Hitting the Ceiling – Reaching Your Limits as a Business Owner

Barbara Taylor runs a retail coffee and espresso business in Arkansas. She wrote a post in the small business section of the New York Times in June 2011, entitled Reaching Your Limits As A Business Owner. What she has to say about hitting a wall will resonate with owners of companies implementing EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

Hitting the Ceiling

When a company begins its journey implementing EOS, we talk about the challenges of hitting the ceiling. Hitting the ceiling can happen as a company, a division, a department or an individual.

We teach EOS leadership teams the five leadership abilities (of the many, many you can choose from) that we have found help companies break through that ceiling, at whatever level it is found.

The leadership abilities you must master are:

• Simplifying – if its complex for your team, how complex must it be for your prospects/customers?
• Delegating – delegate and elevate to your unique ability, get everybody doing what they do best.
• Predicting – both short and long term, so that you can correct errors when the consequences are small enough that they can’t crush your business.
• Systemize – build your franchise way of scaling your business, so you can focus on the inevitable surprises which are in store for you.
• Structuring – get all the right people in all the right seats.

If you’ll focus on these leadership skills, you will find more time to work on your business, instead of being buried in your business. You can read all about them in Gino Wickman’s book, Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business or you can talk with me to learn more.

By mastering these abilities you will learn to break through when you are hitting the ceiling.