Freedom. Control of our own destiny. Making your mark on this planet. Financial wealth. Growth. More fun.
These are a few of the many reasons why entrepreneurs and key leaders desire the positions that they’re in. Unfortunately for most small business leaders, they don’t experience the very things that attracted them to the position in the first place. In fact, they are continually frustrated!
Imagine you’ve founded a service business with about 100 employees. When asked, you explain your role as being involved with everything, especially Sales and Marketing, and Operations. One day, as you arrive at your weekly meeting, your right-hand man tells you, “You’re fired.”
It’s no secret that most people cringe when they hear the words, “let’s have a meeting.” Most meetings are awful.
When I first took the helm of our third-generation family business, I ran some pretty awful meetings. I knew I had to get the team on the same page with everything that was happening on a day-to-day basis, so I scheduled the leadership team to meet for 2-3 hours every other week.
Business leaders have a lot to do. The number of tasks that need to get done keeps expanding, and as a result the To Do list grows and grows. Some people manage tasks through sticky notes, some use technology tools such as Asana or Trello, while others use hand-written lists of stuff they need to get done.
There are a lot of ways to manage tasks, but the majority of us are still overwhelmed by our To Do list. Here’s what I experienced when I took the helm of running our 3rd generation family business.
When you’re stuck, it can leave you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. It happens when you, your department, or your company isn’t growing anymore. It also happens when you’re growing too fast and everyone is struggling to keep up.
This is a normal part of organizational growth—think of it as growing pains. In EOS, we call this Hitting the Ceiling.
Acknowledging when you’ve hit the ceiling is vital, because once you and your team have acknowledged it, it just becomes an issue that needs to be solved.
Ever have meetings where your team is stuck on a topic? Worse yet, you can feel when it’s about to happen because it’s happened so many times before.
Every entrepreneurial team experiences this during the course of growing their business. But to move forward as a business, you need to stop beating the dead horse!
At the beginning of a journey with a new client of mine, the leadership team was stuck on an issue about how to grow their service business over the coming year. Multiple members of the leadership team were passionate about different approaches, causing a seemingly endless repetitive discussion. Every time the topic came up, they started beating the dead horse again.
