EOS – Conrad’s 2024 Goals Review

Conrad Saam | December 30, 2024

I’m finishing up the year – those few of you who are in the office are probably, like me walking through administrivia, checking on end-of-year requests and contemplating how the year work (in short: not doing any actual work).  In our EOS system, I found a note written by my Fractional Integrator when she came on board in late ’23…. “what are my goals for 2023”.

And these goals aren’t SMART business goals – they are the goals for our relationship.  Lisa and I have checked in on these periodically throughout the year (in fact in the note below, you can see the direction to review the 2nd week of Jan – that’s January of ’24). It was good to go back and review what I had hoped to achieve.  Now during those early periodic check-ins, there initially wasn’t a ton of progress,  I’m pretty sure during that first review we hadn’t achieved (or even made much progress on) any of these things.

So it was remarkable to review these today and realize we’ve come so so far on all of them:

Less Chaos

The Chaos concept came from two different factors, both of which we’ve alleviated.

1. Classic Visionary Ideas: are now captured and prioritized within the EOS system (specifically we use 90).  I’m full of ideas – I get them while talking with clients, while mowing the lawn, and listening to pods.  Through EOS we now have a vestibule to collect, evaluate and prioritize ideas as a leadership team, instead of having the President throw around his latest and greatest (at the moment) ideas around like grenades.
2. Fear of Change: For a tech centric firm, we’ve been amazingly afraid of embracing new opportunities.  In fact, new opportunities historically have been seen as “chaos.”  During 2024 we’ve evolved our thinking to correctly view changes as opportunities for our clients instead of threats to our stability.

Profitability

This one really belongs at the bottom of the list – it’s the end result of the changes we’ve made elsewhere.  Sustained, strong profitability came from a real commitment to David C. Baker’s 7 key metrics he uses when evaluating the business value of a creative agency.  For us – they key number is revenue per employee, which has increased by 28% from ’23.  Bluntely, we’ve always known this number was important, we’ve just historically explained away, why we could ignore it in the short term.  Big mistake.

While the numbers are still coming in – it’s looking like profit is up just over 3 times ’23.

Rowing in the Same Direction

You’ll note the parenthetical in this “(even if not on the same page)”, which is super important.  The reality is any group of smart ambitious leaders are rarely going to be on the same page, but it’s how you manage that disagreement that is important. Prior to ’24 we lacked cohesion of purpose – with individuals moving forward on their own pet projects – pulling roughly in a similar direction.  But we fundamentally lacked unity on our Ideal Customer Profile, the services needed by that ICP and how we would market to them.

So… is this all down to EOS?  Probably not, but I fail to see how we could have made these massive changes outside of the EOS system facilitated by a hard-nosed, third party Integrator.