July 12, 2025 • 10 mins
Cheri Kuhn is an implementor with EOS Worldwide and is based in Seattle Washington. EOS is the Entrepreneurial Operating System that is currently used by thousands of small businesses across North America. It's based on the work of Gino Wickman who wrote "Traction" and "Rocket Fuel" and numerous other books on how to run a business successfully. On today's show we are talking about a few insights from working together. To connect with Cheri, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/cheri-kuhn
or email her directly at cheri.kuhn@eosworldwide.com
--------------
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso podcast, your morning
shot of what's new in the world of real estate investing.
I'm your host, Victor Minash. This is the WEEKEND edition.
We've got a very special show for you today.
We have a great guest all the way from Seattle, WA.
Welcome to the show, Sherry Kuhn.
Thank you so much, Victor. It's a pleasure to be here.
This is like the espresso Capital, right?
So this is very apropos. We've got.
(00:24):
Yeah, the Starbucks starting here.
It's perfect. Exactly.
Well, it's great to have you here and we've been working
together now for some time. I'm excited to share what some
of the work that we've been doing with the listeners.
But before we do, perhaps just give a little bit of your back
story and how you got to this point in your journey.
Sure. Well, you know, I actually
started my professional career as a teacher and teaching was,
(00:46):
you know, was full of bureaucracy.
And so that was frustrating for me, right.
It's like I enjoy the teaching part of teaching.
And so I made my entrepreneurialleap into commercial real
estate. Ironically enough, I did that
for several years. But what I discovered when I was
doing that was I had way more fun working with the business
owners, helping them to figure out how to really make their
(01:06):
business grow, like getting the lease and stuff in the building
block. That part wasn't as exciting for
me as as the business part. So I spent about 15 years then
working in and running small to medium sized businesses and I
came across this great opportunity to work with the
business owner at a small and struggling Internet company.
(01:26):
And the two of us together really blew that business up.
We had this sort of Ying and Yang relationship.
We later discovered through EOS that we'll talk about in a
minute. Visionary integrator.
And so we took that little smallcorset company from a nothing to
still to this day the largest off the rack corset company in
the world in the little town that I lived in, in Wenatchee,
(01:46):
WA. So and I set myself to be where
we are today, right. That was such a powerful process
for us that we I took it to everyone that would listen like
hey, I found the Holy Grail of how to run a business, let me
help you do the same thing. One of the things that we've
been implementing the entrepreneurial operating system
within our company now for several years.
We were doing it solo with a little bit of chewing gum and a
(02:10):
little bit of Scotch tape at times.
And then we made the decision tore implement it with some
professional help. Someone who's been working with
the process, training with the author of the book, Gina
Wickman. There's not just one book, of
course, there's rocket field, asmany books that talk about
(02:31):
different aspects of the process.
As we've been working together, we, we understand the process,
we understand the structure. But one of the things that you
helped us with a lot, bringing alot of clarity to the specific
disciplines that are needed as a, as a leadership team.
You want to talk a little bit about that because there's,
(02:52):
there's many facets to it. There's there's time, there's
there's focus, there's getting the right people in the right
chairs. There's many different elements.
So really I think where the benefit of having help is that
the tools are amazing, right? The the EOS toolbox that Gino
created really takes the complexity of running a great
business and brings it into thisreally pretty simple.
(03:15):
But simple is not easy way to torun a business.
Why I think this is so hard to do is there's a lot you just you
kind of hit on it, Victor, when you said there's a lot of layers
and there's a deeper understanding to the why and the
context behind the tools. And if I can help you better
understand what this tool is going to do for you and why it's
(03:36):
important and what its impact issupposed to be, then you as
leaders, I think do a better jobof now leveraging and to make
that tool unique and useful to you as an organization instead
of just plugging some words intosome blank spaces, right?
That that doesn't transform yourbusiness.
It makes it run better. It's helpful.
But transformation only happens when you really understand the
(03:58):
intention behind the tools and you understand as leaders, this
is my passion. My, I always tell people, my
passion is helping people becomethe best version of themselves.
EOS is just my vehicle. You have to understand as
leaders, it's not just enough tohave great tools.
Without the people are everything.
Without you coming along this journey of change and growth and
(04:19):
development, you're not going toget what you want.
So you have to be willing to undergo that same transformation
as your business. When we're running our own
operations meetings, we have folks that are taking the
minutes that are running the agenda, that are perhaps even
leading the executive sessions. It's very difficult to do that
(04:41):
part and be an active participant at the same time.
And one of the things that we'veseen by working with you is that
we were actually all able to fully participate because the
mechanics of going through the process was basically taken off
of our shoulders. We're all still actively engaged
(05:02):
in it, of course, but we weren'tnecessarily having to turn the
crank ourselves, at least in terms of the mechanics of the
process and just that separation.
It got rid of, I think, a certain level of multitasking.
Whereas is it my facilitator hatthat I'm wearing right now or my
sales lead hat? Exactly.
(05:22):
It was, it was funny because before a most recent session,
one of your team leads actually reached out to me and said I
usually do this and this and this.
I'm like, no, you just show up. You're a participant.
That is, your job is to show up wholly representing the seat
that you represent and bringing all of that fire to the table.
One of the things that was illuminating for us as well is
the separation of roles because you know, we have a number of
(05:45):
business owners, we have specific roles that we play
within the organization. And then of course we have
employees and we have contractors and we have interns
and so and we have advisors. So all of these different folks
that are stakeholder and of course investors, we all have,
you know, folks that are involved in the business in many
different ways. But the, the clear separation
(06:09):
between our role as owners and as functional leads within the
business took a lot of weight. Certainly for me took a lot of
weight off of my shoulders because I was at times in fact
unclear which hat I was wearing at that particular moment in
time. And.
That's a big one, Victor, and some people don't even realize
(06:29):
that that's a thing. Like there are sometimes when I
share, there's this thing calledan owner's box and it sits above
the accountability chart. Your owner hat and your employee
hat are different. And one doesn't shouldn't bigot
the other. Being an owner shouldn't
guarantee you a job, right? You should have to earn that and
get paid the same way. And to your it's interesting
that you say that's a relief forsome.
(06:50):
For some folks, it's like, oh, you mean maybe someday I can
only sit in the owner's box and I don't if I can grow my company
to a space where I don't actually have to be a day-to-day
participant in it anymore, I can, right, Because owners still
retain control of all the thingsthat owners you don't, it's not
like you're giving away the keysto the store.
You're just giving away the execution, right?
(07:10):
You're giving away the running of the business, not the
business. And it's a really powerful
thing. And if you think about it,
Victor, if you if you are not anowner in a business and you're
an employee in a business and you as an employee actually feel
that the owners understand the difference and they're not in
there getting special treatment and not having to play by the
same set of rules as everybody else because they're an owner.
(07:33):
We've probably all been in places where we felt that or
we've heard those stories. That's not going to garner a
great deal of loyalty from your people, right?
That doesn't create a great workspace.
People want to feel like they have just as much of a shot at
things as everyone else and thatthey're held to the same
standard. What would be some of the
observations you made of us as you've been working with us from
(07:54):
day one till let's say today? How have we grown as an
organization? How have we grown as leaders?
So I've seen you, all of you actually, I think feel more
empowered to speak to your truthand your opinions.
Yes, a little bit in our first session, but by the most recent
session that was one of my closing comments was how
(08:16):
impressed I was at how we were able to with such passion have
disagreements and attack the issues on the table without
attacking each other at all. You know, you were just really
good at feeling enough confidence and enough trust in
the space that we assuming good intent by everyone on the team.
I, I really believe this team iswants the same thing for this
(08:38):
business moving forward. Like you have such a clear
vision of where you want to go. Where we have disagreements is
how to get there. And we did such good work in the
session today dialing in what isthe right path forward to get us
to where we want to go. I was pretty impressed by that.
And I'm starting to see we're not there yet, but I'm starting
to see some of the loosening of really understanding what it
(09:01):
means to be an owner and what itand what is my seat inside the
organization. And I'm even starting to see on
your team, Victor, that seat doesn't even have to be on the
leadership team if that's not where my highest and best value
is. And I have other teams that have
embraced that. So to me, that's huge.
That strips away your ego. You really are there for the
(09:22):
greater good of this company. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, Sherry, if if folks want to connect, if they want to
learn more, what's the best way?Well, they can find me at EOS
Worldwide to ask questions. I'm sure you'll have my name and
right. It's right there on on the
screen. If you type in that Sherry Kuhn,
you will find me right away. In the eosworldwide.com website
(09:45):
is a great place to find me. Yep.
Fantastic. Well, Sherry, you've helped our
organization a ton and wanted toshare this with the listeners.
Perfect. And my e-mail can be there too,
so you can get that in the show notes.
I won't say it, but if you want to include my e-mail, I'm happy
if you just reach directly to meand then I can match you.
I'll help you find. So what I didn't mention is I'm
also a coach at EOS Worldwide. So I sit on the implementer
(10:08):
development team. I'm part of the coaching program
training for new implementers. So I have access.
I know most of the community andable to be a good matchmaker if
that is useful. Awesome, thank you so much
Victor for having me. Appreciate it.
Thank you, Sherry. And so for the listeners at
home, definitely connect with sherry@eosworldwide.com. e-mail
and links will be in the show notes.
And in the meantime, have an awesome rest of your weekend.
(10:31):
Go make some great things happenand we'll talk to you again
tomorrow.
Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso podcast, your morning
shot of what's new in the world of real estate investing.
I'm your host, Victor Minash. This is the WEEKEND edition.
We've got a very special show for you today.
We have a great guest all the way from Seattle, WA.
Welcome to the show, Sherry Kuhn.
Thank you so much, Victor. It's a pleasure to be here.
This is like the espresso Capital, right?
So this is very apropos. We've got.
(00:24):
Yeah, the Starbucks starting here.
It's perfect. Exactly.
Well, it's great to have you here and we've been working
together now for some time. I'm excited to share what some
of the work that we've been doing with the listeners.
But before we do, perhaps just give a little bit of your back
story and how you got to this point in your journey.
Sure. Well, you know, I actually
started my professional career as a teacher and teaching was,
(00:46):
you know, was full of bureaucracy.
And so that was frustrating for me, right.
It's like I enjoy the teaching part of teaching.
And so I made my entrepreneurialleap into commercial real
estate. Ironically enough, I did that
for several years. But what I discovered when I was
doing that was I had way more fun working with the business
owners, helping them to figure out how to really make their
(01:06):
business grow, like getting the lease and stuff in the building
block. That part wasn't as exciting for
me as as the business part. So I spent about 15 years then
working in and running small to medium sized businesses and I
came across this great opportunity to work with the
business owner at a small and struggling Internet company.
(01:26):
And the two of us together really blew that business up.
We had this sort of Ying and Yang relationship.
We later discovered through EOS that we'll talk about in a
minute. Visionary integrator.
And so we took that little smallcorset company from a nothing to
still to this day the largest off the rack corset company in
the world in the little town that I lived in, in Wenatchee,
(01:46):
WA. So and I set myself to be where
we are today, right. That was such a powerful process
for us that we I took it to everyone that would listen like
hey, I found the Holy Grail of how to run a business, let me
help you do the same thing. One of the things that we've
been implementing the entrepreneurial operating system
within our company now for several years.
We were doing it solo with a little bit of chewing gum and a
(02:10):
little bit of Scotch tape at times.
And then we made the decision tore implement it with some
professional help. Someone who's been working with
the process, training with the author of the book, Gina
Wickman. There's not just one book, of
course, there's rocket field, asmany books that talk about
(02:31):
different aspects of the process.
As we've been working together, we, we understand the process,
we understand the structure. But one of the things that you
helped us with a lot, bringing alot of clarity to the specific
disciplines that are needed as a, as a leadership team.
You want to talk a little bit about that because there's,
(02:52):
there's many facets to it. There's there's time, there's
there's focus, there's getting the right people in the right
chairs. There's many different elements.
So really I think where the benefit of having help is that
the tools are amazing, right? The the EOS toolbox that Gino
created really takes the complexity of running a great
business and brings it into thisreally pretty simple.
(03:15):
But simple is not easy way to torun a business.
Why I think this is so hard to do is there's a lot you just you
kind of hit on it, Victor, when you said there's a lot of layers
and there's a deeper understanding to the why and the
context behind the tools. And if I can help you better
understand what this tool is going to do for you and why it's
(03:36):
important and what its impact issupposed to be, then you as
leaders, I think do a better jobof now leveraging and to make
that tool unique and useful to you as an organization instead
of just plugging some words intosome blank spaces, right?
That that doesn't transform yourbusiness.
It makes it run better. It's helpful.
But transformation only happens when you really understand the
(03:58):
intention behind the tools and you understand as leaders, this
is my passion. My, I always tell people, my
passion is helping people becomethe best version of themselves.
EOS is just my vehicle. You have to understand as
leaders, it's not just enough tohave great tools.
Without the people are everything.
Without you coming along this journey of change and growth and
(04:19):
development, you're not going toget what you want.
So you have to be willing to undergo that same transformation
as your business. When we're running our own
operations meetings, we have folks that are taking the
minutes that are running the agenda, that are perhaps even
leading the executive sessions. It's very difficult to do that
(04:41):
part and be an active participant at the same time.
And one of the things that we'veseen by working with you is that
we were actually all able to fully participate because the
mechanics of going through the process was basically taken off
of our shoulders. We're all still actively engaged
(05:02):
in it, of course, but we weren'tnecessarily having to turn the
crank ourselves, at least in terms of the mechanics of the
process and just that separation.
It got rid of, I think, a certain level of multitasking.
Whereas is it my facilitator hatthat I'm wearing right now or my
sales lead hat? Exactly.
(05:22):
It was, it was funny because before a most recent session,
one of your team leads actually reached out to me and said I
usually do this and this and this.
I'm like, no, you just show up. You're a participant.
That is, your job is to show up wholly representing the seat
that you represent and bringing all of that fire to the table.
One of the things that was illuminating for us as well is
the separation of roles because you know, we have a number of
(05:45):
business owners, we have specific roles that we play
within the organization. And then of course we have
employees and we have contractors and we have interns
and so and we have advisors. So all of these different folks
that are stakeholder and of course investors, we all have,
you know, folks that are involved in the business in many
different ways. But the, the clear separation
(06:09):
between our role as owners and as functional leads within the
business took a lot of weight. Certainly for me took a lot of
weight off of my shoulders because I was at times in fact
unclear which hat I was wearing at that particular moment in
time. And.
That's a big one, Victor, and some people don't even realize
(06:29):
that that's a thing. Like there are sometimes when I
share, there's this thing calledan owner's box and it sits above
the accountability chart. Your owner hat and your employee
hat are different. And one doesn't shouldn't bigot
the other. Being an owner shouldn't
guarantee you a job, right? You should have to earn that and
get paid the same way. And to your it's interesting
that you say that's a relief forsome.
(06:50):
For some folks, it's like, oh, you mean maybe someday I can
only sit in the owner's box and I don't if I can grow my company
to a space where I don't actually have to be a day-to-day
participant in it anymore, I can, right, Because owners still
retain control of all the thingsthat owners you don't, it's not
like you're giving away the keysto the store.
You're just giving away the execution, right?
(07:10):
You're giving away the running of the business, not the
business. And it's a really powerful
thing. And if you think about it,
Victor, if you if you are not anowner in a business and you're
an employee in a business and you as an employee actually feel
that the owners understand the difference and they're not in
there getting special treatment and not having to play by the
same set of rules as everybody else because they're an owner.
(07:33):
We've probably all been in places where we felt that or
we've heard those stories. That's not going to garner a
great deal of loyalty from your people, right?
That doesn't create a great workspace.
People want to feel like they have just as much of a shot at
things as everyone else and thatthey're held to the same
standard. What would be some of the
observations you made of us as you've been working with us from
(07:54):
day one till let's say today? How have we grown as an
organization? How have we grown as leaders?
So I've seen you, all of you actually, I think feel more
empowered to speak to your truthand your opinions.
Yes, a little bit in our first session, but by the most recent
session that was one of my closing comments was how
(08:16):
impressed I was at how we were able to with such passion have
disagreements and attack the issues on the table without
attacking each other at all. You know, you were just really
good at feeling enough confidence and enough trust in
the space that we assuming good intent by everyone on the team.
I, I really believe this team iswants the same thing for this
(08:38):
business moving forward. Like you have such a clear
vision of where you want to go. Where we have disagreements is
how to get there. And we did such good work in the
session today dialing in what isthe right path forward to get us
to where we want to go. I was pretty impressed by that.
And I'm starting to see we're not there yet, but I'm starting
to see some of the loosening of really understanding what it
(09:01):
means to be an owner and what itand what is my seat inside the
organization. And I'm even starting to see on
your team, Victor, that seat doesn't even have to be on the
leadership team if that's not where my highest and best value
is. And I have other teams that have
embraced that. So to me, that's huge.
That strips away your ego. You really are there for the
(09:22):
greater good of this company. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, Sherry, if if folks want to connect, if they want to
learn more, what's the best way?Well, they can find me at EOS
Worldwide to ask questions. I'm sure you'll have my name and
right. It's right there on on the
screen. If you type in that Sherry Kuhn,
you will find me right away. In the eosworldwide.com website
(09:45):
is a great place to find me. Yep.
Fantastic. Well, Sherry, you've helped our
organization a ton and wanted toshare this with the listeners.
Perfect. And my e-mail can be there too,
so you can get that in the show notes.
I won't say it, but if you want to include my e-mail, I'm happy
if you just reach directly to meand then I can match you.
I'll help you find. So what I didn't mention is I'm
also a coach at EOS Worldwide. So I sit on the implementer
(10:08):
development team. I'm part of the coaching program
training for new implementers. So I have access.
I know most of the community andable to be a good matchmaker if
that is useful. Awesome, thank you so much
Victor for having me. Appreciate it.
Thank you, Sherry. And so for the listeners at
home, definitely connect with sherry@eosworldwide.com. e-mail
and links will be in the show notes.
And in the meantime, have an awesome rest of your weekend.
(10:31):
Go make some great things happenand we'll talk to you again
tomorrow.
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