Meet EOS®, a method to run a company efficiently

The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®) is a method to run a company. In this article I’ll share some personal experiences and examples so you can also implement it too and see its benefits.

8 min readJul 15, 2022

Startups are all about identifying big opportunities, finding product market fit before running out of money and if successful, scale as quickly as possible. The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) is, in my experience, the most efficient method to maximize the chances of success for a startup.

In a startup, it’s easy to lose your north star

You have many hypothesis, yet little or none are verified with real evidence. Finding the truth quickly and adjusting (aka pivoting), is all that matters.

EOS does a great job at helping teams to be effective while looking for Product Market Fit, keeping the team accountable and tracking progress.

Some amazing results I’ve experienced with my startups

These are just some real examples I’ve seen while implementing EOS:

Align founders and early employees in the vision of the company and what the dream looks like. Then, work on a plan to get there by doing backtracking with the V/TO (more below). I invested two days in doing this exercise, and eliminated all signs of confusion around vision and mission. This is so critical, that I even wrote an article about Direction vs Speed.
Design the Accountability Chart (more below) with the management team, all in the same room and with a board in front of us. The first time I did this exercise, I realized I was playing 4 roles in the structure, I was not delegating enough, and some responsibilities were overlapped while others didn’t have an owner. We even had a person that realized that his role didn’t make sense any more in this new Accountability Chart and decided to quit (which was good for him and for the company).
When designing the Scorecard, I realized that some team members thought the main KPIs were very different from what I thought were our north stars. A complete miss-alignment which of course, silently led the team to make contradictory decisions.
Lack of a good structure and inefficient management weekly meetings, led in average to five improvised meetings in our agendas to solve issues as they arose and not as a result of a well thought prioritization. Not to say, that the issues were not really solved by finding the root cause, and they took many weeks to get addressed. A very expensive way of working for a startup struggling to survive the valley of the dead.

What makes EOS special are it’s tools

When you are running a startup, you want to focus 100% on the problem you are solving. You want to execute fast and maximize making schedules while minimizing manager schedules.

What makes EOS so valuable is its set of ready to use tools that will help any founder kickstart an operation instead of spending time reinventing the wheel when it comes to running a company. These are some of it’s tools:

1. Tracking progress: Scorecard

Tracking progress in a Scorecard helps you to look at the startup traction with real data. Sales data, operation data, product usage data. No hypothesis, no interpretations of what the client said, just real data directly from the source.

2. Culture: Core Values

One of the best tools that EOS offers to ensure a healthy culture in the organization, are the core values. This set of values come from the team itself, which is very powerful because every team member will make sure the core values are well preserved as the team scales.

Core values are very useful to recruit, hire, review and reward employees. These are the Core Values we came up with at Mighty Block:

3. Effective weekly meeting: L10

The L10 meeting helps founders have time to think and discuss critical issues. Meetings are very expensive. What if you could have just one meeting a week to go over the business traction, TODOs, critical issues, people issues?

Source: https://www.readytalk.com/meeting-resources/infographics/true-cost-meetings-infographic

This is exactly what the L10 meeting offers, in a 90 minute format that will free the rest of everyone’s agenda to execute (all that matters in an early stage startup).

4. Define responsibilities & roles: Accountability Chart

The Accountability Chart will help the team to make sure there is one person accountable for all important matters of the next quarter (and avoid fights and misunderstandings)

While organizational charts (‘org charts’) focus on who reports to whom within an organization, they typically fail to illustrate one of the biggest pain points of companies: Who is accountable for what?

Organizations therefore turn to accountability charts to introduce clarity about who is responsible for specific functions within an organization and highlight their main roles and responsibilities.

An accountability chart solves this problem by showing the one person who’s responsible for a specific function because if more than one person is responsible, nobody is responsible, and this can cause standards to slip.

5. The annual planning meeting: V/TO

Most companies have to plan for their next year. Instead of reinventing a format, why not do it in a structured and proven way?

The Annual Meeting is a two day workshop in person with the management team, with the guide of the Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO). The V/TO is a two page business plan that actually works.

Lautaro Schiaffino, co-founder of Sirena, was the person who introduced me to EOS. In one of our conversations about EOS, me asked me: what can be more important than spending two days of work isolated with your teammates, thinking and deciding about the future 12 months of the company? Don’t answer Emails or Slack, focus 100% in this strategic work.

Leadership, Management, Accountability (LMA)

As leaders and managers, we often tell people what to do — assign work — and expect the work to be done. We expect people to be accountable. When things don’t get accomplished as expected, we may default to punishments or rewards (ie: sales bonuses) to try to make our people more accountable. These rarely work to improve performance.

LMA™: GREAT LEADERSHIP + GREAT MANAGEMENT = ACCOUNTABILITY

In other words, accountability is the outcome of leaders and managers doing specific things. EOS condenses everything to 5 things a person must do to be a great leader:

1. Communicate vision and inspiration effectively

Does a team see themselves contributing to how much their company thrives? Employees get engaged with the organization’s mission when they can see how their daily activities make a huge difference. Great leaders can take the vision and mission of a business and break it down to inspire their team. Every single person should see themselves with an oar, proudly helping row the company to greatness.

2. Self-awareness and continuos improvement

No one should expect anybody (including themselves) to know everything. We all have areas of strengths and weaknesses. Great leaders continue to push themselves to do better for themselves and for their people. But they also know they have limitations on time, energy, and knowledge. So they depend on the expertise of the people on their team to move projects forward.

3. Adaptable

Real talk: Nothing ever really goes according to plan, especially in business. Today’s world requires nimbleness and a positive attitude to roll with the punches. Great leaders can easily adapt to ever-changing situations, reassess plans along the way, and encourage their teams to do the same. Their positivity encourages their people to freely raise issues as they arise and think outside the box for solutions.

4. Strategically Minded

Exceptional leaders keep the overall goals for the company in mind as they plan out the direction for their teams. They play the long game while carefully reviewing current short-term activities. Like a military general carefully mapping out each maneuver, they see how each battle (“project”) contributes to winning the war (“program”). With every single decision, they weigh how it impacts company goals and overall success.

5. Caring and dependable

An effective leader doesn’t necessarily have to be a natural people person. But they should recognize the humanity of each person on their team and show up for them every day. Great leaders demonstrate concern for the well-being of their people. They show respect for the team’s time and effort on projects by putting in their own time and effort too. You can count on them.

And here are the 5 things a person needs to be a great manager:

1. Ability to SIMPLIFY — eliminating complexity and reducing everything to the essential.

2. Ability to DELEGATE — freeing and elevating yourself to do what you do best, and doing the same for every person in your organization.

3. Ability to PREDICT — choosing the right path, long-term and short-term.

4. Ability to SYSTEMIZE — documenting and getting everyone to follow the essential procedural steps in your company’s core processes.

5. Ability to STRUCTURE — defining and organizing the “seats” or positions in your organization to reduce complexity and increase clarity, communication and accountability.

Useful resources

I highly recommend the books Get a Grip and Traction. Get a Grip is an easy to read fable, that will make entrepreneurs and business managers laugh (you will relate to many situations described in the fable) and learn a lot ! Traction is a practical guide to implement EOS.

If you are interested in learning more about EOS, you can find the rest of the articles I wrote in the EOS collection.

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