Stuck? Here’s How to Get Help Breaking Through the Ceiling

In EOS we often talk about hitting the ceiling. It is a feeling of being stuck, frustrated, or that business has suddenly become too complex and chaotic leaving you scratching your head and wondering why you can’t get unstuck.

The good news is that cycles of evolution and revolution are a natural part of growing a business, but many owners reach this point in the life of their businesses where they hit a ceiling, a point beyond which they are either unable or unwilling to go. Business owner John Warrillow was quoted in the NY Times saying “Somewhere around $3 million dollars of revenue, I went from being the driver of my business to the bottleneck. Each year we stood still, I grew more frustrated. I felt like I was trying to swim in a pair of jeans.” He described intellectually knowing that he needed to revamp the way he ran his business, but emotionally he was tired and very tempted to walk away from eight years of hard work.

If these feelings John Warrillow wrote about are feelings that resonate with you, now you know you aren’t alone. I think in this COVID-19 world, we are all being pushed to work way harder than we used to just survive, much less thrive, and we are all getting more and more tired from the struggle.

The good news is you can get support to break through these ceilings with structure and accountability so you are able to take your business to the next level, gain back control, get traction, improve results and have work be fun again.

How to get support to break through the ceiling

There are three very specific, and complementary, areas where you can find the support you need to develop and evolve yourself and your business, and they form three legs of a stool. The three legs are:

1) An operating system so the business can run at scale instead of on the heroic efforts of the founder and leadership team,
2) A peer network to leverage the wisdom of business peers—similar to a board of advisors, and
3) A coach to shore up leadership skills and blind spots.

Many business owners I talk to are confused about these three legs of support, and particularly that they are complementary. They fit together and you probably need all three as various stages. For example, some will say, “Well, I’m already part of a peer group, so I’m all set and don’t need an operating system for my business.” The reality is each leg of the support I’m talking about addresses different issues and problems areas, and provides learning and growth support in different ways. This idea is expanded in fellow EOS Implementer Jonathan B. Smith’s book: “Optimize for Growth: How to Scale Up Your Business, Your network and You“, where he addresses how a business owner who is feeling stuck and out of energy can get the help and support they need.

Business owners who are seeking to get unstuck out of this crisis can choose to leverage the wisdom of a set of trusted outsiders, people who have tools and relevant experience, and who can accelerate your personal and organizational learning curves.

Why do you need an Operating System for your business?

I know from my own experience that many businesses start out small, experience success and then start growing. All of a sudden they get to a point where operating the business has become complicated. A business owner I spoke with said that moment came when they grew beyond 15 employees. What had been fun before, had now become unenjoyable as running the business become more than they had the tools and skills to handle. People are the necessary core of any business, but people are people and they run in all sorts of different directions doing all sorts of different things.

An operating system, like EOS, provides a systematic and process-driven way to harness all that human energy in your business and get it pointed in the same direction.

Often when I’m talking with business owners I hear about struggles with partners who want to go in different directions. In EOS we provide a structure for getting your leadership team to talk about the vision for the organization in a very systematic way. We get the group to define their core values, their core focus, 10 year target and marketing strategy. When we do that the leadership team gets 100% on the same page about who you are as a business, what you are doing, where you are going and how you are going to get there, and now the magic can start happening.

The operating system also gives you tools for getting the right people onboard and in the right seats in your organization, a system for keeping track of the right data so you can keep a pulse on the business, as well as skills for solving issues together as a team, a way of defining your processes so you can get the right thing done the best way and the same way every time, and tools for gaining traction in the business with discipline and accountability.

How do you get help from a peer network?

Public companies have boards of directors to keep the executive leadership team accountable to the business vision and provide advice and guidance for the critical challenges faced by the business. You can get access to the same benefits even if your company isn’t listed by engaging with a group of peer advisors to help you on your path to success. I know running a business can leave the business owner feeling very alone and searching for a trusted resource outside of the business to talk with about what’s going on inside the business.

Peer advisory networks consist of other business leaders, like yourself, who can help problem solve issues and test ideas from their vantage points of similar roles, industries, or business size.

There are several in our area, such as EO, Women’s Presidents Organization, Vistage, Insight and TAB. In peer advisory groups you will find a mix of leaders who have more experience than you or less, who run larger businesses or smaller. But the power comes from these varying perspectives as they listen to you and share their thoughts, giving you new ideas and the benefit of their collective experience.

In Optimize for Growth, Jonathan Smith reports the benefits of a peer network as:
1. Advancing your learning curve
2. Confronting potential issues ahead of time
3. Testing decisions

How do you go about getting help with developing personal leadership skills?

Eric Schmidt, past CEO and Executive Chairman of Google, has said: “Everybody needs a coach”, and elaborated further by observing “One thing people are never good at is seeing themselves as others see them. A coach really, really helps.”

A coach can be your leadership support system and can help you develop the personal skills you may need to help you lead your company more effectively. I think in the last 30 years we have gone from a command and control, “Do as I say” leadership mentality to a servant leader style which focuses on stewardship and empowerment. But we don’t all know how to operationalize this in our day to day interactions. As I was talking about with an executive coach recently, there is a gap between stimulus and response. Sometimes that gap might be a nano-second and we label those leaders as having a “short fuse”, but with coaching we can learn to widen that gap and develop our repertoire of effective strategies for response that make us better leaders.

Jonathan Smith lists out what a good coaching relationship looks like:
1. Opens your mind to possibility and fosters the mindset to succeed
2. Provides an objective sounding board—“Shines the Light”
3. Holds you accountable to your goals
4. Brings experience—the coach has been in your shoes before
5. Helps you create a legacy—think bigger than you do

One important point to consider is that perhaps people on your leadership team might also utilize a coach to help them prepare for advancement and promotion. There are many areas in a business where a coach can help in personal ways so the team as a whole can get unstuck.

In the end, the three components of support for you and your business has two major goals:

Firstly: to give your business access to the trusted advisors who can help it get unstuck and grow again.
Secondly: to give your business the necessary tools to tackle the daily issues and barriers to growth.

Each of the three components drives a particular part of development: whether it be the business, the leader’s network or the leader’s personal growth. An effective approach to business growth uses all these components.

Here to help

I am here to teach, facilitate and coach your business leadership team so they can learn the tools and implement them in their business to have a positive impact and attract a premium return.  I’m passionate about helping business owners use the EOS tools to get their crew sailing smoothly together and building a better business, and that’s what excites me everyday.