In this conversation
Here’s our interview with Scott Rusnak, Author, Executive Coach, and Expert EOS Implementer, on his rules for success.
Scott built and sold an education technology company that went head to head with Apple and Pearson. Then he spent the next two decades coaching entrepreneurs on the same discipline that once decided whether he made a podium as an international cyclist. He color codes his calendar. He runs his life on a stranger’s phone book theory. And at sixty, he still surfs fifty days a year.
The most interesting part isn’t the resume. It’s the failure his coaching career is built on: the year he tried to run his own company on a system he invented himself, and why it collapsed. He wrote a book about the fix, called Who Is the Architect of Life.
Background of Scott Rusnak
Scott Rusnak grew up in Western Canada trying to do everything at once. Baseball, soccer, rugby, hockey, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, speed skating. He hated losing so much that he’d throw participation medals on the ground as a kid in the 1970s, and his parents made him go back to his coaches and figure out what he actually wanted to focus on. That question sat with him.
A cycling coach eventually put him in training packs with elite riders, including Alex Stieda, the first North American to wear the Tour de France yellow jersey. Scott wasn’t at their level yet, but the coach told him something that reshaped how he thinks about growth: you become a product of the five or six people you spend the most time with. That coach also handed him a phrase that became his internal compass for every decision from age seventeen on: will this make the bike go faster? Scott still asks a version of that question every morning, now applied to his business and his clients.
Scott competed internationally as a cyclist and later worked as a board certified coach for the US and British Olympic teams before co-founding SchoolLogic, an education technology company that competed directly against Apple and Pearson for share of the worldwide edtech market. Since 2008 he has coached, consulted, and advised thousands of entrepreneurs, building his practice around the same discipline that shaped his athletic career. Know who belongs in your inner circle. Protect your recovery. Stay focused on one thing at a time.
One of the clearest lessons in his own story is the failure he doesn’t hide from. When Scott first tried to implement EOS in his own company, he read Gino Wickman’s book, thought it looked simple, and rolled it out himself. His employees privately called it the Scott Operating System, SOS for short, Save Our Souls. There was no buy-in, because the entire plan had come out of Scott’s head with no third party pointing out blind spots or checking whether the tools were being used properly instead of just checked off a list. It wasn’t until he brought in an outside coach that the business actually rallied around a shared purpose. Even the coach, he says, needed a coach.
In this episode of Rules for Success, Scott Rusnak shares his insights with Joseph Varghese about protecting your calendar and energy like an athlete, and why no entrepreneur can build that discipline into a business without an outside coach.
Questions and Discussions with Scott Rusnak
Here’s a bullet-point summary of the questions and discussions from our interview with Scott:
1. The Athletic Roots of Scott Rusnak
- Grew up in Western Canada playing baseball, soccer, rugby, hockey, cross-country and downhill skiing, speed skating
- Hated losing so much he’d throw participation medals on the ground as a kid
- Parents pushed him to go back to his coaches and choose a focus
- Full origin story in Background above
2. Proximity and Cycling Discipline
- A cycling coach placed him in training packs with elite riders, including Alex Stieda, first North American to wear the Tour de France yellow jersey
- Learned he was becoming a product of the five to six people he trained with most
- Adopted the implementation intention “will this make the bike go faster” as a daily filter, still uses a business version of it today
3. Managing Internal State
- Teaches clients to use the word “no” the way toddlers do, instinctively and often
- Full calendars get filled with the wrong opportunities when people can’t say no
- Filters every opportunity through “is this a hell yes”
- Uses a four-zone system to track energy across the day, separate from the day-of-week color code covered in Calendar Protection below
- Red zone: full-on execution energy
- Blue zone: calm and quiet
- Green: getting ready
- Yellow: yield, slow down
4. Glass Balls and Rubber Balls
- Frames business as a rubber ball that bounces back, family, faith, and health as glass balls that shatter
- Told Joseph directly: you cannot drop the glass ball, using Joseph’s mother’s thirty-year heart transplant survival as the example
- Warns self-care is not selfishness, it’s what keeps you competitive
5. Knowing Your Strengths, Scott Rusnak on Personality Tests
- Skeptical of tests generally but finds value in specific ones
- Culture Index: identifies him as a daredevil, willing to stretch limits with clients
- Kolbe: 5 fact finder, 9 quick start, moves fast once he has facts and breaks rules
- DISC: a D, driver
- Uses Dan Sullivan’s “who not how” to hire out weak spots instead of trying to fix them personally
6. Protecting the Calendar with Dunbar’s Number
- White space in a calendar gets stolen by someone else’s priorities if you don’t block it first
- Dunbar’s number: protect the five to six closest people first, then the next fifteen, then a wider circle capped around 150
- Followers on social platforms don’t count as people worth building your calendar around
- Separately, color codes entire days of the week to plan his workload, a different system from the daily energy zones above
- Yellow days: buffer days
- Red days: focus days
- Blue days: preparation days
7. Why Athletes and Entrepreneurs Both Need Recovery
- Compares entrepreneur burnout to Premier League and World Cup athletes who get only two to three weeks off between grueling seasons
- Recommends entrepreneurs take ten days off every ninety days, with nothing scheduled
- Applies the same logic to the week: hard days need to be followed by an easy or a nothing day for the body and mind to actually recover
- On the same theme, argues that if an owner can’t step away from the business for seventeen days, a number raised in the conversation, the company owns them rather than the other way around
8. Failing His Way Into EOS, Scott Rusnak’s Coaching Origin
- Full story of self-implementing EOS as “SOS,” the Scott Operating System, told in Background above
- New detail: brought in Daniel Pink’s concept of self-actualization from the book Drive to explain why employee buy-in matters more than a clean two-page plan
- Believes even coaches need a coach, since blind spots are invisible from the inside
9. Building a Life With the People Analyzer
- Uses EOS creator Gino Wickman’s People Analyzer tool to filter who belongs in his circle, screening for his top core value of being humbly confident
- Applies GWC, get it, want it, capacity to do it, in both directions with the people around him
- Points to the Johari window as the reason everyone needs an outside voice
- People close to you see self-sabotaging patterns you can’t see in yourself
10. Scott Rusnak on Identity, AI, and Reinvention
- Has reinvented his business through Y2K, the 2008 crash, COVID, and now AI
- Treats each disruption as an opportunity rather than a threat
- On AI specifically: if you’re worried AI will replace you, the real question is why you’re replaceable in the first place
- Encourages a ten-year outlook on AI instead of panicking over the next ninety days
Today, Scott runs his coaching practice from Solana Beach, California, working with leadership teams and entrepreneurs as an expert EOS implementer while still surfing most mornings the swell allows. His current framework centers on protecting calendar space using Dunbar’s number, the idea that everyone should guard time first for the five or six most important people in their life, then the next fifteen, before letting anyone else in. He color codes his own week, buffer days, focus days, preparation days, to manage energy the way he once managed training load as a cyclist.
Scott’s latest audiobook, Who Is the Architect of Life, pushes high achievers to deliberately design their goals, relationships, calendar, and future instead of letting other people’s priorities design it for them. He’s currently running a session in Scottsdale, Arizona in mid-October for entrepreneurs who are self-implementing EOS or considering it.
To learn more about Scott Rusnak and his current projects, visit https://scottrusnak.com.
💬 Notable Quotes
“You’ve got to design your life before someone does it for you.” — Scott Rusnak
“You become a product of the five to six people you hang around with the most.” — Scott Rusnak
“Will this make the bike go faster?” — Scott Rusnak
“White space, blank space in your calendar, someone’s going to jump on that.” — Scott Rusnak
“If you drop the family ball, it can shatter. You have to glue it back together, and there’s going to be broken pieces.” — Scott Rusnak
“Self-care is not being selfish.” — Scott Rusnak
“Use those personality profiling tools to find your weaknesses, find someone else to help you with those so they become your strengths.” — Scott Rusnak
“They called it SOS, Save Our Souls.” — Scott Rusnak
“The company owns them. They become a slave to the business, and it’s unfair.” — Scott Rusnak
“If we look at AI as something that’s going to replace us, you need to look at yourself and say, well, why are you so replaceable?” — Scott Rusnak
“Every ninety days, take ten days off and design nothing into that.” — Scott Rusnak
“It wasn’t until I brought a coach in to do it properly that we stopped checking the boxes.” — Scott Rusnak
🙌 Connect with Scott Rusnak
Scott’s implementation intention, will this make the bike go faster, is really the same test Success Circles members apply to their calendars every day: if an action doesn’t move the result you actually want, it doesn’t belong on the schedule.
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