Taking accountability in 2025

Staying on top of goals will lead to success

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Susan Degrassi and Chasity Kopeny of Antis Roofing. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

Susan Degrassi: Hi, I'm Susan Degrassi and I'm the president and COO of Antis Roofing and Waterproofing.

Chasity Kopeny: And I am Chasity Kopeny. I'm the director of finance, accounting and business operations.

Susan Degrassi: Thank you for being with us. We're going to be talking about how to hold our employees accountable. In March of 2022, Charles worked with a Vistage Chair and he brought an operating model to Antis that Charles had seen before but never implemented. It's not new, it's been around for many years. In fact, our friends and partners, Rackley Roofing use it also among many others, I'm sure. But it's called the Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS. We all read this book, What the Heck is EOS? It's an allegory about implementing an operating model that recognizes a visionary CEO at the top. That would be Charles, who's also the founder of Antis Roofing, an integrator that reports to that CEO, which turned out to be me after we went through all this process. And then all the business functions report up through that integrator. Along with understanding and learning the model, and there is lots of material on the internet about this, videos, et cetera, we bought a platform called Ninety. And Ninety uses the EOS model and all the functions it recommends.

And so we're going to talk to you a little bit about that because our entire company tracks, runs their meetings and holds ourselves and others accountable through Ninety. So Chasity, you were an early adapter, you really embraced it, you liked it. What is it about 90 and the EOS model that works so well for you and your teams?

Chasity Kopeny: Like you had mentioned, I do have a lot of people reporting to me and I oversee a lot of departments. So for me it was a way to keep each department organized and myself organized and be able to track our to-dos, our projects, any issues. And just be able to hold each other accountable of what issue is rising, why it's not completed and just be able to move those along to completion. And it's just helped me keep organized.

Susan Degrassi: So do you think it takes things out of Excel spreadsheets, out of email, out of constant reminders?

Chasity Kopeny: Absolutely. A lot of times I will be having a collab conversation with a teammate and often I'll just say, go put it in Ninety, because really what Ninety is designed to do is kind of sidestep those one-off ancillary conversations because it doesn't include the whole team. And it should really include the whole team that's why the Ninety meeting was designed.

Susan Degrassi: So tell us about the meetings and why they function better. What is the process for holding a meeting and why is it more effective than just having a regular staff meeting?

Chasity Kopeny: We have them on the calendar, so it could be a monthly thing, it could be a weekly thing, it could be a bi-weekly thing, just depending on the needs of the department. But in that meeting, there's a structure already built into it. You follow the structure each meeting, it's designed to kind of just open the conversation. You have a segue, you have headlines, you move on to just look at your to-dos and your issues where you can have a really collaborative conversation with everybody that needs to have input or feedback or understand the issue that we're discussing in the room at the same time. It's designated to be just 90 minutes so that we all know that's the amount of time we have for the meeting. And we end it promptly just to be respectful of everybody's schedules.

Susan Degrassi: So what if you don't cover everything?

Chasity Kopeny: If you don't cover everything, you just will either table it to the next meeting or if there's an emergency or urgent action item you created to do with a specific deadline.

Susan Degrassi: Very good. You know what I liked about it is it doesn't stop the hallway conversations, but it doesn't encourage them either. And it always redirects it back to the full group. The other thing I really saw play out over time was the hold each other accountable part. So obviously there's the supervisor and manager relationship that's meant to do that. But there's also the peer group part, both during the meeting and outside of the meeting. Well, in the last year, you and I are part of a group where we had a member that's chronically late for everything, these meetings as well. And the entire group confronted this person live about it, and it was respectful. It was done with love, it was well-received.

Chasity Kopeny: Honest,

Susan Degrassi: Honest. And that's how you build high performing teams. You should have healthy conflict. You shouldn't always agree on everything. You should be able to say, "Hey, I rely on you and therefore this is what I need from you." Do you have anything else like that that may be a little story that might've happened with any one of your groups?

Chasity Kopeny: Well, really what I notice a lot is when we're in this meeting together, we look at our due dates. And when something's not completed, it does create a conversation and an opportunity for us to either say, we need help with this issue or I need to renegotiate the due date because I have X, Y and Z going on. Or simply, they just didn't do it and the entire peer group can hear that. And you could then deal with the employee and the way that you need to for performance improvement. But yes, it just holds us accountable.

Susan Degrassi: I agree. And as a leadership team, we meet four times a year. We could do this more often actually, but we do a full day, off-site where we go through what they call ROCs, but they're really large initiatives that you're working on. And maybe it's your revenue targets, maybe it's adding and implementing a new software program, something that's going to take months to complete. And reset those goals, our immediate goals, our one-year goals, our three and five year goals. And we're doing that over and over again so that really the business stays on track, or it shifts based on change conditions and we make that shift quickly.

Chasity Kopeny: And everything's archived in that system. So you can go look back on discussions that were had and decisions that were made to try to understand at that time why was that made or what was discussed. And it comes up again or it's just an archived issue. So I like that aspect too. It's housed all in the same spot where you can always go look at the history.

Susan Degrassi: So I encourage everybody to begin by learning what the heck is EOS and why does it work and try it for yourself. And if you have any questions, want to see? You have a nifty handout.

Chasity Kopeny: I do. I read What the Heck is EOS? It's a very fast read. You could read it on the beach in an hour. But I also created just some really simplified notes that kind of covers everything from start to finish in the system. And I am happy to give anybody a copy that wants one.

Susan Degrassi: All right, thank you. Okay.