After the 90-Minute Meeting at the very start of the EOS Process®, organizations adopting the Entrepreneurial Operating System® hold a full-day meeting called the Focus Day®. This meeting is designed to give leadership teams some basic tools to break through the ceilings currently holding back their progress.

Preparing for a Focus Day

The Focus Day aims to equip the leadership team with the tools they need to impact the business immediately. The concepts and methodologies of EOS play an essential part in implementing the system, but the tools covered help address actual pain points. As you and your team prepare for your Focus Day, review the following sections of the EOS Toolbox inside our Knowledge tool:

• Delegate and Elevate
• The Accountability Chart®
• Rocks
• The Meeting Pulse®
• Scorecard

We built Ninety to grow with you as you advance through the EOS Process. Before your Focus Day begins, explore the relevant tools on Ninety. You may even want to begin drafting ideas and populating the tools. Learn more about how our platform can help below.

Your Accountability Chart In Ninety

During Focus Day, you’ll take a fresh look at the structure of your organization. Are people in the right seats? Have you created the right seats to fulfill each function of the business? Is your current structure built for growth? Do you have mechanisms in place to make sure you’re hiring and retaining the right people?

Answering these questions takes time. Opportunities like the Focus Day allow the leadership team to step back and work on the business.

Following the EOS model of an Accountability Chart allows you to focus on defining function-specific roles and responsibilities rather than titles or even the skills of your current team members. Throughout the session, your leadership team will clarify the needs of each department.

New accounts on Ninety start with five Seats on the Accountability Chart:

1. Visionary
2. Integrator
3. Sales/Marketing
4. Operations
5. Finance

Use these as a starting point. Our help articles can help you edit these Seats and expand your Accountability Chart to make it the source of truth for your organization’s structure.

Identify and Document Your Company’s Rocks

One of the most effective ways to gain traction on your organization’s progress toward its vision is to identify, document, and complete its Rocks — these are the most important things you can accomplish this quarter. It’s best practice to tie these quarterly goals to more significant initiatives and other long-term goals. But if your team is just starting to establish its vision for the organization, then focus on the obstacles in your way right now. What would meaningfully solve them do for your business?

Each leadership team member should take on and be accountable for approximately three to seven Rocks. Then, as a team, nominate about that same amount to label as “Company Rocks;” these are the most important projects to complete this quarter. By aligning on what’s most important, your teams can justify pushing resources toward getting smart things done.

Learn more about building and prioritizing Rocks from my blog, How to Implement EOS® Rocks for Business Success.

Establishing and Maintaining a Meeting Pulse

A common theme of the Entrepreneurial Operating System is aligning teams toward greater goals. Alignment takes place during regularly occurring team meetings. If you haven’t already started a practice of weekly Level 10 Meetings® as a leadership team, you should commit to the habit moving forward from the Focus Day. There are five key points to establishing a strong Meeting Pulse for weekly meetings:

1. Meet on the same day.
2. Meet at the same scheduled time.
3. Use the same agenda.
4. Start on time.
5. End on time.

Ninety’s Meetings tool simplifies each of these five steps. Learn more about using this tool from these help center articles. For the Focus Day, your team should familiarize itself with the practice of maintaining a Scorecard (more on that below), following up on To-Dos, and identifying, discussing, and solving Issues (IDS®).

Holding your weekly Level 10 Meetings will keep your team aligned and practice the ability to set time aside for working “on” instead of “in” the business. Roughly 30 days after the Focus Day, you’ll hold Vision Building Day 1 to build upon what you’ve learned so far, work on your Core Values, identify your Core Focus (Purpose, Cause, Passion + Niche), and determine your 10-Year Target™. All of these items and more are documented in Ninety’s V/TO tool. After another 30 days, you’ll hold the Vision Building Day 2 meeting. This is when you’ll complete the first iteration of your Vision Traction Organizer (V/TO) by developing a Marketing Strategy, building a 3-Year Picture, aligning on a 1-Year Plan, setting quarterly Rocks, and identifying Long-Term Issues.

From there, the leadership team enters the 90-Day World — a continuous cycle of weekly Level 10 Meetings capped off each quarter with a Quarterly Planning Session and one yearly Annual Planning Session. You can find agendas for all of these meetings built directly into Ninety’s platform.

Monitoring Your Past, Present, and Future with Scorecards

Each team in Ninety has its own Scorecard tool that can track Measurables across multiple timeframes. During the Focus Day, your team’s goal is to establish 5-15 weekly Measurables to track the health of the business and the progress of your goals.

Throughout the meeting, you may want to make notes about the Seats you’re creating. Ask yourself, “What kind of Measurable(s) can we use to create accountability for this Seat’s roles and responsibilities?” As you’re creating Rocks, ensure they can be measured to show how they affect the organization.

We want to help you make data a superpower. Learn more about our Scorecard tool from these articles.

Starting a Focus Day On Ninety

To start your Focus Day on Ninety:

1. Click Meetings from the left navigation.
2. Click the Start Meeting button.
3. Select Focus Day from the list of agendas.
4.  

The other leadership team members can quickly join the meeting by clicking Join Meeting on the Meetings tool page.

The EOS Focus Day® Agenda

The following agenda is pre-built into your Ninety account.

1. Check-In — 30 minutes.
2. Hitting the Ceiling — 30 minutes.
3. Accountability Chart — 180 minutes.
4. Rocks — 120 minutes.
5. Meeting Pulse — 45 minutes.
6. Data — 60 minutes.
7. Next Steps — 7 minutes.
8. Conclude — 8 minutes.