Ready, fire, aim: How to refocus your business for sustainable growth

Ready, fire, aim. Entrepreneurs are advised to start a business this way, to just start and then make adjustments later on. Given this, it’s no wonder that many entrepreneurial businesses struggle as they grow. It’s a familiar problem: the founder’s vision gets lost, or other times, teams struggle to create systems that work. What’s an entrepreneur to do?

Enter EOS — short for Entrepreneurial Operating System — a worldwide organization that helps entrepreneurs take control and grow their business sustainably. I recently spoke with Haraya “Ia” del Rosario Gust, an expert EOS implementer, on the RJ Ledesma Podcast where she shared valuable advice for entrepreneurs looking to spark a meaningful change in their business.

As an entrepreneur, I can see how EOS’ work has far-reaching benefits for business growth. And thousands of companies such as Sunnies, Straightforward, Blue Water Resorts, to name a few, have already reaped the rewards of the EOS system. If you’re an entrepreneur as well, do check it out. You can even implement the EOS system on your own, using the book Traction by Gino Wickman, who is EOS’ founder. Here are some highlights from the interview.

WHAT IS EOS?
Before anything else, what exactly is EOS? Ia Gust explains: “The Entrepreneurial Operating System is a complete set of simple concepts and very practical tools that help entrepreneurs get what they want from their business.”

She simplifies it further into three things: Vision, Traction, and Healthy.

Vision, she explains, entails being clear about what you want. Meanwhile, Traction is about “being able to execute against that simple and clear vision with focus, discipline, and accountability.” Finally, Healthy is about “becoming a healthy, cohesive leadership team because many times as businesses grow, the team tends to be more dysfunctional and less cohesive.”

ROADMAP TO RESULTS
Here’s another familiar problem for entrepreneurial businesses on the brink of taking off: as the business grows, new leadership teams come in and implement their own systems. One business begins to be run in different ways, creating confusion.

Gino Wickman, the founder of EOS and an accomplished entrepreneur, familiarized himself with problems such as these. He then studied how the most successful entrepreneurial teams handled these problems and created a roadmap so that other entrepreneurs could achieve results — or what he called Traction.

Wickman broke down the roadmap into six components which are at the heart of EOS: Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, and Traction.

Ms. Gust explained the first three components:

Vision: “Everyone in the leadership team being 100% on the same page with where their business is going and [knowing] what’s the plan to get there.

“[EOS believes] that where the leadership team goes, so does the rest of the organization, and they eventually get to a point where the entire organization is on the same page with a vision and the plan to get there, everywhere you look, everyone is executing against that vision with focus, discipline, and accountability.”

People: “We can’t execute a great vision without great people,” Ms. Gust says. She expounds on this truth by explaining how EOS can help entrepreneurs define what a “great” employee is and how to develop them.

Data: “[Being] 100% strong in the data component just means that you can run your business on a handful of numbers that gives you an absolute pulse on your business.” She compares this data to a car dashboard. “So data,” she continues, “when it’s strong in the business, you look at it and you get a feeling of whether your business is okay, it’s healthy, or you need to do something else. When those first three key components are strong, your vision is strong, your people are strong, [the] data component is strong, the business becomes transparent.”

From there, achieving traction is all about processes and tackling the issues that hold your business back. If you’re curious to learn more, there is a wealth of information on their website or you can talk to their experts who have experience in working with companies across the region.

What’s great about EOS is you also don’t need to pay for the organization’s services. There are benefits to doing so, of course, but you can opt to self-implement EOS by reading Gino Wickman’s book, Traction, then subscribing to Basecamp, a free tool to implement EOS in your organization.

WHEN ENTREPRENEURS NEED A SYSTEM LIKE EOS
Ia Gust’s own personal journey as an entrepreneur — and how she found EOS — is one that other entrepreneurs can relate to. It also underscores why a system of tools like EOS can be so valuable.

She said, “When I set up my business, the point that Traction came into my life, that was the point where I felt like I just didn’t belong on this journey. I thought that starting a company with 10, 12 people was going to be chicken — very easy — given I was leading a 200-person organization before. I think because of that, I realize now that the best indication of when you need a system is when as the entrepreneur, you’re starting to not love the work that you’re doing because it’s taking you [down] a different path… An entrepreneur starts to question, right? ‘What am I doing? I’m not happy.’”

It’s clear that the Entrepreneurial Operating System has deep and far-reaching lessons for entrepreneurs and the organizations they are building. And if there’s anything that entrepreneurs should take out from this introduction to EOS, it is this: every entrepreneur can reboot or refocus the way they work with this simple set of thinking tools. It’s all about being a better entrepreneur.

“When I introduce EOS to leadership teams,” Ms. Gust says, “especially to entrepreneurs who are curious about it, I say that we help entrepreneurial teams run a better business so you can all live better lives.”

RJ Ledesma () is a Hall of Fame Awardee for Best Male Host at the Aliw Awards, a multi-awarded serial entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and business mentor, podcaster, an Honorary Consul, and editor-in-chief of The Business Manual. Mr. Ledesma can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. The RJ Ledesma Podcast is available on Facebook, Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts. Are there entrepreneurs you want Mr. Ledesma to interview? Let him know at ledesma.rj@gmail.com.