After Reading One Book, It Changed How We Ran Our Entire Company

As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest struggles can be setting clear goals and getting your company aligned to achieve them. It’s a constant struggle to think ahead to what your mid-term to long-term goals are and to find enough time to chip away at them. A common failure for a majority of startups is to only focus on the short-term, while making sure you don’t run out of money. Most don’t realize that achieving mid to long-term milestones is the best way to drive a company forward.

As the Chief Operating Officer, it’s my role to help the company run more efficiently and increase output. About a year ago, I set out to explore ways to improve how we operate our company. Looking back it was one of the best decisions I’ve made as a founder. I set out researching and learning methodologies to drive this process and ways to improve the way we run our company.

After reading the book Traction and implementing the Entrepreneurial Organization System (EOS), I can honestly say that it has completely changed the way that we run our entire company for the better. I recommend it as a bible for every founder to live by and I re-read key parts of the book every quarter.

After implementing it across our company for the past year, I wanted to share some of the biggest benefits, learnings, and the impact that it has had on our company.

Prior To Implementing EOS

As an early stage founder of an events company turned tech startup, we made a lot of directional changes without having a clear set of goals for the company that were fully understood by the extended team.

Early on, we had been coached and mentored to learn the OKR methodology which was helpful in learning about the importance of setting goals, but EOS goes far beyond that. It helps improve the ways in which you run your company, not just how to set and track goals.

6 Key Learnings:

1. Take The Time To Complete the Vision Tracker Organizer as Founders.

Spend a few hours as founders identifying, debating, and agreeing on the company’s mission, niche strategy, values, short term goals, long-term goals, target custom list, and key metrics. This is a key step to implementing EOS. We put ours on a google doc so it’s easily accessible at all times from each employee.

I found that as founders we had varying degrees of things that we saw eye-to-eye on and certainly things that we did not. This exercise was helpful in getting us aligned so that it was crystal clear to communicate to our employees.

2. Have Your Employees Disagree and Challenge The Vision Tracker Organizer

Often as founders the way that you envision the company might not be the actual reality of what happens day-to-day from your employee’s perspective. Have a healthy and open discussion where you invite the entire company to challenge what you present in the VTO.

After a healthy debate we landed in a really positive place with everyone feeling bought into the VTO. It was incredibly helpful to have each person offer their input and perspective.

3. Create a Company Wide Issues List

Be transparent about the issues challenging the growth or productivity of your company, don’t sweep them under the rug and never solve them. Having our entire team constantly add issues that come up in their day-to-day, made it easy to understand where each employee had challenges in their role. Tackle one issue each week as a company. If you can tackle and solve one big issue a week you will progress your company forward. If you are able to solve more issues than what you add (which I’m not sure is feasible for a startup) then you probably are not capturing all of issues in your company.

In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle discusses how the strategy of “finding and improving small problems” has helped businesses flourish. The practice of kaizen (Japanese for continuous improvement) involves a focus on tiny, incremental change — improving efficiency on a production line by moving a trashcan or a tool a few feet to save time. Each tiny fix can add up to over a million tiny fixes each year. This same concept applies here.

4. Have a Company-Wide Quarterly Meeting

This is one of my favorite parts about the EOS is getting the entire company together for an off-site full day retreat, we let a different employee plan each one at a really cool Airbnb. One of our company’s values is to have fun, after all our name is Recess, so we always make it a point to have a full day of fun activities and team bonding. So far we’ve gone to San Diego, Calabasas, Lake Arrowhead, and Temecula. Some photos below are from our Temecula trip where we went hiking to a waterfall, and hit up a private wine & food tasting.

The main goal of the Quarterly Meeting is to set your Rocks (Goals) for the next quarter for the company and each individual. We usually start by looking and reviewing our Issues List and agreeing on what are the most important issues and what issues that aren’t important. One of the things that I have found to be most beneficial is to clearly lay out things that we aren’t going to focus on or that is not a company priority for the next quarter and add that to the VTO. This helps to align people on what not to focus on and has been a huge benefit.

We try to set no more than 3–4 Company Rocks. Over the years, I’ve become a huge believer in focusing on doing fewer things better. Achieving 1 or 2 Rocks is far superior than achieving 40–50% of 5 rocks. Each person on the team is the owner of each rock and is accountable for completing that rock.

We then agree on what are 3–5 individual Rocks that can help solve company issues or help achieve the company Rocks.

End your quarterly meeting by trying to solve 2–3 of the most important Issues that the company is facing. Last quarter we agreed ahead of time what those issues were and that made things much more productive.

5. Have an Off-site Annual Meeting

Just like the quarterly meetings, this is a two-day off-site meeting with a more intense day of solving issues. The goal here is to spend a full day planning out longer-term of what the company needs to achieve in the next 12 months, as well as discuss where the company will be in 3, 5, and 10 years.

Additionally, you will discuss the company’s position in the market, including running a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. The second day is used to try and solve some of the company’s most important issues with the goal of trying to solve 3–7 top issues.

6. Have an Efficient Weekly Team Meeting

This has been key in reiterating what the company & individual goals are and holding each other accountable on how close you are to achieving them. Each week we spend 20–30 minutes in our weekly meeting having each person share what progress has been made on their rocks.

At the end we try to solve an issue or review our issues list and agree on what will be solved in our Weekly Issues Meeting