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How to get what you want from a restaurant business (using EOS)
95 Plays2 years ago
Adam Johnson is the owner of The Plough, Harborne - "The place where people feel good".
In this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast, Adam shares his story of how, after years of delivering great hospitality, quality food and a bustling but easy-going atmosphere, The Plough 'hit the ceiling' and he turned to The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to rediscover his passion for - and the growth potential in - the business.
Interested listeners can reach Adam ( linkedin.com/in/adam-johnson-58009771 ) by emailing adam@theploughharborne.co.uk or Rob ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/ ) at Rob@mission-group.co.uk
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Transcript
Introduction to Adam Johnson and The Plow
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the First Time Founders podcast, the show where we talk about how to start a business from nothing and grow it into something meaningful. Today we're talking to Adam Johnson, the visionary owner of The Plow in Harborne. It's one of the best all day dining, drinking pubs in Birmingham. Adam's owned the property for about 20 years. He's a lifelong hospitality entrepreneur, never had a job working for anybody else.
00:00:25
Speaker
And he'll be the first to confess that he's what we call a visionary in entrepreneurial operating EOS circles.
What is the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)?
00:00:33
Speaker
Now EOS is a company management system that small, medium-sized owner-led businesses can implement to help them get more out of their businesses. It's all about aligning people around a goal, driving accountability through an organization so that you can deliver better, more sustainable, repeatable customer experiences and ultimately deliver your vision.
00:00:54
Speaker
whether that's growth, profitability, impact, doesn't matter. It's all about making the trains run on time so that you can get to your chosen destination as quickly as possible and frankly have as much fun as possible along the way. In this episode, Adam talks about how prior to implementing EOS, he was a classically frustrated visionary, introducing so many ideas into his organization that his people got whiplash, struggling to hold people accountable so that the business ran
00:01:23
Speaker
In line with the business that he wanted it to be, he felt like he wasn't really living his true purpose. He was trying to do a thousand things rather than focus on the work that he's best at and then elevate and delegate to a team so that other people could do the things that he doesn't love and isn't so good at. EOS has a really, really well-tested, battle-tested system to enable.
00:01:44
Speaker
visionary founders to make exactly this transition.
Implementing EOS in Hospitality
00:01:47
Speaker
So in today's episode, we go deep on the entrepreneurial operating system from a hospitality operator's perspective. At the end of the show, Adam very generously offers to talk to any hospitality operator that's interested in EOS or wants to learn from his experience.
00:02:02
Speaker
And next year, we'll even be running some workshops together for operators that want to test the waters on EOS and learn from each other. We'll be hosting those at Adam's place in Birmingham. So if you enjoy this episode, do stay tuned to the end so that you can get in touch with one of us and get involved in that. So without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Adam Judson.
00:02:30
Speaker
Adam, welcome to the First Time Founders Podcast. Thank you for doing this, my friend. Pleasure. Great to see you. I'm in a dodgy office at the minute. I couldn't get the glamorous office because there's a level 10 going on and that's got to be in the same place, same time. So yeah, I got resigned to the pub office.
00:02:51
Speaker
that's all right you're keeping it real for those that are watching rather than listening they're going to be like what a down-to-earth guy so Adam we are as you know this is the first time founders podcast there's a million different things we could talk about on the founder journey but you're very kindly offered to come on and talk me and the viewers and listeners through
00:03:08
Speaker
EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system from a hospitality entrepreneur's perspective. So we'll definitely get into your life story, but why don't we start at the end? How did you discover EOS and why did it resonate with you? Wow. So I joined just before lockdown a group called Vistage, which is kind of a, I guess in a nice way, a self-help group for business owners, people who don't really have anyone to bounce their ideas off.
00:03:35
Speaker
and you kind of join a chapter. I joined just before lockdown and the guys in the group were talking about introducing traction into their lives or into their businesses.
00:03:44
Speaker
I'd never heard of it. So came out of the first meeting, got it straight on audio book as I drove back from Leicester, which was about an hour away. And I listened to it and thought, Oh my goodness, I need this in my life. This is me. This is just talking to me. And so I listened to it and then just could not get enough of it. You know, I just then was thinking, right, this is a way out of a situation where I've been in hospitality pretty much all my adult life. I've never
00:04:14
Speaker
Never worked for anybody. I've owned my own business all the way through and managed to make successes, failures, et cetera. But at the time that I'd reached, it was a point where I just couldn't go much further. Do you need to be in just to get your... No problem. We got people coming into print.
00:04:34
Speaker
And so Adam, why don't you tell people
Impact of EOS on Business Growth
00:04:37
Speaker
about the plow? Actually, that's, that's actually a good segue into talking about the plow, where you are now, because it's a big old business, isn't it? Where are we on now? We are a pub on a high street opposite of Marks and Spencers. You can kind of picture the scene, a Peter Express on the high street, a Waitrose at the other end.
00:04:53
Speaker
reasonably affluent area of Birmingham that is about two miles from the city centre, lots of chimney pots, a big hospital, a university on our doorstep and we are a pub on that high street that over the last 20 odd years has grown, expanded through
00:05:14
Speaker
through extensions, through purchasing the buildings next door, to knock through, to add capacity, to add kitchen space, to add meeting rooms, to develop a garden at the back, and most recently to develop accommodation that is separate to the business. But we have about 85 to 90 staff, probably about 60 full-time. By full-time, I mean 30 hours and over.
00:05:45
Speaker
And it's a big business that opens to the public at 8.30 every morning and closes at midnight. We do breakfast, lunch, dinner. We make our own bread, our own dough, our own burgers. Pretty much everything that comes in gets transferred or created into some sort of product to sell in terms of through the kitchens. We're a local pub that does comfort food predominantly. So pizzas, burgers,
00:06:16
Speaker
great Sunday lunch on Sunday so the gravy is literally on Monday morning they start making the gravy for the following Sunday and so it's literally a pot just bubbling at the back of the kitchen so I've been here 20 years I've got amazing staff predominantly and which has helped me get to where I have got to but I probably didn't have any of the tools that traction has helped me
00:06:41
Speaker
start to understand and develop within the team that has allowed me to just take a little bit of a step back and just start to enjoy the business which I absolutely love and I always have loved it but the journey through traction and EOS has just made the whole thing so much better.
00:06:59
Speaker
So I'm going to come on to quiz you about how you've applied the six tools in EOS. But before we do that, can you just induct people into what it means to be a visionary? That's a very special role in EOS that about 50% of organizations have. What does it mean to be a long suffering visionary? So I know I never heard this term and thought it was a bit of a
00:07:26
Speaker
a naff term and I would never want to associate myself with that. But after reading traction or listening to traction, I then listened to the book called Rocket Fuel and traction made me think this is what I need in my business. But then reading rocket or listening to rocket fuel made me understand that I was actually part of the problem.
00:07:46
Speaker
And actually, Rocket Fuel describes visionary owners who are people that very often are founders.
Visionary vs. Integrator Roles in EOS
00:07:53
Speaker
And then they start a business. They have incredible drive. They have incredible vision. They have 100 ideas a day. 99 are rubbish, are absolutely rubbish. And they are full of ideas. And they very often
00:08:10
Speaker
take an idea and get it to fruition. And I think I'd managed to do that, but it spent 20 years doing both jobs, being very creative and full of ideas, but equally trying to manage and deliver my vision. And actually, again, listening to rocket fuel, I was like, oh my God, this is me. This is me I cause. So a visionary would notoriously come in and interfere with things, would mess, tinker with things.
00:08:40
Speaker
And not intentionally, never intentionally, but come in and cause problems. That's all right. We've got printing coming in. There's, there's level 10s everywhere in this building. But yeah, I would not intentionally, but come in and cause all sorts of. Unintentional organizational whiplash, where one day I'd be saying, right, we're going to do this. The next day I was saying, we're going to do the other, which is very difficult for a team because they don't know where they sit and they don't know where they stand.
00:09:10
Speaker
So that has been a real eye-opener for me, which I haven't necessarily, well, I'm trying to just be a bit more moderate in terms of how I'm trying to behave with the team. And it's really helped me to understand, again, the unintentional chaos that I caused by, right, let's do this. Come on, let's do that. Today we're making sushi, tomorrow we're making pasta, tomorrow we're making
00:09:36
Speaker
roast dinners, and it just goes all over the place and the team don't know where to be, which is why EOS would prescribe an integrator, someone that comes in and effectively distills all the ideas and keeps me on track. You say comes in, but they may already be working in the business, right? The integrator is a full-time role that in a non-EOS world, people would typically think of as an MD or COO, right? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And my integrator, James, has worked with me for
00:10:06
Speaker
probably 10, 12 years. And again, we probably didn't realize the roles. And historically, I would have the final say. Now in the EOS world, the integrator has the final say, which initially is quite difficult to accept. If you're a founder of a business, it's really tough. Hang on. This is my baby. This is my business.
00:10:33
Speaker
But actually, if you really embrace the tools and really embrace the philosophy, actually, you sometimes have to accept that you're not always right. And you're you may actually be causing more damage to an organization or to a business by pushing forward 100 ideas that never get finished. That some of them are great. Some of them are terrible. And really just try and stay in lane, which is what James certainly has helped me do.
00:11:01
Speaker
And again, using a lot of the tools in the books through the crystallizer assessment is great for anybody who hasn't done that. I think you can sign up to Rocket Fuel. It's free of charge, but there's an assessment that you can go through and it will help you kind of work out who you really are.
00:11:20
Speaker
Well, we'll jump into some of the tools, because I think it's interesting. And actually, we'll start with vision, because I think what I found when I've sort of seen visionaries coming to terms with being visionaries and the opportunities and the challenges and limitations is that they do worry about letting go. I think here, let's call it letting go of the vine.
00:11:38
Speaker
Once you get into a 90-day world and you've got your meeting pulses and the business is running to a prescribed vision, that's actually what keeps you in control, isn't it? Because the integrator is not going to set a vision that the visionary doesn't agree with. The integrator is going to help to execute in service of the vision.
00:11:56
Speaker
which basically means that you sort of still are in control, but just not at a micro level where you're going to undermine your own vision. Do you want to talk about vision, the VTO? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's been a brilliant document to help us crystallize and then almost
00:12:14
Speaker
be able to describe to people what we're trying to do, where we're trying to go. And historically, the vision was very, very woolly. Because of me, no one had pinned me down, and I was all over the place. One day this, the next day that. And therefore, it was very, very difficult for anyone to say, well, where are we going? Where are we actually going? And now we've worked hard. And though
00:12:37
Speaker
We all know that we have in EOS it's a 10 year vision and clearly things we've seen that with COVID, we've seen that with cost of living, we've seen that with inflation. Who knows what's around the corner, but we do have something that we can really aim towards and it's
00:12:53
Speaker
You know, it's a big, what do they call it? Big, hairy, audacious goal. You know, something. That's it. Yeah. The Jim, Jim Collins, the, the, the BHAG. And it, but it also encourages you to break down, right? So you've got your 10 year, then your three year, then your one year, which eventually come down into your sort of 90, 90 day objectives. Can you, can you give viewers and listeners a kind of an example of something that's a short-term initiative that's in service of your longterm goals?
Developing a Sustainable Management Team
00:13:15
Speaker
Anything come to mind? Yeah, absolutely. We, we have a situation where we're one site and we're now looking to grow.
00:13:20
Speaker
and which EOS has helped me or has given me confidence that I feel I can grow and before I felt my confidence had probably been knocked because I thought I can't keep doing this that every time the phone rings it's something that ends up on my desk or my doorstep but EOS has helped me to release some of that and for me to be in my sweet spot and so as a result we've looked at things that if we're going to grow we need to develop the management team internally which is a
00:13:50
Speaker
clearly an obvious thing to do, but actually to break that down into a 90 day target to say, right, all supervisors need to be in a position where they can run a Saturday night and a Saturday night or Saturday in this place is probably two, two and a half thousand covers coming through on a with the place having potentially 300 people sat down up to 35 staff.
00:14:18
Speaker
needing to be managed with two kitchens, different departments and trying to ensure that A, the customers are having a brilliant time, B, the staff know what they're doing and are equally having a great time, ensuring the place is safe and the place is clean and it looks fit for purpose. That is a big job even for someone with a lot of experience in hospitality.
00:14:45
Speaker
But we realize as a leadership team, we can't move on until we protected that, that the golden goose, I suppose, the main, the main source of income. So we've had to really work on breaking down and saying, right, how do we get our supervisors to this next level, which creates an EOS, another tool, which is the process.
00:15:06
Speaker
So while we're doing that, we're also creating a process which then will be followed by the next round of supervisors, hopefully, and the next round. And so we've got something in place where historically there was bits of training all over the place on one drives here, there and everywhere, where now we're trying to pull it into one.
00:15:26
Speaker
One overall document. No, no, it's brilliant. So you've alluded to the vision, vision tool, you've a vision component of the model. You've alluded to the process component of the model and you sort of hinted at people.
00:15:39
Speaker
EOS, of course, has this talk called the People Analyzer, right, where you have to see if people get it, like they sort of intuitively just have, you know, a God-given gift for a particular role. They want it, i.e. they actually want to do that role, and then they have the capacity, the kind of acquired skills of the time. Can you, maybe in the context of a supervisor, obviously don't name any names, but can you talk about what it's like when you realize that you've got somebody in a seat, EOS calls role seats?
00:16:05
Speaker
that doesn't GWC, doesn't get it, warn it, or have the capacity. It's really confronting, isn't it? It's really difficult. The people analyze it. Again, I really struggle with the name, but wow, it's an amazing tool. Absolutely brilliant. In the fact that you look at your core values and you
00:16:26
Speaker
You grade people, whether they mirror the core values 80% of the time. None of us can mirror core values all the time. All of us have bad days. But the idea is if 80% of the time someone mirrors the value, then they're a right person. If they plus minus it, then you obviously can't have plus minuses in all the values. Otherwise, they're the wrong person. And if they're a minus, they shouldn't be in your organization.
00:16:54
Speaker
But then the GWC and very often you can see people get the core values and that's, you can see that they live it, they understand it, but we've always been guilty of taking a great bartender or a great chef and moving them into a management position where actually they just want to be great chefs or great bartenders. To actually then get a leadership role where they really get what that means and actually to be a leader, you know, talks about LMA in leading managing
00:17:24
Speaker
leading plus managing equals accountability. And very often people make amazing food, amazing drink, but actually their sweet spot is not leading people or holding people accountable. That's a different set of skills. It's hard, isn't it? Holding people accountable is super difficult, really difficult. Particularly if you're a caring founder, which I think most founders in hospitality actually are.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And they want to see the best in everybody. And sometimes it's really tough to say, I'm sorry, you just don't get it. And some people just don't get it. They don't get it. And then some people get it. They really understand it. They really understand the role. They know exactly what it is. But you can tell they don't want it. They don't want to be there. They'd rather be working nine to five in a golf club or still maybe in hospitality. But they don't want to do the late nights. They don't want the busy bar or the busy kitchen or the
00:18:14
Speaker
I can understand that sometimes it's really stressful when you're dealing with customers who want changes on their burgers on this on that on the other they want everything delivered right now and sometimes it's really stressful equally other people thrive on that and they love that and they get energy from it and so
00:18:34
Speaker
having to want something is also really, really important. And then the thing that we've struggled with most recently is the capacity. How do you know whether someone's got the capability or the capacity to do the job? And you can look at them in a role where they get all your values.
00:18:49
Speaker
They may apply for the job, so it suggests that they want the job. And you'd think, you know what? They get this job. They worked here. They understand this job. But then putting it into that capacity role, are they mentally resilient enough to move from just serving a customer to then leading a shift or leading a team? It's a very different dynamic, and you still have to be able to do both.
00:19:12
Speaker
And until someone's in that role, we found it really, really tough. And so we're really having to review our process to think how and be really honest with people and say, you know what, Rob, I think you're great as a bartender, but are you really going to be able to deal with the stress of the issues with customers complaining on Table 50, the internet going down because something's gone wrong, a clash of tables because we're overbooked or something's happened.
00:19:42
Speaker
dealing with an issue in one of the kitchens, when all of that's going on, do you have the desire and at that point the mental and physical capacity to do that? Because it's tough. It's so hard. I've really struggled with that because telling someone that they don't have capacity when they want it
00:20:03
Speaker
feels unbelievably hurtful. Takes you back to primary school, not picking someone for the dance or the sports team or whatever. It's really savage. But EOS asks you to come to it being open and willing to put the organization and the vision and everybody first over the needs of any one individual.
Improving Business Meetings and Metrics with EOS
00:20:24
Speaker
Talk about the issues then.
00:20:26
Speaker
Because obviously in the example you just gave where you're a leadership team and you do the people analyzer and you realize that you've got a right person wrong seat issue, how do you deal with that? Can you talk a little bit about IDS and how most organizations like endlessly discuss issues but they don't identify root causes or ever move to solution?
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah, again, in terms of the tools that the level 10 will come onto that, the meeting pulse or the meeting that they prescribe to the OHS is absolutely brilliant. It's fantastic. And we'll get to the point in the meeting where issues come up. Every single business has issues every day of the week. And the idea is that rather than just almost
00:21:06
Speaker
fight be firefighting you're you're actually stopping the root cause so you're going to the real root of what is the issue is the issue that we keep having a really bad service on sunday is the issue because we're overbooking it is the issue because we've got the wrong person in the wrong seat running sundays or or as i say going back we discovered that we haven't closed the bookings off between quarter to 12 and quarter past 12 when our kitchens turn from a brunch
00:21:34
Speaker
service to a Sunday lunch service and it means the kitchen needs to be almost broken down and reset up and we were still pouring customers in in those half an hour at that half an hour window and expecting everything to work correctly and
00:21:51
Speaker
When you take a step back and you really, really dig deep into what is the issue here, you very much find that it's not the superficial issue that, oh, well, so and so can't run a Sunday. It's actually something much deeper than that. And if you put the right fix and go deep and try and find out and give everyone the opportunity to talk and to be heard, then come to a solve.
00:22:17
Speaker
and then discuss and then come to a solve, we find that nine times out of 10, that issue just disappears forever, where it's been coming up time and time and time again. And I look back at some of our early
00:22:31
Speaker
early IBSs a few years ago. I think that's coming up time and time again. Why is that? When now these issues just are dealt with and they just go, which is amazing and it's brilliant because we can try and almost identify where they sit in the EOS or the traction wheel. It's a people issue or it's a process issue. And the Sunday lunch example I've given is it was a process issue. We got the process wrong and we were letting people
00:22:58
Speaker
pile into the place when we couldn't physically serve them because the kitchen wasn't the position to serve.
00:23:05
Speaker
It's amazing when that penny drops. I went through exactly the same thing with my business. So we talked about vision, people, issues, process. Can we talk a bit about data and the scorecard? Because I think people have got sort of data fatigue working in hospitality in all industries where we all know that we're supposed to be making data-driven decisions. We've all invested in systems that are exporting or have the ability to export tons of data to us.
00:23:33
Speaker
And yet in my experience, nine out of 10, probably more hospitality leadership teams do not actually run on data. So what does it mean to be data-driven from an EOS company perspective, Adam? How is your business different now running on EOS than it was before from a data perspective? EOS definitely prescribes less is more, which is for someone, a visionary, I need loads of information. I want loads. I want to learn. I want to listen.
00:23:59
Speaker
And actually, certainly in hospitality, I don't know about everyone's business, but in hospitality, you're very much up against it with.
00:24:06
Speaker
labor costs and maintaining that and there is lots and lots of data out there but sometimes there's almost data overload and really the scorecard tells you what you want to know if you're on a desert island what are the key things you want to know to see whether your business is on track or off track. You mean if you couldn't call someone so basically if you couldn't meddle as a visionary you could just look at this one document that contained a series of metrics
00:24:34
Speaker
Basically, you need to construct that document so it tells you everything you need to know about whether your business is performing or not, when you're on a desert island and you cannot call anyone to medal. Is that fair definition? Absolutely, yeah. That's how I define it, yeah. That I want to be away and I want to download the scorecard or it goes into a Slack channel and I look at it and go, right, okay, turnover was good last week, but the labor percentage was off. Customer satisfaction's down, right, there's an issue there. Okay, that's not good.
00:25:03
Speaker
Staff satisfaction is down. Okay, we've got an issue there and it very quickly tells you how your business is performing based on the metrics that you want.
00:25:13
Speaker
There's so many metrics in hospitality, spend per head, number of bookings, number of covers, number of future covers. There's so much. Obviously, everybody is different and they'll have things that they want to know if they were on a desert island, but we find it's really, really powerful. Obviously, within different departments within your organization, so the key leadership
00:25:35
Speaker
scorecard has the real real headlines but if you dig a bit deeper the kitchen scorecard might have how many complaints there were last week it might have how long does it take for dishes to arrive at a table if you've got a target of 10 minutes and 60% were 12 minutes then there's an issue and it allows us to dig deeper and hold people accountable find out in each department where there are issues and and why is it why why was
00:26:03
Speaker
Why did it take 12 minutes to get to the table? Oh, well, the Sunday lunch meat slicer was broken. It failed on Sunday lunch. Ah, okay. That's an issue. It's not a big issue because we can get it swapped and next week we're back up and running. But if actually every week it's always 12 minutes or 15 minutes, what there's a bigger issue here. There's something else that's going on that we've got a problem with, which allows us to dig deeper. And that would become an issue on the weekly level 10. Or if it's a bigger issue.
00:26:34
Speaker
If it becomes a bigger issue, that would go onto our quarterly issues list, which it may well be that our kitchens are just basically not big enough for
00:26:46
Speaker
the volume of business and okay, that's a big issue. You don't solve that in a weekly meeting. Well, let's talk about that, Adam, because you now hinted at Traction. You alluded to it earlier and it makes sense. So Traction is the kind of, that's your pulse, which you've just talked about and your ROCs, so your quarterly initiatives and then your weekly, quarterly and annual meetings that EOS prescribes. Why is a level 10 meeting called a level 10?
00:27:12
Speaker
Adam, it's contrasted, isn't it, with the average experience and people have of doing meetings? I mean, previous to this, our meetings were an absolute shambles. And one of the reasons I joined this team...
00:27:23
Speaker
to get this whole thing going was I thought, there's got to be a better way to run a meeting. And because I've been self-employed all my life, I've never sat in other people's meetings. I've always had to do it myself. And I sat in meetings and thought, this is a joke. People with their laptops open, people answering phones, people doing things, doing their to-do's, doing things while they're in a meeting, people turning up late, people leaving the meeting halfway through. It was an absolute, meetings going on for hours.
00:27:53
Speaker
And it was just an absolute disaster. And then come the level 10, we get introduced to a level 10. And I think the level 10 is called a level 10, because they want people to love going to meetings. And most people would rate their meetings at about four, where they're unproductive, they don't enjoy them, they're going through the same thing. And actually, now, a level 10 is something that I think, well, I love them, I look forward to go into them. And they're a really structured way where we are
00:28:21
Speaker
We've changed so much in terms of people being late for meetings or walking out or having their phones on now. If you're sat in this meeting and you're, if you're late, that means if you're not five minutes early, you're late.
00:28:35
Speaker
So we expect people to be in the room at five to nine if we're starting at nine and we're off at nine o'clock. And it's a brilliant way. Again, it felt really awkward to start with. It was a really difficult process and it just felt clunky to start with. But once you get into them, and we've been running them for probably about a year now, and it does take, I'd say,
00:29:00
Speaker
Our implementer said it'll take 25 weeks to get you really good at these and it has taken us and we still wouldn't say we're masters at all. We're still we're still learning and we're still rating our meetings maybe an eight because we don't necessarily all go around the table and in an organized way we don't necessarily get our issues on the board in a in a way that's understandable for everybody so we're still learning. The difference in our meetings is just phenomenal
00:29:29
Speaker
I love your humility. I mean, look, we're all still learning. As you know, I'm taking the qualification to certify as an implementer next month. And I know I'm definitely going to learn a lot next month. But the thing that's already come through to me from EOS Worldwide, the organization that convenes EOS is that they're all still learning. Like the guys that created the system say that they're still learning. So what I love about them, I mean, I can see why people follow you because you are so sort of humbly confident. But like,
00:29:55
Speaker
The system kind of forces you to be humble, doesn't it? And except that you continue learning, because it's such a dynamic, it's such a dynamic system. Okay, so you've talked about issues and causal objectives and meeting polls. So just for viewers and listeners that are interested, basically in that weekly meeting, you will bring up issues. If they can be resolved in a week, then they'll go on to a to-do list. And as Adam said, you then they're assigned and people are accountable for getting them done in a week.
00:30:21
Speaker
they can't be done by the next level 10 meeting next week, then they'll go on the company issues list and in your quarterly session, you'll consider whether that issue is still a big enough issue that it needs to be potentially assigned to someone as what they call a rock, which is a task that you have 90 days
Achieving Goals with ROCs and Implementer Support
00:30:37
Speaker
to get through. Adam, do you want to give some examples of things that you've allocated as rocks in the plow? Yeah, sure.
00:30:45
Speaker
These are the big things, the big things that, I suppose, when you get up in the morning and you come in, this is what you should be working on. And very often, I know previously, I open my diary, and I think I'm a pretty organised person, I open my diary on my to-do list, and I probably start working from the bottom and ticking quick things off, the things that I can get rid of really quickly, and then you kind of look and think, well, actually, the day's gone, and the most important thing I should have been working on was, for example,
00:31:13
Speaker
making sure our supervisors are up to a level that will allow us to grow because if we don't get that sorted we can't grow or if we do grow we're likely to harm the core business and so me or my staff or the leadership team tinkering around the edge is doing very quick fixes is not going to help us in the long term and so we've had big
00:31:37
Speaker
Big kind of bigger issues that needed to get finished. So our accommodation that we've just opened was a rock that needed to be finished and needed to be up and running. And that was a effectively a drain on cash. And therefore it dragged on for too long. And therefore it became someone's rock to get that finished and get it 75 percent occupied. It became, as I say, the supervisor or the training rock, the was a really, really important
00:32:05
Speaker
thing for us. Our EPOS system, so swapping over an EPOS system so that we can get better and more informed data is a really big rock, but it needed structure. And historically, we wouldn't have structured it. It would have been like, we're going to look at a TIL system or an EPOS system. This is what we're going to do, X, Y, Z. And it would move on, but not really in a structured way that was communicated to the rest of the team. So everybody knew what was happening.
00:32:34
Speaker
We have really worked on rolling out the EOS tools. So that's been something in our first year and a half. And I still don't think we are there yet in rolling out to the whole organization our VTO, our vision, where are we going and how we do that. And so that has been on as a rock that we're going to roll out the fundamental tools or the five core tools. And we thought,
00:33:03
Speaker
We nailed it. We've got there. We've done it. And I can see that as you get deeper into this process. So it came off the rocks list two months ago or three months ago. And as we've got deeper and we're working and we're learning and we're going through the people analyze that the idea I discussed before about finding people that you think are going to fit, but then they don't have the capability. You then get to a point of thinking, right, you know what? This might need to go back on as a rock.
00:33:30
Speaker
to really go deeper again to roll out the tools or so it's it's it's a brilliant brilliant system to focus everybody and align everybody in the same way and the organization for 90 days that's amazing Adam so let's um would you mind just talking very briefly about self-implementation and why you use the implementer and then just for those watching and listening um Adam works with a guy called Martin Andrew
00:33:57
Speaker
He's an amazing guy. He's been a little bit of a mentor to me. He's one of the guys that inspired me to go and get certificated to implement myself. So I just want to be really clear that Adam's worked with Martin Andrew, even though I'm embarking on that journey. So this isn't a plug for.
00:34:10
Speaker
for my emerging practice. But Adam, can you talk a little bit about why you worked with Martin and an implementer having tried to self implement first? Yeah, so we, as I said, I got involved before or I was exposed to it before lockdown. And we worked internally, I worked internally with someone that really read the book and really got it. And she was absolutely great. And we put a lot of work together to present the concept to the team.
00:34:39
Speaker
And that happened just probably the Tuesday before lockdown. And clearly everything just went out of the window and we got through lockdown and doing whatever we could, came out of lockdown. And as we came out of lockdown, I really, really wanted to push forward with Traction and I talked to my leadership team and they felt that
00:35:02
Speaker
we should reach out and speak to an implementer. So I spoke to Martin, and I remember being on the phone to Martin and saying, look, we've all read the book. We all know what we're doing, really. You're going to be almost preaching to the converted. So almost you don't really need to tell us about a scorecard. You don't need to really tell us about this, that, the other. And Martin came in and
00:35:23
Speaker
and explained how the whole process worked. And it became so clear that we had just scratched the surface. We hadn't realized how deep and how powerful these tools were and how uneducated we were with regard to using them and knowing how they were going to work. And it very quickly became clear that if we wanted to move this forward quickly,
00:35:49
Speaker
And when I say quickly, for a visionary, quickly, this is never quick enough. From my point of view, this is going so slow. But equally, I can look back two years and look how far we've come. But a visionary tends to want things done yesterday. They want things they can't take their foot off the pedal. I want to keep going all the time. Take the shortcut. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do it quicker, faster. And so we would never have been able to keep where we've got. I had the same thing.
00:36:20
Speaker
We just would never have been able to get to where we got without Martin in terms of his depth of knowledge and the structure and delivering it. We would have had to try and learn it. We're not trained in learning it whilst trying to run a bar, restaurant whilst trying to deal with everything that goes on. And so we just and also because.
00:36:39
Speaker
Because of my visionary things, my staff said it was not called traction, it was called fraction because I tried to change everything. I tried to change the rocks instead of them being every 90 days, I tried to change them into monthly.
00:36:53
Speaker
things that were linked to bonuses and it was just me trying to mess with the system and it just it just doesn't work and I certainly think that they talk about sticking with one system and you might see things from other other operating systems or other things that you think wow that looks great that's and I and I still am really really attracted by those shiny things but equally all the tools that you need are in EOS and it's just
00:37:20
Speaker
digging deeper and deeper each time. And every time I come to a tool, I learn something more or the penny drops, certainly when I'm talking to someone like Martin, who just really gets it. So, Adam, we in the new year, you very generously offered to host a kind of a first get together for UK hospitality operators that are either on or interested in
00:37:42
Speaker
self-implementing or assisted implementing EOS. And obviously, Jay Bates from Mirey's gonna join us. Are you happy for folks like other operators to reach out to you between now and then so that they can pick your brains a bit more detail and decide if they wanna come join that session? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's changed my life for the better. It's been brilliant for my personal relationships, my relationships at work,
00:38:11
Speaker
my own personal mental health, my headspace, it's been absolutely brilliant and I can't recommend it to anybody enough. Some people are already sorted, they're already nailing their business and it's absolutely great, which is absolutely fantastic. But I know, and the number of people I talk to that are self-employed or run their own businesses and they're struggling, they're finding it tough and we go into business to open and hopefully it's meant to give us freedom.
00:38:38
Speaker
of time and freedom of money and all of those sorts of things. And very often you find that you're working harder than everybody for less. And so this has just really opened my eyes into a better way. And you know what? It's a much better way for the staff. The people that work with me now, I would argue, I think if you spoke to them would say the plough is a much better place than it was two years ago. And it was a pretty good place two years ago, I would hope. But now it really is great.
00:39:08
Speaker
I actually can testify to that because I've visited the Plough, I've met many of your team now as I've gone on this journey myself and that absolutely resonates. So listen folks, if you are excited by what you've heard from Adam today and you do want to come and hang out with us in the new year and talk about scorecards and vision and people and issues and process with other like-minded operators that
00:39:32
Speaker
that are embarking on the same journey, maybe just a little bit ahead or perhaps even behind you, then please do, I'll put the mine and Adam's contact information in the show notes and you can reach out. Adam, God bless you. Thank you so much for doing this. I've always learned something when I speak to you and I know people that have been watching and listening, this definitely will have to.