Phil Kristianson 8:25
Yeah, and I have done a couple of really cool things over, you know, over the years, we, one of the things that we don’t do a bunch of, but we do I get completely involved in it. And we do structural glass floors. And so those really cool floors that you can walk on and see through and so yeah, that that scratches my itch for, for constructing things, which I still love to do.
John Corcoran 8:48
Now, you seem to have real good awareness of that particular interest of your own. Do you find yourself even to this day? getting drawn into projects and having your ask yourself, Is this the best use of my time? Or how do you balance those two needs one to get paid or money and the other to scratch the itch or to express your creative side?
Phil Kristianson 9:15
Yeah, it’s something I’ve learned that I have to be very careful with. Because it’s, it’s easy to get distracted. And I have a couple of rules for myself. If I am going to get involved with actually being in the business as a worker, then I have to document what I’m doing so that we’re I’m building a system and making the business better, which isn’t as fun as just jumping in and doing it and so it tends to moderate and I noticed I had a really big entrepreneurial lesson when I left Hawaii to start my second company in California. For the first year, I was back every month because I was the president of the EO Hawaii chapter and I stayed in my local Hawaii forum, EO forum. And the first year was rough because it was transition and, and then the business in California started taking off, they spent less time going back to Hawaii, and the business started thriving. And I’m not proud of this. But my first reaction was, I was a little insulted because it clearly wasn’t me. And
John Corcoran 10:33
There are business owners that have sabotage their business when that happens.
Phil Kristianson 10:37
Well, so I just decided to be curious. And I dug into what was different. And what I realized with me not there. My company couldn’t do all of the crazy stuff that I would say yes to. And so they ended up doing the stuff that we did really well that I didn’t find Derek, I thought it kind of boring, but it was profitable. So you know, our gross profit went up, our revenue actually went up. And when I realized what was going on, I also realized that I was starting to do the same thing with my business in California. And I realized that, you know, in a great to great extent I was the bottleneck because I suffer from a condition that a lot of entrepreneurs in EO suffer from, it’s called ados. It’s attention deficit, oh, shiny. And most entrepreneurs don’t die of starvation of ideas. It’s indigestion of such you know, shiny things. Yeah. And so I’m saying
John Corcoran 11:38
Saying yes to a lot of things, pursuing a lot of different things, trying new stuff that rather than kind of putting your head down, deciding, this is what works, we’re going to do this over and over and over again, like a machine.
Phil Kristianson 11:50
Yeah, we have to honor the core focus of our business and not get distracted. If new ideas make that better. It’s awesome. But you know, probably 10% of the ideas that a visionary entrepreneur has, don’t actually make the business better. And so it’s important to have a filter for that. So that you’re not creating operational and organizational whiplash, which I found that there’s a name for that. Some of your listeners might relate to this. It’s called Vision bonding. It’s where the, the owner or the entrepreneur goes off to some conference or some EO event and comes back with a brand new idea. And everyone ends up completely distracted by this vision bomb. And yeah.
John Corcoran 12:33
Like photobombing, like in the back of a photo, but vision bike, Mama. Yeah, exactly. Like,
Phil Kristianson 12:38
here’s where we’re going now.
John Corcoran 12:40
Yeah, yeah, that’s hard. Well, I want to go back to Hawaii first before we get into the Sacramento stuff, but an EOS stuff, but so at some point, you figured out that the general contractor work that you were doing wasn’t as exciting to you as more of a product based business. And that’s how you ended up getting into war, the glass block work, right. So talk to me a little bit about that transition, and how you ended up getting into particularly a very specific niche, which is glass block work.
Phil Kristianson 13:15
Yeah, so what I realized is, as a general contractor, where the industry was going was more mitigating risk, and I noticed it was quite adversarial, between me as the general contractor and my subcontractors, the architect, the owner, and my personality just didn’t lend itself to being that sort of cold hearted to be successful. And so I watched the the guys that were selling me products, and that seemed like a really cool gig, you know, they, they were buying stuff, selling stuff, it was simple, which I liked. And I, I went to buy a product for one of my projects, and which was glass block, and the local distributor, didn’t give me very good service. And they wouldn’t give me they wouldn’t give me credit, they wouldn’t give me terms. And that was really frustrating. It took forever to get the product. So I reached out to someone on the mainland, and the price of the glass walk was so much cheaper than locally in Hawaii. And I just saw an opportunity. And so the, the Mason that I had set the glass block, would call me every couple of weeks and saying, hey, you know, I’ve got this project, can you supply me product, my chair. So I called my buddy in the mainland. And I just realized this is a really cool niche. And it turned out the reason I wasn’t getting credit terms, and that I couldn’t get product from the local distributors, they were about to go out of business. And so when they closed down, the manufacturer reached out to their network and called me up and said, Hey, would you like to be the distributor? And I said, I very much would like to be the distributor.
John Corcoran 14:58
And so it wasn’t from lack of demand, the maybe operational issues that drove them out of business. But there was enough. So that I imagined that was great for you to start this business. And then all of a sudden, this poorly managed competitor goes out of business.
Phil Kristianson 15:15
Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s the angel story of entrepreneurship, it’s recognizing opportunity, and then being prepared to grasp it when it comes. And so often, the timing works out if you’re ready to go. There’s an opportunity and you have to jump on it really quickly, which I was able to do and so,
John Corcoran 15:34
right right now, I also want to ask about you we’re, I think this is still in the right order. You were still in Hawaii and Hawaii, prices, property construction had all taken off, in large part because the the economy in Japan and done well, a lot of people from Japan and common bought properties in Hawaii. And then it all came crashing down very suddenly. So talk a little about what that was like.
Phil Kristianson 16:02
Yeah, I mean, I started my glass block company during that boom. And I used to say, jokingly, you could sell pencils to carpenters outside jobsite to make money because there was just so much going on and, and we rode that wave up, it’s doing really well decided to expand my business, so moved into a larger warehouse. And then the Japanese economy tanked and wrote it down for a while, and then realized that I was in financial trouble. And so my decision was to just become very lean. And so I actually sold my house and pitched a tent on the mezzanine of my warehouse, and move some of my fracture into it and lived in that tent for a couple of years. Well, you know, the economy was just in in real trouble, but I was able to maintain my lifestyle, and maintain my business and, and it was actually awesome. I didn’t feel you know, what was important to me was success, and you do the things you have to do. And that was great life lesson. You know, I was, in essence, a pretty happy camper.
John Corcoran 17:14
You’re the most happy, formerly homeless person that I think I’ve ever met, is very interesting, the way you describe that you didn’t say you’re homeless. But that’s kind of what you were describing.
Phil Kristianson 17:27
I think it just depends on how you look at it. You know, the, the dream was more important than the immediate circumstance. And I just didn’t see it as a negative. I saw it as an adventure. Right, which I guess is the difference between being a camper and being homeless is your perspective.
John Corcoran 17:46
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I want I do want to ask about after things rebounded, at some point, you make the decision that going to move to California, and you’re gonna start basically similar business, but serving Northern California, I believe, what are some things that you did in order to prepare the Hawaii business to be able for you to not be there to leave?
Phil Kristianson 18:11
Yeah, as I said, the first year was was I was back so much, it wasn’t like I left. But when I, when I spent stopped spending so much time in Hawaii, it became pretty clear that developing as a leader, and a more effective manager was the most, you know, that was the most important thing I could do. And that’s where I really leaned on EO and started looking at, you know, operating systems for the business, because when I was there full time, you can get away with a lot because you’re fully present, you’re completely in the business, but living 2500 miles away, I couldn’t pull that off. And so I had to start developing myself as as just more effective at running the business by the numbers and making sure I have the right people doing the right things.
John Corcoran 19:04
And did you have a really good manager in place so you could trust?
Phil Kristianson 19:09
I went through a couple I made some, you know, some early on mistakes. But yeah, ended up realizing what, what I needed and went out to my network and ended up finding someone who worked out really well. And we had a great relationship and, and develop the right cadence of communication didn’t give them room to make mistakes, which I think is important as a leader is letting people make small mistakes so that they grow and and become better but not allowing them to make ones that are going to permanently damage the company. And it’s, it’s, that’s I think the biggest one of the biggest challenges of the leader is just shifting that coach mindset. You know, much like raising children, there’s a point where you just have to let them skinned their knee because the lesson from that is far greater than you trying to protect them from skinning their knee.
John Corcoran 19:59
Now You do EOS Implementation now which I’ve interviewed many people, entrepreneurs that have businesses that run on EOS. And we can talk about what that means. And then are, they credit EOS to making it possible for them to run a business or to own a business and not actually operationally run it, but to keep tabs on it from a distance. But you didn’t have that when you had this operation in Hawaii? And when you moved away? So looking back on it now, did you have to kind of invent those different pieces, the cadences, the rhythms, the check ins, all that kind of stuff?
Phil Kristianson 20:40
Yeah, I reached out to EO members and found out what they were doing and you know, cobbled together a couple of Franken systems which got me through, but they were clunky and weren’t always great fit. I mean, it gotten through, but when I, when I discovered Eos, it was just such a well designed, elegant, simple model that it it did all the things I was looking for, and it just wasn’t as clunky is the things that I created myself by, you know, plucking different things from different places.
John Corcoran 21:18
Yeah. When did you discover EO? And at what point did you decide to start the Hawaii chapter.
Phil Kristianson 21:25
So I, I was dating a woman at the time, who later became my wife. And some good friends of mine were, were getting ready to start the Hawaii chapter. And they were twisting my arm to join and help them out. And thankfully, my, my girlfriend at the tap timeline, now my wife, Lily, she said to me, you need to pay attention to this, this is a really good thing. She had some knowledge of YPO a similar organization. And she, she didn’t let me blow it off, which I’m, you know, now 23 years later, really, really thankful for. And I didn’t even realize I was an entrepreneur, I was just a business owner and my, my involvement with you know, getting the chapter launched and then just all of the learning from my relationship with EO really allowed me to start the second business. I think if I hadn’t joined El, I’d probably still be running the Hawaii business, you know, just open my eyes to thinking bigger and, and being able to scale an organization.
John Corcoran 22:42
Yeah, now starting a brand new business in a new area that you hadn’t lived in before in Northern California, Sacramento, not an easy thing to do. When all your network all your connections are in Hawaii. What made you think that you could do that and you’d be able to pull it off?
Phil Kristianson 22:59
Just blind faith and and the fact that and sometimes we do this we airbrush, our past, right? And my memories of starting the first company, I had romanticized an airbrush and was really looking forward to doing it again. And once. Once I started doing it, I realized how much work it was. And yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a grind.
John Corcoran 23:25
You’re back to knocking on doors and trying to get people’s attention, trying to build relationships and all that.
Phil Kristianson 23:31
Yeah. And, you know, again, reached out to the EO chapter in Sacramento, where I decided to move to Sacramento just because of its geography being central to a bunch of things. There was no network there. And, and so, the EO Sacramento Chapter was just had just launched and so I was able to lend some of my experience to that. And it really helped me to build a local network really quickly.
John Corcoran 23:57
Yeah. Now, we mentioned earlier that you do structural glass, flooring work and you also sell product, the blocks. How do you decide between when you’ll take on a project that’s maybe larger, but requires more creativity requires more complexity, versus putting your energy and effort into you know, selling the standardized product that you can sell over and over again?
Phil Kristianson 24:24
Yeah, the glass flooring is I know myself well enough that I need to scratch my itch for building something that’s going to last beyond my lifetime and, and I just can’t justify my time, you know, doing glass block Windows walls and showers. And so the structural glass floor has to be a really interesting project. And when we put glass floors, and high end car dealerships where they park the supercars on the glass floor so you can see the underside of them from the showroom. How is that even possible? It’s just really cool engineering and put a glass floor over a monstrous aquarium in the lobby of Waikiki hotel so that you can walk above the aquarium and look down and see the fish at night. And you know, just interesting projects like that, that. Yeah, just scratch that itch and create balance in my life. And there, the product is pricey enough where I can I can justify my time. Yeah, working on the project.
John Corcoran 25:31
So speaking of balance, so one of the things that brought you into doing more of the EOS work was in the construction industry. Over the years, we were talking before, and you said that there are uptimes or downtimes, during some of the downtimes, you would switch, and you would start spending more time doing the facilitation type of work, which brought you into doing us implementation. So for those who aren’t familiar with EOS talk a little bit about what what that is I got the book right here, I always keep it close by tremendous book.
Phil Kristianson 26:04
Yeah, and the EOS is based on the book Traction, which you have there. And the simplest way to describe it is as an EOS implementer, I help people to get what they want from their business and do that by helping them implement a it’s a complete proven system with simple, practical tools. And to help you do three things we call vision, traction, healthy, and vision just from the standpoint of first getting your leaders people on your leadership team 100% on the same page with where your organization is going and how it’s going to get their traction is just installed instilling discipline and accountability so that your leadership team is executing really well on every part of your vision. And healthy just means helping your leaders to become a healthy, functional, cohesive leadership team. Because sadly, the reality is often leaders don’t function well in a team. And what we find is, As goes the leadership team and organization, so goes the rest of the organization. And our goal is we finally get to the point where the entire organization is crystal clear on the vision, they’re all much more disciplined and accountable, executing really well containing the game consistent traction, and they’re advancing as a healthy, functional, cohesive team. And so it’s just a system for operating your business on. And one of the things that I think makes EOS unique is, is those three things because there’s a lot of systems that I played around with and tried that they worked on vision and you know, execution on traction, but they didn’t have the healthy piece. And that’s where a lot of the challenges come with running an entrepreneurial organization is the people side of it. And so EOS has a lot of emotional intelligence baked into us. And it’s a simple system. And Mark Twain popularized this saying, If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter. Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician originally. And Mark Twain was good at ripping off and duplicating which is what we do as entrepreneurs. And but it’s it’s true, making something simple is incredibly difficult. And that’s what EOS is just something that’s incredibly simple and elegant. So that was one of the things I had challenges with over the years as I tried to operate, tried to integrate operating systems was at a leadership level, we could pull it off, but trying to push it down into the organization. If it’s too complicated, it just gets stuck and it doesn’t move forward. And so that’s, that’s the reason I ended up liking EOS so much started using it my own business and then found that I really enjoyed helping others to implement.
John Corcoran 28:55
And one of the concepts that the book talks about is the idea of the entrepreneur as visionary. That is someone who is good at ideas, good at big picture, stuff like that not so good at the operations of the business. And it provides a solution for that. So can you explain kind of that idea?
Phil Kristianson 29:18
Yeah, and you know, we’re both members. You know, most EO members are visionaries, but they’re the big idea, people. And what, what a US discovered is that if the visionary gets stuck in the operational piece of the business, you get lots of 90 days spikes followed by chaos, because you just can’t maintain that energy moving forward. And so what EOS does it recognize that that that’s an important role. And every great visionary needs an integrator, someone who runs the day to day who can maintain that energy The visionary entrepreneurs don’t like difficult conversations, they don’t like getting down into the weeds. That’s where implementer or integrators really thrive. And so it’s this really amazing relationship where the, the day to day, integrator acts as a bit of a filter for the visionary, so that those 140 ideas that they come to every meeting with 10 of them are brilliant ideas that are really going to help the company, but we want to filter the other ideas from distracting the team. Yeah. And it frees the visionary up to do what they do best.
John Corcoran 30:39
And how does that relationship work? If the visionary is the owner of the business they hire as an employee, the Integrator as their CEO, or president or whatever. So technically, right? It’s your boss. And the integrator has to say to their boss, like, Thanks for your 100 ideas, we can’t focus on any of them, or we can focus on two of them.
Phil Kristianson 31:02
Yeah, great question. So one of the things we, as all owner entrepreneurs have to be clear on is that we wear two hats, right? There’s the owner hat, where we get our return on our investment. But as a visionary, we are an employee of the organization, which we get paid to provide a service. And so making sure that when we’re having a conversation with anyone who works for us, making sure that we’re clear is what hat we’re wearing. As an owner, we don’t want to speak directly to our the people that work for us. We want to make sure that we’re having that conversation with the owners hat with our integrator, and make sure that we’re really clear that that’s the conversation we’re having. When we’re in the visionary role. We’re not an owner, we’re appear to the integrator. And we want to make sure that we’re really clear on what our roles are. And we’re staying in our lanes. And I know some female members that when they need to be the owner, they were literally a different hat, so that everyone knows, you know, who they’re speaking from. And it is tricky. But we we create same page meetings, where we know what our role is in that meeting. And so when the visionary and the operations person, the the integrator are talking, they know exactly what roles they’re in as they’re speaking. And it gets even more complicated when the visionary is also head of sales. And so again, just knowing what what hat you’re talking from, and that tends to reduce the complexity and creates clarity,
John Corcoran 32:44
Right. As we record this, as we’re heading towards late spring of 2023, last year was kind of the coming out of COVID. Phase, I guess you’d call it. The economy this year has been really kind of unpredictable. It’s been very strange and not like anything I can remember in my lifetime. What are you excited about? What are you What is your eye on right now, and in terms of what you’re doing professionally, and, you know, in the business world.
Phil Kristianson 33:19
I’ve been, I’ve been doing this for a long time. And so I just realized that there is constant change, everything goes through a 10 year business cycle. And so, you know, for me, wearing my entrepreneur hat, I’ve got enough in reserve where I know that a change in the marketplace isn’t going to put me out of business. And as long as I have some dry powder, change equals opportunity. And so I’m just sort of paying attention to the big trends. I mean, there’s some really exciting, interesting things going on. AI is one of them. So I’m paying attention to that and what it means. And so I think it’s just important with the visionary hat on is to keep our eyes down the road and keep our finger on the pulse. And that to me, that’s one of the values of CEO is I can tap into this huge network of entrepreneurs and find out what’s bleeding edge, what’s coming, what other people are experiencing, literally around the planet, so that I’m not caught being blindsided by something.
John Corcoran 34:26
Yeah. And you actually during the pandemic exited from your Hawaii business. What was that like for you to come to the end there and sell that business?
Phil Kristianson 34:38
Yeah, I just realized that it was creating too much complexity. And, you know, one of the one of the mantras I think, for every entrepreneur is rooting out complexity, because in an entrepreneurial company, you know, complexity is can become exponential and so I really was that it was a distraction it was and COVID really brought that to a head running something 2500 miles away. Yeah, hard. You physically couldn’t go there if you needed to, just got me really clear that I needed to focus my energies on the stuff that was a bet best fit for me supported, you know, my my life’s journey. And so it was hard getting there to the decision. But you know, often once you reach to reach the decision, then it’s like jumping out of an airplane, once you’re out of the plane, all the anxiety goes away. And I’ve actually experienced that. And so
John Corcoran 35:37
Well, that’s good, because I’ve heard some people say when they exit their business, that that’s the opposite that they suddenly realize, oh, my gosh, I’ve sold my baby.
Phil Kristianson 35:45
Yeah, unfortunately, I’ve always had a few things going on. So other places to put my energy. I think that the the what’s next question can be the most daunting when you exit a business. And so having already thought that through and clarity where I was going to put my energy and what was going to be my need for purpose made that a pretty easy transition.
John Corcoran 36:07
So for those who are listening to this and who are curious about Eos, and the work that you do, what are some resources that they can go to check out? And also where can people go to connect with you, Phil?
Phil Kristianson 36:19
Yeah, so we often read if you know nothing about EOS, you know, starting with the book, Traction, it’s sort of where it all came from. It’s I know, when I read it, it, it took me a while to read it because it related so intensely to my company at the time, I had to put it down and then go fly a kite fly a few things. But yeah, attractions a good start. And then EOS worldwide.com, there’s just a tremendous amount of content there. EOS is designed to be either implemented by someone like myself, or an entrepreneur can sell implement. It’s, it’s really a user friendly system. And then you can always contact me at phil(dot)kristianson with a K @eosworldwide.com. And one of our core values that EOS has helped first. So always happy to share what I know and point people in the right direction. And I find what comes around goes around, the more people you help the more abundance you create for yourself.
John Corcoran 37:23
And it’s a really interesting model to which is worth mentioning that the EOS system is designed to be implemented over a period of time a year or two years, something like that. And then you you your your company knows how to quote unquote, run on it after that. And maybe you hire someone new or maybe you have someone who steps in the integrator role. But that’s kind of the way the model is built.
Phil Kristianson 37:45
Yeah, that’s another thing that really attracted me to it. I’ve been you’ve probably been through this. I’ve hired consultants over the years, and they just tend to burrow themselves into your organization, like a tick. Yeah, with with EOS, I’m trying to work myself out of a job, right. And so over typically about a two year period, we help the organization, first at the leadership team level, and then the leadership team teaches down into the organization. And at some point, and it’s usually plus or you know, a few months plus or minus a couple of years, then they graduate and they’re able to completely do it on their set on their own. And so it’s it’s an empowering model versus an enabling model as as implementers. We’re coaches, teachers and facilitators, you know, we believe the answer is in the room 99% The time and so we’re just trying to allow the organization to fly on their own.
John Corcoran 38:42
Yeah, Phil, I always enjoy talking with you. Thanks so much for your time today.
Phil Kristianson 38:46
You bet John, great to see you.
Outro 38:48
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