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What is the EOS Model?

Lloyd Wolf | Professional EOS Implementer®

The EOS Model® provides a visual illustration of the Six Key Components™ of any business that must be managed and strengthened to be a great business.

EOS® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®) doesn’t treat symptoms – it helps you cure the "whole body" by strengthening the Six Key Components™ of your business – Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, and Traction.  The EOS Model provides a visual illustration of the Six Key Components of your business – of any business – that must be managed and strengthened to be a great business. This model applies to big and small businesses alike, in any industry. 

When I talk with entrepreneurs and business leaders about the EOS Model, they often ask me to explain a little more. Here is what I tell them: 

The 1st Key Component is the Vision Component™. Strengthening this component means getting everyone in the organization 100% on the same page with who you are, what you do, where you are going, and how you will get there.

The 2nd Key Component is the People Component™. Simply put, we can’t achieve great Vision without great people. This means surrounding yourself with great people, top to bottom. Great people are the Right People (who consistently exhibit your Core Values) who sit in the Right Seats (who have the God given talent, skills, experience, ability and desire to be great at their job). Right People, Right Seats, you've got to have both.

The 3rd Key Component is the Data Component™. This means cutting through all the feelings, egos and subjective emotions that opften drive decision making in an entreprenurial company and running your business on facts, figures and a handful of objective numbers that give you an absolute pulse on where things are with the organization.

The 4th Key Component is the Issues Component™. Strengthening this component means becoming great at solving problems throughout the organization – setting them up, knocking them down and making them go away forever.

The 5th Key Component is the Process Component™. This is the secret ingredient in your organization. This means identifying, simplifying and documenting the core processes that define your way to run your business – getting everyone on the same page with what the essential procedural steps in your core processes and then getting everyone to follow them so you create consistency and scalability in your organization. It makes it easier to mange, more profitable and more fun.

The 6th and final Key Component is the Traction Component™. This means bringing discipline and accountability into the organization – becoming great at execution – taking the Vision down to the ground and executing on that Vision, day in and day out.

As a Professional EOS Implementer®, I work with businesses in the Greater Pittsburgh Area and Western Pennsylvania – as a teacher, facilitator and coach – to help them implement EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) and strengthen the Six Key Components of their business. On our journey together, we are working to strengthen each component – get it to 100% strong, knowing that goal is virtually impossible – because that is utopia. We embark on a journey with the goal of getting you to 80% strong or better. Truth be told, most organizations are operating somewhere around 20% strong in the Six Key Components – succeeding in spite of themselves. 

Would you like to learn more about the EOS Model or the Six Key ComponentsHelp First is one of my Core Values. I’ll give you 90 minutes of my time to tell you more about EOS and show you and your leadership team how to experience "Vision, Traction and Healthy" by strengthening the Six Key Components in your business. This 90 Minute Meeting provides a simple but informative explanation of EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) to help you learn more and decide whether it’s right for you. There’s no better way to tell if EOS is a fit for your business. It's not a sales pitch - it’s just the easiest way for you and your team to connect with me for a overview of the system, the tools and the process. There’s no charge for this meeting, and there is no expectation or obligation to ever work together, I promise. It’s simply meant to answer all your questions and help you and your leadership team decide if you'd like to transform your business with EOS, and if I am the right Professional EOS Implementer for you. Contact me today for an initial discussion or to schedule your free 90-minute meeting.

Lloyd Wolf is a Professional EOS Implementer®. He works with business owners and senior leaders located in the Greater Pittsburgh Area and Western Pennsylvania – as a teacher, meeting facilitator and business coach – to help them implement EOS® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®) in their organizations. Contact Lloyd today for more information about how you can experience "Vision, Traction and Healthy" in your company using EOS.

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By Lloyd Wolf | Professional EOS Implementer® 31 Mar, 2021
I’m sure you’ve seen cartoons like this one. It does a great job of humorously exposing the universal problem many business owners and leaders find themselves in – feeling so overwhelmed with the daily/weekly/monthly challenges of running their business that they are blind and deaf to solutions that can eliminate (or at least significantly reduce) those challenges. I call this “but I’m too busy to solve my biggest problems”. Whether you are putting out fires with customers or clients, dealing with people issues, working on growth or profitability, juggling projects or simply going about your day-to-day job, do you feel like there never seems to be a good time to take on anything else? People often use “but I’m too busy” as an excuse not to have to deal with the real challenges or issues at hand. They often hide behind, buy into, and believe they are truly too busy. If you feel this way or have ever felt this way, that just makes you normal. Lots of business owners and leaders feel that way, or have felt that way at some point. I know there were times when I felt that way when I owned and was running my former IT business. Sometimes those daily/weekly/monthly challenges felt so overwhelming. But just look at the cartoon. Isn’t it painfully obvious the cavemen pulling and pushing the cart should take the time to get assistance from the caveman offering them wheels? I was blessed in 2015 when a trusted business friend handed me a copy of the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman and introduced me to EOS® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®). Think of EOS as the round wheels in the cartoon. EOS is a complete and proven business system, with simple and practical tools, that align and synchronize all the pieces of a business. It creates a clear overall vision, provides real traction in achieving that vision, and leads to more control, better results, and healthy teams. EOS addresses business issues at their root – rather than spot treatments and rather than treating symptoms of issues. Think how much easier life would be for the cavemen moving their cart if they had the benefit of round wheels! For me and my leadership team, yes implementing EOS was work and required our time. But it ultimately SAVED us time and made things better. What opportunities do you have to make things better for you and your business – but you’ve said you’re too busy? Are you really going to have more time next month? Next Quarter? Next year? Or will you still be just as busy if you don't make a fundamental change? I encourage you to pause, take a step back, look around, and see what opportunities are right in front of you that could make things better. Are you feeling too busy with your business? Are you frustrated with the status quo and wish there was a better way? I am blessed to be able to help business owners and leaders implement a set of wheels that have successfully helped thousands of others run better businesses and live better lives. If you’re open to learning more, reach out to me – if you’re not too busy 😊.
By Lloyd Wolf | Professional EOS Implementer® 22 Feb, 2021
I was recently talking with one of the leaders of an organization I met last summer. He shared with me that he and some other members of the management team felt an important change needed to be made, but the top leader of the organization wasn’t ready to make the necessary change. This is certainly not an unusual situation. There is a tendency in all organizations, and even in our personal life, to resist change. That’s true even when we realize that what we’re doing is no longer as effective as it once was, or is completely ineffective and fails to provide any value. That discussion with the business leader reminded me of “The Dead Horse Theory” my friend and mentor shared with me a little over a year ago. It goes something like this: The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians — passed on from generation to generation — says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Just get off. Sounds pretty simple, but it doesn’t take very long looking around and talking with people to realize that it is far from simple. Change is always hard, and just because everyone knows it needs to happen doesn’t mean it will. The reality is that today’s organizations (businesses, non-profits, churches, educational institutions) and even us as individual people, have found a whole range of creative and far more advanced strategies to use when dealing with a dead horse, such as: Buying a stronger whip. Changing riders. Threatening the horse with termination. Appointing a committee to study the horse. Proclaiming, “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse.” Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses. Declaring, “God told us to ride this horse.” Develop a training session to improve our riding ability. Reminding ourselves that other organizations ride this same kind of horse. Determining that riders who don’t stay on dead horses are lazy, lack drive, and have no ambition – then replacing them. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included. Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired.” Hiring an outside consultant to advise on how to better ride the horse. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed. Confessing boldy, “This horse is not dead, but alive!” Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance. Riding the dead horse “outside the box.” Get the horse a new or refreshed website. Killing all the other horses so the dead one doesn’t stand out. Taking a positive outlook – pronouncing that the dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the organization’s budget than do some other horses. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position of hiring another horse. Name the dead horse, “paradigm shift” and keep riding it. Riding the dead horse “smarter, not harder.” Remembering all the good times you had while riding that horse. We all have some dead horses we are riding. We need to first admit the horse is dead. We often live in denial. You can try to beat it, you can flog it, this will not change the fact – the horse is dead. So what dead horses (i.e. structure, people, processes, policies, products, services, customers) are you clinging on to in your organization? One of the things I love about working with my clients to implement the EOS® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®) in their organizations is the help it brings to avoiding riding a dead horse. The EOS Toolbox™, the Meeting Pulse™ (annual, quarterly, weekly) and meeting agendas, and the open and honest dialog between the leadership team members allows them to have those difficult, but very necessary, conversations – rooted in trust and HEALTHY conflict, without the fear of grudges, politics or guilt. The simple and practical tools used by companies running on EOS allows the team to know when they’ve got a wrong person in the organization, when someone is sitting in the wrong seat, when something in the organization is off-track and needs to be put back on-track, and when its time to make a change – simply put, when they need to dismount a dead horse. If something is off-track in your organization and it feels like you’re “riding a dead horse”, ask me how implementing EOS can help you make the change(s) needed to solve the issue, as well as give you the tools to make changes that will be needed in the future as your organization grows.
Groundhog
By Lloyd Wolf | Professional EOS Implementer® 28 Jan, 2021
Do you remember the 1993 movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, where he finds himself inexplicably living the same day over and over again? Do you ever feel like Bill Murry? Do you sometimes find yourself and your business in the same place, year after year?
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