[EO Boston] The Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Scaling and Avoiding Costly Mistakes With Eric Crews

Eric Crews is the Founder and CEO of Crews & co., a management consulting firm dedicated to helping businesses increase revenue, profitability, and salable value. With decades of entrepreneurial experience, he is an EOS Implementer®, helping companies implement a business operating system into their organizations. In 2021, Eric launched the Growth Method℠, a proprietary business operating system designed to propel companies to new heights. He is also the Co-founder and CEO of CE Painting, one of New England’s largest commercial painting businesses.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[3:17] Eric Crews explains Crews & co.’s mission and consulting approach
[4:47] Why Crews & co. provides finance, marketing, and operations support for SMBs
[7:22] The importance of a three-year financial vision for business growth
[10:00] Common financial mistakes businesses make and how to avoid them
[12:16] What to look for when hiring a CFO
[16:29] Eric talks about the Growth Method, a proprietary system for scaling businesses
[20:59] How OKRs create company-wide alignment and drive growth
[33:50] How Eric helped Mission grow from $500K to over $80M and get acquired
[39:46] Why tough conversations and team trust exercises are crucial for scaling businesses

In this episode…

Scaling a business is no easy feat. Many entrepreneurs hit roadblocks that stall growth, drain resources, or create inefficiencies. Whether it’s financial missteps, leadership blind spots, or an unclear strategy, these challenges can quickly derail even the most promising ventures. So what separates companies that scale successfully from those that struggle to grow?

According to Eric Crews, a seasoned entrepreneur and business strategist, sustainable scaling starts with financial clarity and strategic alignment. He highlights the importance of setting a three-year vision tied directly to financial planning, ensuring that every decision contributes to long-term growth. By leveraging OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), companies can align priorities from leadership to frontline employees, creating accountability and momentum. Without these foundational elements, Eric warns, businesses risk wasting resources on ineffective initiatives or hiring the wrong talent, both costly mistakes that can stunt growth.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Eric Crews, Founder and CEO of Crews & co., to discuss the key principles of scaling a company while avoiding common pitfalls. Eric explains how to build a financial framework that supports expansion, the role of OKRs in driving alignment, and the biggest hiring mistakes that hinder growth. He also shares insights on structuring businesses for long-term profitability and exit potential.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“Scaling a business isn’t just about growth; it’s about aligning strategy, finances, and execution at every level.”
“Most companies don’t fail because of bad ideas; they fail because of poor financial planning and execution.”
“OKRs help businesses focus on what truly matters, ensuring every team is aligned with key objectives.”
“Hiring the wrong financial leadership can silently kill a business before you even realize what’s happening.”
“The biggest difference between companies that scale and those that don’t? Clear priorities and relentless execution.”

Action Steps

Align your company with a three-year financial vision: Mapping out revenue, profit, and valuation goals ensures long-term strategic growth and sustainability.
Use OKRs to drive company-wide alignment: Setting clear objectives and measurable key results keeps teams focused on the priorities that matter most.
Ensure financial leadership is the right fit: Hiring skilled CFOs, controllers, and bookkeepers prevents costly mistakes and strengthens financial decision-making.
Communicate priorities transparently in team meetings: Regularly reinforcing goals and expectations fosters accountability and prevents misalignment within the organization.
Assess and refine your business model regularly: Evaluating customer retention, acquisition costs, and revenue streams helps maintain profitability and long-term scalability.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:13

Doctor Jeremy Weisz, here founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Eric Crews. You can check him out at CrewsandCo.com. Eric, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. This is as part of the top EO member series. I’ve had quite a bit of EO companies on actually. Eric and his company work with a lot of EO companies as well. Mark Bealin talked about driving digital dominance and he’s an EO Chicago runs SearchLab Digital. I had Craig Swanson of EO Seattle. He talked about building businesses and meaningful partnerships. He was the co-founder of CreativeLive. And Robert Hartline of EO Nashville was another one he built up. Absolute Wireless. He started from scratch and built it to over $100 million, and it was a pretty incredible journey that he shared. That and many more and inspired Insider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. And we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So, Eric, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the company so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, most importantly, run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I have found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and the companies I most admire and share with the planet what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com. Eric also has some amazing content on his website, which we’ll check out. I’m excited to introduce Eric Crews is Founder and CEO of Crews & co. Eric has guided over a hundred organizations to increased and sustainable profitability while optimizing their operations and also instituting an elevated quality of life for their leadership teams, which is super important. He’s been building on decades of successful entrepreneurship, eight years as a certified EOS implementer with over 1000 sessions. And Eric led Crews & co.’s 2021 launch of the Growth Method, which we’ll talk about. It’s a proprietary business operating system designed to propel companies to increase revenue, profit and saleable value. And Eric is also the Co-founder and CEO of CE Painting, one of the largest commercial painting businesses in New England. Eric, thanks for joining me.

Eric Crews 03:03

Thank you Jeremy, I appreciate you having me. I’m excited to dig in.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:07

Because I’ve been consuming your content online. I figured just start us off and talk about Crews & co. and what you do. I’m going to pull up your site as you do it.

Eric Crews 03:17

Awesome. So Crews & co. is a management consulting company that focuses specifically on small and medium sized businesses. We’re like consulting for the rest of us. We’re the Deloitte for small and medium sized companies. Ultimately when a company brings us in they’re trying to align the company from top to bottom on the right priorities. They’re going to drive what we call RPV, which is revenue, profit and valuation. So we get hired by a a small and medium size company. They’re trying to take this vision where they’re trying to go and they’re trying to figure out what do I need to be doing to achieve that vision? And then how do I align my company from the senior team throughout the entire company on what those priorities are and how to get them to do it now? Then we also have all the resources they need. We have a finance company, we have a marketing company, we have an operations component of our business as well. So we have all the resources they need along the journey. But ultimately we’re trying to drive RPV in every company we work with.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 04:23

Eric I find that to be unique. When I hear a company that you actually have pieces that the companies you’ll help, like with the finance and other things, talk about that decision, because that’s also a lot of work, right. Like you can help them with, you know, the strategy and everything they need to do. But you’re also behind the scenes doing some of the stuff too.

Eric Crews 04:47

Yeah. So you ask a really insightful question that I don’t get very often, actually. So I we’re kind of like the anti consultant company honestly I we’re a consulting company. It’s what we do. We’re going to help you grow. We’re help you figure out the priorities. What we really are designed for small and medium sized companies, companies under 1000 employees. That’s I mean some of our companies are quite large. We work with. But what I found after being an entrepreneur for so many years is you can set these priorities as a company. You can align to the priorities you have as a company, but then you can go out and hire resources to help you achieve some of these things that you need to get done. And you just you just get bamboozled, for lack of a better word, you get vendors who sell you a bill of goods, they charge you a fortune, marketing companies that will charge you X amount of dollars per month, and then you won’t get any ROI. Finance companies that don’t know how to speak the language of a CEO, a small CEO, or recruiting resources that aren’t set up properly for you or, you know, whatever the case might be. So ultimately, we built all these different parts of our company, specifically with the small business person in mind, because when we were working with these teams to figure out what they needed to do, we’d find they’d go out and try to get things done, and they’d hire these resources, which would set them back six months. So we created boutique resources that we think are designed that we know have been proven to help our companies in these specific areas. So we have M&A and M&A function that’s set up just for small and medium sized companies. We have search functions that are the same. And a finance company that’s designed to speak to CEOs and leadership teams using words. They can get it. They can they can understand. But we’re also giving them the top cream of the crop resources. We’re just putting them together in a way that they can afford and process. So that’s our goal. And it’s it’s not easy. It is not been easy to do. But after being entrepreneur for 20 years, I just got sick of hearing so hearing so many people say they’re going to help me, and then spending a fortune, and then not being able to get results from what I was being sold.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 06:55

Yeah. Do you remember that time because like obviously you have the growth method, which you’ve developed over decades, right? But then do you remember that moment where someone’s like, hey, we’re struggling finding, I don’t know what the finance or the operations and you’re like, okay, we’ll just do it for you because, you know, that’s a big decision, right? I mean, because you’re you have a certain focus. What was one of those times when you’re like, let’s just let’s do it for you and make it easy.

Eric Crews 07:22

So here’s here’s what happens a lot to us. So for us, one of our most important things we’re focusing on, we’re helping a company scale is not just a one year plan or quarterly priorities or OKRs. We use OKRs objectives and key results to set priorities with the small business. In particular, we find that they don’t focus enough on dialing in the three year vision of the company and even converting it into like a mini business plan. Now not going crazy. You don’t need to hire Deloitte to do this stuff, but to the degree that you’re going to scale your company is way beyond one year. It’s usually needing a vision. That’s pretty clear in terms of how you’re going to get to where you’re going in three years. To that end, I like our companies to link that to their finances. So if they say that right now there are $7 million company and they’re going to grow to $14 million, I want to have them map that out. What does that look like for this year financially? What does that look like for the next two years? Beyond that, what do I need to have for cash flow for investment? What exactly am I investing in specifically, and what’s the ROI need to be? And is my plan just crap? Honestly, I’ve I’ve spent so much time creating my own plans that were junk, honestly, that I finally just said not. I’m not going to work with a company anymore where they say they’re going to double the company without having the financial plan in the and the backdrop to sue, to say it’s actually going to be actually going to work. And what we found is that that financial planning, three year and one year and quarter actually then drives all the decision making in the company. And without that, you end up just setting a bunch of priorities that you really can’t figure out if you’re getting ROI on those things or not. So we think it all links up and we had to build. I had to build a finance function because I would send people to other firms, and I wouldn’t be able to get the results I needed for them to get to help them as a company. So we just built it ourselves. It took us years to build this engine, honestly, but now we have a team of, I think 16 or 18 people inside the finance company, 4 or 5 CFOs, bookkeepers, controllers. And if we have an issue we have with the client or client wants to really translate that vision into financial reality, we can get that done pretty quickly.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 09:40

I’m looking here at the page here. Right. We’re in the Crews & co. We’re on the on the finance page here. And you can see kind of the executive coaching operations, human resources contingency and everything else. What are some of the biggest mistakes people make with this? When when they’re thinking of their financial engine.

Eric Crews 10:00

So. So it’s interesting you’re you’re keying on finance. Finance is a fractional finance is one of the fastest growing spaces that exist in the business world, which is kind of funny. We kind of stumbled into it. We weren’t trying to grow a big finance company. We were trying to help our clients. But we have plenty of companies that we work with that are just finance clients. Also, they’re not clients of our growth method or of our consulting team. So what issues do I see that people making? One, because unless a CEO or a senior leadership team has strong financial background of some kind, they will put people in roles that have titles and think that they’re going to deliver because they have a certain title, so title, so they’ll put somebody in a controller role. It really is more of a bookkeeper that puts people in a CFO role who really is more of a controller. And ultimately, you have overreliance on people in numbers and delegating to people that really can’t drive the business financially. So sometimes a CFO will be there, and a CFO whose job is to tell you where to take the business financially. And they will not actually have the basics covered. Sometimes I’ll see a controller who people love. I have a phenomenal controller. I absolutely love my controller, but he’s not a CFO. He won’t tell me where to go. He will tell me how things look, and he’s very good at that. And people don’t understand the differences between bookkeepers, controllers, CFOs. And without knowing that information, you think you have a resource that’s guiding you. And then we go in there and I say, you know, this is not it’s not you’re not where you think you are, and you don’t have a plan to get to where you want to go. And then we have to figure out what that combination you need is. And usually it’s a combination. It’s usually a combination of controller and CFO and bookkeeping. Honestly. And knowing the mix that’s required based on where you are is crucial.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:02

Yeah. As you were saying, controller is like how things look. CFO is where do I need to go? Where I need to go? What do you look for in a good CFO?

Eric Crews 12:16

So first of all, hiring is difficult as a whole. So we built a hiring engine. We also have hiring partners we work with for C-suite positions, but we hire a lot of people ourselves. Also, we have an internal recruiting engine. Hiring is is an art. So if us or one of our partners is hiring for a CFO in particular, first we’re trying to look at the story. I recommend this for anybody. does the story of of of them being a CFO actually makes sense. Are they actually even even a CFO? That’s one thing we get. Some people bill themselves as CFOs when they’re really not. So we look at what did they achieve in their previous background. What companies have they driven to success? Who was around them on the leadership team and the companies they were had they were previously? Were they a financial reporting element of that team or were they a financial driving element of that team? So if we’re a CFO, we really want more of a the person that can kind of tell us how to build the clock, to use a Jim Collins analogy, rather than tell us what time it is. And we’re going to be looking to see how much of that they’ve done in the past. For controller, we’re going to we’re going to index more on accuracy of the books. Are the books accurate? Are they telling us what we need to know, at least accurately, from a, from a, from a numbers standpoint and from a bookkeeper? It’s just is the is the is the magic elves, as you would say. Are they actually working in the background to get the numbers in the right spot?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:46

At what level have you found? Obviously there’s a lot of different services here. I’m just speaking the finance piece. Does the company have to be at to make sense? Right. I don’t know if it’s a staff level or revenue level to be like, listen, we we need, you know, because I’m we’re looking at this bookkeeping comptroller and CFO services. What what is where should they be at? To make sense to to work with you.

Eric Crews 14:12

It’s it’s a great it’s a great question. So everybody needs a finance function. So for us it’s less about whether or not. So if you can have one full time person you don’t need to go. Fractional. You can you can hire somebody yourself. We only provide resources because our clients happen to need a lot of these things. But you can hire somebody yourself if you need a full time person for. Usually a controller will show up when a company is Five. 6 million. And they can usually get away with it up to eight, 10 million. Sometimes 12 million. You start seeing the CFOs appear 12 to $15 million. But there’s a different reality behind that. So for us, we’re a consulting company. So when we go in and help a company, our consulting team comes in and helps them set priorities and figure out what actually needs to be done to grow. The different component is we may not need a CFO until we’re ten, 12, $15 million, but we need sprinklings of a CFO potentially now even at six, seven, $8 million. So when we build a scope of work for a company, we’re asking ourselves, what does this company need for sprinklings of these resources? And our goal is we’re pretty boutique, and it’s not only reason we can get away with it, honestly, is because the marketing, we don’t need a marketing engine of our company. We already have a consulting firm, so we have our costs pretty low, so we’re a little more boutique than a lot of finance companies. We can do custom engagements short term, longer term and still do well financially as a company. So we’ll come in and say we only need a couple hours a month of a CFO. You need ten 20 hours of a of a controller and you’re going to get a higher horsepower engine. Sometimes even for less than you pay for one employee. So we’re just figuring out what is the sprinkling of of the combination of these that you actually need.

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Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:04

That makes sense because in order to grow, it’s like, well, you need to like you said, someone saying, where do we need to go? But, you know, you’re maybe not someone’s not at the point where they need a full time CFO at that point. I’d love to talk about the growth method. Because this is kind of what you’ve created over decades as an entrepreneur. So can you talk about that?

Eric Crews 16:29

Yeah. So to your last point about the CFO thing, also, it’s this is This is going to sound weird. I built the company originally. The finance company, because I’ve been working with my clients. And, you know, our CFOs mostly came from our clients, first of all. So the companies that have exited, etc., they’ll come back and they’ll work with us because they know they know what we do. And it’s a lot of it’s a it’s a great thing to have an opportunity for us. What’s what’s important to understand is I can take a CFO into a company that’s, you know, 4 or $5 million that may not need a CFO, but only ask the CFO maybe 6 to 10 hours of questions total in a year. But just by getting that ten hours I might not have had access to, I can get the company the next level. So it’s sometimes it’s really just having access to to super good resources for a short period of time, which you just wouldn’t be able to have without actually hiring the resource. And that’s what we’ve tried to build the finance function. So the growth method on turning the page on this. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. I’ve been a member for 20 years. I’ve owned, I think, five companies. All kinds of ups and downs. And ultimately, I used to own a student painting company, of all things, a student painting company, which ultimately I sold. We used to teach college students how to run painting businesses for the summer. And it was entirely system based company. We’d hire a college kid, and they’d go out there and knock on doors and they’d hire painters. And we could take the average college kid and get them to do 60 or $80,000 in business for the summer. Have a great resume boost. So I did that for many years for I sold that company and had I had a, I think I had 11,000 employees during the time I owned that company. So tremendous experience running lots of people, which is a gift. I became a volunteer in the Accelerator pPogram for EO, which is a wonderful thing to do. If any of you are EOS and you have a chance to do that, it’s a gift to be able to do that. And then I became an iOS person for many years, which was a great system for us as well. Great. I was, you know, it was a great good system for me to learn, and I appreciated my time there. Ultimately, I built my own system because I wanted to to not only have a system, I wanted to build a company that was willing to be accountable for the results of the businesses that they work with. And I get why our competitors, almost all of them don’t want to do that because it’s hard not not that’s that’s saying negative things about them. It’s not because it’s hard. It’s just we’re we lean into being a consulting firm rather than a system company is is is a challenge. It’s a mission driven thing. But it felt right to myself and my leadership team that we wanted to be accountable for the results of our companies. And so to do that, we built a system that we thought had the Lincoln financial results. So that was the finance portion of our system. We felt like it had to be able to drive alignment from top to bottom in a company. So we switched to OKRs because although we like the rocks and the myth in the the. The methodologies around rocks, we needed something bigger for our Scanlon companies, and OKRs allowed us to set broader objectives and then set key results across an entire company. And the combination really of OKRs and the finance engine. And then we layered in a strategy piece as well. So for us, when we’re working with a company, we got to make sure the strategy is actually scalable, that the financial engine shows it’s going to work. And then we use OKRs to operationalize the company. So we built a system that we thought not only is a good system for people to use, whether they’re using us or not, but it’s easier for us to help companies scale past a certain size. And that’s what the growth method does. It’s designed to help companies achieve scalable, continuous growth.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:40

So you mentioned the financial results driving alignment with OKRs and the strategy. What are some mistakes people make when we’re talking about alignment and OKRs. And maybe just give a brief explanation of OKRs for people. I know there’s I think John Doerr wrote a really good book about it.

Eric Crews 20:59

John Doerr is the father of OKRs. He was it all started with Google. OKRs are heavily used in the tech space. They’re very widely used in larger firms. OKRs are very simply stating I have an objective of that’s broad usually. So you might say something like increased gross margin or increase my customer success Function or achieve utilization. Improve utilization amongst employees. Or improve my go to market plan. So it gives you a broad, easy to broadcast. Lens to use for alignment for employees. So you can say to somebody, you can say to 50 employees, we’re trying to increase our gross margins or increase utilization, and they can get that without it being too specific. They get the concept. So objectives allow you to do that. The key results are being more specific. So what that means is that for for the senior leadership team, we’re going to focus on getting the following things done this quarter. And this year for the departments. We’re going to focus on getting these things done this year. But what it allows us to do is by setting a broader objective and then setting what could be hundreds of key results across the company against the broader objective. It allows us to not lose sight of the of the the forest through the trees. And what we found out when we’ve used rocks or other systems is it becomes a series of many to do lists that are being checked. And I’m not checking against a broader nugget that I’m trying to achieve. And what we found is when we go work with a company, there’s only two or 3 or 4 broad things they need to usually fix, ever. So what we try and do is get those things distilled down, make it all simple from an objective standpoint, and then we can set hundreds of few results against those things. But they never lose ground. They never lose sight of what the ultimate end goal is for that objective, which we’ve defined. So it allowed us to better operationalize things. Now mistakes that are made. So one of the biggest issues that we’ve had as a company, us and that our our clients have is not just with OKRs, but just running the business as a whole. And I was with a big SaaS firm this morning and we discussed this topic. 200 employee SaaS firm using OKRs. Private equity owned. Great company. They said they had the the perfect quote. Eric 20% of our company the senior leadership is extremely well aligned. The other 180 I don’t know what they’re doing. So what happens is they’re doing all the work. So senior level team leadership alignment, it’s a big deal. But the beauty of OKRs and the tools that go with it is that they require you to then align the rest of the company. And even in our consulting company, our commercial painting company, these are these are, you know, they’re not huge companies. Commercial painting 12 million is consulting company. We’re about a $6 million company right now we’ve hit ceilings on this topic. We have great leadership teams, but what we realized is we’re not properly rolling out these objectives to the entire company. And it it bit us in the butt this year. And I’ve actually never seen a company hit a wall as hard as ours. Our three companies did. And they did. And then it’s funny, my team said, Eric, I think it’s because we’re not using we’re not eating our own dog food on this stuff. And we’re supposed to be doing all this other stuff. And of course, like every other owner, I said, yeah, but there’s exceptions. The consulting model is different. And then what I realized is that is just crap. Like literally crap. And I got lucky, probably because I’m in the I’m in the space that knows, you know, this is my expertise. I at least caught myself. And I’m like, even I don’t want to listen to me anymore. Like, this is just stupid. So I just said to Tim, I’m like, I’m like, look. And I’m thankful my our consultant team is a gift to us. They’re transparent, they’re honest, and they’re like, look, we appreciate the candor that you have in our organization, but you need to start telling us what to do. And they’re like, we think you have all the tools set because we do it for a living. And we just like, we want you to align the departments and put leaders in charge, have full alignment. And we we put in scorecards, we put in roadmaps and key accountabilities. We’ve dropped OKRs to every level of our company. And you know, we already do that for our clients. But even the ones we’re not doing it for, we’re starting to have a greater awareness that, look, we got to roll this stuff across the entire company. You know, we start we do a state of the company every quarter. I learned that from us, actually. It’s a great tool that I used. But the state of the company, I used to think, okay, well, I’ll tell everybody what’s going on in the company. Now, I realize, no, the state of the company is the broadcast. Here are our priorities as a senior level. And here’s what we are not doing right now. So don’t ask. Here’s what the departments need to do. So pay attention. Now go do your meetings and get aligned behind the vision. And also tell me where we get it right and wrong, but go to work. So instead of the state of the company or this town hall as people call it, being this like exciting update, it’s not. That is what I’ve known and just learned. It’s not an update. It is a directive. It is. Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s what we’re not working on. If you have questions, let us know. Here’s what we need the departments to be working on and not working on. Please fill in the blanks as needed. We trust all of you as leaders, but this is the direction. Unless you have questions about this. This is the direction. That is what it is. You have 90 days go march. And that has been a, you know, as a person that trains this stuff for a living. I don’t know why it took me so long to come to about that, but apparently it did. And it’s changed everything. So now the company won’t come to the state. The company. I’m like, don’t have to come to the company if you don’t want, then you’re just gonna do exactly what we tell you to do and don’t ask any questions, because that’s when the when the updates are coming out, and we’re going to work extremely hard as a senior leadership team to make sure that’s clear. And we’re gonna tell you what you need to do in that update. And then we’re gonna ask you two questions. And it’s changed our entire company. So, you know, doing this for 12 years, and apparently it works for everybody, including us.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:33

I’d love to hear Eric. Maybe an example with it could be, you see painting of like an OKR that when you say kind of rolling it out and and dropping it to every level. And I just want to say before you answer that for me, I can often see things in other people that I am blind to in myself, and once I see it in them, it takes me. Maybe I’m a slow learner. I’m like, oh wait, I’m also doing the exact same thing that that I’m seeing them do. But I don’t know. For me, it seems sometimes obvious to see it in someone else than myself personally. But how do you. Yeah. Go ahead.

Eric Crews 28:15

Yeah. So I’ll answer your question. So we have a couple of things on this line. So I’ll go with the consulting business first. And it’s funny it I’ve always for the last 12 months I’ve asked myself, I need, I need a me to come in and tell me what to do. But then I realized the reason I don’t have a me, because I have a whole team of consultants, all of which I love. The reason I don’t have a me is because I’m just a pain in the ass client like I would never I. I’m horrible because my teams like, we’ll work with you. I’m like, I’m not working with you. And I realize I’m just such a terrible client. But you’re right about the blind spots.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 28:51

I’ve seen you and Brendan’s dynamic, and I don’t know. I don’t know, Brendan, but it seems like he may. You may have that dynamic of Brendan at least watching the webinar.

Eric Crews 29:03

Yeah. It’s it’s it’s it’s yeah, it’s we have a lot of we have a, we have a lot of senior leaders in our company and it’s it’s it’s a fun it’s You know, once, once again, it’s a gift. So the here’s an example of an objective that is going to be the theme of our year. So one alignment across every level of our company is going to be a theme this year. And it’s so stupid and basic. But we’re using that as clear clear accountabilities through. We use a tool called a position agreement which is clarity on everybody in the company having the right job description and key accountabilities. We need to make sure that everybody in our company is in the right seat, which may sound basic, but we’re realizing we have a lot of roles that we just don’t have defined, that we need to define this year. And by not defining them, it’s killing our language. We’re rolling out scorecards to our entire company this year, which is difficult but is proving to be very valuable. But another big one for us is and this is another a hire this year business model. So business model is a weird thing. and we finally came up with ours this year. We’ve been working on it for years too, and our business model is basically any service business is basically based on. We need to get clients that stay with us for a certain period of months, that spend, on average, a certain amount of dollars and don’t cost more than a certain amount of money to acquire. That’s it. So one of the issues that entrepreneurs make have is that they don’t think about their company from a valuation perspective. Every company has got value, but our whole value if we ever go to sell our company, but even if we run it efficiently, is based on those three things. So we have turned those three things into objectives that we’re focusing on, cross company and those objectives around increasing number of months per client that could live for. I’m betting that’s going to live for 18 to 24 months at a minimum, because it has to go from our current number to our bigger number. Now, once we figured that out. Which took us years to figure that out as a base number and a lot of data. We then put our whole team against that standard, and we looked at it and we said, where does the data show us? And it showed us that we have some people we need to move around in different seats. And it also showed us we have some people that are destroying it. And but ultimately, that objective of retaining customers for a certain amount of months, and we’re very specific on how long that needs to be. And it populates into our financial model. Our financial business plan is linked to our financial model, for the record, but our ability to create value in our company and that metric right there is going to link to, I would know that exaggerating, I would say close to 100 key results that we’ll set up this year against that objective. That’ll be everything from company priorities, client community, better training for consulting team. But it’s all linked around that objective of increasing retention for x number of months. We have the same thing for average spend. People say why do you build all these other companies? Well, one, from a mission standpoint, we do it because we need to provide more services to our clients to make sure we increase their revenue, profit and valuation. That’s the mission of what we do. From a business model standpoint, we also need our average client to spend a certain amount of money, because if we’re going to spend a certain amount to acquire that, can’t that client, we have to get them to spend a certain amount of money to increase our total lifetime value. Now, most companies don’t have that kind of business model. And I go in there and then I see them spinning out clients, and I just keep getting more clients. And I’m like, you’re on a hamster wheel, and that hamster wheel you’re on doesn’t grow like you think it does. There’s stuff that’s creating it, things to shoot out the back. And what can we do to actually prevent that? So these are big topics for us that we’re going to have to wrestle with at every level of our company. So we’re going to go to go to our consulting team and have a meeting about this. And there’s going to be some things they need to own to fix to do better. There’s just as many things at a senior level we need to do to also work against this do to do better in our end as well. So the clarity of what that is though, is really important to us.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:23

Yeah that’s helpful. There’s a lot to digest. So I’m gonna have to relisten to this after it goes live. But I appreciate you going through that because there’s a lot of gems in there. Just just how you talked about, you know, the state of the company every quarter. What what things you do there. I, you know, you you had some incredible results with mission. I love to have you talk about and walk through what you did there and what happened.

Eric Crews 33:50

Yeah. So I’m glad you asked that mission because I talk about too much. The clients I get sick of hearing about mission. But I never I never talk about them, about podcasts or anything else. Nobody ever asks about them. So mission is a One of my earliest clients from, you know, many, many years ago, I think maybe 12 years ago at this point. And I started by a guy named Glenn Grant, fellow EO guy, fellow Boston guy. Great guy, smart entrepreneur, great tech entrepreneur. Now, now, also a very dear friend. But he hired me as he was an accelerator and we helped. I helped him, worked with him and his team, helped build his team, grow his team. We grew the company to about 5 or 6 million. Then we sold it to a tech company, to a PE company called Great Hills. Great Hills, by the way. We’re looking to have a company acquire you. Great Hills been great PE firm for us to work with great people over there. So they acquired mission about seven years ago and Glenn had a good first exit, but we’d always had a goal to sell to a PE firm that would help take the company to the next level, next size. And they kept me around and we took three companies, and that one, there was a roll up of three purchases and they kept me around to smash these companies together, helped get them all on the same page and work with the new leadership team at mission, which I did. Mission then became used to be G2 and it became mission and mission grew up to about. I won’t go too in the details, but 800 million and we sold them after about seven years. They were phenomenal student. So it’s interesting if you look at mission, they’re in the right space. Certainly their premier AWS mission.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 35:23

What did they do?

Eric Crews 35:25

Cloud services AWS, they’re an AWS partner and their whole metric is around, you know, AWS and cloud and everything to do with AWS and cloud. I don’t want anyone to I don’t want to pigeonhole them because if it’s AWS and cloud and anything to a small, small business, even enterprise, at this point, they’re going to they’re going to help you with that, get you in the cloud, keep you in the cloud, all that kind of stuff. So it’s the right space. But they’re just a good student. They, they, they they eat their broccoli. They, they they do the planning. They they do it across all levels of the company. They do the state of the company. They do. is at every level of the business. And then ultimately you got purchased by CDW and CDW. Is is a is a is a fortune 200 company. And you know, we just kicked off annual planning with CDW in Park City last month. Now mission is part of this. You know billions of dollars company and mission will be the it will be their the biggest part of their of their AI and dev arm of the company. And. And a lot of that was because we and we were bought. I was I was really proud of the fact that we didn’t know what was gonna happen when we got bought. We got bought for a big number for us. Wasn’t probably much, wasn’t much for CDW. It was a big number for the company is a big, big number. And you know, when you sell your company and they bought the whole thing, you don’t you never know what’s going to happen. But CDW basically said, you guys just run it as you’ve been running it, at least for the first year, and we’ll see how that goes. And I was proud of the fact that we did a planning session with them, wonderful people over there. And we said we do think we should be doing differently. And they said nothing. You should just be doing exactly what you’re doing and we’ll help you finance it, the three year plan and just keep doing exactly what you’re doing. But that is an example of a company that’s aligned from top to bottom that has made many difficult decisions. And, you know, they just eat their broccoli. They’re in the right space. They have a good strategy. All those things are super important. They have great financial arm, all those things we care about. But and they’re great people. But, you know, that’s an example of what you can do. We have a lot of stories like that. But that’s just that’s a really big one.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:48

I think Eric, they started off maybe a little bit over a half a million and then grew to, you know, like you were saying To 80 to 100 million. That’s pretty incredible.

Eric Crews 38:01

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And then they, you know, they sold for a much bigger number than that. So it’s it it’s incredible. Yeah. It’s a great story. And it was difficult. And now I’m working with mission in the new version of mission, which is now part of CDW. But ultimately we do the same boring stuff. We meet every 90 days. We set priorities. We our team helps to align the whole organization from top to bottom. They work very hard. And we keep questioning the strategy to make sure it’s the right one. And we stick to the basics and funny it’s funny. People think, well, you run $1 million company. Things are different. No, things are just worse. Things are actually simpler in grander magnification. So it’s kind of this like. The only difference is that what was what was once a problem of a 5% gross margin issue that cost us, you know, No. 500 grand a year now costs us 50 million in a year. That’s the difference. But it’s the same problem. And the problem is that companies grow. They’re like, oh, it’s so much more complex. No it’s not. It’s not more complex. We need to make sure we have the right people in the right seats that are following the right stuff. And they need to be showing up to work 40 hours a week. That’s really it. And when you trick yourself into something’s different, when your company grows, that’s when you get stuck in bloat and inefficiency and everything else. And I’m proud of mission because it’s never done that. So it’s not been easy, but it’s been fun.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 39:30

Talk about eating broccoli for a second. You mentioned a couple things about, you know, doing the state of the company. Right? People in right seats. What are some other things that you consider that they did that you would consider, you know, making sure they just always ate their broccoli?

Eric Crews 39:46

Yeah. So one, if people ask me what we really do for a living, it’s figuring out what vegetable to eat and make sure people eat it. That’s really what we do. And we’re very that is what we’re really good at. We’re good at people saying, what should I be doing? Well, we can work with you to help you figure that out. We can try and use external resources to figure that out, but ultimately we can figure out which vegetable to eat. And then we’re pretty good at making you say, you got to eat it, or we need you having a different conversation. So in their case, they did a lot of stuff. They leaned in on a lot of things which were really exceptional that they did routinely. They they certainly did quarterly meetings every quarter, no matter what. They did something very interesting. We have always done team trust. Once again, part of my hangover from EOS, we’ve always done team trust exercises at a high level, but mission has done his team trust exercises for 12 years straight on an annual basis, and in some years we’ve missed them because we’ve had so many hard topics going on, but they’ve always committed to we must always talk openly and honestly, even when it’s when it’s extremely, painfully difficult. And they always relying on me to step in where I can to make sure that continues to happen. And it is never. It’s funny, they’re the same humans that have been there for seven years with some changes. The conversations have never gotten easier. We just keep forcing ourselves to have them. People don’t change. It’s just the same people that are just getting better talking. So they do a lot of that. They do a lot of analyzing the strategy on an annual basis to make sure it’s the right strategy. It’s actually working. And they test it. We’ve had to do heavy cost cutting, very unpopular, but we’ve had to do cost cutting in times when it was required, when it was miserable and almost counterproductive. But the model wouldn’t have worked otherwise. And we sometimes weathered the storm, but sometimes we just couldn’t afford it. And we made tough decisions. We also made key hires in that company that were that were risky. And they’re risky for big companies, too, because they’re trying to, you know, hit their numbers. We made some key hires that took some convincing of the leadership team. And those key hires made a huge difference.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 42:09

So what would be an example of like a position. Oh that’s risky. That was a key hire.

Eric Crews 42:14

Yeah. Well, I’ll give him credit in case you ever listened to this thing. They hired Glenn Beck, who was the original founder, and put him in a service delivery capacity. And Glenn is is a great tech leader. Like, he’s I always call him the angry hoodie guy because that’s what he is. And I love him. We’re big Star Wars fans together. But the company just needed some more alignment. You know, the tech, the tech leadership team, the tech, the whole tech team is awesome. Like the tech team over there. And there’s a couple hundred of them are all I’ve met a lot of them. They’re amazing people. But they needed somebody as a tech leader who was kind of tech ey, who got it and who can hold them, you know, help them, help them hold themselves more accountable to productivity. Glenn comes in. He’d been gone. He’d exited. They brought him back. It was a risky hire, tough to bring a founder back. But he took that thing seriously, drove it to success. I don’t know how many points he’s picked up in margin, but it’s probably 3 to 5 million in one year at minimum net. He’s picked up and off the gross margin simply because he’s just like, look, I may not be able to run hundreds of millions of dollars in a company, but I can tell you what a service delivery team needs to look like. And he nailed it. So that’s an example of a hire that was needle moving. Not ridiculously expensive, by the way. Glenn’s not cheap as a resource for certain, but it he. It was a resource that was the best bang for the buck. And I mean he made a big difference missions that other key hires like that as well. But those are risky hires that you’re just like, you know, they’ve also done a lot of heavy investment in selling and marketing. You can look at it and say, well, they should cut back in sales and marketing. Mission. Mission doesn’t do that. They they everybody cut sales and marketing when things are tough. They have not. And they’ve built some tremendous conferences and everything else because they did not cut that budget. So very difficult decisions. But they did a good job of it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 44:13

Eric, I know we have a few minutes left, and I’d love to hear some of your mentors throughout in your business journey that have helped you. I do want to just point people to check out Crews & co..com. We’ve pulled it up. Actually, they have some great webinars there. You touched on one of the eat your broccoli things situations with the You have a difficult conversations webinar, which is great. You talk in there about speed to candor. So I would encourage anyone to check out that that resource on their page. But I’d love to love to hear mentors throughout the years.

Eric Crews 44:50

So I’ll tell you, I have a couple of those. I will say on the speed to candor thing, I get the question a lot in these. What kills the company? I can tell you what kills a company, and what prevents something from growing more than anything else is lack of trust. And that sounds weird because I even have high trust companies. Or my answer is always the same I. This happened to me recently. I sat in a leadership team of a fast growth company and as a super valuable executive there. And at the end I said, you know, how’d it go? And he said, it went great. And I asked him later, I said, how do you think it went? And he’s like, it went great. But we got to focus on X, Y and Z. And I’m like, next time in the room, please. That was incredibly valuable. What you just said. Even if you piss off the entire room, just say it, because we may lose time because you didn’t say that. So that speed to being able to say things without worrying about what everybody else is going to think, even if you’re wrong, is often the biggest difference I see in companies that scale and those that don’t. So that’s a comment on that. Thank you. I gotta I gotta give always give credit. I always is probably sick of hearing it because I know he’s heard some of these. But I gotta credit to Mark Moses CEO coaching. You know, I’m very close to Mark. I was Mark’s third client and he’s also from the Stuart painting industry. But Mark is a great coach. He was a coach to me for almost six years. He rings in my ears all the time. If you ever want to, we have clients that will send to him sometimes any coaching in certain areas. And I always tell him, like, you want to know what marks don’t tell you any topic. I can pretty much tell you. But he taught me the basics. Mark was a funny guy. And still is this way because he’s, like, literally one of the smartest dumb guys that I know. And he would know what that means. Like, sometimes you look at him, he’s like, he’s like a caveman. Like, he says things that are just, like, so stupidly basic. And it’s. And I’m just like, Mark, there’s more context to my question. He’s like, Eric, the context is not necessary. The answer is this, and you know that. That’s what he’ll say. And what I’ve learned is, as people, we talk ourselves into so much context around topics because we don’t have to deal with things or we don’t have an answer. And what Mark is really good at is he’ll say, Eric, I don’t know the solution. I just know what you’re doing is wrong. So we have to figure out from here to get from here to here. And that I catch myself all the time because he rings in my rings in my ear. There are certainly others, though. There are others, honestly, that I’ve met that I’m extremely that I love, honestly a great deal. If I think some specifically. I can’t remember his name right now. Oh, the Priceline guy. I can’t remember his name.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:39

I know who you’re talking about.

Eric Crews 47:41

Yeah. Wait. Hoffman. Hoffman.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:44

Yeah. Jeff.

Eric Crews 47:44

Hoffman. Wayne Hoff. I think it’s Wayne Hoffman. Was his name not read? Although it reads good to Jeff Hoff.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:50

Jeff Hoffman.

Eric Crews 47:50

Thank you. Jeff. That guy’s phenomenal. He’s phenomenal. He’s a phenomenal human. And he’s a he’s a phenomenal business leader. And he’s the most understated person you could ever meet. You’d think he was worth like, you know, a million bucks. Have you talked to him? Maybe. And he started talking. And you realize, man, this guy is sharp. So Jeff Hoffman, super smart, admire that guy. Rick Shapiro, unfortunately just passed. Wonderful guy, wonderful leader, wonderful mentor, extremely intelligent guy. Listened to. I’m a big believer, by the way in EMP. If you have if you have any others on here who have done EMP or not.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 48:31

My business partner, John Corcoran is going through it now.

Eric Crews 48:33

Yeah, so I graduated EMP. Now I’m gonna return to masterminds. I’ve done that for ten years now, I think maybe even 11 years straight. So a lot of people that speak to us inside that circle. I’m very passionate about I give, I give big props to Verne, honestly. Verne is he’s had his hiccups along the way and and, you know, scaling up and traction all the systems crap that we all come up with. That guy’s freaking smart. Like, he’s smart. And I’ve learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from Gino, honestly. Gino Wickman. Interestingly, I learned a lot. A lot from Gino talking to him directly. More so than I ever did as an implementer. Like talking to him. He had great quote, two phenomenal Gino quotes. I give him 100% credit for it. I’ll give one to Vern too. Phenomenal. Gino. Quote. Number one does not in any of his books. He says if you keep anybody on your team, if you keep 5% of your team, that’s in the wrong seats, 5 to 10% of people in the wrong seats, you eaten up all of your profit period. At least all of the money you would have ever had to have any growth of any kind to invest in your company. So even keeping the extra 5 or 10% of fat, he says, which almost all companies do because they don’t want to deal with that extra 5 or 10%. It eats up their entire ability to invest in their company permanently. That’s the number one thing, he said. Second thing he said, which I’ve never forgotten, is in that case, in the US case, we believe this is in our system. He said the value of us is not. It’s in the leadership team. But 90% of the value is in all levels below the leadership team. And I believe wholeheartedly in that. So those are the two nuggets from him from Vern. The biggest I got was he said once he said so eye opening for me. He said he said the definition of a senior leader is somebody who does not need to be managed. I’ve never forgotten that. And by definition, what he’s saying is if the person is truly a senior leader, you shouldn’t have to manage them. And then also, by definition, everybody else does need to be managed in some way, shape, fashion or Fashion or form. And then he also said that he went on to then say every, every goal you set with everybody else needs a follow up loop. Any goal does not have a follow up loop of some kind. You can expect it won’t get done. So that really helped summarize to me the whole difference between micromanagement and just management. Was that quote and further conversations with Verne. So I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by lots of people that are good mentors. And I tried to listen to them as much as I possibly could, and share it with as many people as I can.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 51:07

Eric, I know you have to hop on another meeting, but this has been incredibly insightful and valuable. I encourage everyone to check out crewsandco.com to learn more. We’ll see everyone next time. Eric, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Eric Crews 51:20

Thank you Jeremy.

Outro 51:21

Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast. This episode is powered by Rise25. Please subscribe and check out future episodes.