Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

by Gino Wickman

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.

The best leaders rely on a handful of metrics to help manage their businesses. The Data Component frees you from the quagmire of managing personalities, egos, subjective issues, emotions, and intangibles by teaching you which metrics to focus on.

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

Issues are the obstacles that must be faced to execute your vision. Just as an individual’s success is directly proportionate to his or her ability to solve any issues that arise, the same holds true for a company.

You will not get your company to the next level by keeping your processes in your head and winging it as you go. 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.

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.

If you’re not happy with the current state of your company, you have three choices. You can live with it, leave it, or change it. If the first two are not an option, it’s time to admit that you don’t want to live this way any longer.

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.

You must also all remain open and honest about all issues and be willing to fight for what is best for the company as a whole.

You cannot build an enduring, successful organization that lives beyond you if your organization is designed to crumble the minute you step aside.

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

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.

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

“Simplify, simplify.” Henry David Thoreau “One ‘simplify’ would have sufficed.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No further progress and growth is possible for an organization until a new state of simplicity is created.”

When you experience that personal growth, the company will grow under you. This is exactly what is meant by letting go of the vine.

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?

In summary, 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.

“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?”

You cannot embark on this journey if you’re not willing to be vulnerable. You have to let your guard down to see your organization for what it is. Eliminate the facade with your leadership team, and invite openness and honesty. The leader who feels he has to have all of the answers and can never be wrong is completely missing the point. Being open-minded means being open to new ideas and being ready to change for the better. When your arms are folded, the wall is up and there is no getting in. The mind is like a parachute—it has to be open to work.

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.

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.”

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

By answering the following eight questions and filling out the V/TO, we will clarify exactly what your vision is. Let’s get started. The eight questions are as follows: 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?

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.

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.

While a new idea may look like a no-brainer on paper, it’s simply not worth doing if it’s not a part of your core focus.

When your core focus is clear, you’re going to come to several important realizations. You’ll realize that certain practices, people, and, sometimes, entire divisions and/or product lines don’t fit into your core focus. As a direct result of this discovery, past EOS clients have gotten rid of entire departments and excelled as a result.

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

I’ve yet to see a single business that is easy to run. They all take work. Success in one kind of industry doesn’t necessarily dictate success in another. You can only succeed in the kind of business that is right for you and your team. As Jim Collins puts it in his bestseller Good to Great, “You have to figure out what you’re genetically encoded to do.” That’s a vital point. The combination of your talents and passions combined with your leadership creates something unique that no other company has, and that something is your core focus. You must uncover what it is.

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.

How do you know if you’re heading in the right direction if you don’t know which direction you’re meant to be going? As Yogi Berra said, “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you are going, ’cause you might not get there.”

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. By identifying your target market, you create a filter. Out of that comes The List of perfect prospects for your organization and sales team to target.

Eventually, we realized that it was the presidents and CEOs of real estate organizations with 200 or more agents (demographic) in North America (geographic) that saw the value and need for outside sales training (psychographic).

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?

The most common mistake that most organizations make involves competing in too many sectors, markets, services, or product lines, and trying to be all things to all people. It’s a game you will not win.

If you believe in your Three Uniques, and you believe they matter to your ideal customer, you should never apologize for them.

“Never tell someone something you can show them.”

In most companies, when salespeople are meeting with a prospective new customer, they normally try to win new business by using countless words and visuals in the form of pages and charts. When it’s all said and done, they end up looking just like everyone else.

Rather than giving them a sales presentation and inundating them with information, you’re saying, “Let me show you exactly how we are able to accomplish great results for our customers. We have a proven process that we follow called The (your company name) Difference.”

A guarantee is your opportunity to pinpoint an industry-wide problem and solve it. This is typically a service or quality problem. You must determine what your customers can count on from you. If you guarantee it, that will put their minds at ease and enable you to close more business.

You will not go out of business without a guarantee, but you will attain your vision faster with one. You’re actually closing less business now because you’re not entirely putting your prospective customers’ minds at ease. If you can do that, you will gain more customers.

Your guarantee has a secondary benefit. It forces all the people in your organization to deliver on it. That in turn forces you to look inward and make sure you’ve got all the right people, processes, and systems in place to do so. If not, you’ll be forced to improve upon it. Your client will never need to make good on that guarantee if you’re at your absolute best.

As Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can surely achieve.”

“Attainable” means that it’s doable. Setting unrealistic goals is the biggest trap entrepreneurs fall into. The team has to believe it’s possible to hit the goal, or else you can’t hold someone accountable to it. If every goal is a “stretch goal,” how do you know what success is? Goals are set to be achieved.

The sooner you accept that you have issues, the better off you’re going to be. You will always have them; your success is in direct proportion to your ability to solve them. Your leadership team should state them openly and honestly so that you can get them out of your heads and into writing. In doing so, you’re taking the first step to solving them.

People need to hear the vision seven times before they really hear it for the first time.

The right people are the ones who share your company’s core values. They fit and thrive in your culture. They are people you enjoy being around and who make your organization a better place to be.

One of the obstacles in gaining traction and achieving your vision is that roles, responsibilities, expectations, and job descriptions are unclear due to structural issues. A hazy structure may have gotten you to where you are, but it will not take you any further. A common mistake entails creating a structure to accommodate people you like or don’t want to lose. When creating a structure to function efficiently, you must take the long view. Sometimes this means eliminating or changing seats that are no longer relevant.