From Loss to Legacy with EOS | Debra Chantry-Taylor | Ep 196

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:07 

Welcome to another episode of Better Business Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry -Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:00

Life is too bloody short. You just never know when your time is going to be up, when your family's time is going to be up, that you can't control much in life. To be honest, having the people around you supporting you with that laser sharp focus means you can actually be freed up to make sure that you're actually taking time off, to make sure that you are doing the things that that feed your soul.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:29

Good morning and welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating to businesses.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:47

Hello, I'm a certified EOS Implementer, an FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner myself with several business interests, I spend all of my time working with business owners and their leadership teams to really help them create that better business. So taking a good business to a great business to ensure that they can then create a better life, I wanted to share a little bit of my reasoning for doing that today. So today is quite a special day, as this podcast gets released. Tomorrow would have been my mum's birthday. Sadly, my mum passed away several years ago, and in fact, for those of you who don't know, I lost all of my family in a very short space of five years. So first my brother passed away, then my mum, then my dad and I wanted to just honour all of my family today and just share a little bit of why. Whilst that happening has been really challenging and really difficult for me, it's also been able to give me a completely different perspective about life. So I want to share a little bit of that, and without going into huge amounts of detail, I guess I wanted to share my story as an entrepreneur.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  01:50

I have been running businesses since I was 13 years old, but really being paid for it since I was about 23 years old, and I've always had a passion for making sure that businesses run really well, that the teams in the business are on the same page. I just, I don't know there's something in my blood about running businesses, but there was a point in my life where, literally, business was everything. Now, don't get me wrong, I love business, and so there, you know, therefore I don't have a nine to five mentality. I don't ever switch off. I'm always thinking about the various businesses that I run, the business I work with. So I'm not pretending to be somebody who has got it all sorted out and who has a beautiful life where they're doing nothing. I don't know that would be a beautiful life for me. I enjoy business so much. It becomes everything that I do. But what I did want to share was that there was a time when it was all consuming, where I would be awake and at two or three in the morning, worrying about the things, some things I couldn't control, some things I could have done better. I would worry about I was going to pay the bills, how I would take the next step, where the business was headed. And it became more consuming. And in that time, I was not sleeping well. I was definitely working ridiculously long hours, I wasn't really building a team around me that could, I could enable myself to let go, and it was really the death of my brother that kind of changed things dramatically for me.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  03:14

So my brother was younger than me when he passed away, he was only 43-44 years old, and he was two and a half years my junior, so it was a bit of a shock. It was certainly something we hadn't expected. It was all very quick, very unexpected, very tragic. I'll never forget the call from my parents on that day when he passed away, sort of one of those haunting calls that I think will stay with me forever. But anyway, it was, it is what it is. We can't we obviously can't change the past. But it really gave me a wake up call, because what I realized at that time was that everything I was doing was about the business. I didn't really have time for other things. I certainly hadn't spent the amount of time I would have liked to have done with my family. And you know, we go into business thinking that business will give us the freedom, the opportunity to actually spend more time doing the things we love, spend more time with our family, but often what we find is we get into this vortex of business. And I don't know about you, but I feel like I just couldn't escape that, and everything was all consuming. It was overwhelming. I felt like I had no control. I felt like everything was just challenging. Everything was always challenging.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:22

And so when Marcus passed away, it was a bit of a wakeup call. I don't suppose I necessarily wanted to, but I obviously chose to leave the business and go back to Australia and spend time with my family, with my beautiful niece and my beautiful sister-in-law, and my mum and my dad and we all kind of helped each other through that difficult time. And, you know, I came back to the business with a slightly different perspective on life, realizing that life was pretty short, and you couldn't be doing things that, you know, what you didn't enjoy, that you couldn't be building a business that kept you so enslaved, so handcuffed to the business 24/7 and I started changing some of the ways that I did things. But it wasn't long after. After that, my brother passed away, that I got the news that my mother had terminal cancer, and mum had already had cancer before. She had breast cancer, she went through treatment, she got over that she'd had adrenal cancer. She'd got over that she was on dialysis because she'd lost one of her kidneys and one that wasn't working particularly well. And so was doing dialysis three times a week, and life was pretty tough for her. And so I remember getting a call from her and my dad, and they said, Look, mom's been diagnosed with terminal cancer. At this point, we think she's going to go ahead and have chemotherapy and radiotherapy and see what she can do. And it's okay. That's not ideal, but she's been through it before. I thought she'd get through it again. And then I got another phone call where mum and dad sort of said, hey, look, we've talked about it.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  05:47

And mom doesn't think she can actually go ahead with this. Doesn't want to go through all that stuff again. Don't think she can cope with it. I think the death of my brother really, really affected her. He was, he was definitely her favourite. We were very, very close friends, mum and I. So, there was definitely, there was no, there's no Anna. No there's no animosity there at all. But he was there. He was living in Australia with them. He would visit them. He was a stay-at-home dad. He had time to visit them, and he genuinely, I loved them with his entire heart and did everything for them. So, I understood that losing him was pretty major for my mum. So we had the conversation, and we talked about what she could do, and because she was on dialysis, it meant that she could actually come off dialysis, and her body would just really shut down over a period of time, and she would pass away. And we had that conversation. We agreed that was she wanted to do. We supported her in what she wanted to do. I don't think it was an easy decision for my mum or and certainly not for my dad and I, who did not want Mum to leave. Selfishly, I wanted my mum here for as long as I could have her, but I understood that actually.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  06:52

It was the best thing for her to do. She could, she couldn't, she couldn't continue on, and I completely got that. So fortunately, I was able to leave the business again. By this point, I had people in place who were running the business really well, and I could actually leave it, leave it with them to run. So I went home, and I spent time with my family and with my mum and my dad. That was awesome. Left now, and we spent time just reminiscing about, you know, the stuff that we had done throughout our lives. Mum and I used to do a lot of things together. We went back, back around Australia together. We had done a whole, a whole series of things that I feel very grateful, very fortunate to have done. We had not in our earlier part of our life. I would say that we weren't particularly good friends. We clashed a lot. I think we were very similar, and so I think was a lot of clashing, and then in my very early stages, but as I got older, I appreciated mum for who she really was, and we just had an amazing relationship. So I got to go home spend some time with them, before mum went into hospital. And then we went into hospital with her. And as she came with the dialysis, we spent time with her. In the beginning, she was still mentally there, but it was the body was shutting down physically. And then over time, she just got worse and worse, and eventually she was not really there mentally. I don't think maybe her body was still going, but certainly she couldn't talk anymore. And then I was with her in the room when she actually passed away, and that was really tough, because that was my mum, and I love my mum dearly, just as I love my brother dearly and much as I love my dad, we didn't have quite the same relationship. It was a bit more tumultuous, a bit more disagreement in terms of the way that we viewed life and things.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  08:29

But nevertheless, it was good that I got to spend time with her. It was heartbreaking. I went back into the business. I made it really clear, a really clear priority, that I was not ever going to let the business take me away from time that I should be spending with my family, with my friends. And it was at about that time that actually running the Event Centre in Auckland EOS came into my life, and so EOS actually used our event centre to launch into New Zealand. They booked the space, and I remember seeing their name and thinking I was part of the entrepreneur’s organisation at the time, and our business was called the common the entrepreneurs playground. So all these things entrepreneurial were kind of coming out. EOS was the Entrepreneurial Operating System. So of course, it piqued my interest, and I had a look at what they were doing. I read a couple of the books, and I realised that the stuff that they were doing was just so great in terms of helping entrepreneurs, not only create a better business, actually lead a better life. And whilst a lot of the tools that they used in EOS were not rocket science, there were nothing new.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  09:35

There were things I'd been doing almost naturally for many, many years in my business, it gave a framework, and more importantly, it gave a pathway for how you could build a business that would actually allow you to free yourself up. And so when they talked about the EOS life, they talked about the fact that you should be doing what you love with people you love, making a huge difference in the world, being compensated appropriately for what. You do whilst having time to pursue other passions. And I suppose at that point in my life, with mum, just having passed away, my brother, having passed away beforehand, I realised how important that actually was for me. I mean, I wanted to I love business. I'm never going to not love business. I'm always going to be somebody who doesn't stop thinking about it. But I wanted to make sure that I was only working with people I love, doing the stuff that I love, and that I did have that time to pursue the passions.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  10:27

So I jumped on board. I jumped into the EOS training that was five years ago, in December. It's so hard to believe that that time has passed so quickly, and I started doing EOS. I still continue to run business and still continue to do other things, but the OS became part of the cornerstone of the stuff that I was doing. It helped me. I'd always been involved with helping other businesses. So when I was working at the Ice House, I would support businesses there, in the startup space and the established space, in the market validation space, I did a lot of work business mentors. So no matter what I was doing, I was still always helping other businesses. And I guess EOS just gave me that framework to actually do that. It's a really simple, pragmatic set of tools that can create a better business, that you can have that better life, to do the things that you really love. So I suppose I feel like I'm rambling a wee bit here, but I wanted to share a little bit of what I what I do and why I do it.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  11:23

So what I do is I just help businesses to create better business, taking a business from good so you may have a good business that you feel is, you know, it's certainly, there's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't feel like it's giving you everything you want to need. It might not be giving you enough profit. You may not feel like you have to control. You may feel like you got lots of people issues going on, so we put in place a people management system, a people energy system that actually enables you to bring everybody on that journey with you, get them on the same page, know how they contribute to the success of the business, and having a plan in place, they can actually execute on as well as really all fighting together for the greater good of that business. And with that framework, what that does is it frees you up as the business owner, as the business leaders, to get back to doing what you really love in the business. You know, I'm really proud to say that the work that I do now in Eos, but also in other businesses, is work that I genuinely love, that I'm great at that I really want to do. I get to choose who I work with, you know, from a staffing point of view, from a team point of view, from a client point of view, and that is all really about, you know, doing what you love with people you love, and having the framework just means that you are always really laser sharp, clear on what you should be doing, really to focus your energy and that, and having the people around you supporting you with that laser sharp focus, means you can actually be freed up to make sure that you're actually taking time off, to make sure that you are doing the things that that feed your soul. And so, you know, it's it comes that my why, why that's what I do.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  12:58

But why do I do it? I do it because I I can't turn back the clock. I can't, I can't make my brother come back. I can't remember come back that that's, that's just part of what happens in life. And of course, dad passed away just recently as well, a couple of years ago now, but you know, not long after they passed away, you can't turn back the clock. You can't change what has happened. But it does mean that for me, that was the catalyst to go. Is this the thing life am I doing? The right thing should is the more I could be doing. How do I make more time? Life is too short. You'll hear me say that a lot. Yeah, honestly, life is too bloody short. You just never know when your time is going to be up, when your family's time is going to be up. You know, you just, you can't control much in life, to be honest, but at least with EOS, I can help people to have more control in their business, which means they then have the freedom to do more the things that they love. So this is just a real, very short episode. Attribute to my mum, to my brother, to my dad, all who played a really important part in my life, all of whom I miss desperately. But you know, despite what happened, they have been able to be a catalyst for me to think.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  14:11

About what is important and think about what we do need to do, and how we can still make a huge difference in the world, but still have time to actually spend time with our family. I'm very grateful that, you know, these days I've got Steve, I've got our fur babies, we have a pretty special life where I still, you know, do a lot of business. I'm still here on the weekend, recording a podcast, so that doesn't change, but I still make sure that we have time for other things. And that means that when I do travel with work, I often ask Steve to come with me when I do when we go away, we make sure that we well the whole year gets planned out. We make sure we've got at least five weekends long weekends every year where we're going away and spending time together this weekend, on the long weekend, the weekend just gone. We sat down and we planned out our holidays for the year and what we're going to be doing.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  15:00

Planned out our next year so we know exactly what next year looks like. And I'm really happy to say that, you know, this year, I am taking three and a half weeks off at Christmas. We are taking three and a half weeks off at Christmas. We are going to Europe, where we're going to catch up with my uncle and auntie and my cousins. In Germany, I'm going to catch up with my pen friends that I have had since I was 11 or 12 years old. So I've got a pen friend in France, I've got a pen friend in Denmark. I've got a pen friend in Germany and a pen friend in East Germany. And we're actually going to go around and visit all of those, those pen friends while we're over in Europe, and spend some time, albeit short periods of time, but time actually catching up with them, catching up with their families, really spending some quality time doing what we love, which is we love our family, our friends, we love traveling, we love food, we love wine, we love photography. Going to be an amazing time of year, because obviously Christmas is you've got the Christmas markets in Germany, which where would be for Christmas. We're going to have, hopefully snow in places like Denmark. And even the scenery in Europe is just beautiful any time of year, but I think in Christmas and wintertime, it's particularly special. So very much looking forward to that that will be three weeks on the ground, three and a half weeks total in travel. And it's something that we've been meaning to do for a while. So it's good that we've actually finally planned that out.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  16:18

Thinking of next year, we've been talking about going to South Africa next year. So some of my family are still in South Africa. That's my father's brother, his wife, and so we're looking at going over there again. It's been on our bucket list for some time in terms of being able to do a, what do you call those, the game Park Reserve type things, and just seeing South Africa. I mean, I've got a an assistant dash who's over in South Africa. I've got friends over from South Africa. We've never actually been actually been there, so that is on the plan for next year. And of course, just in terms of business side of things, you know, the EOS practice has been almost five years.

So five years, in December, I'll receive my plaque to say that I've been an EOS symptom over five years. We are now helping several 100 people every year with EOS, which is part of my goals. I want to get to 1000 but a couple of 100 will do to start off with. We're slowly getting there. We have got the two new businesses that are underway. So we have integrated executives, which is very much about providing fractional executives for business owners, whether that be a fractional integrator, a fractional CMO, a fractional CFO, whatever the business actually needs. So being able to help people with having those fractional, high level executives that you need in the business, where you may not need them full time, and then the ultimate goal for that business is to become a venture capitalist firm where we can actually invest in businesses that need help, who are running on EOS, so that we can actually help to grow those businesses.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  17:43

So we're actually impacting more than just the stuff that we do with EOS, but a greater impact on those businesses. And then there's a little AI tech business I have a small shareholding in, which is really about, you know, how do we use AI to improve people's lives, improve security, and just generally, make the world a better place so exciting times, unfortunately, comes from a lot of adversity and a lot of pain in previous years. But I, as I said, I'm grateful to my mum, to my brother, to my father, to my family for being there for me when they were here, for what they did for me in terms of helping me get to where I am. And you know, I didn't want to go, I didn't want this day, my birthday, to go unrecognised.

So I thought I'd just share that with you. If you think I can help you in any way, that is what I always say. I'm here to help. I truly mean it. If you think I can help in any way, drop me an email, debra@businessaction.co.nz, or even send me a text messag, 021332007 or in Australia, 0420855405, I'm really happy to help in any way that I can.

I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to do that. So please, if I can help in any way, to help you create a better business which helps you have a better life. I would love to do that.

Happy Birthday mum for tomorrow, and I look forward to speaking with you all again next week.

Thank you.