The Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS for short, seeks to resolve many of the most common challenges to scaling. While not without its pros and cons, the Entrepreneurial Operating System provides a straightforward framework and tools for business operations that are easy to understand, easy to implement, and provide many of the key elements of a strategic operating system. 

Due to its ease of use, quick implementation, and practical tools, EOS has grown more and more ubiquitous. But EOS is not the only answer growing businesses need, and understanding both what it does well and where it falls short is crucial for leadership teams looking to make the best decisions for their organizations.

As experts in strategic planning and growth, our team at BLUECASE has spent a lot of time helping organizations work through the inevitable challenges of scaling. In that time, we’ve also gotten a front-row seat to see EOS in action, which has given us a lot of insight into what it does well and how organizations should consider supplementing a possible EOS implementation. So today, we’re breaking down the pros and cons of the Entrepreneurial Operating System and sharing how executive teams can get the most out of the EOS framework.

What EOS Does Well

As companies begin scaling, they inevitably face a variety of challenges. The most crucial of these tends to be a failure to align around the priorities and goals of the organization, with frustration, wasted time, and wasted resources all resulting from these alignment difficulties.

The Entrepreneurial Operating System provides a simple framework for establishing goals that is easy to understand and implement. It has many of the key elements of a strategic operating system, including:

• Establishing measurable annual and 90-day goals with a single point of accountability
• Creating and aligning on the organization’s purpose, values, differentiators (“Three Uniques”), and 10-year vision for the organization
• A “People Analyzer” for evaluating talent
• Creating an organization chart for the executive team with their key accountabilities
• Development of an EOS Scorecard with forward-looking financial, performance and process measurables to track weekly business successes. 

In addition to these elements, EOS helps organizations become more efficient through their “Level 10” meeting process, in which team members use the IDS process to identify issues, discuss, and solve problems rather than using meetings solely to report out.

All of these things are critical for any company to have. Just about every scaling organization without an existing operating system will find it helpful—whether they’re self-implementing or working with an implementer—to establish these essential company hygiene practices.

By identifying goals and articulating the vision of the company, EOS helps to get all of the human capital and energy of the company flowing in the right direction, which in some cases may be all an organization needs.

Critiques of EOS

It’s hard to create a framework that is both straightforward enough that organizations can self-implement and comprehensive enough to provide an answer to every challenge scaling businesses face. 

EOS deserves a lot of credit for how efficiently it can solve many of the most critical logistical challenges of scaling. However, it understandably must make sacrifices, and where EOS doesn’t quite have all the answers is in the Leadership aspect of the business.   

Where most business leadership teams see the struggles of scaling as a graph of time vs. profit, this point of view misses the people-centered challenges associated with scaling.

As we’ve seen time and again, businesses that are growing—whether via hiring or more sudden changes like mergers and acquisitions—must have a plan for their culture and must establish the communication and leadership protocols that will echo across their company. If they don’t, they risk losing the core values and core purpose that got them where they are in the first place, and they’ll lack the needed communication skills to address real issues within the company.

EOS will ensure the organization, as a business, is performing well enough to continue growing and making a profit. But the cultural and leadership journey is just as important as the financial goals of a business—if not more so.

In building high-performance teams, we’ve seen firsthand that a company full of extraordinary leaders, an extraordinary culture, and extraordinary people can outperform any team—even those who have used EOS to clearly define their organizational goals. That’s because teams built with a high-performance culture can communicate with each other, have healthy conflict, give each other feedback, and grow as a unified organization. 

In other words, EOS is a good start, and sometimes all a business needs to take big steps in the right direction. But it isn’t the whole picture. The challenges EOS solves are the existential ones: Can my business make enough profit to survive? 

But to truly thrive—to scale the business, complete with a strong high-performance culture that makes people excited to come to work and draws out the best in each individual—requires intentional organizational development with a focus on establishing and strengthening the leadership culture of the business.

When to Use EOS vs. When to Add Leadership Development

Most companies around the world can—and perhaps should—benefit from EOS implementation. However, there are situations where EOS will be the most effective solution, and other situations where it simply won’t solve the biggest problems the organization is actually facing.

EOS may be the best solution if:

• You are a smaller, privately held business below $75M in annual revenue 
• You want to scale quickly and need to get everyone aligned 
• You want to self-implement and not spend money or spend very little 
• Your meetings are not effective
• Your team is not aligned
• You want to create a one-page strategic plan that can be easily understood by all 

EOS should be supplemented with leadership and cultural development when:

• There is conflict on your executive team.
• Trust is not where it needs to be.
• You have new executives on your leadership team and need strong relationships but do not have the time to build rapport because of ongoing business needs.
• People are not as engaged as you want them to be.
• Employees do not share freely with their managers.
• You want to build a feedback culture of radical candor, accountability, and ownership with high levels of trust. 
• There are cracks in your culture.
• You know that you are not getting the most of your people and you want to tap into existing employees’ discretionary effort, innovation, creativity, and intelligence instead of hiring. 

Scale Your Organization—and Take Your Culture with You

At BLUECASE Strategic Partners, we believe it’s often a business’s culture that is most impactful for its long-term health. While goals, accountability, and efficient meetings are all essential to ensuring a business can survive and profit, creating an organizational culture that fosters open communication and leadership is what keeps employees motivated, excited, and ready to perform at their best.

Whether you’ve already implemented EOS and you’re wondering what to do next, or you aren’t sure what the first step is toward scaling your business, BLUECASE is ready to help. We can work with you to evaluate the pros and cons of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, leadership development, and other key solutions for your organization. Reach out today to schedule a discovery call.