Get a Grip: Why You Need Traction to Grow
Traction is the difference between spinning your wheels and getting your business on the road to success. Learn how these methods of gaining control can supercharge business growth and focus.
To grow your business, you have to guide it consistently and carefully. Business success is not about luck. It’s about you harnessing the tools you have to push your vision forward.
Traction is crucial in growing and sustaining your business. To increase revenue and customers, teams must be aligned, and all parts of the company must be contributing to moving the overall machinery forward toward your vision.
So what is business traction, exactly, and how can you create it?
What do we mean by traction?
Think of traction in the literal sense, with the tires on your car. Without traction, nothing is making your vehicle move forward. When you hit the gas, your wheels just spin, meaning you’re expending energy but not getting anywhere.
Don’t just spin your wheels in business, wasting energy that’s not leading you to reach your goals or to grow. Traction is your ability to make nearly every decision and action count in the long run. It’s about taking control of the business and being deliberate. You can only fill the gap between vision and execution with traction.
The Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) allows you to gain traction in all of your business’s moving parts. This means creating a team that holds each other accountable, is disciplined, communicates well, and executes actions and steps that move you forward. Making these changes may be a little uncomfortable at first, but recognize that temporary discomfort is a requirement for growth.
How do you create traction?
Let’s break down these moving parts.
1. Creating an accountable team
The vision and goals you’ve created won’t be realized unless everyone is on board and acts consistently to reach those goals. This requires accountability for all personnel, including (and especially) leadership. Set up clear tactics to holding each other accountable for plans, strategies, and methods that have been put in place.
Methods of accountability include checking in with team members to ensure deadlines are being met, steps are being executed, and every decision made aligns with the company’s mission and vision for the future.
2. Building a disciplined team
These methods then contribute to a more disciplined team overall. A sense of direction will be made clear for everyone when it can be defined in big-picture terms. Explain how each role fits into that big picture.
If something is not serving the overall goal, it should be reevaluated to see if it’s still a relevant process or task. This creates more efficiency and leads to more growth opportunities.
3. Communicating more effectively
A big issue that can develop quickly on any team is poor communication. When this happens, resentment builds, trust lessens, and all that discipline and accountability go out the window. The three factors must work in conjunction with one another.
Make communication a priority within your team. Promote honesty and openness, and give employees at all levels a chance to voice their opinions and contribute to the strategy. Ask for feedback and change your approach accordingly. Update your recruiting practices so that you’re focusing on hiring team members who are a good fit with the company’s values.
How does traction promote business growth?
When your teams are aligned, and they’re holding each other accountable to reach goals and stay in line with the company’s vision, traction is created, which then shifts into the key elements that lead to growth. These key elements are revenue growth and better lead generation and customer retention strategies. Without traction, you won’t be able to handle or execute these important elements of growth.
With traction and momentum created by an aligned team, your business can contribute to and properly manage increased revenue, more customers, and more repeat customers. These are all crucial elements for long-term growth, and they’re realized by creating and meeting specific goals, in addition to measuring success.
Well-defined goals and a clear vision both attract investors for new companies and help more established companies to remain stable and sustainable. Progress toward these goals must be measured regularly to help improve strategies for optimal success.
Metrics to track include things like sales numbers, churn rate, customer retention rate, customer lifetime value, and customer feedback. Employee response time is also a significant factor to be aware of to improve customer service.
It’s time to bring discipline and accountability to your team to execute your vision better and create a sustainable, growing business.
Provident CPA & Business Advisors implements EOS with our clients to help you improve the six key components of your business: vision, people, data, issues, process, and traction. We help you solve big problems for good and create plans that will promote growth and profit improvement. Get in touch with our team to get started.