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Excerpt
Sean: What are some of the biggest problems that entrepreneurs face after the startup stage?
Jeff: You really got to focus on getting that customer in the door, but once you start hitting that growth phase and saying, Hey, okay, This is simply more than I can handle with my two or three people around me. We’ve got to go and grow this and scale this that’s where, and really on up as long as you’ve still got that entrepreneurial kind of mindset of saying, “Hey, I want more, I want to grow this company. There’s more possibilities here than what we’re currently capable of.”
That’s where EOS really sits is that sweet spot. So from a struggle standpoint, a lot of times it really kind of varies based upon what that entrepreneur wants out of business. So I’ll have people ask me all the time, it’s like, well, what’s your profitability measurements that you get out of EOS?
It really doesn’t necessarily go that way because one entrepreneur may want more profitability and they might say, “Hey. We used to be at 30, 40% margins. We’ve added on new staff. We should have scaled up. And now we’re only at 10% margins. What happened?” And that’s, that’s a lot of times that, okay, we don’t have the systems, we don’t have the training, et cetera.
We don’t have the efficiencies anymore that we used to have. At the same time they may be looking at, it may simply be that, “Hey, I want I’m the visionary type entrepreneur. I’m tired of fighting fires. I’m tired of dealing with issues in the business. I want to go play golf on Fridays and go back and have those conversations. Those big conversations with my friends or the people out on the golf course. I didn’t want that time back, that enjoyment back. Because I’m spending too much time right now doing stuff I don’t like basically.”
And it kind of takes the fun out of what, of the business. And that’s really what I’ve seen a lot of times. Cause you have the early stage kind of failures where obviously the product has been launched, but then you’ve also got a whole another stage, usually about five to seven years before you start saying. Those businesses have fallen as well, and a lot of times that’s really the entrepreneur, the visionary type said, okay, I was having fun down here where we were at four or five, 10, whatever people, early stage kind of a thing.
Now that this has turned into a 20, 30 person company, this is business. This is work. I want to go back to playing in my area here, or whether it’s technology or medical or take your pick, whatever your little focus is that this is your enjoyment play area. And now you’re having to handle staffing.
You’re having to handle finances. You’re having to handle marketing and sales and you don’t know necessarily how do I, how do I get back to having fun? How do I structure this business? So it’s really a sense of frustration, almost more than anything. It’s okay. I don’t, I don’t know what to do. It’s stuck here on the business that in many ways, like I said, it used to be fun.
We used to be lightweight. We used to be agile. We could adjust real quick. Now it takes six months for anything reasonable to happen. And even then it’s a questionable kind of a thing there. And it’s just, everything’s stuck in the mud. Nothing’s moving forward anyway. So a lot of times it’s just pure frustration with the business and where they are.