of been turned over.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That happens.

SPEAKER_03 10:57

Um, but again, the product that we sell, aside from curating a physical platform for digital content and digital insights, which is what we do, uh, creating an incredible experience. Um the product that we sold was we solve problems for people. That's our product, and that's the way that the language that we used. And so it's hard to deliver the product. The kind of people that you have to deliver that product are people who are problem solvers. And so um we were running EOS and diligently following the protocols and the rituals of EOS, but we weren't focusing on rocks as much as we should have because there was always this problem right now, this brand right now, this major luxury brand right now that everybody has heard of that needs their problem solved right now, everybody is focused on it. Um, and not necessarily very effectively, because the organization had grown to a point where you have multiple stakeholders that are involved with things. And so I would say getting our leadership team to the point where we were actually working on the business. And so we would set rocks, we would set our scorecard metrics, we do milestones, do all those things, and then there would be some problem, we would our focus would shift and we'd go to this project. This project is having problems, we got to get it on the road. Or we need to change this, this, and this on this. And we're talking about materials, we're talking about um colors. Um, brand colors are extremely expensive. Coca-Cola is very particular about their color of red. Right. Um red looks a certain way on different substrates. On vinyl, it looks a certain way, on leather, it looks a certain way, on wood and on metal, and on a screen. Even if it's the same color, it looks different. So it's very easy to focus on all those little things that people are, our customers are very focused on. And we'd get to the end of the quarter and oh yeah, we had some rocks. Uh, how'd we do? You know. Um, and so I would say it's taken me and our leadership team probably a few years to really get the operating cadence of our company to be different from what is our product and who are we as people who are problem solvers. We are problem preventers now. We are supposed to be kind of like a self-cleaning oven now. So the big thing that's happened is we've gotten very good, and again, this is a journey of having a leadership team that's very focused on where are we going. And then having a management team that can go and deal with 95 to 99% of the day-to-day things that happen when we're delivering our products and services. Um, and I would say, really, in the last six months, that management team has done a fantastic job of doing that. And so now they are operating and doing things at or better than what the core Lyme founding team would have done in that situation. Yeah. And that's allowed us to really level up what we're doing from well, you know, let's go look at everybody's rocks every week. And so people have, every department at Lyme Media has rocks. We have a very, very specific criteria for what a good rock is. We have a smart methodology. We have a smart methodology with milestones. And so people are using 90, and every rock has a milestone. And the milestone has to be written specifically and has to be outcome-based. Yeah. And that took a long time. Um, and everybody has to go in every week and update their milestones and their rocks so we can actually see did you make progress on it this week? What obstacles are you running into? Like, did you not make progress on it? Um, and the latest thing that we're doing is we're able to cascade AI through it and monitor and see, hey, it appears that this person has updated their uh milestones and their rocks the last few weeks, but it looks like really they've they've lost momentum. And you sometimes you don't can't tell that by looking at the comments or even sitting in their level 10 meeting. Um, and so that's that's the latest thing that we've done.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

I've been doing that for like myself personally, of okay, my I use Claude, so like my system knows the rocks that I have and the milestones I need to hit, but it also is connected to all of these other systems, my calendar, the other meetings that I'm having, my email. So it knows am I actually spending the amount of time that I should be spending in order to go get these like bigger commitments done. And so it's kind of a really nice like feedback loop for myself to stay on top of that.

SPEAKER_03 14:47

I love that. I do the same thing. Like I like we've got Claude GPT and Gym and I, and like Claude is my go-to right now for that reason. Like it is so good. We have skills in place now for interviewing talent using behavioral interviewing concepts and behavioral-based competencies that are tied to our actual culture at my media. Um, got a thing that goes and it can look at 90 data. I wish the integration was a little bit tighter, but like I can feed the data into it and I can have it make things so much better.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Maz, which is our AI agent, like I was playing with it this week uh because I was getting ready to coach a client, and I can just ask it for like go through all the teams in the organization, who's struggling, and it looks at the scorecards, the rocks, and then it gives you output by team because it also can see how they're rating their own meetings. And so instead of going into our historical like insights tool, which was which good and graphical, now you just ask the AI agent for anything that's moving across the teams. You can even, I queried it to say, hey, that one rock was off track. How many times did the team IDS on that during the quarter? Yeah. And it was once. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

And when did it go off track? And it knew when it went off track. And it was like six weeks ago it went off track and they only IDSed on it once. And it's not those moments in for those at home where like, well, Chris, you're just gonna start calling people out. No, I want to call them up, right? Like we want to help them get better at what we're doing. And now with the ability to see the work and the progression of the work and go back and go, hey, team, we can do that better next time. Let's just talk about it, right? And then figure out how to be better with all that information that we now have.

SPEAKER_03 16:16

So Yeah, it's been it's been insane for us. Uh we're, you know, what we're doing is we're building uh an experience in real life, and that's something that people are craving. Um it makes it, I think, in a way, easier for us to adopt AI tools within our organization. Um, because we're not a digital company that's worried about being disrupted from that perspective. And so this is the first, like I'm very, I'm very, very particular about writing good goals. Um, it's just one of my things. Um this last quarter, um, I really leaned in and I used Claude. I've been using GPT and some other things. Um, and again, I'm really good at context, and so I've I have lots of context into it. It just was a different level. And it's really good at identifying, you know, blocking issues and contingencies. And so we did our quarterly a couple of weeks ago. And so, you know, we always want to pre-kind of decide what are the major themes for the quarter, where's the business going? And so we walk in there with a lot of the goals already mostly baked, and then we want to spend the time arguing and debating and talking about what does this actually mean and what are the contingencies and blocking issues? And so we're able to do that, you know, instead of just okay, we IDSed these long-term issues, this should be Iraq, this should be Iraq, this should be Iraq. It was, okay, we already kind of know where we're going and what we need to be doing based on a larger plan. And, you know, well, it looks like this rock and this particular milestone and this rock are gonna conflict with this other guy's rock and this milestone. And so let's talk about how we're gonna deal with that. Right. And again, we wouldn't have had the foresight to see any of that stuff. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

Um now we do. And and I think there's um inside the US community, there's there's lots of big feelings on this topic using technology pre-the-meeting and kind of during the meeting and even post the meeting. But I think what we're doing is we're we're removing the administration layer to the event pre, during, and post, and we're actually allowing for the creativity to be that much higher in the moment. Yep. And that's what we need because if I'm surprised in the minute and we've got all different shapes and sizes of people, we've got the extroverts, we've got the introverts, and they need different times to process information. Yep. And in that moment in your quarterly, you only have so much time. But if I can actually show up, especially for the introverts, and had started processing the issue before I get there, then we're that, in my opinion, we're that much better off. Absolutely. Because we're getting to the cycle of what really matters versus discovering the thing in the moment and then trying to figure out how we're gonna get through it. Yeah. Um we love the tangent button, by the way. Oh, it's it's helpful.

SPEAKER_03 18:44

We really want to be able to go in there and customize what shows up because it has that like caution sign, like I want to put people's face on it or like make it a funny meme or something. But yeah, because that's the thing that happens, is we'll get on one topic and we'll stay on it. And we won't have necessarily even properly identified what is the actual issue. It's a cluster of issues, is it one issue? And then we'll we'll look up and it's been 45 minutes and of a day-long session, and it's like, gosh, oh god, we gotta get to this, this, this, this, and this.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

And yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

I yeah, my my kind of go-to moment is always when we start with an issue, especially if I you know gauge it as an implementer facilitating. It's like, all right, team, we're gonna put 10 minutes on the clock and literally grab my phone and put 10 minutes on it and just let it beep. And that doesn't mean we're done. I gotta check in with where we're at, because often that's exactly what's happening. They're just they're going, you're going down that moment with lots of passion and pursuit, but it's not the thing that we're actually, you know, and should be in pursuit of. Yeah. Yeah. So, Bart, I've got like 10 questions. I don't know, Christine. I mean, you've got that.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

I I want to go back to what your comment on meetings. Um, Chris just wrote a book, Meetings Kind of Suck.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

And so congratulations on the they kind of do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

But it's really interesting your perspective of bringing more people into them. I'm assuming that's during the level 10. Like, walk me through what your level 10 is and kind of the evolution you've had over time of pulling more people in.

SPEAKER_03 20:02

Sure. Well, so so that's we let guests attend our L10 meetings because we want to evangelize EOS for small companies. That that's really what that is. Okay. Not necessarily participating, although sometimes they do have something to say. We have customers sometimes sitting in our level 10 meetings, and um, and you know, sometimes we're we're we're showing sometimes we're fairly not necessarily confidential stuff, but stuff that's very inside baseball. That's right. Um, I will say um the thing that's really, I think, leveled us up, or maybe it's been a key thing, has been our best level 10 meeting, our leadership level 10 meeting every week is good. It's very good, and we're focused mostly on where is the business going? Like what is the longer-term vision? What are we investing in? What are the things that we're doing research and development on, the data side of the business, which is huge now. We have what we call the ops leaders L10, which is really, I would call the management team's L10. That is the most effective problem solving day-to-day in the business, experiential marketing, mobile out-of-home, you know, a fabrication issue, creative issue, client issues, those sorts of things. Uh, accounting, whatever, whatever the problem may be, that has become a super highly effective level 10 meeting. It's not the leadership team meeting. And um, we have a full fabrication shop at Lime Media. So if you come to our office, which I would invite you guys to do, it's a really cool, it looks like an amusement park. We have all these beautiful vehicles and custom things that we've done there, and you can come and see it in case you want to build a brand experience for 90. Or we have B2B companies doing this stuff now because they all realize, well, I have a digital presence, I'm doing digital marketing, I have a website. Um, it's table stakes. Um I need to build a deeper connection with my clients. And the digital stuff, people are kind of fatigued from it. They need something in real life. I don't know if you guys, if you're in Dallas, I'd encourage you to go to Netflix House while you're here. Okay. Netflix builds an in person experience at the galleria mall. Um, and there's a couple of other TV shows. There's like this theme thing that you go through, it's an experiential thing. Um, the reason they're doing that is because they're a digital company that sells. subscription service and they need to build an emotional connection with their their customers because and that happens in real life and companies have been very focused kind of bottom of funnel on digital marketing because it's very measurable and I love measuring stuff I'm completely partial to that uh but they've underinvested kind of at the top of the funnel and that's where trust is built and and brand recognition is built and so now they're having to pivot and do that um which is kind of where our business comes in because we're we're building an in-person experience um so a key part of what we're doing is we have an enormous fleet of all kinds of different vehicles and platforms and we have a fabrication shop and so we have people that come and they weld and they build stuff and they do A V stuff and they paint and they lay vinyl and they do all kinds of cool incredible things. They build scenic things. They have a level 10 meeting every week it's one of the best level 10 meetings at Lime Media like they solve problems. They're very like good at it they understand it they're measuring a bunch of different things and they're going to the meeting with good issues like that department has done a fantastic job like really embracing EOS in part because you know that part of the business is very you you you know when things are off track. But they've done a better job than some other parts of our business where you would think people would be you know more likely to have embraced that more quickly. So it's been very interesting to see that.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

I want to go back to something you said in the beginning because you know 90% of the companies running on EOS are self-implementing. And I think I didn't know that. Yeah it's 90% and it's it's okay because it's the beginning of the journey as companies start and then they grow and then they you know they hopefully get to that place where they're like hey we're ready for the next the next part of that venture to to do it. So we're actually working I think the next book that I'm gonna work on is something like self-implementation's not a sin. Because there's so much out there in the community that that that you know tries to say it's the wrong thing to do, but I think it's the right thing to do at the right time. Yeah. So I want to drill a little bit into your self-implementation story and like when you were doing it, you know, what were some of the learnings and if you reflect back on it, you know, not just running to to hire an implementer, but I don't know what are what are some of the stories that you think about like hey if I had to do it over again, if I was going to go self-implement, I might do these things a little bit differently as you got started.

SPEAKER_03 24:20

Sure, sure. Well and I might you know I might not give you the answer that you like on this so that's okay that's cool. So you know I think the self-implementation wasn't necessarily like something that was particularly well thought through I think it was we need to get more organized. This framework looks like it's gonna work really well obviously the book's super easy to read. Yep. We need to just kind of like start iterating like at you know the the company at the time that I was running was a MariFlex. Again software developments payments reconciliation processing it was more of a SaaS company very scrappy and very good at building products. And so it's like let's be scrappy and let's start iterating on this. We already were doing lean on the uh you know agile software development and so very familiar with a product backlog and product poker and then let's go do a sprint and let's go see what happens and let's get feedback. So already very uh adapted to like closed feedback loops and so it was really just let's be scrappy. Um and line media same thing um I would say if I were going to self-implement again I wouldn't I would I would hire an outside implementer um which is what we did at Lime Media. And as the kind of the integrator person um you know you get half of it installed upside down with its head chopped off and you can start really really making progress immediately like if you get a good weekly level 10 meeting and you really get good at issue processing and people get comfortable developing the muscle of healthy conflict like that is huge. Like that is a huge win in and of itself if you have red and green numbers on the board every single week and people are doing that stuff you're gonna get a lot of lift. But to really get the the maximum value out of it like it's so much more helpful to go ahead and invest and have an implementer who can take you through that process in in part because if you make that investment you're you're obviously pot committed to it. And so it's not half-hearted. We've done a number of things over the years where we're paying a consultant to help us with something that you know it seems like it should be obvious but it's not necessarily they're bringing some magical new thing to us. It's that we're we're we're telling ourselves a story that we've committed to this we're putting really real money behind it. And then it there's accountability um and when we're drifting because we're in it and on it at the same time the perspective gets lost and you start drifting um you have that person there to say hey guys you're drifting um and that's what our outside implementer did a really good job of now we had Leonard Linsky who I I can't you know endorse enough. He was our guy still is a great guy. Yeah we implemented with him and then he probably we probably had a six or seven year relationship with Leonard um and now we've done it enough where we don't use Leonard anymore. And so now I run the quarterlies and I run the offsite and you know it is a challenge to run that and also be in the business. AI is helping me tremendously with those tools. And so I'm not necessarily having to take like super detailed notes anymore. Like I'm recording the entire session and everybody's knows that we're gonna have a huge transcript that we're gonna go through and analyze everything after the fact. And so so that's been a relatively that's been a but again like we've gotten to the point now where everybody's bought in we've been doing it for years. Like we are used to the cadence and so like it's much more you know it's a habit at this point. And so we don't necessarily need now probably would make sense for us maybe once a year to have somebody come in and be like look you guys are drifting or did you did you see what just happened? Like y'all just went off into a corner and did this this and this and you didn't even talk about this which you said was the most important thing. Probably would be good to have that kind of calibration built in. There probably needs to be some kind of a postgraduation model where somebody comes in and just audits you.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Well there's I I probably have a handful of clients that I still do annuals for because they want that if the annual I don't do their quarterlies. But because they're in 90 I can also still just catch up like that if they go in there and say if they have a moment, I get the phone call, the text, whatever it is and you can pop in and say hey blah blah blah and then by the time I see them at the annual still feels highly connected to it. One of the things that I just because you mentioned AI in the session room 100% what I also love is is putting in like an owl for those playing along home is the recording device and you both get the audio and the video. Yep and so I was doing a session two weeks ago and we had an amazing IDS and everyone just kind of riffing and solving and we get there and the the CEO visionary stops and he's like who's taking the notes and it's like we got it all we got the video we got the audio we're gonna put it all in we're gonna clip out the video because he wanted to share it with the rest of the company we clipped it to a three minute shot gave it to them and so there's just such a different way to do it.

SPEAKER_03 28:47

Yeah um and by the you know I was with with probably get to the point where it can pick up on visual cues and body language. Yeah exactly process a lot of data to do that but that most communication isn't verbal.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

So like if you don't know if somebody says something sarcastically or not or what they don't say and you see their face change like it's another level of you know and no no promises but our our AI engineers believe that with 90 by the end of this year so call it Q4, you're gonna be able to talk to the application and it'll move with you. Yeah. No hands on keyboard. It'll actually populate the issues it'll pick it up it'll drop the transcripts in and if you actually are recording video you can just tell it to go ahead and clip the last four minutes and drop it into the knowledge base. And then you can share that with the organization whatever team you want to share it with. Yeah. So it's coming man it's gonna be wild because now it it gets back to our level of creativity in the moment in the room we're not worried about note taking we're not worried about that. You are really paying attention to the rest of the humans and you're managing the human energy. Yeah. So by the way you're you're about that feature I'm excited for whenever it drops. It's one guy right now doing the notes you're the guy doing the notes right with at least in the leadership meeting.

SPEAKER_03 29:51

We have other people doing it in the other and and frankly the funny thing is like I'm kind of a control freak when it comes to that so I still run our leadership L10s and I still take all the notes. In the other department meetings our directors are not doing that they're like they've got a person that's the note taker and they're the ones running through and everything. I should probably should do that, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Well it's coming we'll we'll we'll get we'll get that taken care of soon. But I just want to go back to your self-implementation you actually did give me the answer I was I was hoping for because what we see we have about 9,000 self-implementing companies right now inside 90 and we see the progression of usage of the tool kind of an agnostic scenario but what we do see the companies that are thriving and progressing are the ones that are just running great meetings. It's like when we meet an ES implementer like hey let's start with the focus day VB1 VB2 vision building day one and day two that's great if you have that. But otherwise just get start running a great meeting. Yeah right and and that's a great place to start because that's where the action's at yeah which is the way you described it.

SPEAKER_03 30:46

That's what I like too I think you can you can get so much progress by starting with that. You don't have to necessarily start with the big vision casting thing I mean you have to do that obviously at some point but just to get into the the daily rhythm of what this actually means and and how it actually works is that's the hardest part. That takes the longest you know and you're constantly having to recalibrate it. And for teams to figure out what are the issues and then be vulnerable enough to bring those things up and like I that's what I hear so much from teams easy to have an elephant in a room and like you're gonna issue process some some safe issues and then there's some big elephant issue that nobody wants to talk about and you know sometimes we'll you know we have big elephant issues and we're very one thing about our culture at Lime Media is we are very candid people. We have a a behavior called clearest kind that we got from Brene Brown. It's one of our kind of I would call of our anchor behaviors. We have like 21 behaviors I think um that are that roll up to our values and they're very intentional. We're a very direct very candid culture and most cultures that I've been a part of generally people are conflict averse and they're not that way. And that's a different kind of problem to solve. For us, we're we have the very direct very candid culture. However, that does not mean that we're not human and we will avoid an issue and be very direct about something that is very low stakes and then completely like in lost in the weeds or like ignoring the bigger issue. And so sometimes we'll have to process some easy issues just to get to the rhythm and then we'll okay let's go have let's raise our heart rates for a minute. Let's go talk about this tough one here.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Yeah my my experience in the I think doctors call it the the doorknob moment was at the very end of the meeting and if for those who have ever been to a doctor at the very end the doctor says anything else you should tell me as they turn the doorknob to walk out of that's what the meeting actually happens and then they actually say the thing. So I actually well when I when I'm when I'm coaching in the moment I'm like hey teamwork because the idea I'm like which one of these is the doorknob moment that you haven't said yet? Let's just get it out there. Because our energy's high it's not the highest at the end it's highest in the beginning. So is there anything that you're really uncomfortable with that we really just need to get after yeah I love that.

SPEAKER_03 32:49

One thing I've found is um whenever you're having a conversation or there's a meeting and then kind of the meeting is ending and it's like you got anything else like anything else we should talk about? And a lot of times people will say no and then they'll just tell you five things. Right. But it always starts no but blah blah blah blah blah blah oh okay well here's what we actually should have talked about the entire time. Very very common.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

100% well you came and you brought an impact moment and aha that happened along the EOS journey. And so tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_03 33:18

Developing the management team has been a huge impact moment for us. Scaling a business that on paper looks like it's not scalable but in in real life is extremely scalable because it's extremely repeatable has been another huge impact moment. Being able to the number one thing has has been being able to not do the firefighting thing, which is what we're paid to do essentially we're paid to build really cool stuff and have an amazing experience but at the end of the day solve problems. Not have that problem solving fighter fighter mindset every single day in the business has been the big impact moment for us. For me personally when I came into the business um again I'm not the founder like I don't know anything about the business at least at the time and so uh our business is the business of like 10,000 details. Like everything is very high fit and finish everything's very cool. Like there's not a lot of businesses that do what we do. And so there's a lot of expertise and know-how deeply buried in the minds of the people in this business and now we've got a lot of that documented but at the same time it's still very very much like you have to have felt the pain in order to be able to develop the expertise. And so very often the the highest volume person was also the hot most credible person. That's a very common thing in businesses as they're growing and when I first was in the business I would always defer to the highest volume person in our leadership team would defer as well. So somebody would be very passionate about something and it wasn't necessarily the founder. It wasn't necessarily Heath it was frequently but it might be a fabricator it might be the project manager on the job might be the salesperson. And again we would you know be faced with something that maybe it was behind schedule or maybe the client was upset and it was going to go into the field and we were really concerned about it. And we would see one thing and then we would just focus on that one thing and one person would be like this is the problem that we have to solve right now at the expense of the 15 other things that we need to address with this project that we're not seeing. That I would say that's been that that theme has been a huge impact moment for us and then and then creating a process where that doesn't happen anymore. At least it largely doesn't happen anymore. So there is a fixed lean walk that we do every day at every single project. There is a board with lots of numbers on it and a burndown chart. There is a JIRA project with the entire scope of what we're doing broken down into individual chunks and who is doing what and all those things are being tracked. And so if something looks like it's about to go off track or there seems to be a miscommunication or a misunderstanding about the scope of what we're delivering because that happens sometimes. Somebody's paying you a million dollars for something what's the level of fit and finish is this going to be to be on the road for three years and does it need to look like you're walking into a luxury experience or does it need to go for four hours and we're curating an Instagram post on it and it needs to look really cool. It doesn't need to last because it's not going to be on the road for two years. All that stuff now is systematized and so when somebody says I can see a pattern here and this is on fire and you guys don't even see it yet we can then socialize that into the project and say okay let's go see if that's true or not true because sometimes it is and we got to address it. Sometimes it's not um but then we can go back in and say okay now let's make sure we're not losing sight of all these other details of what we're doing because in the past when we see a pattern or we see something that's going wrong we all go 100 miles an hour in the direction of that problem and we are great at solving that problem. Well guess what? We took our eyes off the ball on these other things uh might be on that particular project or the 12 other projects that we're working on. And so one of the things that um you know we like to say at Line Media, uh particularly I would say years ago, not as much today is the more difficult the project is for us, the higher the budget, the more public the brand, the better job we would do. But because we were laser focused on that and we might be doing some quote unquote easy project and that project may not be getting as much attention from us as this project. And so the easy thing would not go as well as it was supposed to go or might be some major problem. And it's because we were laser focused on this thing and solving this problem because that was the biggest spotlight. So that's been a that's been a big thing for us.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah. One of the things I think it's interesting as as companies grow and there's we at 90 we talk about five stages of business building or business development. You know you kind of the first level is you got to you got to start it right and then you got to build it and you hit a growth phase and you hit a scale phase and then get to this last phase which is more exit optionality. But what we find is the people that you have especially in those first two stages um they love the firefight because that's what they're good at and they're broad skill based they're not specialized and then you start to get into that third phase now you're specializing you mentioned kind of the leadership team kind of reshift, reshape. And the people who are used to that almost addicted to the adrenaline of the fight feel like something's changed here. Right. That is us to a T. Yeah. And it's hard to coach through that.

SPEAKER_03 38:09

Yeah. Well and and so again for for you know entrepreneurs who have the wherewithal to say no no I have something really special here. I want to make it bigger and I want to do more of it for whatever my ultimate legacy is to be, recognizing that, you know, you're probably going to be the person that's going to be faced with that the most to Heath's credit, um, the business that he sees today uh is somewhat unrecognizable to the business that he built and in in a way that he intended. But his role has changed dramatically because he doesn't have line of sight to everything that we're doing anymore. And he solves problems. And the problem that he's solving now is a much bigger more abstract problem. It is helping 10 million people to lease the lost and the lonely it is funding a retreat center. It is increasing the giving that he's already been doing by you know orders of magnitude. That is a much thornier problem than it is we're building a step van for a brand that's going to be a target and we need to make sure that we can hand out these samples and the art looks good. So it takes a certain kind of founder to be able to realize um frequently that it's not harder. It's just a different kind of hard um and that's why you don't see a lot of people that are like founders of businesses that are CEOing a business that's you know a trillion dollar business. There's not a lot of Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks out there. Those are the exception. Most people at that point have long exited because what they're good at is bounded within this particular sort of altitude of where you're going. I don't have that problem. I have a different problem which is I'm going in and I'm trying to pour cold water on founders some of the time and um doing what they've hired me to do, which is kind of help them build a legacy that's going to be more sustainable than what they've what they've kind of put together so far as they're growing and scaling a business.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

What's your tactics as you go into those conversations where you feel like you're the wet blanket or you're pouring the cold water?

SPEAKER_03 39:52

Yeah, you know, I don't have a good pithy answer for that other than you know I I go into it with a lot of a lot of trust already built. So the people that I've worked with in my career, we already have a really good relationship and so there's a lot of trust that's already kind of pre-existing and um you know reality bats last. And so um generally speaking, you know, we might take two steps forward and four steps back and then we'll take five steps forward. And so the results ultimately end up speaking for themselves. And again it's a matter of um you know having the emotional wherewithal to understand you know that we're having to make a big investment here and do these things and it's going to feel a little uncomfortable and a little out of sorts. And ultimately though, if you want to have control, you want to grow, you can't do both of those at the same time. There's a book that I love um called The Anxious organizations not a very common business book that people use. In fact I think it was written by a social worker uh it's by a guy named Miller. It's a fantastic book but it's about something that we like to call online media which is wildebeasting where people anxiety moves through an organization in a very particular way. And there are things that cause that anxiety to to start to to manifest itself and then when that happens everybody obviously makes your job less fun but also you become worse at doing what you're supposed to be doing. And so I would recommend that by the way to people and it's used the original framework for that context was not inside of an organization. I think it was actually used in therapy but uh the anxious organization is about organizations and how how anxiety propagates. And so like you have to be the kind of have the kind of temperament where you bring the temperature of the room down. Um right so I don't know that I I have any particularly good tactics when it comes to those sorts of things. I think it's just having the right personalities in the room and then again having a leap of faith that is made and then trust is built over time and then having the wherewithal to go around and say okay I want everybody's perspective on this because I value but their perspective is different from my perspective. And so I think it's really more on the founder than it is on somebody like me to be able to to do something like that.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

To really create that environment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:57

Yeah or at least allow it to propagate and not uh train wreck that environment, you know?

SPEAKER_01 42:02

And and there's probably few organizations that aren't anxious right now between Well there always is some level yeah there's just there's so much going on in the world and I know that most of the time there is it just seems that it's it's being highlighted a lot now between we've been talking about AI, but we've got wars going on. We've got inflation we've got all kinds of stuff. So it's it's good to recognize that the organization probably is anxious.

SPEAKER_03 42:23

Absolutely absolutely yeah and it's tell the anxiety is telling you something so you don't want to get rid of anxiety. It's like the smoke detector that's beeping you know like it's telling you something important. But there's healthy anxiety and there's unhealthy anxiety and then there are ways to to deal with it that are productive and ways to deal with it that are maladaptive and and so it's a confluence of things. But trust is the kind of the foundation that everything is built on.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Did you also come with a what was that screw up hardship moment that you had to build and work through uh I don't have as good an answer to that.

SPEAKER_03 42:57

You're gonna have to ask Heath Heath has those for me it's much more iterative and it's much more about building a system over time and a culture. I've had major screw ups in my life in my personal life and my investing life and those sorts of things um but a lot of times I think when people are talking about those things I think they're fitting those on the past and really it was a series of chance events, a series of variables and a series of things that came together that allow you to be the person that you are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

So sorry I don't have a good better answer to that question. No I think when we we hear it mostly in the work we've been doing on the podcast, it's like there's one way and two way door decisions. The two way is like I could walk through and I can easily walk back out. Yep. The ones we hear are the ones that you you one way doored it and you thought you had the best information at the time you had it. You got in there the side of the door you're like oh no that was not what I thought it was going to be. Yeah. But hopefully there's learning there, right?

SPEAKER_03 43:50

Absolutely yeah. Yeah and one of the nice things about EOS is you know you can do that Eisenhower matrix and you can you know most of the decisions that you make are are reversible. Now some of them might be painfully reversible or a great cost. But usually usually things are fixable and usually there's lessons there that ultimately end up making the you know what you're building more valuable.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

Aaron Ross Powell time gives you hindsight and we even at the end of every quarter we talk about did we win or did we learn? And like you're learning all of the time constantly but there's that concept of like well what's not working yet? And so you're always looking to like have those moments of improvement.

SPEAKER_03 44:25

Yeah yeah yeah we have them every day we have thanks to EOS and thanks to uh the way that we collect and process data and our daily stand-ups and the things that we do at Lime Media every day we have learnings we have things that go wrong all day long every day. And you know we've gotten really good at at at learning and socializing those pretty quickly because we're having to move very quickly.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

Well if people do want to get in contact with you or learn more about LimeMedia, tell them where they should go.

SPEAKER_03 44:50

Sure. Uh you can go to our website limedia.com follow us on Instagram you can see a lot of the cool stuff that we're doing on Instagram um if uh you know you want to do your quarterly offsite at OKLs I think it's OKLSretreat.org incredible property just outside of DFW if you want to know more about me I've got a book called You Before Me that I co-wrote with a mentor of mine who's a behavioral psychologist. Mark Winters actually endorsed uh the book for me a really nice yeah we love and it's about leadership and management but it's not a boring book about that there's thousands of books on that topic but I think we put a little bit of a different twist on it. So um so yeah that's how you can find out more about me and more about Line Media.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 45:31

Awesome well thank you so much for being here we will need to talk more after this too about nine thank you for having me yeah yeah thank you thanks for listening. Bart said something that really stuck with me if you want to have control and you want to grow you can't do both at the same time. And that's a trade that every founder has had to make eventually what I keep coming back to too is this shift from problem solving to problem preventing. Seven figure budgets, a movable deadlines with thousands of details but the company only leveled up when they stopped treating every day like a crisis and actually built the systems that could run without the founder fingerprint on everything. And I think that's a good instance evolution that happens and where the EOS framework can actually plug in and help you identify what the problems and what the issues actually are that are coming up so that you can work and be proactive about solving those things. So thank you again for listening to if this episode resonated with us with somebody that's building something to build and we'll see next afternoon