Why I Tell Every Business Owner to Read Traction

If you own a business and want a bit more structure, or you want to start one and are not sure where to begin, there is one book I keep coming back to. It is called Traction, it is by Gino Wickman, and I recommend it to just about every business owner I talk to.

This is not a book review in the usual sense. I want to explain why I think structure is the thing most small businesses are missing, what this book actually gives you, and how to start using it without turning your business upside down.

A business without structure crumbles at the first real challenge

This is my belief, and it is the reason I bother recommending the book at all. For a business to stand the test of time, it needs structure. Without it, the business holds together right up until something tests it, and then it falls over.

Most small businesses run out of the owner's head. The plan is in your head. The numbers are in your head, or in the accountant's inbox once a quarter. The jobs for the week live somewhere between your phone, your ute and your memory. That works surprisingly well, right up until it does not. A big month lands and things start slipping. A good staff member leaves and takes half the know-how with them. You get crook for a week and the whole place stalls.

None of that means anyone is doing anything wrong. It means the business is resting on one person, and one person is a single point of failure. Structure is what spreads the load.

Where I found it

Back when I was starting my own business, I was trying to work out how to run it properly. Not how to do the work, I knew how to do the work. How to run the thing. How to set a direction, how to know whether we were on track, and how to stop the same problems turning up every week.

Someone introduced me to Traction, and I loved it. It demystified a lot of things for me. More than that, it gave me steps I could actually take and a structure to put around the business, which is rarer than it should be in business books.

What is actually in it

Traction lays out EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Wickman built and refined the system over years of working with real businesses, then wrote the book so any owner could pick it up and run with it. The idea underneath it is simple. A business is made of six key components, and if each one is strong, the business runs well.

• Vision. Everyone knows where the business is going and how it plans to get there.
• People. The right people, in the right seats.
• Data. A handful of numbers you check every week, so you know where you stand before the bank statement tells you.
• Issues. Problems get named and solved properly, rather than talked around for months.
• Process. The way you do things is written down and followed, so it does not live in one person's head.
• Traction. Discipline and accountability, so the vision turns into things actually getting done.

For each component there is a tool, and that is the part I like most. You are not left with 'get a clearer vision'. You get a two-page document that asks you eight specific questions, and once you have answered them, you have a clearer vision.

Not a bunch of conceptual stuff

A lot of business books are one good idea stretched over two hundred pages. You finish them feeling motivated, with no idea what to do on Monday. Traction is the opposite. It gives you the actionable steps and the worked examples, and it tells you what order to do them in.

Some of the tools, in plain English:

• The Vision/Traction Organizer. Two pages that capture your core values, what the business focuses on, where you want to be in ten years, three years and one year, and what you are working on this quarter.
• The Accountability Chart. Like an org chart, but built around the jobs that need doing rather than the people you already have. In a small business your own name often ends up in most of the boxes, which is a useful thing to see on paper.
• Rocks. Three to seven priorities for the next ninety days. Not everything, just the few things that matter most this quarter.
• The Scorecard. A small set of weekly numbers that tell you how the business is tracking.
• The Level 10 Meeting. A weekly meeting with the same agenda every time, where most of the time goes on solving problems rather than giving updates.
• IDS. Identify, Discuss, Solve. A simple way to deal with an issue so it stays dealt with.

You do not need a big team for this

A fair question is whether this is only for bigger companies. It was written with a leadership team in mind, and some of it assumes you have one. But most of the tools scale down well.

If it is just you, the Vision/Traction Organizer still works, and it might matter more, because nobody else is going to hold the vision for you. Rocks work. A Scorecard of five numbers works. A weekly meeting can be thirty minutes with your partner, your office manager or your bookkeeper. The structure is the point, not the headcount.

Where I would suggest starting

I would not try to install all of it in a week. That is the quickest way to give up on it. If I were starting again, this is the order I would go in:

1. Read the book, or listen to it. It is on audiobook too, which suits the drive between jobs.
2. Fill in the Vision/Traction Organizer, even roughly. A rough version you can see beats a perfect one that lives in your head.
3. Pick your Rocks for the next ninety days. Three is plenty to start with.
4. Choose five numbers to check every week, and put them somewhere you will actually look.
5. Book a weekly meeting, same day and same time, and keep it even when the week gets busy.

That is about a month of work, give or take, and it changes how the business feels to run. The rest of the system can come later.

A few honest caveats

• It takes discipline. The tools are simple. Sticking with them past the first few weeks is the hard part.
• Some of it is written for teams of ten or more, so take what fits and park the rest for later.
• There is a whole EOS consulting world around the book, with paid implementers. None of that is required to get value from it. Plenty of businesses work through it from the book alone, and EOS Worldwide offers free downloads of the main tools on its website.
• I have no connection to EOS Worldwide and there is no affiliate link here. I just think it is a very good book.

Over to you

If your business is still running mostly out of your head, I would suggest giving Traction a go. Grab it from any bookshop, borrow it from the library, or put the audiobook on in the car. Even if you only take one tool from it, that is one more piece of structure than you had before.

Over the next few posts and videos I am going to go into some of the specific things I took from it, one tool at a time. And if you read it and want to talk any of it through with a real human, feel free to reach out. I'm here for you. I will catch you in the next one.