Chris Davies · Certified EOS Implementer®
I ran a business for exactly twenty years. Then I sold it. Now I spend my weeks in rooms with leadership teams helping them do the thing I wish I’d done sooner: get clear, get aligned, and stop relying on heroics.
That’s the short version. Here’s the longer one.
The business
In 2002, in my twenties, I co-founded an IT services business in Geelong. Two of us, 50/50, a handful of clients, and no idea what we were doing. We bootstrapped it, grew the client base, hired people, and built something that looked, from the outside, like it was working.
From the inside it was the full small-business roller coaster. Revenue contraction. Cash that never sat still. Great people I didn’t manage well, and good people I let stay in the wrong seat for too long.
About ten years in, we nearly ran out of money. That’s also when the partnership ended.
Clarity, alignment and accountability were the missing pieces. We had plenty of effort and plenty of goodwill, but no shared picture of where we were going, no agreed way to decide, and no habit of having the hard conversation before it became the only conversation. When you’re about to run out of cash, time is your enemy. One of us had to go. It ended in a buy-out.
Here’s the honest bit. If I’d known then what I know now, that partnership may well have survived. And when a partnership doesn’t build those things, it’s not just the business at risk. It’s the relationship underneath it.
The turnaround
What got us out wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was the team.
We got everyone around one idea: look after the customers we’ve got, and keep them. We rebuilt the business on service and retention. It worked. Slowly, then properly. That was my first real lesson in what a galvanised team can do, and it’s still the thing I care most about in a room.
Then we found EOS.
The ceiling
I read Traction®. I self-implemented for a while, and I’ll defend that to anyone. It’s a valid path, and plenty of good businesses take it. But there’s a line I’ve heard that stuck: you can drive yourself from Melbourne to Sydney. It’s just faster, and a lot less stressful, if you let someone fly you there.
So I brought in an Implementer. Over the next five years we ran the business on real structured operating rhythms, properly implemented this time. We doubled revenue and tripled profit. We’d built a company someone wanted to buy. In 2022, twenty years to the year after we started, we sold it. I stayed through the handover and walked out the door in 2023.
I’m not telling you that to impress you. I’m telling you because when your team hits one of those walls, I’ve been on the other side of it. That matters in the room.
What’s next
Business owners ask me all the time: how did you know what you’d do after you sold?
Honestly, I didn’t. While you’re running a business, everything is always changing. “What’s next?” is a horizon. It keeps moving away, just out of sight. It’s only when the decision to sell is made, or the completion date starts getting close, that things have the chance to become clear and the next thing can actually show itself.
For me, Eb saw it before I did. She pointed out that what I loved was the art and science of business, and the people I loved doing it with were growth-oriented owners. The ones who want help, and are willing to be open and honest to get it. Fun, respectful, curious, coachable.
That’s who I work with now. I became a Certified EOS Implementer, and since then I’ve spent 165+ full days in the room with 25 leadership teams across Geelong, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney. Most of the teams I start with are still with me.
New to EOS? The model and the process are explained properly on my EOS Worldwide page →. This site is about whether I’m the right person to take you through it.
Two kinds of business I know from the inside
I’ll work with any leadership team that’s ready to do the work. But there are two I understand in a way you can’t learn from a book.
Business partnerships. Especially 50/50. If you and your partner are pulling in different directions, or you’ve stopped saying the real thing in the room, or you’ve quietly started wondering how this ends, I’ve had that exact year. EOS gives a partnership a way to decide things that isn’t “whoever’s louder.” Build the clarity early and you protect two things at once: the business, and the friendship that started it. I can help you get there before it costs what it cost me.
Husband-and-wife and family-led businesses. Eb and I have worked together for over a decade. In the IT business, and now in this one. It works. It doesn’t work by accident. Separating the seat from the marriage, being clear about who decides what, and having a rhythm that keeps work at work: that’s most of it, and it’s learnable. If your business is also your family, we’ve done the thing you’re trying to do.
How I work
Three things, mostly.
Calm. Clients describe me as a calm, grounded presence, and I’ll take that. Reactive rooms don’t solve issues. My job is to lower the temperature enough that your team can say the things that matter without blowing things up.
Curiosity, Care, Concern. In that order. Ask before you assume. Care about the person before the problem. Then be direct about the concern, because clarity is kindness and vagueness isn’t.
No hero. I’m not there to tell you what to do. I’m there to make sure you do what you already know you should, and to hand you the tools so that in 18 to 24 months you don’t need me.
More on the three hats I wear (Teacher, Facilitator, Coach) on How We Work →.
Two seats. One team.
Every EOS journey has two seats that matter most: the Visionary and the Integrator™. I’ve sat in one. Eb has sat in the other.
In the IT business, Ebony Davies (Eb) held the People & Culture seat. On paper. In practice she was doing the work of an Integrator before either of us had a name for it: taking a Visionary’s ideas (mine, mostly) and turning them into things that actually happen, holding the operating rhythm together, and following through on decisions after everyone had gone back to their day jobs. Since then she’s sat in the Integrator seat formally for other businesses, so she’s seen it from more than one side.
Now she runs this practice, and she’s the reason it runs. But that undersells it. When your Integrator is drowning, or your Visionary and Integrator can’t hear each other, or the plan from the quarterly quietly dies by week three, Eb has been there. She brings that lens to how we set your team up, how we follow up between sessions, and how we help you make the tools stick.
Two seats. One team. You get both.
Outside the room
After the sale, Eb and I made the tree change. We live on a farm halfway between Geelong and Lorne, amongst the trees, the grass and the kangaroos. I have all the gear and no idea. My cattle and sheep farming neighbours find me amusing, and they’re not wrong.
I’ve sat on a few boards over the years. Enough to work out, later than I’d like to admit, that I get far more joy coaching leadership teams than governing organisations. So that’s where the time goes now.
If any of that sounds like your business, let’s talk.
90 minutes, no charge, no pitch. You’ll learn how EOS works, I’ll learn whether I can help, and we’ll both know if it’s a fit.