Mike Paton discusses elevating businesses with EOS: blending visionary inspiration and integrator precision, reshaping leadership for success.
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About Mike Paton
Having grown up in a home full of teachers and entrepreneurs, it’s no surprise that Mike Paton has spent much of his nearly 40 years in business helping entrepreneurs and leaders get what they want from their businesses. One of the first EOS Implementers on the planet, Paton has helped the leadership teams of more than 150 companies run better businesses and live better lives, co-wrote Get A Grip with Gino Wickman, and succeeded Gino in the Visionary role at EOS Worldwide. He’s now a sought-after speaker, host of The EOS Leader podcast, and continues to create and share content with EOS fans around the world.
About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Here’s your host, Alex Nottingham. Welcome to Dental All-Stars, and we’re talking about the entrepreneurial operating system, or EOS. And I have with me our president of coaching, Eric Vickery, and we have a very special guest. And his name is Mike Paton. And he goes by Paton. And Paton is an EOS implementer.
00:30
And he’s a former visionary of EOS Worldwide. He co-authored two books in the Traction Library, Get a Grip and Process. Please welcome Paton. Thanks, Alex. Eric, great to be here with both of you. Oh, that’s awesome. So tell us, I mean, again, you’re in the inner circle. You ran this company. So what is EOS for those who don’t know? Sounds good.
00:56
High level EOS is an operating system for an entrepreneurial company. Just like your laptop has an operating system, so does every business. And my business partner, mentor, and friend, Gino Wickman, created this operating system specifically for the busy owners and leaders of entrepreneurial companies who he discovered in his own entrepreneurial journey have to operate much more differently than the typical leader of a large corporation.
01:26
where they’re full-time leaders, managers, strategic thinkers, and deciders. In an entrepreneurial company, we all have day jobs and we’ve got to figure out how to lead, manage, think, make decisions, et cetera, inside the margins of that day job. So we built a system and a simple set of practical tools designed to help make that possible and feasible for entrepreneurial business owners and leaders. That’s interesting what you say is that EOS
01:55
was not necessarily generated for the large companies. This was generated for the entrepreneur, smaller companies, if you will, that don’t have the economies, don’t have the professional support that some of these larger companies do. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, and the inertia for execution, right? You get 1,000 or 1,500 or 2,000 or 10,000 people in an organization, there’s a forward momentum that’s almost self-sustaining. And a company with…
02:25
EOS was created specifically for companies that have between 10 and 250 people, typically privately held. Their owners and leaders are growth-oriented, open-minded, more afraid of the status quo than they are of change, which is kind of another key difference between an entrepreneurial company and a bigger organization. Change is often something we are afraid of or would prefer not to have to deal with in a bigger company.
02:55
And so that’s really the person or the leader or the owner, Gino, was targeting when he built this system.
03:04
And I’m going to get to it in a moment about the dentist. We’ll get there a little later. Yeah, you bet. And in general, we have mostly dentists follow us, but all businesses, I encourage businesses that aren’t dental to follow our podcast, because everything we cover, 99%, can be applied to any business. We just happen to target a large portion of dentists. Yeah. So how did or why, how or why, did you get involved in EOS? What was your journey?
03:32
Yeah, so I grew up in a household with teachers and entrepreneurs. My parents were entrepreneurs, my grandparents were teachers. Right out of college, I decided to forego the entrepreneurial journey myself. I got a job as a banker. My father took a dim view of that career selection.
03:56
sat me down and said, you know, Mark Twain says a banker is somebody who will give you an umbrella when it’s nice outside and take it back when it starts to rain. So that gives you some idea of how enthused he was about my career choice. But for me, it was a great opportunity for me to learn about the art and science of running a successful business and watching businesses that weren’t so successful struggle and fail. And you know, I always sort of knew.
04:20
I wanted to do something different when I grew up, but it was a great training ground for my own entrepreneurial journey. I ran or helped run for entrepreneurial companies after my career in banking. And the fourth of those opportunities brought me to Minneapolis, where I was trying to run a little $7.5 million company for a founding entrepreneur. And I was stuck and frustrated and discovered EOS in my zeal to find some way to…
04:47
connect with this business partner of mine and get on the same page. And I just fell in love with EOS really quickly. And, and as I like to tell Gino drank some purple Kool-Aid in his office and, and the rest is history. That was about 17 years ago, back in 2007. It’s interesting. So my background, I’m a lawyer, MBA, my father, while I got into dentistry is my father’s a dentist. His business was facing difficulty and
05:16
My wife and I were able to double his business and I also worked for Tony Robbins. So my path was not dentistry, but I said there was a need and dentists are really good people. And Eric has a similar story. His father-in-law is a dentist and he worked and helped his father’s business grow. So we have a passion for dentists and I’ll tell you in a moment again, I’m letting the listener know we’re going to get to you guys because as this builds, you’re going to see that this is just wait. So
05:45
I’ve been trained in business. I’ve seen these models. EOS, scaling up, a lot of these are, they’re not new, per se, but what was revolutionary, what you guys have done is you took a lot of complex business systems that I was taught, I paid a lot of money to learn, into a very actionable oriented way. Done here at All-Star, it helped us a lot and it continues to help us grow.
06:14
using your EOS system. So congratulations to you and Gino, Paton, for putting together a remarkable process. So I just wanted to tell you about that. It was very impressive what you’ve done. On behalf of Gino, I’m extending a hearty thanks. There’s nothing that makes him happier than hearing that what he’s built has had a positive impact on hardworking, genuine, trustworthy
06:42
normal people who are just out there trying to make a difference in the world. And you mentioned dentists. I mean, so many of my clients are very much like your tribe. They’re technically skilled people with a passion for the work they do. And they wake up one day and realize they’re signing 22 paychecks. And they’ve got to learn a whole different set of skills that very few trainers of these professionals, you know, take the time to train them aptly to do.
07:12
And what Gino did was he created something simple and accessible. You know, it’s elegantly simple. It doesn’t mean it’s always easy. I mean, there’s some hard moments you go through when you’re implementing EOS because you’re dealing with people and you know, when people are involved, there’s emotions and so on and so forth. And we tend to sometimes be our own biggest problems. So, uh, but, but it is simple. And so if you don’t have a lot of time and you just need some basic building blocks,
07:41
of a well-run organization capable of executing on a clear vision, I don’t think there’s anything better on the planet. So my other question you actually answered, which is, who can this help? You answered that right in the beginning. And now we’re going to get to the dentist. Here we go. Eric, help me out here. So they’re not like what you said in the beginning, typically. They do not like change. They were not looking to do this. Most of them.
08:08
is like, wait a second, I have to run a business. I don’t like it. The ones that do well are the ones that say, this isn’t my strong suit, I get it. I’m willing to improve myself personally, personal development, that’s important, and my business. And I’m going to engage with coaches like ourselves, or EOS coaches and implementers, or integrators, we have one. I’ll tell you that story, the integrator story. And so…
08:36
So that’s not what comes natural to them. Eric, anything else you wanna add about our avatar, the dentist? Yeah, the epitome, the perfect example, you’re so right on Alex. They work in their business, not on their business. It’s the perfect model for this type of system. So speak to, how does someone like this step back out of that mindset of I’ve gotta be working or I can’t produce to realize that there’s a deficiency
09:05
in that process to say, if I actually took a step back and put this in play, I could be more efficient, more productive down the line. How does one get there? Yeah, it’s a perfect question that allows me to go back to the original comment, which is Gino created something the typical entrepreneurial company can benefit from when they don’t have a lot of time, right? It’s simple, efficient. Our belief is you need to spend some time
09:35
thinking and working on the business. You don’t have the luxury of spending all your time thinking and working on the business. So Gino actually experimented with lots of different formulas for how to make that the most efficient, productive system possible. And he came up with something we call the EOS meeting pulse, which is really a two-part meeting pulse. We ask our clients to spend five full days a year.
10:03
at four different dates during the year, three full day quarterly planning sessions, and one two day annual planning session with their leadership team. Where most of the day we’re thinking and working on the business, we’re solving issues, we’re creating a crystal clear vision and plan, getting 100% aligned about it, etc. Driving accountability for execution, that sort of thing. So five full days.
10:32
Plus once a week, we ask our leadership teams to meet for 90 minutes in what’s called a level 10 meeting. Level 10 being the name of the meeting because when we ask a leadership team of an entrepreneurial company to rate the quality of their internal meetings on the way into the journey to implement EOS, the average answer we get when they rate their quality on a scale to one to 10 is four.
10:57
And I just find that sad and depressing. Most of them are spending several hours a week, if not a full day a week of meetings. And they’re engaged for maybe a day a week in an activity they rate themselves a four out of 10 on, and I don’t care what curve your professor grades on, that’s an F. And so Gino wanted to create a meeting pulse where the weekly meetings are designed specifically to smoke out issues.
11:25
and solve issues that require a leadership team to get in a room, roll up their sleeves, and work through some problems, challenges, obstacles, roadblocks, new ideas, and opportunities. So that’s how he does the things he does with the system. So really an hour and a half a week for say 50 weeks of the year, skipping two for vacations and holidays, and five days a year, and you got plenty of time thinking and working on the business and the typical.
11:55
So in a dental office with, you talk about a leadership team, you’ve got basically three departments, the front admin, you got the assistant doctor, and you’ve got hygiene. You have one to two employees in each of those departments typically. So could your leadership team be everybody or does it really matter that it has to be just a couple people that are in these five days of meetings, these four meetings?
12:22
It’s a great question. It could be everybody, depending on head count, right? One of the inspirers of the work we do with our clients and Gino’s building of this system was Patrick Lencioni. He’s done a wonderful amount of work on health at a leadership team level and organizational health. And one of the things he says is you get more than eight people in a room and the
12:49
entire nature of the communication changes from attempting to align to just everybody advocating for their own position and hoping to be heard. So if it’s fewer than eight people, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with just saying we’re going to all meet. If it’s more than eight people, I think you’ve got to get a team leader or representative of each department. My clients who have set up dental practices,
13:16
If there are four or five locations, there might be the head of each functional department, plus a office manager from each location on the leadership, for example. And so we, that’s one of the questions we get frequently in our job as professional implementers is helping our clients figure out who to invite. For those listening who don’t know, I would just say, pick the handful of people on whom you rely most.
13:43
to make important decisions in the business and get engaged with an EOS implementer for a initial consultation we call a 90 minute meeting and ask that question there and you’ll get a great answer to that question unique to your own practice.
14:01
So let’s spend a little bit more time on the challenges with dentists. So I’m seeing, I guess I say challenges because we’re having in a few days our quarterly. And that, when I read that in the book, I’m like, oh, damn it, that’s the one I don’t wanna do. That’s a lot of investment, a lot of time, but we’re doing it and I’m proud of the team with respect to that. So Eric, where are some other areas that you think that dentists struggle? I mean, we’re familiar with EOS.
14:31
to some extent that we implemented in our system. Is it the mindset? Is it the accountability and sticking with it? Tell me, what do you think Eric, and then Mike and Peyton can help us out? So speaking as a dentist, listen to this right now. They’re saying, you want me to shut down my business for how long, to get rid of how many dollars? And all they see is time away from producing patients as costs. So.
14:57
give us a cause and effect on, hey, if you actually spend this 90 minutes a week, if you actually do these meetings this way, it turns into this result. Where do they land on this? Give them some sort of future look into the benefits of this. Yeah, so I’m gonna answer that with a story and you can edit the story out if it gets long or boring. That’s, please do.
15:23
All right. I have my finger on the marker right now. Here it goes. My teenagers do that all the time. So that, but they do it by looking at their phone. So, um, back in the day, probably 15, 16 years ago, Gino engaged a market research firm to kind of interview the clients who were running their businesses on EOS and, and what he was hoping to come up with was a list of statistics he could cite when asked questions like.
15:51
You know, what’s our average, our company grows faster. We go from, you know, a thousand patients to 10,000 patients, five years faster than we thought we could, for example, or we’ve got six offices now, blah, blah, blah. Our profit increased, blah, blah, blah. That all happens when you implement EOS. But when he did this survey of all of his clients and all of his business partner, Don Tinney’s clients, and the handful of us that also had clients.
16:20
What he heard 82% of the people say first was, you improve the quality of my life. I don’t take business home with me. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night at 3 a.m. sweating about something I forgot to do, or I worry that one of my staff people forgot to do. I’ve got a system and a set of tools in place that let me and the rest of my team know what needs to be done, when and by whom, and…
16:50
99 times out of 100, I can count on that system working and the one or two times it doesn’t work the way it’s designed to do, somebody’s on it and we’ll figure it out. That’s the number one impact. You get a higher quality of life because it isn’t all you. It isn’t all everybody on your team, if they can, would prefer for you to make the scary decisions if you’re the boss.
17:19
If they can, they would prefer to have your cover so that they’re not fully accountable for mistakes. Okay? And unless you build a system or use some tools for everybody to know what they’re accountable for doing and what they’re empowered to make decisions about, everybody in your company is just gonna kind of automatically come to you and say, hey, Doc, what are you gonna do about this? What should we do about that? What should we do about this? It’s exhausting.
17:46
And that’s what EOS is. It’s a system for helping everybody in the organization know who we are, where we’re going long-term, how we plan to get there, what my role and the role of the people on my team are, and then just go execute, grab a canoe paddle and start paddling and let’s do that together and we’ll get there faster. That’s EOS. The, I’m thinking about a quote from Brian Tracy, a buddy of mine. We wrote a book together and
18:16
He said, every hour you spend planning, you save four hours in execution. And I also like what you said is we’re here to build a great life. Wealth is not just money. It’s health, it’s freedom. And dentists do resonate with this. This is what they want. I joke. I said, I wish for you to have a boring life. You go to work, you love what you do. You get paid very well. Your patients are happy and you have a lot of time to do what you love. And.
18:46
using these systems, utilizing coaching or an implementer at EOS, which is a coaching function, all those things, working on yourself, making these investments, becoming the best that you can be, you’re going to not just will that help your business, but you’re going to really get more out of life. Tony Robbins, my first mentor, right? He talked all about modeling the best. That’s his thing. He’s not shy about it. This is the best system.
19:15
These are people that are happy, that are getting what they, you know, the most out of their lives. Don’t recreate it. Yeah. Don’t, you know, that’s kind of your ego. See what, what’s working and put that into, into play. I don’t like creating. I like building new businesses. I’m very, uh, well it’s enterprising, but I want to see something that has worked and I’m going to apply it in this industry. I’m not going to just.
19:44
Well, I’m just, let me just, and I, ideas are a dime a dozen. But I wanna see what’s working, replicate, and put that into play. Yeah, and that’s been the fun part for me as somebody who was in on the ground floor when I went off to bootcamp in November of 2007 and asked Gino and his partner how many clients they had worked with, it was 61. It’s now 23,000. Wow. We’ve always called the.
20:10
organization EOS worldwide. And the inside joke in the early days was that must’ve meant there was an implementer just over the border in Windsor. Cause you know, the rest of us were in the U S well now we’re everywhere. I mean, there’s very few countries on the planet where there isn’t at least a handful of companies running on EOS. It’s just been a delight to watch happen. And it’s happening because he built a system based on proven concepts that have been around for a thousand years.
20:37
simple practical tools that anybody with any level of business acumen and grit and determination and a desire to learn can learn to apply in their business. You nailed it earlier. It is a system for execution and planning is a required piece of execution, but there is no reason to develop a thorough strategic plan for your business if you don’t intend to go execute well on.
21:04
And so planning, you know, vision without traction is hallucination is the quote we like a lot. Vision without traction. Hey, I don’t I take offense to that. I’m a visionary. Excuse me. I don’t know. Vision is you need an integrator with you as you. I do. So that’s a good transition. Let me tell you an integrator story. Okay. So I, this is our, our integrator, Shelly, and she was one of our top coaches. Still is. Eric brought, brought her in.
21:34
And she was still working for a dental practice, but she was on her way out. Eventually. She just couldn’t pull the trigger. And I kept talking to her. I’m like, you should come work with me. And she’s, I don’t think you can afford me, you know, or something like that. And I I’m very loyal. It’s like what an integrator would say. Right. And so I, I kept, yeah, I kept going back and forth with her and I had her on my podcast. I’m like, you are amazing. I didn’t know anything about visionary integrator yet. Cause you’re amazing. You got to work for me. I spent two hours and I’m very persuasive.
22:03
And it is, you know, nagging is persuasion. I just don’t give up. That’s my, you know, Determination. That’s what my parents always said. You’re gonna be a lawyer when you grow up, you know, I want to be a lawyer because I pain the ass. So eventually just bugging her She finally said okay, and she said what to your salary be I say whatever you say it’s gonna be you’re that good I really believed in her and So far she’s amazing. Yeah, I’m not surprised and Then about a month later. I met we met with our mastermind group and they gave me traction
22:32
One of the members gave me Traction. And he said, this is amazing. And I went through it. I’m like, yeah, another damn business book. I read them all. And I go through Traction, I go, crap, this is so simple. And I love simple. I’m a lawyer and I don’t like to read. And I like this. It’s like very easy to read. It’s very straightforward. I’m like, they got it all in here. This is a Cliff Notes, baby. And so, and then what, when I, the chapter that caught my eye, Peyton, and you would agree.
23:00
I saw visionary integrator that chapter and I go, oh, I’m not CEO. I’m, I’m visionary. That’s what I am. I can play CEO as a function. I can do some of these things, but the acts, the visionary, the ADD of the visionary, that all the, the personality profile fit me. And when you talked about the integrator, what I lack and what I needed, I’m like, I just hired our integrator.
23:30
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s it’s, it’s a great story about accidentally find finding finding your integrator, but you know, I’m a visionary too, and, and, you know, I’m a visionary who’s capable of executing on anything I’m passionate about, especially when I look around for people to help me and there isn’t anybody, right. And so then I’m going to go prove people wrong, but so your listener, get the concept of visionary.
23:57
in an entrepreneurial company is the person who’s constantly bringing new ideas to the table, challenging the status quo, wondering what’s next. You want to motivate a visionary to work hard at something, tell them it’s impossible. I’ll prove you wrong. And so what we say to underscore the difference between the two types of leaders, a visionary often leads with passion.
24:26
and inspiration and motivation and that kind of stuff. Integrators are more in the trenches, data-driven fact-based leaders. Careful, thoughtful, not a lot of gut level stuff. Not that they don’t have instinctive guts, but they’re logical managers and testers. A visionary is somebody who likes inventing trains.
24:55
An integrator is somebody whose job is keeping trains running on time and they fricking love it. They do. And then when the train is a couple seconds late, they’re annoyed and they want to go figure out why and they’ll spend time figuring that out. So it never happens again. And we’re like, yeah, what’s a couple seconds. Yeah. And you’re, and you’re like, and that’s the thing is like just picking on Shelley, for example, she scored well on both. She scored integrator on your process, but she, she has visionary capability.
25:23
But what Erkser or the integrator stuff has to happen. Like that, I think what you did a great job about is you stopped making it into a job. And you said these are personality inclinations that what is gonna trigger you to do and how you work. Also, I have to be visionary because I can’t do anything else besides that. So that’s beside the point. But the- Well, most of us are unemployable, Alex. Right, right. I don’t think I ever had a real job, right? Working for Tony Robbins and all these things.
25:53
But, anywho, yeah, so I think that was really… So moving this concept of integrator to the dental practice, because as I speak to dentists, because I have strategy calls with our members, and then when I’m having those meetings, I’m thinking about trying to develop or to bring out their visionary capabilities and so on. So there’s two issues I have here, Peyton. And Eric, you could jump in to help.
26:22
give context to if we need, is for dentists, this visionary integrator concept, A, dentists would do great with an integrator if they have one, some may not know. An office manager does not mean they’re an integrator, that’s the first concept. The other issue is dentists, I don’t know if they’re natural visionaries, most of them are not. So do they have to be a visionary? Do they have to have those qualities?
26:52
Does a dental practice need a visionary? Tell me a little bit about that interaction. God, there’s so many great questions in there. And literally all of them are great. We could talk about this for the rest of the time. The first thing I would say is this is about what you love and what you want as a professional. You took the risk to start a business. You’re employing a bunch of people. If things go south, your whole reputation and your
27:20
financial and emotional well-being is at risk here. You deserve to do what you want, what you enjoy every day, and get paid handsomely for that, okay? Unless, you know, what you want is underwater basket weaving or something like that, that’s probably not gonna work in a dental practice. So, what I would say is, to the owner of the dental practice, if what you love is being a dentist, and you don’t wanna lead and manage as a visionary or an integrator, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
27:50
That doesn’t mean when your practice has 22 people on its payroll, it doesn’t need leadership and management. And so if that’s what you want, you’ve got to figure out how you’re gonna surround yourself with the people who are gonna do the necessary leadership and management so that you can be like Frank Sinatra and just show up and play the piano instead of having to worry about all the work around that. And there are as many ways to fill those ancillary seats as there are dentists on the planet.
28:20
I’m not going to prescribe a single one. There are successful companies being run without a visionary in them. And so if you’ve got a dentist who listens to this podcast and says, I’m not a visionary, but I want to run my practice well, he or she may be an integrator running an integrator driven practice. There’s nothing wrong with that. Yeah, and I think to your point, Peyton, I think you nailed it. I, and maybe the book says it.
28:46
Maybe I did, of course, I probably forgot or didn’t read that part or skipped over it. But the integrator, and when I read the first book, I skimmed it. Then I read it back. So the integrator, I believe, and tell me if I’m wrong, because you’re the all-knowing, you and Gino on this, that a business can be successful. So let’s say a dental practice. If they have an integrator, and the dentist doesn’t have to be the integrator. If they have an integrator.
29:16
And they don’t have a visionary. I mean, they got to have some visionary capability. What do we stand for? And our coaches work on that, but they don’t have to be a true visionary. But like, I see like, like our integrator, she ran that practice. And now that I look at it and I see my father’s practice and I look back, oh, well, I was providing the visionary work for that practice. And my wife was an integrator at that practice. But, but when I look at like, for example, Shelley’s practice, uh, she ran that show.
29:43
the integrator made everything work. That’s why you see practices. They have a great office manager, which is probably an integrator, and the doctor don’t do much, and the practice goes. That’s right, yeah. And that’s why I say integrator is a position that the leadership team or the group of people you assemble in the early days of implementing EOS, we spend a lot of time taking what we call a structure first, people second approach.
30:11
building out the accountability chart for the dental practice. And the time we spend on the visionary integrator discussion probably is equal to the time we spend on all the other leadership team seats combined, because we’ve got to be careful about exactly what an integrator of this unique practice looks and feels like. In some practices, it probably is a kick-ass office manager.
30:38
In other practices that are more complex, it might be a manager of office managers, right? So I don’t know, but that’s what we’ve got to do together and figure out the right structure for your business for the next six to 12 months. And then once we have the right structure written on the whiteboard, then what we do is we turn to the audience, including the dentist, and say, what seats do you love doing that kind of work and feel like you’re gonna hit out of the park every day?
31:05
And that’s when we put names in seats. And you’d be amazed at some of the things we’ve seen happen where a dentist who thinks they’re not a visionary, the rest of the leadership team looks at them and goes, are you fricking kidding me? Every word that guy just said at describing a visionary describes you. That’s your seat. In fact, you’re kind of an average to below average dentist. You should get the hell out of a dentist chair.
31:30
and get in the visionary seat because we’ll take this firm to the moon. I’ve seen that kind of thing happen. And it’s awesome. If we get stuck, we get stuck in our little ways of doing things and we start feeling like something vastly different from the way things are working now can’t possibly be better than the hell we’re in today. And so if you’ve got a listener who’s feeling that way, you know, please encourage them to reach out and.
31:59
do some research and reach out to me or a local EOS implementer to talk about this stuff because it’s transformational. So I’m picturing them, again, them listening and listening for advice and all that. And what I’m hearing is, okay, this is what we run into as our coaches. I can’t get them to do what I want them to do the way I want them to do it. And they always look back to the doctor.
32:26
to lead by example, to show them how to do it, to create the accountability and all that. When you have an integrator that’s not the doctor, who’s saying, we’re gonna go get this done, this is how we’re gonna do it, this is the direction we’re gonna go, and they’re looking at that person, office manager, lead assistant, whatever it is, they don’t see them as the person who hired them, therefore maybe not the leader, how do you overcome the empowerment of this integrator? How do you get the team to really follow them and not question them?
32:56
Well, first of all, they have to be good at the work, right? If people don’t take direction from folks, they don’t have confidence or giving them the right answer. Okay. Secondly, the doctor has to work hard here. The doctor has to do something we implementers refer to as letting go of the vine. And, and, and all that means is you got to be comfortable letting people learn their own methods for getting great results.
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the solid leaders, the visionaries who successfully let go learn to focus on the team’s ability to generate desired outcomes and worry less about the methods they employ. Now, one of the reasons we wrote the book, Process, is a confounding problem amongst entrepreneurial visionaries is they don’t like to think of themselves as particularly process-oriented.
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Now, my interaction with dentists would say that they’re an exception to that rule, even those who are visionaries, because they’ve gone to school and they understand that there’s a right way to do this work we do, and they kind of repeat the same protocols over and over and over again, because that’s how they’re hardwired. But a lot of visionary entrepreneurs hate that. And so what I ask visionary professionals like dentists to do…
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is I just say, I want you to fully engage in the creation of the process you want everybody else to follow. And then I want you to trust that your integrator is going to hold everybody accountable to doing it the way you would do it if you were in all of those other seats on your accountability chart. And when you see that we’re not getting consistently exceptional results, go talk to the integrator about why that is. Are they not following the process?
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Is the process wrong? Do we need to do some coaching? Do we need to exit and replace? And in that way, what we’re forming is a very solid visionary integrator partnership where the integrator is doing the dirty work and the visionary gets to focus on whether or not the team as a unit is creating consistently exceptional results. You know, Paton, I think I would love to have you back. To have you do a session just on the
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integrator and visionary and we can bring our integrator on and really get into the weeds because I think it’s so much Powerful topic because she’ll make fun of you for the whole oh she will I’m gonna have to have a talk with her Beforehand that just take it down 50% my requirement will be you let her listen this section of the interview She’ll watch she she’s really you know, what’s amazing is I I have some self-awareness like a wow
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It’s amazing. I mean she’s still very supportive of what I do and I see what and I’m watching what I’m doing Like oh that’s not and she’s like, but yes, she’s very complimentary and Yeah, definitely get a lot of zingers and she holds me accountable too because I’m like, you know You said this Mr. Visionary. This is the what you guys stand for and then you’re not doing it. I’m like, yeah, you’re right Okay, what do I have to do? So I mean fabulous rationalizers
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changed mind. She keeps me locked in and and my wife who has integrator capability as well with the company. She was doing that a lot before we had her so she’s just like thankful somebody else is keeping me in line with respect to that. You have a business wife and a home wife. Well, yeah well my yeah well I have two business wives I guess right the integrator and then my actual wife she runs the company with me but she was a the former integrator she’s like happy to get that off her plate.
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She wants to do sales. Reinforcements arrive. Oh man. We need so many integrators to keep me on track from wrecking the company. But I think also, I will point out, which I’m really grateful for, for our company, what I see like our president of coaching. I joke, sometimes people think he’s a CEO because he runs the podcast sometimes, he’s speaking out there. And I don’t care because, and I can see Gino’s a lot like that as well because he had you run the company for several years. It’s all about
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the messaging and helping and everybody. And I remember this from Tony Robbins as well. People always ask me about Tony, what’s he like? He is all about the mission more than himself. It’s not about himself. He’s about how do we get there and empowering people. And again, you’re modeling what are the best leaders doing. So it isn’t, I’m so smart. I just say, okay, they did that and that seems nice. I’ll do that too. Yeah.
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And so, so Peyton, if you could. It doesn’t need to be any more difficult than that. It really doesn’t. It’s all about, if you’re focused on who’s controlling things, if you wanna be in control, you’re not focused on getting consistently exceptional results. I want my teams to focus on consistently exceptional results and.
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Whoever on the team can be effective in their roles to do that without any control being exerted, good for them. That would be my hope and my wish for your listeners, is that they focus more on the results and assembling the team and the clarity capable of creating them and focus less on who’s in control or what their title is or who people think is in charge. At the end of the day, nobody cares. It’s true. It’s true.
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And that’s why what’s great about what you did is taking those titles away and focusing on the heart of it and who and what happens is if people are doing it, Eric’s big on personality profiling. If people are doing what they were built to do, they’re happy again. And I give the example of my wife. She’s a great integrator. She don’t want to run the company. She wants to talk to people and, and, and be a support and build her programs. She’s our phone skills instructor. That’s what she wants to do. So let me ask you, Peyton.
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What are some, so I have two last questions for you. The first is if you can give us a few action steps to take home from our discussion. And then also if our listeners wanna learn more about you and EOS, I know you do a lot of speaking, you have two books, you also do some implementation, I suppose, and there are other implementers. So action steps and how to learn more about you because you are a very impressive person. So it’s great to speak with you. Thanks.
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Yeah. So the action steps are pretty simple. From the start, we built EOSworldwide.com as a place for anybody curious to learn more about this system and how to implement it in their business. Go there. So EOSworldwide.com. You can find all the books in the Traction Library. You can conduct a search for local EOS implementers. You can find me. If you’d prefer to email me directly, my email is mpaton.
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at EOSworldwide.com, but you can also find me on the website. You’ll get a bunch of free tools and videos you can download and watch to learn how to use this stuff. And just reach out and get some help. I mean, I think that’s the one thing I wish I could change about the busy entrepreneur, is just take a deep breath, pick up the phone, and reach out to somebody who’s been there and helped other folks like you before.
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If all you get out of it is somebody who empathizes with your unique challenges and is there to lend a shoulder to cry on or a ear to chat into, good for you. You might find a business partner or a coach or an EOS implementer that can help you change your current state and love your life a year or two from now. And God, nothing makes us happier than the chance to do that. Oh, that’s wonderful, Peyton. And I’m going to put in the show notes all the links that April, you’re
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implementer or integrator or support person. She’s phenomenal. She gets your boss. Yeah, she doesn’t miss anything. Wow. She’s like, Hey, can I make sure everything’s set up? Do you need anything else like three times? And I love it. I love the preparation that goes into it because that really sets apart the amateurs from the professionals is preparation. And you look at all the great athletes. They’re the ones that prepare. They’re the ones that prepare over and over again. So I’ll put all the links there. I encourage you to reach out.
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And also reach out to us at All-Star that if there are other things that you want us, we’re going to have Peyton back again. I’m going to get on April and get him back. And if there are other things that you’d like to hear, remember this is the former visionary of EOS, of Worldwide and a bestselling author. So if there’s anything about the traction or EOS framework you have questions for, let us know. We’ll make sure we ask them on the next podcast. Thank you again, Peyton.
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Thank you, our president of coaching, Eric Vickery. And remember to follow us, of course, on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Get the episodes as they are released. Share with your friends. A lot of your dental friends need this information, and those that are not dentists that are listening, you need this too. And share with all your business professionals. And until next time, go out there and be an All-Star. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars.
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Visit us online at AllStarDentalAcademy.com
