“OK, let’s talk personal and business best.”
It’s April, and my husband, Ben, and I are sitting at our back porch table in the spring warmth—me hunched over my laptop, and him finishing a cup of coffee.
While this setup isn’t necessarily novel, it stands out today because we’re not just working outside—we’re holding our first L10.
The L10 is EOS-speak for the weekly Level 10 Meeting, where we:
- Give updates
- List out issues
- Solve them in real-time
- Walk away with a clear to-do list.
On this Monday afternoon, we’re a little awkward and unsure—like we’re playing business instead of actually running one.
We’re a boutique financial consulting group, and we’ve made it this far without implementing any kind of structure. It’s a new dance, and we’re trying to honor its formalities without taking ourselves too seriously.
Fast Forward Six Months: L10 and Growth
Jump ahead six months, and we’re wrapping our weekly L10 on Zoom with our first hire, Noah. The meeting now flows seamlessly through the prescribed rhythms, offering us the space to:
- Solve the issues that have come up over the week (IDS anyone?).
- Track key metrics on our Scorecard to help us hit our goals.
- Feel our named Core Values in our bones and run every decision through them.
Jumping into the EOS community as a smaller business was full of little fits and starts—just like adopting our weekly L10. But our EOS Implementer, Anastasia Toomey, saw the potential in what we were doing and treated us like a larger operation. This meant we got to grow up.
EOS’s Impact on Amplify: Five Key Activities
For our company, Amplify, this transformation was the result of five key activities we implemented as part of our EOS journey:
1. We Named Our Core Values
Naming our Core Values has impacted every corner of our business. This might seem overly dramatic, considering how most businesses treat core values (e.g., Integrity! Quality! Honesty!). But that’s the beauty of the EOS way.
Instead of allowing us to name qualities that are basic expectations in any decent interaction, Anastasia pushed us to dig deeper into the beliefs that truly make Amplify what it is.
For us, this meant stepping away from the tired classics and naming values that resonated with us, such as:
- Hospitality
- Relationships Over Transactions
- Healthy Life Rhythms
- A Friendly Guide Approach
From there, we made bold statements like: “We will always be willing to spend extra time and money to offer our clients a more hospitable experience, and we encourage our team to notice creative ways we can do this.”
It’s not everyone’s core value, but it’s ours, and it spills over into everything we do.
2. We Defined the Roles We Wanted to Fill
The first time Anastasia showed us a sample accountability chart listing roles like Visionary, Integrator, Finance and Marketing, she asked us one simple question: “Which seat do you each want to own?”
At first, our response was super vague: “Oh, well, we’re both visionaries who love to dream but also get things done!” But Anastasia wasn’t having it. She pushed us to do the hard work of thinking about which role we were each best at (“Gets it! Wants it! Can do it!”) and then consider how Amplify would look and operate if we each owned just one seat.
Of course, as a small business, our names were still scattered across the chart, filling seats they had no place in. But realizing our limitations led us to the next pivotal step.
3. We Made Our First Hire
Recognizing our human limitations, we realized Ben needed to step out of some of the day-to-day operations. We had fallen prey to the yo-yo cycle of consulting: You sell so much that you bog yourself down with operations and have no time left to sell. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
The numbers work we do is a heavy lift. We hadn’t hired anyone because we thought it would be hard to find someone who shared our Core Value of hospitality while also possessing the brainpower for financial forecasting.
Anastasia helped us see that this fear was unfounded, and she asked if we hoped to ever grow beyond a two-person team. Spoiler: we did.
With Anastasia’s confidence in us, we circulated a job description and hired Noah part-time. He took on enough operations work to free Ben to focus more on his role as Visionary and Sales Lead. Selling more no longer meant Ben had to be bogged down by every detail of day-to-day work.
4. We Built a Weekly Rhythm with the L10
Despite our initial awkwardness keeping time during a weekly meeting and using the L10 template to keep things moving, we eventually came to love the rhythm. Every Monday from 1-2:30, we hop on Zoom to:
- Give updates
- Name issues we’re facing
- Spend time solving them
It’s simple, but most of us run for years without this kind of accountability. Now, our L10 has become something we look forward to. It also frees up conversations during the rest of the week because we know we can say, “Let’s chat about that on Monday.”
5. We Set 3-Month Goals (Rocks) and Completed Them
Oh, the power of accountability.
Simply saying a goal out loud and committing to it means it’s more likely to get done. In our Quarterly Meetings, we name our Rocks for the coming quarter, and then we just get them done. It’s not always easy, but it prevents us from pushing things into the future just because we’re busy with day-to-day operations. It also gives us the freedom to name big goals and actually hit them.
Moving Forward
After six months of running on EOS, we’re already committed to sponsoring the 2025 EOS conference. We believe in the process because we’ve seen it play out beautifully in our company.
Have we hit all of our wildest financial goals in that short time? No. Do we sometimes doubt ourselves? Yes. But we’re confident that we’re plowing in the right field, using the right tools and planting the seeds we hope to grow.
And for us, that has been transformational.
