In this tactical episode, Eric Crews, Founder and CEO of Crews & co, shares how he guided 100+ organizations to increased and sustainable profitability.
You will learn the value of great business coaching in entrepreneurship and the characteristics of a good consultant.
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I am here with an absolutely high demand coach. And that is Mr. Eric Crews. Eric is passionate about helping companies achieve their growth goals. And he’s guided over 100 organizations to increase and sustainable profitability while simultaneously optimizing their operations and instituting elevated quality of life for their leadership teams. There’s so much in there to unpack, Eric, and I can’t wait to explore just what each of those elements mean. But before we get there, first, welcome to the show. And I’d love to just start with your story. How’d you get into coaching? And why did you ultimately make the leap?
Eric Crews
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I got into coaching. I’m a longtime member of a group called The Entrepreneurs Organization. I’m sure you’ve heard a bunch of yours associated with yours. That was the past Presidents Organization. I’ve been in that group for almost 17 years. So big shout out to EO IF people want to get involved in something. And I had some regular businesses, some non coaching businesses that I’ve owned for years. Love, I’ve owned a lot service businesses, and I still do on some regular service businesses. And the companies that I worked with, we’re scaling nationally. So EO, after I was president said, Can you help out some companies that are under the sub million dollar mark? Get them over the million dollar mark? Can you do that as a volunteer? And I did that for years, I probably worked with 2025 CEOs as a volunteer. And then a couple of them said, Can you help out more on a paid basis, and I said, Sure, getting a few clients. I started doing that maybe 10 years ago. And then I evolved and I became an EOS implementer. And one of the first year was implementers, way back when in New England, eight or nine years ago. And I had no intention of growing a consulting business or coaching business. But I worked in the Eos world for years. EOS was a great system. And ultimately, we ended up leaving and finding, founding our own consulting company, because we’re so focused on results. And we really do appreciate the value of an operating system. But we also want to be more accountable to the results that our clients get. So I kind of wind it up here by accident. And I still have regular businesses actually, I still own, I have a partner, we own a commercial, a commercial painting company that’s scaling nationally right now, and almost made the inc 500, actually two years ago. So my world’s about working with entrepreneurs in our current our crews and CO works with, like 105 companies actively right now across the United States. My whole world has been about scaling entrepreneurs, but it came from helping them as a volunteer. And it all comes from the spirit of that I also am an entrepreneur, and I’m just humbled to be able to work with them, honestly. Yeah. It’s not easy space to be in.
Scott Ritzheimer
Well, that is absolutely the truth. So that was one of the questions is I was just looking through some of your website and materials ahead of this. One of the things that I noticed is how much entrepreneurial experience you have yourself, and how do you think that shapes your approach as a coach and consultant with your clients.
Eric Crews
So first of all, I can’t stand consultants, and I have a consulting company. So and sometimes it can’t stand me either. So I gotta be careful. So it’s, I have a strong belief, our firm focused on small and medium sized companies, we focus on companies that are from one or $2 million, usually, and size, up to you know, we work with numbers are up to half a billion. So but we’re focused, our goal is to have provide consulting, services, finance services, whatever they need for consulting to a market that typically cannot. Really, they can’t, they can’t afford it. So, you know, for us, where we’re trying to scale into this whole thing and, and do this, and, you know, it’s, you know, I don’t even that’s what that’s what inspires me to do it. And that’s kind of how we ended up and, you know, that’s that’s kind of the gist of it really.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. One of the main reasons I started this podcast is because I, you know, I get to travel across the country, I get to work with lots of CEOs and teach folks around the world. And one of the things that I noticed is that so many of them have had a bad coaching or consulting experience, to the extent of like, I, you know, I’d say, hey, how many of you have had a coach or consultant in the past and somewhere on nine out of 10 hands would go up in the circles that I’m in? I say, How many of you had a bad coaching consulting experience and about nine out of 10 of those had a bad experience with a coach or consultant and so, you know, I don’t want that to rag on the coaching consulting industry. In fact, the reason I started the podcast was to say, Hey, this is what great coaches look like. So, tell me a little bit about I would say what that means to you is like I do Don’t like consultants, I don’t even like being one some days. But how do we overcome that?
Eric Crews
So you’re getting around, you know, some great questions here. So it. So one, I am lucky. And I mean truly lucky. I just happen to be in the right place at the right time and a few different things. One, I have a great coach. So I was coached by somebody who was great for years. And so I learned about the format of coaching from somebody who’s phenomenal at it. And I was one of his earlier clients, too. I’m still an entrepreneur. So in my companies are in the 10s of millions of dollars I’ve had, I’ve had 11,000 employees in a time I’ve been an entrepreneur. And I’ve been through it all. extreme difficulties. Extreme successes. And I think the reason that I don’t like Consultants is because they have a playbook. If they’re good, hopefully, they have a playbook. But you can end up in consulting, if you’re not good at what you’re doing. And we got lucky, you know, I was an EOS implementer, and more powered all powered EOS great systems who were listening to using EOS good for you. I know it’s a scaling up people. So I know them quite well. I’ve been an EO forever. I own my own business. So I kind of built we built an operating system in our company, that was the, that takes the operational, a lot of the operational strength from EOS, a lot of the strategy from scaling up, and then applies it to the knowledge that we have from actually running companies. And we have a core value of your business is our business. And so we catch ourselves, we call a quarterly meeting mindset, we try and get ourselves out of the mindset of we’re in a room, we’re having a conversation like this, and you’re like, Well, you want to say certain things like the answer is right people write seats? And the answer is you want to do this. And I’m like, Yeah, we lean into cliches to like I love cliches. But at some point, we try and get it out to what do we actually do in this situation? Right? And when we apply that filter to it, it’s usually a different answer, it’s the playbook tells us that we have a huge elaborate system, you know, we have a, you know, an operating system we help our clients with and we rely on it, we have, it’s, we’re kind of, you know, we can be rigid on it. But we’re only as rigid as we as we need to be, to be realistic with the client we’re talking to in their situation. So, you know, I say, consultants, although I work with a bunch of them, and I am one, I think the only way you should do this job is if you care almost as much about your clients as you do, or really as much about your own clients as you do your own business. And so, and most consultants don’t do that. And they they charge a lot of money and build scalable models. I appreciate it. I like my whole business is about scalable models. But I think the scalable model for us is, what is this one client doing? Are they successful or not? Are we doing that 100 times, yes, but we care about the one client, and we watch all their metrics internally. So we judge our success based on revenue, growth, profitability, growth, and valuation. So we come up with a formula for those things. And we have a consultant team of 11 people. If we don’t think those numbers are going the right direction, we consider ourselves to be a failure. And we try and come up with whatever we need to do to help them succeed. You know, we’re kind of like the anti consultant consultant in that way. And it’s not easy. You know, our business proposition is not an easy one. But, you know, we happen to be good at it. So I guess work?
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. What would you say is some of the most important work you’re doing with your clients right now?
Eric Crews
That’s another great question. Important work? So? Well, it goes back to a question you might ask me soon, which is around kind of what lessons people should be learning and things they should be doing. So you know, I guess I do have a great coach. So we have tons and tons of things we focus on in a client’s business, we focus on strategy, we focus on people, we focus on operations, we focus on finance. But the consultants cheat sheet, in my opinion, where coaches cheat sheet is that 90% of the game is getting the right people in the right seats back to that cliche. So when we lean into it, and we’re overcomplicating things, I would say the most important thing we’re trying to do, especially at the senior leadership level, if we’re working depending on the size of the firm, is we’re trying to make sure they’re the right people the right seats, but not only the right people, the right seats, the right people, the right seats for where they are as an organization at that time, and that’s a big thing. People say well, like that cliche from Jim Collins gets a lot gets a lot of traction because it’s great. The right the right seats needs to it’s more important. It’s regular right seats for where you are as a business at this very moment. And then we help them map out. This is what looks like right now q1 2023. What should that look like in q2 by q2 2024. It should look like this. So we give people a vision for how people can accelerate their business, which is not easy to do. But we don’t, you know, our businesses are scaling, they’re growing. So they get stuck a lot with these people. And they can’t figure how to map to get to the next location. And I say, Well, how long can this person make it in this role? Maybe another $2 million? Okay, then we got to be careful that we don’t try and push it to $4 million. Because we’re gonna get over our skis there. Yeah, that’s probably the most important work that we do. I would say.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. I just could not agree more with that content. Because where right people right seats tends to drive me crazy is that we think of it in absolutes. This is a good person or a bad person, because the right person or the wrong person, you know, and, and it creates really, really lousy team dynamics and awkward conversations when it’s growing. Because it’s like, well, if we said they were the right person back then why is it that they’re not the right person? Oh, because they’re bad somehow, right? That tends to be one of the few tools we have left to explain it. If we don’t embrace this idea of when so I love love that you identified that. I want to dig in a little bit deeper, because you’re doing this a lot for clients. And it’s a really, really powerful principle. What would you say are some of the patterns or principles that you use to help clients identify what’s right for right now?
Eric Crews
Huh! This is probably not your first podcast? I bet it’s not? That’s a great question. All right. So that’s a hard question. Don’t you everything else easier, like personally what happened to me in my lifetime or something? All right. So what do you got to figure out? That’s a big question. And I’m gonna give you the micro version, in our opinion, one, you got to figure out what kind of businesses actually is like, so how does this business actually scale? Is it a business that scales through hiring reps to sell this product? Is it an organic business? Is it a referral business? Like, what’s the engine that makes this business grow? You got to kind of think about that. So some businesses grow with referrals, some business grows out of marketing, and content, some people grow up product differentiation, some people grow off hiring sales reps, there’s all these different growth models that exist out there. So you got to figure out what your growth engineers because you have to have the right people in those seats that are heavy on those things that drive growth. Now that can look like a at a smaller company, a inexpensive bizdev hire guy lover, people as heavy growers commercial big painting business so large, because we have this amazing woman named Joanne, she’ll listen this podcast, and she’ll love this, you know, the best biz divers we’ve I’ve ever met. And but she has been pivotal in helping us grow our company. And people think, Well, you’re a huge company, how could that one person was so pivotal, because our growth engine because she accelerated our growth engine, and she was the right heart, we needed that time. So you got to figure out what your growth model is, what are your points are going to make your company grow, and then make sure you have the level of talent needed to grow you. Ideally, I picked three years out. So ideally, you can hire if you’ve mapped out your three year vision, ideally, this person you’re hiring, can get you to three years. So if you’re if you’re a 2 million, you’re trying to get to say 4,000,003 years, I would say can I get you to 4 million? No, how far can they get you 3 million? Okay, well, then, let’s try and map out what that next person looks like. And, you know, if it’s a marketing person, if it’s if it’s a market driven thing, and the marketer is not going to make it, I’m gonna say, look, you’re gonna have to go heavy on price tag on a price point on this marketing secret, that’s how your business accelerates. If it’s a referral type business, I’m going to probably say you’re gonna have to go heavy on quality control, and up so do you want to spend a lot of money in that seat. And then as the scales, it really gets down to the typical C suite, you know, is struggling bigger, you gotta get I’ve had to finance you got to have a head of sales, and you got to have a head of ops. And then you got to have a, you know, President or, you know, general manager or whatever, you’re calling it an integrator, if you’re an EOS person, but you need somebody to do that. But in the early days, though, you only have limited amount of funds. So I would invest first, I get this question a lot. First, I’d invest in things are going to make you money. And then I would also make sure you cover operational quality at the same time, at the level that the cheapest level you can you can afford to keep the quality high. That’s how that’s how we do it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Oh, that is so good. There’s so much wisdom in that for folks and and what it does, I think there’s two big things that it does it just relieves the pressure for folks who are trying to overhead too soon. Right? Because if you hear it you got to have a players. You know, there’s this immense pressure on especially small businesses, those million dollar sub million dollar to compete with outrageous salaries relative to what they could afford, right? And so the specificity of that Last comment is just his incredible and it’s gonna be really helpful if you’re listening, rewind and listen to that, again, because it’s really great advice. Second thing about that is, you know, a lot of different tools and platforms will talk about an org chart or an accountability chart or fill in the blank, you know, whatever you want to call it. And I’ve found a lot of people will resist that at first, because it feels like why are we doing that? It’s just, it’s kind of like your, you know, p&l to an extent, it just explains what happened in the past. But what you’re talking about is using an org chart as a planning tool. And it’s an absolute game changer.
Eric Crews
Yes, that’s right. Yeah, that’s. We focus on people operations, finance, and strategy. So you know, if we had a bunch of hours, you know, I could probably talk to you about all this stuff. And you would probably give me a lot of wisdom that you’ve heard from all these people. But for the people part, in my opinion, 90% of the game is people, even if you’re a product company, like you have to have somebody who’s going to be innovative the product. So your company, to the degree that you’re able to make the necessary staffing changes, at the right points in your company, as it grows, in my opinion, is that almost in direct relation to the ability that you are going to be able to hit your growth targets. Now, that’s a very difficult statement, because what it means is that you have to be able to have very difficult conversations, you have to often invest, invest ahead of where you are, sometimes you have to bring in fractional talent. But you have to have a both extremely compassionate and caring, personality, he had to love your team. And you have to be able to maneuver people from into seats where they’re, they sit, and they may listen, they may last for 1020 years, it’s possible. But if they get to their ceiling, you have to then find the person that can do that role for the next couple of years. And then elegantly move that next person into maybe the reporting into that person. And if you don’t master that art, your business won’t grow. And your team will get cheated out of career development, honestly. So people say, Well, I love that person as to well, how much you’re blocking their career. Because, you know, they’re they don’t know any more than we’re gonna, they’re not gonna learn here. And so when you find amazing talent as you grow, the people that initially resisted it, always say the same thing, which is, I’m so thankful you hired that person, I’ve kept my job, they end up making more money, because now they’re more leveraged, they’re better leveraged, and they have a better path. So but, you know, it’s like, it’s like, I don’t like consultants, me being one of them. Because that’s hard. Like, that’s when we say that we know. That’s not easy, like this person, five years. And they say, well, that person in your five years, and I say, well, that’s terrible. But that fact does not change this fact. And I think that we still need to maneuver around that organization. So we do map it out, intentionally. And then if a company says, Well, I know that that we need to make that change, but we’re not comfortable, we want to wait nine months, we say, no problem. Nine months is better than never. So then we map that out. And we get agreement on that it may and sometimes help help, it helps people to say, I gotta prepare the company for that move. How would I do it in nine months? Great. Let’s put it in the map for nine months out. And you know, and that’s how we do it. So we look at companies as this progression. And if people can stay in the seats for a long time. That’s amazing. But generally speaking, if you do this, right, everybody wins in the organization if you do it, right. And if you don’t get it, right, everybody in the organization loses. Yeah, and I can’t, I can’t tell you this enough. And I just myself, I’m on my own organization, to the degree that you leave the wrong person in a seat, that part of the business generally stops completely. And if you have the rest of the business accelerating the right level, you really can create problems. So you know, that’s my experience on that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I made that mistake more times than I came out. Yeah, me too. And yeah, I would say, if you look at every big kind of inflection point in a business, it is at least one or two people decisions that’s in between you in that, you know, you can, you can bring in a consultant, you can teach strategies and tactics until you’re blue in the face. But if you don’t have the right people to execute on those, then they’re just not going to stick if they have a goal.
Eric Crews
And that’s the broad strokes. I mean, there’s 1000 things that are more to it. There are additional to that, but that one will definitely stop. Yeah, there’s no question about that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And for those of you listening, I just want to pause for a second and say, what Eric has done so far in this conversation, I’ve asked him about four or five questions that each are about an hour long answer, and he’s done all of this in about 15-20 minutes. So just a masterful articulation of just some really, really profound topics and an Eric, I want to do this to you one more time I did give you a heads up about this one, and and so we’ll make it a little easier. But I love to ask every one of my guests this one question that is, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish everybody listening today knew?
Eric Crews
So this is a big one. And many firms do know this. Don’t be careful how I say this. This is also a reflection on me, because I have done what I’m about to say, in my opinion is a big secret, I did not likely even get right until maybe I was in my 52, probably that I was late 30s or 40s. And it’s why I have no regrets in my life or anything. But the one thing I would say I wish I’d done more of my entire career is being more strategic about things. Now, here’s what I mean by that. So you can get work with operating systems that focus on operations. And you can be an EO I know or Vistage, whatever group you’re in. And you a lot of stuff is about Operation about how do you run a better business, right people right seats is operations really. But ultimately, when we work with a company, I asked them assuming everything was fixed, which we can usually fix the company in a year and a half, two years, we can usually fix it. The company that won’t make you grow, necessarily, it might help, like, it might help you to do better. The companies that everybody idolizes, a lot of them are not even that well run, honestly, they’re just have a thing that is sold, because they thought of it. And people think, Well, Steve Jobs is a great entrepreneur, I would say Steve Jobs is an innovative entrepreneur, and he was extremely intelligent. But I don’t think he read books about how to run a better company. Like, I don’t think that’s in his bookshelf, right? Like, he’s not watching any of this stuff. You know, Bill Gates, I don’t think he doesn’t even like people, right. Like, he’s like, he said, he built a great machine. So I think there’s a confusion that if you’re gonna go in and fix the operations of your business, that you’re gonna have this great home run. And I do agree, that’s extremely important, and we focus on it big time. But we then focus on if we’re trying to go from $3 million to $6 million, or from $6 million to $30 million. Once we get operationally fixed up, what strategies do we need to be employing? What is our actual strategy into the market? What’s gonna give us no friction into the market? And that’s not an easy question. Because you have to have addressable market, you got to make sure that what you’re selling is needed by people. And you got to do your homework on that, which nobody does, honestly. Other than just they think people like it, you have to really ask yourself, Am I innovating something here? Is this do I should I be my innovating something in which case, you better be good at innovation? If that’s what you’re good at? Or am I do I have a commodity here, in which case, you better be able to do it faster, stronger and cheaper, faster, cheaper and easier to use, but you have to be, you got to figure out what your scaling proposition is. And you got to figure what differentiates you. Because it’s not enough to say, I’m just gonna get it done. And I spent a long time in my life, just saying, I’m gonna figure it out, I’m gonna die trying. And I wish I’d taken like 10 or 15 of those years, and just said, Wait a second, before I die drying? should I even be doing this in the first place? Yeah. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are like, tenacity never quit. And I in our company, I say, look, never quit, unless it’s stupid. If you don’t know what you’re doing, in which case, quit. Like, it’s, you got to step back. And you have to figure out, Is this smart? Do I have the right strategy? Am I looking at the right things. And now, let’s make sure we don’t give up and not quit having great operational business. But I didn’t do that till I was 40 years old. So you know, it would have changed, I would have done things differently, I probably would have picked different spaces to be in I would have played in different markets, I would look the value prop a lot different differently. But you know, so that would be my biggest, biggest answer.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s exceptional, exceptional advice. And thank you for sharing it, because there’s not easy lessons to learn. And so those of you who heard it and have the opportunity to skip some of the pain of those lessons, I would strongly encourage you take, take Eric up on it, but All right, so in just a second, I want to figure out how we can get folks connected to you where they can find more about you. But before we get there, I want to have you take off your consultant hat for a moment, put on your entrepreneur CEO hat and talk to us a little bit more. It’s a great segue, just the strategy. What do you think is next for growth for you, particularly on your coaching, consulting business?
Eric Crews
It’s a great question. So ultimately, we are truly entrepreneurs. So when I go work with a client or our companies or consulted with a client, we’re just working with another entrepreneur who’s likely having some type of challenges we are depending on what phase of the journey they are. So our consulting company, I mean, I know it’d be very honest, our companies are all in different phases. We own and our consulting company is about a, you know, I think we’re about a $5 million business, okay. So that’s where we are. And we have goals to, to grow, and all this other stuff. But to do that we are working right now significant we realize, you know, we’re cracks that we preach, I look at it like if we’re operationally strong, our clients love us we have very low churn, it will stay with us for a very long time. That is not going to fly. We’ll us into our numbers, it just won’t. So we are currently working on what is the flywheel mechanism inside our business, the Jim Collins thing, two or three things that are going to work together in tandem, to help spin up our business so that it spins and grows frictionlessly in the market, we’re working on what are those two or three legs of the stool? They’re going to get that flywheel going. Because we are growing, we’re growing at a rapid rate. But we’re not going to grow at the rate that our I look at our team’s numbers, I look at his numbers. And I’m like, Yeah, I don’t buy that. Like we don’t have the flywheel for that. So we’re trying to build that flywheel and figure out what that is, is it? Is it marketing mechanisms? Is it structure? Is it offerings in the market? What’s going to make the market to say I want that, and then we’re not to work as hard. So that’s what we’re working on. We’re getting closer. We have some companies that we own, the consulting business is not one of them. I think the consulting business, we have like one of the three legs of the stool, right right now, in our commercial painting business. Actually, we almost have all three legs. They’re starting to flywheel up. But our companies are in different phases. So the consulting business though, oh, yeah, we’re obsessing over that problem right now.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. Wow. What a fantastic conversation, Eric. It was just an absolute delight having you on the show. Just an honor. I’m so glad you’re here. To everyone who is listening your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Eric Crews
Passionate about helping companies achieve their growth goals, Eric has guided 100+ organizations to increased and sustainable profitability while simultaneously optimizing their operations and instituting elevated quality of life for their leadership teams.
Want to learn more about Eric’s work at Crews & co? Check out his website at https://www.crewsandco.com
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