Written by Elliot Munro : Partner in GCITS, a Microsoft Gold Partner in Queensland , Australia.
I could discuss the impact that Get Traction and the EOS Model™ has had on our business for hours. But I'll try to be brief, TLDR - we really recommend it.
At GCITS, we're a small team of 8 people. We've been implementing EOS® for the last couple of years and we have a clear vision of where we are headed and how we’ll get there. We’re not perfect, but we’ve come a long way.
What is EOS like in practice?
On a high level, this is what EOS® looks like for our company: Each financial year we meet with our EOS implementor for two days. We discuss how we are working as a team, solve issues and define our targets for the next 1,3 and 10 years. We analyse our sales, marketing and operations. Define what makes us different, including our unique value prop and our company culture. Every quarter, we meet with our EOS implementor for a day, track our progress against our 1, 3 and 10 year targets and define goals for the next quarter. Every Monday, we have a Level 10 meeting for 90 minutes with the entire leadership team. Here, we reflect on the week, report on our accountable metrics and key quarterly goals, then discuss issues and create to-dos.
Since we started EOS:
- Our CSP revenue nearly doubles year on year
- Company revenue grew 35% over last year
- Profit was up 400% over last year
- Our team has grown from six to eight with two more on the way
- Improved content marketing has seen site traffic jump from 600 to 17 000 visits per week.
- We’ve taken the team on a yearly trip overseas to operate remotely for a week
Prior to this we were experiencing issues that seem to be ubiquitous across the industry:
- Lack of focus
- Inconsistent product and service offerings
- Generalised approach to IT services
- Low staff buy-in
- A subset of clients that didn’t align with us.
What did we do differently?
We used the EOS® program to define our company’s vision and share it with the team. We decided that our new company focus would be ‘Security and automation on the Microsoft Cloud’. Around the time we’d started EOS® we had discovered an alarming number of security breaches across customer environments. We’d written some PowerShell scripts to detect unexpected login locations and found evidence of longstanding access by bad actors in multiple unmanaged environments.
To address this, we decided to build our managed service offering around security and start to grow our I.P Services and Solutions. We defined a security focused managed service product, with all the licensing and services that we thought would keep customers safe and productive. We put aside our own ideas of what customers would be willing to pay, packaged it up and presented it to our clients. We discussed our new direction with them, explained the impacts of the recent NDB/GDPR regulations and how we could help address these new challenges.
Due to the increased cost of our service, we lost a few existing clients, but way less than we’d expected. Nearly all our customers stayed with us, even if it meant paying 3 to 5 times more per month than before. The benefits for our customers were increased security, peace of mind and access to the best productivity tools and services. The benefits for us are a happier team, a consistent and reliable stack, MUCH lower ticket counts and we’re working on the things we enjoy while we grow our business. By participating in the EOS® program, we were able to identify what we did best, build a service around it, take it to market and use the tools to solve any issues along the way.
