Book Review: Keeping Score with GRITT: Straight Talk Strategies for Success by Shawn Burcham

By Carmelo Turdo

Keeping Score with GRITT: Straight Talk Strategies for Success, by PFSbrands founder Shawn Burcham, lives up to its title as a practical guide for anyone to become more successful in work and life. Based on Burcham's early life experience and over two decades as a business owner in the food service industry, Keeping Score with GRITT offers a roadmap containing many encouraging life illustrations along the way. This is not a high-level, theoretical construct, but a real-world, roll your sleeves up call to action that will involve a mindset change for many. And that's a good thing.

The purpose and audience for the book are clearly identified in the Introduction, "The Difference a Book Can Make." First, Keeping Score with GRITT gives PFSbrands employee-owners, franchisees and suppliers an inside look at the company's history, philosophy and challenges in a highly competitive environment. But the second stated purpose aims to address the broader need to develop a new generation of business leaders:

The Ultimate purpose of this book is to help ANYONE become

more successful in business and in life, to teach people about

business and financial literacy, and to teach people how to 

mentally change in order to consistently improve as a person. 

The knowledge, skills and habits needed for business success translate well into other areas of life, especially when the inevitable obstacles turn up along the way. Keeping Score with GRITT directly addresses the steps necessary to not only begin the journey to business and personal success, but to rise up from a sense of stagnation and aimlessness that comes with a lack of goals and direction.

So, what is GRITT, anyway? The GRITT acronym is almost self-explanatory:

Goal-Driven, Responsible, Involved, Team, Tolerance of Failure

Yes, there will be accountability through measurable results and introspection, but the GRITT method also includes a support system and a relief valve for recovery and rejuvenation along the way. Each step builds upon itself for a logical, cumulative approach to improving the total person. 

Shawn Burcham with 2024 GRITT Summit
Keynote Speaker, Amelia Rose Earhart

The Aero Experience met Shawn Burcham this summer at the annual GRITT Summit in St. Charles, MO. He reiterated the purpose of the book, which is echoed in the Summit and through the individual and seminar programs offered through GRITT Business Coaching.

"Keeping Score with GRITT is really all about how to help people be more successful in work and life," Burcham said during our on-site interview. "What I really love to do is help other people be more successful. And not just in their work life, but in their personal life. I really like to help people go from good to great."

Keeping Score with GRITT is a fascinating study in the development and transformation of PFSbrands from an idea to a multi-million-dollar, employee-owned company that continually scales up to satisfy new markets. Each chapter elaborates on how to set and achieve priority goals (G is first for a reason) while promoting team success and employee ownership through servant leadership. Counter-intuitive? Maybe, but Keeping Score with GRITT walks the reader through the process to show how it can work as it did for PFSbrands. And, by the way, Shawn Burcham is also a pilot, rated for Citation series jets, with some relatable stories applying aeronautical decision-making to the GRITT process.

There is a great wealth of material in Keeping Score with GRITT, and we encourage everyone to get their copy and do a deep dive into this valuable resource. The 2025 GRITT Summit is scheduled for July 15-17, and it promises to be better than ever. For more on the 2024 GRITT Summit Keynote Speaker Amelia Rose Earhart's book, Learn to Love the Turbulence: "Flight Lessons" on Becoming the Pilot in Command of Your Own Journey, check out the recent book review by Alexis Noel on The Aero Experience. Also, look for the upcoming video from our interview with Shawn Burcham and Amelia Rose Earhart on The Aero Experience YouTube Channel.