Getting your business where you want it to be has never been easier. Using what's called an Entrepreneurial Operating System, one can have protocols in place for every situation to make sure they make the most out of their results. Ben Snyder, principal of Bizexe, chats with Bob Roark. Together, they go into some of the best techniques to ensure maximization of your results, the results you're looking for. Learn how to work with this Entrepreneurial Operating System today!

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Entrepreneurial Operating System With Ben Snyder

We're fortunate to have Ben Snyder. He's a professional EOS implementer. He's a principal at Bizexe. Bizexe provides real-world expertise in the Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS, to help business owners and operators grow their companies consistently. It's a time-tested model and a process with simple, practical tools where they help clients achieve three things: vision, traction and a healthy business. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show.  Bob, thank you. I appreciate it. We were chatting before the show. We have lots of things in common. The one fun fact that people may not know about you is you were a professional baseball player at one time in Houston Astros if I remember it correctly? Yeah, back in the early '80s. With a math degree. Yeah. I was the smart guy in the locker room. Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.  First of all, if the people I serve are people who have businesses from $5 to $50 million or if you want to go with employee size 10 to 200. They're usually the operator owners, a lot of family businesses too. Those are the people that I serve. In terms of what I do is I help them basically get what they want out of their business. Every entrepreneur has something they want out of the business, whether it be financial security or they want more time with their family. Ultimately when I work together, I help them get what they want. Rolling the clock back a bit, EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System is an outgrowth of a fairly well-noted author that's widely respected in the business arena. Gino Wickman is the person who wrote the book Traction back in 2007, and since then obviously, it's become quite popular here in the States, I would say as a whole. It's starting to move outside into the international world. I've actually read Traction. I've interviewed some people that use Traction and there's a lot of complimentary dialogue that goes off on the concepts and principles that are contained in that book. The Entrepreneurial Operating System, as I understand it, incorporate some of that into a systematic process. These are tools that have been around a long time. Some of them, people recognize but the power of it is when it's brought together in a complete system where the tools interact with one another and support one another. When you talk to a business owner that's functioning in the business without EOS, what do you typically hear from the business owner? The biggest part is their lack of control. They're constantly working in the business, firefighting, resolving conflicts with customers. As a whole, what they're struggling with is basically not being able to have control of it, not having a vision for where they want to go. Their employees or their customers, their interactions are full of strife. I would say there's a lot of chaos in it. [bctt tweet="Every entrepreneur has something they want to get out of their business. " via="no"] There's a tipping point for that business owner somewhere. There's a reason that when you show up and talk to them about the operating system and they go, “This is where I have been,” what do you think that tipping point discussion is? Is it the vision that they have? Is it getting organized? What do you think the tipping point to start using EOS is? I do hear a lot of people saying, “The vision component, I used to do some of that and I've lost it.” I seem to be working day-to-day on my business, not looking out towards the future. That's a strong one for sure. That they can get a vision and know where they're going. The being out of control, the sense of knowing who's the right person for my company, I can look at the data, I can look at a scorecard and know that my company is healthy. Those are things that they really wished they had. It's funny when we first introduced the scorecard and people started getting, and I asked them, "How do you know that your business is healthy?" A lot of times, people say, "I wake up at 2:00 AM and I start thinking, ‘How am I doing this area?’” I get my email together. I send off some emails to my leadership team and I'm asking for things on how's manufacturing? How's accounting? How's this? When I get in, I get all this information, I take a deep breath and I say, "I'm reasonably okay." That's how they let it go. Versus every week being able to pull up a sheet and say, "Here you are." This is not your first rodeo. You've owned businesses in the past as well. There was some good and some not so good. I would say definitely I've seen the full spectrum of that operating four different businesses over the past twenty years. I've been able to see quite a bit. I've seen businesses from the very conception I've started them from $5,000 line of credit, $100,000 credit card all the way to transactions where you're selling it for $6 million to $7 million. I've been fortunate enough to be around several businesses. Some of the things that people don't know is that your training ground was one of the largest companies on the planet, Lockheed Martin. Way back then I worked as a systems integrator. I learned a lot about project management, which obviously helps me know how to execute. One of the things I always did well in the business was to be able to set goals and execute on them. What I think about is, where were you? Which is in competitive sports, a mathematician coming up through the Lockheed system, owning businesses yourself and then you transitioned where you're helping business owners get a hand on the levers of their business. I've actually got the workbook and I was at a Vistage meeting where you were the presenter at Vistage, which you do that and YPO, Fairmont. I was struck by the organization inside the workbook. Can you talk a little bit about the components or the items that are important in this book that EOS stands behind? It's all built on a model that starts really with the business owner. If you're a business leader, you're very familiar with, “I've got about 139 things running around in my head.” You're trying to keep all those organized and checking and making sure they're going. One of the realizations we've found is that if you strengthen six key components of your business, those 139 things fall into place because they're not the problem. They're the symptom. The six key areas attack the common problems people face that caused the chaos and uncertainty within their business. Most business owners are extremely passionate about why they got into a particular line. They're passionate about their customers and their vision and their visionaries. I'm a premed kid that went through the army. I didn't have a business course and you think as a mathematician you didn't come through with a business course and I think about these key concepts. Let's dig into those six key components starting with vision.  One of the things that we're very aware of is that when you look at vision and strategy, you can do it to the nth detail. Simplicity matters here. Getting your whole leadership team 100% on the same page with where the company is going and how you get there is important. One of the funny things I like to say is getting a vision or having a vision is really not the issue. The issue is getting all of members of your leadership team on the same vision. When you start pulling out those peculiarities of the vision, making sure everybody agrees to them, that's the part that's important. Let's say I'm the business owner and I'm working with you. We've established the vision and then we look at my inventory of people in my business and you go, "How do I know that I have the right people that are going to get on board with my vision?" The next one would be people. Nobody gets to their vision without good employees. That's the bottom line. Good leadership teams recognize they may be directing the company, but it's the people in the trenches who actually make it happen. Oftentimes I find customers or clients asking, "What is the right person for me?" That's really important. One of the things we do in the vision is to create the values for the company. Once we have the values, now we're able to hire, fire, promote, compensate based on those. Finding the ideal person for your business in terms of character is important. You have to find your ideal person in terms, do they fit that seat? Do they get it? Do they want to have that job and do they have the capability performing? Good people are what's needed. There are tools where you say you've got the right person in the wrong seat. You can get that going. You segue over to the data side of the effort. We move away from magic, subjectivity, political, personal agendas, and you get to the raw, hard data. You’re like, “How is my company doing?” Every company has a set of vital signs that tell them, are they in good health or not? When you identify those and you know that when they're not on course or not meeting the goal or the standard, you need corrective action. Some of those corrective actions happen on a weekly basis. Some of the corrective actions can wait monthly and some frankly could be quarterly. It's the items that when they're outside the bounds, you need to take action. [caption id="attachment_4812" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Entrepreneurial Operating System: Getting all your leadership team on the same page, on the same vision, is very important.[/caption]   The next component is once you get through the vision, the people in the data and the issues, then you have a process. That balance of people data and the vision of where you're going right away, you start seeing issues bubble to the top that are preventing you from chasing that vision. The leadership team needs to strengthen their muscles on how to resolve issues and resolving them once and for all. You do not want them kicking the can down the road and you don't want those attacking issues and talking about it and then never resolving it. Getting to resolving issues is a huge part of it. Probably, the favorite word in the six is traction. Traction is where you're actually getting the accountability. What I like to say is there's a certain meeting pulse that you want and the meeting pulse is that you want to have a weekly meeting that checks to make sure that what you're trying to get done that quarter is on track. Once you understand that they're getting on track, where every quarter you're making sure that you're producing deliverables that are attacking your goals. Every quarter you want to make sure that your goals are on track. Ultimately at the end of the year, you get to see, “I met everything I wanted to do.” The traction component is a magical piece, but it all starts with that weekly meeting. We have a very unique way of handling that. We call it the Level Ten Meeting. That sounds like a secret. What's the Level Ten Meeting? Level Ten is in 30 minutes you want to capture what's the state of my business? You're looking at the data and anybody can look at a scorecard and start asking comments or explaining things away because we have a person who basically is accountable for each of those metrics. All you do is if it's on track, you leave it alone. Many people waste time in meetings talking about things that don't need to be talked about because it's self-evident. You're not on a phone conversation, you don't have to keep the conversation alive. You're looking at the data. Do I have something that's out of fault or in a bad state? Do I need to take action? If I do, I put it on the issue list and then resolve them during that level ten. The level ten is it has 30 minutes of basically status on what we're doing and then 60 minutes for resolving issues. That's the power. You want to make sure you have that 60 minutes with your leadership team every week solving problems. That's done not done, right?  Yes. It doesn't matter if it snowed, done, not done. I think about the process, what it feels like to me is you take a nebulous, we're going to run the company thing and you can set some very specific milestones, guideposts, tools, techniques and structure. As a business owner, there's a transformation when they go into this process. Let's say I'm the new business owner and I've adopted the EOS and I'm in my leadership team. What are the typical responses that you would expect to somebody that's doing this for the first or second quarter? What do you typically see? You get a real sense of how much accountability is in the company because if they're very easily, they don't come to the meeting on time, that's a sign. If they have certain things that they were supposed to accomplish, they don't accomplish them. One of the things we hit right away is if they don't accomplish what they were supposed to accomplish, the next time I meet with them, I break that down. “Why didn't you?” Behind that isn't necessarily they just couldn't get it done. Behind it is they thought something else was more important than that. They understand that the little things that they work on compound together to absorb a lot of time that you don't get the real thing that needs to get done. We press into that and find out what are the items, what are the reasons that they're really not getting work done? We bring those lessons forward. The next time we set things up for the deliverables where we call them rocks, they go ahead and achieve those. It is very obvious that you're excited about helping business owners and you're a business owner. What gets you going? Why are you so excited about helping business owners? I'm involved in Vistage. I've been involved in YPO. I'm also been involved in trade association groups. I can't tell you how many people have fantastic products or services and they have such potential, but because they don't have the business acumen, they're not able to take that thing forward. They get short-changed basically. I was very fortunate to be a part of these different groups and gain that business acumen, I want to give it to the small business owner because they have very few resources to make that happen. If you go into your favorite bookstore and you look at the business books out there, they're built for the big audiences. The big audiences typically are the people who are in professional companies, your Fortune 1000 or more. These are the people who can take those books and concepts and move them forward. A lot of times when they read it, it doesn't apply to the small business. Where does the small business guy go to get the knowledge that they need to push their business forward? For me, I get a kick out of that. I like seeing that. I like helping people and I've been doing it. I'm actually getting paid for doing it. In the past, I volunteered and helped people. There was a statistic I saw not long ago since the recession in '08, '09, they said two-thirds of all business and all employment jobs created, was in the small business community. The flip side to that is for the Baby Boomer-owned businesses, they say up to 80% of the businesses between $5 and $50 million in revenue will not transact. You think about that disparity. I think about for the business owner, that's short of tools. If you're a business owner and you know at some point you're going to exit one way or another, but you're going to exit in the next 3 to 5 years. How do you see EOS helping with that exit planning issue? You're hitting it right on the mark. EOS creates a business that operates independent of the individuals. When you're the business owner, let's say you've got a $5 million company, but you're the center of it. That's doomsday because when someone buys that business, they want to buy the predictability that they're going to be able to generate the same amount of revenue without you being there. Predictability is all about getting higher multiples on your business to be able to sell it differently. EOS puts in the processes so that it's not the individual that understands the process. It's that business knowledge basically is on paper. The next thing is that you have a vision, you know how to go forward. You're able to put something out there a year to three years out and you're able to actually execute on it. It's in the culture. That ability to execute again is predictability. Those are the things that increase the multiple. The person who's struggling to transact, it's probably because they put a big S on their shirt for Superman and the business revolves around them. [bctt tweet="When you're a business owner, you are the centerpiece. " via="no"] You talk about predictability and me as a purchaser, I think about that as less risk. As you de-risked a business and you have policies, procedures, process and the right people in seats and there's that ongoing business argument, are you in it or on it? It’s working in the business versus on it. Many people focus on working in their business. They're fighting the fires, they're doing the jobs of their employees and you might take a step backward, but you're going to take 3 or 4 huge steps forward when you learn to stand back and look at the business and pretend that you're a stakeholder or you're a shareholder, what you really are and say, "How do I influence the business from afar?" As soon as you start looking at it from that perspective, now you're getting out of the business and you're building the core separate from you. That gives you the predictability and the multiples when you're trying to sell. Rolling the time back a little bit. When you were a business owner running your business and then you think about EOS and Traction, how did that influence or how would it have influenced your behavior had you had these tools in place when you were running a business? I did bring EOS back in 2008, 2009. What I found was the business was all over me. I like to tell people, I felt like I had an octopus on my face and its tentacles are all around wrapping me up my arms and I couldn't get separated from my business and it was consuming me. What I needed was to get that space. When I read the book Traction and started applying some of the tools, what I learned was that octopus got away from me and I started being able to see the...