Max: 00:07 I’m Max Clark. I just finished recording with Scott Levy, founder and CEO of ResultMaps. Scott is, by background, a business management consultant. Large organizations think Deloitte, CBRE, you know, Texas Utilities, large, large companies. And use that experience in building and organizing product teams and actually created a company called Result Maps to help businesses create alignment and measure and monitor against objectives that they’re trying to actually achieve.
And and this is, you know, regardless of whether that’s an approach around OKRs or v two mom or EOS or whatever framework that you’re in, how do you actually take and, you know, figure out what your objectives are? And are you tracking and measuring the results and and achieving those goals? If you’ve ever been through an EOS implementation or try to do an OKR implementation, you this is something that will be key to you to get correct and and really becomes the secret to unlocking success and scale. It was a fantastic, chat for me. It’s, it’s something I’m very focused on and very curious about and and working really hard for ourselves to get correct.
So hope you enjoy it. Scott Levy, founder and CEO of Result maps. I am sitting with Scott Levy who is founder and CEO of result maps, and I’ve wanted to have this conversation I think since I met Scott originally. I didn’t really even know how to ask him the questions I wanted to ask when I first found out what it was that Scott, that you do and what result maps does. So just as like a as a starter, 30 second elevator pitch because I wanna I wanna I wanna circle back to what you do after we talk about all the things that you enable with what you do.
But 32nd 30 seconds, what is result maps and and how did you fall into this?
Scott: 01:49 So, result maps helps CEOs, leaders, and their teams get everyone on the same page, get visibility into how they’re executing their strategy at every level of the organization, and actually get them to the results they’re after twice as fast. It’s called strategy execution software. If you look at how the ways people handle that have evolved over time, there’s a lot of silo based software tools out there. Like, they they handle, like, one aspect of things, but it’s very difficult to connect all the pieces together. And you spend a lot of time trying to connect all the dots and moving between the different systems.
Result maps keeps a focus on results, strong team fundamentals, strong operating rhythm so you can keep everyone aligned and executing instead of micromanaging or juggling all your docs and meetings and things like that. That’s how I usually explain the product.
Max: 02:38 So, so to connect the dots a little bit here, in the conversation we started having briefly because I was asking you, like, what the heck is this it feels like in the last few years, maybe it’s just because I’ve become aware of it more and we went through this. There is this, you know, general kind of awakening into EOS attraction. It’s been very popular. You know, the tech space has been on OKRs for a long time. You know, there’s v two MOM that’s on the market.
And I I think what’s interesting about all these things is it really comes down to, like, is there an operating system that you’re adhering and and driving your business with? And I wanna I wanna dig into, like, the differences between, like, EOS and v two m o m and OKRs because you implement. But then as you start deploying any of these things, they each there’s a lot more similarities, I think, than differences for me at least when I look at these platform at these operating systems, and approaches. But then you you get into, like, well, what are you actually running? Right?
Like, in OKR land, you know, it’s common you’re running Asana, and then you’re trying to figure out how to implement and track OKRs in Asana, which Asana kinda shoehorns in. But, you know, chances are you’re doing something else to actually track your OKR. And in the EOS world, you’re you’re maybe using the EOS tools or you’re implementing the EOS template, and then you’re trying to, you know, maintain what your rocks are in your in Asana or in ClickUp or in Monday or all these different things. Right? And then and, you know, personally, we went into this.
We fell into this, like, you know, state where we’ve we’ve we turn around and realize that we’d I mean, we’d you know, Google Workspace, and then you have Asana, and then you have Notion, and then you have, you know, this, and you have that, and you have the next thing. And I kinda had a little freak out and was just like, okay. We’re getting rid of Notion, and we’re gonna put everything into, like, just Google Docs going forward here just because of of a of a sprawl issue. You know, as companies that are getting started and they’re trying to figure out, like, oh, we’ve heard this thing. We’ve heard about EOS.
Like, how do people end up on EOS versus v2m? I mean, first off, what is v2m on? But, like, EOS versus v2mon versus mom versus, you know, OKR. And and is there a practical difference that really matters based on the type of organization you’re running? And from where you’re sitting, you know, what are you seeing?
And and, I mean, do people switch from EOS to another tool or from another tool to EOS? Like, is is this a thing where it’s like, oh, we decided to go from Monday to click up to Asana? Is, like, the same thing happening with, you know, with these management tools?
Scott: 04:53 Yes and no. Right? So let me take a step back and kind of, you know, kinda just to set the stage. Right? I think it’s important that we that we create a little bit of a a difference in our thinking between kind of fundamentals, so the fundamental techniques we use, between different tools and methods, right, that we use to get more results out of those fundamentals.
And then there’s frameworks and systems that fit everything together. And when you when you understand that, it starts to get a little easier to slice and dice all these different options. And if you wanna move between them, sure, even though, you know, each of the founders would say, no, never do that. But, I mean, ultimately, these these different constructs kinda fit differently into each of these areas. So, you know, if you think of what what are fundamentals and fundamental techniques, those are like when you’re writing, it’s your letters, it’s your grammar rules, it’s your vocabulary.
Right? Those are fundamentals. The frameworks and methods are how do you take those words and put them together in a certain way to to achieve an end? Is it a blog post? Is it a podcast script?
Is it a book? Whatever the case may be. And then you have, like, these frameworks and systems. Okay. I’m gonna have a book or a series of books or a television series, where things are getting into these bigger arcs, these bigger stories.
And so each of those each of those frameworks or tools that you mentioned, objectives and key results, what Marc Benioff calls V2MOM or the, you know, the acronym, which I’ll get into in a second, and then objectives and key results or OKRs. Each of those kinda fits a little differently. And if we go, I’d say, simplest up to most comprehensive, maybe that’s a good way to understand them. Would that be a good way to approach this? So so objectives and key results, or OKRs, they came out of Intel.
And Andy Grove was running Intel way back in the day. He took a framework that already existed called management by objectives, and he tweaked it for his needs. He wanted something leaner, meaner, faster. And one of his proteges, this guy John Doerr, kinda coined the phrase objectives and key results for it and became a big, proponent of it. He took it to his first big investment when he became a venture capitalist, and that was a little company called Google, and they ended up using them.
Right? And that sort of brought OKRs outside of Intel to the world. They tend to be I think of them as a goal setting method. You know, they’re a way that you can align everybody by saying, look, here’s what we’re trying to get done. Number 1, this is our objective.
And here’s how we’re gonna measure success, which are our key results. And they can kind of exist that way if you just look purely at what is an OKR. It’s an objective. What are we gonna get done? And a key result, how are we gonna measure success that it was done?
Max: 07:38 OKR implementation will tell you only have 3. Like, you have 3. You have a product. You have a you have sales, and you have people maybe as, like, a top line organizational OKR, and then you end up departments, but, like, don’t do more than 3. And it it becomes just like but then but then going down the organization, right, it’s like how many layers of organization do you have within OKRs?
It’s like you have 3 times 3 times 3 times 3 times 3, you know, as you step down the
Scott: 07:59 Just say no. You you’re better off not doing that. Right? And I think that this is one of the problems, with all these systems is when you start cascading things, there’s a part of our brain likes the idea that we can rationalize ever more key results or objectives and key results, and that’s where you create just a complete cluster. You wanna have, like, a set for your organization, maybe a set for each team, maybe.
But cascading is where people spend a lot of time, piss each other off, and get frustrated, from what I’ve seen. And I I I’m probably offending someone when I say that, but I’ve just seen it over and over and over. Right? You can justify it. No.
It’s okay if you’re not if you’re not pissing someone off. But but what I like about v two mom is you you keep it fairly simple, and you can run pretty fast with it, without worrying too much about the cascades and everything else. Like, here’s where we’re driving. What progress are we making? Are we seeing our numbers move?
Are these methods working? The last one is the first one you asked about, which is the entrepreneurial operating system or EOS. So this is very much, a cohesive system. It’s a framework of 22 different tools, 6 different, areas of the business that they call their 6 components, and they fit together in a cohesive way where with OKRs, yeah, there are some structures they put around it, but they leave that fairly open because that can vary so much with the size of the business, the stage of the business. EOS is very, very prescriptive.
Where OKRs and V2MOM came out of particular entrepreneurs needing to align their company, EOS is very much developed as a consulting product, and it’s very well done consulting product. And there’s an origin story around it. Like, Gino Wickman is the founder, and he turned his father’s company around, did some companies for his friends. But what I think he did incredibly well was he wove together, a lot of great things from Jim Collins, from Michael Gerber, from, Patrick Lencioni, and a lot of other very brilliant thinkers, thought leaders, consultants with real world experience. He wove them into a cohesive framework with his team, and then they created a system that says, okay.
If you’re the founder, the entrepreneur, and you wanna get out of the day to day operations of the business, which they argue very well that you should, here’s how you do that. And then you can take your business and grow it or sell it or whatever the case may be, but you no longer are the bottleneck. Because what we see in businesses, as they grow from 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 and beyond, each one of those stages, the founder has to be someone different. You literally have to become someone else. And I don’t mean existentially where you aren’t the same person you were, but your skill set, the things you’re concerned about, how you spend your time.
You hear this again and again and again, if you survey successful CEOs who’ve made the journey, or you look at what each company needs. So EOS helps you kinda step out of that original founder mentality and get structure around your business and create a thing out of the business that isn’t focused on you. Now it’s a lot heavier. There’s a lot more to it. And even though you can, you can start by implementing a subset of tools, they’ve coupled everything together so tightly that it can be difficult to unwind them and take them apart.
But they’ve got a lot of great tools. I mean, they don’t just have a goal setting framework that they they bar Stephen Covey’s rocks idea. They make those goals smart. But they’ve got a great framework for evaluating whether people fit your culture, a great great framework for doing performance reviews for, a whole range of things. I really like their emphasis on the people.
I really like their emphasis on, running strong meetings and keeping the operating rhythms weekly, quarterly, and yearly, and really, really adhering to those. But there are a lot more than just the goal setting part of it. So that’s that’s kind of the breakdown of how to look at those.
Max: 12:08 So it’s it’s, I actually am laughing a little bit because, you know, you say in terms of, like, comprehensiveness and complexity of EOS being the top of that when EOS is probably the most dominant in terms of, like, the SMB, like, to mid market space of what people are actually implementing versus, you know, you know, if you think like organization size and sophistication, it’s not like, you know, it it’s kind of it’s it’s almost a little bit backwards in that sense. Something you said at the very beginning when you when you talk about, like, answering the question of 30 seconds, what do you do? And here’s here’s my I think my segue into this is you talk about alignment. And when when we talk in and just going through these examples of OKRs to v two mom to EOS, a big value in all these systems is alignment communication process consistency of the organizational movement. Right?
Like, how does you how does the organization actually operate day to day? How do you do planning? How do you track? That’s the real value that comes out of these things. So you’re doing this with a lot of organizations.
You’ve seen a lot of this. How do you how does how do you apply this with result maps? And how do you actually help companies get what they’re trying to get out of here which is again, you know, which is alignment, which is consistency, which is consistency, which is this this whole thing kinda, like, wrapped up of, like, we’re now moving in the same direction at the same time.
Scott: 13:29 That’s a great question. Yeah. The a lot of it, the way to answer that comes down to how I came into this business. I found myself on my earliest consulting project when I went into management consulting, working for a spin out company from that consulting company, where I wasn’t reporting in theory directly to the founder, but I kinda was. Right?
He was launching a product. And then, I did several things in larger corporations for a period of years, but then came back to another start up and again was working with the founders. When I got into product consulting, which is what I did after that and doing a lot of product work, again, I was working with CEOs and founders or high level VPs. It varied. What I found is there were a lot of different ways that people managed, and a lot of them had a lot of success.
But oftentimes, what I would do for 1 founder or one executive would get you completely thumped at the next one. Right? People have their own ways they like to do things. So I got very curious of, like, why? What what are the principles?
Even though everybody has their own flavor of things they like, what are the principles that really carry through in all these different situations, number 1? And then how easy and effective is it to teach these not just teach them, but actually seduce people into using them inside the company in a way that they get done? And I found over time, I was doing the same sets of questions, the same set ways of introducing these ideas. And that’s what I ultimately productized into result maps. Here’s how we introduce a concept.
Here’s how we get you guys on the same page. Here’s how we manage week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter. Here are the things we need to look at. OKRs immediately fit very well with that. A lot of the tools and systems that influenced or that were adopted by EOS also fit into that.
So when I learned about EOS, which was, I don’t know, around the 20 16 ish time frame or something like that, the way I learned about it was one of my customers was saying, oh, this is just like what we just did with this EOS implementer. We can plug all our things from the EOS tools into result maps. And I went, Wow, this is really interesting. How do I find more people like you? Because they were they were doing the things already that I usually had to sell, leadership teams on doing.
They were just already bought in. So that started us looking at, okay, well, how do we play beautifully as possible with EOS? And along the way, discovered VT MOM and saw the same thing. What I’ve seen happen is a lot depends on the makeup of the company and the industry you’re in, and the stage you’re at. So if you’re early stage, riding a strong market, or indeed if you’re riding any strong market, you don’t have to be quite as on top of your collaboration game, no matter what anybody tells you.
I’ve seen a lot of, to quote Mark Anderson, you know, he says, out of product market and team market always wins. If you have a strong market, it’ll carry through a lot of dysfunction in a team or a product. For better or for worse, that happens a lot. But if you’re in a competitive environment where you start to need more structure, getting people to buy into that structure takes a lot of times having an example you can point to. And so EOS can give you that example.
They can give you the numbers on how many companies they’ve helped and and the number of meetings they’ve sampled and run. And that was kind of the same approach we were using at result maps, which is, let’s just gather data on what’s working. Let’s figure out how to get these things implemented. Now what I found was there are 3 things that if you don’t have, everything else gets very difficult. You need a vision that everybody understands and that they can see their self in and and they can see how your plans fit into that vision.
So that’s that second part is your strategy. Right? You need that. You need rhythms where you’re checking in with how you’re doing on that every single day, every single week, and that informs your quarterly and your annual rhythms. If you don’t have that, it gets very very difficult.
Right? Maybe you can get away without the daily check-in. It depends on the speed of your business. But if you’re, like, fast paced product company, which is what I’ve tended to focus on the most, you’ve got to have some form of daily sync, just checking in. The third thing or actually, that is the third thing.
But the the second of those three things is this weekly cadence where you’re coming together each week, and you’re asking a few questions like, how are we doing against the numbers that we’ve chosen to represent our vision? How are we doing against the goals we’ve set to hit our vision? Is what we think was true when we started all this still true? Because that allows you to start to adapt and adjust course. It also forces you to get really good at solving the problems that come up.
So I’ve I think I’ve kind of digressed from your original question. So I’ll let you reign me back in a little bit here.
Max: 18:09 You know, there’s there’s so many different ways I wanna take this conversation. I’m trying to think what would be the most useful. Right? So I think the trap that I’ve seen people fall into when they try to do OKRs or EOS and rocks and these things is I I think First Stars is like just goal setting. Like how you get around creating appropriate goals and then figuring out what your you know, so what, like, what your o’s are and then what your KRs need to be as a result of that.
I recorded an interesting conversation with Steve Harroux, who’s a sale you know, has a sales training company. He’s very, you know, he’s a very yeah. Very passionate about these things. Right? And and he talks a lot about, you know, leading versus lagging indicators.
And I and I and I think a big problem that I’ve seen a lot of companies do, and it really kinda connected a lot of dots for me, was how many of these, like, OKR or V2MOM or, you know, EOS processes really trying to, like, push you towards that, like, lagging in you know, like, you fall into this, like, lagging indicator kind of thought process of, like, we’re trying to add to this much revenue or this may say, you know, these things. But it’s almost opposite, you know, in terms of what, like, your daily and and weekly cadence needs to be. So I’m listening to you say the same thing, which is, you know, if you’re gonna get down to this weekly cadence, right, like, what can you really accomplish during the course of a week? You’re not gonna be able to say, like, hey, we’re gonna incrementally increase our revenue by x number, you know, x x percent over the week. You have to be really intentional about how you’re planning and how you’re, you know, maintaining alignment.
And I’m I’m kinda I mean, I’d be interested to hear what your take is on that because when you start talking about, like, going to vision to strategy, add that granularity of a daily or weekly cadence, you know, what does that actually mean to you in terms of an organization of what you’re doing and how you’re actually achieving those things?
Scott: 19:48 Yeah. I think, it’s interesting. The weekly cadence is where I see the most pushback initially, typically, and then the most well, often the most buy in if somebody actually does it. A lot of people will view those cadences as micromanagement. They’re really not.
They’re just saying that we’re gonna get together and check the numbers and communicate in a disciplined way each week. And then the answer is, well, we can always have a conversation. And it’s like, you could always have a conversation, but what if we made this just a practice that you are relentless about, like a basketball player shoots free throws? Coming up with what goes on the scoreboard, I will usually try to get people at result maps, we usually try to get people to think through your leading indicators and make sure that you can report against those each week. And typically, those are what your key results are supposed to be pushing, your leading indicators.
You can have the lagged excuse me, lagging indicators up there, and probably should. But the things that you want to have visible each week are the things that will motivate you. So if you’re in sales, do you have a forecast? Are you delivering to it? How much are you are you forecasting to be over or under?
Like, those numbers should probably be reported on in in a lot of organizations, and I’ve seen that be very, very useful. Sometimes it’s what does the pipeline look like? Are we putting enough leads in the pipeline? Are we closing enough of those leads? But I’m I’m kinda skewing towards sales here.
If you’re in a project environment, even if you’re running agile, this form of weekly meeting is still the tightest I’ve seen on a project. Like, you take if you’re familiar with agile methodologies, most agile methodologies rely on some form of daily stand up. Hey, guys. What got done? What’s next?
What’s blocked? Those are actually really important meetings, but they get kinda glossed over a lot of times. We found that you can get a lot of that sync done asynchronously if you just fill out a quick form. What I get done, what’s next, is anything stuck? And then you’d use your weekly cadence to address the larger issues or patterns you start to see.
And in the best case, everything’s going great, you don’t even have to glance very much at that information. But week to week, as humans, we cannot remember what we did on Monday within 3 days. There’s research on this too, and, like, people Human memory just doesn’t work that way. So these cadences set up this awareness and they start to give you data you can use to adjust, and they’re very lightweight. Like, they actually result in fewer blow ups, fewer explosions, but it does come back to setting, you know, the right leading indicators and making sure you’re working on the right things.
And, yeah, just checking in with that once a week, I always look at it like, why wouldn’t I do that? If I know that doing this is going to ensure I’m successful and I’m kinda rolling the dice and hoping it works out. You you everyone I’ve talked to that’s hit, ceiling in their growth, implementing that starts to remove the ceiling immediately.
Max: 22:50 So you productize this experience. And, actually, this is another thing I’ll I’ll come back to. This isn’t that you went out and you hired a development team. Like, you when you say you productize this experience, you know, this this this, your experience in this consulting, like, you actually wrote a lot of this code. Correct me if I’m wrong or if I remember correctly, it’s Ruby on Rails.
So, like, this isn’t you’re just, you know, not so we’re not you’re not just like some, you know, business suit strategy consulting guy. Right? Like, you’re actually coding the platform that that turned into result maps. We we talk about this also of, like, you know, there’s there’s, like, so many tools out there, and everybody has, like, oh, use this tool, use this tool. You know?
You know, Asana, Monday, click up this, that, the next thing. You know? How how do you slot into this thing and not be, you know, just adding on additional an additional layer of, like, tool fatigue for companies of you know, are you are you complimentary? I mean, are you are you duplicative? Are you replacing?
Are people still gonna run Asana for for task and project management? Or is that all gonna come into result maps? Like, where how does this all how does this fit together?
Scott: 23:51 I kinda go back to it it’s really not about the tool. Right? It’s not about tools. Tools only work as well as you use them. And whether you’re looking at Asana or, ClickUp or I mean, I lose track of them.
It’s such
Max: 24:05 a crowded space.
Scott: 24:06 Going back to Basecamp, Microsoft Project, all of them. I would I would go into clients when I was doing consulting, and I was the way this came about was I was doing product work for about a decade. Every conversation started like this, Scott, I think we need your help. We we’re running things, and let me tell you how we’re running them. We have this cool tool and that cool tool, and we’re using Jira, we’re using GitHub, we’re using like, you just like go through this list of the 50 tools and the 4 frameworks, and we read these books, But our project is in the crapper.
Can you help us turn it around? And what I found was it was never the tools, but it was prioritization and sequencing, which the tools actually make harder because those tools want you to create more Shiitake. Right? They don’t track the results. And then you’re just bolting together all these layers of work.
And what we found was we had to actually get people out of all their user stories and their requirements and all their stuff to do and say, time out. What are the 3 things that will make anybody care about this month or this project? Like, just give me 3. You can only pick 3. Okay.
Those are the 3. So here’s what we’re gonna do on this project. This week, we’re gonna start on number 1. We’re going to prototype. We’re going to wireframe it.
We’re going to come back and review our progress and we’re going to look at everything wrong with it and we’re going to fix that and come back the next week and we’re going to do it again. But in week 2, we’re also going to introduce the first wireframe of the second thing. We just started doing this like, you know, the cannon where you row row row your boat, you start this one thread. Like, let’s get v 1 and begin iterating. Then let’s get 2 and begin iterating.
Let’s get 3 and begin iterating. If we got more than that, there were just too many things going on. And just getting people to hyperfocus. So the software is designed to help you with that and help you do all the things you need to make those decisions. Because nobody on planet Earth is paid for how many Asana tasks they get done.
Right? There’s nothing your bank cares about. You don’t fill out your bank statement and say, I did 50 Asana tasks, or I have all my stuff captured in Jira, or whatever the case may be. What we do with result maps is bring everything back to results, and okay, if you are hell bent on using Asana because people get I mean, the reality is most companies have, like, 5 to 7 different tools. Because one team likes Asana, this other guy can’t get away from Jira, this third guy’s using Trello, and we all have our own personal lists, but we’re not getting together.
So result maps brings you together on this cadence and allows you to align and see how these things fit together. And by the way, we, you know, we’ve all the all the things in those tools, those are table stakes these days. We have all that stuff too, but what’s more important to us is what is your vision? How are you gonna get there? Are we on this journey together?
Because what you typically find is you can get there much faster if you take care of some of the pitfalls early on. To answer your question, we we play with everybody. We bring them all in, but we add this layer that you can’t get just from bolting on OKRs. You can’t get just from using this framework’s favorite system. You really need a holistic view that becomes your personal dashboard and your team’s team dashboard.
They have a beautiful product. The product guy on me likes all these tools you mentioned. I think they’re all great.
Max: 27:09 You know what Asana falls over for me? Is Asana is a phenomenal task and project management tool. And once we started using when I started actually using their, like, automations and integrations, like, it really I understood Asana at that point. I was like, finally, like, okay. I get it.
I get what the obsession with Asana is. My problem with Asana always rolls back into collaboration and, like, updates and, you know, communication. Or it’s not it’s not it’s like it’s all that is such an afterthought. You know, you mentioned base camp. You know?
Base camp was a collaboration tool that then introduced, like, task management into it later, and you can kinda just see the vibe difference between these, you know, between how these things work. You know? And I’ve seen people implement, you know, OKR and reporting and cadence or l ten in Asana, and it’s just like, okay. It’s it’s it’s working, but like wow, you know, it’s painful, you know, but you know, it’s it’s more of that like, oh, if you have buy in all the way through and through then it’s great and and, you know, I’ve I’ve seen some examples of people with Asana that are, like, never use Asana for personal tasks. Like, maintain your own personal task list somewhere else and only use Asana to, like, maintain what your okay are, what what your actual, like, you know, team project, you know, agreement tasks are.
So that way it doesn’t get too cluttered, you know, and it’s it’s, it’s like this endless circular pattern of, like, how do you how do you do this? And then how do you scale it? And and then, you know, what what you and I talked about originally was this idea of, like, how few companies make it to a million? How few companies make it from a million to 10? How few companies make it from 10 to 50 and 50 to a 100?
And it’s like and and it feels like almost the commonality that I’ve gotten from most of these conversations and really looking at with our clients is is it’s almost unintuitive where, like, each tier requires you to become so much more focused and discriminating on what you care about and, like, what you actually pay attention to and what you’re doing. You know, like this transition from 1 to 10. You talk about EOS and, like, founders getting out of the business. It’s not them getting out of the business. It’s just that their focus has to get really, like, you know, you’re focused on all this stuff.
Now you got to focus on this other thing and get really specific into this other thing. And and I feel like a lot of these things are trying just to help you get to that end game of where’s your focus, what are you actually focused on, and how do you how do you actually accomplish that?
Scott: 29:20 I think with EOS, you know, they they say, rightly, they help founders get what they want out of their business. You know, if you want if you wanna scale, then you have to be able to take yourself out of parts and hyper focus on certain areas. That means you have to have a system and and someone you trust them to run day to day operations so you can be strategic, so you can be out there recruiting your team or whatever the case may be. I think they probably do the best job of saying in fact, they’ve got a whole system around bringing in founders, helping them get coaching with with the same coach Gino Wickman uses and and be part of a community of other founders like them. They’re brilliant at building community and everything.
OKRs are are a little, you know, a lot less prescriptive. And I say v two mom is that way too. It’s just like, hey. Here’s a framework. You can take this and run with it.
But to your to your question about the tools also, it’s like you know, again, I’m a product guy, so I love when I see innovations come out of Asana or or any other company. You mentioned Notion. I think they have a really cool product. I think it’s important to remember is the result we’re after needs to be at the forefront of all those conversations. Is the result to get to that next stage?
Some founders don’t wanna make that journey. Is the result, to find product market fit. You know, as a result, to scale our company from 50 to 300,000,000. And to your point, you have to be someone different at each of these stages. Not just as a founder, but as a company.
Problem I see, and I made the same mistake. Right? You come out of working and helping big companies. You know, Deloitte was one of my clients, Texas Utilities, these really massive companies, CBRE. If you take the structures that make those companies successful and put them on your little $10,000,000 company or your little $5,000,000 company.
It’s like taking the radar array from an aircraft carrier and putting it on a fishing boat. It’s gonna sink. And you just just because it just because the big guys do it this way, doesn’t mean that if we adopt all those practices, because you don’t know what issues they were overcoming, and typically there are issues that we don’t have when we’re a smaller company. So kind of understanding what fits best for your stage, I’d say is the is the special sauce. And having someone who can help you do that, whether it’s an integrator or or, chief of staff or part time COO, whatever the case may be, they can help you make
Max: 31:37 Let’s let’s let’s let’s sidetrack on that for a little bit. Because part of this, I feel like it’s just, you know, like, oh, I heard I’m supposed to be running EOS because my friend runs EOS. Or, like, you know, you came out of a tech company, and so therefore, you wanna go down the OKR system. You know, if you if you go out and you find an integrator, right, that integrator is gonna prescribe EOS because that’s definition or an implementer. Right?
Because that’s just what they do. They’re an EOS consultant. How how do you figure out other than this is what you ran beforehand? Let’s just assume that you didn’t run something beforehand. Right?
And you’re and you know that you need something because you just know that you need something. How do you pick? Like, what’s is it does it even matter at that point? Just pick 1 and do it? Or does is there is there a you’re this type of organization, you’re this size, you should probably do this.
Like, how do you help peep how would you help somebody with that?
Scott: 32:20 I I think you wanna look for someone that, I I try to be careful saying that has experience in your industry because that’s not always a good thing, but they understand what the challenges you’re facing are. Right? It’s gonna be difficult to pull someone from manufacturing that only has a manufacturing background into a software environment today for a really, really early stage company. Not impossible. Things move at a different speed.
It’s not one’s better than the other. You just have a different set of logistical challenges. So having some understanding of that, I think, is good. I’ve talked to several founders that have tried several different ones, and a lot depends on who you get, like, the individual rapport. I know a founder that he tried scaling up, which is another system we didn’t talk about that EOS actually grew out of, or at least Wichman, I think, was in that system.
He then went to nothing, then now they’re doing EOS. And they’re experiencing some friction because there’s some things outside of EOS that aren’t EOS Pure. They have a thing EOS Pure that they wanna use. In his mind, it’s like, this is my ship. I’m steering it.
If I wanna use outside, that’s what I that’s what I’m gonna do. The scaling up, I’m not quite as familiar with as I am, like, say with EOS, because we run components of EOS. Where I hear feedback and I heard when I first was talking with a lot of implementers that came out of the scaling up community is that companies find, like, scaling up, for example, a little complex early on. It’s very flexible and it can be applied and there’s great work on that particular one. I think EOS gave people a simpler model.
If you’re just running, like, OKRs and that’s all you wanna run, then, you know, there’s reading you have to do and learning you have to do. I think there’s things you’ll run up against depending on your industry, whether it’s hiring, you know, I learned, I learned about hiring and team building 320 experiments of hiring people. And and, you know, I’m very grateful for what I’ve learned. But, yeah, I’ve seen a lot of that outlined in some good books. We offer a lot of resources on it.
Obviously, I’m partially the whole point of result maps is to help people navigate that journey. So where do you go? We we’ve got some great free resources that start you off, including reading lists. And, yes, start reading lists.
Max: 34:33 Companies are you working with today? You know, I mean, what’s what’s what’s result map’s sweet spot? I mean, are you dealing with, you know, emerging? Are you, you know, growth phase? Are you established entrenched?
You know, is this, industry specific? Like, you know, who’s coming to you, and who are you helping?
Scott: 34:49 Companies that are in the range of 5 to 30,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. So those there’s really 2 distinct groups in there that you can’t nail down by revenue as much as it is by culture and where their gaps are. And so when they come into result maps, they get an assessment to kind of assess, like, where they are on the journey so that they can get the proper focus as result maps gets implemented in the organization. Because let’s say it’s a 21 point checklist. You really need to focus on, like, a couple key areas first, not try to implement everything, which is also how EOS themselves do it.
Right? They take you do a journey of implementing all the different tools. But where I’m going with this is depending on whether you’re immature makes it sound judgmental. It’s not what I mean. Like, if your if your business model is still formative in a lot of ways, there’s one approach there.
And if you’re now we know where we are. It’s time to scale up. There’s something slightly different. So there’s kinda 2 subsets in that range we find.
Max: 35:48 I wanna let’s let’s end this on talking about mission, vision, and values. And, something that EOS I think does pretty well and, Matt Mosheri with with the Mosheri method gets into this as well is really trying to, you know, use mission vision values as an alignment tool both for are the people are you rolling in the same direction? And are you hiring people that have the same that can see that you use the you know, do you have a vision to can people see themselves in that vision or not? And, you know, Elon Musk is mean, you you look at his companies. Right?
And Tesla’s a very, very I mean, they’re they’re all these amazing, like, transformative visions of what we’re trying you know, if we’re gonna put people on Mars to be multi planetary, we’re gonna
Scott: 36:30 we’re Not just moonshot,
Max: 36:31 but Mars. We’re gonna put people on Mars. We’re going to save the planet from, you know, and going to solar. We’re going to, you know I mean, and values is a very interesting thing because when you start talking about, like, RPRS with EOS, you know, a lot of that comes back into values of, like, are you hiring and have you hired people aligned with the values that the the, you know, the business is operating in. So shouldn’t you, to some degree, like, start?
Like, you know, I feel like there’s a lot of companies, a lot of businesses I come across and, like, this isn’t like you everybody knows what the vision values is of the company. Like, there’s not, like, the singular, like, this is what we’re doing and this is where we’re going, and are we hiring around this stuff?
Scott: 37:05 Oh, this is one of the biggest challenges I see. Yeah.
Max: 37:08 So how do you how do you tackle this? You know? How do how do people tackle this?
Scott: 37:12 There’s a process. Again, we we
Max: 37:14 Give me the secret.
Scott: 37:15 Tools and resources to walk you through it, but you don’t need them. Right. I am gonna give you the secret and the reading list. One of my favorite books on this is Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold. And he has a very specific way he does it where you outline your 3 year vision.
I think that’s a really good exercise. What we take people through is starting with, you know, what are your beliefs that get you into the company? Like, outlining, we believe that this is what the market deserves. You have to think a little bit about who you’re serving first, but, you know, we believe that they deserve a great way to build this widget or receive this widget or whatever the case may be. And so what’s the future you see from those beliefs?
Okay. We see a world where this happens, that happens, the other happens. And you go through this exercise of just putting yourself if everything went perfectly, what’s that vision you wanna see? That’s step 1. Step 2, we work on putting that into a press release, which is something, I I know Jeff Jeff Bezos and Amazon are very big into these press releases, and it’s a fantastic tool.
So you write the article that you would love to read about yourself, you know, and go ahead and date it. And we usually put people through a format, like, here’s the format to use, and actually write your press release. And then there’s there’s a few other steps you can go through, like, there’s sets of questions and prompts. Again, Cameron Harrell’s book Vision Vision has several Vivid Vision, sorry, has some different prompts. We’ve used a few based on just what we found gets people going.
A lot of times, you have to you have to get people going and get them out of their own heads because writing a vision is scary for a lot of reasons. And people say, I’m not scared of it, but it’s actually their their brain is, like, I don’t wanna do this. I’m afraid of what people are gonna say. But once you ask a few questions and get things going, it usually just flows out and then you can edit it down. Core values, it’s it’s a I can’t won’t be able to sum it up in the few minutes we have remaining, but there’s a great talk given by Patrick Lencioni on actionable core values.
I think everybody should watch. It’s the same. If you Google search make your values mean something, Patrick Lencioni. He’s got his own books that are very, very good, but he gives a talk that’s on YouTube that you can hear, and he’s written an article. And part of what EOS does in their implementations is they make everybody read the article and make your values mean something.
Max: 39:27 The the best version of the values I have seen, and it and I think and it comes from Patrick, is your values are things that if you it’s it’s like, are you offended if people don’t see your you know, see that or or or, you know, like, my brain just completely turned off with this one. Like, what would you be offended if somebody, you know, said that you didn’t have? Right? Like, those are your values, and that’s what you’re hiring for. Right?
Like, is is the values, you know, like, oh, attention to detail or speed to market or customer service. You know, somebody said we, your customer service is terrible that you would actually be offended to hear that from somebody. And that was a very interesting way of looking at how do you select and how do you narrow down what your what your core values are.
Scott: 40:09 I always like the the the, like, the anthropological definition is your values are the behaviors you encourage or discourage. So whether it’s, you know, training or teaching, you get very concrete examples of that. So I think of, like, what can I high five? If this is happening every day, can is it something that’s easy to pick out? And a lot of a lot of leaders are like, no.
You don’t need to do that. I’m not saying you need to be on top of it every day doing that. But if you can’t make it very, very clear to people what you value and where the boundaries are, it’s gonna be very difficult to lead.
Max: 40:41 Scott, thank you. There’s this is this is one of those areas that’s so important for every business to get into and to talk about and really makes a big difference in scaling and being able to scale. And there’s so many different approaches. There’s so many different techniques. And it’s becoming like this really noisy crowded thing where, trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.
And and I’m in a group and somebody was asking about EOS implementation and could they do it themselves? And, you know, there’s like 20 people in the group and every single one of them said no no you have to hire somebody. You cannot try to do this yourself and you know it’s it’s hard to you know say let let’s go run out and try to find you know how do you find somebody to help you through these things and I’ve asked you a bunch a bunch of these like okay RV b2 mom EOS of just how important it is to have a partner that can help you, you know, start this journey, figure out what’s important for you, how do you actually implement it, how do you track it, how do you maintain it, how do you align around it, you know, how do you adjust it, what’s important to you, what’s not? Because, I mean, this this really is it. Right?
Like, this is this is the answer. This is the secret. This is how you scale. And, or maybe maybe you don’t wanna scale. Maybe you just wanna be really efficient and go fish every day.
Right? Like, but this is also the answer to that one as well. Right? Like, it’s choose your own adventure very much. So, I, I I appreciate the time.
This is, you know, this is something that’s very near and dear to my heart right now because we’ve been going through this pain as well.
Scott: 41:58 Always a pleasure.
Max: 41:59 Good to see you. And, I need to catch up offline and talk about Ruby on Rails and journey now to, like, the Python PHP world into Ruby a little bit right now because, you know, I needed some some hobby and distractions. So can can use some advice and feedback?
Scott: 42:13 Nice. Yep. Anytime. Let me know.
Max: 42:15 Good to see you, Scott.
