Asher Carr is the Operations Manager at Forte, a proactive mental fitness platform that builds inner strength and sustainable performance for teams and their people. Forte serves schools, church ministries, nonprofits, and other organizations through what Asher calls “a gym membership for your inner life.” The roughly four-and-a-half-year-old startup brought Asher on as their first dedicated operations leader to bring structure to a fast-growing team — and to integrate EOS as their operating system. They’ve been running on Strety since late 2025.
Table of Contents
- Tell us a bit about your background with EOS before joining Forte.
- What was Forte like when you walked in?
- EOS came up during the interview process. What was the plan going in?
- You mentioned you went too fast at one point. What happened?
- What did you learn about change management going through this?
- How did you decide what to introduce first?
- What did the pilot rollout look like?
- Walk us through the tech stack before Strety.
- One thing that stands out is that you didn’t walk into a team that wasn’t getting work done. So what was actually missing?
- How important were the integrations?
- How did the team take to L10s?
- You launched your largest client ever in Q1 — 8,000 members in four waves. How did Strety fit into that?
- How has using the system shifted what your CEO spends time on?
- How did your first quarterly off-site go?
- Speaking of Q1 — how did the Rocks land?
- When you reflect on what’s changed across the team, what stands out?
- One of the values you’re putting on the V/TO is “learn fast and execute faster.” Why that one?
- For another operator looking at a similar rollout, what would you tell them?
Tell us a bit about your background with EOS before joining Forte.
I first came across EOS through the book Rocket Fuel while I was in real estate. My productivity coach mentioned it because I was working in sales, and operations at the time — building out SOPs, supporting the team leader as an inside sales agent. He wanted me to really get the concept of Visionary versus Integrator so I could merge things together for our team.
I read Traction two or three times before I interviewed at Forte. There wasn’t an opportunity to fully implement the model in real estate, but having the mindset of what an Integrator is and how that role fits into whatever world you’re in helped me serve my team leader better. So by the time Forte was hiring, I was very familiar with the system.
What was Forte like when you walked in?
A lot of figuring out. Like any startup — you just guess every day and hope for the best. They’d been doing that for a few years, learning who their ICP was and how to deliver on the product. By the time I got here, there was a ton of change happening. They’d hired two people three months before me. A co-founder was stepping down to start another venture. I took on a lot of his responsibilities. There were invoicing issues, system changes, new deals coming in.
Honestly, I thought — how did you guys make it four and a half years on this? There wasn’t any playbook for me to refer to. There was clearly a system and they were doing a lot of things right. But to gain clarity on how the company was ran, I started my due diligence by talking to every team member and understanding their roles.
EOS came up during the interview process. What was the plan going in?
Vineet Rajan, our CEO, had a heavy interest in integrating EOS. They had a process in place, and they were doing the things — there just wasn’t a level of structure to see where everything was at any point in time. No real-time view of how to go from point A to point B on a project.
One of my interview assessments was actually on integrating EOS at a high level. I knew implementing it wasn’t going to be straightforward. Depending on where the company was, we’d have to fragment the system — start with To-Dos and Rocks, then build everything else over time. It was a matter of where we’re at right now, what makes the most sense for our team, and how to slowly but surely integrate it in a way where people could understand it. I knew there’d be resistance at first, before they’d embody what EOS is and how it would serve them long-term.
You mentioned you went too fast at one point. What happened?
Week two, I introduced a little bit of what we could do with Strety and the EOS component of it. New deals were coming in. New potential projects. I told the team: for us to execute at the highest level possible, we’re going to need to make some changes in our operating system.
And at first, they were scared. They were like, “What the heck is this guy talking about? He just got here. Who is this dude?” So we had to roll back. That’s when I realized we’d have to chunk this down and take our time — crawl, walk, run.
What did you learn about change management going through this?
The real challenge isn’t the change — it’s the transition. Change is external. You have an idea, you have a game plan for implementing a new system or new model. That part’s not actually the hard part. The transition is internal, and that’s what’s actually challenging. It’s a matter of how people are going to react. You don’t really realize that until you reflect on it.
So as much as I had the rollout plan mapped out, I had to accept that the plan was the easy part. The team going through it with me was the real work. That’s why we had to crawl, walk, run instead of dropping the whole system on day one.
How did you decide what to introduce first?
The first thing I did was meet with everyone individually to understand how they did what they did, how they stayed productive, and what challenges they were facing — short term and long term. When I had the summary across the company, it helped me figure out which parts of EOS could meet us where we were now, and how we’d get to 100% within a year.
I created a rollout plan for Vineet. Phase one was foundation and vision — the V/TO, mission, vision, values, making sure people knew what they were working toward. Phase two was data — Rocks, scorecards, getting people to understand that everyone has a number. Phase three was process standardization, which we actually pulled into Q1 ahead of schedule. By Q4 we should have full mastery and integration of EOS.
What did the pilot rollout look like?
I started with our product team and the lead engineer. He’d been an early advocate of Strety, so I trusted him to give me direct feedback. I had him put his goals in there — three to five — and his To-Dos. Even though his work is very technical, I challenged him to put whatever he did day-to-day in there, even if it didn’t connect to anything. Just to help him stay on track.
He liked it. Then he started doing little huddles with our UI/UX Lead using the L10 agenda feature, which surprised me — I hadn’t even pushed L10s yet at the team level.
Having Rocks helps you keep focused on what matters most within a 90-day sprint. It was very easy in this company to focus on something for the Rock and then steer away because something else came up that wasn’t actually a needle-mover. The pilot showed that using the system kept the focus.
Walk us through the tech stack before Strety.
People were doing most of their To-Dos and day-to-day task management in Notion. We had a few salespeople using HubSpot, but they weren’t really using it for task management. There wasn’t a system everyone could come to every morning to see what they had to do for the day, the week, the month — and at the same time see everyone else’s relevant work.
Notion was messy for managing tasks. We create documents for everything we do, so Notion still has its place — but the communication piece was missing.
What was great about bringing Strety on is that it created this middle ground for people to come to every day. They figure out what they’re doing for themselves, and any related projects show up through the project space or our Forte HQ team space.
One thing that stands out is that you didn’t walk into a team that wasn’t getting work done. So what was actually missing?
Right — and that’s an important distinction. People weren’t slacking. Everyone was doing what they were supposed to. We don’t micromanage people like that. The work was happening. What was missing was visibility — understanding where people were on certain projects and seeing how we could support each other.
That’s really what EOS and Strety unlocked for us. It gave the team a shared view of what was happening so we could actually help each other when needed. The accountability piece — especially through the L10 setup — has increased a lot. Now we know where we all are at any point in time, which gives us the agility to support each other quickly and get projects done sooner.
How important were the integrations?
Pretty crucial to my decision. Our CEO uses ClickUp for his task management. If you’ve worked in operations long enough, you know team leaders don’t necessarily follow every single tool because they have their own thing to stay productive. Strety has a ClickUp integration, so whether we put a task for him in Strety or directly in ClickUp, he sees it.
The Slack integration is great too. Everyone lives in Slack, and we can create tasks from any message right there. I’m doing the HubSpot integration now, too. It all matters because it lets us communicate and work together without forcing anyone out of where they already are.
How did the team take to L10s?
We started doing a light version of the L10 in December. Scorecards weren’t involved yet. We kept it light — segue, headlines, then Issues. People didn’t know what an Issue was, so we just said: come with what you want to talk about. We defined it more over time. Now we have at least five or six Issues a week. We figured out how to park things that aren’t relevant in the moment.
Everyone latched on to the L10 pretty quickly in the early days. That was the surprising part for me. I thought there’d be more friction.
You launched your largest client ever in Q1 — 8,000 members in four waves. How did Strety fit into that?
That client was a years-long thing for our company. The deal kind of died in the fall, came back, and they signed in December. So I’d just rolled out the light version of EOS, and now I had to figure out features I hadn’t even touched yet to manage the biggest launch we’d ever done.
We had to break it down into waves — about 2,000 members a week. The early idea was to give every wave its own project space. Once a wave launched, we’d do final analysis at the end of the week and start the new project space a few days before the next launch. I created a template for everything we did Monday before launch, Tuesday during launch, Wednesday through Friday for monitoring. Then it was a simple copy-paste for the next wave.
What I liked about Strety Projects is it gave us options. I asked the team — do we want a separate project for each wave or one big project space? They voted for week-by-week. We ended up doing a hybrid by the halfway point. Our CEO said it was the most organized launch they’ve ever had. Last time they did a big launch — about 2,000 members — he felt it wasn’t as organized. This time everything was together.
How has using the system shifted what your CEO spends time on?
Those pre-launch meetings used to be 40 minutes with the CEO on the call. After week two, it was just the rest of us. He doesn’t have to be in those rooms anymore.
I’m always cognizant of what’s a good use of his time and what’s not. Now we do the weekly client meeting amongst ourselves, and I send him a decision report — here’s where we’re at, here’s what we decided for next week. Nine times out of ten, he says execute. That gives him a lot of freedom to focus on his 20%, so we can get the 80% results we know we can get. That’s Rocket Fuel at work.
How did your first quarterly off-site go?
The one thing the team keeps saying — and I’m not making this up — this was the most organized off-site we’ve ever had. They didn’t usually have an agenda going in. Logistics weren’t communicated as far ahead. Apparently, by bringing in EOS® and organizing the system for them in Strety, we did a ton of new things as a team.
Day one we talked about Vision and what the V/TO would look like moving forward. Day two we focused on a single big issue — basically an extended IDS session on one topic that mattered. Day three was Q2: the Rocks, our biggest client, what the next 90 days would look like. We had it as early in April as we could, on purpose, so we’d have time to figure out the quarter and keep the momentum from Q1.
Speaking of Q1 — how did the Rocks land?
We hit three out of five. The other two were longer-term — recruiting and rebuilding some infrastructure — and we knew going in that those probably wouldn’t be fully complete. But even then, we got to about 70% on both. So real progress on all five.
When you reflect on what’s changed across the team, what stands out?
Clarity. Each department now sees its impact on the company. There wasn’t always time to reflect on everyone’s work and the impact on the other end of our service. Our Product Team ran some testing with the large client, made one shift, and activations went through the roof. Our Marketing Team — we were at 12 YouTube subscribers when he started. We hit 2,000 about a month ago. During the off-site this week, we crossed 4,500. That happened in two weeks.
Our coaches have been huge for this client. The coach training program they built specifically for this clientele is why the launch is succeeding now. With EOS — through following the system in our way and implementing it — there’s been a lot of clarity. It’s shown that what people do matters. That’s really the purpose of trying to do work — to do something that actually matters and to let people know their skill set is a gift.
One of the values you’re putting on the V/TO is “learn fast and execute faster.” Why that one?
That one was straight up: this is how we operate. In a startup — especially a startup — you should be learning something every day, or at least every week. Sharing it with others, making adjustments, executing. We do that very well. Because we recognized it, we want to make sure it’s reflected in how we scale.
If it weren’t for implementing EOS and having Strety as part of that process, I don’t think we would’ve had the clarity to learn as fast as we have. So now we can execute faster.
For another operator looking at a similar rollout, what would you tell them?
Meet your team where they are. I didn’t want to be the operations guy who shows up and says, “Here’s the thing, here’s what you’re going to do, and that’s it.”
Even with our biggest launch ever, we sat down as a team to make sure the templates and structure in Strety would actually work for everybody. I asked them how they wanted to set up the project space — one big space for all four waves, or one per wave? They voted to go week-by-week. I thought that was a lot, but okay — we did it that way, and it worked until it didn’t and we made the shift as a team together.
This is truly a team effort because everyone’s putting a part of their soul into it. I wanted them to have a voice and to make sure it works for their role while it works for everybody as a whole. That’s why it was so seamless — we went in on the same page.