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Inside the EOS Toolbox: The Six Key Components of a Thriving Practice · Integrity at Scale™

• Hey. Hey, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper here, and you're listening to the Culture Focused Practice Podcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining me. Welcome for the first time, or the fifth time, or the hundredth time. It's good to see you. Today, my dear friends, we are cracking open the EOS toolbox. You know, I love EOS. Specifically, the six components every practice needs, if they want to move from chaos to clarity and from survival mode to sustainability. That's what we're getting into. If you've ever run a practice without structure, I am guilty of this, for the record, it's basically like trying to build a house with no foundation. It's like a house of cards. What EOS did for me, and what I would purport it can do for many others is fix that. This episode is part of our mini EOS Foundations for Group Practices series, and we are just knee deep inside of this concept and notion of having an EOS toolbox. Before we go on, I will say make sure you subscribe to stay up on any new episodes that are coming out. You can go back and binge to listen to previous episodes, and the more you subscribe to the podcast, if it speaks to you, the more it reaches other people that it will likely speak to. Hashtag thank you algorithms. There's a few main points to hit in this episode. First and foremost, EOS is the entrepreneurial operating system developed by Gino Wickman. If it's not clear already it's comprised of six key elements, and each of those elements represents a very distinct aspect of your business structure. What's really great is that each of the elements also comes along with specific tools for ensuring that it's all running smoothly. So our agenda today is to basically briefly cover each of those six elements, just like a quick description as well as an associated tool. There is not enough time in today's episode to go in depth with any of this. So think of this as sort of an overview, like a large level framework for what this looks like and how it can be enacted. Don't think of it as a very detailed teaching you specifically how to implement because that's not what this is. So first let me just say all the different components, and then we'll get into a little more depth with each of them. One, we have vision, that's one. Two is people, three is data, four is issues, five is process, and six is traction. So let's start from the top, shall we? Vision. Everyone has to be crystal clear on where you're going, how you're getting there. So if you're thinking of vision, think about, especially if you're the visionary in your business, if you are on leadership, you're also gonna have a huge part in this specific process. Your vision is comprised of eight key things. Some of the main pieces to vision are gonna be clarifying what your core values are and ensuring everybody's living them out. It's going to be looking out a very, you know, far distance. You actually get to agree on the distance, whether it's 10 years or 20 years or five years, sort of looking into the future to say, that's the direction we're headed. It's about marketing, it's about your core focus, your niche, and your purpose. It's about your quarterly rocks, the things that you focus on in the next 90 days to ensure that you're on track with that 3, 5, 10 year target. Vision is really sort of charting the course. Where are we going and who are we in that process and what do we say no to? So that core focus piece in particular that's embedded in vision is really important for figuring out what you don't focus on as much as what you do focus on. It's important for someone like me anyway. 'cause I wanna say yes to everything. So, you know, there's that. If you have a lack of vision, you know, it really does feel like moving in different directions, like everybody's trying to row in a boat, but the timing is off. And like the island that you're rowing towards, everybody's rowing towards a different island. People are sort of arguing about the direction that you're going or there's not arguing, but people are just rowing in the wrong direction and then getting low level frustrated that the other person isn't following you. It's just fucking messy. It's honestly messy when there's not a clear vision. It's not only messy for leadership and the people who are doing the rowing. It's messy for your team because they also don't know where things are going. They don't know where we're headed. They don't understand how we engage with each other in the process of getting there. They don't understand how we make decisions. They, it's, it's messy. Trust me, it's messy. One of the ways that we keep vision organized, and this is the tool that goes along with vision that's really, really important, is something called a vision slash traction organizer. So this is a, I think they do it on two pages. Ours takes up about two pages. So if you go to eos worldwide.com, I think that's the website, they have a VTO on there you can download. It's a free like PDF resource. The eight components to vision, everything is housed in these two pages. So when you have something like your core values, they're listed out and clarified. They're, you know, everybody not only knows what they are, but seeks to follow them. Your core focus, what you do and why you're here, that's also clarified in your V/TO, any sort of goals that you have that. Can't be captured in the next 90 days. Sort of like major projects might go in your VTO issues list. The VTO is the catch all for your vision. It's a way for everybody to stay on the same page. If you're interested, you can share this with your wider team. We share our VTO with our full team. It's developed and cultivated and maintained by leadership, but everybody has access to seeing it because we want them to be rowing in the same direction as we are. We share it in other ways, but that's neither here nor there for right now. So think about your VTO as the tool to really create alignment around your values and your goals and your focus. That's ultimately what it's about. So that's vision. That's that first, first element. Second element is people. The core components people is having the right people in the right seats. So right people means that they are in alignment culture, their cultural fits. It also means that they, they call it GWC for short, but that they get it. They want it, they have the capacity to do it. It meaning the job. And so if you have the right people, you also have to ensure you have the right seats. There's two components to Right seat. One is from an accountability chart perspective, which is. Uh, kind of like an org chart, but not quite the same thing. And so the accountability chart would say, these are the roles and these are the main responsibilities. Very broad level for each role. So right seat means one that we have literally the right seat crafted on our accountability chart. The second component to right seat is that. The person is in the right seat for them. And that kind of ties in with GWC. Do they get it? Meaning that role, that seat, do they get it? Do they understand? Do they want it? And are they capable of doing what's expected within that role? So right people, culture fit right seat, are they in the right seat at the practice? And is this the right seat for your business structure? It's really not uncommon that chaos masquerade as underperformance or misalignment. And so when you can get clear on your accountability chart, the roles and responsibilities as well as your core values, think vision, remember that's up in vision, but we assess it via people. In our people component. If you can get clear on those core values, you're getting at that cultural fit. So when you are clear on the role and the right people for the role. The underperformance, it, it's just, it's gone either by way of people shape up or they decide to leave. They don't want accountability. They don't wanna, they don't wanna live out what's expected. And so the way of assessing people is via a tool called the People Analyzer. This honestly just assesses values based on your baseline. Like if you say four or five values have to be met at this percentage, that's the baseline. So the people analyzer assesses people on core values in accordance with your baseline and gwc. Do they get it when at capacity to do it? So that's the component. If we keep going to data, this is the third element of EOS data is all about numbers. I know so many. Oh my God. So I think, you know by this point that my origin into group practice ownership is through mental health. You know, there are way more therapists than not that do not like numbers. They don't. They don't like 'em. They don't want anything to do with them. They feel like they're cold and purely quantitative and have no story. Look, I get it, but the reality is you're not gonna have any fucking clue what's going on in your business unless you look at numbers. There is for sure significance in the qualitative experience of a relationship of a business. It matters how you feel about things and your, your sense for what's happening is important. It needs to be backed up by data. So it's not that the data needs to be cold, it's that the data and the qualitative experience need to be merged. And we typically, I will say therapists in particular are gonna lean into the qualitative experience and just believe their gut, sort of trust how they feel. I. Look, I love how I feel. I absolutely respect how I feel, and I know that I don't wanna just trust this without having something objective to either support or refute how I am feeling. It's an, it's an important aspect. So the data component is all about objective numbers, not really feelings. You're gonna have feelings, period. The data just again, either supports this or helps to disprove something. When we don't have data, what ends up happening is that we make these, um, not always, but I mean, I would say that we're probably more likely to make fear-based decisions, or like purely emotional based, impulsive, in my case, decisions. And when we have data, we can have a, a thought and a feeling, and we might want to make a decision. But if we say to ourselves, hang on a second, let me just pause for, let me just pause and look at what the data's also telling me. It helps to establish the checks and balances between maybe what your emotionally driven self wants to do compared to what the data would support doing. Again, I love both. I don't want it to come across like I don't, I love feelings. I also love data. I think the two need to live together. The tool for this that is really, really important is called the scorecard. This is like think five to eight weekly metrics that really give you a pulse on your business. So it might be something like session count revenue, claims submitted, aging report, um, provider utilization, marketing connections, community connections. Some measures might be lag measures, some might be lead measures. The point is that you just need five to eight-ish metrics that are going to give you the sort of full view of the practice. So when you have that gut feeling like, fuck, something is off with our inquiry process or our inquiry to intake process, why are we not getting more clients in the door? If your scorecard measure has both an inquiry count on it as well as a conversion count. As well as you know, number of sessions per week. The data in combination might tell you that your inquiries are hella low, which points to marketing related needs. It might say that your conversion fucking sucks, which points to something happening in your client care process and your intake process. It might point to your session count is crazy high, but you haven't increased the number of clinicians and slash or your clinicians haven't increased their caseloads or their schedules. So it might mean that you need to hire. So my point is that the data is giving you a lot more depth with what might be actually going on in conjunction with how you're feeling. Like if you have a sense that something is off, again, the data can either expand on that and say, yes, something is off. And it also can give you more. Depth of understanding with what exactly is off and thus what is needed to fix the problem. So I love data. Again, the tool for data is gonna be that score Okay, let's do the next component. This is element number four in the EOS framework, and this is the issues element. I fucking love the issues section. I love it so much. Oh my God, I love it so much. I was doing consulting with somebody. It was in my EOS mastermind actually. Somebody brought up something about when they were doing issues, a lot of the issues were reactionary, and they wanted to know if it would ever become more proactive. My short answer is yes, it absolutely will. My longer answer is once you can keep the issues solving track implemented and get through all the reaction things, all the reactionary issues, because once that's done, then you're able to take stock of where you are and look forward, and then you start being proactive about what's to come and what needs to change, and you're anticipating things that are going to come up in your planning, which keeps you more in line with your VTO, with your vision. It's more forward thinking. It's more strategic. The issues solving track is the only way to get to that point, though from my perspective, it is. I'm really, I think one of the only ways, I'm sure there are more. This is like one of the fastest, most efficient ways to get to a proactive place in your business is when you can effectively work through issues, which might mean, again, working through a lot of the, you know, we're reacting initially because of the issues that are coming up. So for issues, this is really about strengthening your ability to solve problems instead of avoiding them or band-aiding them. And I would say. Ultimately, you are being proactive with your problem solving and not reactive. When we have something like issues list. Within our issue solving track, it sort of forces us to pay attention to all of these various components in our practice. The scorecard does that, but even when you notice something on the scorecard, the rule of thumb is that you drop that topic down to your issues list and that's where you work through it. So when you're running EOS at your business. You're implementing the weekly rhythm of meetings, the weekly cadence, the the 90 minute L 10 meetings. What you're also doing is ensuring that 60 minutes of those 90 are spent solving issues. And so the issues component in this entire process is fucking huge. It's a big deal. It should be treated as a big deal, and it is a game changer ultimately. The tool preview for the issues element. I've said a couple of things. I've said issue solving, track. I've said issues, element. Just think issues collectively. A couple of tools. One is your issues list. This lives in your L 10 meeting, so it's where all of your, honestly problems as you see them. It's even where ideas go, where you need to like flesh out concepts. It's where if you're struggling with, uh, completing a, a quarterly rock, it's where that rock would go, like, Tara, struggling to complete rock. It's where something's off, but you don't know what, so you might just say, spidey senses are tingling about this topic. And then the point when you get those things listed on your issues list. Like I said, you have 60 minutes in that L 10 meeting to focus on issues. You pick the top three most pressing issues and you and your leadership team, IDS that issue, you do them in order, IDS is identify, discuss, solve. You identify what the root cause of the issue is, what's the actual issue. So if I say something like conversion is down. That's the issue we've listed. When we get to IDS, what might actually be happening is that we don't have any clinician availability. So conversion being down is a symptom, but it's not a client care issue. It's not an issue with my intake coordinator. It's an issue with hiring and that we need more people. Through identifying what the actual problem is, then we discuss all angles of that problem. Okay, what's our hiring look like? What's, what are the things that we might need to do to solve this problem forever? Let's discuss and then solve. So IDS, the solve piece is how do we get rid of this problem forever? It might be very broad. We need a hiring pipeline or a hiring funnel in place. It might be we need to move fast on these candidates that we have. We've been sitting on them for. Three months, God forbid. I hope you've not been sitting on candidates for three months. It might be any number of things I don't actually know. My point is that when you can identify an issue and then you can, IDS the identify, discuss, and solve, you're seeking to tackle problems very, very fast and in such a way that you are getting rid of those problems forever. This is why I talked about initially it might feel reactionary, where it's very reactive that you're responding to fires over and over and over. Ultimately, it shifts to proactive, where now my issues list is gonna be way more peppered with forward thinking. I have this idea, how do we get it going? Hey, I'm anticipating this is gonna be a problem in the next quarter based on this other stuff. What do we need to do about it right now? So that shift from reactive to proactive is gonna take place in the issues element of EOS Okay. Agenda item number five. Element number five is process. This is probably my least favorite section in the book Traction. They also have another book written. It wasn't Gino Wickman who wrote this other book. Somebody else wrote a book called Process with an exclamation mark and it's in the Traction Library. And the point of it is to help you really crystallize the documentation and simplification of core processes at your practice. So when there's not a process, everybody just makes shit up as they go. By process, I don't mean standard operating procedures. This, this sort of documentation of processes follows the 20/80 rule that you're documenting 20% of a process, and that 20% captures 80% of the process in action. So we're not getting into the very specific nitty gritty of this is how you do this exact step. The core process documentation is much broader. It's it's more high level than it is like hyper detailed. When you have a process documented, not only can that then be shared with everybody and they use the language followed by all. So when a process is documented, you wanna share it with everybody such that they can follow it. Also, what it does is it helps you decrease the firefighting with regard to process oriented questions. So again, this kind of points back to the issues list, but when you have process related questions that come up in your L 10 meetings or they're on the issues list and you work through them, sometimes the outcome of that is to develop a process and plug it into a relevant manual or handbook or process document. When you do that, what you're doing in the future is short cutting your discussion. If there's something now that comes up around said process, we all might say, Ooh, actually, let's go to that process document and see what's documented, and then if we have further questions, we can go from there. But immediately you're going from a whole ass discussion about a process down to five sentences. Go to this process document, see what's documented. If we need further information, let's bring it back here and discuss. If not, here's the to-do for this person. Boom. Done. Much, much easier. So it really gets rid of firefighting. I mean, it's, it's something that just slowly chips away at the need to be constantly reacting to things that are going wrong around you. The tool preview for this is the core processes documented and that using that 20/80 rule, again, I think this is probably my least favorite section in traction. So I would recommend, if this is important to you, which it should be, I would recommend reading Process again, if you go to eos worldwide.com, you're gonna be able to see the. Process book on there somewhere. It's in the traction library. The last element to this is traction. So what traction is really getting at is regular execution. So regular cadence, regular rhythms, regular meetings, for example, so that your vision becomes real. When you have consistent action and accountability, which is hardcore baked into your L 10 style meetings. You will get traction because you're constantly looking at your scorecard. You're always doing your to-dos. You're super in tune with your rocks. You're working through any process related things. You're sharing messages with the rest of the team. You can't not have traction. If you don't have traction, you probably have people issues or you might be integrating EO S in an inaccurate way, but. For traction. The tool preview here is that L 10 meeting. There is a very structured agenda that goes along with it. It is incredible for tracking progress and solving issues and staying aligned. L10 is, I mean, it's absolutely one of the best ways to have a meeting and also my favorite way, I mean, that goes without saying. So that's the traction component. Again, just to recap the the six elements. We've got Vision, the tool is the VTO, the Vision Traction Organizer. We have people, the tool is the People Analyzer. We've got data, tool is the scorecard. We've got issues, tool is the issues list, plus IDS. We have Process, tool is the core process. Documenting, which is the 20/80 rule. For traction. The tool is that EL in meeting. It's that weekly, weekly rhythm of meeting. What I would say in terms of action steps, what I think you should do is just score yourself quickly on each of these six components. As you were listening, were there any that you recognized right away as being very problematic? I. If you use EOS consistently, what are the weak areas for you? If you don't use it, you're probably doing some things that you could point to and say, oh, I think that's an alignment with EOS. So my thought is still, if you're thinking about each of these components, even if you're not using EOS consistently, which elements of business are dragging you down? Because again, this is an overall framework. It's a structure for running a business. You don't have to be using it to still have these elements at your practice. If you are realizing that these components are a little bit, you know, ugh, wobbly, problematic, weak in your practice, then this is what my EOS Mastermind is for. So the doors close for this EOS Mastermind on June 2nd. They're not even open yet. Join the wait list. Then stay up on the deets and dates for when they open, and obviously when it closes, you'll have insight into that as well. You can go to www.taravossenkemper.com and click on EOS Mastermind to get on the list. And that's all I got. It was great seeing and you here. I hope this was helpful. I'll see you next time. Thanks for making this awesome. Bye.