Aligning Business and Life with EOS | Renee Russo | Ep 214

Renee Russo  00:00

If you stay hiding out in your difficult circumstances, hiding out behind the label or the logo of your company, it's the ultimate denial of self. You have to honour yourself and take action on behalf of yourself, otherwise you won't get what you want.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:22

Thank you for joining us on the Better Business better life podcast. I'm your host, Debra Chantry Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses. Because my mantra in life is life is too bloody short.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:48

I'm a certified EOS implementer, an FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner myself with several business interests, I work with established business owners and their leadership teams to help them live their ideal life using EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I use this podcast and the guest to share practical tips and tools about how to use EOS in your business and life to get more of what you want. After a few weeks off to work on the business and on myself, I'm really excited to be back in the hot seat and really looking forward to sharing some new podcasts and some new guests with you, but today's guest is actually somebody who's back for a third time on the podcast, always popular with the listeners. Today's guest is a certified exit planner. She's an expert EOS implementer. She's an author, speaker and proud mother, and she's going to share with you today why you matter in your business and how to set yourself up for freedom in your business using EOS and Exit Planning. Rene Russo is the CEO whisperer of Rise Up Business Coaching. Renee, welcome back. It's so great to have you back in the studio again. How have you been?

Renee Russo  01:53

I've been well better now than ever. Yeah, I keep it myself, excellent.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  01:59

Tell me what you've been up to.This has been a while, and I know that since we last spoke, you have launched your book, which is doing amazingly well. I know you're really building your exit planning business, and of course, working with business owners of the EOS. Tell us a little bit about your what's been happening the last couple of years.

Renee Russo  02:12

Yeah, it's been a ride, a lot of self-discovery. And someone asked me what I've been up to recently, and I said, I've been learning how to be myself. And I realised that as a business owner and a mom and just uh, kind of hard working human being, I spent a very long time doing a lot of things that I thought I should do, and living my life the way I thought I should try to fit in and do it like everybody else, and then discovered that that wasn't working for me, and owning that truth and breaking out of my circumstances caused a lot of loss and a lot of trauma and difficult times for me and my family and stepping out into my new reality of being an independent, solo woman, took a lot of getting used to, and so I spent a couple of years kind of bouncing around trying To figure it out and trying a bunch failing, a bunch of times, like a bunch of work things, personal things. And the last year or so, I've been coming into a little bit more of a rhythm of being myself, honouring myself, and doing the things that fuel my soul, so learning how to say no to more things and honour myself and be in the consistent practice of being my true, authentic self has been a journey, and I've made great progress since we spoke last.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  03:53

That's fantastic, and that word should it's awful, isn't it? It's like we have this, these pressures put on us by our society, by our family, by our mum and dad, about what we should do. And I even see it sometimes with other coaches, whether you know, they actually say they use the word should it's like, that's not a, not a word that we should ever use, because it puts.

Renee Russo  04:15

I was saying no shooting on anything. We're not going to shoot on anyone. Love it.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:20

Okay, so tell me a little bit about, yeah, that journey. I mean, I appreciate it's been tough, and I know that there's been, it has been a lot of loss for you, a lot of changes, but it looks like you've found a space where you can truly be who you are, which is what I would wish on for everybody. You wrote the book about that, right? The whole book is around how you actually rediscovered yourself and what you did to do that. So share with me a little bit about that journey and particularly how it might relate to business owners, because I know that sometimes in business, we also have these shoots. You should be working long hours. You should be doing whatever it might be.

Renee Russo  04:52

Yeah, so much there. So with the context of honouring myself and. And learning how to be myself, I realised that I got to a point in business and in life where I felt displaced. I didn't feel I didn't feel connected to my circumstances or connected to myself like it was kind of like stuck in this dichotomy of living the way I thought I ought to or should, and that meant working long hours, that meant putting everything into keeping the business afloat, tackling all the issues that it threw at us, getting my kids through early stages of school and they're learning milestones and having them in sports and keeping up at that time, I was married to an Italian with a big fat Italian family, I call it, and keeping up with all those events and life it seemed like was happening to me and Not for me, and I, at times, just told myself that this is the way it is. You know, what can you expect? Renee, this is just what everybody else does. Like. Why do you want more? Why do you want things different than what they are? And I was pretty hard on myself, and I just told myself that at some point I was going to have to accept that this is the way it was.

Though I was working hard to convince myself that everything would be fine and just keep on going, there was this inner knowing inside of me that on some level I didn't want this, and I believed on some level there was a different way, and I had similar experience when years prior, I had been struggling with our business, and it felt like it was out of control. We were working hard, not getting what we wanted, and we did something about it. So my brother gave me a copy of Traction, in which we discovered EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and I learned in that process, through working on the business and making changes to the way we designed and organised a business, that we could create more flow and better outcomes.

Renee Russo  07:15

And so as I started to recognise that I was out of alignment, displaced and not getting what I wanted for my life, I, instead of defaulting to surrender to a life of infinite This is how it is, I made the decision to do something about it, and what I didn't have at that time was a plan and a process and the right professionals around me. So unfortunately, in those early stages, I went about that burning down of my life in a very messy and destructive way. I wanted one thing, though, and I knew in my heart what I wanted. I wanted freedom. I wanted the freedom to be myself. I wanted the freedom to have a life that I could align with and move out of this emptiness, this void is stuck in between what I who I was, and what I wanted to a place where I could have that level of alignment.

The challenge was I didn't know how to get there, and so I learned the hard way. I fell on my face, crashed very hard, lost everything, and then including to me, I wonder if I could do to myself and for myself what I had done with our business, work on myself from the outside, looking in, with future outcomes in mind, and get back to some basic disciplines and tools that I could then use to create the capacity to move forward with my life in a positive way, to pursue that freedom to be myself and the life that I wanted and could align with. I didn't have the answers though Debra, I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew something had to change, and I knew deeply that that change had to start within me. So I took what I did in business and I did it for myself. The book that I wrote captures my elements, I would say about 15 to 20% of what I actually went through for the psychological well-being of my children, I chose to pull a lot out and just convey enough of my real life experiences to create impact and meaning for the reader. But not you know, bare all, because that would be hard for my kids to read.

Renee Russo  09:46

And in that process of putting the book together, I was really able to start to solidify what I had been through, associate a lot of meaning and capture the insights and the wisdom. Them that I that I needed to really take on board. So the book was a great way for me to reconcile with my mistakes and my lessons, understand where my patterns were coming from, and go through those finer stages of breaking the habit of being my old self so that I could be my true self. So the book really just helped me lock that in and solidify and then bringing that to the outside world has been an enormous gift for me, because I'm now able to have meaningful conversations with other people, particularly business owners, where I can relate to any sense of feeling stuck out of balance, hit a ceiling, not getting what they want, not having the answers, those kind of things that almost every business owner experiences.

It's created an ability for me now to relate to them and through my own journey, have demonstrated the importance of doing the work to become yourself and live your life in alignment, because that would then, if you don't do that, and as a business owner, if you stay hiding out in your difficult circumstances, hiding out behind the label or the logo of your company, it's the ultimate denial of self and the end of life. We want to be able to say that I made it. I became myself. I created impact. I lived in authentic alignment with who I am and why I'm here, because that's the only thing that matters, answering up to yourself, recognising you matter, and that this life was well lived is the ultimate human journey, and so my story now allows business owners to step out and to have a conversation around who I am, what I want, and allow the business then to align with that and work for me, as opposed to what sometimes many business owners feel is that the business is working against them.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  12:01

I think you make a really valid point there. It's like, you know, the book Traction for businesses gives you a framework to actually get more of what you want from the business. But there's still the element of the business owner who may you know that the so the EOS will help the business to run better, but the owner still sometimes gets wrapped so wrapped up in the business that they lose all sense of self, and they actually forget why they were doing it as well. So it's about reconnecting with their own personal why, as well as the business why, to understand, as you said, who they are. And once you have a really good sense of who you are and what you want and what impact you want to make, then you can start to align your personal things with what you want to do. Is that fair?

Renee Russo  12:41

Absolutely, when you go against your grain and your, you put your energy into things that are not in alignment with who you are and your destiny, it creates a lot of friction and things are hard. The business operating the business is difficult. Relationships are challenging. Those challenges, rather than just working harder to fix them or overcome them, are an opportunity to say, stop and say, You know what's really going on. You hear, you know, recognising that I have to own my truth around what I really desire, what I want, what I need, and honour that. Because nobody else can do that for you. You have to honour yourself and take action on behalf of yourself, otherwise you won't get what you want, and it would be such a miss to not have the ability to have a great life and a great business. Have a great life and great relationships with people that you care about and a business that supports your needs, it would just be such a shame.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  13:51

I know. I'm just intrigued, because I know that you do a lot of Exit Planning with businesses, and I wonder if sometimes people feel like they have to stick with the same business forever, because it's, you know, the business that they started. But sometimes you can outgrow a business as well, can't you, and it's time for you to actually move on and do something else. Have you seen that with some of the clients that you work with?

Renee Russo  14:11

Yeah, absolutely. You know, in Exit Planning, we work on the three legs of the stool, the personal financial and business legs, and make sure that the plans for the business owner on a personal level, their financial plans and their business plans all align, and that process is rooted around one key objective, and that's to create value. Because when we create value, we create choices for business owners and when they have that those choices, they then can pursue their freedom, whatever that might be. Now that might be to stay and work in the business. That might mean, it means selling and moving on. That might be staying a business owner and just buying back your time. We create those options for business owners when they have a baseline of alignment between their personal financial and business goals and have built in a tremendous amount of value. Many business owners work hard to produce a business that generates results, and we call that income thinking. And the challenge with that is that they often work so hard building this business up around them, it's like building a house up around them, and they haven't put in a door, and it's very important that that door be built-in from the beginning. I love that analogy, so that they can have the, you know, the reason to stay and the freedom to go.

And why is this important? Like, if we want to stop talking about, you know, business owners and their needs, let's talk about the employees. They need to know that this business is going to outlive its owner, that is going to be standing for generations to come, that they can invest themselves in a career here, and irrespective of who owns this business, they were going to have a fruitful, long, lasting career, and the business is going to be able to fulfil its legacy and create impact for generations.

Renee Russo  16:17

The truth is that business owners are subject to what we call the five DS all the time, disability, death, divorce, disagreement and distress, and we need to be ensuring, as advisors, that we're working with business owners to ensure their business is exitable at any point in time, because any one of those five D’s can come up, and they need to have the freedom and the door built in to pursue their next chapter, whatever that looks like for them, and at all times, ensure that this house stays standing, to continue to employ people and create in economic input for our communities. So Exit Planning is a way for us to ensure and assure that the shorter term viability and while also shoring up the long term sustainability of both the business as well as that business owners need to survive and thrive and create a degeneration.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  17:41

Wow. I think this is particularly valid for a lot of family businesses. I know when I work with family businesses, they often feel like the next generation has to step into the business because they need to have somebody of the family running it. But the reality is, you can create an amazing business that doesn't actually require you to work in it. So as you said, you're building the door. That means you have the freedom to kind of exit if you want to. But that could mean exiting, as in selling, but it could also just mean exiting from the day to day operation of the business, but still being a business owner and the family earning generational wealth from that business, but somebody else actually running the business.

Renee Russo  18:15

Absolutely, you know, all transfer of ownership options must be factored into the exit planning process. We do not want to, you know, sell our business to our children and hand them over a lemon. We don't, we don't want to set them up for failure. We don't want to sell it to management or employees and give them a sinking ship. We don't want to sell it to an external buyer and be tied in to an earn out or terms that collapse after the deal, because you didn't set it up to succeed and stand up on its own. So whatever type of transfer of ownership we're looking at, the objective is the same. We need to build a significant company, one that's attractive, transferable and ready for a transfer at any point in time, and aligns fully with the personal and financial objectives of the business owner. Every business needs to be a significant company for all stakeholders present and future.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  19:25

Okay, so going back to the because you talk about the three legs of the store, the personal financial business, so going back to the personal side, I think this is a really important thing, but obviously you've done a lot of work on and I think a lot of business owners often have it. They've got the financial side potentially, sort of, they've got the business side, sort of, but they haven't really thought about what they want or need, what who they want to be, what the future looks like for them. Where on earth do you start with it?

Renee Russo  19:52

Yeah, you know when we're in the thick of the day to day, in the present moment, and feeling the heat of all the all the burners on the stove? All at the same time, it's very hard to move into a space of awareness around self, because so much of your energy is going into serving your environment. I learned how to approach these conversations through a general coaching technique when I'm working with one of my kids through a challenge, I say, okay, you know, this is, like, really hard right now, and you're going to need to do something, but it's, you know, obviously difficult to figure out what you should do. But why don't we actually just get take ourselves to the end of the school year, and imagine the end of the school year, when you've passed grade 11, and you're feeling good about your year, and you look back on what you did right now, what are you proud of that you did? What is the thing that you could say was the right thing to do right now?

We as human beings have the ability to transport ourselves into the future. It's fascinating that we can do this, transport ourselves into the future in a space where we are wise and we could tap into our inner knowing and then look back on now and identify what we would do or should do now based on the future outcomes or the future state that we're in. So with business owners, I and I've been practising this a lot. Normally, when I'm on an aeroplane, I just keep to myself. I put my sunglasses on my AirPods in because I need to rest and regroup. But when I clue into the fact that I'm sitting on the same row as a business owner. Now I just practice this, and because there's no attachment when we get off the plane, they could give me a fake phone number, and we don't even have to speak again or vice versa that. So I've been practising this a lot, and I've been using with my existing clients and everyone that I'm meeting right now, and it's working, and all I'm simply doing is saying, Stefan, take me five years out, what does life look like? You know, kids, wife, life outside the business, your financial positioning, what does the business look like? And what's your relationship with the business? And they're like, Oh, well, it looks like this. And I'm like, okay, great. So as you look from that place back on your current circumstances, what are the things you think you should be doing now to ensure that you get there, it's taking them into the future where they are free, getting what they want, having it their way because their future is not real, and so they can have their way and they don't have to say, but I can't have it right now. They can say everything can be true in the future, because then what I'm doing is helping them realise that they're in control.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:53

It's a Stephen Covey, 7 Habits, right? Start with the End in Mind, and I know that we did it when I did my Outward Bound course, when we did Outward Bound, and we had to do the solitary confinement solitary confinement, that's prism the solitary days that you do on your own. You had to write a letter to your future self, and you had to describe, you know, what the future going to look like, and then they actually mailed it to you six months later. And it was really interesting, because at the time, I was actually in a fairly abusive relationship, and I knew it wasn't right, but I just didn't know how to get out of it. And so, and I knew that I had the potential to do a huge amount of things, but I just felt really, really stuck. And so I wrote this letter to myself, and I wrote it about the future and what my future looked like. And by the time they actually mailed me the letter, six months later, I was actually on my way out of that relationship and onto the future, because it had given me the focus of that's where I know I need to be, and suddenly you can create what needs to happen. It's also interesting, because you talk about on the plane, I actually now always have a traction book packed in my in my carry on luggage, because the same thing, I sometimes talk to me on the plane, I don't ever, I'm only, you know, I have a chat. It's really about having a conversation, but I always give them a book at the end of it. And it's amazing who you can meet on aeroplanes.

Renee Russo  24:01

Yeah and those conversations around taking them into the future, they work because we have so much wisdom we can't hear when we're in the thick of the day.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  24:09

And it's part of the reason we recommend clarity breaks too for business owners. Doesn't know it says about actually, when you're fighting those fires consistently, it's so hard to have clarity of thought, and it's so hard to think about the future, because you're just there right now and fighting those fires and dealing with the issues.

Renee Russo  24:25

Yeah, I repositioned my exit planning practice to really just start out with giving business owners an exit wise journey, a 90 day journey where I get them exit wise and in that time, I help them identify what's important to them, the outcomes that they require. I help them identify and assess fully the value and value potential of their business. I then do personal visioning. Work with them to help them identify that future state that they want to be in, and then create a prioritised action plan for. Next 12 months and first 90 days to get in there, all in 90 days. But when I was naming that programme, I realised that wisdom was the greatest gift I could give business owners, because they really do already know a lot more than they're aware of. It's just that they have a lot of information. They're often overwhelmed. They're getting a lot of advice from a lot of different places. So to just slow it all down and create that 90 day window for them to get exit wise has been the greatest gift that I can give a business owner. And they may stay on working with me, or they may then go back to their local Advisor Group and start operationalising the plan. But wisdom is so important. You know, we didn't just start running businesses today. You know, businesses have been run for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Businesses have been transacted for hundreds of years, and business owners have created wealth for hundreds of years. So we don't have to pretend like it's all on us. We've got to figure out our own and at the same time, we don't have to have all the answers, but we have to have the wisdom to ask ourselves these questions, and we do have a lot more inner knowing in us that can come out in the process of getting curious around who we are, what we want, where we're going, and then how we're going.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  26:27

And my work brother Adam Harris is a phrase that I love, is clarity creates confidence, and so that giving them the wisdom to ask the right questions and then to come up with the answers gives them that clarity of the future state, which gives them the confidence to actually do something about it. And I think, you know, we see this in business as in the business planning is often it lives in the owner's head, but it doesn't actually get out of their head and shared with everybody. Once that happens, you've got everybody rowing in the same direction on the same bus, whatever terminology you want to use, and the same happens in our personal life too, right? Once we have that clarity around who we want to be, where we want to go, what our legacy is, what impact we want to make, we can then have the confidence to actually move forward and do it.

Renee Russo  27:11

Absolutely. Yeah, and the only person who can advocate for you is yourself. The only person who can get you what you want is yourself. And so the important thing is that business owners have the support of the right professionals, a good process and the safe space to do the work to discover what they really want, speak of it, name it, and so that they can build goals and plans around getting there. The only way they'll get there is if they actually speak of it and operationalise it in a planning process, and really Exit Planning, from my standpoint, is just helping business owners get more of what they want.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  27:53

You did make an interesting point that often business owners are getting advice from all different angles, and that can be very confusing, because often people aren't coaches, which means that rather than asking the questions, they're just telling them what they should do or share advice givers. Yeah, and I remember when I used to work very heavily in the startup space over here in New Zealand, you know, I would be a mentor for a lot of startup businesses, and the mentors that were there, some of them were not particularly good coaches. They were just advice givers, which meant that these poor startups who really had no clue about what to do, were getting lots and lots of advice from lots of different people, and most the time, I would just ask them questions, and that's the key to unlocking because, as you said, they actually have the wisdom. It's not that they don't have it. It's just being able to ask those questions to get there. So what is, I suppose, what is your way of cutting through all that noise and all that stuff that the business owner is getting? How do you bring them back to what's important?

Renee Russo  28:50

Yeah, I will say all the advice is, you know, well intended and with the desire to have a positive impact. I find, however, it's typically out of context and not always coming from the skilled professionals who could speak best to that subject matter. And so creating a more of a structured environment where business owners interact with their advisors is another part of my role as an exit planner. I need to quarterback the advisor bench, the professional advisor bench for that business owner. So bringing together their accounting relationship, their insurance relationship, or financial planner, legal, and getting them to play as a team can create this team-like structure to wrap around the business owner and support their holistic needs. The traditional model is that the business owners here, and they've got all these relationships, and those relationships are not talking to each other, and they're not they're actually often adding more complexity.

For the business owner, because they're pulling the business owner in different directions and trying to get them to prioritise competing initiatives. And so the role of the quarterback brings them all around the business owner, so that they're more cohesive lines, and we're all kind of prioritising the most important things at any point in time. And so it insulates that a business owner from needing to go around and talk to 20 different types of advisors and get different opinions that are not adding up. Another thing that I think is really important is that every business owner find themselves in a peer group. I became a Mackay CEO forum chair, because I wanted to create ecosystems, as CEO business owners, for them to have that safe space to acknowledge I don't have the answers, to get you know, support, experience, sharing guidance and genuine care from a peer group that can help them see themselves from the outside, looking in, tap into you know wisdom, and move through those different stages of trial and error and not having all the answers.

Renee Russo  31:13

So I love that CEO business owner group environment to create that safe space for them to move through the stages of learning and growth and figuring things out, it's important that they have the advisory team and a peer group those places for them to get their needs met, so that when they come back into the business, they're much more composed and focused and clear on what's important. I feel like a lot of business owners that I have interacted with as an EOS implementer have struggled to have their needs met, and so they tended to behave in a bit more of an erratic way in the business, a lot more emotional, changing direction and creating a lot of inertia in the business. And a lot of people would say, Oh, well, they're just a crazy visionary. I don't think that's a fair label. I think that we have a distressed business owner whose needs are not being met.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  32:09

That's a really good point. It's just a symptom, right? The actual cause is something quite different.

Renee Russo  32:15

Symptom of the root issue. Business owners needs are not being met. They don't have the strong advisory team around them. They're not in a peer group, and they don't have a process like we do in Exit Planning that aligns their personal, financial and business goals. Everything is going in different directions. And if that was happening to me, I felt alone, unsupported, and I didn't have a plan and a process to get me where I want to go, I'd be behaving like that too. Yeah, fair point. I was in that those shoes when I did my double exit from my marriage and my business with my ex husband, I didn't have a plan, I didn't understand the process, and I didn't have the right professionals, and I caused a lot of harm and a lot of inertia, and I was distressed on a lot of levels, and had I had that team and that process and that place to figure things out, I would have likely been a lot more methodical and strategic in decoupling from my ex-husband and how I then navigated the relationships with my children, but I didn't have any of that in place, And so now I know that that's very important any major transition, whether you're selling part or whole of your business, whether you are doing an intergenerational transfer, whatever it's a major life transition that you're navigating, you deserve the best team, the right support and a really strong process.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  33:39

100% agree. And yeah, it's, it's interesting, because I know that the teams that I work with, I recommend things like entrepreneurs, organisation, Family Business Association, as you said, those CEO groups, that peer thing is something that is often missing. So, you know, it's great to have an operating system in the business. It's great to have your coach or your advisory mentor, but then having that peer group, is it? They, they really about you? I was member of EO for three and a half years, and my forum, we really went deep. You know, it wasn't surface level stuff, it was the 5% you'd never talk about with anybody else, because they actually got it, because they were there going through it as well. And what you often found was when you shared something like, I'm really not sleeping while I keep waking up at two or 3am in the morning with all these sort of negative thoughts, and around the room, there's seven other people would go, Yeah, me too. And then they'd share how they'd actually help to overcome it, or some of some have got through it, and share how they got through it and what they do with it. I think that is such an important part of it.

Renee Russo  34:35

Yeah, totally. And you know that saying how you do one thing is how you do everything. So it's important that we recognise that, you know, the challenges we're experiencing in business are likely also being mirrored in other areas of our life, and so we can in the peer group, address more of the broad issues that we're experiencing as business owners and CEOs in that safe space.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  34:59

So I'm just, One last quick question for you, in terms of just some of the stuff that we've talked about is, I know that you also use EOS with your clients, as well as the exit planning stuff. How do the two dovetail together? What's the importance of EOS in the business? What's the important and how does it dovetail into Exit Planning?

Renee Russo  35:15

Yeah, so I, I had a conversation recently with somebody I didn't leave my EOS profession. I just stepped up to that, that next level, because I recognised that the challenges we were experiencing the operating entity were cascading down from other issues that are up in the owner's box. And so the work as an Exit Planning. Exit planner has been a 2.0 so going from working in the business, I now step up into the owners box and run a parallel engagement that mirrors the 90 day cycle. It's holistically addressing the personal goals, the financial objectives and the business goals in a 90-day world, they're bringing the advisors around the business owner and taking them through 90 day world of take working on rocks to improve their circumstances, drive change, create value. And that is alongside the EOS implementation. It's very important that the business owners objectives align with the operating plans and on the V/TO on the EOS journey. Otherwise we create that disconnect, misalignment, and often inertia of the business owner. So I work on two levels. Sometimes I'll start with the owner's box journey, get them activated and realise that they need EOS to get what they want from the business. So then we'll commence an EOS implementation. Sometimes they'll just come to me wanting EOS, and I'll let them know the broader scope of work that I do, and we just start with the EOS implementation and then eventually step up to the owner's box.

Sometimes they need to do that first, because they don't have the capacity, headspace and heart space to have a conversation about their owner's journey, understanding the value of the business and so forth, when they're so locked into the day to day. But their parallel engagements, the team that they're working with on the EOS journey, is the operating team, the team that they're working with on the owner's journey, is that professional services team that wraps around them. My role here is to quarterback for the business owner, educate, inform, guide and quarterback, and my role as an EOS implementer is to ensure that this framework is adopted as a as a core foundation of disciplined execution in the business, so that the intangible value that's locked up in the business can be extracted and ensure that the business is significant, transferable and standing up there for many decades to come. So they are beautifully aligned. In fact, I say to exit planners, you will never be able to create the level of value you want with a business owner unless you are addressing that business leg at the store with an operating system. And I can, hands down, say that EOS is the cleanest, most targeted and proficient way to extract all the intangible value in the business, which is up to where up to 80% of the business value lives in intangibles.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  38:24

That's interesting. Why do you say it's the cleanest I'm just interested in that to comment.

Renee Russo  38:29

Yeah, it's it overlays. We talk about four intangible capitals that are locked up in the business, structural, human customer and social capital. And so when you break down, we can talk about that on another podcast. But when you break down, what those are, the six components beautifully overlay those four intangible capitals, like vision, people, data, process, meetings like it's a perfect alignment. It cuts through all the crap, and it just gets to the core, it also then cascades, EOS then cascades down into the business very nicely, so we can really get our hands around the full value potential of the business. Some other systems are good, but they're often more complex and they struggle to go in. And a lot of the systems give the consultant or the guide a lot of freedom of discretion, and so everybody's running whatever that operating system in a unique way. And the challenge with that is that then the success of that operating system in the business is dependent on that consultant. And so there's a dependency relationship EOS creates that independent operating system and sustainability of it. So it's the one I choose. It's the one I recommend. And as an exit planner, when I'm working with a client that is running EOS and they're running it with another implementer, I know. The consistency of the product and the how it's working in the business, because we all run it exactly the same way.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  40:06

I just wrote a blog about this in terms of, you know, why use an accredited EOS implement and it's because we do. We follow the pure EOS process and that that delivers benefits. Okay, I'm going to get you back on another show later on to talk about the four pillars. But um, in the meantime, I think what I'm getting from the talk today is that, you know, the Exit Planning is all about those three things, the personal, the financial and the business. The business is around your operating system. How you do that? The financial, you can go into more detail, but the personal thing is around. They matter, right? It's important that they think about what, what they want, and how they are in alignment. And this is really what your book Ready to Rise is, is starting to challenges, net sort of tea. How much do you matter? And how do you ensure that you're actually in alignment with what's important for you?

Renee Russo  40:50

Absolutely, yeah. And the denial of that is going to short change the business owner, their family and also the company, because if they don't have the ability to stand out on their own two feet and set that business up for success to run without them, they're also going to short change the business operating team. So it's in everybody's best interest that the owner stand out into the light, recognise that they matter, advocate for their needs and set their business up for success to operate independently of them, so that the both the business can thrive and the business owner can get what they want in business and life.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  41:33

Love it. Hey, we're going to have to wrap it up. Unfortunately. Renee, we could always talk forever, but I'm definitely going to get back on again. So about the other things? Just three quick tips for the readers. And I would hope one of those is gonna be about your book and where they can find it. But three top tips, they can take away some action points they can actually do from what we've talked about today.

Renee Russo  41:49

Yeah, I would definitely recommend, obviously, doing an EOS implementation. It's a 1.0 if you're not running an operating system, your business is running you. So that's my guidance there. In terms of a manual for every business owner, there's a book called walking to destiny that captures the entire framework I use as an Exit Planning advisor, walking to destiny by Christopher Snyder. It's very practical and actionable, just like traction, and you can start to get more value from your advisors when you're using that as a baseline. And then if you're at a point where you're ready to identify who you are, what you want, and start to get clear about what you want in life, ready to rise. My book is a really great way to use some practical tools, rules and habits. I call the 555 Playbook to go image. It's the 1.0 of energy management, the 1.0 of manifestation. Change starts with you. If you want to change your outcomes, you need to change yourself.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  42:55

Yeah. And I can really, I can reiterate that. I mean, I've read the book and I've actually done the exercises. They are really practical exercises. They really get you thinking, which is important and so, yeah, definitely, it's not a it's not a book that is just about your journey, but it's actually sharing those tips and those tools with real, practical insights that they can apply straight away.

Renee Russo  43:14

Absolutely, thank you for having me here today. This has been fun.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  43:17

Hey, it's been it's been amazing as always. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you again soon. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your week.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  43:24

Thank you.