March 2021. An off the grid ranch in Texas, six people from my leadership team, and the end of me trying to bring lessons home secondhand.

Six people from my leadership team are in the Big Fish bus with me and there is an hour of Texas going by outside the window.

Covid was still strong enough that you could not really gather anywhere, so some guy was throwing this thing on a ranch off the grid where nobody cared whether people gathered. A bunch of entrepreneurs looked at that and said yeah, let us go.

An hour from the airport, no Ubers out there. Somebody set up a group before the trip so people could carpool.

I did not need a carpool. I had the bus.

You cannot reheat a room

For years I did what everybody does. Go to the conference. Take the notes. Come home lit up. Stand in front of the team on Monday and try to hand it over.

It has never worked. Not one time.

You cannot reheat a room. You can bring back a framework and two good lines, and everybody nods, and by Thursday it's gone, because nobody sitting there felt any of it. They didn't sit next to a guy at dinner who is four years further down the road than they are.

So I figured, all right, I'll just take everybody with me. I called it a culture experience and a work trip and breaking bread together, which sounds like a man justifying an expense. It was. It was also exactly what it was.

The math you are already doing

I know what most of you are going to do with this. Open a calculator.

Six flights. Six rooms. Six seats at a thing. Six guys not producing for three days. Then you'll look at that number and decide this is not the right quarter.

It is never the right quarter.

You'll wrap a truck for that number and never think about it again. You'll buy a booth at a home show where nobody remembers your name by Sunday. You'll hand it to a lead source that already burned you twice. But six people who have handed you their working lives, and all of a sudden you are the most disciplined CFO in America.

Say the actual sentence. You don't think they're worth it. You think you are the asset and they are the overhead, and every number you ran after that was math built backwards to protect a feeling you already had.

The timing, because the timing is the story

I want the dates down, because this is the part I still think about.

I kicked off EOS in November of 2020. Four months in. I had just hired the man who would run the operating side of my company and he had not even started yet. He started April first. The ranch was in March.

So I put six people on a bus and drove them into Texas at the exact moment my company was the least stable it had been in years, with a brand new operating system half installed and my key hire not on the payroll.

Every reasonable voice in my head said wrong quarter.

It was the right quarter. I believe a team that is about to go through a hard change has to break bread before the change, not after. Culture is not something you install once the systems are running. Culture is the thing that lets people survive the installation.

The van is the trip

Nobody puts this in the budget line.

The conference is not the trip. The van is the trip. The ride to the airport, the dead hour at the gate, the hour of Texas out to the ranch, the table at the end of the day.

In a conference room, every man on your team is wearing the version of himself that gets him through the meeting. That version is good. It is also a costume, and a costume gets heavy. Nobody can hold one up for an hour of Texas. Somewhere out on that road it slips, and whatever is underneath starts talking.

I learned more about those men on that drive than I had learned across the table from them in our own building, and I ran good meetings.

Here's what I did not plan for. My costume got tired too. They watched how I handled a delayed flight, how I talked to the woman at the front desk, whether I listened to the speaker or sat in the back working my phone. I thought I was showing my team a conference. I was showing them me. It ended up more helpful for me than it was for them, and I did not see that coming.

The seat

On that trip a guy hopped a ride with us. That's the whole event. He needed a ride and there was room in the bus.

That ride turned into a working relationship that paid for years, that put me in front of rooms all over the country, that got me reps at my craft I could not have bought at any price. It ended eventually. Different story, different lessons.

I did not go to Texas for that. I couldn't have. I went so my people could see something outside our own building, and there was an open seat.

The seat had to exist first. God fills empty seats. He has never once filled a spreadsheet. And none of it happens to the man who stayed home to watch the numbers.

What to do about it

Don't overthink this. It is not a program.

Pick one thing on the calendar you were going to go to alone. Take four people. Not the four you like the most. The four who most need to see what you have seen.

Do not fly them separately to save an hour. The travel is the point. Get in the vehicle.

Do not build an agenda for the drive. Nothing kills the van like an agenda.

Then eat together. Every meal you can. I've stopped trying to explain why breaking bread works. I run a barbecue at my house every summer for this exact reason. Two bounce houses, a DJ, two food trucks, thirty kids tearing around the yard. I curate the entire list, and every year five or six people find their way in that I have never met. I let them. How am I ever going to meet new people if I never meet new people?

Same principle as the bus. Get the right humans in one place, feed them, and get out of the way.

The part I still get wrong

I'm still catching myself doing the exact thing I just told you not to do.

I travel a lot. I bring people with me less than I should, because the calendar's tight and the flights add up and Old Benny would rather just go alone and get it done. Every single time I do bring somebody, I get more out of it than I expected, and I tell myself

I'll do it more. Then a quarter goes by and I've got a fresh set of reasons.

I am not writing this from the far side of the lesson. I'm about two thirds of the way in.

There is a seat open on your next trip and you already know whose name goes in it. You knew it before you got to this paragraph.

Say the name out loud. Then say your reason out loud.

Which one of those two sounded ridiculous?

Prepared by Benny Fisher | Visionary Navigator | bennyfisher.com