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one or more of five common frustrations:
1. Lack of control: You don’t have enough control over your time, the market, or your company.
2. People: You’re frustrated with your employees, customers, vendors, or partners.
3. Profit:
4. The ceiling: Your growth has stopped.
5. Nothing’s working:
What I teach business leaders is simple, but not simplistic.
After EOS, you’ll make quicker decisions to change people, strategy, systems, and processes where necessary.
VISION Successful business owners not only have compelling visions for their organizations, but also know how to communicate those visions to the people around them.
Focus, Al Ries
PEOPLE Successful leaders surround themselves with great people.
two essential ingredients of any great team: the right people in the right seats.
DATA The best leaders rely on a handful of metrics to help manage their businesses.
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.
PROCESS Your processes are your Way of doing business.
TRACTION In the end, the most successful business leaders are the ones with traction.
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.
a Meeting Pulse at all levels in the organization, which will keep everyone focused, aligned, and in communication.
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.
Most business owners are unable to reach the next level because they are simply not ready to let go of the vine.
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.
As goes the leadership team, so goes the company. Your leadership team must present a united front to the rest of your organization.
If you’re not growing, be it internally or externally, you’re dying.
If your organization needs an internal transformation first, be honest with yourself and spend the next one or two years growing internally and honing your business model so it can support external revenue growth.
Many organizations fail because they’re unable to survive these growing pains.
80 percent of businesses fail in their first five years and 80 percent of those remaining will fail somewhere between years six through ten.
Above all else, your leaders need to be able to simplify, delegate, predict, systemize, and structure.
SIMPLIFY The acronym KISS (“keep it simple, stupid”) is your mantra here. Simplifying your organization is key.
DELEGATE Your ability to break through the ceiling also depends on your ability to delegate.
PREDICT Prediction in business is done on two basic levels: Long-term and Short-term.
In a small to mid-size privately held organization, you don’t have the luxury of missing your prediction.
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?
Long-term predicting is not really about foretelling what will happen; it’s making a decision about what you will do tomorrow based on what you know today.
SYSTEMIZE
There are really only a handful of core processes that make any organization function. Systemizing involves clearly identifying what those core processes are and integrating them into a fully functioning machine.
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.
STRUCTURE Lastly, you and your leadership team will need to structure your organization correctly.
once you understand that hitting the ceiling is inevitable, you and your leadership team must employ these five leadership abilities to reach the next level: (1) simplify the organization, (2) delegate and elevate, (3) predict both long-term and short-term, (4) systemize, and (5) structure your company the right way.
YOU CAN ONLY RUN YOUR BUSINESS ON ONE OPERATING SYSTEM 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.
Dr. David Viscott, author of Risking, wrote, “If you cannot risk, you cannot grow. If you cannot grow, you cannot become your best. If you cannot become your best, you cannot be happy. If you cannot be happy, what else matters?”
The leader who feels he has to have all of the answers and can never be wrong is completely missing the point.
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.
most entrepreneurs can clearly see their vision. Their problem is that they make the mistake of thinking that everyone else in the organization sees it too.
Clarify your vision and you will make better decisions about people, processes, finances, strategies, and customers.
Entrepreneurs must get their vision out of their heads and down onto paper. From there, they must share it with their organization so that everyone can see where the company is going and determine if they want to go there with you.
“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.”
The One Page Business Plan, Jim Horan
