Ep. 169 — Daniel Moshe: Living in the Owner's Box After Installing EOS

6 min read

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Episode Summary

You built the business. You also operate the business. The line between those two seats has never actually been drawn, which is why every decision still funnels through your inbox and every distribution still feels like payroll for yourself. Daniel Moshe runs Tech Guru, an IT firm in Minneapolis, and he’s been quietly working himself out of a job for the better part of a decade. Not because he wanted to sell. Because he wanted to be home for dinner with his kids. He and his business partner Micah installed EOS, drew a hard line between investor and operator, and built what Dan Sullivan calls a self-managing company. We got into how Daniel treats Tech Guru as an investment instead of a piggy bank, why compensation conversations between partners never actually end, what it looked like to take six months off during his divorce and watch the company keep growing, and the Visionary and Integrator structure that holds the whole thing together. Plus the scary niching decision (dental practices first, $20K and six months in the trash, then CPA firms) that took them from zero leads to 78 from a single webinar. The honest version of decoupling without walking away.

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## Top 10 Takeaways
  1. Without a life you want outside the business, you will never actually let go of the inside.
  2. Your business partner is not your employee. The investor seat and the operator seat are separate.
  3. Compensation conversations between partners never end. “Set it and forget it” is a fantasy.
  4. Treat the company as an investment, not a piggy bank to fund your lifestyle.
  5. The owner’s box sits above the org chart. Owners set direction. The leadership team executes.
  6. Leave for six months. Whether the company grows or stalls in your absence tells you everything.
  7. Being a generalist is more expensive than niching. You just never see the bill.
  8. Ask yearly: if a competitor opened next door and put you out of business in twelve months, how?
  9. Free days, focus days, buffer days. Mixing the three is why your strategy is stuck.
  10. Vulnerability with your partner is the unsexy moat. Without trust, the two of you decide nothing.

Sound Bites

“I kind of mentally considered Micah an owner and he’d always had an owner mindset for quite some time.” (@00:20:37) — Daniel Moshe

“We are investors in this company. That’s kind of how we think about it. And yeah, we happen to be also employees of this company, but we draw a pretty distinct delineation between those two separate roles.” (@00:21:13) — Daniel Moshe

“I’d come back from a conference, I’d tell everybody to stop what they’re doing, we’re going to do it a totally different way now. And this would happen about every other month. And then we had burnout, we had turnover, the company was not profitable.” (@00:28:00) — Daniel Moshe

“90-some percent of entrepreneurs are solving for the income each year instead of solving for the value creation.” (@00:25:01) — Ryan Tansom

“The question we ask ourselves every year is: if somebody moved in next door and put up a business and they put us out of business in a year, how did they do it?” (@00:34:23) — Daniel Moshe

“Without that trust, I’ve seen what it looks like when that trust doesn’t exist within a team of leaders. You can’t do anything. You’re totally frozen.” (@00:53:00) — Daniel Moshe

About This Episode

Daniel Moshe is the founder of Tech Guru, a Minneapolis-based IT firm that now serves CPA firms nationwide as their outsourced IT department. He’s also a Certified EOS Implementer, currently working with 14 leadership teams to install the same Entrepreneurial Operating System he used to decouple from day-to-day operations at Tech Guru. Daniel is a long-time member of EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) and a student of Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach methodology. He came on the show because his story is a different version of the “life after business” arc most guests bring: he kept the company, installed the system, and built himself into the owner’s box instead of selling out of it.

Resources Mentioned

  • Tech Guru — Daniel’s IT firm for CPA firms. — techguruit.com
  • Strong in 6 — Daniel’s EOS implementer practice. — strongin6.com
  • EOS / Traction by Gino Wickman — The operating system Daniel installed at Tech Guru and now installs for clients.
  • Entrepreneurial Leap by Gino Wickman — Daniel pre-ordered it; aimed at pre-startup entrepreneurs.
  • Strategic Coach (Dan Sullivan) — Source of the “self-managing company” concept and the entrepreneurial time system (free / focus / buffer days).
  • Greg Crabtree — Small business finance thought leader who shaped how Daniel and Micah think about return on invested capital and cash on hand.
  • Mike Paton — EOS Implementer and prior podcast guest who introduced Daniel to EOS through an EO board meeting.
  • Brené Brown — Referenced for the vulnerability and trust work.
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear — Referenced for habit discipline.
  • Inside Bill’s Brain (Netflix) — Referenced for Bill Gates’s “think week.”
  • Root Works — CPA peer learning org Tech Guru struck a strategic partnership with.

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