Gaining Traction

When you launch a business, you often treat and care for it much like your own children. It needs your full attention — not just to keep it alive, but also to become something that can stand on its own. The hours are long, and the amount of energy it takes is something you really can't understand until you've done it.

But, like our kids, our businesses grow up. For me, these two things happened in parallel.  I started Blend when my son was a baby, and when he became a teenager, I realized that Blend had as well. For over a decade, we'd been running Blend successfully, yet still viewed it as a scrappy startup just trying to make it. Just like my own teenager, it was time for Blend to mature and grow.

Since owning a company doesn't instantly make us good leaders, we'd embarked on a new chapter to help us be better and hired Navigate the Journey to help us get there. Leadership development and coaching led us to EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. After a year of tough decisions and hard work, we had a shared vision for Blend, gained TRACTION® that instilled focus, discipline, and accountability throughout the company, and now have a more cohesive and healthy leadership team.

Three years later, EOS is now in the background of everything we do at Blend. It's our toolbox when problems arise. It’s a system for identifying and solving issues. We have identified the future in manageable chunks — a ten-year vision of what we strive to become, a three-year picture of what it will look like on our way there, and a one-year plan to move us forward — and we ensure progress happens week-to-week through quarterly rocks and weekly L10 meetings. We all work on the company, no matter the position at Blend. We're a team, and we each know our individual responsibilities for which we're accountable.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” - African proverb

We're all in. We've read all the books. We have an EOS implementer challenging us every 90 days. We attend events, workshops, and conferences, including the 2021 EOS Worldwide Conference in Houston last month. We even got to meet Gino Wickman, the founder of EOS, as well as other members of the Entrepreneurial Operating System community.

If you couldn't tell, I'm a big fan and advocate of EOS and Traction. You can learn more and catch me speaking at an upcoming event in Sioux Falls hosted by our friends at Keystone International. I'd love for you to attend.

It's been fun watching Blend evolve quickly over the last three years since implementing EOS. It's been a lot of change in a short amount of time, but that's just part of growing up.