From Athlete to Expert EOS Implementer

0:00I'm going to try not to insult anyone that's listening to this, but I like in self-implementing as learning how to fly a plane on Xbox. Hey, you know, this is really cool and I got virtual reality and maybe I can go to a flight simulator, but when you've got your entire team on board that plane, and you need to take off, you need to avoid turbulence. Who's your aircraft control, who's your co-pilot, and who's going to help you land that thing? We didn't have any of that, and we really needed a third party to come in and point out our issues because we had a lot of them.

0:33Welcome to Real Talk with EOS Implementers, the podcast where we share real stories from entrepreneurs who've made the leap to become EOS Implementers. I'm your host Marco Donnell, visionary at EOS Worldwide, expert EOS Implementer, and best-selling author. Each episode will explore how EOS changed their lives, helping them do what they love, with people they love, making a huge difference, being compensated appropriately with time for other passions. Let's dive in.

1:04Hey there, everyone. Marco Donnell here. I have the pleasure. Well, maybe not the pleasure, but definitely the pleasure of Roger Bannister. This Roger's still alive. Unfortunately, no. No, he's not. I didn't even know. So, I have with me today Scott Russnack, aka Roger Bannister, and Scott, I would love for you to just dive in and tell us your story. How did you become an expert EOS Implementer? Where do you passionate about? Which I know is a lot of different things. So, if you just dive right in and give us your story.

1:40I'm going to start with this thing called expert because you guys allowed me to take that title. I guess you put enough reps and you'll get there, right? I don't think there is such a saying as truly. I mean, it's all relative. Right. I mean, your expert compared to someone just starting, but mastery is probably another ending journey. I love it. I love it. Well, then let's go back to putting in the reps, trying to become an expert and Roger Bannister. And as a kid growing up in Western Canada, I was around a lot. I rode my bike a lot. I played hockey a lot, but I just wanted to be fast at everything Mark. And as you know me pretty well, I like to get a lot of stuff done.

2:27And growing up in Western Canada, I had a pretty cool running coach. And I was good at the 800 meter. And in seventh grade, I competed against the high school kids and he's like, look Russnack, if you got focused, you could probably do a four minute mile. And I remember saying to him in seventh eighth grade, it's like, yeah, I go to Vancouver every summer with my family. And there's this picture of Roger Bannister Stanley Park and is still there. Every time I go, I see it. But the thing is, I kind of lost focus. And right, no shock. I'm racing my bike and start playing hockey. And it wasn't until a really great coach grabbed me at the end of high school and said, you got to focus on one thing. And for me, I was like, what do you mean one thing? I'm really good at these things. He's like, no, just one thing and figured how you can become world class at one thing. And that's right.

3:19It was lucky enough to have a coach named Des Dickie and cycling. He's like, look, focused on this type of circuit race with this type of hill, 200 kilometers, making a four or five hour race. And let's just train for that. I was lucky enough. I went to worlds and got a top 10. Missed the finish line by this much. I should have been on a podium, but that's another story. So it's like the opposite of a fish story. No, it's the same. I missed by just much.

3:45Now, actually, truthy, no, and if I was a one-armed cyclist, I missed by this much. It could have been a mild trouble. But the funny thing is I took that coaching lesson into my entrepreneurial journey, which I got out of college. I was working at a corporation for a couple of years. This is when software was kind of kicking in like dinosaurs were just starting to become something. And I assumed to be fatherless and said, hey, look, and he was a superintendent of schools. He said, you know, max school has developed this product. Maybe you should develop one of those.

4:19And I was lucky enough to know some guys who were pretty good at coding as we called it back in the day. And we just focused on one thing. And we took on Apple and our own little space. I was able to move to the States. I immigrated. You guys shouldn't let me in, but well, you bet you know people sneak in all the time. So you're not alone. Oh, no, now this is public. This is not good. Someone knocks on my door. This whole thing's over. Oh, yeah, that's okay. So yeah, like we build the thing to 3,000 schools or on Dr.

4:52American, you're up and get ready for this one. I'm coaching T-Ball with this guy who is starting this online tea time thing that became golf now. And Brett's like, it's got you know about software. You're involved in the software business. Why don't you join me? And right place at right time again, I got involved in golf now in the early days. Again, I wasn't focusing on one thing. And as soon as my mentor and my coach grabbed me by the throat, like you got to pick one, you got to focus like crazy. Exited from golf now, which was fantastic and just focused on school logic. And the crazy part is we bring in these teachers and these coaches and we're doing all these different programs. And it wasn't until the end we focused on one thing.

5:36People can guess what that one thing was. It has six key components. Actually got what we wanted. And as we were doing this, I realized it was probably more soon as you'd be, I always wanted to be a sports coach, but then I realized not. It just need to be a business coach because I was working with a ton of entrepreneurs and they just got a ton of value on it. So this has led me to EOS and here we are. So a couple of questions there with school logic. Now, did you hire an implementer? How did you get introduced to EOS? Did you just self-implement to tell me how that went? Well, I was in Detroit and there was a guy named Geno doing a talk. Like many people, probably 90% of the people on EOS, we did it ourselves. And we did okay. But my staff started to say, well, this is an EOS. This is SOS. Scott operating system sort of saved our souls. Which was the same thing? Which ever comes first. So we did pretty good. I thought it was until a really good friend of mine, Ted Bradshaw, poked me in the nose really hard after school logic. After I was trying to coach and do my own thing for five or six years, he's like, look, just join us in this

6:51community. And I guess the rest is history. You haven't kicked me out yet. You've given me this extra special badge. So I'll stick around. Yeah. So I mean, tell us about doing one thing. So you mentioned it a couple of times here. You're going along this journey. Someone says to you, hey, Scott, it seems like you're apt to do a whole bunch of things. And maybe some of them pretty well, but not necessarily great. Or you could be better. You come to golf now and school logic, sort of the same advice is coming to you. And so just tell us a little bit about that. It's something that we teach, do one thing, you know, or a red and bocker or popcorn. So just talk a little bit about what do you think you're apt to do many things all at once? Yeah, you can ask my wife.

7:49But the thing is most human beings don't focus on one thing until they've had a pretty significant failure. And we didn't have a failure at golf now, but I couldn't punch through it. When I stepped out and they really brought in the smart one and they got focused, they did really well. And I congratulate Brett on that. We got to a point is school logic where our sass was kicking in. The big boys and girls really started to show up. We had a couple really not fantastic years.

8:19And it wasn't until we got incredibly focused in that business that here's where we're going, jump on the bus. Let's go. And the right people joined us. And it took a bit of failure, much like in sports earlier in my life and in business. So I'm really glad we failed so we could focus. Yeah. And you know, we always like to say that you learn much more from the failure than you do from the successes. And I like to say that there's really no learning outside of failure.

8:52Do you think that you can learn from other people's failures? Or do you think that you got to experience yourself? Or do you think like maybe some people can learn from others' failures? But most people just got to go fail and fall down on their own. Well, if you watched someone in a terrible car, actually, like, I really don't want to do that. I mean, what about idea? It's a bad idea. But Mark, you and I both know not until we've got a ton of road rash, self-inflicted, not until concussions, or you get mocked out or you lose your teeth, you're like, okay, that wasn't such a good idea. Or a lot of people lose a lot of money with this shiny object. That wasn't such a good idea. And you hear about so many credible entrepreneurs that reset and really understand that, okay, that was a big issue.

9:39That was an obstacle. And I'm going to take it to this next level. So person, I'm glad I failed in sport and business because it's given me this fuel to really help others succeed. And it creates just way better stories, too. If anyone is actually listening to this, they can tell we're riffing. And I'm interested hearing stories from you as well. Oh, we've got plenty. We've got plenty. So, you know, talk to me a little bit about your self-implementation experience.

10:11What was it about the tools that you see, Gino? He does his talk. He talks about this thing called EOS. And you're like, ooh, I think that this could really help us. And so you start cobbling together. How was that experience? How'd you do it? And what was the tool that when you implemented in your business that had that focusing moment to it where you knew that this was something that when Ted Bradshaw then later came to you and said, hey, you should join us. You're like, yeah, I think this is it.

10:43I'm going to try not to insult anyone that's listening to this. But I like in self-implementing as learning how to fly a plane on Xbox. Hey, you know, this is really cool and I got virtual reality and maybe I can go to a flight simulator. But when you've got your entire team on board that plane and you need to take off, you need to avoid turbulence. When you need to avoid the storm, who's your air traffic control, who's your co-pilot, and who's going to help you land that thing? We didn't have any of that.

11:14We just had me pick out and go, wow, let's pat each other on the back. We're doing a great job. And we really needed a third party to come in and point out our issues because we had a lot of them. So Ted Bradshaw says, hey, Scott, you've been messing around building your own thing, trying to be a business coach. Why don't you just join us? Why didn't you join earlier? What was stopping you? Just stubbornness, right? Like we're entrepreneurs. We've got this. I can beat my chest. I've got a surfboard behind me and I try to keep this in a lot of my zooms because I surfed for so long by myself. And it wasn't until one summer I hired a surf coach.

11:59My wife was very appreciative and so is her friends. Yeah, it looked me in all the rest. But I just stubborn. And the surfboard taught me a lesson. It's like when you learn just the intricacies of things you get there. And again, you know, Mark, we think as entrepreneurs, we can do it all ourselves and we don't need a third party. And I probably was coaching six or seven businesses at a time. And two of them, we just couldn't get anywhere. And Ted met me on Vancouver Island. I'll never forget the day. He'd finished a game of golf. I'd ridden my bike.

12:32We had a couple of drinks and he just laughed at me and we're really good friends. And we can poke each other. The nose really hard. And he finally said like, when are you going to do this the right way? Took it as a bit of an insult. I might know it. He's like, no, no, tell me about your biggest failures. Tell me about some bad things going on right now. Okay. So then he said, look, if you just do this and you dig in as a coach, you can get everything you want and these teams you're working with to respect you. So I think you can pull it off. So that was the start of the journey. A gentle, but polite poke on the nose from my friend. And so you you join, you go to Denver.

13:10I think it was actually there at your, were you your Denver bootcamp? I'm pretty certain. No. And straight from helly skiing to Detroit. Detroit. What year did you start? I think it was eight years ago. So 2016, like a couple of years, two, three years after you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was 2014. So you come to bootcamp. You already had some coaching clients I'm assuming from when you're working with yourself. How was your start like as an implementer?

13:45You just dive right in, get a bunch of clients right away. What was your path to mastery around EOS like? And of course, it's a journey you're still on. But what was that like? You know, interesting. I had a handful of clients. Lots of friends of YPO pretty well connected in the sports scene. And I realized I had one bite at the apple with a lot of these people. So I kind of held off telling them about what I was up to in this next stage because I wanted to perfect and have some mastery. But then when I was ready, they all got to find out on the mountain bike or skis on a ski lift. And that really opened up the window. But the cool part is I'd been a coach before. So maybe I had a little bit of an easier entry into this than than many because if you're really a coach and you've got this base of people, you can I would say standing on shoulder of giants, the giants can help you get in those doors. They really helped me a lot. And the first year things really took off for me. Yeah. And I've been playing with this concept of identity.

14:51It sounds a little strange. I'm not going to, you know, it's been something that people have been talking about over the last few years in the headlines. That's not really what I'm talking about. It's about exactly what you just said. We have a lot of implementers who come into our community. They're known as the entrepreneur. I was known as the pharma biotech entrepreneur. When I became an implementer, and I found that what one I didn't intentionally become an implementer.

15:22So once I made that decision, and I was going to become a real implementer after a few months post bootcamp, no, my network was really, they're like, Mark, you run this pharma biotech services business. Like my network disappeared almost immediately. And I realized that my identity was something completely different. So I find it interesting for you to say that you spent five years as a business coach. And so you're already known as that when you became an implementer. But so many of our implementers are known as something different. They're the the SaaS entrepreneur. They're the whatever entrepreneur. And it takes a little bit for them to transition to being known as a coach.

16:11It's my question for you, Roger. Bannister. AKA Scott Russnack. What was your transition from SaaS entrepreneur to business coach? What was that like? Can I swear? You can. It was really fucking hard. I had lost my identity. And let's just go back to this. You get to the top of the hill as an entrepreneur. You have a couple of exits. You ring the bell. Boy, am I ever great. You're looking the mirror. Smart. I gotta, I think it's a David Burns song.

16:48This is not my beautiful wife. That's not my beautiful car. But it is. And that doesn't give you anything, right? There's no joy in that. That's a moment of fleeting happiness. So the two years it took me to transition and being a business coach was a rude awakening. He's a kid. I was a paper boy and I would just knock on the door at minus 20 Celsius and they'd give me hot chocolate and they'd buy the paper. That was an easy sell. And you can't sell yourself as a coach. People need to experience that. They need to understand your brand, your personality, who you are. And that was really hard because like, well, okay, we see as a cycling coach.

17:25I'm still a board certified guy for British and US Olympic teams like, oh, you're a cycling coach guy. You're a SaaS coach guy. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to pull both of those together. My friends are like, let me know how that goes. And I tried to bring together, and we had this thing called map, my accountability plan, which is better known now as the VTO. But here's your weekly metrics. We had crappy rocks. We had a bit of a plan. And I had ripped off and duplicated a lot of the US stuff. And it was really, really hard because there was no legitimacy behind it. It was hard. Yeah. It is hard.

18:05I don't think very many people lend too much credence because I think that we really become known as what we focus on, whether whatever project we're focused on, whatever role we are playing. So for you and your businesses, we really end and we're also known as different things in different contexts. In some contexts, I'm sure you're known as the cycling guy. And I know you're trying to bring all of your, those things all together. But when new EOS implementers are making that transition, they're not known as an EOS implementer. Their entire identity is wrapped up in something else as something else and in different contexts. None of it has to do with who they are and who they want to become because that's not what they've been focused on. So when you started out as a business coach, you did some other coaching. Did you go through any types of training for that coaching or you just kind of, hey, here I am. You should want to become me. And so you need to hire me now. More of the later than what I'll tell you is, you know, I went through some stuff with scaling up and Rocketfeller habits and I enjoyed it. I'm not trying to slag them. I think those are

19:21fantastic systems. It was just too much. And I was looking for something really simple that made a ton of sense. And I wish that Geno would have poked me in the nose that in 1996 and said, hey, look, this thing could help you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in 1996, I just got my driver's license. I think Geno was pretty young and you were pretty young too. I turned 30 then. It was funny because the school logic was cranking then. And that's when we immigrated to the States. And that was really hard. And, you know, I want to make this the hard Scott Russenak show. But all that stuff allowed me to persevere. And so we'll go to the next point of how do you transition from sass or whatever your thing is to being a coach. You get to really have to put a lot of hard work in.

20:18But you got to do it the right way. You just can't watch a couple online videos and big I've been learning how to do this thing. So you got to immerse yourself. Got to be vulnerable with people as well and say, hey, look, I'm really good at pulling this part together. But I'm going to need a little need a little bit of help from you. And you're going to coach me to make sure we get across this line together. So you got to be open and honest and super vulnerable when you do this thing. Yeah, for sure. And so Amy, when I was making that identity transition for the next phase of my career, I went on LinkedIn and I actually disconnected myself from all of my pharma biotech connections. I just went through and said, hey, if this person cannot benefit from EOS and what I am becoming, I need to distance myself from that previous past and appreciate it.

21:13Super grateful for it. But I knew that I needed to start from basically zero and then slowly work to become known as the guy who can help me get what I want from my business, who also built an exited his business. And I didn't exit at first. I exited four years after I became an implementer is when I exited. So I did both at the same time for for a while. But I just think it's just an interesting thing where we kind of go through these phases and who are we known as in the hearts and minds of the people that we serve. So I'm going to ask that question to you.

22:01I'm sure you're not known as Roger Bannister to your clients or maybe you are. And by the way, for people who are listening, Roger Bannister, Scott brought that up earlier. So there's the concept of the banister effect where the banister effect is once he ran the first four-minute mile up until that time, no one documented has ever done it. But the minute he did that, high school students were doing it, a couple weeks later, college students were doing it. And the minute someone showed that something was possible. And everyone's mind tipped off and said, hey, I can do this as possible.

22:39So Scott had the record revenue for EOS implementers. And so he's Roger Bannister in that every quarter we come together and we show the records. We simplified the records down to how many focus days in their first quarter, how many first year revenue and how many and how much annual revenue any one implementer could do. And since Scott has that record, I tell implementers that the reason we show that is to show you what is possible. Because as soon as we do that, someone else will say, I can do this. I can get one step closer to Scott. And so that's with the joke of Bann and Roger Bannister comes in. But so what are you known as to your clients? What is your identity with them? Dislexic, leisure studies, athlete who, well, Jam is head through a wall to get what he wants. And drag them along with him. That's Canadian humor. I would love, and I've got some coaching calls after this. But my clients are like, man, you're just so freaking focused.

23:56And I always tell them they might not like the methods from time to time. They might not like how hard I'm pushing them, but you're going to love the results. And there's some angst in the room. I go back to my cycling coach and I tell them this, I'm not going to make you bleed through your eyes. My coach, if you're not bleeding through your eyes, you're not trying hard enough. I'm not going to make you kick us yourself and fall over the road. But they know I push them pretty hard.

24:19I just won't settle on them. I'm not hitting their rocks. I won't settle on them. I'm not hitting their one-year plan. But I also won't settle on the fact that if people start acting and behaving and making decisions that go against their core values, it drives me freaking crazy. And I'll bring that people analyze, I'll be like, are you walking the talk? Are you acting like a great parent? Because what you're saying right now is not what I'm seeing in the behavior. So just back to that. I think my clients know I'm pretty damn intentional. I push them pretty hard. So you're the pusher. Is that what I'm saying? Visionary pusher. What if they want to keel after we'll grab a tequila? Yeah. Yeah. And I see that from you and how you behave with inside of the U.S. Simple Mentor community, always encouraging people, pushing them beyond what they perceive as their limits encouraging and inspiring, which we all appreciate. I appreciate that. You do that. I'm sure your clients do too. Hopefully you appreciate it most the time. I know in our internal U.S. Slack channel that nobody outside this community gets access to.

25:33Everyone's going to wake up at four o'clock in the Saturday. And I'm just like, we're getting soft. Have you looked at your scorecard? Come on, let's go. And how many pushups did you do today before breakfast? Something like that. But I'm close to 60. I'm year away from 60 and I finally feel like I hit my stride mark. And hopefully I've got another 20 some years to do this because there's a lot out there to give. Yeah, there certainly is. And our conversation brings up a book that was recommended to me from our chairman, David Mann, who's the chairman of the U.S. World Wide.

26:13And he's part of the Firefly group. So he recommended this book. He doesn't recommend many. It's called From Strength to Strength by Art Brooks. You're familiar with it? I recommend it to all of my clients that are going through a transition. Yeah. And I think it's really interesting because then just to quickly share the overview hypothesis of the book is that we kind of lose our skills a lot earlier in life than we tend to think is through. And because of that skill loss, we stop performing at a high level, we stop pursuing our purpose in a lot of ways because we're feeling just not as good as we use to be.

26:57And it can start in the early 40s, really. But to the degree that we can double down on our purpose and teach and coach and help others achieve what they want to achieve, we can go from one thing that we were masterful at to another because our verbal skills or stories telling skills because we've amassed all this failure as we're going, we can now really help people progress and we can live out a full life and full purpose as long as we're kicking, we can do that. And so I think this is a really important book for implementers who are just starting out in their transition for current entrepreneurs, really anybody who is experiencing that that transition and who wants to embark on on that journey. I think it's just a great book sets from strength to strength by Art Brooks. Mark, I'll jump on that comment. It's a fantastic audible listen because he actually narrates it. And he's got such a smooth, fantastic narration voice. I got a kick out of it and I listened to it on many mountain bike rides and you can play it at one and a half speed and slow it down from time to time. Yeah, yeah, highly recommended. But then let's let's add another book that's

28:24pretty spicy to that. A book written by Scott Alexander called rhinoceros success. Oh, yeah, my good friends at Dutch Bros Coffee who I've worked with forever. They have a lot of their assistant managers, managers, they're grooming, listen to that amongst the EOS work, but rhinoceros success on audible. It's hilarious. He's charging through the jungle rhinoceros. We got thick skin and we're getting shot at. We're not going to slow down because of cows. So the narration is hilarious.

28:58But if you're going to get from strength to strength, you got to have thick skin. You've got to have a pure focus and realize you got to do hard things. You got to do it for decades. But you got to write your own story and not writing your own story and doing those hard things. There's just not much to it. Right, right. Yeah, I appreciate that. So Scott, as we kind of wrap up, what is one thing that if you could just impart upon the world, you have the direct line to every human on the planet? What's the one thing that you'd just like to say, all right, this is it. What's your one piece of advice that if you could wave a magic wand everyone will get? Not only you, Marco Donald, but Mark Winter, you know, some other people have been nice enough to put me on a stage.

29:49And they keep the mic in front of me and my whole being for being on that stage is to ask people who is the architect of your life? And it's a big deal to me. You've got to write your own story. You got to design it yourself. And if you could become the architect of your own life, gosh, this thing becomes pretty cool. Awesome. Well, Scott, I appreciate the conversation and I'm sure others have two. So with that, I'll talk to you until next time. Can't wait to see at QC, Mark. Thanks a lot. Thanks for tuning in to Real Talk with EOS implementers. If today's episode inspired you or gave you a new perspective, share it with someone who might need to hear it.

30:33Want to learn more about becoming an EOS implementer and living your EOS life? Visit EOSWorldWide.com. Until next time, do what you love with people you love and make a huge difference in the world.