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How can you get your Vision 'shared by all'? (Preview of Simon Vella's EOS Europe Community Conference workshop)
70 Plays7 months ago
Simon Vella is a Certified EOS Implementer with 20+ years experience holding various senior leadership roles in the ICT industry. He credits EOS with allowing him to transform his last company together with its leadership team, scaling from 24 to 50 employees and doubling financial results.
Simon will be hosting a masterclass at the EOS European Conference on 27 September in London titled "Getting your Vision Shared by All" (09:30-10:15, Break Out 2). In this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast, Simon previews some of the big ideas to be covered in that session.
Get your ticket here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/eosworldwide/1227926 (ask your EOS Implementer for their discount code for 40% (c. £200) off or please feel free to use code "EOSI-RobL" if you don't have one). You can also connect with Simon on LinkedIn, via https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-vella/.
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Transcript
Introduction to First Time Founders
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome to the First Time Founders podcast, the show where we talk about how to start a business from nothing and grow it into something meaningful. I'm Rob Lydiard. I was the co-founding CEO of a software business called Yapster that was acquired in 2022. I'm now a professional implementer of the Entrepreneur and Operating System, or EOS, which means I work with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leadership teams to help them get what they want from their businesses.
Sharing Entrepreneurial Stories
00:00:23
Speaker
That's my day job, but in my spare time, I love talking to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial people and advisors about the first time I found the journey, what those of us who've done it learned along the way so that we can pay some of those insights forward to help new entrepreneurs make their own mistakes rather than just repeating ours.
Guest Introduction: Simon Vela
00:00:39
Speaker
Today, I'm talking to Simon Vela. Simon's one of my colleagues in the EOS worldwide implementer community. A great guy, he's got an interesting technical background.
00:00:49
Speaker
Quite unusual, actually, for EOS implementers. A lot of us came for the sort of business side, sales and marketing side, leadership and strategy side. It's got a really interesting perspective on building a small business, particularly in the technology managed service space. He's leading a masterclass on the 27th of September at the European EOS Community um Conference in London.
Focus on Vision Component
00:01:12
Speaker
on getting a vision shared by all. So the conversation we're having today really focuses on the vision component on the entrepreneurial journey, the pitfalls that um typically face rookie entrepreneurs that are perhaps learning the entrepreneurial operating system when it comes to getting their organization to move at the speed and in the direction that they want it to go in. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Simon Bella.
Simon's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:01:46
Speaker
Simon, my man, thank you for doing this. Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me here. So listen, we're going to spend a decent point, part of our conversation talking about your forthcoming presentation at the European community. We run on EOS conference, but before we dive into that, you've got like a really interesting background for a sort of entrepreneurial EOS implementer in that you're technical, right? Most of us are fast talking, sales, business, marketing, you know, creative types. Can you just like, walk me back to the beginning of the business career. Like what was the prior career and how the hell did you end up teaching EOS?
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah. Um, well, it's always been, you know, my, my, my search for learning something and and and doing something with it. Right. Um, so I was never driven to a career really, but, uh, when I started off and in, in, uh, in IT, I had graduated in, in electronics, um, back in 98. Um, you know, that's very long time ago. The internet was still, uh, growing just at the access section.
00:02:52
Speaker
and I definitely didn't want to work in electronics. So I ended up with a startup ISP.
Achieving Vision Clarity and Alignment
00:02:59
Speaker
And I think that is where sort of I started always trying to solve problems um and and and getting people excited around me to to help me solve them. It's when I really started using my my brushed up on my Italian again, because I wasn't working with Telecom Italian and and these likes to actually tell them You know, we're small. I think we need to solve this problem. I need you guys to do this for me. This is how we're going to do it. And like, you know, squeezing out, um, as much as possible, um, of the bandwidth that we needed as a country. Right. And you know, that, that's that, that progressed for 12 years.
00:03:41
Speaker
towards the end of of my carrying telecoms area is actually, you know, leading the design and roll out of fiber optic in the country. um And again, it's like, okay, there's a technological issue, but many times it's a people issue, right? and There are people who know exactly what needs to be done in the streets, how they dig them up, what are the issues, what problems you're going to encounter in which neighborhood, right? um And you need to leverage those people because they know better than you.
00:04:08
Speaker
and So that that was sort of my always seeking this growth. In 2009, literally sort of at the head of the financial crisis decided to leave and pursue setting up a new IT company. Started into a very saturated market, but again, sort of we started growing, we're successful.
00:04:34
Speaker
Up till 2015, we were one of the, you know, local leading organizations, but it felt, you know, the usual, I'm having the ceiling, you know, I'm dealing with one thing, something else moves, you know, two steps forward, one step back, sometimes sideways. And that was sort of when I i was always, I always believed in peer groups and learning from others. And I had joined an IT service provider peer group. We used to meet in the UK, predominantly, but it was a worldwide group.
00:05:04
Speaker
called IT Nation. And within the second quarter, you know, our facilitator, Hardin told us, you know, and what business operating system are you using to run your your business? I said to my business partner, Liam, who's also now a US implementer. You know, I said, and we studied, we have a lot of scars, an experience, you know, what the hell is this? And gave us the book.
00:05:32
Speaker
and We had a, I had a clarity break with my family and Emily's families who were in in Sicily. I was on a deck chair in August reading this book quickly. And it was an aha moment because literally, I mean, all that I wanted, I used to do this many years back, but I always had to like, you know, teach and tell people, you know, we should do this, this dashboard, this process. i And I had this like, you know, Bible in my hand was a very easy one.
00:06:02
Speaker
I turned, I told Liam, we'll teach this and we'll run with it. Unfortunately, back then we had to do a self implementation because there was no one. This was 2017. We doubled the company with, and like this was so amazing that by 2021, remember we are the co-founders. So we really literally part of the, you know, the furniture, as we say, and and the business.
00:06:26
Speaker
We managed to build such a team that we could exit out of the business very quickly. So we're we're out of there in three months. Like we handed over. Now they have their own vision. They're running their own thing. And that was the cherry on the cake for us. We said, this is going to work, right? We'd have to like go there and teach this to others. And that was it. And incidentally, when I was in the peer group, the peer group, they used to do a lot of this and you know, helping the business owner understand what they want to achieve on a personal basis and what they want to achieve with the business. And I recall writing on the top of my legacy plan, you know, that sort of my why is, you know, telling people, going around, teaching people to anyone really who would listen, you know, teaching this, whatever I know to others. And I wrote it jokingly, but looking back at it five years later, I said, you know what, this is it, you know, this is it.
00:07:26
Speaker
That's awesome. Are you particularly passionate about the topic of getting the vision clear and then shared shared by all? like Before we get into the substance of how you do that, like can you just share a little bit about that journey of clarifying and then sharing your vision as an entrepreneur before you kind of became a teacher at VOS?
00:07:49
Speaker
and so Really, it starts off So if you realize when you're in the business and and some other people sort of start you know telling you, you know, you can't do this alone, that and you many times end up being the bottleneck. So you didn't realize, and but unfortunately you'd meet and some entrepreneurs who feel sort of that they're always like carrying the load and no one understands them, you know.
00:08:20
Speaker
I was very fortunate that I think when we actually started implementing us and I had already sort of a relatively good team, I remember one time in one of the quarter leads, the finance manager just wrote my name in the issues list, Simon, and that again,
00:08:39
Speaker
reinforced sort of that, you know, I cannot do it alone. Thankfully, there are others who want to and understand it. They want, but they might not be understanding where we're going, right? So the power of this is is immense because when you really want to get things done on a scale, there's no hope in hell that you can manage on your own. um So that realization, that's difficult for many.
00:09:07
Speaker
that's difficult for many, but the power and and the energy that you then get, you you feed in some energy into the team, you know, and you you describe something passionately and they give you back. And that is sort of what I would like others to experience and others too to feel. What are some of the the common failure modes in getting a vision clear and shared by all in in your mind? You know, you've been teaching EOS for a number of years now, you clearly have deep experience implementing it yourself.
00:09:38
Speaker
Where does it go wrong? and
00:09:42
Speaker
It's typically, and it's always at the top, right? It's always at the top. And there are, because because of the different personalities and especially founders, and um my personality is that I'm very much future oriented, right? So I would see something, plan it out, you know, I'm seeing the scale of what we can achieve.
00:10:07
Speaker
And I, in my younger years, I used to see others slower, right? I'm seeing others, I do it quickly. And it's like, you know, in the flash, when I'm seeing everyone like like this and I'm going round and I, why the hell are you so slow? And that is a ah big problem because when you don't realize the the majority of the organis of population any in any given country, and never anywhere,
00:10:35
Speaker
A lot of people are present oriented, right? They're great at caring for today, doing it right, caring for others. They're not future oriented. So there's this frustration. And unless a founder realize a visionarian realizes realizes this frustration and that they have to get accustomed to it and deal with it, they will never manage to get there, right?
Role of Integrators in Success
00:10:59
Speaker
And there are a number of things that we explained how to do that.
00:11:03
Speaker
and And I think this frustration, this want to be 10 years ahead and we're not there is is what keeps a lot of these visionaries backwards. That's hilarious. do you know My wife is constantly telling me off because I have a, I mean, amongst many things, but one of the things she tells me off, which cracks me up because it's fair, is that I'll have an idea. I'll ah obsess about it for days. I'll read you know a classic kind of like visionary type chaos.
00:11:33
Speaker
And then in my head, it already exists, right? The thing that I only learned about a couple of days ago, but now like in my mind, this is how the world works. And then I'm just constantly pissed off that nobody else is with the program. Can you relate? Very much, very much so. And, and we forget that we've, we've passed through that experience of us learning it. And now we like already even want to get everyone short circuited to it. It doesn't work, right? It doesn't work.
00:12:03
Speaker
And we have to be realistic as well, that there are people who dream and see these things. And we have a very important role for these people in an organization. But then we need also the people who are going to help us build it and also tell us you know that this big structure probably needs some good foundations, otherwise it's going to collapse. So, yeah, it's it's how do you get all these different personalities line aligned with us?
00:12:31
Speaker
What are some of the most common kind of tips then you um you would give to a frustrated visionary, whether they self-identify as a visionary yet or not? and Number one sort of is is this realization that and they think complicated, they think fast, and they always think they're there, right? So how do we mitigate all these three?
00:12:55
Speaker
and The complication, I would say, is going back to simplicity. As we know, EOS, we're always we don't have a tool we don't have a specific tool because we're always harping on it, right? Simple, simple. So if I can get a sentence and chop off a few words from it just to make it super clear what I'm focusing on, the key words, that's crucial. Because then, guess what? I have to repeat, and I have to repeat, and I have to repeat.
00:13:26
Speaker
Like when you were reading that thing, the the book that you're saying sort of, and it's already in your head, you went through a repetition while you were reading the book. You didn't realize, right? You're reading the concept. So we cannot expect our team members to like hear it once and it's there. It needs to, depending on its drop. So we need to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. Um,
00:13:47
Speaker
And the third one is is they need to slow down. Now, slowing down is a very difficult thing and for for visionaries and they need to come to this realization, right? At what speed do I want to go ah in this organization? As I was describing before, it's like the visioner wants to go 100 kilometers an hour or miles in the case of the UK. And the rest in the car, like the other five passengers want to go 20.
00:14:15
Speaker
And I asked them, okay, so what speed should we go at? You know, what's the, let's say, compromise. yeah The average, the average 60, 70. You're gonna still be so frustrated, but the rest are gonna still be very scared going at 60, right? And I tell them, what about 30? 30 is 50% faster for all the organization. Can you imagine what you would achieve if all the organization goes 50% faster?
00:14:44
Speaker
So you're always going to be super frustrated, but at least we've got everyone behind us. So this slowing down, right? And saying, okay, how can we do this? That's so heavy. That's so heavy. So actually you lean into the idea that to be a visionary is to be frustrated on some level. Yes. Yeah. It's a reality.
00:15:06
Speaker
Um, when they become accustomed to do it, to deep to live with it, right. Um, it's going to make a lot of things easier because when they are opening the team and they tell them, listen guys, I'm frustrated about this. Then probably there can be a discussion and we understand which is the part that is more important. And we address that, you know, we ease a lot of that frustration.
00:15:30
Speaker
So opening up, you know we know we say that with EOS, we build team health, right? This is the kind of team health that we're talking about, that they're open and say, listen guys, I would love this to be happening like next week, not next year. and The reality is, and this is the reason why I jokingly in my post, I said sort of visionaries should be accompanied by their integrators. Like it's like the PG, but it's like integrator guy Um, the key I would say is that they need to find the right integrator. If they find the right integrator, that integrator is going to work closely with the visionary to really help them free themselves to go forward, but at the same time sort of hold on a bit, slow down, but at the same time, they're the gel that they're pulling the rest of the organization. They can help them to simple to simplify. They can repeat on their behalf, right?
00:16:29
Speaker
And they can sort of ease this, manage, help them with with this frustration. And I think that the the integrator is is a crucial role for them. That's really interesting. So for your for your talk, I think you're in breakout three morning session at the the European Community Conference, 27th of September in in London. Yep. Would you recommend for people that are interested in getting their vision shared by all If you're a visionary, bring your integrator. If you're an integrator, for God's sake, get your visionary, get their bum in the chair next to you. like Are there any other things that you think people could do to prepare and get the most out of the session? and For sure, it's taking a bit of an assessment, and even even doing an org checkup just before you come over and get an assessment of the whole organization. Because I would say that getting your vision shared
00:17:23
Speaker
is the pinnacle of like implementing EOS. There are a lot of things that are related to the vision. There is the the the exercise, the the process that we do, but the reality is that everything underneath, all the other components interlinked to this. It's like, imagine going to were ah to to work.
00:17:46
Speaker
And you love it. You just happen to be paid for it. right You would do it for free. That is the kind of company, that's kind of the business that where everyone really gets and shares the vision, where I would do it for free, but I just happen to be paid.
Preparing for the European EOS Conference
00:18:03
Speaker
Love it. Okay, so folks that are thinking of coming, do the organizational checkup, ideally come as a leadership team. ye and be ready to be open and honest about the fact that we're all frustrated, some because the organisation isn't going fast enough and some of us because it feels chaotic because it's going too fast and just live live in that discomfort and together we'll get there. Is that the key? Yep. I would also say that and reading the people book, I have it here, reading this one, this also touches a lot on getting the vision
00:18:41
Speaker
shared by everyone because there is a lot of alignment that needs to happen between the personal focus, the personal on why of each um of your employees and the company one, right? And that is the key. If we in recruitment stage and poor performance management, when we're having chats with our employees,
00:19:01
Speaker
we are getting this understanding and helping them understand whether they really align with our vision or not. That is how we're going to strengthen it. At the end of the day, and I've had ah an experience in the past where when we clarified our vision, so we were a software and infrastructure IT organization. In the infrastructure side, we're mostly services. In the software, we are a bit of a development and developing as a service, you know both of them.
00:19:31
Speaker
And our vision became clearer that we had to become a service-oriented organization. So even the software part had to happen in the in the way that was most in service to our clients, not to us to develop you know the best code, but in service to our clients. And when we explained this and we clarified, it was even became an aha moment to us as well. After like probably three, four quarters, the clarity and the penny dropped.
00:20:01
Speaker
For some in the, in the software teams who said, you know, we're still, we love working with you guys. You're a great bunch, but this is not really for us. We would like to continue developing really complicated code. Right. And it's not in service to our clients, but in service to our product, trying to do product development. And we're still very much in contact today, but they decided to move on. And the new people who came on board were even more aligned now and we reinforced the vision.
00:20:31
Speaker
So I think, you know, ah understanding the people element and this personal focus aspect of of our air employees and ourselves is crucial to this as well. That's brilliant. um Simon, a lot of the people that listen to this are technical founders or aspiring technical founders, all aware of EOS on some level. I'll put your LinkedIn in the in the notes. I assume like if people can't make the conference, you're happy for folks to reach out to you and and just how about anything you've picked up here or more?
00:21:01
Speaker
Sure, sure, sure. I mean, you know, and it's it's something that I love doing, love sharing experience, if I can help even with just giving them an idea um or or getting them interested more into EOS and also, you know, get them in touch perhaps with other EOS implementers across Europe depending on where they are.
00:21:23
Speaker
um I'm even like now trying to to build this in in Italy as well. So it's an important thing for us to actually grow this awareness throughout Europe. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Look forward to chatting to you again soon.