You may have been working for someone else and finally got tired of making that person rich … Maybe you wanted freedom from answering to other people and felt it’s a good time to be your own boss… Maybe you DID reinvent the wheel…You might have found a need for a product or service that you provide with your unique talent and touch …

So you started a business.

The first few months or year there was euphoria! True beginners' luck. The adrenaline and excitement was palatable and it drove you to excel. Things moved quickly.

Word got out. You really were just good at what you were doing.

Then you hit a wall.

You're exhausted … working way more hours than anticipated. Forever racing against the clock when you had initially thought that you would be in control of your time. Yet you have to be available 24/7 to provide stellar customer service. It’s what makes you so good at what you do!

You're frustrated. The money isn’t coming in fast enough … or it’s getting lost in a deep black hole … you are not really sure how to manage and analyze your finances.

You're disappointed … the phones have died down … business isn’t coming in as fast and easy as it did in the beginning...

You're puzzled; your product isn’t landing the way you thought it would. Delivery isn’t consistent and your customers are vocalizing their disappointment.

Maybe you feel like nothing is working ...

Welcome to entrepreneurial life.

Michael Gerber, in his book “The E-Myth Revisited,” says that statistics show that 50% of businesses go out of business in the first five years.

Why is that?

Because most business owners fail to learn the “science” of business. They start out overwhelmed with enthusiasm for their new venture, yet when reality hits and they need actual systems and processes to create longevity and sustainability, they are buried too far under a pile of hard work and exhaustion.

Let's say you are great at selling cars. You can sell cars all day every day. You feel that you can do it better than your former boss. So you go and form your own business. But what you are not prepared for is the administrative work that comes along with owning a business. Managing customer relationships, managing finances, hiring employees etc.

Suddenly you are busy with all of these logistics and you barely get to do what you love, which is standing in front of people and selling them cars. Maybe you even start resenting doing the thing that you used to love, selling cars.

That is where the art and science of business comes into play.

Business is an ongoing cycle of art and science.

In reality, being good at selling a product or a service and being good at “business” is not one and the same. Because running a business is an art and science. It takes more than merely knowing how to produce and provide a product or service.

The art part is the unique talent and service or product you bring to the industry. The unique way you execute your business to provide a superior value.

Business is considered a science because it has an organized body of knowledge which contains certain universal truths. The science part of business is the same for each and every business. Once you learn the science of a successful business you can copy and paste it into any business, and it will be successful.

Through my work as a professional EOS implementer, I teach people the SCIENCE of business.

The Entrepreneurial Operating System is a set of simple practical tools and timeless concepts that have been around for many years, that are just well organized in a holistic system. It's nothing new and no magic bullets.

When I work with leaders and their teams I help them achieve three things: Vision, Traction and Healthy.

Vision is about creating alignment within organizations.

The biggest bottlenecks happen when team players aren't on the same page. When people assume that everyone thinks like them but in reality it is not so. This is very true for business owners and visionaries. They assume their employees know what they want from them and what their expectations are, yet when I get the head of sales, operations and finance, and owner into a room to discuss the vision for the organization and the roles and responsibilities of each person, most often we get a few versions of the same idea. This is a disservice when it comes to making decisions for the greater good of the company. Because each person will make decisions based on what they assume is the goal of the company, yet when there is no alignment it's like you are running three different organizations within one business.

Traction is about creating accountability and discipline throughout the organization to execute on the vision.

And if you are a solo entrepreneur, you must hold yourself accountable to your own goals. Because it is not that visionaries (a term we use for founders and leaders of business) don't have a vision, it is that sadly, most of them never bring their vision into reality because they don’t have a plan and constant accountability to the vision. As Gino Wickman, the founder of EOS, says, Vision without Traction is mere hallucination.

Too many businesses spend way too much time becoming “smart” and not enough time becoming “healthy.” As Patric Lincioni, famous author of “The Four Obsessions of an Ideal Executive,” “The Ideal Team Player” and “Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” among many other books, says:

Successful businesses focus on becoming “healthy and smart.”

The “smart” part is all the fancy systems and sophistication that businesses invest in. New software, websites, machinery and crm systems, to name a few. The “healthy” side of business is humanizing businesses. Creating a healthy culture. An environment that's open and honest, where employees and leaders are in alignment and there is psychological safety and trust.

The way to achieve a united vision, with accountability and discipline in a open healthy environment, is by having the right people in the right seats, who have gotten really good at measuring activity, and have learned how to solve issues effectively so they go away once and forever; by creating systems and processes that are followed throughout the organization; and running your business on a steady cadence of check ins and meetings.

We will cover all this and more in the months to come.

Quiz:

1. What would you say is the primary reason why you started your business?
2. If you could do one thing in your business for the rest of your life, which seat/role/ job description would you choose?
3. When you look at your own business, can you identify which parts are art and which are science?
4. What do you think right now is the biggest bottleneck in your business?
5. According to Patric Lincioni, successful businesses focus on being healthy and smart. Are you focusing your business enough on being healthy as much as smart?