Reflections from our CEO

Last month I shared part two in our transformational change journey that occurred in 2021 when we first implemented EOS.  If you missed it, here’s a link to both part one and part two of our journey. As a reminder, EOS stands for the Entrepreneurial Operating System which is a set of simple concepts and practical tools that help organizations clarify, simplify, and achieve their vision. This final article in our series picks up in January 2022 after one full year of using EOS. After a year of running the business on EOS at the executive team level, we were ready to roll it out throughout the entire organization. 

As I reflect back, there are two areas I believe had the most impact during 2022 that helped us gain traction with EOS and set the stage for our record revenue year.

First, was the focus on LMA (Leading, managing, and

holding people accountable) with our business unit leaders. 

We created a detailed training curriculum to help them learn the SSE Way to lead their teams and manage the overall business. We spent a lot of time developing and simplifying our Core Processes that we use every day to ensure success. We gained input from the entire team and revised these processes multiple times throughout the year. The executive team and business leaders started holding Quarterly Conversations with their direct reports to discuss what was working/not working, their relationship with each other, the accountabilities of their role, and the GWC (do you Get the role, do you still Want the role, and do you have the Capacity to do the job).

Second, was the implementation of an individual and department scorecard.

A scorecard is a tool to track activities that if accomplished consistently predict future success.  I’ll be completely honest, this EOS tool has been the most painful to implement and get right. It evolved over the entire year and personally didn’t completely ‘sink in’ for me until earlier this year.  As an organization, we have always been very metrics driven. But prior to getting the scorecard right, we typically measured outcomes like billable hours, number of orders written, number of client interviews, and number of offers/hires.  These are all outcomes/results and are not activities that predict anything.  They are also results that our staff did not feel they had complete control over. Even though we didn’t immediately get it right, the focus on our scorecard measurables, did have a huge impact on our 2022 results.  And I am pleased to say that after many, many conversations and training with our EOS Implementor, I think we finally got it. We are now tracking things like number of phone screens, number of candidates presented, and number of client/prospect conversations, all the activities that predict how well we will do at meeting our commitments to our candidates and customers.

We wrapped up 2022 with 45% year-over-year growth and 25% growth over 2019 pre-pandemic levels.  I am so very proud of this team and their commitment to this transformational journey.  It definitely wasn’t always easy, but impactful change often isn’t.  Their focus and determination to make SSE the best it can be has positioned us for continued growth and success far into the future.