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All right, everyone, we are back- The Testing Psychologist podcast. Today is another installment in the EOS Journey series. If you haven’t tuned into the previous few episodes on the EOS journey, this is basically a real-time [00:01:00] documentation of my journey and my practice’s journey through the process of implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System or EOS- a business framework that gives you guidance and structure for running a business in many aspects.
It has been a relative game-changer for our practice. I can say this a few months in. And I hope that there’s something to learn here.
The content here is probably aimed at practices who have been around for a little bit longer, maybe larger practices with at least 5 to 10 employees, but I think there’s a lot to take from this content either way. It’s just a good way to think about your business and get your head in the space of being a leader and a CEO.
So let’s transition to talking about Vision Day 2 [00:02:00] in the EOS journey.
Okay, everybody. I’m back. I’m going to jump right into it. Like I said in the beginning, if you haven’t listened to the previous four episodes in the EOS Journey series, I would definitely recommend going back to listen to those just because they provide a lot of background and context for what I am going to be talking about today.
If you remember, the last episode was Vision Day 1. So here we are about a month later. There’s about a month between Vision Day 1 and Vision Day 2. We did a lot of work last time on looking at values and [00:03:00] creating goals for the next year, three years, and five years, but we started to hone in on that today. So I’m just going to go down the checklist of things that we did during our second Vision day.
There’s always an agenda for these EOS meetings. The agenda is set by our implementer and it’s generally similar each time. Today, we started with a check-in. During the check-in, we went through all of the Company Rocks and Individual Rocks. If you remember, Rocks are those items that we decided as a leadership team were the most important to-dos or tasks or projects that we needed to work on in order to move our practice forward. These are the absolute most important [00:04:00] things for us to be focusing our attention on.
To digress just for a second, this is one of the best parts of EOS, I think is helping identify the items and the projects that are actually important. Many of us have fantastic ideas as entrepreneurs but it’s the implementation and the prioritization that a lot of us get bogged down. I’m no different. This happened to me when I was trying to run the practice by myself and it didn’t go well.
So again, we checked in on the Rocks, these are the things that we had previously decided were super important, and we were judged on how many Rocks we got done. I was not expecting this but we literally went down every single rock that we identified. I think there were about 5 or 6 Company Rocks, and then probably 8 to 10 [00:05:00] Individual Rocks separate from the Company Rocks. We went through each one and our implementer asked us if we completed it.
Now, we did pretty well. We actually calculated the percentage of rocks that we completed and I think we came out at maybe 87% or 91%. So we were pretty good. The benchmark is 80%, so we did pretty well. We reached that but I was not expecting to actually be graded on whether we finished our rocks or not.
So this is just another sign or marker that EOS is no joke. We are walking the walk. EOS is big on accountability and measuring our goals and our progress and we were doing it. It wasn’t just a simple check-in like, “Hey, did you get that done?” It [00:06:00] was, “We’re going down this list and we’re going to figure out what percentage of these rocks you actually got accomplished.”.
So that was a little bit jarring but a great way to start out and just again, set the tone that, hey, we are going to be held accountable for the rocks that we identify. We can’t just shoot for the moon unless we’re going to actually make it happen.
From there, we reviewed all of our work to date. We talked a lot about the core values. A big part of my work was to finalize the core values between our meetings and to write a core values speech. This core values speech was super interesting. It forced me to really define our core values well and come up with examples of our core values so that I could articulate [00:07:00] those values to the rest of the leadership team.
So giving the core value speech was a little bit of a trial run for rolling out EOS to the rest of our staff. And if you read Traction or get into the EOS materials, you’ll know that this core value speech comes up a lot. There are many instances where you use the core value speech in hiring, in staff retreats, and evaluations.
So this was my first chance to practice. I was nervous. I spent a lot of time writing the speech and identifying examples of our core values to put into the speech. I rehearsed it many, many times. But it was really cool to stand up in front of our leadership team and just launch into this core value speech that we’d all collaborated on to come up with the values. To pull it all [00:08:00] together and deliver that speech and to see people get excited was super rewarding.
So if you have identified values for your practice, that’s fantastic. EOS will force you to refine those values and really pull them together and make them come alive. If you haven’t, then it’s an even better process because you get to define them and identify how they come to life in your business.
Let’s see. We also reviewed what EOS calls the right person right seat issues. So we went back through our accountability chart. I thought it was pretty well-established and pretty concrete but it wasn’t. We identified 11 positions that needed to be refined and corrected or changed.
So again, I’ve [00:09:00] really thought we spent a lot of time on this. I wish we had talked about other things, but a core tenet of EOS is having the right people in the right seats. I’ve done episodes in the past on core values and getting the right people in the right seats. At the time, I thought this is a waste of time, but I came around to realize that if you don’t have the right people in the right seats, it’s just going to wreck your entire operation because those folks either don’t get it, they don’t want it or they don’t have the capacity for the role. And if any of those things are missing, it’s going to sabotage your business. So this was a big topic of discussion and we came out of it with a lot fewer people problems.
Let’s take a break to hear from our featured partner.
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All right, let’s get back to the podcast.
We spent a lot of time talking about our marketing strategy as well. I won’t dwell too much here because we didn’t actually dwell too much here, but we did have a lot of discussion around our ideal client or avatar. You hear that term used in marketing parlance. We identified that ideal client. At this point, we aren’t spending any money on marketing, so this was not a huge point of discussion but we identified that ideal client in the event that we would like to throw some marketing dollars [00:11:00] toward that ideal client down the road.
So that is a big component of most businesses who work with the EOS. For us, like many of your practices I would guess, we have referrals coming out of our ears and so marketing is not the biggest priority right now.
Now, the place that we spent a fair amount of time that was also most nerve-wracking for me as the practice owner was designing a 3-year picture and a one-year plan. So the three-year picture, I think I’ve mentioned during these episodes before that prior to this process, I had not really shared a lot of financial information from our practice. I’m the only one that has access to our bank accounts and QuickBooks and so forth. But when you talk about your 3-year picture and your one-year plan, finances are a big part of that. There’s gross revenue [00:12:00] goals, there are profit goals and there was a lot of talk about numbers. There is the whole idea of how much we want to make as a practice and I was worried about this for a number of reasons.
It really ran the gamut. I was worried that the leadership team would think maybe I was making too much money from our practice. On the flip side, and this is almost even worse, would they think that I was not making enough money, which meant we weren’t profitable enough or as profitable as folks would assume we were? Would people, once they got some insight into our finances, think that I was bad with money or mishandling the practice finances?
There was [00:13:00] a lot of anxiety wrapped up in this, and of course, it did not come to bear the way that I thought it would. It was actually much lesser of a big deal and folks really got on board with it. We had some awesome discussions about like how much can we make as a practice and what would it take to get there. People were really excited about it. They were actually pushing me to say, “Oh, I think we can do better than that. We can make more than that in three years. Let’s strategize about that.”
So it was really affirming, and just another point of connection with my leadership team to reinforce like, “Hey, I made the right choice here with these folks, or we made the right choice to bring this group of people together and we’re all in it.” [00:14:00] So that was awesome.
So as part of the three-year picture, again, we identified financial goals and several soft goals like perks for our employees, office space needs or aspirations, and goals for our training program, just to identify a few of those things.
We also worked on a one-year plan. This was much easier to define where we just said by the end of 2022, we will do X. And again, there were financial goals. We’re going to have this much gross income, this much percentage profit, these goals accomplished. And this really helped us to focus in. So the timeframe was a lot shorter, right? We went from three years to basically six months. And this is a big theme of EOS, is just focusing and prioritizing, like I mentioned earlier. So setting those goals and just [00:15:00] walking backward from December 31st, 2022, back through the months to now really helped us to know what we’d have to do along the way to get to those goals.
It’s great. If anybody’s read the book, The One Thing, it’s kind of like an expansion of that. So you start with this big picture and then walk backward and say, what’s the one thing that needs to happen to reach that goal? And then what’s the one thing that needs to happen to make that other thing happen? And you just walk all the way backward to the present moment.
So we set our one-year plan. I was very excited by this whole process by this time, like everybody getting on board and helping to plan and sharing the vision. This is the stuff that I did not have prior to the leadership team being in place. So this is really cool.
As we started to wrap up, we identified new rocks. So, we reviewed the old ones. [00:16:00] We cast those aside if appropriate and we set new rocks. Our new rocks, just to give examples, were to roll out EOS to the staff. So really get the rest of our staff on board with the system and our goals and our vision and where we were headed; finalize a pay rate rubric for our staff. We are working hard to make a really consistent pay rate rubric that everyone can look at and know what they’re going to get paid and what the schedule for raises is and so forth.
Another rock was to figure out our office space because our lease runs out in October of 2022 and we have to figure out what we’re going to do after that point. Are we going to move into a new building? Are we going to try to add space here, are we going to do something else that I don’t even know what it might be? So that’s huge. And then we also have to fully transition what we call the finance seat [00:17:00] because I’ve been handling financial stuff for a long time and as I drop more and more responsibilities to become the visionary, we are getting someone else into our finance lead seat. So those are the rocks.
We also identified relevant issues. Issues are less important than rocks. They’re not quite as big in terms of project setting. They’re not projects necessarily. They’re just problems that we need to solve. Some of the things that came up were a little bit scary, honestly. We talked about, do we need to drop some insurance? Should I give up on trying to buy a building for us because it’s been a really challenging process? How do we reveal these financial goals to our team? These are just a few examples of issues that came up. So things that we need to solve. [00:18:00] And these issues went directly onto our L10 agenda as things that we are going to chat about.
All right. We talked about the next steps, and what we’re going to do over the next few months. We set our quarterly pulsing meeting for September.
So that’s the summary of Vision Day 2. Again, going into great detail here and I don’t know that this is incredibly compelling content, but like I said, trying something new, trying to chronicle the journey through EOS as we implement this in our practice. And I hope that you took a little bit away, learned a few things, and might consider EOS for your practice as well if it seems appropriate.
All right y’all, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we [00:19:00] mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes so make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast.
If you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out the Testing Psychologist Mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
The information contained in this podcast and on the Testing Psychologist website is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here, and similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical [00:21:00] matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your needs.