When a company is in its early stages, one of the biggest challenges is that the knowledge, decisions, and vision that helped to start the business often remain trapped inside one person’s head.
When you first start out, this isn’t a problem because it’s just you. You sit close enough to the work and the vision to understand what is happening and why. But growth changes that. More people become involved. More decisions need to be made. More complexity enters the business. What once worked through instinct and memory becomes increasingly difficult to scale.
This is where systems become essential.
Getting it all out of your head
In a nutshell, systems allow ideas to move from one person’s head into a shared space that more people can access and use. A good system doesn’t replace people. Systems provide people in your organization with a common language. They articulate what is known so that other people can understand, contribute, act, and improve. Systems create alignment and a shared understanding.
Without this visibility and understanding, people are left to fill in the gaps themselves, and that’s never a good thing. And when people don’t understand how to do things, why things are being done in a certain way, how decisions are being made, or where the organization is going, confusion and mistrust often follow.
One conversation from years ago captures this lesson for me.
My business partner and I used to hold regular meetings at a local bar. They were valuable conversations. We would talk about whatever seemed important that day. Sometimes we brainstormed. Sometimes we solved problems. Sometimes we discussed clients, hiring, opportunities, or frustrations.
One afternoon, I suggested that we spend more time discussing long-term planning and goal setting.
The response surprised me.
“Why don’t you trust me?”
I remember immediately thinking that trust wasn’t the issue.
The truth was that I trusted him completely at the time. We’ve known each other for most of our lives. He’s one of the smartest and most capable people I’ve ever worked with. He cares deeply about the company and spends an incredible amount of time thinking about its future.
What we realized looking back is that this wasn’t really about setting goals. Goals are important, but by themselves, they accomplish very little. We realized that we had no system for us to align on our vision and then get what was in our heads out into the organization. We needed a trusted system for discussing ideas, opportunities, making decisions, communicating priorities, assigning responsibility, measuring progress, and adjusting course when needed.
As I’ll mention later, the process we now follow is called “Rock Setting,” and it’s from The Entrepreneurial Operating System. It not only requires us to set yearly and long-term goals, but it also gives us a process to actually achieve our goals and hold ourselves accountable. It’s a game-changer.
When you’re just starting out, you simply don’t operate like this. But as you grow, nothing can just be in one person’s head. Embracing systems forces everything out into the organization, and it’s always a good thing.
Standing on the shoulders of giants
It’s my opinion that your personal knowledge and experience has limits. Many people don’t like to admit this, but I think it’s true. If you’re unable to admit this as a business owner, you’ll be limiting yourself.
When you’re starting a company, experience feels like the answer to almost everything. You do the work. You make mistakes, improve, adjust, and move forward for the better. Every challenge teaches you something new, and every success reinforces the belief that if you work hard enough at it and learn all the important secrets, you’ll figure everything out.
In the early days, that’s exactly how we operated at Sanctuary.
When our small team of smart people encountered a problem, we worked through it and did it better the next time. When we needed a process, we created one. When we faced an important decision, we relied on the experience and judgment of multiple people. None of this was unreasonable, and things usually worked out “ok”.
The challenge is that eventually, experience and your combined knowledge stop being enough because you continually face challenges and issues that are new to you. As companies grow, complexity grows with you. The issues are bigger. More people become involved. More decisions need to be made. More perspectives, opinions, and yes, experience enter the conversation. This can be beneficial at times because the pool of knowledge is larger. But what once worked through informal discussions and shared understanding starts becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
What I think is important to realize is that there are trusted systems available to all of us that ensure that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel when our collective experience runs out.
Here’s another story.
Debates are a good thing. But when debates involve many people, meetings can often become unproductive. People bring their own experience, perspectives, opinions, and everyone is operating from slightly different assumptions and angles. Complex discussions about vision, hiring, planning, accountability, financial decisions, or priorities end up taking far longer than they should because everyone is just trying to “figure it out” together.
Nobody is wrong.
Nobody is trying to create conflict.
Nobody is trying to waste time.
Everyone has the best interests of the company at heart.
It’s just that everyone is working through their own lens, all while trying to fill in the gaps where their knowledge and experience are limited. This tends to result in circular debates that just land on someone’s opinion and best guess, but no clear right or wrong answer.
Over time, those debates create an incredible amount of friction internally. They can create frustration and resentment. They consume important energy that could be spent moving the business forward.
At worst, they produce mediocrity and even failure because the decisions were flawed.
I can think of countless situations where we spent hours debating questions that, in reality, thousands of businesses had already solved.
How do you turn vision into execution?
How do you do the work consistently and serve your clients?
How do you surface and permanently solve issues?
How do you hire, manage, support, and develop your team?
How do you make good financial decisions based on facts instead of feelings?
These are not unique challenges. Businesses all over the world face them every day. Yet for years, we often approached them as if we needed to discover the answers ourselves. Eventually, we began to realize that there was a better way.
Instead of relying solely on our own experience and knowledge and arriving at an opinion of what we thought might be right, we could embrace a trusted system that had been tested and refined through the experience of thousands of successful organizations. We could literally stand on the shoulders of giants.
Here are just a few examples:
- Getting Things Done (Personal productivity and work management)
- Lean Manufacturing (For quality and continuous improvement)
- Agile + Scrum (For project and workflow management)
- Simple Numbers (Financial Management)
- EOS (Business Operating Systems)
EOS has been one of the most valuable systems that we’ve embraced, and it’s the foundation of how we run our business. At its core, it’s a trusted business system designed to help organizations gain clarity, alignment, and accountability. It provides a practical framework of tools, meeting rhythms, goal-setting processes, and problem-solving methods that help leadership teams execute consistently, solve issues effectively, and keep the entire organization moving toward a shared vision.
Sidenote: There’s a sub-system in EOS that’s explained in the book “How to be a great boss” by Gino Wickman that provides an excellent system for people management. (Highly Recommended!)
The Simple Numbers system specifically has helped us create visibility around our numbers and implement clearer rules around how we think about financial health, growth, hiring, cash reserves, debt, and long-term sustainability.
The value of the Simple Numbers system is that it allows everyone on our leadership team to actually see the data and know what to do with it. It’s all out in the open and not stuck in one person’s head. This system gives everyone the visibility and data that we need to plan, make informed decisions, and grow in a sustainable way.
Creating efficiencies and freedom
Outside of having visibility, understanding, and trust, something interesting happened as these systems have been integrated into our company.
The conversations improved.
The debates became shorter.
The frustrations were reduced.
We still have differing opinions. We still challenge each other. We still bring different perspectives to important discussions. There are still unique issues to solve. But, we’re no longer starting from scratch every time and burning through our limited time and energy just to arrive at someone’s opinion. Instead of debating the rules and trying to build our house from scratch, we’re usually discussing how to actually execute based on a trusted set of plans.
That change has created an incredible amount of freedom for everyone.
When people hear the word “structure,” they often assume it means more control or bureaucracy.
I’ve found the opposite to be true.
Systems create efficiency.
Systems create autonomy.
Systems create confidence and trust.
Systems create empowerment.
Systems create freedom.
Our team benefits because they have clarity around expectations, priorities, process, and decision-making. They don’t have to guess what leadership wants or interpret unwritten rules. They can lead with confidence because they simply understand what to do.
New team members can learn the system rather than trying to decipher how things work through observation and interpretation alone. Even clients benefit because they experience a more consistent and aligned organization that ultimately ends up doing better work, together.
When people know what is expected, they gain autonomy.
When priorities are visible, they can move faster.
When accountability is clear, they can take ownership and feel empowered.
Today, Sanctuary operates very differently from the way it did years ago. The company is less dependent on any one person. More leaders can lead. More decisions can happen without oversight. More people understand not only what we’re trying to accomplish, but how we’re trying to accomplish it.
We’re still learning. We certainly don’t have everything figured out. But we’ve stopped trying to build a house without the plans.
My lesson here as a leader is to continually learn from people who have already solved the problems you’re facing. It’s “ok” to not have all the answers. How could you?
Adopt proven systems and commit to them.
Stand on the shoulders of giants, and someday you might be one too.