If you’ve talked with anyone from ThreeWill lately, you may have noticed that we’re talking a lot about “core processes” – a term that I learned from reading Gino Wickman’s best-selling book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business (amazon.com). In this book, he lays out a framework for managing and growing a small business that he calls the Entrepreneurial Operating System®, more commonly referred to as the EOS Framework, or simply EOS®. And let me tell you – we LOVE EOS here at ThreeWill.
If you’re the CEO or COO of a small business and you haven’t heard of EOS, I’m excited to introduce you. It’s a framework for managing and scaling a company that we’ve embraced wholeheartedly at ThreeWill — and it’s been a game changer.
I’ll tell you how I came to learn about EOS, why I personally love it, what it’s done for us here at ThreeWill, and how I see it shaping our future.
First, though, in case you’re wondering – we’re not officially affiliated with the company EOS Worldwide and this is not an ad or paid endorsement. We just believe in their framework and like sharing helpful information.
EOS Made Business Click for Me
For most of my time at ThreeWill, the idea of running a business felt huge and overwhelming. I’ve asked Tommy more than once — what gave him the guts to take on something so massive?
You can find his answer to that question in the blog M365 Consulting for Small Business: A Chat with Tommy Ryan, but I have always struggled to start on large undertakings – especially if I had no clue on where to begin. Starting a business is about as large of an undertaking as they come.
And keeping one going? Don’t get me started.
A Curios Will is a Dangerous Thing
I have a tendency, though, to get real curious about things that I don’t understand – especially once I start getting to know people who have already figured it out. So, when our leadership team announced that they were going to be reading Traction, and they told us a bit about it, I got excited.
Only problem? I wasn’t on the leadership team…but I’m not beyond a little healthy snooping and besides…is it snooping if I also just read the book? I don’t think so.
So — long story short — I read the book. Traction walks you through six core components of running a business, each filled with tools and strategies to help you gain control and get everyone rowing in the same direction — one you and your leadership team actually choose.
EOSWorldwide.com has a great visual that breaks these down but, which you can see on their home page, but just to give you an idea, the components have names like “People”, “Vision”, “Data”, “Issues” and “Process”.
The Big Click
As I was reading (okay…listening on Audible), something clicked. For the first time, I — the eternal employee — saw a path I could follow and actually understand. Suddenly, I was equipped with a whole new vocabulary in a language I thought I’d never speak so fluently: business.
As an employee – I was incredibly excited to be included. I wanted the chance to explore what it was like to work on ThreeWill, instead of just for ThreeWill, and I felt like this was going to be the perfect opportunity.
And boy was I right…a year or so later, once we were finally ready to start rolling it out across the organization.
Patience is a virtue. Or so I’m told.
EOS Gave Our Team Focus — and a Common Language
The real power of EOS? It gets everyone in your business focused on the same goals, using the same process, speaking the same language, and pulling in the same direction. That’s what EOS means by “Traction” and once you’ve got EOS rolled out and “Followed by All” (another key EOS phrase), you’ll start to see your strategy going from idea to execution within 90 days.
When you run on EOS, you can tell everyone in your organization “This is what we want to have accomplished in the next 10 years, where we need to be in three years if we’re going to stay on track, and here are our goals for this year to help.” Each quarter, teams commit to quarterly goals — called ‘Rocks’ — that directly support the company’s annual objectives.
After that, they will meet each week, review their team’s scorecard metrics, and give updates on their rocks. They’ll also spend some time discussing any issues they’re having and need help with, again working together to determine what the next step should be.
The Impact of EOS on ThreeWill
It took time — but EOS turned every single person here into a business decision maker. Every week, my colleagues and I will sit down, hold ourselves and each other accountable, and talk about what we need to do in order to help ThreeWill reach its stated goals. We’re all trying to offer solutions based on what we think is right for ThreeWill.
Sure, it can get messy — but instead of every decision coming from one person (you), the people closest to the work are solving problems and proposing solutions that support your vision. “Many hands make light work”, and when you give your people a direction to go in and the tools to figure out how to get there, the only thing left to do is set a routine and the expectation that it will be followed.
Then follow it yourself.
That’s how you go from talking about how you should write an eBook one day, to crashing your website 90 days later because your server couldn’t handle the influx of traffic. EOS made me do it.
EOS Helped Us See Where Tech Makes the Biggest Impact
One of the most challenging undertakings that we’ve gone through with EOS was to transition away from a project-based “Work-For-Hire” type of firm towards someone our clients saw as a strategic partner. Perhaps I’ll write another blog about the reasoning behind that decision – leave a comment or reach out to me on LinkedIn if you’re interested – but what’s important for this blog is that one of the earliest business outcomes that resulted from EOS was the launching of our Community Management service.
We wanted to partner with our clients and journey with them – helping them knock out their biggest employee engagement or productivity issue. Our guarantee was (and still is) that you will receive 2x the value for every dollar you spend with us on Community Management.
The challenge that we faced – for years – was explaining how we did that. How did we know what was important, or where we would find places to add value. Our answer was, “We’ll work with you to identify your issues, provide you with a recommended solution and an ETA, and then you tell us which ones you want us to go after next.”
Do You Believe?
It was true – and our clients who already knew us trusted us enough to take that journey. We’ve had more clients start their journey since, and I’m happy to say that all these years later, we’re still working with well over 90% of them. But convincing people who have never experienced us that we’ll, essentially, “figure it out” without being able to really explain it well was…difficult.
That was until someone-who-doesn’t-like-to-brag was re-reading about core processes and it dawned on him. Or her. Ok, fine. It was me. I had the bright idea. Anyway.
If you’re running on EOS – you get it.
Your Core Processes really dictate how the most valuable work in your organization is supposed to happen, every single time. If it’s not happening the right way, every time, your process is failing and you’re losing time, money, and probably morale.
So, if I want to help you figure out how to get the most value out of Microsoft 365 – I just need to look at your core processes, understand where the bottlenecks are, and then cherry pick the right application, automation, or AI solution and tailor it to support your employees’ workflows.
How EOS is influencing Our Approach
Right now, most of these conversations are taking place internally here at ThreeWill, but you can expect to start hearing us talking about core processes in more and more of our client and partner conversations.
If you haven’t heard of EOS or core processes – I cannot endorse it strongly enough. Even if you and I never meet – I hope you at least check them out. It’s worth your time and your business will thank you.
Like I said in the beginning, neither I or anyone at ThreeWill gets anything out of promoting EOS. We’ve been inspired by it, we believe in it, and in the spirit of our abundance mentality – we love sharing success with people.
If you’d like to learn how EOS, Microsoft 365, and ThreeWill can help your business thrive — drop a comment, reach out on LinkedIn, or use the big orange button below to schedule a free discovery call with our Co-Founder and CEO, Tommy Ryan. We’d love to share what we know with you.