You may have heard of EOS, or the entrepreneurial operating system, which many business owners are using to transform their companies. If you’re not familiar with it, this article will outline the basics.
EOS is a set of simple, practical tools that are designed to help companies archive three things we call Vision, Traction and Healthy.
Vision is about getting your leaders 100 percent on the same page in terms of where your organization is going and how it’s going to get there. This article, the first in a series of three, will cover the Vision component and introduce the Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO). The Traction and Healthy components will be addressed in subsequent articles.
Why does vision matter?
Keith Schoolcraft, CEO and visionary of local IT company a Couple of Gurus, has a story many business owners can relate to: “Before embracing EOS, I always wondered if people were really on board with my vision. The vision was crystal clear to me, but my employees—including my president—just didn’t get it.”
Most companies operate like a raft floating on the water, with all the employees around the edges paddling passionately and furiously in the direction they believe the company needs to go. There’s a lot of impressive activity, but ultimately the raft doesn’t go anywhere.
When you can align your employees around your Vision, then your company operates more like a canoe, with everyone’s passion and energy moving the company in the same direction. It’s not effortless, but it’s much more effective than trying to move that raft.
The EOS tool for helping your employees align around the company’s vision is called the Vision/Traction Organizer (download the V/TO template for free at eosworldwide.com/vto).
To the degree that you and your leadership team are in agreement on the content of the V/TO, that’s the degree to which you have an aligned leadership team.
Anne Schoolcraft, the president and Integrator of a Couple of Gurus, says, “I was intensely focused on managing the day-to-day operations and making payroll, and when Keith’s vision wasn’t clear to me it just wasn’t worth the time or energy to try to understand it.
Now that we run on EOS and have the V/TO, I am confident I understand where Keith is taking us, and I make decisions every day that help move the company in that direction.”
This article will cover the first six sections of the V/TO.
Take the downloaded V/TO and get out of the office with your leadership team, or by yourself if your company is not yet large enough to have other leaders. Grab a cup of coffee and dive into these six sections:
Core values: Your core values define who the right people are for your organization. They should NOT be generic things like communication, respect, integrity and excellence (those were Enron’s by the way). They should be truly yours.
A few favorites from among my clients’ core values: “We give a cr@p,” “Embracing what others see as impossible,” and “Nobody is above taking out the trash.”
Core focus: Your core focus is made up of your purpose/cause/passion (the “why”) and your niche (the “what”). Why do you keep coming back to the office when things are hard? Why do you fight for your customers’ best interests? That’s your purpose/cause/passion.
What is it that you do better than anyone else? That’s your niche. The core focus is not marketing material, so don’t overthink it. Once you know what your core focus is, it acts as a filtering and guiding mechanism so you know when to say “yes” and when to say “no” to opportunities.
10-year target: What’s the dot on the horizon that everyone should be paddling toward? That’s your 10-year target. It can be either qualitative or quantitative, as long as it’s inspiring.
Marketing strategy: Your marketing strategy consists of four parts.
1) The target market is the demographic, psychographic and geographic of your ideal customer.
2) The three uniques are the combination of attributes that differentiate you from your competitors.
3) The proven process is a simple, one-page illustration showing the process you take your customers through.
4) The guarantee is the promise you make to your prospects to put their minds at ease and help you close more business.
Three-year picture: This is the color commentary to your accountant’s spreadsheets. Forget about financial details for now. What do you want your company to look like and feel like in three short years?
Anne Schoolcraft advises, “Your employees likely can’t interpret a spreadsheet of projections, but if you paint a picture of the future for them they can visualize it, embrace it and do their part to move the company toward it.”
One-year plan: What are the three to seven most critical things that MUST get done this year to keep your company on track for your three-year picture? You’ll get there faster and more easily by focusing on a small number of top priorities and accomplishing them than by treating everything as a priority and actually accomplishing little or nothing.
Caution and encouragement
A word of warning: if you take your V/TO seriously, it WILL bring change to your organization, and change is sometimes painful.
You may discover that your longest-tenured employee clearly does not uphold the company’s core values, or that an entire product offering doesn’t fit with your core focus, or that you’ve invested thousands of dollars in a website that is not attracting target market clients.
I want to reassure you that thousands of companies have gone before you on an EOS journey, and the best of them are the ones that faced the hard truth head on. “Go for it!” says Keith Schoolcraft. “I promise you’ll thank yourself later.”
Now that your V/TO is complete and you’ve shared it with your employees, how on earth do you go about bringing that vision to reality? The main EOS tool for execution is Rocks, which will be covered in the next edition of Upsize.
Contact: Joel Swanson is a certified EOS implementer and the owner of Swanson Insight. He works to help business owners and their leadership teams simplify, clarify and gain the traction they need to become best-in-class: 612.836.3656; joel@swansoninsight.com; www.swansoninsight.com.
