KimbleCo is an Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) company. Our journey began about 2 ½ years ago. CEO Julie Kimble was skeptical when she heard others talking about the book Traction, written by Gino Wickman. It seemed that every other day a new “must-read” business book was published. Each one professed the “best” way to run a business. Nonetheless she picked up the book and started to read. She did the Organizational Check-up and realized that while she had done much of this organization in her head, she had not written it down—it was not clearly shared across the company. What KimbleCo had already written down, however, were their core values and these values had complete buy-in from the team.
Given that one of the established core values was transparency and that KimbleCo had a tight, highly synergistic leadership team, the tenets of EOS seemed to make a lot of sense and could provide process, tools and a structure for growth that had been tested by many growing companies.
EOS employs a set of simple but powerful tools based upon six keys to help build a truly great organization. It provides a straight-forward framework that is developed for your unique organization through a collaborative and inclusive approach. It helps to instill discipline and accountability and importantly brings everyone together with a focus on a clear company vision.
We’d like to share the six key components of EOS and give you an example of how KimbleCo is benefitting from employing this fabulous system:
1. Vision: Develop a compelling and laser-focused vision. A vision understood throughout the company has a greater opportunity to be achieved! Vision is established and crystallized through the Vision/Traction Organizer V/TO, a strategic planning tool that simplifies your vision, defines who you are as an organization, where you’re going and how you’ll get there. All on two pages!
Two pages! We love this! Clear and concise with measurables. We developed this together as a leadership team to achieve 100% buy-in.
2. People: Simply said, hiring a team that embraces your core values and getting the “right people in the right seats” as well as charting a path for organizational growth overtime.
Absolutely critical for us is the need to hire team members with core values that align with ours. We may have personalities and skills, but alignment of core values is our foundation. The People Analyzer™, Accountability Chart and GWC™ have been great tools for our team. And we took the advice to take the Kolbe A™ Index which helped us to work together better and showed us were we have gaps as a team. Important information for future hires! We still need to work on our Accountability Chart for future growth. Understanding whether individuals are Visionaries or Integrators is also supporting the future needs for our growing company.
3. Data: Managing the business based on collection of a handful of the right data established in your organization’s scorecard.
Objectivity vs. subjectivity is so important. As we are earlier in our EOS journey it will be interesting to track our scorecard outcomes over time. We needed to perfect this a bit in our year 2 annual meeting.
4. Issues: A framework to solve issues right away, saving a multitude of time in the future if these issues were to fester over time. Addressing issues transparently helps to foster a culture of openness and honesty. Identify. Discuss. Solve.
We love hitting issues head-on with the expectation and freedom to create transparency and resolve earlier than later. We see issues as an opportunity for growth and improved synergy as a team and as a company.
5. Process: Developing your documented “way of doing business” simply done through a Three-Step Process Document.
This was probably the most challenging component for us to develop. Probably because it is difficult to simplify for our various services. Yet, it was just this exercise – to simplify and clearly state our process – that helped us to understand the essence of what we do and the way we work.
6. Traction: Bringing it all together through action! Establishing Rocks and a Meeting Pulse that keeps the team accountable and on-track and in alignment with vision. Resulting in profitability, growth and a highly synergistic team!
We cannot say how much we love the Traction “glue” that holds this all together! We are very disciplined with the Meeting Pulse and our Rocks. Our team is just back from our annual meeting; it is a lot of heavy lifting on our brains, but we come out of it with clarity and energy and excitement for the new year. And we get to spend time together as a leadership team without emails, meetings and calls. We are refreshed and ready for the new year!