Episode 317: Operating Systems for Businesses (Part 1)

---

This week’s transcription is brought to you by Alectrona

James Smith:
This week’s episode of the Mac Admins Podcast is brought to you by Kandji. You know where the biggest potholes are when switching device management solutions? It’s not the prep work or figuring out how to replicate your current configuration in the new system. It’s that moment when management is temporarily removed from a Mac, leaving you with no control. From there, you have to rely on users to follow your instructions and enroll their devices into the new solution. Multiply by hundreds or thousands of devices and support tickets and errors start cropping up at scale. Kandji has changed the game with this migration assistant. A seamless tool with completely customizable logic that guides users through enrollment into Kandji’s device management solution so your support team won’t have to. 100% free for all new customers, Kandji’s migration assistant is just one piece of an overall exceptional experience Mac Admins enjoy with the use of Kandji’s comprehensive solution. To learn more, head on over to kandji.io/migration. That’s K-A-N-D-J-I.io/migration. Or join the Kandji channel on the Mac Admin Slack to say hi and see what they’re up to. Thanks again to Kandji for sponsoring this episode of the Mac Admins Podcast.

Marcus Ransom:
Hello and welcome to the Mac Admins Podcast. I’m your host today, Marcus Ransom. And as Charles and Tom are currently in midair on their way over to [inaudible 00:01:40] I’m joined by James Smith, or should I say Sir James.

James Smith:
Hey, Marcus. How’s it going?

Marcus Ransom:
It’s going all right. It’s a chilly day here in Melbourne today, isn’t it?

James Smith:
I’ve got the heaters going at home. Well, I actually just turned it off in the study here where I’m recording because I didn’t want future James when he’s editing this episode to have to cut out that noise. But yeah, it’s freezing. We were discussing, I think a bit before the show, would it be too much with Tom and Charles off to have two Aussies on the podcast and two Australian accents be the primary voices, but hopefully it goes well and everyone can understand and actually differentiate between the two of us.

Marcus Ransom:
And the various regional dialects as to what a Glen Waverley accent is compared to a [inaudible 00:02:30] accent and try and work out which one. But to protect the audio sensibilities of the podcast, it’s not just going to be us today on the podcast. We’re going to be talking about business practices and things that you can do to help organize and run your business. Every organization has a set of norms they follow, and within those, there are processes that people go through routinely and they aren’t often documented at new organizations, be they orgs within other orgs or new companies. And there’s been systems like Six Sigma for tracking those processes. But like how neurons know what paths to take, those are only parts of the brain. So EOS is one of those business operating systems like the operating system of the brain that’s more comprehensive than just processes, but goes far deeper into an org. So today we’re speaking with Lucas Acosta from Foojee about EOS and how that’s helped his organization. Lucas, thanks very much for joining us here on the podcast.

Lucas Acosta:
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Marcus Ransom:
One of the things we love doing on the podcast is the origin story. So before we really dive into EOS, do you want to talk to us about how you got into the field?

Lucas Acosta:
Sure. Before I stumbled into the MAC Admin Slack group and all of the conversations that-

James Smith:
It could be as deep as you want to go. Maybe not like the paper run. If you want to go back that far you can. But yeah, how did you find your way into this?

Lucas Acosta:
I don’t know how often this happens these days, but I in the ’90s grew up with a Mac at home. My dad was in university and he brought home a Macintosh LC3 in ’92. I don’t even remember what OS that was, but the iLife suite certainly wasn’t out. It was Mac OS7 or eight I believe. So what that meant for me is I was one of those kids in the ’90s … The only kid in school that had a Mac and would happily take on any Mac versus PC debate that any kid wanted to have. I remember … I don’t know how we found this. But printing out a sheet of one-liners for debates on why the Mac is better than the PC.
I don’t know why it was so ingrained into our identity, but one of them that I still remember for example was why does Windows put shut down in the start menu? That couldn’t be more backwards. Just simple one-liners and I would nitpick at my PC friends. But yeah. The spark of inspiration that I remember that came from using the Mac was when iMovie came out and we had a USB webcam. Who knows what the resolution was back then. But just some crummy off brand USB webcam that, with zero configuration, I could plug into our iMac and make my own movie without reading an instruction manual. And back then with no YouTube or Google for that matter, it was a pretty I guess, empowering experience when you’re in fourth grade and I’m making a film and I’m cutting pieces out, and then Apple bundled in all their sound effects and free background music and stuff with even the first versions of iMovie. And that was just what set me off and just loving the applications on the Mac.

Marcus Ransom:
So what took you to the next step of actually saying, “Hey, you know what? I want to do this as a job.”?

Lucas Acosta:
Sure. Well, not long after I graduated high school, I moved to Atlanta where they had an Apple Store. The town I grew up in west Texas was too small for an Apple Store. So I moved here and I think, oh my goodness, could I have a chance at working at this company? And I landed the job. I was over the moon with being able to work at Apple. And ended up spending about three years at Apple as a trainer. I was a trainer by the time I left. And while I was at the store … I think many consultants’ stories are they see the demand walking into the Apple Store asking for assistance in their office or at their house. So after just seeing this opportunity so many times it’s more dumb courage. I didn’t really have much of a plan, honestly, other than thinking I could work five hours a week and have all my bills paid. This is so easy.
So I really had not much of a plan at all, but co-founded Foojee at 22 years old, and we were just looking for people that would pay us hourly to set up not only just Macs, but we back then they had Slingboxes in 2008 and doing odd jobs like that just to pay the bills. And now we’re coming up on 15 years. We are entirely focused on small business MSP. We actually don’t do any more enterprise work, any more private school work. We cut our teeth on all sorts of industries, and about seven years into the company, we zeroed in on what we were really good at and what we wanted to start honing our skillset in. So that’s small business MSP work. By doing that, we are now in four states and love everyone on the team and just doing our best to take care of our clients.

James Smith:
Yeah. Sure.

Marcus Ransom:
It’s interesting hearing you say that you made a conscious decision not to target a certain area of support because having worked for MSPs supporting enterprise customers and also looking at small business support or even individual support for people, whether it be for work, running their own business or people wanting things set up for home, the idea that enterprise is harder is sometimes not true with everything. That there’s often some of the challenges that small businesses have due to not having enormous machines behind them providing everything and validating everything, and also for end user support. The idea that somehow should be much cheaper than providing enterprise support when I know my experience of going into someone’s house and trying to help them with a printer and then trying to understand what that means and what that entails, sometimes that’s using parts of my brain that never get exercised in enterprise work because there’s just an expectation, rightly or wrongly with the enterprise, that it’s not going to be a 30-year-old printer. You’re not going to have five machines with-

Lucas Acosta:
It’s true. Because you do have a budget, for example. In the enterprise, there are budgets to renew that Xerox lease every so many years. So that is I guess, an advantage. And there are pros and cons to enterprise work, and that’s why we were doing it for so long. We’re here in Atlanta. A lot of Fortune 500 companies are here, publicly traded companies, and we’ve worked with them. And the size of the invoices was also very alluring to us. And was exhilarating needing to turn over 2000 MacBooks using Jamf back in the day with a Thunderbolt network within a two-week period. And really getting to flex all of these sysadmin muscles was really fun. And what was right for us was deciding on what path we wanted to be great at. I think that should be done really for any organization that wants to improve. However, every organization will have a different answer based on personality, based on skillset, based on your market in that area.
There’s no right or wrong way. We just looked at our data actually. Simple, QuickBooks. This wasn’t complex data. And just looked at our customers and realized that 40% of them were small businesses paying us every month, and they had been with us since we started. And so for us, it seemed like the path of least resistance, in other words, to go down the small business MSP route. Now we’re still using enterprise MDM tools. We’ve used the Jamfs, the Adages. Right now we’re using Kandji across all of our endpoints. And big fans of CrashPlan and scripting and really leveraging all of the enterprise sysadmin tools. But yes, to your point, the end users are sometimes a little bit different and we’re having to convince them to upgrade a printer even though it still technically works.

Marcus Ransom:
It’s about defining what work means to both you as the consultant and them as the user. Sometimes I’ve found it’s about what’s the cost of making sure this is still going to work tomorrow rather than it’s working now. I know I had that with a sole proprietor I supported where, “Oh, Time Machine’s slowing my computer down, so I’m not going to use it.” And I was trying to really encourage them that you need to think more than about what’s happening at the moment and is it actually slowing your computer down? All of these sorts of things. And then the next call was, “The hard drive in my iMac’s making this clicking noise.”
So I went and did a Time Machine backup. I said, “Ah, you listened. You actually were listening. You knew that you’d made that conscious choice not to do this thing until the thing I’d warned you might happen did indeed start happening.” The great thing in that situation was they did in fact manage to get a full backup of their data before the inevitable happened with the hard drive. But yeah, those are really tricky conversations to have. But at the same time, in small business there’s a lot more trust as well where you’re not dealing with competing priorities, outsourcing and procurement and the people you are providing the support to maybe aren’t the people making the decisions as to who they’re going to use as a service provider. So it gives a lot more opportunity for that. Thinking back to my days in Apple retail, that surprise and delight with a customer and that translating into a really solid long-term relationship.

Lucas Acosta:
That is true. I would be lying if I said that wasn’t an advantage of the small business work is that we do get to work with the decision makers. And a lot of times the decision makers in a smaller organization have that time to want to nerd out with you, whereas in a enterprise everyone’s too busy to really talk shop or some new cool Apple announcements or whatnot. Not to say that didn’t happen in enterprise because it certainly does, but there is something about small business that I think is a little bit slower paced, I guess. And again, there are pros and cons. It is nice to be able to present a security solution with maybe five different products and only have to have that conversation one time and get approval from one person. Whereas with Enterprise, one of those tools needs to be forecasted for Q4 and we’re having to discuss it with five teams before then to get approval. Have we talked to all the right departments to get that approved and do they have capacity in Q4 to roll out that change and so forth? But you also don’t have to deal with 10 year old printers. There are just pros and cons. And the stability-

Marcus Ransom:
I don’t know. I’ve seen some stuff in enterprise, and I’m sure you have as well, James.

James Smith:
100%. Yep.

Marcus Ransom:
Adam Codega’s line, which has just lived with me the whole way through is that the definition of something being enterprise great is it has a VGA port because some things just will not die.

James Smith:
Something something proxies. But look, I think, speaking about that, it seems like if we’re talking about those economies of scale between enterprise customers and these small business customers and how you’ve decided to hone in on those small business customers because you found they’ve got that regular income coming in, they’re using you, you have that trust, like Marcus says. When you go from large enterprises where you have … Things are often very much … They’re in that same vein. You can pretty much have one process for an enterprise customer and it’d probably work for most others, but you have all of these different processes and these in intricacies with these small business customers. Is that where something like EOS starts to come into the fold? It seems like most explanations of it start with this big lengthy why, but maybe we should try and do a quick one, customize for engineers. What’s the impact of leveraging EOS as an operating system for you?

Lucas Acosta:
Excellent. Yeah. Great question. And I’ll start by saying EOS is this business framework. What I realized after reading the first book, because they’ve written a few books, is all the guys did at EOS was trademark business fundamentals in the same way we call tissue paper Kleenex or printing a Xerox or a copy. EOS is actually not rocket science and if you could just Google search it and look up some of their frameworks and their templates that they have, it’s pretty straightforward and you’re going to be surprised by how, I guess, plain it seems. And that’s the point I think. So to answer your question, EOS is designed for companies, I believe in the two million to 100 million in revenue size. And it’s also not just for consultants. It’s for any type of business because any type of business, for example, needs a finance department, needs an operations department, needs a sales department.
Again, this is very basic stuff. So I’m happy to share how it relates to our MSP type business. But to just continue with the definition, EOS basically gives you a basic blueprint of running a business so that your brain cycles aren’t being consumed by how to run the business. Your brain cycles can be used for innovating. For chasing cool ideas or cool engineering problems or onboarding issues and sinking your teeth into that and ways that you can improve the business instead of having to think about … Anyone who’s ever been a manager or owned a business knows this. You’re also having to think about what’s the best way to do a performance review for an employee? What’s the best way to create quarterly goals for this upcoming quarter? Is a vision and these core value mushy gushy things that people talk about really that are important? There’s those aspects of running a team in a business that we all take for granted that it’s common sense that, and it is. That’s why it took me so long to look at using EOS because it just seemed like common sense. And I was humbled when we finally implemented it by how much it really accelerated everything we do actually because of that first point I made.
I’m no longer the bottleneck of the company trying to figure out what’s the best way to do a performance review. Should we do it this way or this way? Let me go watch five videos on performance reviews. Let me read a book about performance reviews. They’ve just made it so simple to where now we have a leadership team that just runs the playbook. And Foojee can spend our time innovating on what makes Foojee unique, which is small business MSP work and exploring the tools that we’re going to be using and spending our time that makes us unique.

James Smith:
This week’s episode of the Mac Admins Podcast is also brought to you by Kolide. Our sponsor, Kolide, has some big news. If you are an Okta user, they can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance. How? If a device isn’t compliant, the user can’t log into your cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. It’s that simple. Kolide patches one of the major holes in zero trust architecture. Device compliance. Without Kolide, IT struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone’s OS and browser up to date. Unsecured devices are logging into your company’s apps because there’s nothing to stop them. Kolide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance as part of authentication and it’s built to work seamlessly with Okta. The moment Kolide’s agent detects a problem, it alerts the user and gives them instructions to fix it. If they don’t fix the problem within a set time, they’re blocked. Kolide’s method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and most importantly, 100% fleet compliance. Visit kolide.com/macadminspodcast to learn more or book a demo. That’s K-O-L-I-D-E.com/macadminspodcast. Thanks to Kolide for sponsoring this episode of the Mac Admins Podcast.

Marcus Ransom:
So let’s go back a little bit. What does EOS stand for and how did you come across it?

Lucas Acosta:
Sure. It stands for Entrepreneur Operating System and the book that I started out with is called Rocket Fuel. It’s one of these books that I had heard of over the years, one of these business books like E-Myth or Good to Great, that just kept on coming up. And it wasn’t until maybe the 20th client of mine stopped me. And I’d known her for years. We’re still friends, and we talk about how it’s changed the business for us. And she says, “You really just need to read this book because it’s doubled our revenue in two years.” And they’ve been around for 30 years. And I said, “Okay. I’ll just do the Audible audiobook and just skim this so I can build that relationship and have that conversation piece. Then we can talk about it.” But if you are a founder or a senior role in an organization, reading Rocket Fuel will illuminate and give you permission on a new way to run a business that is actually a lot easier than I have been doing it for over 10 years.

Marcus Ransom:
One of the things it talks about is vision. And vision is important for an organization. How is vision handled in EOS?

Lucas Acosta:
Cool. Yeah. That’s a great question. To your point, EOS is this big framework I guess, and there’s PDFs for every little component of it. And so the vision piece is a great part I guess to get started with it. And there’s actually an old proverb that comes to mind. Without vision, people perish. And as an owner, small business leader, we think of things like vision and I roll my eyes. Like, oh no, are we going to talk about mission statements and vision statements? And it’s like, no. Don’t worry. I’m not going to talk about that here. But the vision in EOS is just one page long and there’s templates for it and it contains about 10 decisions about your business that chart out a timeline from three to 10 years. And actually the first time I heard this, I rolled my eyes because I knew as a small business, I don’t know what’s happening next month barely, much less this week.
So doing a three to 10 year thing, I’m not into that structure. It took me a while to come around to this idea. But the reason why this is so valuable is the vision is hammered out by the two leaders of the organization, the CEO and the COO. And part of our process was determining who those people were. And I had to pick out who was going to be my COO. And the book Rocket Fuel goes into what that looks like. That book Rocket Fuel really gets you from ground zero or step one to making your first few steps. And what the vision is, is taking the very big picture stuff like core values and key differentiators and even what revenue you’re going to hit in 10 years. When the vision in a business is established, it’s actually similar … to bring it in to our engineers here, it’s very similar to a project scope of work.
Can you guys spin up a Jamf environment or maybe a network environment without a scope of work? Yeah. I could do that pretty easily. But would you go set up a brand new network or a Jamf environment with no scope of work with a client? Probably not. And if you’ve worked in it long enough that there are curveballs. You know that there’s multiple parties that need to be informed of what the plan is and you know that there needs to be accountability for deadlines if something doesn’t happen by a certain date.
So the vision within the EOS framework does just that. It’s not set in stone like a scope of work is, but it’s something that we actually refer to almost weekly in our team meetings. It’s in our DNA. We actually use it to interview. We have the vision document open on our computers when we do interviews, when we do performance evaluations because it’s really the lens in which we see ourselves through. Including performance reviews, compensation. And we’ve actually had to terminate an employee based on the core values found in that vision. So it’s a little meaty to establish, but by taking the time to establish the vision, it maps out so many decisions that your team will make throughout the week.

James Smith:
Yeah. That’s great. So while we’re trying to understand what all of this is and how it relates to you, it’s probably important just to define as well there’s these six key components of EOS. So you’ve got … What I understand, just because I don’t do this, but I’m going through the reading. I’ve got vision, people, data issues, process and traction. And so let’s maybe dig into traction next. What’s this next core component there?

Lucas Acosta:
Awesome. Traction is how the work and progress on the company gets done. The traction document is also one sheet of paper. But you cannot have the traction page without the vision page first. And without getting into too much lingo, with both of those documents together, we actually refer to that, the EOS framework refers to that as your VTO. The vision traction organizer. It’s so cool. It’s a two-page document that charts out the next 10 years of our business. It’s weird but once you look at it, it makes sense. It has the benchmarks and the goals that we want to accomplish between now and 10 years.
So what the traction document is is the one year and sooner plan. So we just got done talking about vision, which is very big picture, three to 10 years out. Well that’s great Lucas, but what about the HR policies, the benefits that we want to roll out this year? The goals that we have this year for the business? The traction is what the COO really manages. Things that need to get done on a 90-day basis and a one-year basis.
So what’s so insanely cool about the traction document for me is that I am not responsible for it. For half of the people listening that have worked in a proper CEO role, they understand that. But for half of the people listening that are wearing a lot of different hats, this sounds crazy. How does Lucas not have to think about what’s going on within the current year? And I thought it was crazy too the first time I heard it. But when you share your responsibility of running the business to other capable people on your team, it’s phenomenal and really humbling, a little offensive by how much they can get done without you. It’s awesome. And what they need the CEO for is to know where we’re going. We are going to be the best small business Apple MSP. These are our three differentiators. These are the core values we look at for hiring people. Big picture stuff.
But the one year is where the leaders and the rest of the team are working every day to get toward that vision. So in order to have traction, there is a whole framework, and I won’t go into the details here, of a weekly meeting. And by the way, the weekly meeting agenda is created for you already. And ways to even manage tasks. For example, a small task must be done in seven days. And it’s simple definitions like this that make EOS just a lot simpler because everyone’s using the same language. They’re like, “Oh, I need to do that. Okay. It’s due in seven days. We’ll check in with you.” Maybe a customer service issue, need to get back with them and explain the invoice or something. We’ll check back on this in seven days. And so that’s what we mean by traction is using the meetings and the task management to get things done and have them be held accountable so that we keep the ball rolling.
So as the CEO, or EOS calls it the visionary role, I’m responsible for everything that’s really six months and further out. The industry trends, big important relationships, the direction we’re going, and even product ideas, customer needs, talking with customers on a daily basis. And that allows me to continue pushing the envelope of Foojee’s capabilities. If there’s new ransomware software out, I can get on those calls, those webinars to learn about upcoming products. While the COO, or as EOS refers to the role as integrator, the integrator is executing the current 90-day plan to ensure this year’s goals get done. So it’s a really simple way to divide responsibilities.
Now, let me stop and say this. When I heard about this separation of responsibilities, when I was riding my bike and listening to the audiobook, I thought this was absolutely crazy. I had been running Foojee for over 10 years and to not have to think about those day-to-day operations sounded like a pipe dream but we don’t have investors. With what money are we going to be able to divide up responsibilities like this? With what time? But here I am now two years into fully implementing this and I don’t log into the ticketing system unless my creativity leads me to it to dig up something. And I don’t log into our CRM unless I’m going to touch base with one of our clients just to look into something. And I don’t run any of our meetings because using the EOS framework, we’ve created leaders in each area of our business.
By the way, we’re only eight people. You don’t have to be a massive organization to have a director and to have direct reports. Some of them were doing dual fractional roles at the beginning until we’ve been able to grow and now they’re able to focus on their leadership role 100%. So it really has been an eye-opening experience for me and that’s why it was really great to be invited on to talk about this. When I discover something that helps Foojee … Just simple, old Foojee over here. We’re no different than other founders and small businesses getting started. I really want to fast track other people to take advantage of something like this too.

Marcus Ransom:
It’s interesting when you’re talking about all of this. I’m thinking back to both. Trying to run my own consultancy, which was just me on my own. So a very different environment. But then having worked in small businesses, both in IT consultancies, but also where this is really hitting home for me is back in my days as a designer in design studios. We’re talking about this framework from what that means for leaders and how people like yourself are able to better manage their time and their responsibility, but straight away, I’m just thinking about being the poor person sitting there, having someone asking them to do something. And it’s like, shouldn’t you be out there trying to work out how we’re going to get the next customers rather than worrying about this detail over here? And just that idea for the rank and file staff members to have that clear delineation of who’s responsible for what and hopefully that translating into those people actually performing those roles. So accountability is a really big thing in EOS, isn’t it?

Lucas Acosta:
Yeah. EOS has made accountability very simple. I think this is one of the strongest components of EOS. Personally, I tend to be flexible with my team and some of our business goals. I’m not a micromanager, but I can admit that I can do this to a fault sometimes. Especially with client work that can distract us from improving our own business. Accountability isn’t just for keeping people accountable, but it’s keeping us accountable to our own plan. It’s like we want to do this, but I keep getting distracted by client things. And so the accountability piece is really shown in two main ways with EOS. The first is with the accountability chart, which is another comically simple concept in EOS that almost needs no explanation. We’ve all heard of an org chart. It’s a tree of boxes that shows who reports to who and who’s responsible for what.
EOS has done slightly differently is they call it an accountability chart instead, is this. Two people cannot be in one box. By definition that’s what typically breaks accountability is when there’s, oh, those two over there run our network or those two over there run sales. It’s like, but who’s the one accountable for it? So when you make your accountability chart, when you’re first rolling out EOS, you literally write all the … They have all the boxes that represent the parts of your business and you are to write out a name in each box. Now, when we first did this I, Lucas, was in seven boxes. And just that exercise alone was a pretty eye-opening exercise. And really as a small business owner, sure, that’s what I signed up for and I like the different roles that I’m doing every day.

Marcus Ransom:
You’re only a seven X founder. You can quite easily stretch to a 10X founder so easy.

Lucas Acosta:
I’m almost there. I’m almost there. Yeah. And like you said, as a individual contributor, it was great probably for my team to also see that, “Oh wow, Lucas, he is running Atlanta sales. He’s running engineering. He’s also one of our senior engineers. He does marketing, he does sales and he’s the CEO.” It’s a really cool just transparent picture of how the company is organized and it really rallies everyone up to get more focused so that we can have more strength in what we want to accomplish. So the accountability chart is the first step in rolling out the EOS process.
The second way that EOS improves accountability … I mentioned it earlier, is the definition of two words. The first one is a task that I mentioned earlier. The second one is a rock. So a task is again, something that needs to be done in seven days and can only be the responsibility of one person. Sometimes two people need to work on something. Like finance and sales need to work on a report for example. But ultimately only one person is assigned to the task and we’ll check in on that in seven days.
But the other word is a rock. Which again, go ahead. I see everyone eye rolling here with these inside words that they use. But all a rock is is a name for a 90-day goal. And the reason they call it a rock is it’s just a metaphor because of that visual illustration you’ve probably heard of before in time management. If you take a jar and fill it with sand first, it’s very difficult to cram rocks into it. However, if you start with an empty jar and put rocks in first, then the sand can fill around the rocks. So our rocks in the EOS parlance are the most important things we must get done in 90 days. And they’re the things in our weekly leadership meeting where every director must share if they’re on track or if there’s an issue with the rock that needs to be discussed. So the rock is just a name for a 90-day goal and we are careful to only establish one to three rocks per director because we are a small business. It’s not like we can have 20 rocks. You can’t have 20 things to do that quarter.
So keeping that collection of rocks very short or small so that they can be accomplished. And this one thing was directly opposite of what we had been doing for 10 years because we really wanted to roll out this new backup tool for example, but then client distractions would happen or we really wanted to research the security tool and hopefully roll it out but things would always get pushed. And so by having a director who’s responsible for one rock it just makes that accountability clear and we make so much progress. It really energizes everyone seeing what we accomplished looking 90 days back.

James Smith:
This week’s episode of the Mac Admins Podcast is brought to you by Alectrona Patch. What would you do with your time if you no longer had to spend so much of it on packaging and deploying updates for third party app? With Alectrona Patch, you can install or update over 300 Mac applications automatically to keep your users protected with the latest security update. Alectrona Patch works with your existing MDM solution by simply deploying a package and a configuration profile for ongoing management. It’s cloud native so no server or package hosting is required and the latest updates are delivered directly from the software vendor. You control which apps are installed or updated so you deploy only what you need. Alectrona Patch is customizable to ensure your users can update without interruption so you can keep your security team and your end users happy. Alectrona is a proud charter sponsor of the Mac Admins Foundation. Check out Alectrona Patch at alectrona.com/patch, that’s A-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-A.com/patch to learn more and to book a demo with our team. Thanks to Alectrona Patch for sponsoring this episode of the Mac Admins Podcast.
When you’re able to look back at those past 90 days and try to look at both the tasks and the rocks and who’s accountable for what, you’ve got to be tracking that somehow I’m assuming. Can you have accountability without data or are you tracking that data so that you’re able to have metrics and report on these rocks or make sure that issues or these tasks that are being assigned to individual people that they are getting done within that seven days so that you are sticking to those boundaries that you’re setting?

Lucas Acosta:
Yeah. Great question. The answer is that, right, you have to record that somewhere in order for this accountability to take place. And the person who does that is the integrator. And if you’re going to use the full EOS method, the integrator in a normal title again is COO. And it’s their job to keep the train running on time. To check in with the leaders, see can they remove obstacles for those leaders, make phone calls to help them. And we are keeping track on that and that’s what the COO does. We at Foojee use a cloud product called 90.io. 90 like 90 days. 90.iO is a licensed EOS tool. It just makes it easier for us. So we’re not having to share to-do lists. We use Basecamp for project managing for our clients, but it’s helped us to keep 90 separate for when we’re working on the business. And that’s a good differentiator. We use 90 for on the business and Basecamp four in the business. And even for just a small team within a larger organization, those words I think totally can still work. Using tasks and then what are our rocks? As a team what do we want to accomplish this quarter?

Marcus Ransom:
Even when the team is just the various different voices that live inside your own head as well. I think being able to-

Lucas Acosta:
That’s so true.

Marcus Ransom:
Identify all those. And it’s interesting talking about how easy it is to get hung up on the lexicon of a lot of these frameworks. Words are important and what the word actually is often not the important thing, but what the word’s trying to define. And even looking at how important it is for Apple having a style guide for language to make sure we’re all using the same language and it’s about clarity and eliminating ambiguity. That was something that I had to come to terms with a couple of years ago where I was the person who was eye rolling it. All right, we’re now tribes and sprints.
The large organization I was in was trying to implement about five different frameworks at once. And then stepping back and realizing, okay, these are just words that we use so there’ll be that shared understanding and clarity about what we are talking about rather than … Especially as someone on the spectrum who can often get hung up on details and realizing that if I stop focusing on the, but that word could mean this and that word could mean that and go right, in this context when we use that word that’s to describe this and then that makes it a lot easier for me to have a conversation or have expectations with someone else. So it’s fascinating for me to see not so much the words that are used but what the words are representing. Another one that we get in EOS is issues. So what does that refer to?

Lucas Acosta:
Yes. An issue is just something that needs to be discussed because it’s preventing a task or a rock from being completed. Again, if you’re hearing that for the first time, you’re probably shaking your head like that’s obvious. So not every word is something weird that you have to go look up in a dictionary somewhere.

Marcus Ransom:
It’s better than calling them bananas or something like that, which some of the other frameworks can get really out there.

Lucas Acosta:
Okay. Got it. So there aren’t too many of those besides the rocks and so forth. But it’s anything interrupting business operations. This could even be a customer complaint, an HR request that someone made that needs to be discussed because maybe it’s not in our handbook. Or any curveball that happens during the given day. And what’s really cool is now just again, we all have that same vocabulary and we just say, oh, that that’ll be an issue for next week’s meeting. We have our meeting every Monday. And the rest of the team knows that if there’s an issue, it’ll likely get resolved in seven days. Or next Monday afternoon or Tuesday we’re going to have a clear decision that’s going to be made during the leadership meeting that everyone’s going to be involved with. Whether it’s an HR issue, client issue.
We have made so many decisions about maybe whether or not to keep a client or recurring issues about maybe a team member. It’s allowed so many things to just get decided on quickly that would normally, as a recovering people pleaser myself, it’s easy for me to kick things down the road and trying to see if things pan out with that person or that client. They’re such a nice client. But when issues are acknowledged, they’re added to the list for Monday’s meeting and they are going to get resolved. Again, it’s very simple in theory and very powerful in practice.

James Smith:
And so what’s the people portion of EOS helped with you the most?

Lucas Acosta:
Yeah. It’s given us a framework for so many things that we know are important. We all want to work in a great culture, great environment. But it’s given us just the basics for evaluating people. And the shorthand term they use is people, right seats. Or if you’ve read Good to Great, it’s being on the right seat on the bus. And it’s a framework of evaluating people based on their core values, if they’re a good fit for the company and then if they’re a good fit for that role. So without going on about the different PDFs that you can get. And a lot of these are really free I think and you can just skim through them. It’s allowed us to execute more effectively. As a small business owner, there had been many years where we just didn’t have performance reviews or they were really quick performance reviews and I would want to change how I do my reviews every year because of some YouTube video that I watched. And it’s just great that we don’t have to reinvent that wheel anymore.
The director for that team does the performance evaluation and uses the EOS framework to do that. So fair and consistent is another thing that we repeat a lot. It’s a fair and consistent way to communicate to the team and set expectations to the team, which as an individual contributor is nice to have too. I know from past experiences what it’s like to work in that ambiguity of performance reviews if you don’t have them and you don’t have that feedback. As the small business owner, I was guilty of not providing that clarity to people’s performance. I was quick to encourage and give positive high-fives, but if things were busy, evaluations just wouldn’t happen. So this is allowing us to stay on track with that.

Marcus Ransom:
So the level of documenting and accounting and maybe more importantly, the deep thinking that’s required to dig into missions and visions on a granular level can be pretty time-consuming. So how have you found it’s worth that effort and how have you been able to get that time and mental and emotional capacity to do this for your organization?

Lucas Acosta:
Yeah. That’s a big question because it’s like the chicken and egg problem. Is the stuff important? Yes. But how do you do it is the other difficult piece. And the answer is that you will stay stagnant if you don’t implement some framework. Maybe you already are using your framework and you’re executing it. I think executing it is really the most important thing. Whatever framework you’re using. And that’s where we were struggling. We always put client work ahead of all. And it’s still what pays the bills and will always be the lifeblood. But everyone was trying to do everything.
So what you listed earlier, documenting, accounting for everything, but also the deep thinking, the mission and the vision, that’s three different roles. The reason it’s so important to think about how you’re going to operate your business is because if you’re like what we did for 10 years, you’re trying to do it all yourself. And the truth is you need multiple people to help you do that. Again, I’m not a micromanager. I don’t think I feared giving control away. But I just didn’t know how to do it right without … I wanted some assurance of how do we teach the director of operations or director of sales to do what’s appropriate? And by having this framework, I was able to get people in leadership roles so that we can do the deep thinking. We have time to do the accounting and the documenting.
I’ll say this actually. It seems like a chicken and egg problem because we were making it a chicken and egg problem. But it was a coach who helped us implement this at first two years ago that told us it’s not a chicken and egg problem. You need a leadership team first. And me and the person who’s helping me run the company just without a clear designated role, we just looked at him dumbfounded like how are we going to get four leaders here with what time? I’m happy to talk about this because I don’t know if we can put all of this into this episode. I’m always happy to share best practices for what we did. But what we ended up doing is creating a profit sharing program for leaders because we didn’t have any money to give them director level salaries.
But what I realized … The coach said this and it was true when we did it. When you give an opportunity for people to lead, if they’re the right person, they want to do it. They are honored to do it and they are going to be grateful that their voice can finally be heard. If they’re the right person. Not saying everyone is like this. But we did our due diligence and thought about who would be the right people to ask if they had ever considered taking on a leadership role. And we were very honest with them. Fair and consistent with everyone. We don’t have any money to offer raises or anything, but we are going to share the profit sharing pool starting this year. It’s probably going to be really small pool this year, but we want to make this company better and we think you would help us do that. And for the right person, I don’t see who would turn that down.
And by having that buy in, they were more energized. They were thrilled to have more work on their plate that could actually change the company for the better. So it allowed us to exponentially do the things that you mentioned earlier, like deep thinking and then looking at reports and then what’s our vision for 10 years and how are we going to make an employee handbook all at the same time. You’re walking and chewing gum at the same time with this. And one thing I haven’t shared yet actually is we failed at implementing EOS the first time because I thought I could do it with one other person. And it wasn’t until I met this coach indirectly that I realized it’s because we didn’t have leaders helping us implement all of these things. So I think it is critical to do all of these things. It is worth the effort. And in order to do it, you will need to have other people elevated and give them responsibilities.

Marcus Ransom:
Having that separation of duties is something that I saw that really experienced the downside of that not happening. And it’s interesting looking at technical industries where you say that someone who is deeply skilled that may make a great engineering manager or a great engineer isn’t necessarily going to make a great people manager or a great visionary. But they may be a really good COO because they’re good at ticking things off, creating those scope of works and working through it and to be able to translate what they’re able to do really well and provide them more scope in their role and to use those skills to better improve the organization rather than being forced into a role that they’re not good at and being set up for failure and set up for creating more grief amongst other people as a result of being pushed into something they’re not able to do. It was interesting looking in the creative field where someone who is unbelievably talented in a creative aspect, that can often translate into having an amazing business mind, but not necessarily so. And seeing organizations constantly go down the toilet, leaving utter carnage behind them with suppliers, staff, customers, everything like that because someone didn’t have the self-awareness to realize that they needed a COO to actually take the little things off their plate.

Lucas Acosta:
Yeah. 100%. Couldn’t agree more. I don’t know where it is. You can Google it. On EOS’s website, they have a little quiz I guess. And they don’t call it personality, but basically if you’re a founder or a senior leader, you can take this and it puts you in one of the two buckets. Visionary tendencies or integrator tendencies. And that’s just based on how we think naturally. And so I took it and I was flying colors, visionary and then miserable failure on the integrator side. And everyone is one or the other basically when it comes to founding a business.
And just like what you shared, I realized that the passion I had to start Foojee, to help small businesses, to help empower businesses with Apple products and to use a super fun, efficient technology, that obsessiveness that you need to start something new was also getting in the way of me just running a meeting properly or doing performance evaluations properly or creating an employee handbook. I spent all of my time … I wore a lot of hats, but it wasn’t a well-rounded business because we didn’t have the separation of duties. And now that we do, there are people that actually enjoy hammering out the details of the HR handbook because that energizes them. And going back to the people component, finding the right people, right seats on the bus, through this process, we can now separate those duties.

Marcus Ransom:
So something that’s really unique with EOS compared to previous systems like E mif is having that timeline aspect. So we’ve covered the differences between issues, tasks, rocks, and also the importance of having those words to describe them. So how does that translate into actual operations?

Lucas Acosta:
Right. So yes, words do matter. As much as we eye roll for the different definitions that EOS has, I realized it was just time to get off my high horse and just use the EOS terms because it made it easier for everyone on the team when we communicated. Like I mentioned previously, rocks are the few big things every year that are most important to accomplish to hit our one-year plan. And one very … I’ll just throw out some random numbers here. Say we want to make an additional $100,000 over four quarters. How do we get there? We can’t land all that business in December. We have to spread those out throughout the year. So our first rock is to get maybe $25,000 in the first quarter, or if we’re going to ramp up, maybe it’s just $10,000 of new business in the first quarter. And you scale it up.
So you look at your one-year goal and then break it up among quarters to establish your rocks. Let me just say it this way. Let me give you an example of how using the 90-day rocks helps. Let’s say you’re in Los Angeles and you want to get to New York in three years. That would be on the EOS vision statement. Well that means that by year one you need to be in Colorado. So on the traction page of EOS, on the traction page for one year, the goal would be to get to Colorado. Because in order to get to New York in three years, we need to be in Colorado by the end of the first year. So now with the COO’s job is to say, okay, by the end of the year in December we’re going to be in Colorado, and then in the second year we’re going to be in Ohio and that will get us to New York in three years.
So to get a little bit more micro, every quarter we do a one-day meeting with all the leaders to determine what we need to do in this 90-day period. So now for example, we’re a little bit closer to Colorado at the end of the year. Let’s call it Reno. We need to get to Reno in the first 90 days before we can get to Colorado. So things like a flat tire happening on the road trip or someone getting sick on the road trip, those are the issues that we collect throughout the week and discuss every Monday. That’s what’s so fascinating about this framework is that it really does scale. Not just in terms of your business size, but it scales from what might happen this week in order to get to where we want to be in 10 years.

James Smith:
Probably trying to close out the episode a little bit before … We’ve gone on a bit over an hour or so. But I think just if we circle back a little bit to around when we talk about accountability and tracking and measurement, it’s probably important to ask are there a lot of tools out there to help with EOS? Could it be Miro boards, Trello implementations, or even custom software or custom software packages? What were helpful to you on this journey that you’ve gone through?

Lucas Acosta:
Yes. I really would recommend the book Rocket Fuel first. I almost don’t encourage YouTube because there as you can imagine, are a lot of people on YouTube that will overwhelm with a five-minute video on every little topic here. But Rocket Fuel does a great job of introducing this concept to someone who’s never heard it before and how these roles-

Marcus Ransom:
And we’ll stick some links in the show notes of these so people can go and have a look at these themselves.

Lucas Acosta:
Yep. Exactly. And then the second book is called Traction actually. That I think ended up getting a lot more accolades and maybe the New York Times bestseller book. But Traction really is about, again, the within one year type of implementation. And what we did for the book Traction was we required the reading of it for every leadership person before we got to our first leadership meeting whenever we offered them the position. So I just read that book with them. I hadn’t read it beforehand and that was perfectly fine because it just goes into more detail of what is expected on a quarterly basis and all of these frameworks. It’s a great way to introduce your leadership team to the concept. And then I mentioned earlier 90.io. I think it’s hands down the way to go to implement from a software perspective. Because you’re already having to learn EOS, why translate EOS into your project manager tool? And if you do, you’re going to see real quickly that it’s a lot to bite off at once when you’re trying to learn this and implement this new operating system for your team.
So I highly recommend that. I think you can get free referral credits. If you want to shoot me an email or Slack me through the Mac Admins, happy to send a referral code. And then lastly, but certainly most importantly, if you want to do this, I do recommend getting an EOS implementer or a coach. It’s something that I didn’t want to afford the first time. And what’s funny is the client that convinced me to read the book to begin with, they used an implementer and told me that I needed to do it, and I ignored them and I ended up using one myself. We’ve used these PSA consultants before that are very expensive. It’s nothing like that. These are just for a few grand. There’s licensed ones. You can probably Google search to get non officially licensed EOS coaches. But it will really give you a couple of days to get all these answers for your specific business. So I do recommend some sort of coach. And you can always Slack me or shoot me an email if you want to bounce any ideas off me. Happy to help.

Marcus Ransom:
Well, the idea of a coach is … I suppose that translates to why do people come to us for help with their technology? Because we’ve probably already solved these problems before or problems like them so we’re going to be able to get to the solution a lot faster than they will on their own. And so a business is not too dissimilar. So why would you not engage the services of a professional to help get to a better outcome? And it’s just deciding how much assistance you need weighed up with how much you can afford or justify at the same time.

Lucas Acosta:
Right. Yeah. And it makes me think of our customers. We all have these customers where they say, “I’m doing IT myself. It’s fine, but maybe you guys can just help me out a little bit to make sure I’m covering all my bases.” When in reality they have no clue what they’re doing with IT and we have to really help them create a security plan and build out the rest of their IT practices. And so having someone that does this every day really takes the load off your shoulders and it’s not really that expensive.

Speaker 4:
Here at the Mac Admins Podcast, we want to say a special thank you to all of our Patreon backers. The following people are to be recognized for their incredible generosity. Stu Bakka, thank you. Adam Selby, thank you. Nate Walk, thank you. Michael Si, thank you. Rick Goodie, thank you. Mike Boylan, you know it, thank you. Melvin Vives, thank you. Bill Stites, thank you. Anoush d’Orville, thank you. Jeffrey Compton, M. Marsh, Stu McDonald, Hamlin Krewson, Adam Burg, thank you. AJ Potrebka, thank you. James Tracy, Tim Pertfitt of Twocanoes, thank you. Nate Sinal, Will O’Neill, Seb Nash, the folks at Command Control Power, Steven Weinstein, Chatz Swarthout, Daniel McLoughlin, Justin Holt, Bill Smith, and Weldon Dodd, thank you all so much. And remember that you can back us if you just head out to patreon.com/macadmpodcast. Thanks everybody.

Marcus Ransom:
Nice segue there because that brings us to the bonus questions. What we’ve come up with today is to … Let’s go back to our customers. We’ve spoken about the how and why and the big picture of running a business. So let’s talk about the meat and potatoes of what we actually do. So what’s the most fun problem a customer has come to you to help solve?

Lucas Acosta:
Oh, man. Anyone in this work knows that every year you get some fun stories. I guess one that comes to mind just on the spot is working with an organization that needed to put iPad kiosks in car dealerships across the United States. 200 iPad kiosks that they wanted to be locked down. And they were going to manufacture custom kiosks. And we had to with iOS … This was just a few years into the MDM spec. Had to come up with a way to do … Not zero touch deployment because that hadn’t really been out at that point. We were still using configurator then. But these were unmanned kiosks locked down that calling a dealership to do any work would almost be out of the question. I even forgot the name of the kiosk app that we used, but we went to the app store and ended up just looking at all of the kiosk developers to see which ones had an enterprise offering for a custom app where we could customize the XML file and deploy it through an MDM. So that was a tricky one where we had to leverage any tool that we could get our hands on before the MDM spec had the power that it does today.

Marcus Ransom:
It’s very easy to throw out complaints about the MDM spec and what it does and doesn’t include now, but I certainly … You are triggering some repressed memories there from having similar things at the same time. And it’s like, yeah, remember before VPP when it was literally solving those problems and what we’d have to do to get to a solution, and then realizing how awesome the tools that we have now are compared to … Whilst sometimes still having some limitations, at least they exist. Whereas in the before times where it was making it up as you go.

Lucas Acosta:
Right. And you had to just trust the XML and the app and trust iOS that it would make sure that the screen wouldn’t go to sleep. It just wasn’t quite ironed out the way that it is now. I remember just having to weigh the solution with the business owner when they were deciding between iOS or iPads and a PC laptop. And so we literally had a spreadsheet out and talking about keys breaking on a laptop keyboard and the cons that come with that. So the IOS barely eked out, but we had to tell them we cannot control the screen. We cannot dial in and control the screen, which we still can’t do today.

James Smith:
Maybe one day.

Marcus Ransom:
I remember in a similar time of when management was … There was one way of doing it for one use case and anything else really didn’t quite work is going to the National Gallery here in Victoria with some friends and their daughter sat down at these tethered iPad kiosks they had and managed to sign in with her Apple ID and install some games on this thing and started … It was like, whoa, hang on. What’s going on here? So James, what about you? What’s a really fun problem you’ve had to solve for a customer?

James Smith:
I will say it’s an internal customer. But when I was working at another large financial organization, a request came down essentially directly from the CEO and said, “At this day, at this time, on every single device that we have in the organization, I want this video to play.” For me specifically, I just had to make sure it worked on all the Macs. Someone else was responsible for the PCs and someone else was responsible for the VDI for those on virtual. And make sure it’s not on branch devices, but for everyone in corporate. So when it came down to effectively to what I was responsible for and had to do, we’re talking about 3,000 or 4,000 Mac devices, and at the local time, let’s say 10:00 AM, I don’t know what it was, they wanted a video to play. And if someone skipped it or skipped a certain part of it, they wanted to play it again later on in the day and then to kill itself. Yeah. Amazingly, it actually worked really well. This is why you can now play videos in swiftDialogue because at the time I reached out to a friend of the pod, Bart Ridden, said, “Hey, have you thought about adding a video playback into swiftDialogue?”
I could have done it with depth notify, but I was already using swiftDialogue so I’m like, let’s just poke him and see if he can make it work. He did. He got it in. So it was a lot of work around, some scripting, making sure that we drop a launch agent, recording how long it was. The timestamp from when the video started playing to when someone clicked the button. So if someone clicked the button to exit it and it was less than 30 seconds played, that didn’t count, and they got it later on in the day. If they played more than 30 seconds or whatnot, it would mark a little file on the disk so that then it wouldn’t play again, and the script would self-destruct everything so it just disappeared. Amazingly, it worked, and I put some extension attributes into Jamf to actually track it to see how many people it played across, and yeah, most devices, it just went without a hitch. But it was one of those very interesting requests. I hope I never have to do something like that again, because if you think autoplay videos on the website are bad, imagine logging into your Mac and just every single device sounds on, you’re in an office and just at a certain time, just this video plays full screen for everyone. So that was a very fun one.

Lucas Acosta:
And we can’t always share the user experience implications in the IT department.

James Smith:
Yeah. Exactly. And what about you, Marcus?

Marcus Ransom:
Probably the most fun one I had wasn’t even a request from IT. I’d just started working at this big independent school, rolling out iPads, sorting out their Macs. It was all going really well. And then one of the teachers was just telling me how disappointed she was that their project they’ve been having with the class was that they were raising stick insects. And so the stick insects had created these cocoons and there was a new cohort of stick insects about to be born, but it was going to be a four-day-long weekend and all the students were really disappointed that they weren’t going to be able to see this. And it was like, come on, there’s got to be a way we can sort this out. And it was having a look at all of the video recording equipment that we had wouldn’t have been able to record for that length of time.
And so I ended up with one of the awful white plastic MacBooks that they were using for trolley Macs at that time gaffer taped to a tripod pointing at the enclosure that the stick insects were in with a fire wire raid connected to it that we had being used for something else. So there was this ridiculous amount of storage, and then I stopped motion running. So it was just taking individual photos of it because it was the only way we could work out that this thing running for four days wasn’t going to run out of space. And came in on the Wednesday to see what had actually happened and there were little stick insects everywhere and excited kids being able to watch this footage of when it happened. And it was like that was lots of fun and realizing it was about a day of messing about, but it was really the same sort of thing. I love solutions where you’ve actually got to go, all right, there isn’t currently an answer for this. It’s the MacGyver thing. It’s all right, I’ve got to roll a gaffer tape and I’ve got all of these computers and this sort of stuff here. I’m sure there’s a way we can work out how to do this.

Lucas Acosta:
Reminds me of a recent episode of the nano MDM folks where it seems like they’re using gaffer tape and MacGyver a lot in a very sophisticated way. I mean that with utmost respect because I just don’t know how to. I’m so used to getting things off the shelf now. But those old school it days are fun to hear about when we just had to build it together.

Marcus Ransom:
And I think that’s why large organizations and even small organizations have hackathons where it’s like, okay, let’s actually step back and try to use those parts of our brain to create something new. Regardless of how important or pointless the actual project you’re working on is, that it’s realizing how much fun it is to actually do something that maybe isn’t safe enough to exist as a production hybrid reliability service. But getting a little light to turn on when the coffee machine needs to be cleaned is actually kind of fun, especially if you get to use all of this other stuff lying around that isn’t currently being used.
Well, Lucas, thanks so much for joining us. So if people want to get in touch with you or find out more about you on the internet, where should they be going?

Lucas Acosta:
Lucasacosta.com is where I’m doing a newsletter and we’ve got other information there where I’m writing just more small business type content and a bit more long form place than the Slack conversations that we have as well. And I’m on Twitter, @LucasAaron. Lucas Acosta, whoever that is, had already taken it so I went with my middle name.

Marcus Ransom:
They got the blue tick, so that’s fine.

Lucas Acosta:
Yeah. That’s all right.

Marcus Ransom:
Well, yeah, thanks for showing us how you’ve managed to implement EOS at Foojee and as I said, we’ll put some links to the resources into the show notes. Thank you so much to our sponsors. That’s Kandji, Kolide and Alectrona. And we’ll see you next time. See you later.

Lucas Acosta:
See ya. Take care.

Speaker 4:
The Mac Admins Podcast is a production of Mac Admins Podcast LLC. Our producer is Tom Bridge. Our sound editor and mixing engineer is James Smith. Our theme music was produced by Adam Kudiga the first time he opened GarageBand. Sponsorship for the Mac Admins Podcast is provided by the macadmins.org Slack, where you can join thousands of Mac admins in a free Slack instance. Visit macadmins.org. And also by Technolutionary LLC. Technically we can help. For more information about this podcast and other broadcasts like it, please visit podcast.macadmins.org. Since we’ve converted this podcast to APFS, the funny metadata joke is at the end.