What Holds · Oct 20, 2026 · 51 minutes

When the Business You Built Starts to Cost Too Much with Patrick O’Cain

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Show notes

What happens when the business you’ve built begins to demand more of you than you have to give?

Patrick O’Cain knows what it means to build something successful and discover that the success itself has become difficult to sustain. An Asheville native and the founder of Gan Shan Station and Gan Shan West, Patrick created restaurants that brought people together around food he loved. But behind the success was a growing sense of unease, the strain of running two businesses, and the realization that his passion for creating something was not the same as wanting to manage everything required to keep it running.

In this conversation, Patrick looks back at opening his second restaurant before the first had the leadership and structure it needed. He talks about the excitement of pursuing a new idea, the cost of spreading himself too thin, and the years he spent operating beyond his own capacity. We explore why the people who are most gifted at imagining and creating something often need others who see the world differently, and how difficult it can be to recognize when it's time to get out of the way.

Patrick also shares what he learned about leadership. He describes the frustration of expecting people to understand what he had never clearly communicated, the importance of developing the right people, and the difference between creating a workplace where people perform and one where they feel supported. After selling both restaurants, he eventually found his way to the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a practical framework he now helps other business owners and leadership teams put into practice.

We also talk about the relentless pursuit of what's next, and why failing to recognize what we've already accomplished can leave us exhausted no matter how successful we become. Patrick reflects on learning to measure progress rather than continually comparing himself to an ideal that keeps moving further away.

Throughout the conversation, we return to connection: the communities Patrick wanted his restaurants to create, the honest conversations that make stronger leadership possible, and the family, friendships, and meaningful work that sustain him today.

At the center is a question many founders eventually face: How do you continue building something you believe in without losing yourself in the process?

In This Episode

00:00 Why celebrating progress matters
02:00 Helping business owners and leadership teams get unstuck
03:00 From a love of cooking to building Gan Shan Station
09:00 Connection, community, and the deeper purpose of business
12:00 Expanding too soon and the cost of chasing the next idea
15:00 Creativity, adaptation, and keeping a restaurant open through COVID
18:00 Why visionary founders need people who see things differently
23:00 Building the ship but not wanting to be its captain
26:00 Unspoken expectations, unclear vision, and the limits of leadership
31:00 What Patrick would do differently with his people
35:00 Leaving the restaurant business and discovering a new direction
38:00 Finding freedom through structure, clarity, and better conversations
40:00 The gap and the gain: Why success never feels like enough
46:00 What sustains Patrick now: meaningful work, family, and community
48:00 The difference between being kind and being nice

About Patrick O’Cain

Patrick O’Cain is an Asheville native, entrepreneur, former restaurateur, and Certified EOS Implementer. He founded Gan Shan Station and Gan Shan West, two Asheville restaurants shaped by his love of Asian cuisine, hospitality, and community.

His years as a restaurant owner brought both significant success and firsthand experience with the challenges of growth, leadership, and burnout. After selling his restaurants, Patrick discovered the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a framework that addressed many of the problems he had struggled with as a business owner.

Today, he works with business owners and leadership teams to create greater clarity, strengthen accountability, and build businesses that can grow without depending entirely on the people who founded them. His approach combines practical business experience with a belief in honest conversations, meaningful connection, and helping people discover their own answers.

About What Holds

What Holds is a podcast about what holds what founders and leaders are building, and what holds the people carrying it.

If this conversation brought someone to mind, send it to them. That's how a new show like this reaches the people it's for.

Connect with Patrick O’Cain

Website: Patrick O’Cain — EOS Worldwide
Email: patrick.ocain@eosworldwide.com
Phone: 828-545-1324

Connect with Carla Royal

Website: https://www.carlaroyal.com/
Email: carla@carlaroyal.com

Read the transcript

0:00If we don't stop and celebrate our wins, then we're setting ourselves up for complete and utter exhaustion. Then it's never enough. Never enough. Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach, has this concept called the gap in the gain. Gap thinking is constantly measuring ourselves against an ideal, and we're never, ever going to quite get there. We're always like, oh, I did I did this, but I didn't do this. Versus gain thinking, which is measuring ourselves from the time we start something to the progress that we've made along the journey, knowing that we're never going to achieve the ideal. We want to measure our progress along the journey and celebrate that.

0:50This is what holds conversations with founders and leaders about the work that holds what they're building. I'm Carla Royal, a private coach for founders, and your host. My guest today is Patrick O'Kain. Patrick is an Asheville native who built Gon Shawn Station, then opened a second restaurant as the business grew. From the outside, it looked like expansion and success, but Patrick has described those years as living with a baseline of unease, and he has written candidly about expanding before the first business had the structure, leadership, and clarity it needed. He eventually sold both restaurants. Along the way, he took the second one through COVID and continued growing it while beginning to recognize some of the same strain he had experienced before. Today, Patrick is a certified EOS implementer, working with business owners and leadership teams on many of the problems he once had to navigate from inside his own companies. What interests me about Patrick's story is everything that happened between building something he cared deeply about and becoming the person who now helps other owners build differently. Patrick, welcome to What Holds.

2:03Thank you so much, Carla. I'm so excited to be here.

2:06I'm really glad you're here. When I lived in West Asheville, I often went to Gonchan West, and it was amazing.

2:15Oh, thank you.

2:16Yeah, I really, really enjoyed it. Before we go back into your story, Patrick, tell us a little bit about what you're doing now. What does your work as an EOS implementer look like?

2:26Yeah, great question. My work as an EOS implementer looks like I get together with leadership teams and help them get unstuck. So oftentimes in businesses, as businesses grow and scale and change, we get stuck either on organizational level, on the leadership team level, maybe a department gets stuck, or on the individual level. And so what I do is teach EOS, which is a framework upon which to run the business. So it's the underlying system that communicates across all channels of the business to help leaders run and get more out of what they want of their business.

3:10We're going to come back to that in a few minutes, Patrick, but for now I want you to take me back to Ganshan. And what did you love about building that first restaurant?

3:19Well, Ganshan was really the culmination of a lifetime of work, although a lot of that work I wasn't even conscious of at the time. So I grew up, my parents grew up here in Asheville, and this was you know 35 years ago, back before the food renaissance, I would say, happened in the United States. So we're just some small little mountain town. But my parents took a deep interest in Asian cuisine and Asian cooking. So we would cook, or they would cook at home, you know, probably once a week, we would have Asian food. And this really came out of this one cookbook called Mrs. Chang's Sashwan Cookbook. So my brother and I grew up having these meals all the time, you know, every week. And we'd also ask for it on birthdays, any type of special occasion. And so I went through life after that, just not really thinking too much about it, went off to college, got a couple degrees, but then found myself gravitating back towards the kitchen and towards cooking, this cuisine particularly. And it was just so it just so happened that at that time we went through kind of a more global or I should say uh nationwide renaissance where food became of real importance and the creativity. You started seeing shows pop up about chefs, a lot of the food network really started getting it. And so I really leaned in on what I was most comfortable with, my taste and flavor memories, and realized that I could come back to my hometown and offer the type of food that I grew up with to a broader community, and it just so happened that there was an appetite for that. So that's how the whole thing came about. I loved cooking, I loved being in the kitchen. I took the leap to come and start my own business and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I knew how to run a kitchen, but I had no idea how to run a business as a whole. And so I was really in uh it was a huge wake-up call for me, really leaning into being uncomfortable. I had to break a lot of those old patterns and habits that I'd developed in order to find a different path forward. And during that, it was a lot of there were dark moments along the way, dark path.

5:56I want to make sure we we circle back to that because it's so important for other business owners, company owners to understand that that is so normal and natural and and it's hard. It's also interesting to me that so many business people, you know, I I'm a coach and that's a business. And I I'm telling you, Patrick, the business side of my business is not my wheelhouse. It is not my zone of genius. I'm a great coach, but and I think a lot of people find that to be the case where they have an idea, they have something that they're brilliant at, but the business piece is difficult and different. I'm curious about with your restaurant, what was it? Was it the art? Were you the chef?

6:43I was the chef, yeah. I had a chef and I had a co-chef when we first started out also. I'd gone through culinary school at A B Tech, so did a year of that, and then went down and did my internship at McCrady's, which was a culinary heavy hitter in the South at the time. From that internship, I decided to stay on. They offered me a position and I decided to stay on at that restaurant and not return to culinary school. I'd already had two college degrees at that point, so I was really just taking a deep dive, accelerating that learning into a kitchen, and felt that McCrady's was the best place to do that.

7:18You've mentioned your two college degrees twice now, and so now I'm I have to know what they were in.

7:24Oh, English and French.

7:26English and French.

7:27English and French. Yeah.

7:29English and French to restaurants to now being an EOS implementer. What a journey. Very interesting. I really want to know what's the thread in all of those for you.

7:41If if you pick up on the thread, please let me know because I'm not quite sure. Um, they all they're all interconnected in in some way, shape, or form. In fact, I find a lot of my time in session and working with teams bringing my love for literature and poetry into the session room. Whether it's a context and framing for me to get to a deeper conversation, one of my favorite poets, David White, who founded a leadership school cohort type thing called Foundations for Conversational Leadership, one of his lines is he says, poetry is language for which we have no defenses. And I think about that a lot. And so inviting forth a deeper conversation, improving the quality of conversation in the room so that we can tackle the most difficult and pressing issues that we have as a business, because oftentimes we're just sitting up here on the surface, skirting around, not really sinking down and tackling at the root. Now I find that that ends up showing up more than I would have expected here in what I'm doing today.

8:56That's very interesting. Is the thread a connection?

9:01Yeah.

9:02And almost an artful connection. Certainly, food is connecting, literature is connecting, and the work that you're doing now sounds like it's uh based so much on connection.

9:18I love that you brought that up. I was listening to something recently that talked about building connections or building community. And this wise thinker uh said, I I don't like the framing of that. I think really our baseline is connection. And so this is really just awakening, awakening community, awaking connection, because that is where we begin. So it's not building anything, it's it's awakening what is already there.

9:49I love that. And in my own business, I find that to be so very true. We are built for connection, that's who we are. We're social beings, and we have become so disconnected in this particular culture at this particular time from ourselves, from each other, from the world, from mystery. And so anybody who's doing the kind of work you're doing to create more connection, I think is what will help us to heal and recover. I always think of it as we have had so much put on top of us that we just have to find ways to take off of us so we come back to our true nature of connection.

10:31Yeah, that's beautiful.

10:33You've said that you had no business opening a second location when you did, but at the time you thought that was that that was what growth looked like. What did growth mean to you then?

10:47Well, interesting. Uh this isn't a direct answering of your question, but I think it goes back to something you said earlier and in in terms of running the business. Businesses are born out of ideas and and problems that people have that we then think we have a potential solution for. And so often the creativity that's involved in birthing that idea is not the same creativity that is needed in order to really accelerate and expand and grow and make that whole thing work harmoniously. And so I would say that within that context, I too have challenges in running the business. The creativity of actually running the business, the day of the day. The ideas they flow fairly freely. So opening up Ganshan West was one of those ideas. Hey, I had built this business, we were successful by all measures from the outside, financially successful, we were putting out an incredible product. And at that point, I got a little bit itchy. It's like, oh, okay, well, what's the next shiny thing? And so opportunities started coming my way, and this opportunity came up for Gonchan West. It seemed like a logical extension. I was excited about it. I I love the process of opening up restaurants and being there, walking through construction. It's just continually learning, creating an atmosphere where people can awaken connection and awaken that community. So I went ahead and did that. Now, as I did that, my focus and attention was then distracted on this new thing. And the running of the business, the first location, started to suffer because I wasn't there kind of holding everything together, partially succeeding in spite of myself. I didn't have any formal management or leadership training. I had learned all that I knew through the kitchens that I'd come up with, which were not breeding grounds for great leadership or management, I will assure you. It was the brigade, very militaristic, authoritarian. I learned a lot, learned what what worked, what didn't work. It was it was too much too soon. And had I had the structure or framework in place that would have uh better allowed me to see that now wasn't the time. It doesn't mean there wouldn't have been a time in the future, but that moment wasn't the time because what we was gonna do is gonna separate out things and ultimately probably I would say maybe Gonchan West was the beginning of the end for Ganshan Station because the energy that it took to run both restaurants far surpassed the energy that I had my hundred percent. And so I was running over a hundred percent for years and then ultimately burned out.

14:03I see that so often with my clients and that chasing the shiny thing is what you said, is how you said that. And it is a particular way of viewing the world, that excitement and the dopamine hit and all the things, and not having what you're talking about, the structure, the systems in place to support that. It's great. And also, Patrick, wasn't Gonshan West kind of in the throes of in the middle of COVID?

14:31No, it was pretty well established before COVID. I'm not sure what how that would have happened differently, although I had made some choices due to the nature of the space that we had where Gonshan West was gone. I'd made some very deliberate choices because it it was such a small space. The actual building area was 700 square feet. We had a walk-in that added to that 750 square feet. So we could only seat 20 some odd people in the restaurant when we first opened. And so I knew that we needed a way to activate outside of that 20-person restaurant in order to make the financials work. So I installed a to-go window. Now, this is back before anyone was doing any it was back before COVID, and we weren't thinking about this. Online ordering almost didn't exist. So when COVID came along, that big challenge, and I had actually just sold Gonshan station, so I was really motivated not to close another restaurant. Like, hey, here's this massive challenge. So we actually never closed throughout the entirety of COVID.

15:40Wow.

15:41We trimmed back, we switched to dinner service only, we took our entire menu and put it online. Like I said, started up with that online ordering, very quick to adopt. We started pushing food out through our to-go window. We didn't have anyone inside the restaurant, and we canvassed the neighborhood with our menus. We're able to succeed in a huge way.

16:05You got really creative.

16:07Very creative. Yep. That's where my strength lies. And I think certainly for a lot of founding entrepreneurs, the creative aspect and the big problems are that's our comfort zone. It's the follow-through, it's the years three, four, five, six that really start weighing a heavy toll on us because we just don't have, if we haven't built up the systems and then we don't have the right people within the business that can execute and genuinely get a high out of executing on the vision that we have created, then our energy just starts to diminish constrict.

16:57So this is a a little bit of a tangent, which is you are a visionary, correct?

17:04I would say, yeah. I would say I have more visionary tendencies than not.

17:10And what do people like you who are the visionaries, which are most of my clients, how do you bring that creativity into what's needed in the work? Can you do that by yourself, or do you have to have other people around you?

17:27I would say for true visionaries. And I would consider myself not exactly a true visionary. Yes, I've got some good ideas and I like to tinker with things and problem solve deeply. And I'm fairly strong at the follow-through and execution up to a point. Like I want to get it started and I want to know how to do it, but then I want to hand it off to someone else. But for those true visionaries that are out there, and I've been around a few in my life, but you sit down with them and you have a meeting, and an hour goes by, and the territory that you've covered in an hour, the ideas that are coming out, and the speed at which they're coming out, is like it's neckbreaking. And so for those individuals, they really have to have that other the the yin to their yang or the yang to their yin, whatever it may be, to create that conflict. And what I mean by that is healthy conflict to the point where we can go forward because that many ideas are not sustainable. We can't just idea idea, and so 29 of the 30 ideas not worth pursuing right now. Either they're bad ideas, the timing's off, or we just don't have the bandwidth to do it. But one of those ideas is actually going to take the company to the next level and is gonna help us break through some of those troubles that we're having, some of the issues that we're having. And so finding that complement to you where you can, it's like if you if you try to freehand with one hand, draw a circle or something with really fine detail, you can approximate it. But if you take your other hand and you push on the opposite direction, so that you have one one hand pushing in one direction, one hand pushing in the opposite direction, your ability to control fine motor movements becomes so much greater. And so it's that complement that these visionary founder entrepreneurs they need to find whoever that compliment is with it for their life and be open enough to recognize who they are, what their what their flow state is, which is to come up with a bunch of stuff. But most of that stuff is again, the timing isn't right, or it's not really a good idea. And so to have that other person become the filter for that, say no, no, no, no, no, but then encourage one time.

20:20And so I love what you said about drawing the circle because I I can't draw a circle for the life of me. Never occurred to me to take my other hand and use that pressure to fine-tune that. And I think about so many entrepreneurs and visionaries who think they have to do it all by themselves on some level. I mean, they know they need people around them, but how much are they going to allow that? And so I just love that metaphor of that pressure and the precision that can come from that. So many entrepreneurs and visionaries are such fast processors and they just love to go, go, go, go, go. And one of the tricks is to help them learn to slow down a bit and how to live in their zone of genius, but also with that support, with that counterbalance, slowing down, but also allowing them to be who they are at the same time.

21:17100%. And tying this in with your work, it takes a certain degree of self-awareness, vulnerability to recognize, hey, yeah, if I'm really honest with myself, then this is not. I can do it, but it actually is really grading on my energy as a human. And so I'm gonna need to turn this over sooner rather than later. Or have come up with strategies and tools to help navigate the path forward. I think a lot about maps and maps. Maps that we have that we create throughout our lives. If we don't have a map, we have no idea where we're going or where we are. Right. I think about locating myself. Where am I in terms of the context of my life? Where am I in terms of the context of my business? Where do I want to be headed? What are the next steps? Where's our map as a family? My wife and I get to create our own map together. That's exciting. Where do we want this family to head? And then I have my individual map. Where do I want to head? And then I've got to make sure that these things talk to each other. Maybe the family map is actually a little bit more important. You know, my personal map, I'm gonna have to give up some things because the family map is really what's most important right now.

22:56It takes self-awareness and real intention. And you brought up vulnerability, and you've described those years with Ganshan West and Ganshan Station as living with a baseline of unease. And from the outside, the business still looked successful, but what was going on with you that people couldn't see?

23:22Oh man, there's so many different things. So many different things. Well, in a lot of ways, I built this, I built the ship. Right? Wow, I did all the stuff and I built the ship, and and here we are sailing all of the ship, but that I didn't want to be the captain of the ship. A coach that I'd used early in my Ganshan days used that metaphor. I am the architect and the build and the contractor on the ship, but I need to have a captain that's gonna then sail the ship. And I may be the navigator, right? Hey, where are we headed? But also talking with the crew and making sure that they're on board as well, and then having someone else sail the ship. I'd been sitting in all these different seats throughout the time, I didn't have language around it, didn't have awareness of it, and that type of schizophrenia became too much to bear and led me down some really dark paths. Do I really want to do this anymore? And what does it look like if I don't do it anymore? What is the worst possible outcome for this? It's losing the business, it's losing all the invested money, it's selling my home in order to pay back as much as I could. It's taking essentially just doing the thinking exercise to get to the bottom, and it takes a while, but then realizing that oh, you know what, even if that were the case, it's gonna be it's gonna be okay. Like things, things will be alright. One of my deepest frustrations and weaknesses was that I had no leadership and management training beforehand. And I wasn't really invested at the time in developing myself as a better manager. I could see things so clearly and so quickly, and I was curious, like, well, why can't you see this clearly? And it's because I hadn't clearly articulated my expectations and or the vision, or a lot of these things that I'd had taken for granted. And ultimately I wasn't clear on the vision myself. So, how could I have anyone else understand it? So a lot of that became an inward point, inflection point on me to really ask myself the deep questions of why am I doing this? What do I want moving forward? That arrived at the conclusion with Gonchan Station that you know what, I don't want to do this with both locations anymore. This is not, this is not the end. In its current setup, in its current framework, and I hadn't been introduced to EOS at that point, which is a really, it takes all this business theory, which I'd read about. I'd read Good to Great, I'd looked into Ray Dalio and all the stuff, and there are lots of theory, but EOS really grounds this into actual practice with tools and disciplines to get everyone aligned and on the same page. And that's when I discovered EOS years later, it was the light bulb moment, the aha, like, oh wow. This is what that theory looks like in practice. Because I'd figured out a system, but it wasn't a system that was coherent, it was coherent only to me. And even then, it wasn't all that coherent. It was based in a lot of these first principle practices. Just as EOS is based in the first principle practices, but it's packaged into one complete system that talks, has a vocabulary. I have a quote on the board behind me here from this English Austrian philosopher named Wichtenstein, and he says, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. And so getting everyone aligned on the language, we need to be sharing a common language to create the world we want to live in.

27:59There are so many threads here that I want to pull. We'll see how many we can pull. It sounds to me like you are a very fast processor, and I am too. And I I know that I used to think here's a good example, Patrick. Driving in the car. I can see all the possibilities and all the different things really, really, really fast. And so I can react super fast. So I find myself getting frustrated with people who are like, why are you driving this way? And then I realize that not everybody's a fast processor. And by the way, fast processing does not mean better than, it's a different way of processing. And so not everybody literally can do that. They do something different that I can't do, for example. So when I understood that that um fast process, I'm like, why can't you see this? Why can't you get this? I mean, it's so clear. But a lot of people, you know, one of my favorite mentors who helps me with financial things, she is a very slow processor in a very good way. And helps me to slow down and to see the reality in a way that I wouldn't allow myself to because I'm such a fast processor. And that can create difficulty with people who don't understand those differences. And you're like, why can't you guys get it? And it's like, well, because we don't process in the same way that you do.

29:22And isn't that the gift of great financial people? Great financial people do have this incredible aptitude for slowing down and putting it into a larger picture and creating a context. Yes.

29:37Um and don't people like you and me need that kind of person for life?

29:42Yes, we do. Oh my gosh. Yes, we certainly do.

29:47You talked about needing some self-awareness and openness, and I agree. I know that that I can't work with people who don't have any self-awareness. I'm not saying they're bad or anything, I'm just saying I just don't do good work with those kind of people. I find though that if there's just a little bit of self-awareness, that's enough to get in and to begin to do some deeper work. If you had known early that you were an architect and navigator and not a captain, what do you imagine would have happened or could have happened with your restaurants?

30:23Oh, I would have gotten out of the way. I would have taken a longer view, longer-term view on people, and cultivated the right people. I would have made difficult decisions more quickly in terms of getting rid of people that were the wrong people, and I would have spent a lot more time developing the people that were the right people to really bring them in and give them the tools and the support necessary to be successful in what in their job.

31:04And what difference would that have made to the restaurant?

31:10The difference that I think it would have made to the restaurant is it would have been a more inviting, hospitable place to enter as a customer, as a as a guest. And it would have been a more inviting, hospitable place to work. Ultimately, I've I've grown a lot in the what was that, 2014, in the 12 years since I started, since I first started Ganshan Station, and realizing that what I was doing while I thought I was building myself a career, really was building something for other people to awaken that sense of community. I remember talking back, I wanted the restaurant to feel like cheers the bar, the place where everyone knows your name. You walk in and everyone recognizes, you know, sees their friends and is going up and talking with friends, and that's why it was in the neighborhood where I grew up. And we were able to achieve that, and I didn't lean into that with my people as well. So I think that's one of the big awarenesses that I have today. And were I to do it again, to take a much more deliberate caring focus on getting the right people in there and making sure they had the right tools and support to do the job that needed to be done. And encouragement. If you're gonna work for me and really I would say if you're gonna work for anyone, you gotta be willing to get your ass kicked sometimes, and then you also really need some encouragement sometimes. So as our boss, you gotta be willing to do that ass kicking and then also give the positive encouragement. Hey, if you do something that I like, I'm gonna encourage you, I'm gonna praise you. It's such a cliche, but it's so true. Praise in public, criticize in private. There's another phrase that I love. If someone does something that you like, don't punish them for it. If someone does something that you like, don't punish them for it. And how I see that taking place is, for example, in a restaurant, someone takes a little bit of proactivity to do something, to go and clean clean something up, or to to start a project that needed to be done, or that they saw that needed to be done. But they messed it up. Rather than going and punishing them for messing it up, let's celebrate the fact that they were proactive and they did it. And let's learn from the little mistake. Hey, you know what? We all make mistakes, I've made plenty of mistakes, I've lost more money in this business than you could ever lose for me. Now it's it's easier to lose the money when it's yours to lose versus having other people's lose it for you for whatever reason. But that phrase sticks around with me all the time. Don't punish someone for doing something that you like.

34:31I love that. When you eventually sold both restaurants, what did leaving that life change for you and what didn't it change?

34:39What I what it changed for me was it freed me fully to pursue the next steps.

34:47Um did you know what those next No idea.

34:50Nope.

34:51So it took a lot of guts then to make it that kind of a pivot, that kind of a change without knowing what you were going to, I would imagine.

34:59I didn't launch out into the complete unknown. I had concurrently during COVID gone and gotten my real estate license and learned all about that, which played in nicely to business and really understanding real estate, I would argue, is fundamental to any type of business with a physical location that you're going to have, office space, whatever. Really great experience. Also helped with contract negotiation, just lots of learning throughout that. But I knew that real estate was not the end. That's not the culture that I wanted to participate in for the rest of my career. I'd always been attracted to business owners. My friends are all business owners. I can think of maybe a couple who aren't. Entrepreneurship has been my passion since forever. I've always acted like an owner, even when it wasn't mine, and done what I thought was best for the for the greater good of the company. And sometimes that came at self-sacrifice, and that's good. Like I'm proud of that. But I didn't have a clear vision on what the next step was, and I opened uh not to get too woo-woo, but I just kind of opened myself up to the possibility stepping into the unknown to see what came out of it. And not long after I did that, I discovered EOS, and I immediately knew this is what I was going to be doing. It seemed that my whole life had led up to this, to that inflection point.

36:46What attracted you to EOS?

36:49The simplicity, the practicality. Again, this wasn't business theory, this is business practice. The help and clarity that it offered to business owners, and knowing that my experience would have been much different had I had these simple tools. Seeing how it all works together that remains the beauty of the system. And it's something that's that's very compelling and easy to teach.

37:26Would you say that it allows the entrepreneurial spirit to soar?

37:34Yeah, yes, that's a that's a great way of looking at it. Yeah, it it unshackles you. It unshackles you. Having sat in that visionary seat for so long and having felt a prisoner to the business, and so you're down in the depths and you're calling out, and it's just echoing in the cave, and you're like, what is going on? You know, the abyss. And you can't, you feel like you can never get out of this. And EOS is the ladder that helps you climb out, knowing when to let go, knowing what to focus on, figuring out the answers for yourself, and not having the answers told to you by someone else. When I work with companies, I'm not there as an advisor. No, I'm here as in threefold. I'm here as a teacher, I teach EOS, I facilitate the difficult conversations that need to happen in a room, inviting them forth, getting the people to call upon the courage that's living within themselves to say something difficult and creating the conditions for that. And then lastly, I'm there as a coach for the team. Not an individual, I don't do individual coaching like you do, but a coach for the team. This goes back to the kick in the ass and then encouragement. It's like sometimes they need a kick in the ass. Hey, you guys said you were gonna do this, you didn't do it. What's up here? Come on. Where are the blockages? Or you guys said you were gonna do all this stuff and you didn't get all of it done, but you really got a lot of it done. And let's look back and let's celebrate this. Because this is that you have made a huge stride in the last 90 days, and you guys need to take some time to celebrate the wins. A lot of time I find people just pushing so hard, push, push, push, push, push, more and more and more and more and more, and it's never enough. And we gotta stop and we have to celebrate when we've done something really well. Because if we don't stop and celebrate our wins, then we're setting ourselves up for complete and utter exhaustion. Then it's never enough. Never enough. Dan Sullivan, who you probably know, strategic coach, has this concept called the gap in the gain. And gap thinking is constantly measuring ourselves against an ideal, and we're never ever gonna get quite get there. Oh, we're always like, oh, I I did I did this, but I didn't get, but I didn't do this. Versus gain thinking, which is measuring ourselves from the time we start something to the progress that we've made along the journey, knowing that we're never going to achieve the ideal. It's the horizon. The ideal is the setting sun. Like who's ever caught who's ever chased the sunset and actually gotten to the sunset, right? It just doesn't happen. So I I I like that we want to measure our progress along the journey and celebrate that.

40:50It's so important, and I have to remind my clients of that all the time because they scale one peak, and before they have even taken a breath, they're looking at the next one. I agree with you, how important it is. I'm curious how being an EOS implementer satisfies the visionary in you. Is there a place for your visionary self as an EOS implementer?

41:16Yes. And interestingly, in the community that we talk about, most of the visionary, if you're familiar with the Colby personality cognitive index, the implementer community is made up mainly of high fact finders and high quick starts. And high quick starts being those visionary folks, I'm kind of a middle ground on the quick start. And I'm kind of a middle ground on all of it, but I'm a what they call a leading fact finder. So I'm a 7454 in the Colby. So I lead with my fact-finding. And the visionary, yes, it allows us to scratch that visionary itch. It allows me to scratch that visionary itch as an EOS implementer because I get to see all different types of companies. So many different things. And help them get to to arrive at the answers that they need in order to be successful. Connect the dots on, hey, you said this two sessions ago. What about that? Let's bring that in. And the amount of creative energy that goes into connecting those dots from over a span of two years, which is what a typical engagement looks like with the client, is massive. Oh, we're pulling this from maybe four or five seconds, maybe over a year ago. That we're just having the conversation. Like that was a seed that was planted, and now we need to have that talk right now. Now you're actually ready for it. I'm sure you see this in your work as a coach. And I'd be curious, how does that scratch your visionary?

42:59Well, I first want to say that your Colby results show I can see how you would be perfect as an EOS implementer. Because you truly, because of where you land in there, you truly can see all sides pretty darn clearly. And so I can imagine you can not only help the visionaries, but you can help the implementers. I'm a 3394. And so I don't it's which by the way, so many of my clients are right there with me. I think which is why I do work well with them. Only I do have the ability, believe it or not, I know it's shocking, to slow down and help people see something beyond that or underneath that. Um I can see that you're perfectly set up to be an excellent EOS implementer.

43:50Well, thank you.

43:51I'm sure there are lots of other reasons beside the Colby, but just how you you get things done in the world, you can truly see it. You can see

44:01You asked me earlier on what my what what I had gotten my degrees in in college, and it and it really does, and I'd mentioned this before, it it really feels like everything aligned in coming to this career, from my studies in English and literary traditions all the way through to owning a business, seeing the highs, high, high highs, you know, featured in national publications about restaurants and and the low lows, which is those dark, lonely nights where, like, oh my gosh, how am I going to get myself out of this have put me here today, able to do the work that I love that's so compelling and so engaging and helping other people get what they want out of their businesses. I truly believe that entrepreneurship is the way to solve the ills of the world. And to get even deeper than that, I think that entrepreneurship can create a this may sound a little out there, but can create world peace.

45:12I remember you saying that, and man do I wish we had another hour to go down that rabbit hole. Because I really want to hear something because I I do see, yeah, I we can't. We don't have time, but but I may have to have you on again just to just to scratch that itch because it is a a very interesting concept that I would love to hear more about. What also makes you a good EOS implementer, I'm sure, is the fact that you've lived it. You didn't go in, learn this EOS system, learn how to teach it. You've actually lived it and know what a difference it would have made had you had those skills and systems and structures and accountability and so forth. So it does set you up beautifully for being an amazing EOS implementer. So, Patrick, we are nearing our time. You have spent years being responsible for businesses, teams, and a lot of other people. What holds and sustains you now?

46:14I absolutely love what I do. I think operating in that unique ability, that zone of genius to use the Luncioni language. This work is so compelling to know that I'm helping people. And then also outside of that, on a personal note, I have a very young family. I've got a son that's almost five months old and a daughter that's almost two. So we're just like burning at both ends, and they really give me a lot of excitement and joy. And a supportive wife who has a completely different career, who would never be an entrepreneur, but is one of the people that I respect the most because she allows the entrepreneur to be the entrepreneur. And that she is she's a nine follow-through.

47:19Oh my gosh.

47:20You know, she is. I've got a very low um threshold for niceties, surface pleasantries. I really want to get down to it. I'm gonna say the difficult thing, and it may piss somebody off, and that's okay with me, because I'm not here to just operate on a surface level. I want to go deeper. And so the people that have met me there within that distance, like, hey, this is what you're gonna get. You know you're gonna get like if you say something to Patrick, he's gonna give you the the pushback, right? He's not gonna sugarcoat it or just let it go by. I think that that wins a lot of respect among the business community. And I respect those who also do the same. And that means we have tough conversations sometimes, which is good.

49:16Well, Patrick, we have reached our time. Unfortunately, I could go on forever and ever, but how can people reach you?

49:24You can reach me through email, give me a call. I've got a microcell website that I can send over.

49:30You want to give us your email address and then I'll put it in the show notes as well.

49:34Yeah, yeah, yeah. Patrick.ocane at eosworldwide.com. That's patrick.ocan at eosworldwide.com. And then my phone number too, which I give out like candy, is 828-545-1324. So 828-545-1324. Call me. Love to talk about this stuff.

49:56Well, I see and feel your passion, Patrick, and also your integrity and and the no-nonsense kindness that you have and the big heart. I have thoroughly enjoyed spending time with you, and I hope we get to do it again soon. Thank you for being here.

50:12Thank you so much for having me, Carla. It's been a pleasure.

50:15You are welcome. If this conversation brought someone to mind, send it to them. That's how this show reaches the people it's for. I'm Carla Royal, a private coach for founders. They often have good advisors for the business. They don't always have someone for themselves. That's where my work comes in. You can find me at carlaloyal.com. This is what holds. I'll see you back here next time.

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