The challenge
Northstar started 21 years ago, out of the back of a minivan. It grew fast: from a $2 to 3 million business six years ago to about $38 million last year. When they started EOS five years ago, their business coach was shocked to find they weren't tracking anything. "How are you guys even successful?" he asked. The honest answer: they always had been.
There was no real system behind the growth. The numbers lived in QuickBooks and one spreadsheet nobody could actually use. Their EOS Implementer introduced Bloom Growth to keep the work from their sessions going between them, but the team never took to it.
All I could hear was a lot of agitation with the tool. The tool was slowing us down.
The solution
At around 100 people, EOS touches almost everyone at Northstar, so how they rolled it out mattered as much as the tool. They wanted every team to feel that EOS was a system working for them, not something they did for show.
They moved to Success.co. It was easy for the whole company to pick up, and it gave the leadership team one place to share the vision, the structure and the processes with every team below them.
It's not directly the software that changed things. But it is an amazing tool that helped us become more objective and more accountable to the decisions that needed to be made.
The results
With everyone working from the same plan, Northstar came together quickly and moved fast: a handful of people changes and process changes, made with clear owners and clear decisions. After five years on EOS, it finally feels like it works. As one of the team told Travis: "In the last six months, we've actually had EOS work for us."
For Travis, that's the point: "To feel like something is actually helping people make their day better, that's pretty cool."
