From Scientist to Visionary & All Things EOS | Mark O'Donnell - EOS Visionary & Debra C-T | Ep 204

Mark O'Donnell  00:09

Hey, there everyone. This is Mark O'Donnell, and I am here today with Debra, our EOS implementer from New Zealand. Welcome to our little podcast.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:22

Oh thank you very much for having me. Very much looking forward to it.

Mark O'Donnell  00:27

Yeah, so, Debra, you are in New Zealand, and now what's the population of New Zealand? It like, you know, it's hard for people in the United States to really get a good view of what your life is like in New Zealand.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:43

So, I think if you probably take the smallest state in the US, that's probably the entire population of New Zealand, we've got 5.2 million people.

Mark O'Donnell  00:50

Oh, all right. Well, that's not too bad. That's not too bad. So I live in..

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:54

That spread out over a huge geographic area, so it's very the cities are quite dense, but the rest of it's pretty rural.

Mark O'Donnell  01:00

Yeah. Yeah, awesome. So tell us your entrepreneurial journey. How did you get here? What led you to EOS and becoming an implementer and helping other entrepreneurs?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  01:13           

Sure, I’ll go right the way back to the beginning. I actually had my first business when I was at school, about 13 years old. I was working a couple of jobs, going to school and also producing little, little mini notepads and envelopes that I would sell to my fellow colleagues at school, my friends at school, didn't make lots of money from it, but really got the bug for kind of running a business. But my parents wanted a much more traditional journey for me, so they suggested I should go and do science and get my science degree, and that would help me find a good husband, and I can get married, settle down, and that would be the end of my life.

But it pretty much turns out that wasn't quite for me. So I tried that. I suck at it for a while, and I worked my way up through lots of different businesses. I was in the modern national pharmaceutical industry. I started in sales, moved through into marketing, finally got to a GM role, then went out and started working for private businesses, as I suppose we probably call an integrator these days, but general manager, managing 220 staff, trying to hold everything together, trying to keep the team motivated, inspired and doing what we did. And then, after doing that for several years, I decided I did want to go on my own and actually run my own business. And I had a real passion for marketing and for educating.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:22

And so I started a marketing agency in the text, kind of marketing field. Had a couple of really fantastic years, made money, had all the toys, the cars, you name it, and then basically had a massive train crash, lost it all, didn't keep the eye on the ball. And so went from being a really great organisation, making lots of money to not having an organisation anymore. And so I actually had had to go back into corporate world for a few years to rebuild. And did three and a half years back in corporate world, and kind of went, you know what? It's great having a regular income, but I don't get to do the things I really want to do. I hate all the red tape. I hate all the hierarchy. And so I left again, went back out again on my own, and that was probably 20 years ago now, and haven't looked back since. So that's my original kind of journey. I've had many different businesses. I've had a tech business, I've had a marketing agency business, and I actually had an event centre.

And I had an event centre in Auckland, which is actually how I came across EOS. So they launched into New Zealand using that event centre, and at the time I was a member of the Entrepreneurs Organisation, I kind of went, EOS. There must be some linkage here. We knew nothing. We knew nothing about it in New Zealand. I mean, I know in the EOS, it's a very, very, you know, popular acronym. People know what it stands for. They know about the traction book in New Zealand. Nobody had any of that knowledge. So I just sort of saw EOS and went, I must find out more. And that was the beginning of my EOS journey.

Mark O'Donnell  03:46

Yeah, that so I've got lots of questions. No, all. Totally good, totally good. You know, thinking about that, that first business. So for my actual question that I have for you first is, did you get a science degree and in what, like, what type of science?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:06

So I'm actually a qualified food technologist as well as a biochemist. Yes, I got my degree. Yes, I actually did get the husband, but sadly, that was after 14 years that it wasn't meant to be so, but, and so, yes, I'm a scientist, but I realised that it just wasn't my passion. I mean, I love people, I love languages, I love travel. Being a scientist in a laboratory, looking at little bugs on a plate, wasn't going to do it for me.

Mark O'Donnell  04:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, the reason I ask is, my background is in pharmaceutical and biotechnology, and I owned, I owned a lab, a microbiology lab, the chemical doing Chem analysis, and all kinds of different things. Two different types of labs, of course. But so that's my background too. So that's why I was curious.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:54

But that's fascinating, because, yeah, because food technologies, microbiology was one of my kind of majors. And so, yeah. I wasn't that. I didn't, I can't say I didn't enjoy it, but I just got much more pleasure out of actually motivating, leading and inspiring people. And so I actually rose up through management quite quickly, because I just love that people element of it. But I could never have been stuck in a laboratory, day in, day out.

Mark O'Donnell  05:13

Right, wearing a lab coat and a hair net and, you know, filling out paperwork.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  05:18

Exactly, exactly.

Mark O'Donnell  05:22

I mean, if you like being by yourself, it's probably a good spot to be so you make this transition from a scientist to running a marketing company. I mean, to me, that could not be too. I mean, they're just completely opposite of one another. How did you make the transition from scientist to marketer?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  05:48

Okay, so we go a bit more slowly. So as a scientist, I did work in laboratory. I actually worked first of all as a laboratory technician, and then kind of rose up to being the team leader, and I found out I had a really, a really amazing ability to actually get people motivated. So we were making a lot of errors in the laboratory, and I started putting in systems and things in place to actually stop those errors happening, and by rewarding the staff and not making errors. So we're based in Australia, it was always hot over there, and so I would have a little thing for the staff, if they didn't make any errors in the day, I'd buy them all a paddle pop, and that's like an ice cube kind of thing, ice lolly, I suppose you'd call it. And so we stopped, we stopped making errors.

We started turning things around. And I realised that's the part that I really enjoyed. So I actually got offered a job by the opposition laboratory, who wanted me to go and manage their laboratory for them. I remember going to my boss at the time, and I said to Jeff, look, Jeff had been offered another job. It's managing a laboratory for a competitor, and he was pivotal in my life. He said, Debra, do you enjoy working in a laboratory? And I went, No, I don't. He said, so why are you going to go and work for somebody else doing the same thing? I said, because they're paying more money. And he's like, Yeah. He said, But you know, do you really enjoy it? I said, No, I've just told you that. He said, Well, why are you doing it? I said, because they're paying more money. So Debra, there's more to life than money.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:06

And so from that conversation, look, I think you really enjoy people. I think that you've got a massive career ahead of you. I don't think it's a laboratory. We've actually got a role for what we call a liaison officer, which is kind of a sales person who goes out and actually meets with the doctors, solves their problems, talks about our services. And I went, Okay, that sounds really interesting, but you're, you're way too young. We usually hire women in their mid 50s who are sort of, you know, much more mature. It's going to be a real challenge for me to actually get you through, but I'm happy to go to the board and ask for that, if you would like to do it. And I went, sounds brilliant. So next thing you know, he fought for the board. I decided to give it a go, and that's how I got into sales. So that was my first role in sales liaison.

And then I got poached by, I think it was originally GlaxoSmithKline, and so went to GlaxoSmithKline as a medical rep, again, rose up through the ranks. Really enjoyed that. Got poached by Roche pharmaceuticals, went and worked for them. And after seven years of doing kind of sales, what I realised was that I got tired of sitting in doctors waiting rooms, waiting for that five minutes with a doctor to have a conversation. So I started developing all these little, little toys and things I could take in to have a really interesting conversation for doctors. So I'd take in a basket full of goodies. I'd say, pick one of the toys, and we'll talk about what that toy means. So they pick a car. We talk about, you know what? What effect the drug had on your motor, neuro function? And we had, we'd pick a I was like a toothbrush, and we'd talk about the effect on sleep, and I just had all these different things that I would actually have these conversations with.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  08:32

And so I realised that I just wasn't enjoying sales so much. I was really enjoying just more the engagement, the interaction. And so after seven years of doing this, I started to do more of the marketing side of things, and then I actually got sacked. One of the biggest things in my career, again, I actually got sacked for not going out and seeing enough doctors. I was still the top performing rep, but I wasn't doing it by going and knocking on doors like they expected you to. And so I had to go home to my husband at the time and say, hey, look, I've just lost my job, you know, the job that pays us lots of money, and I've got the beautiful car, it's all gone. Um, haven't got a job anymore. And I decided to go back to school, and I started studying marketing, because I realised what I was doing was actually marketing. And so while I was studying typical person who can't sit still, I got myself a job as a sales and marketing coordinator, and went to university in the evenings, I do marketing.

And I think I was four weeks into my sales and marketing assistant role, and the sales and marketing manager actually quit. And I said to my boss, I think I can do this job. He said, What makes you think you can? I said, I just think that I know I think I can actually add some value. And he wrote him a business plan on what how I thought I could add value to the business. Next thing you know, sales and marketing, manager of a full wheel driving company, and then I just kept going on. And from sales and marketing, I went to general management, went to CEO roles, just kept sort of getting further and further up the chain, managing more and more people, doing more the work that I loved. But I always had this thing about people, and I suppose that's my thing is I love people. I love health. People and marketing was really about, how do we solve people's problems? How do we help people connect with other people in the organisation? So got into the sales and marketing field, got into the tech spaces. I loved my technology, and just saw a real need for developing marketing solutions in technology.

Mark O'Donnell  10:19

That's great. And so you start your own marketing firm. What happened that it failed? Why did it stop growing and going?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  10:30

So, I think we're probably a little bit early with our technology, and so I recognise this quite early on, that we were kind of pushing stuff up here, trying to get things done. And so we started working with another team, and we realised we had some synergies, and we decided we'd actually merge the two teams together. So I actually bought into another company. We started doing them kind of a it wasn't a true buyout, it was merger and acquisition like we actually merged together, sure. And this was a great business that was doing work over in the US. Our main client was over in the US. We were building content management systems way before there was WordPress or any of those things out there, doing some really great work for a big luxury travel firm.

And it became very clear very early on that we had one major client where so all our eggs were in one basket, excuse me. And you know, we knew that, and so we were working on trying to remove that, and trying to build up another revenue stream and another bunch of customers that would actually take away that risk. But in that time frame, the major client actually called us and said, We're not going to be working with you any longer, bringing it all back in house. So I remember, I remember jumping on a plane my first time to the US, and going over there and talking to the leaders there and trying to convince them that they should not do that and how they should work together, and they gave us a reprieve for a short period of time, but it just wasn't long enough for us to get ourselves back on our feet with the other plans.

Mark O'Donnell  11:52

Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure as you're working with your clients now, I'm just wondering how often that trauma comes forward to you as you're working with your clients today.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  12:05

I don't know that the trauma, I think the wound is healed. Well and truly healed it, and I can talk about it and laugh about it now, and it was not a laughable time at that time, but, but there's lots of lessons to be learned from that, and I suppose so we chose to put the company into receivership. It's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy, let alone anybody that I liked. So I guess I learned a lot of lessons. First things were, you know, don't put eggs in one basket. Do your due diligence before you actually merge and acquire a different company. All kinds of stuff came out of it. And so I think what it gives me is the experience to sometimes ask the right questions. You know, we're not consultants. We don't tell me what to do, but at least I have been on both sides, and know what both sides look like, so I can ask, hopefully, some of the intelligent questions.

Mark O'Donnell  12:49

Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems like I always say that there's no learning outside of failure, and because when you're winning all the time, you're just doing your thing, and you don't really learn very much. But then when something doesn't meet expectations, I think that's where really most of the learning comes from. And depending on how fast you're in motion, learning and growing and going, that's really where all the things that we can transfer to other people so they can maybe avoid some of the same mistakes and pains and struggles that we have.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  13:28

Yeah, and that was kind of my motivation, was I didn't want anybody else to have to go through what I had gone through. And like I said, I'm very fortunate. I've had other businesses since then, and that we've had other successes and one more great big failure as well. So, you know, there's been, it's just, but that's the learnings. And I think, I think I'm very tenacious and very resilient, but only because of those failures. It's like, I call that my second MBA. I've got a formal MBA. That was my second MBA, probably far more powerful than the actual formal one, to be fair,

Mark O'Donnell  13:57

I’m probably sure, yes, yeah. Yeah. So you start a couple other businesses. You go and you have an event space. And events business, is that right? And that, that is where you discover EOS. So what about Eos, the book Traction, what made it attractive to you? And did you start to self-implement your own company? How'd that? How'd that go?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  14:26

Yeah, so just before we open up the event space. So what happened was I actually was working with the Ice House, which is one of the top 10 incubators in the world, over here, and I was doing a lot of work with them around startup businesses, established business market validation, and I've been doing that for again, seven years, since we were magic number. And while I was doing that, I saw this hole in the market for it wasn't just an event space. It was called the entrepreneurs playground. And so it was. My concept was to bring together established entrepreneurs with startup businesses have an environment where they could actually engage with each other. We had a bar, we had an event space. We had meeting rooms. We had it was also a bit of shared co working space as well. And so that kind of was born out of working in the Ice House. Seeing this gap in the market opened up the event space directly across the road from the Ice House. And so was now running that as a business, plus doing the coaching.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  15:16

Still working with the Ice House, doing some of the coaching as well. And I said, when it when the EOS booked in to do this launch? I just saw the name and made some inquiries with Fran, who actually booked the room? She'd, oh, look, it's, it's called The Entrepreneurial Operating System. I was like, Okay, that sounds interesting. And she said, you know, can you come to the event? I said, I actually can't. I've got a client session on that day, so I can't. I was still coaching at this time, but I'd love to find out more. She'll be like, give you a couple of books. And so she gave me Traction, and she gave me Get a Grip. And if I'm really honest, I tried to read traction, and I just didn't really enjoy it. It just wasn't my type of book. And I now realise I'm a big Patrick Lencioni fan. I like fables. I like stories. That's how I get into it. So I almost gave up and almost went, this is a bit hard. I can't I don't enjoy it. And then I started reading Get a Grip.

And from the first page, I was completely hooked. And I just read it voraciously in literally, I think, about three hours. And went, This is amazing. And then I went back to the traction book and went, Ah, now I see this is the how to book. And so now I know what it's all about. The how to book gives me the How to and so I did. I started actually using some of those tools and things. I mean, I think I was already using similar methodologies, but it just gave this beautiful framework to hold it all together. And so I started implementing it into the events based business. So looking at, you know, our scorecards, our daily measurables, our weekly measurables, running what they were true level 10 meetings. I now know, but, you know, running these meetings and making sure we had the rocks, and so I suppose we self-implemented, of sorts, into the event space business.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  16:50

But in doing this, speaking with Fran after they'd had the event, she said, why don't you come and be an EOS implementer? I said, Well, what does that intelligence? Well, pretty much what you're doing now with the ISOs, the coaching, it's the teaching, it's facilitating. And I went, Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And so again, I talk a lot, but I want to put some context around it. We had just decided to actually close down that particular venue and open up a brand new venue around the corner that was almost three times the size. We'd proven the model. Knew what worked. We wanted to go and bigger and better. So this is December 2019 so we decided to close the doors. December 2019 I flew across to Sydney.

I did my EOS training. We had, we had four months in between the old space closing down and the new space opening up. And so I thought, well, I might as well use that time. I'll go and train as an EOS implementer. I'll be able to use that in my business. Going forward, I can continue doing some coaching on this. Doing some coaching on the side. And in February 2020 the sale of the building that the building we were actually going to be moving into fell through, and so suddenly we didn't have a space to move into. And in February 2020 was like, oh my god, this is the end of my world. You know, there's what am I going to do now? And then. Of course, March 2020, happened, which was COVID, right?

Mark O'Donnell  18:06

So a little blessing in disguise there.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  18:08

We would have had a half a million dollar a year lease without any ability to run at any events or functions. Because, if you don't, you know, but New Zealand literally shut the borders like we just went into complete lockdown. We had three months where we weren't allowed to leave our room pretty much. I mean, it was pretty and really in Auckland particularly, I think we had something like 362 days of lockdown in two years. So almost half a year, half of that time was in lockdown. So complete blessing in disguise. But as you can imagine, it was at the time, it felt devastating. So then I thought, Okay, well, it's a sign I need to obviously focus on building up my practice again. I now had the EOS tools, and so I started from scratch. And that was the first I've been running business, my own businesses, this for 20 years, and this was the first time in 20 years where I had zero income for three or four months because the whole world shut down. Nothing was happening. But now, five years later, completely different story.

Mark O'Donnell  19:07

Yeah, which is which is just great. So you were already known in your markets, into your network as a business coach when you became an implementer. Tell me about the transition from running other businesses to joining the Ice House. Did you go through some sort of training? How did you become a coach?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  19:31

So this was a really fascinating thing. This is probably why I fell in love with the EOS immediately. So the Ice House, despite being very, very well known around the world, and yes, I was very well recognised by time I left there, they didn't actually give you any training. They didn't give you any framework. They just said, Well, you've run businesses before, so just go coach other people on how to do just do that. And I guess, I mean, fortunately, I think I'm a naturally, I was a curious child, and I'm actually the person who likes to ask a lot of questions. So I just saw, went, I just asked lots of questions, and I just help people to think about what the answers might be. But there was no there was no real formal training. There was no real frameworks, which is why, when I came across EOS, I just went, Oh, my goodness, finally, I have this framework that I can actually apply.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  20:14

My challenge was that EOS was not known over here. If you Google EOS over here, you get lipsticks, shoes and cameras. As a photographer, I love my Canon EOS, but it doesn't help what you're trying to tell me, what it's all about. So I love the framework. I love the fact that was something I could actually work with and start to use within businesses. But there was a big sort of transition between, yeah, being recognised. I mean, I'm again, quite fortunate. I've been recognised one of the top 30 business women in New Zealand at this point. And so people knew me as being a good business person. They knew me as being a coach, but they knew me as being more of a start-up business coach. And the businesses I now work with in EOS are much larger, more established, family, privately owned businesses. So there was quite a big transition to try and change from being known as that sort of start-up business coach to now being somebody who could actually help more established businesses, and I had to also explain what EOS was. So it was a massive branding exercise. I've given away 500 traction books in my five years.

Mark O'Donnell  21:11

Wow, that's great. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Now, what do you think changed? So you're still doing some other coaching on or just EOS.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  21:22

No, I mean, I'm a family business advisor, and so I do like to specialise in family business, but I just, I still the EOS talks. This is what I love about EOS. I think that it actually it's people say, Oh, but it won't work for my type of business. It works for every type of business. And so even though I call myself a family business advisor, I understand the dynamics of family business, but I use the EOS tools to help them get the same results. So no, I don't do any other coaching anymore. I have got a couple of businesses on the side that I am still involved in, because I can't help myself. One's an AI technology company, and one is placing fractional executives into businesses. So I still keep my finger in the pie doing other things, but my majority, of 90% of my life, is EOS.

Mark O'Donnell  22:05

Yeah. So question for you with your AI business now I'm curious, what are your thoughts on AI putting a dent in the world of coaching. Positive? Negative?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:22

I sit on the fence in terms of, I don't think we'll ever move away from people wanting to do business with people. We saw this in the pandemic. You know, when we're in lockdown, we sure, we all shifted to a virtual world, and we did everything virtually, and it worked for it for a period of time. But as soon as we open up our borders here in New Zealand, since we're able to go back out to events, people started coming back into events. They wanted to see people. I mean, there was almost like this mass sort of people going to these events again just to have that people connection. So I don't think we'll ever move away from that.

I've just finished reading a book called Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat, and he was one of the top engineers at Google in their the Google lab, the laboratory they do all the to the fancy stuff. And so he talks about AI, and it's, you know, how amazing it is, but it is really super scary smart. It has huge possibility, but it isn't a human and I think that is the thing that, you know, I've got, I've got a colleague that I work with who has actually created a complete virtual AI coach. They've fed all the information that he has from his years of coaching and everything else. And I think it's great for answering a quick, ad hoc question. But most we want to talk to other people. We want to engage with other people. That's what business is about. So I don't know. I think it's got huge potential. I think it could take away all the boring stuff that we don't want to do. But it's not right?

Mark O'Donnell  23:46

Hopefully. Yeah, hopefully it takes all this stuff that we, you know, moving paper from one point to another. Talk about, you know, going into the microbiology lab and all the paperwork it would be really useful to not have to get because what I've found is, like, with, you know, very detailed stuff, most of it's a documentation error that causes those types of things, and hopefully AI will be able to fix that. But.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  24:13

And from a medicine, it's going to be fascinating, right? Because it will actually, it's so much more accurate than we will ever be as humans. So I think, as in the microbiology lab, in the histopathology lab, you know, picking up things like cancers that we would not even necessarily see as a human. So, yeah, I bring it on. I say, but not. It's not going to replace us.

Mark O'Donnell  24:30

Yeah, definitely. And, you know, go, go with the drug business in general. I work for Johnson and Johnson. I also worked for GlaxoSmithKline biologics. And, you know, I always had two jokes is that the drug you take is the one not tested, because we're just using statistical analysis to assume that it's probably good. You know, you don't test the quality of every of every lot or dose you spot check. And. And the other thing is that when you do clinical trials, the population of the drugs you're testing is very small in relation so there's nothing that's personalized to you and your individual DNA, your individual blood type and situation. So I think that there's could be a huge opportunity for personalised drugs that are meant just for you, that are probably be much more effective. So I think AI has a really interesting application in a lot of those areas.

But I was having a conversation with Dan Sullivan as strategic coach. So we do a we're just launching a podcast called coaching collaboration, so it's between Strategic Coach and EOS. So Strategic Coach is the largest entrepreneurial coaching program in the world, and EOS is the largest business operating system in the world, and so we've got together, and we're having conversations, and one thing that came up is AI and our conversation led to Dan's hypothesis, Dan Sullivan that coaching is actually the bridge between technology and people and AI is the technology. It's really smart, it's really useful, but people don't really know what it is that they want. What do you want this thing to do? And that the role of coaching is the intermediary between people and technology. Any thoughts about that?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  26:39

So, it's like the business analyst doesn't it in terms of the you know, when you've got people who are doing techy stuff, you always need a business analyst that translates the business stuff into what the techie stuff needs to do. And so, yeah, the coach is kind of like that role. I think that's probably true, because we use AI, a lot of us in the AI business we do, but also in our EOS practice, we'll use it to help us to write articles and to do certain things, but it's all about what you feed it. At the end of the day, it's only as smart as the inputs that get put into it. So, yeah, I like that analogy. We are there to make sure that we get the best out of the technology.

Mark O'Donnell  27:15

Right, right. Awesome. So I have one last question for you, if, if you with all the clients that you've worked with, if you could just have one thing that they would get right each and every time as you're observing them running their businesses, the one thing that if they could get this thing right, they would get more of what they want from their business. What would it be?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  27:43

One thing,

Mark O'Donnell  27:45

One thing can't be two, just one.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  27:47

Yeah, I know I hate that question, because it makes it really difficult. I suppose business is about people, and I think we should never forget that it's, you know, having your people all on the same page, knowing where you're headed, what you're doing, being on that page with you, that's you've got to we've got to focus on that. Like I said, people do business with people. We have teams of people. It's like, just make sure that you're looking after your people, and they'll look after you.

Mark O'Donnell  28:14

Yeah, awesome. Well, Debra, I appreciate the conversation, and I hope everyone else enjoys the conversation as much as I did. Thank

Debra Chantry-Taylor  28:26

Thank you so much. And thank you for allowing me to kind of share my story. I really appreciate it.

Mark O'Donnell  28:31

Yeah, thank you. We'll see you.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  28:33

Thank you.