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Why EOS Works for us
Last week I sat in a room with our leadership team to review our annual and quarterly goals and setup for Q3. This week we took time to bring it home for the whole team. For 3 years now, we have done this every quarter, and 10 years ago I would not have believed I could look forward to a meeting like this.
My dad ran this firm for over 50 years on instinct, all of it kept in his head. He knew his clients, he knew his numbers, and he moved fast. That works when it is you and a handful of people in an office. I watched it stop working the moment we grew past that, because more people means more decisions, and instinct alone cannot carry a firm through it.
For us, the thing that replaced instinct is EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I adopted it because I needed a system that forced me to do the thing I am worst at, which is saying no.
Saying yes is easy. Yes to the new client, the new service, the one off exception. Every yes feels small in the moment. String enough of them together and you wake up running a firm that does a little of everything for everyone, and none of it particularly well.
EOS makes me sit down, every 90 days, and ask what actually matters, not what feels urgent or loudest, then say it out loud in front of my team where I cannot quietly walk it back later. We run this through a weekly meeting with the same agenda every time, and a scorecard that keeps a handful of numbers in front of us so we are never surprised by our own business.
The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) helps leadership teams get everyone rowing in the same direction through six key business components.
That is the real value. Not the software, not the acronyms. The forcing function. I have to strip the list down to a handful of priorities and defend why those made the cut and the rest did not. Most of what gets cut is not bad. It just is not what moves us toward where we are actually trying to go, and you cannot build anything worth building if you are carrying everything at once.
Right now, our numbers are strong, but too much of our business depends on too few relationships. So our direction is not about getting bigger for the sake of bigger. It is about narrowing who we serve so we can go deeper for the people who actually need what we do best, and being honest when we are not the right fit for someone else.
My dad never had a system like this. He carried it all himself, for better and for worse. EOS does not make running this firm easy. It just makes sure that when we are hard at work, we are working on what actually matters, instead of everything at once.
If you run on EOS yourself, or have questions about how it works, reach out. I would love to talk shop.
If you want to learn more , check out the book Traction to learn more. And if you need an implementer, hit me up , I know a great one.
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