Family-owned businesses have unique challenges that impact their profitability – both positively and negatively. And often, the advantages that come with a family business are also the things that are most challenging. But by addressing the Six Key Components™ of your business, you can set yourself up for greater profitability. In fact, next year could be your most profitable year yet. Follow these steps to take your family business to the next level of profitability.   Establish a Company Vision Where are you going and how will you get there? If you don’t have a crystal-clear vision for your company that everyone understands, then you’ll have multiple people going in multiple directions. When your company is pulled in multiple directions, it can’t go anywhere. It’s vital that everyone in the company is 100-percent aligned on where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. Hire the Right People This can be

One of my clients who has been in business for over 20 years was hitting the ceiling when I first met them. They had been very successful over the years, but now they’d hit a plateau on revenue and profit. The team all felt stretched thin, even though they had 80 employees – plenty of staff for their needs – and they couldn’t put their finger on the real reason they were stuck.   A Leadership Team in Trouble When I asked them what their roles were in the business, nearly everyone on the team said that one of their main roles was “firefighter,” putting out fires – shipment errors, production errors, customer complaints, workforce issues, cash flow challenges, and much more. They were also frustrated because although they felt most of their people were well-intentioned, they were all being pulled in too many directions. This team was full of

You may have missed this article when it was published in August 2016. I’m resharing it now because I often talk with companies that could benefit from the timeless content in this post. Hope you enjoy it! –Mike Kotsis.  Are you willing to become your best? Instinctively, most business leaders would answer “Yes” to this question. Why on earth would anyone say “No”? The challenge comes when small business leaders are put to the test—in the heat of the moment of the day-to-day grind. This is when shortcuts are taken to ease tension and pain. Because after all, everyone is overwhelmed. One family business comes to mind. The leadership team consists of four people, and three are family members. The 35-person company has been in the service industry for over 20 years. The team put a smart growth strategy in place three years ago and was making substantial progress until

What do you think of when I say the word ‘keyboard’? Do you see a grand piano? Or a small computer keyboard? What else? Such a simple word, yet it has so many different variations and meanings. The same is true for your business. Does everyone on your team see the business in exactly the same way? Do you all have the same understanding of what the vision is and how you are going to achieve it? When everyone is on the same page and seeing the same thing in their mind’s eye, the chances of you achieving your vision are significantly higher, because everyone is working together towards the same thing. However, when even one person is on a different page, different decisions are being made that aren’t aligned. Going for a grand piano is very different than going for a keyboard. Why Everyone in Your Business Needs to

The power of EOS is that it gives your company a single way of doing business that’s simple and proven. Over 50,000 organizations around the world are running on EOS and getting their business under control. By addressing the Six Key Components of your business and providing a model for solving your company’s issues for good, EOS helps you grow to achieve your vision and goals more effectively. But some leadership teams that are running on EOS aren’t gaining the traction they’d expected to see when they started using the system. As a leadership team, they’re getting more done, solving more issues, and working together better than ever. But the business as a whole isn’t improving, and the operations side of the company is still out of control. What’s going on?   There are a few possibilities why a company stays out of control, even though they’re using EOS. Let’s explore

At the end of every EOS Meeting, whether that’s a day with your EOS Implementer or a weekly Level 10 Meeting, we ask the team to rate how we have done as a team in this meeting, where 1 is terrible and 10 is awesome. If anyone scores less than an 8 then they are asked to explain why and what could be done to improve the meeting. I am privileged to run a lot of EOS Session Days with clients and also sit in on a lot of Level 10 meetings with clients. If a Session Day scores low then I will take responsibility for what I could do to improve it and I also ask the participants why they didn’t insist in getting what they needed out of it. We use this a way to self-correct and improve in the next session. It’s similar in Level 10 Meetings.