Did you know that the most important part of your annual planning session isn't planning? If you're like many companies, your leadership team skips the most critical component of your annual planning. And it negatively impacts your team's creativity and goal setting for the coming year.

Business leaders of entrepreneurial companies are so hard-charging, so busy, and so overwhelmed, that they tend to see only the gaps ahead of them. These are the goals, ideals, and accomplishments they haven't reached yet. When you're feeling overworked from the previous year and start looking at all the gaps you have yet to cover, it can put you into the wrong frame of mind for moving forward.

One of my clients was chomping at the bit to document their core processes – especially their HR process. They were a family-owned business and their turnover was holding back their profitability. They believed a robust HR process would reduce turnover and help increase profits.

So I taught them the three-step EOS^® method to document their process. They created a rock for it, and got to work. But there were problems.

As we turn the final corner of 2017, many family-owned businesses are preparing to become more profitable in 2018. When I took the helm of our third-generation family business several years ago, I was eager to boost our profitability. But what I found was that there are a lot of profit-eaters in a family-owned business. And they can be very difficult to get rid of without a robust and objective operating system in place.

Want to have a more profitable family-owned business in 2018? Watch out for these profit-eaters!

The power of EOS^® is that it gives your company a single way of doing business that's simple and proven. Over 40,000 organizations around the world are running on EOS and getting their business under control. By addressing the Six Key Components™ of your business and providing a model for solving your company's issues for good, EOS helps you grow to achieve your vision and goals more effectively.

But some leadership teams that are running on EOS aren't gaining the traction they'd expected to see when they started using the system. As a leadership team, they're getting more done, solving more issues, and working together better than ever. But the business as a whole isn't improving, and the operations side of the company is still out of control. What's going on?

Many entrepreneurs are frustrated because they aren't getting what they want from their business. Most of them don't understand why they've hit the ceiling, and they're left spinning their wheels without gaining any traction.

Wondering why you aren't getting what you want from your business? It comes down to one or more of the following seven business problems.