Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

by Gino Wickman

Lack of control: You don’t have enough control over your time, the market, or your company. Instead of controlling the business, the business is controlling you. 2. People: You’re frustrated with your employees, customers, vendors, or partners. They don’t seem to listen, understand you, or follow through with their actions. You’re not all on the same page. 3. Profit: Simply put, there’s not enough of it. 4. The ceiling: Your growth has stopped. No matter what you do, you can’t seem to break through and get to the next level. You feel overwhelmed and unsure of what to do next. 5. Nothing’s working: You’ve tried various strategies and quick-fix remedies. None have worked for long, and as a result, your staff has become numb to new initiatives. You’re spinning your wheels, and you need traction to move again.

You are not your business. Your business is an entity in and of itself. Yes, you created it, but in order to find success, you have to turn it into a self-sustaining organism.

Reaching the next level requires more than just a product or service, or a simple determination to succeed. You need skills, tools, and a system to optimize your people, processes, execution, management, and communication. You need strong guiding principles that will work for your company day in and day out.

The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) identifies Six Key Components of any organization.

Successful business owners not only have compelling visions for their organizations, but also know how to communicate those visions to the people around them. They get everyone in the organization seeing the same clear image of where the business is going and how it’s going to get there.

Are your staff all rowing in the same direction?

the two essential ingredients of any great team: the right people in the right seats.

the three absolutes for any good hire. They must get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it.

A Scorecard is a weekly report containing five to 15 high-level numbers for the organization.

ISSUES Issues are the obstacles that must be faced to execute your vision.

Your processes are your Way of doing business. Successful organizations see their Way clearly and constantly refine it.

Ask yourself: Have you documented the way you want everything done in your organization? Do your people know what processes they are following and why? Are they all executing the required procedures uniformly? Are they skipping steps? By deciding what the process is and training everyone to follow it, you will enhance your troubleshooting abilities, reduce your errors, improve efficiency, and increase your bottom line.

Vision without traction is merely hallucination.

everyone in the organization should have Rocks, which are clear 90-day priorities designed to keep them focused on what is most important.

In summary, successful businesses operate with a crystal clear vision that is shared by everyone. They have the right people in the right seats. They have a pulse on their operations by watching and managing a handful of numbers on a weekly basis. They identify and solve issues promptly in an open and honest environment. They document their processes and ensure that they are followed by everyone. They establish priorities for each employee and ensure that a high level of trust, communication, and accountability exists on each team.

To be truly ready for this change, you must be willing to embrace the following four fundamental beliefs: 1. You must build and maintain a true leadership team. 2. Hitting the ceiling is inevitable. 3. You can only run your business on one operating system. 4. You must be open-minded, growth-oriented, and vulnerable.

Each of your departmental heads should be better than you in his or her respective position.

Your leadership team must present a united front to the rest of your organization. In a nuclear family, when the child doesn’t like the answer from Mom, he or she might go to Dad. In your company, there can be only one answer, and your leadership team needs to parent everyone to greatness.

Above all else, your leaders need to be able to simplify, delegate, predict, systemize, and structure.

Use models, visuals, acronyms, and checklists to simplify processes and procedures, because as your organization grows, it will get more complex.

Dan Sullivan, the creator of The Strategic Coach® Program, makes the point as follows: “No further progress and growth is possible for an organization until a new state of simplicity is created.”

Long-term predicting is the forecast of everything 90 days and beyond. To do so, your leadership team has to know where the organization is going and how you expect to get there. You do this by starting with the far future and working your way back. What is your 10-year target? What is your three-year picture? Your one-year plan? What do you have to accomplish in the next 90 days in order to be on track?

The first step is to agree as a leadership team on what these processes are and then to give them a name. This is your company’s Way of doing business. Once you all agree on your Way, you will simplify, apply technology to, document, and fine-tune these core processes.

You must have one abiding vision, one voice, one culture, and one operating system. This includes a uniform approach to how you meet, how you set priorities, how you plan and set your vision, the terminology you use, and the way you communicate with employees.

In summary, the four fundamental beliefs are as follows: 1. You must build and maintain a true leadership team. 2. Hitting the ceiling is inevitable. 3. You can only run your business on one operating system. 4. You must be open-minded, growth-oriented, and vulnerable.

The process of gaining traction starts here. Clarify your vision and you will make better decisions about people, processes, finances, strategies, and customers.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

In his book The One Page Business Plan, Jim Horan also deflates several popular myths, two of which are that “business plans must be long to be good” and that they take “six months, a significant amount of the owner’s and key staff members’ time, and expensive consultants” to create.

The simplified approach to strategic planning is generally the best approach.

What is vision? It’s clearly defining who and what your organization is, where it’s going and ...

1. What are your core values? 2. What is your core focus? 3. What is your 10-year target? 4. What is your marketing strategy? 5. What is your three-year picture? 6. What is your one-year plan? 7. What are your quarterly Rocks? 8. What are your issues?

What are core values? They are a small set of vital and timeless guiding principles for your company. A good rule of thumb is to limit them to somewhere between three and seven. As always, less is more. These core values define your culture and who you truly are as people. When they are clear, you’ll find they attract like-minded people to your organization. You will also find that when they are applied in your organization, they will weed out the people that don’t fit. Once they’re defined, you must hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize people based on these core values. This is how to build a thriving culture around them.

Have each member list three people who, if you could clone them, would lead you to market domination. These three names should preferably come from inside the organization. Once each person has his or her three, post all of the names on a whiteboard for everyone to see.

Don’t run out and tell everyone immediately after you’ve established your core values. Instead, let them simmer for 30 days and then meet one last time as a team to sign off once and for all on the final list.

Most people are sitting on their own diamond mines. The surest ways to lose your diamond mine are to get bored, become overambitious, or start thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. Find your core focus, stick to it, and devote your time and resources to excelling at it.

Decide what business you are in, and be in that business. As the old saying goes, “He who chases two rabbits catches neither.”

First, you and your leadership team should define, with absolute clarity, your two truths: your reason for being and your niche.

Orville Redenbacher’s theory says it all: “Do one thing and do it better than anyone.”

One important point: The task of clarifying your core focus assumes that you already have a financial model that works. If that’s the case, it’s just a matter of focusing on and executing your vision so that the profit will follow.

Marketing strategy is made up of four elements, which are contained in the fourth section of the V/TO: 1. Your Target Market/“The List” 2. Your Three Uniques 3. Your Proven Process 4. Your Guarantee

Identifying your target market involves defining your ideal customers. Who are they? Where are they? What are they? You need to know their demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics.

Have everyone on the leadership team brainstorm what they believe to be the following: • The geographic characteristics of your ideal customers. Where are they? • The demographic characteristics of your ideal customers. What are they? (If you’re marketing business-to-business, consider characteristics such as job title, industry, size, and type of business. If business-to-consumer, then age, sex, income or profession.) • The psychographic characteristics of your ideal customers. How do they think? What do they need? What do they appreciate?

If you line yourself up against 10 of your competitors, you might all share one of these uniques. Some of you may even share two, but no one else should have the three you do. You need to settle on three qualities that will truly make your company unique to the ideal customer.

Telos : College-age, self-organized/managed, innovative/adaptable

Rather than your salespeople saying, “Yes, we do that, and oh yes, we’ll do that,” to everything, they should be saying, “If you’re looking for that, we probably aren’t the company for you. What we excel at are these three things.”

There is a proven way you provide your service or product to your customers. You do it every time, and it produces the same result. It’s what got you where you are. What you need to do is capture that process in a visual format to guide your sales team. It should be encompassed on one single piece of paper, it must illustrate your proven process, and it must have a name. It should show each step, from the first client interaction to the ongoing follow-up once your product or service has been delivered.

How to Create Your Proven Process Step 1 With your team, illustrate on a whiteboard what you believe are the major steps in your proven process and then give each step a name.

Telos: 4M's

the three-year picture is composed of measurables at the top and bullet points to create the picture. It’s simple but powerful. Do not underestimate the importance of this section, but also don’t overthink it. You’re painting a picture of the destination, not discussing every obstacle along the way.

As with the three-year picture, again, decide on the numbers. What is your annual revenue goal? What is your profit goal? What is the measurable? This number should be consistent with the three-year picture measurable.

SMART