Implementer Posts
Five Keys to Growing Your Business in 2024
In the ever-evolving landscape of business, staying competitive and thriving in 2024 requires a keen focus on your organization’s core elements. As a certified EOS Implementor, I’ve seen firsthand how adopting these five crucial principles can propel your business to success this year and beyond. Vision and Values Clarity One of the fundamental pillars of business success is having a clear and compelling vision, accompanied by well-defined core values. To ensure that your entire team is moving in the same direction, it’s crucial that each member understands and embraces the organization’s vision and values. These act as guiding principles, shaping the culture, decision-making, and actions within your company. Right People in the Right Seat The success of your business heavily depends on having the right people in the right roles. This means aligning team members’ skills, strengths, and passions with their respective positions. A thorough assessment of your organization’s structure
5 Goals for Your Family Business’s Annual Planning Session
The busy-ness of running a family business makes it imperative that you step back once a year and plan for the long-term. If the day-to-day is the race you’re running now, the planning session is what gets you in shape for the ones to come. Here are five essential goals to strive for at your session, and ways to help you meet them. Align the leadership team. One of the main goals of an annual planning session is ensuring that you are all on the same page. Begin with agreeing on a shared vision. This should include answers to the questions— Who are we? What do we do? Where are we going? And how are we going to get there? Identify the values and behaviors that shape company culture. Ask what products or services do you offer and, more importantly, why? Finally, consider a single long-term goal for 8 to 10
Do You Want Batter, or Do You Want a Cake?
When we build out the Accountability Chart with a new client in our first session (Focus Day), we determine the Key Functions (the seats, or boxes) that define the composition of the Leadership Team. Next, we determine the most important things for which each Leader will be held accountable – what we call the Key Roles for each Function. As we do this, I ask if the Function has direct reports. If it does, I insist the first Role in that box MUST be Lead, Manage and Accountability. We abbreviate it as “LMA”. At that early point in our EOS Journey, the Leadership Team doesn’t realize just how critical and profound those three letters are. Later in our Journey, they learn just how important LMA is to building a truly Great Business. How is all this like baking a cake? I like to use a metaphor when I first introduce
Breakdowns lead to Breakthroughs
As we enter 2024, we celebrate being one more year removed from the havoc which the pandemic wreaked on our lives and the economy. Since that very first shutdown, every company’s story was different. Some businesses struggled, while others managed to thrive. For most, now that pandemic-related turbulence has lessened, we seem to have started to settle into a new ‘normal’. How is your new normal? For many of us, the new normal includes a whole new set of uncertainties: how the hybrid office affects employee engagement, the challenge of rising interest rates, the threat of recession, and the emergence of AI in every facet of our lives – to name a few. Sometimes these developments present themselves as opportunities, sometimes as threats. But perception is just our interpretation of reality based on what we think and feel. One person’s threat is another person’s opportunity. Entrepreneurs are used to disruption.
Scorecards – The key to Business as Usual (BAU)
This can be a highly undervalued tool & it can sometimes feel hard to develop a good one. The reality is it can take months to get this right, but it’s worth it! But even when you have nailed it, you will still want to review it every 90 days to make sure it is giving you data that you can use to make real business decisions. So, what is a Scorecard & what is it used for? In EOS our Rocks are the most critical objectives of a quarter. They generally support annual goals or fix processes and help us gain traction on our vision. These are visited every week in the Level 10 Meeting & best practice says you should spend around 20% of your time working on these things that move the business forward. The Scorecard, then, is the way of keeping track of Business as usual
Delegating To Elevate: Why Leaders Should Strategically Delegate
Delegating To Elevate: Why Leaders Should Strategically Delegate As an entrepreneur, one of the hardest yet most necessary skills to learn is delegation. There are only so many tasks you can take on yourself before you get overwhelmed and risk burning out. I learned this lesson early on when trying to run every aspect of my business—from sales to marketing to operations and more. I was playing all positions on the field, which wasn’t sustainable. That’s why delegating became so critical. As an EOS implementer, I knew the value of strengthening all parts of my business, but I simply didn’t have the bandwidth or expertise to handle it all effectively on my own. By building a team and delegating key tasks, I could focus on my core strengths while elevating overall results. Some of the first major task areas I chose to delegate (after hiring my assistant Jen, of course!) include