Today, I’m diving into EOS- Entrepreneur Operating System, which is a concept that I’ve been implementing in my own entrepreneurial journey and has given us amazing results since we’ve been using it with our leadership team.
In this episode, I go over what EOS is and how you can start using some of the concepts today in your own small business.
In this episode, Danielle also discusses:
- What is EOS 2:25
- Vision and why you need it 6:45
- Marketing framework 7:34
- BTO 8:39
- The importance of people and teams 10:20
- Data and scorecards and how to implement effectively 13:09
- The process of creating SOP’s and hiring 16:01
- Issues and meeting 19:13
Connect with Danielle:
Website | https://www.kickstartaccountinginc.net/
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/kickstartaccountinginc/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/kickstartaccounting
Twitter | https://twitter.com/KickstartAcct
Things Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Book your FREE Discovery call: https://kickstartaccountinginc.com/book-a-call/
Test your Financial Health: https://kickstartaccountinginc.com/checkmyfinancialhealth/
Learn how to pay yourself as a CEO – https://www.kickstartaccountinginc.com/getpaid
Full Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:00
Welcome to entrepreneur money stories, the podcast for women entrepreneurs who want to dig into their money stories so they can break free from limiting beliefs around money once and for all hosted by Daniel Hayden, owner of kickstart accounting, Inc. This podcast is a series of real conversations about money mindset with valuable and action packed takeaways for the entrepreneur who’s building their abundant empire. Danielle is a reformed corporate CFO who’s on a mission to help rural breaking female entrepreneurs understand their numbers and gain the confidence to create sustainable profits. And now here’s your host, Danielle Hayden.
Danielle 0:40
Welcome back to another episode of entrepreneur money stories. Today we’re going to be talking about the EOS entrepreneur operating system. This system is a concept that I have been following for a long time during my entrepreneurial journey. I’ve watched hundreds of other entrepreneurs implement the system and their business and have found beautiful, amazing results. About two years ago, we began implementing this system. And I have to say today, we are seeing amazing flow in our meetings, goal progress and cohesiveness throughout our leadership team. I’m really excited to dive into what the US entrepreneur operating system is, and how you might be able to pull concepts from the system to use in your small business. Now, you guys have heard me talk about this in the past. But I am always using my experience in my corporate career as a CFO and my education to pool strategy systems and processes that have worked for bigger businesses so that we can together apply them to our small businesses in order to be able to grow successful businesses. I want to use the same concept here where we can take the EOS concepts and systems and apply what will work to entrepreneurship. Traditionally, ELS is implemented for companies who have between 10 and 250 employees, I promise you don’t stop listening, it’s okay. If you are just starting to hire by starting now, with the end in mind, you can decide how you can use these systems to better set up your business for the future. This is an operating system that’s going to help you operate a healthy business today, and set up the steps and tools that you’re going to need to succeed in the future. All right, what the heck of Eos EOS is called an entrepreneur operating system. And it’s a complete set of simple concepts and practical tools that have been used by 1000s of other entrepreneurs. This is not a computer operating system. It is a people operating system. By implementing ELS it will help you and your leadership team get better at three main areas of your business, vision, traction and health. So what does this mean? Vision, this is where we want to get everyone in your organization 100% on the same page with where you’re going and how you plan on getting their traction. And this is having the focus, discipline and most importantly, in my opinion, accountability throughout the company so that everyone is executing on the same vision every single day. Now, if you’re listening to this podcast, you want to help the business, we all want to help the business. So we have to help our leaders become a more cohesive, functional, healthy team, and have the metrics in order to be able to measure that the strategies help you the business owner get unstuck, right we get stuck from time to time. And we need help organizing all the challenges that we face every single day, and help make them more manageable by solving the problems as they come up. As we learn to solve problems as they come up. We also look at having the right people in the right seats, making meetings productive so that you actually look forward to them and having a system to be able to hold your team accountable. So when you are operating on Eos, you are operating in a system where everyone in your company is working towards the same goals, holding each other accountable and creating a healthy environment. Today, I’m just gonna give you a brief breakdown of the EOS model for you to have a general overview of the system and how you might be able to implement strategies from within the system in your business. However, this is really just to pique your curiosity. If you want to learn more about our operating system, we’re going to link all the books in the show notes. There are four books in this series by Gino Wickman. There’s traction, get a grip. What the heck is EOS and rocket fuel? What the heck is EOS is actually my favorite book. It is a really really simple, straightforward language. that provides questions about each tool that managers and employees can use in creating more ownership and buy in together and operating the system. So I actually found traction and got a grip, a more difficult read. However, what the heck is EOS? I actually listened to the audible version. And this book is what convinced me what helped me actually implement this system here at Kickstarter, counting AIG. So if this series of podcast episodes has you intrigued, I would highly suggest starting with the book, what the heck is ELS? Alright, so let’s get back to what this system is? How can we model it, and use some of these strategies in our small businesses? When we start a business, most of us are really good at our craft. However, we never learned the business side of business. I know that we have so many clients who come to us at kickstarter accounting that say, I am excellent at what I do. I’m good at it. I’m passionate about it and love it. But nobody ever taught me how to actually run the business. They didn’t cover that in school. So as a business owner, you’re left not understanding how to lead people, how to create a vision, how to understand the processes, create a scorecard to monitor your numbers, or to solve issues that are coming up. So this operating system is a tool that will enable you to get the background like an MBA box, to help you to implement the back end of your business. Now, there’s a few key areas within the EOS model that we’ll touch on today. Vision, data, process issues, and people. Let’s first talk about vision. How many of you have ever taken a step back to work on your business instead of in the business? I mean, really spend some time setting the strategic vision of your business? Now, again, we hear from our clients all the time, what does that even include? How do I know how to do that? So EOS has included a framework called the BTO and this framework helps us step out of our business. Right? So we’re working on our business in our business, and provide a framework for you to complete so that you understand the vision of your business. So included in the BTO are our core values, and the core focus or purpose of our company. Next is the marketing framework. How is our company different from our competitors? What are the three things that make us unique? What is your proven process or brand guarantee to your clients and customers? Now, if you felt kick started counting in good social media, you’ve heard us talk about this, you might not even really realize that we were talking about this. If you haven’t noticed, maybe moving forward, when you see these posts, you might see that now we talk about what our guarantee is to our clients, what our proven processes are and how we apply our strategic framework to what we do that sets us apart. And I’ll tell you until we did this BTO exercise until we applied the EOS model to our business, we couldn’t use this in our strategy. So I cannot tell you it sounds so simple. But having this BTO created, understanding this piece of it will allow you to then be able to use this in your marketing strategy. Alright, next up in the BTO. Now you guys know how I love numbers. So this is my favorite part is our 10 year revenue and profit target? Where do we want to go long term? Now, I’m not saying spend a ton of time here. But briefly visualize and set metrics on where you want to go. The next part is really important. This is a three year picture. Where are we going? And this three year sounds like a long time, but it’s not right. Where do we want to go in the near future? What is the revenue? What is our profit? And what can we measure as we focus on the future? How many employees do we have? Where are we located? How many locations do we have? How many clients do we have? What does team culture look like? really creating a clear three year picture. Once we have our vision our BTO builds, we have completed the first step of implementing the EOS process. They told you it was gonna be that hard.
Now, you heard me say no matter what size your team is, you can implement pieces of the system in your business. You can do the BTO on your own today to set a clear path for your business moving forward. If you want The only employee in your business, this process is going to be valuable. As you start to hire other employees, you will be able to quickly and easily talk about your vision, create your culture and stay consistent within your plan. After we set our BTO we need to talk about people. Simply put, we can run our business without our teams, we can’t do great things without people. So once you’re using your BTO to attract new team members, we will need to consistently evaluate if we have the right people in the right seats, who will be able to get us to the next level of growth in our businesses. Remember, most of us have not received tools on how to lead or analyze our staff members. We provide us with a tool called the people analyzer. And I want to pause for a moment, all of these tools that I’m mentioning today, you can download for free on the traction library by going to the ELS website. So we will have the link here. None of this is proprietary information from us a kickstart, I want to really honor that this method, this tool, comes from EOS. And all of these tools can be found on their website, I am simply sharing her experience that we’ve had internally and with several of our other clients to share this insight with you. All right, the people analyzer, this is a tool that we can use every single quarter to look at our team. The people analyzer is a tool that will help you assess each individual according to your core values. So it is a simple tool that is actually you’re able to customize to your business. This is a process of comparing each of your core values to each team member to analyze, do they have what it takes? Do they have the capacity to do it? Do they want to do it? These are three of the key questions to ask yourself, for every single employee and how they measure each of your core values. Now, this isn’t a tool to eliminate staff members if they don’t have what it takes. Or maybe they don’t have the capacity or quite frankly, in today’s market. They don’t want to do it. It doesn’t mean we have to go in and eliminate them. This is a tool to help you evaluate areas of weakness or opportunities to get better as a team after we have evaluated if we have the right people in the right seats, we can move on to the next step a podcast lovers I hope you’re enjoying another amazing episode of entrepreneur money stories,
I had to interrupt to tell you about an exciting new tool we recently launched. If you’ve been wanting to learn how to start managing your business finances, but don’t know where to start, then visit kickstart accounting inc.com/bootcamp. To receive our new five day video bootcamp series, you will receive a video each day that will take you from accounting overwhelm to money powerhouse. So if you’re ready, go to kickstart accounting inc.com/bootcamp. All right, that’s the episode, then the next step is data. I promise I won’t get too geeky here. I love data because data is an opportunity to cut through all of our feelings and focus on quantitative data. I know in entrepreneurship, we have a lot of feelings, we operate from our gut. And we have a lot of personalities, opinions and egos that are fueling our organizations. However, there’s a time to put that aside, there’s a time to cut through those feelings, to cut through the ego and create a set of objective numbers that will give you an absolute quantitative data on where things are and where things are going. In the finance world. You’ll hear me say work terms like the scorecard, the dashboard or KPIs. These are all other ways of calling it a set of key metrics that will enable you as a business owner to see where you bed and to see where you’re going. Now, of course, I could do a whole podcast episode on the scorecard. Pretty sure we will. However, as you start to think about applying this operating system to your business, we will need to create a scorecard for you so that you can consistently measure the progress of your business and goals. It is important to create a scorecard with metrics that will help you understand your business. We don’t have to overcomplicate things here, we can create laser focus by creating simple numbers and simple metrics. There are lots of examples in the book series to get you started on your scorecard. I think the best way to think of the scorecard is leading and lagging indicators. So what metrics can we monitor to help us understand where we’ve been so that’s lagging? Right. How many discovery calls did we do? How many new client inquiries have we had? How many social media interactions have we had in the past that are lagging? How many people ended up on our website and clicks. These are all things that have happened in the past that are lagging. However, they help us set metrics for the future that help us understand. Did we do enough? Do we need to do more? Do we need to scale back? Do we need to change what we’re doing? Did what we do produce the results? leading indicators are where we’re going? How many discovery calls do we need to do in the future? In order to hit our revenue goals? How many Instagram interactions do we need to have in the future? In order to have people land on our website? And to click on download, right? How many do we need in the future in order to hit our goals? Now, again, you don’t have to have 10, or two and 50 employees to start to think about your scorecard. You can do that today, right now with one employee right now, but just you, you’re you as a solo business owner.
Alright, so talking about growth in hiring additional employees. As we start to think about hiring and growing our team, we have to have a process. And that is the next category in our iOS operating system. This is the secret ingredient in your organization. I hear from clients all the time that say, I wish I could clone myself. Well, this is the best way to dump your thoughts, processes, procedures, onto paper, so that an SOP standard operating procedure can be created and followed by other individuals. The purpose of that is for everyone to be on the same page, and do things in a same or similar way for you to be able to deliver your product or service consistently. We want you to be able to create your product or service and have it be consistent with your brand. And most importantly, your core values, the core values of your business. This sounds amazing, right? Imagine being able to hire additional individuals who can help you scale your business and operate in the same or similar way that you the business owner operates. We have to think about what are the core processes that help us deliver our products and services to our customers today. And those are the core processes that we have to begin to operate these other core processes that we have to start to document as our standard operating procedures. Now, this isn’t going to happen overnight. I know that however, we have a goal internally to do three SOPs per quarter. So it’s one per month, that we are documenting and sharing within our team so that no matter what happens, we are sharing the knowledge between our team so that we can be consistent and always honor our core values. All right, we have our last two elements of the EOS operating system, which is traction and issues. I’m putting this together because they operate together in this 90 day world. EOS operates in a 90 day world in which we live every 90 days. Now this is either you as an individual, or you and your leadership team can evaluate your performance, refocus and set priorities for the next 90 days. And then resolve any issues that might keep you from making progress. This is a system of creating a quarterly planning session that will provide you accountability and discipline in your business. Every 90 days, you are setting an elf they’re called a rock, a set of goals that you would like to complete within the next 90 days. Now if you don’t have a leadership team today, you can still implement this process yourself by having a CEO session or the session might include yourself and your VA, your operations manager or whoever it is your right hand man or woman. So evaluate your scorecard, refocus and set priorities for the next 90 days. All right. Lastly, it’s our issue. How many of us wish we could solve problems as they come up. Eos offers a meeting opportunity called the l 10. Meeting. Again, I could do a whole podcast episode on this but I want to keep this really simple for you. The L 10. Meeting is a set meeting that is held either weekly, bi weekly or once a month. And again, usually this meeting is an hour and a half and is held by you and your leadership team. However, this can be whoever is involved in your business today, however big or smaller that might be. And here at this meeting, you will review the scorecard. Look at the data. Make sure we have the right people on the right seat. Get an update on quarterly rocks and goals and priorities and discuss any of the issues that may be coming up in business, especially the issues that are keeping you from hitting your goals, the goal setting process and these update meetings, keep us laser focused for 90 days. Now, that’s not to say that things don’t come up by operating in this 90 day world that has to be addressed. But it helps us focus for each quarter without getting distracted. Without having to look so far into the future. This ensures that we’re all rowing in the same direction. At the same time. It is so important. Now, I know POS can be a lot. I was really overwhelmed when I thought about implementing this. And I started to implement this. I’ve been reading these books for years long before I ever had a leadership team. However, I know that there are tools and strategies that you can pull from the system just like I did, so that as you create growth, as you bring on additional team members, you have standard operating procedures, you have a method of setting goals. You have created a scorecard system to evaluate your numbers and hold you and your team accountable. So what can you pull from the system to implement in your business to make big changes in your small business to create scalability and success for your future? We’re going to be doing a few more episodes over the next few weeks diving into EOS, the scorecard, the visionary integrator relationship, how we implemented it, some experiences from my team and some of the struggles that we have overcome. So please tune in for these future episodes. If you have any questions or want to hear something specific on this episode, you can always email us at support at Kickstarter accounting inc.com and send us a DM on Instagram at kick started counting. And if you liked today’s episode, please rate subscribe and share this episode with one other entrepreneur who you know needs to hear these strategies and money mindset stories. Until next time, thank you so much for being here.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Fantastic product!