The 2001 book Good to Great by Jim Collins showed us the defining characteristics of companies that had gone (as the title implies) from good to great. One of those characteristics was recruiting the right people for the right roles and getting all the wrong people out of the company. It seems like a no-brainer when stated so simply. But like so many things in the world of small business ownership, it’s easier said than done. How do you do it? How do you assess your people and their roles?
Enter Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. The book essentially takes well-established concepts (like the example above) and combines them into a set of practical tools and methodologies that are easy to understand and simple to follow. Wickman calls it the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) and breaks it all down into Six Key Components™ that any small business owner can follow. The tools in this book almost look too simple, but they do work. And it’s so nice when the simple path is the best path. I’ll give you a few examples.
In my own company, my partners and I are located between Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham area. We have six full-time employees and six to twenty contractors active at any one time. Yet we don’t have a physical office. We’ve been using the EOS for about eighteen months now.
One of the Six Key Components is called Traction, and within that component lies the Meeting Pulse. It’s a prescriptive model of how often to meet, what to meet about, and even what the agenda should look like. So we have regularly scheduled and highly structured weekly, biweekly, and quarterly meetings. Those meetings provide us with connection, discipline, and laser-sharp focus on the critical things we need to accomplish during the quarter.
We’re also working with a few other companies to help them implement the EOS. They’re still in the early stages and recently completed a prescriptive model of how to capture their visions and core values. Capturing those concepts is not a new idea. But the way this model does it has a fascinating side effect—it uncovers issues that get in the way of fulfilling the vision. The process helps to name those issues and decide whether they need to be solved right away or at a certain point in the future. Identifying and solving these issues is key to your success.
Finally, another great feature of this book is the flexibility. Maybe you don’t have time to take on the whole model at once. You can still find tools within the book that apply to whatever is going on in your world right now and implement just those.
The book will be most valuable for companies with employees. But if you’re a solopreneur ready to grow, start off on the right track by building your business with this system.
Wendy provides strategic and practical financial and operational solutions customized to the unique needs of growing health, life science, and technology services companies. Prior to becoming a partner at
CREO, Inc., she founded Laxton CFO Services and was recognized by the Charlotte Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners as its 2013 Rising Star Award Winner.
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