The Entrepreneur’s Growth Playbook

Blog 1: Are You a Pioneer or a Settler? Six Steps to a Better Business Model

Written by: Paul Sparrow, Area Managing Partner & CMO, Chief Outsiders with Samuel Kniseley Ballesteros of The Advantage Solution and a Professional EOS Implementer

Take a trip with us, if you will, back to Northern California in 1849. Word has spread across the land – there’s gold in them there hills, and we need to go find it. On just this pronouncement, and with not much more than hope and a promise, pioneers set forth to go find the gold – and with it, riches beyond their wildest imagination. You know the rest of the story – some of these folks went boom, most went bust, and the California Gold Rush became a literal flash in the pan.

Contrasted against the opportunistic pioneers was another group of visionaries – the settlers. They knew that before, during, and after the Gold Rush, there would be a need for infrastructure to cater to the masses. Things like a hardware store for the miners, a saloon for them to blow off some steam after a long day in the mine, and even a bank to process the gold. Many of the settlers, some might argue, truly struck it rich – building a future that far outlasted any gilded trend.

Even in 2021, we can still observe examples of entrepreneurs who fall into these two camps – pioneers with a great idea and the drive to achieve it, and the settlers who have figured out how to cross the chasm in order to create a sustainable and scalable business.

So, are you a pioneer or a settler? Or, more to the point, do you know how to translate what you have envisioned into something you can replicate, grow, and take to the next level? One way to tackle this is to adopt the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS. For the uninitiated, EOS is a methodology through which corporate leaders can better align the moving parts of their business.

Why can this type of alignment be so elusive? Well, for one, entrepreneurs, and most business leaders, by their nature, tend to have to wrestle with 136 things simultaneously. The EOS forces these leaders to buckle down, focus on, and strengthen just six key components of their business. With this focus they can start to grow and start to get what they want from their business.

The six key areas of focus are as follows:

1. Vision: This is all about getting everyone on your leadership team 100 percent aligned on where you should be going, and how you should get there. If vision is failing, this has to be fixed first before any of the other steps are undertaken.
2. People: This represents the second key component, because, quite simply, you cannot achieve a great vision without great people. Though this looks different for each company, the basic principles are the same.
3. Data: This component is all about running the business based on solid and concrete facts, figures, and numbers rather than the feelings and emotions that most entrepreneurs use to make decisions.
4. Issues: This stage focuses on the outliers – the problems and issues you’re wrestling with – and how to best knock them down so they can be eliminated forever. Doing away with issues is the key to pushing past those things that have been holding us back.
5. Process: In this step, we want to work toward the six to 10 truly core processes – using tools that help to strengthen the concept that the company needs to be built on a process-driven foundation, and not just the personality of the visionary, the face of the company. This step is the transition to getting the business to a more manageable, scalable, and profitable state.
6. Traction: This final step shares its name with a book by Gino Wickman, a bible for business leaders who are truly mired in the muck and need more than hard work and determination to survive and grow. It’s not a coincidence that vision is the first step and the final stage – you’ll need to be able to take your vision down to the executional level in order to separate the dreamers from the doers.

Clearly, this represents a simple primer on how to ignite permanent and lasting change for your business. In the remaining two blogs in this series, we’ll take a closer look at the EOS – including the questions needed to define your short- and long-term plan; and how to layer marketing strategies onto your plans to ensure forward momentum.

We are hopeful that this blog series will set the table for a deep discussion among your leadership team regarding how to break through barriers to growth in an effort to find solid footing for the advancement of your business.

Free consultation offer:

The simplest and fastest way to determine what type of support might provide your business with the highest benefit is to give one of us a shout to discuss your needs.

Paul Sparrow, Area Managing Partner & CMO, Chief Outsiders 
https://www.chiefoutsiders.com/profile/paul-sparrow
psparrow@chiefoutsiders.com

Samuel Kniseley Ballesteros, The Advantage Solution
https://www.theadvantagesolution.com
samuel@theadvantagesolution.com