When we were building our marketing agency, we trusted in two things – hard work and each other. That laid the initial foundation, but as the business grew and we matured as leaders, our trust expanded into other areas.
Nearly 17 years in, we’ve placed our trust in 6 key areas: our vision, our numbers, our processes, our efforts, our insight, and our team.
Our greatest teacher in learning who and what to trust has been the business operating system created by Gino Wickman and the coach who helped us implement it. The Entrepreneurial Operating System was created by Gino around a six-prong focus on vision, data, process, traction, issues, and people.
We have used EOS at M&R Marketing since 2019 and are big believers in his model. The six key focus areas I’ve listed here are adapted from Gino’s work, but I’ve revised it to be applicable to any business owner, whether you utilize EOS or not.
Trust your Vision
What is the vision for your company? Where do you want to be next year, in 5 years, and in 10 years? What is your Big Hairy Audacious Goal?
In order for your vision to move your forward, you have to know it, communicate it with your team, and make decisions based on it. If you want to arrive somewhere, you have to know where you’re going and make plans to arrive.
Once your vision is set, you have to trust it.
Trust your Numbers
In business, you must know if you’re winning or losing. When everything is going well or not-so-well, you need to know if it’s a blip or a new, developing trend. To fully understand how your business is doing, you need to identify the numbers that are most important for your team to track, and you need to review them weekly.
Your numbers are so much more than what your bank account tells you; there are numbers that every department should be monitoring. Here’s some examples:
- Sales: number of new leads, number of proposals presented, number of open proposals, recurring revenue managed, cash on hand
- Marketing: number of leads generated, source of lead generation
- Production: percentage of projects completed on time, number of errors, total over/under for estimates
- Project Management: projects stalled, projects closed out
Your company should have long-term revenue goals, but to help you hit the goal, you need to have specific numbers that each department is responsible for. This also helps them have buy-in and to better celebrate when you hit your revenue goal. It’s a team effort, and your team needs to be reminded of that often.
Trust your Processes
For the first three years, it was just my business partner and I. When we hired our first employee and delegated some of our work to her, we realized the importance of training material, best practices documents, and process documents. If we wanted to truly hand off some of our responsibilities to new team members, we had to provide them with the best opportunity to succeed.
This has continued to be of high-importance, especially as new departments have been created, team members have been promoted to senior and executive leadership, and new positions have been created.
We are currently developing process binders for all of our departments, because simply creating them isn’t enough. They need to be documented, printed, and distributed. Then they need to be kept up to date. It’s a lot of work but it creates efficiency, reduces errors, and ensures you complete your work based on the process you know produces the best results.
Gino Wickman highlights just how important processes are in his book “Traction”: Most entrepreneurs don’t understand how powerful process can be, but when you apply it correctly, it works like magic, resulting in simplicity, scalability, efficiency, and profitability.
Trust your Efforts
Your vision isn’t achieved without focus, discipline, and a tireless pursuit of what’s most important. As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to be lured away by the shiny object. We’ve all fallen prey to the next great idea.
It is difficult to be disciplined and stay focused on what’s most important. At times, the long game is less exciting, even boring, but that’s what discipline is. The Cambridge Dictionary says discipline is “training that makes people more willing to obey or more able to control themselves.”
To truly trust that your disciplined efforts will move you forward, and the time is worth it, you have to know where you’re going (vision) and you must connect your efforts to that. Your time, resources, and efforts on tasks and projects should all inch you closer to your vision.
Trust your Insight
When you’re running a small business, something is always on fire. Always. But there is so much to gain from properly solving problems; in my experience, you come out wiser and stronger on the other side. Trusting your insight means you don’t avoid issues and problems – instead, you consistently deal with them head-on by identifying the root cause and adjusting ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The cause could be a broken process, a lack of service knowledge, or a team member who isn’t pulling their weight. Whatever the issue, you can’t fix it until you identify it.
An important discipline to learn as a business owner is to be a problem solver and to always address the most important problems first.
And don’t forget to use your team to help solve them – they may know more about the problem than you do, especially if it’s within their department, and they’ll have more buy-in to helping fix it if they also help you identify it.
Trusting your insight leads to the final, and most important area of trust.
Trust your Team
Say this with me: I can’t do everything and I’m not the best at everything.
Good job.
After we hired our first employee, we realized we had outpaced our abilities for the specific tasks we hired for.
The sure-fire growth hack for any small business is to pick the right people, empower them to do their best work, be available to them, and then let them do what you hired them to do.
Then you can focus on what’s most important for you as a founder.
As we’ve grown, our team includes some great external partners as well, including our business coach, CPA, and financial advisor.
As you prepare to grow your business, spend some time evaluating how well you’re doing across these six areas and assessing where you need to give more time and attention.
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