Run Your Business on Autopilot Using EOS Lite

If you haven't read Gino Wickman's legendary book Traction, stop reading this for a moment, buy it, then come back here and keep reading. Once you've read it, you get a sense of just how much simpler it can be to run a company, and how much more powerful everyone on your team will feel when they can track progress and where they stand on a weekly basis.

The problem is that the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) that Wickman lays out in the book is for large enterprise businesses.  I wanted a way to make his ideas work for my smaller Remote Local biz.  Enter a version of EOS that I ended up implementing at MaidThis: EOS Lite.

Pain Points Addressed

Once you've implemented whatever version of EOS makes sense for your business, here are some immediate benefits you will reap:

• A formalized way to run meetings and hold your team accountable
• Easy-to-track KPIs that you can tie job descriptions to
• Quarterly review system to help you track individual and team performance

Start with the Org Chart

Create an org chart for your business for one year from now and next to the job title write down the single most important metric for a given position.  That metric can then help you create tasks and deliverables.  

I used to write lengthy job descriptions, but they didn't have the relevance and immediacy of the KPIs generated when I started with the single metric.

Performance Evaluation

Part of installing EOS Lite at MaidThis led to some departures from my team, and some of those departures were due to a gap in core values.  Simply put, if an employee doesn't match core values, they have to go. Once this standard is put in place, someone like that wouldn't be hired in the first place.

Once I know that there's alignment with values, I go back to the metrics I've created for a position and make sure that team member gets it, wants to accomplish the KPIs, and most importantly, has the capacity to do so.

Level 10 Meetings

If it sounds awesome, it's because it is.  Level 10 means that the meetings are highly structured and don't waste time.  We make sure we are moving the ball forward on multiple fronts, making sure that the most urgent and pressing ones get our attention and everything else is deferred to a future meeting.

During these meetings we go over KPIs via scorecards as well as something called "rocks" which are measurable quarterly goals we revisit each week just by checking in (the team member says whether he/she is "on" or "off" track).

Learn More

If any of these ideas intrigue you, I'm only getting started. I've got a LOT more to say.  I did a four-part twitter thread series (starting with this one) as well as a two podcast episodes on it (Part 1) (Part 2).

Got questions for how to implement EOS Lite at your business? I'm @neelbparekh on Twitter.  Hit me up!

Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash