Transcript: How an Entrepreneurial Operating System Produces Greater Outcomes // Doug Hall, Resources for CEOs

The Flourishing Culture Podcast Series

“How an Entrepreneurial Operating System Produces Greater Outcomes”

May 2, 2022

Doug Hall

Intro: Does your organization have an operating system that links your vision down to your employees’ daily and weekly actions? Well, find out how many entrepreneurial companies and ministries are discovering how an effective operating system can lead to improved outcomes and impact.

Al Lopus: Hi, I'm Al Lopus, and you're listening to the Flourishing Culture Podcast, where we help you create a flourishing workplace. The problem employers are facing today is that more of our employees are quitting than ever before. Some people are calling this the great resignation. And now with millions of open jobs, how can churches, Christian non-profits, and Christian-owned businesses face this tidal wave of resignations while attracting new, outstanding talent? And we know that having a flourishing workplace with fully engaged employees is the solution. I'll be your guide today as we talk with a thought leader about key steps that you can take to create a flourishing workplace culture.

So, now let's meet today's special guest.

In order to effectively lead an organization, senior leaders need a management framework and practical tools to keep the organization moving forward, and employees are looking to senior leaders to bring them together for a common purpose. Wise leaders have learned how to implement systems that support the growth of their organizations. What steps can you take to increase your effectiveness as a leader and position your organization for growth? I know that's something that we're all looking at and thinking about here post-COVID. Well, we're going to address these issues on today's podcast.

I'm delighted to welcome Doug Hall, whose consulting firm, Resources for CEOs, equips leaders to effectively run their businesses and position themselves for growth. And, again, whether it's businesses or non-profits, he's got experience in both.

So, Doug, it's great to have you here on the Flourishing Culture Podcast. Welcome.

Doug Hall: Thanks, Al. It’s great to be here. Looking forward to this.

Al: I am, too, Doug. And you’ve helped us a little bit here at the Best Christian Workplaces the last couple days, and that was a great experience. And so, Doug, you know, you're a seasoned leader. Before you launched into consulting to equip senior leaders, you held key positions in various technology companies. And I know you live up here in the northwest, in the Seattle area. So how’d you decide to move from leading corporate teams to stewarding your influence to help other leaders be more effective in their own leadership?

Doug: Well, being self-employed on that side now, there's a story. I didn't always start this way, but I did survive 35 years in the computer industry, and I loved every year to some degree. Some years were better than others. I think somewhere—I'll go a little more back in my history, but somewhere in that 35 years—and I like to joke about it and say, well, 15 years in, I realized I wasn't a very good employee. So for 20 more years, I kind of steeled myself and worked for the man and did a good job. I had great experiences, going around the world, many different cultures, got to do everything from sales to sales management to industry marketing, channel marketing, product marketing, product management, you know, dealing with multi-million-dollar budgets and big teams of people. And it was fun and exciting, but there was always something missing. Something wasn't there. So I thought back over it as I matured, raising a family, moving around the country to different jobs, and I realized I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My mom and dad, over and over, did different businesses. They created their own little insurance agency. That was too boring for me. I went in the computer industry. So, you know, I kept an eye on Mom and Dad, and they ended up selling the agency to one of my brothers, and it grew in the back of my mind that, you know, you probably should get off this train at some point, this corporate train.

Ten years ago, at age 55, the stars aligned. God made it possible for me to take a comfortable exit, kind of say goodbye to the corporate life, and venture off on my own. And what I saw in the last couple years of my career was working with small-business owners in the computer-dealership network was very rewarding. And I was like, you know, I don't really want to have a bunch of employees. I've managed people for 30 years, but I really respect what they're doing, and I'd love to help them. So I found a way to do that and started into that and literally relocated back to Seattle, my favorite city—not my home. It's my adopted home—and got that started 10 years ago, and it’s had a couple of phases. And we're going to be talking about phase two, which is in the realm of operating systems.

So that's sort of my back story, how I was always a latent self-employed entrepreneurial person, but I sort of suppressed it for decades to raise kids, get them through college, you know, do all that kind of stuff, pay for their braces, and then, okay. Now I'm over. My burn rate's a lot lower now with those kids all grown up.

Al: That’s great.

Well, you know, I know that some of our BCWI-certified organizations and some of the people that have been on our podcast have mentioned the entrepreneurial operating system, known as EOS, and that's what you help companies implement. And some of our podcasters might even be familiar with EOS or other management operating systems. So can you give us an outline of what EOS and what the framework is and how it can help people manage for growth?

Doug: Yeah. One of my favorite topics. So my first phase of being on my own was running CEO roundtables and doing one-on-one coaching. And one of the things that was a recurring theme when I meet with them month after month—some of you are familiar with C12 and Convene and Vistage. That’s the kind of thing I did under a different brand. But after three or four years, I'm like, “You know, the same problems keep coming up over and over,” sort of like a Groundhog Day thing. I'm like, “What's missing? Am I a bad facilitator, or am I a bad coach?” I said, “No, I'm pretty good.” You know, whatever.

Al: Humbly speaking, yeah.

Doug: Yeah. Something’s missing.

So literally, the way the story goes, many of you have heard of the book Traction, which is what launched EOS, and it's now in its 15th year. So they're coming out with a 15th-year-anniversary edition, I think. Kind of interesting, right? So seven years ago, I'm meeting with a prospective member of my group, who I would coach, and we're talking and talking. And in the middle of it, he says, “Well, Doug, it's good to get to know you, but what's your favorite business book?” And I went, “I don’t know.” I sat back, literally. I'm like, “I don’t know. Michael Gerber's E-Myth Revisited.” He said, “Oh, that's a good business book. But this—” he turns around, grabs a copy of Traction, leans over, says, “—this is the best business book I've ever read.” And I went, “Okay, okay. Tell me the story. What's it about?” He told me the story. I took note of it. You know, I didn't know the author, Gino Wickman. I didn't know anything. And I was pretty well read, you know? Business books were sort of my thing.

So I downloaded the Kindle that night, read three or four chapters, sat back in my chair, and went kind of like thumped my forehead and said, “Okay. This thing in Traction, this thing adds on to what I already help business owners with. It creates a structure of leadership and management that we all have a way of operating our business. But it's like an intuitive, unconscious cadence and way of managing. Some of us are a little more systematic; some are less systematic.”

So what I'm reading in this book is basically a blueprint for how to bring an outside system into any kind of organization. It can be a church or a synagogue. It can be a profit business. It can be nonprofit. Anywhere where humans group together to achieve a vision and a mission and a purpose, that's an organization. I just call it an organization. And every organization has a default operating system. And just like in computers, you can upgrade the operating system.

So when Gino Wickman put the EOS together, he said, “We've got vision, we've got traction, we’ve got people, we've got data, we've got issues, and we've got process,” is what he called six key components. He based his work off of another open source from Verne Harnish, The Rockefeller Habits, where Verne had those six, but he also had strategy and profits and cash flow. So there's eight operating levers to sort of improve a business or tune it up.

So I just fell in love with the structure. I fell in love with the concept. I started working with clients. I decided in early  2017, five years ago, I went and got certified, and I literally pivoted my whole practice from groups and one on one to working with leadership teams, like I sat with you and your leadership team over the last two days, and we hammered out a whole bunch of things so that everybody's on the same page with vision; everybody's got the same goals; we share the objectives; we share the time frames; we agree on projects and initiatives, called rocks; we agree on those rocks for the next 90 days; and then we have accountability; and we have check ins every week; and the team's off and running. So to me, what I got so excited about was the change was in the leadership team. It wasn't the change that I was looking for in the CEO or owner. The change was empowering a leadership team around the owner CEO. That's the key that unlocked the door for me.

Al: Yeah. And as you said, you know, I'm just reflecting on my own experience. I had read Michael Gerber's E-Myth book. I've listened to it on audio. And just a couple of years ago, I was casting about because we'd experienced growth. We were continuing to experience growth, just leading up to COVID, and I ran into Traction and also The Rockefeller Habits, and I'm trying to remember, Scaling Up—

Doug: Yeah, that’s right. Rockefeller Habits 2.0.

Al: Right, yeah. I’ve read Scaling Up. I thought, wow.

Doug: Really powerful stuff, right?

Al: It’s really great stuff, yeah. And I thought, “We need this,” and I could see the shortcomings in our management operating system, or the lack thereof, because we were just kind of making it up as we went along. And I thought, “Wow, this is going to be great.”

So between the two books and particularly the EOS is a system; it is a process. It describes what to do next, and it has a number of great tools. And we thought, “Wow, this is really helpful.” And it's been tremendously helpful for the last couple of years.

You know, Doug, what are some of the common problems that you see senior leaders grappling with in running their companies? You know, what are they looking for when they reach out to you for help?

Doug: As humans, we don't change unless there's some impetus, right? And unfortunately for most of us, it's usually more pain induced than advancement or improvement, but always a mix of both, right? So when I get engaged, it's usually somebody who hears another owner sort of talking about this Traction book or talking about somebody else that had done something like this, or some pain that they were feeling in missing goals, like falling behind on goals is a common thing, and the owner-founder gets sort of agitated about that.

Another common theme is lack of accountability. That's a big one. Sometimes there's a toxic person or two in leadership or management, sort of wrong person on the bus. Jim Collins, you know, picked the right people, put them on the bus first, and then decide where you're going. So key hires that have gone wrong is another pain point.

Another big pain point is founders, owner-founders, putting in more and more hours as the company grows, and they're not freeing themselves up. They may be making good money, financial reward, or value captured in the organization, but they're working themselves to death. That's a losing formula, right?

And the other one is, probably the last one, and it's a more of a special case. It's when a founder realizes they want to make a transition, they want to have a succession plan, and they're not well prepared for it. And it's less about selling the business and more about positioning the organization, right, like getting it ready for a successful transition.

Those are the major themes that I see. So my main goals are to help teams achieve their goals faster, gain more time freedom as a founder-owner by building a stronger leadership team, and then help them prepare the legacy they want. The effectiveness of the organization, the value, tapping into the financial value can be part of the legacy. Maybe having a generational organization is the legacy they want. But those three things, if I keep them as goals, they help me deal with whatever those four or five or six presenting problems are.

Al: Right. Well, one of the factors of flourishing workplaces that we highlight in our organization is sustainable strategy, and the EOS methodology equips leaders to have a sustainable strategy, in a sense. So let's dig into what it looks like in terms of goal setting, both long term and short term. You advocate developing 10-year, three-year, one-year, and 90-day goals. So how does an organization implement that kind of goal setting, and what are the benefits?

Doug: That's a big thing because as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a visionary, whether you're in ministry or in a profit business or a nonprofit, the number one problem is we have that vision in our head, just the other people can't read our minds. We think we're good at voicing it. We're really not. And we're not good at voicing that vision in a coherent way that other people can pick up and execute, right? That's that connection, well, that strategy connection. Like, “Okay, boss. I see where you want to go. How are we going to get there?” So going through a systematic process of breaking that down, beginning with the end in mind, for example, 10 years out is not the end of an organization, but it's a good BHAG area, using Jim Collins’s terminology, big, hairy, audacious goal. Ten years out, we're going to be 10 times bigger. Hey, do the math. It's 25 percent-a-year growth. It's not that outrageous. But wow, 10x is a lot more than we are today.

So you start with that longer-term view, and then you bring it back and say, “Well, okay. Ten years is a long time. Three years isn't that long. What's it going to look like in three years? What does it need to look like in three years so that three of those get us almost to 10 years?” Then back it down to, “Okay. We got our idea of what it looks like in three years. We've got sort of this mirage-in-the-desert view. Let's bring it into sharp focus with a one-year plan. What are we going to look like for 2022?” And then we bring it down to, “Okay. If that's what it's going to look like at the end of the year, let's back it down to 90 days.” See, this is the opposite. Instead of being obsessed with doing work today, we're obsessed with the long term, and then reverse engineering into, “Well, what does it need to look like this quarter? You know, what do we need to fix this quarter? What kind of revenue and profit do we need to generate this quarter?” And then we break it down to weekly accountability.

So the connection here that I want to say about business operating systems, and EOS does this as well as any, is connecting execution to strategy. It’s strategy execution. You can't separate one from the other. If we just execute, we're just cutting trees and bumping into stuff as fast as we can. If we're just strategizing, we're sitting on the hilltop, never going down in the valley to cut any trees. So how about we plan the path up on the hill, go down, cut some trees, and then go up on another hill? And look, are we going in the right direction? To me, that's how you tie the long term to the medium term to the short term. And again, we assume you have a viable business model, that part of the strategy. We don't obsess over that upfront. That's probably one of the remedial things that companies need to keep an eye on. And that approach to strategy comes really well from The Rockefeller Habits 2.0, sort of looking at the seven elements of strategy. Well, that's kind of advanced stuff.

Al: Yeah. You know, Doug, this has really been, again, a couple of years ago we started on this journey, and we went off site and had the entire team, and we did some appreciative inquiry, kind of dreaming of the future and what we—

Doug: Kind of brainstorming, envisioning.

Al: Brainstorming, yeah. Came up with our 10-year goal. We call it a God-sized goal. You know, we want to see a thousand flourishing workplaces in the year 2030. And that was 10x. I mean, it's a nice round number, but we thought, wow. And again, I've done the spreadsheets now for 10 years. Okay. So from where we were then and where we should be in 10 years, that really was a helpful process. And then it's like, “Okay. In three years, what does that look like?” Oh my gosh, you know, to actually have a basically a three-year financial plan and a people plan and an operation plan and really thinking through that as a team, you know, it gets all of us thinking, “Okay. So what does that look like? How are we going to get all the arrows moving in the same direction?” And then, of course, then that's that routine of you talk about a one-year, 90-day, and then weekly, the weekly L10 meeting is a structured weekly meeting of a leadership team. Two years ago, we didn't have a really defined leadership team, and now using this process, we've got a great leadership team—

Doug: Yeah, you do.

Al: —and it works well.

Doug: Yeah. And BCWI is a great example of that maturation process, which you didn’t do it in two months.

Al: No.

Doug: It’s taken some time, right? It’s a journey. It's not just a seminar.

Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

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Al: And now, back to today’s special guest.

So, Doug, you work with senior leaders, and how does this management system play out throughout an organization? What are some key factors that help leaders make sure that everyone, including middle managers, frontline managers, employees, that they're all engaged and working toward a common vision and goal?

Doug: Well, it starts with intent. It starts with the top of the organization. And you know, this is a hierarchic approach, right? So it starts with the founder and then it flows through leadership, flows down. So the model that I've found, and my colleagues out in the world do the same thing, and everybody that coaches in this area, is we teach the leadership team, we encourage the leadership team to be effective with the tools and methods, and then start rolling it down through the organization. It's referred to as roll out, but it's really roll down. And if you're a participant in the leadership team and you're part of one or more functional organizations like part of sales, part of marketing, part of service delivery, part of quality, whatever, finance, you bring the operating system down to your team, and you teach, facilitate, and coach them. So where I come into a team and teach, facilitate, and coach the founder and leadership team, I then encourage and help them to become the teacher, facilitator, and coach down in the organization. And then you just keep bringing that down as close to the front lines as you can.

You know, a lot of companies have a problem bringing it all the way down to the front line. But they certainly have no problem taking it to the first and second level of management and somewhere down around supervisors and leads and floor-level people, if it's a factory or a construction company. Okay. It gets a little trickier down there, but the culture is baked in then. The process is baked into the top of the company, down into middle management, and literally tying middle management to all the way to the founder, that's the magic that can get an organization to really work.

Al: Yeah. Too many times, and all of us, as I’ve talked with leaders, slick, not all of our middle managers are connected to where we're going. They have their own plans. They have their own picture. We're all not connected, and this really does help, doesn’t it?

Doug: Yeah.

Al: Yeah.

So can you share an example or two of how implementing a management operating system has actually helped a company or an organization move forward and flourish?

Doug: Well, actually, three come to mind. You made me think about this. Best Christian Workplaces is a pretty good example. I don't want to puff you up, Al, but you drove this. You got the right people on the bus. You added your own integrator, chief operating officer, along the way. I mean, I applaud you as being a great example. And you really are on your way to your thousand flourishing workplaces.

Two transition cases in my client base come to mind. One is a commercial landscaper, who I worked with for a couple of years, and it just suddenly came to a point. Literally, they were not thinking of transition. But about the end of the second year into the third year, they're like, “You know, the market is so ripe right now. Private equity is all heated up. Maybe it's time to take some chips off the table, bring some investment in, and sort of get to the next stage of the company.” So they did that very thoughtfully, very carefully. The business operating system structures we put in place really prepared them. They were high performing before I worked with them, but they reached a whole new level, and it helped them get a very—I think they were like a 10x multiple EBITDA to sell, and they didn't sell the whole thing. They kept and stayed on board to shepherd it a few more years, the two co-founders. But they've really created an equity event that not only helps them, but actually the main founder is putting it all into charities. I mean, he’s just a blessed guy. Great opportunity there financially and also legacy of the company for the mid management and upper management to keep growing.

Another case is a tech company in Seattle that I worked with a young entrepreneurial owner. He didn't have a lot of—he didn’t have any corporate experience. He founded this firm, digital-marketing firm, out of college, and he felt like, “You know, I don't have the right stuff, and this thing’s going to grow.” Had no thoughts of selling. We would start working on the operating system, putting EOS in, and doing all that. And a year and a half in, he gets an unsolicited offer from a global U- based marketing agency. Great buy out, great program, the disciplines they put in place for leadership and management, the things I taught and facilitated, they put them to work. And their valuation was in that over 10x, probably closer to 15, and again, they're still sticking with it. It's not a sell and dump and run. It's more of a legacy play to get the company to the next level.

So I felt really proud of both of those. They’re great success stories, along with the great work you've done is a great story. So…

Al: Yeah. Well—

Doug: And there's a million others, guys. There's so many people that are tapping into the power of this.

Al: We work with a number of marketplace companies, and these principles seem to work and apply as well to ministries and nonprofits and schools and other types of organizations. So how do you see these tools and resources helping in those kinds of settings?

Doug: Well, the important thing, and I might have mentioned it early in the podcast, but wherever two or three are gathered together, the Lord’s there, and guess what else is there. It's called an organization, okay? Jesus had 12 guys on his leadership team, right? And how'd that work out? Took over the whole world, right?

Al: Yeah.

Doug: So, you know, there is no limit to these principles. And I think effective leadership and effective management comes literally from God's heart. It's a giving leader. It's an engaged leader. It's a servant leader. There’s a lot of different words that go around that. But the kind of things, what resonated with me as a Christian when I saw the system was this is, in a way, doing God's work to help people be more effective at reaching their goals. Whether they're a ministry, a nonprofit, a for-profit, it doesn't matter, it's you're going to harness human energy towards vision and then goals and objectives with accountability, with metrics and KPIs, with, you know, solving problems and looking at opportunities and doing projects and initiatives to improve things. It's a big continuous improvement machine, and it works for any kind of organization, in my experience. I allocate a certain portion of my time to ministries, and I actually have a secular nonprofit, too, that I give them a special deal. It's a way for me to give back a little bit and help folks hit their mission.

Al: And, Doug, you work with many company founders and senior leaders. You've already referred to a number. You also run your own business and have been in senior corporate-leadership role. So how do you manage your own time and energy? You know, and that's something that many of the leaders who are listening to our podcast oftentimes it's our energy that we need to manage even more than our time, according to a number of thinkers. So what are some practices and habits that you've seen that really have sustained you over time, especially over the long term, and that you'd recommend to leaders that you advise?

Doug: Well, I think there's two secret weapons that have helped me a lot and I encourage everybody to think about. One is your mindset, and can you change your mindset? Carol Dweck’s book called Mindset is a really good one to look at for that. I have a growth mindset. I have an abundance mindset. Was I born with it? Did I develop it? It's a little hard to tell, but I think we can cultivate an abundance-growth mindset.

Secret weapon number two is really simple: get more sleep. As I get a little older, I really appreciate that, and I get up pretty early, one way or the other, so that my only weapon is to go to bed earlier. So I got to remind myself of that.

Al: Yeah.

Doug: So don't get too excited at night with looking at your iPad or getting deep into a TV program. You know, I aim for that. I need to be in bed by 10:00. Little physical exercise. I love to ski. Winter season’s great for that. Golfing in the summer. Keep the body moving is sort of my rule number three. And be careful what you eat. Sugar is the enemy, in my view. I got to watch those carbs. I'm half Italian. I love—the pasta sticks with me. So you can't out exercise what you can eat. I’ve learned that lesson years ago.

Al: That's right. That's right.

Doug: So that's that.

And then the other thing is, we have this misnomer out there called time management. No man manages time. All we can manage is our actions and our decisions. So choose wisely. We have limited time on Earth. Use that time well, manage our activities through time and space, pursuing really good goals. And let's get real clear, what is our legacy? What do we want? What do I want somebody to say when they tuck me in my final resting place? And for me, it's people and relationships. Helping people is what drives me. So every once in a while, I have to learn how to say no, but in general, I just say yes to help.

Al: I saw a movie one time where somebody said, “Yeah, I'm just going to say yes this year,” and led them to a new, positive experiences. Yeah, that's great.

Well, Doug, you know, gosh, we've learned a lot from our conversation. You know, I think about how many organizations lack a good operating process. Many organizations will have a communication rhythm that they go through. You know, we do this on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, and an annual basis. But they don't have an operating system that really looks at, as we've talked about, you know, just a 10-year dream and then a three-year plan and then a one-year goal and 90-day reviews and then weekly leadership team meetings. Those are great thoughts and, again, have a system. I was on the board of a local hospital that used lean as an operating system, and they had a lot of great aspects to it, but it didn't have some of the core aspects of what you're talking about. So I'd encourage our listeners to consider, what is your operating system?

Doug, is there anything you'd like to add to what we've talked about?

Doug: Well, one thing that I've found helpful, Al, and I think you're right. I think adding in lean as a discipline is a really good thing, but it's not a complete operating system.

Al: Right.

Doug: So I think you've spurred me to share my eight success drivers, which are ways of expressing what Verne Harnish in Rockefeller Habits and Gino Wickman in Traction and some of the other folks out there. I think it's McChesney with 4 Disciplines of Execution, and you know, there's five or six kinds of systems floating around. Part of my job is to understand a little something about all of them. But the common themes that I see are, first off, you've got to have a winning strategy. You've got to have some, be able to competitively deliver your product or service. I don't care if you're a church or a software company, you've got to deliver to a clientele and make them happy and be competitive in this world, which is full of distractions. So a winning strategy is sort of the first book end.

The next one is a shared vision with the organization. If we don't get the vision all the way down to all of our team members, we're not guaranteed that we're pulling the oars in the same direction at the same cadence.

The third thing is having the right people in the right seats on a great team. And this goes right back to the Pat Lencioni work and the Jim Collins’ work in Good to Great. It's our bus is going in that direction. Here's our core values. Here's our behavior. Are you one of us? Are you with us or against us? And then teamwork, Pat Lencioni all day long. Five Dysfunctions, Ideal Team Player, Working Genius Assessment, all these tools help us make sure that we really do have effective teamwork. Love that topic.

The fourth one is hitting the right numbers. So when we get into KPIs and metrics, sometimes we don't choose the right number. So John Doerr recently published a book about Google called Measure What Matters. What matters? Measure it, and then hit those numbers, hit those thresholds. Do your numbers because KPIs are a reflection of execution. Remember, I said strategy execution? How do we know we're executing? Our KPIs have to tell us. So pick the right ones.

Healthy organizations are always solving problems and looking at new opportunities and doing it in a healthy way. So the Patrick Lencioni Trust Pyramid—trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and results—that's alignment of the right people on the bus, using problem solving and opportunity systems that, then, positions us for consistent execution. So we're measuring the right things, we have process and procedure to some degree documented, and we're getting consistent execution because we're measuring what matters along the lines of our process and procedure. That's what clients want. They want consistency.

And then last but not least, getting the right stuff done. We can't get everything done. And so we break it down to a quarter at a time and say, “What projects do we need to add to the company?” That's, a lot of times, where lean comes in. Continual improvement, but we can't improve everything at once. So break it down, prioritize, get the right stuff done.

And then the number eight driver, it shows up in superior profits and cash flow. And there are strategies, things to do we can focus on. I’ll just give you one example. Another book, Profit First, by Mike Michalowicz, it changes your thinking of plan for profit and spend what's left over in expenses.

Again, some people will call me Mr. Book. So if you’ve got a question, I got a book for you. But those eight drivers come from an amalgam of The Rockefeller Habits and EOS Traction and sort of give us an active framework, not just the intellectual frame, but like, what are we striving for? A shared vision, right people on the bus, right seats, great team, hitting the right numbers, solving problems, executing consistently, getting the right stuff done—not everything at once, but the right stuff for this quarter. And it all shows up in profit and cash flow. Oh, and it shows up in ministry results, happy clients, right? The outcomes we want for our stakeholders.

Al: Well, Doug, this has been great. Thanks for your contributions today. You know, and I can say here at BCWI, we've really benefited from your expertise and guidance. Appreciate it very much.

Doug: Happy to help.

Al: And I appreciate your commitment to helping leaders and organizations flourish by systematically achieving their goals and preparing for growth. We work with many organizations who are really great on vision, but when it comes to execution, well, maybe not so much. But I appreciate your systematic approach to helping organizations achieve their goals. So thank you for taking your time out today and speaking into the lives of so many listeners. Thanks, Doug.

Doug: Thanks, Al. Great to be here.

Outro: Thank you for joining us on the Flourishing Culture Podcast and for investing this time in your workplace culture. If there's a specific insight, story, or action step you've enjoyed, please share it with others so they can benefit, too. Please share this podcast with friends on social media, and show your support by rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen.

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Remember, a healthy workplace culture drives greater impact and growth for your organization. We'll see you again soon on the Flourishing Culture Podcast.