In the book Get A Grip, authors Geno Wickman and Mike Paton discuss the strategies of implementing EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) into a fictional company that has hit their ceiling to engineer further growth and stability. The fictional company, Swan Services, was started by Vic and Eileen 10 years ago. Up until the past 18 months, they had been growing steadily. But since then, their investments hadn’t panned out, and growth had stagnated. This culminated into a hostile meeting where Eileen stormed out after insults were thrown around. At a business owner meeting, Eileen met a fellow owner who recommended an implementer named Alan. With the stage set for the intro and Chapter One, we’ll see how the authors see EOS implemented in a very common situation, struggling Small to Medium Sized businesses, who have hit a ceiling and struggles seemingly out of their control, and how they overcame them.
Alan met with the leadership team in an introductory 90 minute meeting, where he would outline the following: About Us, About You, The Tools, and the Process. He discusses the Six Key Components of the EOS Model, which are as follows: People (having the right people in the right seats), Vision (8 questions shared by all), Data (having scorecards and measurables), Process (documented and followed), Traction (rocks and meetings), and finally, Issues (Issue lists and IDS [Identify, Dissolve, and Solve]). Next, he introduces the EOS Proven Process, which includes: The aforementioned 90 minute meeting, then the Focus Day (which we will get to), 2 day vision building, and quarterly pulsing. As far as the story for this fictional company goes, After Alan was finished presenting, the leadership team eventually decided that this plan was worth following.
The Focus Day is an immediate full-day and off-site day of meetings with the leadership team set to discuss the five tools designed to “get a grip” on the business. The meeting starts with the concept of hitting the ceiling, and how to overcome them with the five leadership abilities: Simplify, Delegate, Predict, Systemize, and Structure. Next, the accountability charts were started, where leaders of different sections of the company would keep each other accountable on the GWC scale (Gets it, Wants it, Capable of the work.) Next, the team would decide on their rocks, and decide whether to kill them, keep them, or combine them to end up with five overall top priorities in the company, to be discussed at quarterly meetings. The rocks, as Alan tells the team, should be SMART: Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Some examples of Rocks that the team provided were things such as: surveying current clients and coming up with a retention plan, and implementing ops staffing changes to improve profitability. The implementer Alan would lead the quarterlies and annual meetings, but each leadership member would have to master the weekly “Level 10 meeting”, broken down as follows:
- Segue/Good News – 5 mins
- Scorecard – 5 mins
- Rock Review – 5 mins
- Customer and Employee Headlines – 5 mins
- To-Do-List – 5 mins
- IDS (Issues List) – 60 mins
- Conclude (Recap, Cascading messages, and meeting reviews) – 5 mins
- Last was the Scorecard, where the team must decide on 5-15 numbers needed to get a pulse on the state of the business. Each number or metric, when decided on, would be given to a different member for responsibility.
After a month from the Focus Day, Alan met with the team to start the Vision building process. Over a 2 day period, the team would build their VTO (Vision/Traction Organizer), while recapping on the subjects discussed at the Focus meeting. The VTO would help answer 8 questions to help unite the business: core values, core focus, 10-year target, Marketing Strategy, 3-year picture, 1-year plan, quarterly rocks, and an issues list, both short and long term. The utility of all of this so far is to provide benchmarks, and ways to measure them, for both the short term and long term at your company. With these tools, Swan Services were able to provide clear short and long term goals and issues that were ambitious and realistic to face. The process of creating a VTO isn’t easy, but a well worthwhile effort for a company “hitting their ceiling” when they know they can continue to grow.
Throughout the rest of the book, the authors take us through the fictional steps of the company, including them facing their next two quarterly meetings, and their first annual meeting post-EOS implementation. They started interviewing qualified CFOs, as they hadn’t had one before. The process isn’t always perfect, but implementing a system like this helped their company continue to grow and find stability.
