From the Military to an 8x Exit

I recently sat down with John on the GO4CEO channel to talk through my whole arc: sergeant, business owner, EOS Implementer, and now founder of Go Expand. Here is the long version of that conversation, written down for the owners and operators who did not catch the episode.

It started with stripes, not a strategy deck

I got out of all my different uniforms in 1999. Before that I was a sergeant in two organizations at once: civilian law enforcement in the Department of Corrections, and the Army National Guard as a Military Police soldier. I got my stripes early. Picture a 23 or 24 year old sergeant leading officers in their 50s. They called me the boy sergeant, and it was a very interesting way to learn how to lead.

Here is what that taught me that I still build my whole business around: being great in the military and being great in business come down to the same thing, a commitment to excellence. In the military, once you sign the contract, the commitment is not up for discussion. You are writing an open check to the country for a set number of years. People do not enlist to get rich. They serve because it is a calling, because it is in their heart.

The civilian world is different in one important way. In the military, they issue you soldiers. They are not always a ten out of ten, and your job is to take fives and make them eights. In business, you get to recruit against millions of people for a limited number of roster spots. You get to choose. And if you are going to spend a third of your life with a group of people, eight to ten hours a day away from whoever your number one is, then it had better be an awesome group of people doing awesome things. The time you spend is roughly the same whether you are great or mediocre. The results are not even close.

Two brands, one mission

My personal brand is The Business Sergeant. It is my one-on-one leadership and CEO coaching business, and the whole point is bringing the military mindset to people who never served. Only about 7% of the living population has worn a uniform, which means 93% have not. A lot of folks always wanted to serve and never did. That is okay. I extracted the parts of military leadership that transfer cleanly into business and left the yelling and push-ups behind.

In fact, that is the subtitle of my book. Back in 2017 I wrote The Business Sergeant's Field Manual: Military-Grade Business Execution Without the Yelling and Push-Ups. It looks like an actual field manual on purpose. A military FM is something you refer to before you go do something, so you remind yourself of the task, the condition, and the standard. Before you walk into a hard conversation, you go to that chapter, tighten yourself up, and then go do the thing centered on solid methodology.

The newer brand is Go Expand, and it is a software company. I bought that premium domain seven or eight years ago and sat on it, knowing that someday something would be worthy of the name. I am not a technology guy, but I know what good technology looks like, and when I found the right software partner I spent a year customizing the platform. More on that below, because it solves a problem I watched my best clients struggle with for years.

Efficiency is where it starts

People ask how I got here. My last company, which I sold in 2011, was an energy-efficient remodeling business in the frozen tundra of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We took old post-World War homes, some with literal newspaper and corn husks in the walls, and rebuilt the building envelope with cellulose insulation, triple-pane windows, and fiberglass doors. It was the energy-credit years of 2008 through 2011, so a fifteen-hundred-dollar tax credit behind a project during a rough economy was a very good thing. Right place, right time. Efficiency is really where my whole way of thinking starts.

After I sold that company I started coaching from the hip. A year or two in, an old business partner named Andy told me I had to look at a program he was going through called EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I looked into it and thought, wow. It is not theory. It is a collection of practical tools from a bunch of different eras. I became an EOS Implementer in early 2014, trained personally by the founders, Gino Wickman and Don Tenny. I was somewhere around implementer number 55 or 60. Today there are about a thousand in the world. I was the first one in Colorado, and now there are more than 40 here. Traction, it turns out, gets traction.

The soul of your business is three questions

I am industry agnostic. I have coached healthcare companies, car dealerships, large contractors, one of the largest bike shops in America. I do not have a niche other than making good teams great and great teams world class, because the principles to lead, manage, and hold people accountable are the same no matter what you sell.

It starts with three questions that make up the soul of your business. Who are we, which is your core values. Why do we do what we do, which is your core focus. And what do we do, which is your niche. You would be surprised how many owners cannot answer those. So ask yourself honestly: are your core values words for the wall, or do they actually describe your team? What is the vibe of the tribe? Enron's stated values, as I recall, were excellence, integrity, and service to others, and their leadership team is just now getting out of prison. You can say anything. The culture has to match the marketing message, or you are being disingenuous.

On niche, you get rich in the niche. You cannot be everything to everyone. The market is as far as you can see. You can have a facial tissue company, or you can be Kleenex. Being first to scale in an emerging space is often all it takes to lead it. And if you do not want to be the biggest, find the sweet spot of your industry and simply outperform everyone in it, because people will pay more for excellence. Special is profitable. Commodities are priced accordingly.

Right people, right seats

If there is one idea I would tattoo on every owner's forearm, it is right people in the right seats. Right people share your core values. Right seat means they get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it. Both matter, and the combinations tell you everything.

Right person, right seat is the goal. Right person, wrong seat is usually our fault as leaders. We told someone they were the best we had, dropped them into a role with zero training and no development, and a year later we are surprised they are struggling. Wrong person, right seat is the brilliant jerk. They may be profitable, but you cannot build a great culture with jerks on the roster. Wrong person, wrong seat is the energy vampire, the oxygen thief. Those are easy to spot, because the boat goes faster without two hundred pounds of dead weight in it, even holding an empty oar.

Here is the part owners underestimate. If you get 90% of your company into the right seats, that 90% will clear out the last 10% for you. But if even 20% are wrong, that is enough of a foothold to frustrate the other 80% and create a retention problem with your best people. Your unicorns do not like sitting next to donkeys. You do not put a yoke on a unicorn.

Kill the subjectivity

The single biggest difference between my teams that soar and my teams that stall is not me. I am the same coach giving the same message. The difference is objectivity. The winning teams have data integrity and a way to see the truth. The struggling teams argue in circles about whether Bob is the right person, because if you look at it one way the answer is yes and another way it is maybe no.

So we get rid of that. Picture a scatter plot. Performance on one axis, alignment on the other. Green if you are in it, red if you are not. Performance is four things: your scorecard, your skill set, your rocks, which are your strategic initiatives, and your to-dos, meaning are you finishing 90% of what you promised each week. Alignment is your core values, your role fit, and your past reviews. High and to the right is green. Low and to the left is red. Now a middle manager can lead with green-go, red-stop simplicity instead of hanging onto a wrong-fit person for eight extra quarters.

I am not an expectations guy, I am an agreement guy, because expectations are resentments under construction. I tell you the number, I ask if you agree, and you agree. Now if you come in and lay eggs every week, it shows up visually and nobody can pretend otherwise, including you. That means we can take action swiftly instead of letting mediocrity run for years. The people moving the needle become the cool kids, not the ones telling the boss they love his shoes.

One more piece: connect your sergeants. I coach the leadership team, but I insist on meeting the management team too, because that is where execution actually happens. I take an extension cord and plug the two together. A couple years in, they finish each other's sentences and the us-versus-them disappears.

The proof is in the engagement

I do not deal in theory, so here is a proof point. I have my clients apply for the Best Places to Work awards through the Business Journals, like the Denver Business Journal here at home. You cannot write a check to win one. You need about an 80% employee response rate, the survey is completely anonymous, and it asks how they are treated, how the pay is, how communication and accountability feel. You cannot fake it, because a disenfranchised employee will let the feedback fly.

In almost twelve years I have run roughly 130 teams through the program. More than half have applied, and the running total is over 200 awards, with some clients winning seven or eight years in a row. Think about being 94% engaged on a survey when the average company, even ones making good money, sits in the 30s and 40s. That is a third party grading our work, and it is why I say the value proposition of working with me is results, period. A proven process with an 85% success rate. The 15% who do not make it are usually a narcissistic, broken founder out of touch with reality, or a team unwilling to make the people moves. I am the forest ranger here. I see a lot of trees, and I will tell you honestly when yours is not healthy.

Where Go Expand comes in

For years I watched my top teams all run a very similar stack of tools, and my struggling teams lash together a Franken-stack of five or six logins they only used 20 or 30% of. Operating-system software over here, people tools over there, and now AI, which people are either running toward or avoiding like the plague. Nobody gets a real ROI juggling six logins.

So Go Expand brings all three together in one curated suite. It runs your operating system, whether that is EOS with the exact licensed terms your team already knows, or a non-EOS version where you name things whatever you want. It handles performance, alignment, and engagement scoring, pulse surveys, dashboards, reviews, and unlimited personality assessments so you only interview people wired like your best performers. And it has an agentic AI agent, the company brain, so anyone can ask for the truth without disturbing anybody else. Because everyone lives in it, you would feel lost if you were not. It is the glue, especially for remote and hybrid teams, and it is priced per user on a volume basis, so it gets cheaper the more of your team is on it.

Go Expand is the dashboard, the tip of the spear. Whatever else you run, QuickBooks, Sage, anything in the roughly 7,000-app Zapier universe, we port the data in through the API. This is what the winners use. You can spend years figuring out your own stack, or you can come to goexpand.com and let the work that over a hundred of the best teams in America already did make it easy for you.

The bottom line

The name Go Expand is deliberate. Expansion means balanced, equal growth. If you double your sales leads but do not double your onboarding capacity, half those customers have a rough time, the one-star reviews catch up to you at scale, and your growth eats itself. Real execution is expanding in balance, not just throwing up big numbers and laying an egg in operations.

That is what I love about this work. Empowering other people is what gets me excited. If you want to talk about EOS, the Go Expand software, or one-on-one coaching, email me at chris@goexpand.com. I am in that inbox every day.