Operating Your Startup — Quick EOS Template | by Chris Herbert | Medium 12-04-21 18:08

Operating Your Startup — Quick EOS

Template
Chris Herbert

I’m a huge fan of the EOS system. (If you are interested in improving your
business’s operational efficacy, Traction is well worth the read) Before EOS, I
ran my last startup off a series of Trello boards, Jira stories, spreadsheets,
QuickBooks, asana boards, salesforce, and proprietary backend reporting
systems. It was a messy thing to operate and the disparate systems created
separate organizations within the company vs unifying us toward our single
mission. My weekly management meetings seemed to be the topic of the
week vs viewing what was upcoming & offsite meetings were mostly
useless.

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Operating Your Startup — Quick EOS Template | by Chris Herbert | Medium 12-04-21 18:08

Enter EOS

I talked to a bunch of people about how to improve this and I got a lot of
tactical advice but nothing to unify the overall operations of the company.
Finally, an advisor turned me on to Traction which I read and then he showed
me how he runs his billion-dollar company — 1 spreadsheet. He walked me
through how he does his team meetings using a single spreadsheet that
added a new level of focus throughout the organization and increased
accountability & visibility.

I was blown away.

I immediately tried to roll out the system into my existing startup which was
about 100 people at the time. It didn’t work. The accountability was a culture
shock and was rejected. My attempts at deploying the system failed
miserably and I stepped away from the company before a second attempt at
implementation.

Starting Up EOS Style

When launching Shine, I began with just me in my garage. I knew we needed

to embed structure and organization from the start. However, when it is just
1 or 2 people, how do you implement a system that is loose enough to meet
the needs of a micro-team but be able to scale up to tens and hundreds of
people over time?

So I created a spreadsheet for EOS. It’s extremely simple, flexible, and

because it’s just a google sheet — open-sourced by nature. You can grab the
template here.

Here’s how I use it:

VTO Section
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Operating Your Startup — Quick EOS Template | by Chris Herbert | Medium 12-04-21 18:08

Values — I put the company culture values here. I see values as filters
for making decisions in the company. So if “fast is better than slow” is a
value, this should be used to decide to ship a product with problems
today or wait and perfect the product.
Purpose — This is why the company exists. For Shine is to provide
comfort and care to consumers
Niche — This is what you do. For Shine internet-connected bathroom
products
Category — This is the category the company operates in. For Shine, it’s
Bathroom Automation.
10 Year Target — This is where the company is going. This should be
measurable. For Shine, it’s 1 million units sold annually and 1 million
active subscriptions
Target Market- Who are you serving?

Accountability Chart

This is an org chart for the organization. It makes it clear who is doing what.
It’s important to note that one person can have multiple roles. I’ll write more
on how to use this tool in a different post.

Rocks

Some people call these OKR’s but they are just goals. Important that these
goals should be able to get done. So “Be the market leader” is a bad Rock.
But, “Sell more units in the US annually than competitors according to NPD
data”

Scorecard

These are data points or numbers to track the health of the business. So
“Top line revenue” might be here.

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Operating Your Startup — Quick EOS Template | by Chris Herbert | Medium 12-04-21 18:08

Headlines

These are where highlights and lowlights are recorded in weekly meetings.

To-Do

This is where the company records what activities everyone is working on.
To-Dos should roll up to a rock or scorecard. If they don’t, I would challenge
if they should be worked on.

Issues List

In the meeting, opportunities, problems, and other discussions pop up.

Instead of diving into discussions on the spot, the team should record this as
a discussion topic and then select what are the biggest topics to discuss.
This keeps pointless discussions to a minimum and gives the bigger
discussions priority.

Traction Template Docs — KonMari.xlsx

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