After 33 years running my transportation company, I sold it, took a year off and was bored out of my mind. When you run a business that never stops, and it suddenly does stop, there is a big emptiness. A friend handed me the book Traction. I read it and thought, where was this 30 years ago?
That is how I became a Professional EOS Implementer. Looking back at all those years on the hamster wheel, EOS is the missing piece I never had. If your American dream turned into a nightmare, it is the cure.
The lifestyle business ceiling
Getting from zero to a million is a reasonable amount of effort. A $5 million business is a completely different animal, and a $20 million business is different again. Every time you grow, you hit a ceiling, and you either break through, flatline or fail.
Many owners have built a lifestyle business without realizing it. If they took off 30 days, the business would suffer. If something happened to them, the business would die. That is not a company yet. That is a job with a lot of overhead.
Why owners hold on to the wrong work
I see owners closing out jobs, getting the mail or washing the vehicles. I did it too. I loved taking reservation calls. I told myself it was good customer service, but really it got me out of the work I did not want to do.
Owners do those tasks because they feel finished. There is a sense of completion. The goal is to find that same satisfaction at a higher level, in the work only the owner can do. EOS has a simple tool for this called Delegate and Elevate: list everything you do, keep what you love and are great at, and hand off the rest to someone who will love doing it.
Right person, right seat
For every seat in the business, we ask three questions. Does this person get it, meaning do they understand the role? Do they want it? And do they have the capacity, in skill and in time, to do it well?
The two hardest people decisions are the ones every owner avoids. The first is the person who has been with you forever but cannot do the job; they need a different seat. The second is harder: the person who is great at their job but does not share your values. They are hurting the company in ways you cannot see, and they need to move on.
The real objection is time
Cost is rarely what stops owners. Time is. But if you cannot take your leadership team out of the business for one day, you have a much bigger problem to solve. At some point you have to let go of the vine.
Working on this in your firm? Let's talk through where your leadership team is stuck.
Book a free callMore conversations like this on the podcast page, including the Lead Counsel show I co-host.
