What Growth Founders Need to Add to EOS
Photo Illustration by John Gauch.
Hi - I’m a hands-on operating partner to founder-led companies and a fractional COO. Over 20+ years, I have applied my growth and operations experience to help dozens of startups (Axiom, Spartan, etc.), having begun my career as a business and technology lawyer in New York City. So far, I have helped build one high-impact startup to nearly $100M in revenue and a second to exceed that benchmark.
Introduction
Gino Wickman's Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) has had a significant and valuable impact on many businesses. The framework is an excellent summary of proven management principles, pulled together in one place for easier consumption and implementation.
EOS Is Built for Stability
EOS is a powerful, comprehensive system that can improve business performance and operations, especially after a company's business model and value proposition have been proven out and firmed up.
EOS assumes you have a known strategy. When Wickman says you need to "get the right people doing the right things," he’s presupposing you've figured out what all of the right things are!
With modification, however, founders can use EOS for their startup or growth business.
Growth Requires Something More
That's where lean experimentation fills the gap.
Companies attempting to make a big leap forward are trying to jump onto a new and uncertain growth path. Finding a growth lever or executing on one will require a flexible and iterative approach, a lean framework emphasizing learning amid uncertainty.
It isn’t new, but the book The Lean Startup is considered a classic for good reason.
Read also: Struggling with Growth? You Can't Create Demand—You Need to Find It
By bolting a lean learning model developed for startups onto EOS, you can add structured experiments to your sales, marketing and business operations that explore the hypotheses—and hunches—about what it will take to dramatically grow the business.
Doing more of the same things, even if you execute well, won't get you there. The growth you are looking for usually requires finding a new lever—not just optimizing the ones you already have.
If you are scaling a proven model, expanding city to city, for example, you should still bring this experiment-driven mindset to optimizing what you are doing, to take big steps forward, not incremental gains.
Scaling up with EOS, informed by lean methods, puts energy where it needs to be for a company navigating sales, marketing, product and operational questions to determine whether it can build a $10M, $100M or larger business.
One reason I am writing about my business-building approach is that there seems to be a gap for a system that combines EOS with a more flexible framework geared toward founders with big growth ambitions who are facing unanswered questions.
See in Resources: Venture Plan on a Page (VPop)
Conclusion
If you’re a founder who’s found value in running EOS in your company, that’s a strong foundation. If you have big growth ambitions, there are also many unknowns you will need to explore and make known. For you, it’s imperative to also bring an experiment-driven problem-solving approach to the team and culture, making that part of the company’s fundamental way of thinking.
Reach out if you want to talk more about this topic and how it applies to what you are building.