Keeping things simple is your business’s path to success.

That may seem counterintuitive, because as your business grows, your company becomes more complex. So it may be natural for you to assume that by employing more people, offering more products and reaching more customers, your business would need to be more complicated.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Chances are, you do many things well. As a business owner, this may have been imperative at times, especially in the early days when you had no choice but to do it all yourself.

Then at some point your business gained traction. The opportunities continued to grow, but so did the complexities of running the business.

Along the way, you may have become comfortable in certain roles such as being the ultimate decision maker, the go-to person for business processes, or just the person that seems to have all the right answers. Everyone wanted a piece of you!

A few months ago I published a blog post entitled Too Small To Make a Difference? The point of the article is that everyone in a business matters—from the owner to the newest “front line” hire. I further suggested that entrepreneurs work hard to engage everyone in the EOS process, including the use of Rocks, Level 10 Meetings, and Scorecards throughout the organization. 

When my clients are struggling with that concept, I’ve found that a painstaking approach to clearly and simply defining these tools really helps. Because try as we might, entrepreneurial leaders and managers often over-complicate things.

Over the last 11 years I have had my business, Nexus, I have probably said this phrase, “Good people in a bad system look like bad people” 300 times (if you are one of my big math people that is just about once every two weeks). The impetus of the saying goes back to the first year of Nexus when I was working with a local client.

I frequently encounter this odd, paradoxical statement in my work. My clients specifically hired me to teach them how to run their businesses in a way that will give them more time and freedom, yet when I try to schedule sessions with them, they often tell me they’re “too busy.” They’re so busy trying to do that they “don’t have time” to learn how to do those things better, faster, and with less effort.