Point North Networks is a managed service provider that’s been in business since 2005. What started as a hosting company has evolved into a full-service MSP — driven by founder Brian’s core tenet of relationships and taking care of people. When clients asked for more, he delivered.
Now, with 20 employees and recent major certifications, Point North is experiencing hockey-stick growth powered by EOS and Strety. Integrator Dana Johnson shares how Point North self-implemented EOS, the challenges of rolling out EOS in a high-pressure MSP environment, and how Strety’s features — from Personal Space to External Team Spaces for client management, performance management, and integrations — have become essential to their operations.
Can you tell us about how you became the Integrator at Point North Networks?
In 2019, a fellow Navy chief introduced me to Brian. I applied and said, “Hey, I can’t do that sys admin job you have posted. I’ve got some experience, but I don’t have the right certifications.” Something must have gone right in that phone call because Brian invited me to meet up and have a chat. But then we sat down and he said, “Hey, you like process and stuff, right? You’ve done SOPs.”
That led into me onboarding and our EOS journey. He was working with a consultant who was EOS adjacent and talking about Traction a lot. So I came in to do process stuff, read the book, and we started self-implementing while I was figuring out everything about the company.
We were four people when I started and now we just hired our 20th employee. Things are taking off. We got a pretty big certification recently. That’s the fun part of EOS — you get the structure, things leapfrog forward. We’re at that hockey stick point.
How does your company culture influence your decisions around EOS and change management?
There’s times where you get caught up in your numbers. Everybody does. But we’ve had multiple points where we pause and say, “Hey, this is probably gonna crush our profits a little bit, but let’s hire some more people. I feel the team is more stressed.”
Because a happy team is what it’s really all about—happy team and happy clients. The rest is the icing on the cake. As long as you have those things, you’re happy going to work, everybody you’re working with is happy, your clients are happy. You don’t want to lose that secret sauce where people actually want to be there.
Self-Implementation Journey
That must have been a huge learning curve — learning an entire company, a role, and EOS all at once. How did you approach that?
With a fire hose. That’s why EOS self-implementation was our way. I definitely see it’s not right for a lot of companies. It worked for us because I didn’t know anything about MSPs at that time. I’m just that nerd who will actually open up the help file to figure out how something functions.
That was one of the things I like about Traction — that the book exists. So as you’re starting, you have this thing to refer back to. I like the EOS community a lot—very helpful, happy, friendly people. To me, it’s like the CrossFit of business operating systems.
But it was drinking from a fire hose trying to organize the work and say, “Hey, who’s accountable for what?” when you don’t actually know what that stuff is yet. My Visionary is awesome — we have really good rocket fuel. But you know how it is trying to get a Visionary to pinpoint the real work from an organizational standpoint, and they’re saying, “We just get it done.” Anytime you say it just happens, I get nervous.
What were some of the challenges in the early rollout?
We had some aborted efforts. The deeper I got into EOS tools, the more excited I got, so I tried giving Rocks to some of our techs.
But asking techs who’ve never been exposed to this stuff to do Rocks and strategy things while also serving clients in a high-pressure environment — in MSPs, you’re constantly putting out fires. It was really hard to figure out how to hold people accountable for a Rock when we don’t want to damage client satisfaction.
That’s why I pulled back and focused on making sure our leadership team was 100% solid before rolling out company-wide. For the techs, I should have been focusing on smaller Rocks more relevant to their personal role. That’s how we’ll approach it next time.
Everyone is familiar with core values. I have them submit Issues to us. We roll them up. That’s been part of their reviews — what Issues do you want me discussing at the leadership team? Then I go back and discuss what was resolved. Because we’re techs, I had a lot of those Issues in our PSA, and I’ve been rolling those into Strety now.
I’m a big believer that it takes three months to be okay, six months to be pretty good, and a year for people to be solidly competent with any big new thing, even high performers. So our approach to self-implementation is going to be a lot more deliberate and wrapped with the knowledge that things won’t be perfect; we just have to work through them as a team.
Tools & Software Evolution
What tools were you using to track your EOS implementation before Strety, and how did you make the switch?
We used Ninety eventually. Probably just Excel before that, but we weren’t doing it right.
We moved into Ninety.io before Brian, one of Strety’s cofounders, messaged us and said, “Hey, you want to try out Strety?”
We liked his original product, BrightGauge, and the way he was approaching things — that the product was looking to do more than run a meeting. At that point, my experience with Ninety was that it’s a pretty good product, but I felt it was stagnating.
When we got into Strety in late 2023, it had some growing to do, but not a ton. You could tell the bones were going in the right direction. As exhibited in the Strety User Group, the vision coming from your visionary, the passion — you could tell it was there, and that made the switch really easy.
Ninety was fine. We weren’t struggling. But it didn’t have other bells and whistles and we didn’t feel like it would grow. And there were minor pain points. I’m in an MSP space—we work with a lot of applications. I’ve come to expect that none are ever perfect. You just pick your poison.
The Strety team responds really quickly to support questions, requests, and making changes. I know nothing’s perfect, but Strety has a team that will listen and do the best they can. That’s probably the most important part.
What Strety integrations do you use?
We use AutoTask—I go back and enter tickets in there. It’s a good integration. I have Microsoft Teams integrations set up too. I found out recently that Strety now has a public API, so I’m excited to get in there.
Key Product Features & Changes
You’ve had front-row seats to the evolution of the product over the past two years. At a high level, what are the biggest product changes that have made an impact for you?
Having filled in for my service manager for a significant chunk of time, I just started using Strety as necessary, which was fantastic because it was functioning very well.
The accountability chart got better. That’s where I’m doing a lot right now. I’m enjoying being in the Accountability Chart, navigating through it, getting the team set up.
Playbooks are going to be a really big thing for me. I wasn’t fully sold on using them because we use IT Glue for documentation. But I like that you can assign Playbooks to people in Strety. I want to assign a policy, have somebody read it, and then if I make changes in the future, reassign it to be looked at. It’s fantastic that it can all now be automated in Strety.
One of my early projects for next quarter is moving all our policies into Strety so that as we onboard users, it’s all there. I can verify everybody’s read it, and they’re good to go.
As an Integrator, what is your favorite feature?
I love the personal space. That’s probably my favorite piece of Strety. As an Integrator, especially in an MSP, there are a few tools I could be using—my ticket system Autotask, salespeople want HubSpot. Everybody wants their own space to track their stuff. Cool, but for me, my life is in Strety. I’m tracking people’s stuff, looking at To Dos, doing the strategy stuff.
It’s great to have my own personal space to track my To Dos and Issues—when people bring me Issues, I put them on my Issue list. What I started doing is going in at the start of the week and thinking, “Okay, what’s on my plate, what am I going to tackle this week? Which are my top three issues? Let’s get some To Dos on my list and tackle those.”
When I started using Strety as my home base as an Integrator, probably halfway through last year, my clarity got a lot better. I wasn’t checking To Dos here and there and everywhere. I was able to get back to being more organized. That’s been a game changer for me. I can see my Issues and To Dos in line and connected to the strategy and other work that’s happening.
Client Management in Strety
How are you using Strety for client management?
We have a couple clients in their own External Team Spaces, and we run our meetings with them similar to a Level 10. We go over Issues and assign To Dos. With the clients we’ve brought into Strety, it’s made a big impact. The people we’re working with don’t live in IT world. They have a whole different problem set. Being able to talk to people in an EOS way, they got more traction — pun intended. It helps get movement with people we weren’t getting as much movement with before.
It’s not that they weren’t trying. Their emails are blowing up, they’ve got all these other things going on—where are they tracking their stuff?
Giving them access to this portal where we can list Issues, To Dos, notifications has really streamlined our communications. Then when we run a Level 10 style meeting — a communication style they’re used to — we go over Issues and make sure they’re getting resolved, To Dos are getting completed. It just helped move those conversations along in a way we were struggling with before.
With these clients, using Strety has been a total game changer. We’re looking at doing it more because we want to increase our ability to have that strategic IT conversation, not a tactical one. It’s not about how many tickets we solved—it’s, “Hey, IT is an essential part of your business. Where are you trying to go? What IT needs do you have to grow the way you want to grow?” Strety gives us an ideal medium to have these higher level conversations.
We want to help our clients shift to a proactive strategy mindest instead of a tactical reactive one. Traditionally, people think about IT when something breaks, or a need is impending. If we’ve been doing our job right people forget IT exists because we’ve taken that burden off of their plate. It reminds me of when I worked on the railroad on signals. You’d say, “Hey, I need to get out and maintain that switch.” The dispatcher would always say, “Nope, we’re running trains because trains make money.” Then the switch would break, trains would be down for a long time, and they’d be all over you. “Well, now it’s going to take longer because you didn’t let us get out there and do what we needed to do.” So I bring that experience over to the IT space—being proactive always pays off in the long run.
How did you choose which clients to bring into Strety?
We bring in clients who are already using EOS, so it makes sense to have our conversations in an EOS style. We can say, “Hey, here’s your Issue list.” That clicks right off the bat. “Oh, an Issue list. Cool. We can IDS these things now.” That’s a great place to start with EOS clients.
We love working with EOS clients. We want to work with more of them. Companies running on EOS are growing. They’re enjoyable to work with. They’re usually more excited because EOS is helping them grow. They want to be structured and organized. The culture around EOS is just energetic and exciting. Being able to frame conversations and work with people feeling that success and happiness is fun.
Performance Management in Strety
How do you use Strety for your one-on-one meetings?
I ran 1:1 meetings myself for a while when our service manager was deployed and I was filling in his seat. I noticed that now that we’ve been growing, I don’t get as much of the nitty gritty details from everyone. I had a feeling people weren’t telling me stuff they might want to tell somebody. Even though I thought I was making myself available they just didn’t know the right time to bring it up.
I went to everybody and said, “Hey, everybody’s gonna have a one-on-one. You can schedule it once every week, once every other week, or once a month. I don’t care what the frequency is, but I need on my calendar that we’re going to have a one-on-one. That day, you can come in and say, ‘I’ve got nothing to talk about.’ But I need you to know that I have time set aside specifically for you at a frequency that you want.”
I talked to someone else about how he runs 1:1s and came up with some questions that work well for us: what have you done since the last one-on-one? What makes you most proud? What’s a challenge you have?
One that kind of surprised people was: what are the challenges going on in your personal life? I don’t force people to tell me, but most people open up. I think it’s important for people to know that I recognize, and the company recognizes, you have a personal life. It does come to work and does affect you. Knowing about it, we can adjust workloads and conversations. If you have something tough going on, I’ll step out of my office and you can use it for a day. I’ll go somewhere else. You can have a quiet space. Go work from home today. You’re fine.
Now I’m implementing across the company for our 1:1s to be run the way I was doing it. My managers are going to do it that same way because I had a lot of really good success. It helped the techs open up in a grander way. I love mentorship. I’m passionate about that.
To roll it out, I created a custom 1:1 meeting template in Strety that all my managers can now bring into their reports’ spaces to keep conversations consistent. This also helps create an easily accessible historical record around those conversations.
How does your team approach performance reviews?
We do quarterlies and an annual, and I’ve made a template for those reviews in Strety too. That one uses more of the generic EOS stuff. But then at the bottom, it has those same questions from the one-on-one meeting template just to have those same ongoing conversations at a higher level and with a longer scale in mind.
We’re very strong on culture and relationships. Being a Navy guy, I’m a big deckplate leadership person, as a Navy Chief, I always tell people, “If you’re finding out anything for the first time in this meeting, then I haven’t done my job. This is just a meeting where we validate the things you’ve done and remind you.” I remind my techs of the good things they forgot they did at the start of the quarter, because that happens. Especially at the end of a year — “Hey, do you remember when you did this? That was really great.” That’s one of my favorite things to do in those meetings because people forget and they need to celebrate themselves more.
How will using Strety for your performance reviews help your team with consistency and engagement?
Beyond the ability to create templates for our one-on-one meetings and performance reviews, I’m going to have better control visibility with the HR center. For example, right before this meeting I just pushed out our next review cycle without even thinking about it. I put it in there and sent it out to everybody, so now I can see it all in there. That’s fantastic and makes life so much easier than the annoying back and forth of “Hey, did you schedule your meeting?” You can forget people, and that is a pet peeve of mine. I really don’t like missing somebody’s review. It says such a bad thing to that person. Even if it’s unintentional, nobody means to skip somebody’s review, but it sends a bad message.
Now with Strety, I can just check in the HR center and see that these things are scheduled and getting done without micromanaging. A fear as we grow is letting that stuff slip, because that’s one of our core things. We don’t want to have that problem. One of the core tenets of the owner when he started the business — and he says this all the time — is that we spend so much time at work, so we should want to be here. He started this business because he wanted people to have a place where they wanted to go to work. That’s one of the core driving factors to a lot of decisions we make.
Are you planning to use surveys?
We do plan on using surveys. We’ve used our payment platform or HR platform to do surveys, and I’m going to shift some of those surveys into Strety. It’s going to be a big help to bring all aspects of our employee engagement initiatives together in one platform.
Accountability Chart Revamp
As your team has grown deeper into your EOS implementation, you’ve decided to give your Accountability Chart a refresh. How have you approached that as a self-implementer?
I went and did my own areas — mine and my direct reports. I went back through Traction, as I do. I reread the Accountability Chart section. I asked AI some questions. I don’t love using AI for this, but I use it as a sounding board. I’m that type of person that sometimes needs a conversation to really sort out my thoughts. I find AI works pretty well for that. Sometimes I think you get more out of phrasing the prompts than you do out of the responses. I poked around a lot. I’m a big fan of asking the EOS community, “What is everybody else doing?”
How are you planning to relate measurables to the Accountability Chart in Strety? How will relating measurables to a particular seat help your team?
I’m really excited to have all the key performance pieces linked together through the Accountability Chart. I’ll be able to say, “Hey, here’s your Scorecards, which is going to feed into those reviews as well.” Because I have that data section in there.
One of our techs actively wants to be held accountable. Some people are that way. She’ll say, “Can you give me something to measure myself so I know how I’m doing?” That’s going to go really well for her. I think it’s really nice for people to be able to look at their own personal metric to determine “How am I doing in this role?” outside of the more subjective conversations.
I’m really pumped to be doing it in this manner because everybody should have some sort of metric where they’re seeing how well they’re doing. I can just populate it, and they can go look at it whenever they want to see how well they’re doing. That goes back to what I was saying about how we approach performance management in general — you shouldn’t be surprised walking into your quarterly, in your annual, you shouldn’t be surprised anytime. If I do have some correction to make for somebody, they should know it’s coming. By having the transparent metric, we can reduce surprises even more.
How are you planning to use Playbooks with your Accountability Chart?
I’m excited to relate Playbooks to the seats on the Accountability Chart. I think that’s going to be a big thing to be able to say, “Hey, you’ve got a new role. I just gave you this responsibility. Here’s the Playbook for it.” Have people read it right off the bat and know that this is the new expectation for them. I think that’s going to be a game changer.
Because otherwise you tell people stuff and try to be as consistent as you can. But without that documentation, it’s hard to be consistent. With Strety, our team knows what they’re accountable for and the critical process information around their role, because they’ll have their Playbooks and their Measurable directly attached to their seat in the Accountability Chart. That’s gonna be a game changer. I’m really excited about it. I’m a people and process nerd. That’s what I call myself. This is exactly my level of geek.
An Integrator’s Advice for Companies Considering EOS
What would you say to companies considering an EOS implementation?
EOS is fantastic. There are other systems out there. I think you need to pick a system and stick with it. Try to start as pure as possible if you’re self-implementing. The tendency is to try to tweak things here and there. It’s not a great tendency. I’m not just saying to drink the Kool Aid, but if you don’t give it a try and really go all in, then you’ll see mediocre results. It just won’t be as effective. You want to go all in, do the best you can to follow it, and things you think might not be that big of a deal — it’s going to make a difference. It does matter.
For example, your Annual. It’s very tempting for a self-implementer to do the annual meeting in a smaller dose, to say, “I don’t need two days, we can get it done in one.” But the concept is that the first day is getting hyped on what you did last year and getting familiarized with where you were and where you’re at, and then the next day is all about what we’re going to do next year — it’s significant. Doing it all in the same day is exhausting, and your mental space is different. Getting to sleep on it makes a big difference. That’s a common one I’ve seen other people change. But I would say: do your two days. It makes sense.
If you’re like us, self-implementing makes sense. But it was a longer journey. And we knew it was going to be a longer journey. But I noticed in the Strety User Group the sheer number of people that said “We started self-implementing, and we got an implementer, and man, are we happy. We’re so happy we did that. It made all the difference.”
So to me, that’s a big thing that speaks to the powers of working with an EOS implementer vs. self-implementing. And if you are self-implementing, you still need a business coach of some sort. You need a third party to hold you accountable, to help you get back on track.
What advice would you give to companies starting with Strety?
For using Strety, I would start with the basics. Start with the EOS stuff. Make sure you’re using it in the core of what you’re doing, keep yourself there to begin with, and then branch out. There’s no reason you can’t layer on the new things, the EOS+ tools, and the cool stuff as they apply. It’s a good idea to do that because you can get really good at the core of the tool, which is running on EOS, and then add something functionally useful, make use of it in the best way possible.
I haven’t used it much because you just released it, but the Check-Ins is a nice little tool you could layer in right off the bat. I just did it with two of my people as a test, and I’m going to push it out more. It gets people in the tool in a fun way.
I think Strety is a great tool to get into. I would recommend, if you’re getting into EOS and you’re considering different tools, people should use Strety instead of some of the other tools. It’s got better growth potential. It’s got a passionate team behind it. And I think that’s really important.
I have commented in many multiple forums about how I’ve made recommendations in the little support chat, I get responses from you guys within 5-10 minutes. And a couple weeks later, that request is live in the product.
The Strety team cares a lot about the product. And if you happen to have a good idea and you suggest it, it’s more than likely going to happen.
What Integrators Love About Strety
What’s your favorite thing about Strety?
Oh, man, the confetti!
Strety is a really great tool in itself, but the passion of the team is what’s really important to me. I’ll fall back on that every time. It was very clear at the Strety User Group. It was clear when Brian reached out to us the first time about Strety. What caused us to decide to join Strety was that clear passion behind the product and the thoughtfulness behind what’s decided to be put in there.
It’s great that it integrates with other stuff, and it’s great that it has other bells and whistles related to the jobs we do but that may not be EOS. But I also know there’s thoughtfulness. The Strety team talks to Implementers, you make sure that while this thing might be really cool, it’s not distracting from the purpose of the application.
If you use Strety as just EOS software, you’re going to be better off in this tool than a lot of other tools anyway. But it also enhances the rest of what you do if you choose to use the additional tools. Having this extra functionality that other EOS software doesn’t have keeps me from having to track in many different places what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.
Why not build all of my stuff out of the tool where I’m living every day? That’s what I love. I love the flexibility of it and the passion behind it.
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If you’re an EOS company in the Minneapolis area looking for an IT provider who understands how you work, check out Point North Networks on their website.
If you’re not using Strety yet, why not? Start your free trial now or learn more on a demo with our passionate team.