“It’s consistency, not smiles that keep customers coming back.”

Well-documented processes, that are followed by all, ensure consistency for your customers and scalability of your business. However, it’s one thing to document a process but another thing entirely to have it followed by all. Embracing something new, such as a process, doesn’t come easily to people. If you’ve invested time, money and resources to implement a new reporting process to manage workflow and information, you probably know what I mean. Usually, just over half of the employees are using it a year later. Why?

On your journey to becoming your best in business, you’ll need to make some tough people decisions. Usually those decisions revolve around Right People/Right Seat issues. In the EOS Process™ we use the People Analyzer™ with GWC™ (Get It/Want It/Capacity to Do It) to identify the root cause of a team’s specific people-related issues. The most common people issues are:

• Wrong Person/Right Seat – someone who doesn’t share the core values but is in the Right Seat.
• Right Person/Wrong Seat – a person who shares the core values but is in the Wrong Seat, i.e., they don’t get it, want it, or have the capacity to do it.

Sometimes the tough people decision is to fire an employee who doesn’t get it, want it, or have the capacity to do the job. One of my clients recently had to make that tough decision. Afterwards, the Visionary told me about the way the employee responded to being fired.

“The unique talent that I bring to my business is my ability to manage my calendar and email,” said no leader ever.

Often, leaders get trapped into doing things like scheduling and email while the hours in our day vanish with little or no benefit to the company. I’m not sure why we get trapped doing things like this, but it’s common. This work could easily be done by someone else, but many leaders resist delegating these tasks – to the detriment of themselves and their companies.

EOS Implementers™ teach clients to use The Assistance Track™to refocus how they use their time. A large part of this involves handing off tasks to someone else who is better suited to do those tasks.

One of the core EOS^® tools for helping a leader determine whether someone is in the right seat is GWC™, which stands for Get it, Want it, and Capacity. When evaluating whether someone GWC’s their job, you must ask three questions – Do they Get it? Do they Want it? Do they have the Capacity to do it? – and answer either "Yes" or "No" to each question. "Maybe" is not an option.

If any one of the three answers is "No,” then that person is in the wrong seat. It’s a very simple and powerful exercise, but when leaders begin to use this tool, they sometimes experience confusion between “Get it” and “Capacity.” Here’s the difference.

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!