EOS® Implementer in Santa Barbara

Two hours up the 101

Santa Barbara is a long way from my Santa Monica office, an hour and a half on a good day and two hours on a normal one. I won’t claim to be your local implementer. What I can offer a Santa Barbara team is a plan that respects the distance instead of fighting it.

The plan is simple. Quarterly sessions, and the annual that takes the place of one of them, happen in person at your office or a room you choose. The rest runs over video. The opening days, a Focus Day and two Vision Building days, go better with everyone in one room, so we settle at the start where those happen. Video for the rest is less of a compromise than it sounds, because the most frequent EOS meeting, the weekly Level 10, is run by your team without an implementer anyway.

A smaller economy than the reputation

Santa Barbara’s economy is smaller and more varied than its postcard. Goleta holds the technology companies, many started by people who came through UC Santa Barbara, along with research and defense-related firms. Santa Barbara itself has hospitality, wine, real estate, healthcare and a lot of professional firms. Montecito means wealth management and family offices. Carpinteria has agriculture, greenhouse growers especially, and a handful of manufacturers.

Plenty of owners here moved to Santa Barbara to have a life outside the business, and then built a business that would not let them have one. That is the dependency problem with a view, and it is the one I work on.

Distance cuts the other way too. When the implementer drives two hours, nobody on the team treats the quarterly day as movable. Put the four days on the calendar at the start of the year, like board meetings, and protect them.

Running EOS at a distance

The rhythm looks like this. The weekly Level 10 Meeting runs every week with your team and no implementer in the room. The Scorecard and the Rocks live in one shared place the whole team can see and update. I come up for each quarterly session, which resets the next ninety days: review the last quarter, solve the biggest issues, set new Rocks. When something gets stuck between quarters, a video call is the fix, not a drive.

It works because EOS puts the discipline in the team’s weekly habits rather than in the implementer’s visits. A team that keeps its weekly meeting sharp needs its implementer four or five times a year, and those days are worth making in person.

Industry guide: EOS® for Staffing and Recruiting Firms in Los Angeles