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No One Told You This About Productivity—And It’s Costing You Big Time

April 8, 2025• Issues, People, Process

You’re drowning in distractions.
Your team is constantly firefighting.
And no matter how hard you work, it feels like you’re stuck in place.

Sound familiar?

Here’s why: You’re not compartmentalizing your work effectively. And if you don’t fix this, your business will stay chaotic, your stress will keep rising, and your biggest goals will never get the attention they deserve.

But once you learn to compartmentalize like elite organizations do…

🔥 You’ll regain control of your time.
🔥 Your team will execute with ruthless focus.
🔥 And your business will finally scale—without you having to carry all the weight.

The Four Types of Work: What’s Stealing Your Focus?

Every single thing you do in your business falls into one of these four categories. Most entrepreneurs spend their time in the wrong ones.

🚨 Fire Drills: Urgent, non-value-adding crises that must be handled immediately—but don’t grow the business.
🎯 Strategic Priorities (90-Day Rocks): The mission-critical work that actually moves you forward. These should command 80% of your time.
💡 Bright, Shiny Objects: The tempting distractions that seem exciting but don’t align with your strategy. Capture them for later—don’t chase them now.
⏳ Wasted Time: The meetings, emails, and nonsense that eat your day and kill your momentum. Cut this out ruthlessly.

Most business owners spend too much time on fire drills and distractions—and not nearly enough on strategic execution. Here’s how to fix that.

The 90-Day Execution System: How Elite Teams Stay Focused

If you’re serious about compartmentalizing your work and executing at a high level, you need a 90-day execution system. This is what separates the top-performing businesses from the ones that constantly spin their wheels.

Here’s how it works:

✅ Set 90-Day Rocks: Identify the 3-5 most critical priorities for the quarter. These aren’t “nice-to-haves.” They are non-negotiable, must-win initiatives.
✅ Hold Weekly Tactical Meetings: Every week, check progress on each Rock. Are you on track? If not, fix it now—don’t wait until it’s too late.
✅ Use Milestones to Prevent Last-Minute Chaos: Break your Rocks into smaller milestones. No more procrastination. No more last-minute scrambling.

Eliminate Distractions, Protect Your Focus

Even the best-laid plans will fail if you don’t ruthlessly eliminate distractions.

❌ Defer Non-Priority Tasks: Capture bright, shiny objects for later—but don’t chase them now.

❌ Reduce Fire Drills: If the same emergencies keep happening, fix the root cause so they stop.

❌ Cut Wasted Time: Kill useless meetings. Streamline communication. Automate or delegate low-value tasks.

Accountability: The Secret Weapon That Drives Execution

Plans don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because no one follows through.

💥 Weekly Check-Ins: Every leader must report on their Rocks every single week. No exceptions.
💥 Track Progress Publicly: Use a simple on-track/off-track system to flag issues early—before they derail your quarter.
💥 Prevent the Procrastination Curve: Most people push work until the last minute. Weekly milestones stop this from happening.

Your Business Will Stay Stuck Until You Fix This

You can keep grinding day after day, constantly fighting fires, chasing distractions, and feeling overwhelmed.

Or you can compartmentalize your work, install a 90-day execution system, and start scaling with clarity, control, and confidence.

At Next Level Growth, we help entrepreneurial leadership teams install the same execution systems used by elite organizations to achieve consistent growth with less stress.

📩 If you’re ready to stop the chaos and build a business that runs with precision, let’s talk.

Next Steps

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Accountability with a team when climbing

Your Organization’s Accountability Is Broken—Here’s How to Fix It

March 18, 2025• Issues, People, Process

Brace yourself. This might sting.

  • You rate your leadership team as A-players… but at the same time you wouldn’t enthusiastically rehire most of your employees.
  • You think you’re holding people accountable… but deep down, you know expectations are vague and accountability is weak.
  • You’re frustrated with your team’s performance… but you haven’t clearly defined success for each role.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone.

The Leadership Accountability Gap

A new client of ours rated their leadership team as A-players—scoring them a 4.8 out of 5.

But when asked, “Would you enthusiastically rehire everyone on your team?”

They gave it a 1.2.

Let that sink in.

If leadership is so great, why would they rebuild their team from scratch if given the chance?

The answer? Accountability is broken.

The First Obsession of Elite Leaders

At Next Level Growth, we teach that every leader must own their first obsession:

➡ Lead. Manage. Retain. Hold people accountable.

Most leadership teams fail at this because they assume their team knows what success looks like. They don’t.

Here’s how you fix it:

    1. Clearly communicate what the mission for each seat is. You can do this in one sentence, identifying where the goal line for each seat.
    2. Define success in one measurable outcome per role. If they don’t know their #1 result, they’re guessing—and so are you.  We call this the Most Critical Outcome® or MCO™.
    3. Clarify the obsessions that drive that outcome. What specifically should they focus on daily? Without clarity, execution crumbles.
    4. Communicate expectations relentlessly. If you haven’t repeated it ten times, they probably haven’t heard it once.
    5. Generate agreement.  You can’t hold someone accountable for an expectation.  You can only hold them accountable if they agree to the expectation.

When you nail this, something powerful happens: Your team starts delivering. And suddenly, that second question—“Would you enthusiastically rehire them?”—gets a different answer.

As Dr. Jordan Peterson says, “Enabling failure is not a noble cause.”

Let’s Fix Your Accountability Problem

Your business will never scale if accountability is soft. At Next Level Growth, we help leadership teams install the systems and clarity they need to finally get results—without the frustration.

If you’re ready to build a high-performance, accountable team, let’s talk.

Next Steps

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90-90-1 Rule - 90 days to the summit

The 90-90-1 Rule: Why Most Entrepreneurs Stay Stuck (And How to Break Free)

March 12, 2025• Entrepreneurial Freedom, Issues, People, Process, Traction

There’s a reason most entrepreneurs never reach their full potential.

It’s not because they lack ideas. It’s not because they don’t work hard.

It’s because they refuse to install the one habit that actually moves the needle.

The 90-90-1 Rule.

  • 90 minutes
  • Focused on ONE high-impact goal
  • Every day
  • For 90 days straight

It’s simple. But let me be brutally honest – most people will never do it.

The Brutal Truth: Most Entrepreneurs Waste Their Best Hours

You know the type.

They’re grinding. They’re hustling. They’re running from one fire to the next.

But what are they actually accomplishing?

  • Checking email 27 times before lunch
  • Jumping into meetings they shouldn’t even be in
  • Playing whack-a-mole with problems that wouldn’t exist if they just had the right process playbooks in place

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs who actually scale their businesses?

They protect their time like their vision depends on it.

Because it does.

If You Can’t Commit 90 Minutes, You Don’t Actually Want It

Let’s be real – if you can’t dedicate 90 minutes a day to driving your company forward, you don’t actually want to grow.

You just like playing office.

The elite entrepreneurs? They don’t waste time. They don’t wait for the right moment. They execute.

They block distractions. They focus. They build momentum.

And after 90 days?

Their business is on another level – while the excuse-makers are still drowning in email and wondering why they feel stuck.

The Challenge: 90 Minutes a Day, 90 Days Straight

Starting tomorrow, set aside 90 minutes for the ONE thing that will drive the biggest impact in your business.

  • No email.
  • No Slack.
  • No distractions.

Just pure execution.

Do it for 90 days. Watch what happens.

Because elite organizations don’t run on wishful thinking. They run on obsession, focus, discipline, and execution.

And the ones that do it best?

They don’t just grow. They dominate.

Want to build an elite organization? Stop making excuses and start installing better habits.

At Next Level Growth, we help leadership teams do exactly that. If you’re ready to break out of the chaos and build a business that actually scales, let’s talk.

Next Steps

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the empty chair lesson for business processes

The Power of the Empty Chair

January 31, 2023• Issues, People, Process

Over the past decade, the entrepreneurial world has seen a significant increase in the availability, and use of, business operating systems like EOS®, Scaling Up®, Pinnacle Business Guides, and Next Level Growth® to help entrepreneurs and their leadership teams run better businesses.

The Problem…

While companies utilizing a business operating system will almost always, in the long-term, outperform competitors who do not use a system, there is one common component of almost every business operating system that is both extremely important yet often the lowest priority in the organizations who use them…Process.

Why does Process take a back seat in most organizations? Because the urgent gets in the way of the important. Ironically, that is exactly why you need to focus on process.

Most leadership teams in organizations running on a business operating system like EOS, Scaling Up, Pinnacle, Next Level Growth or one of the many other systems out there, find themselves so busy firefighting that they deprioritize process documentation and optimization, even though it is one of the most important tenets of their operating system’s model. Ironically, optimizing their process playbooks and training is the very thing that would eliminate so much of the firefighting that is keeping them from doing the work to get them done and operationalized in the first place.

The Empty Chair Metaphor…

One of our client’s COO’s recently shared an idea they tried to drive the importance of prioritizing Process Playbooks with their Leadership Team and CEO. It was November of 2022. The COO of the company was having difficulty getting her CEO and the rest of the leadership team to really buy in to the idea that they needed to prioritize 2023 as the “Year of Process Playbooks.”

To make her point and get her CEO and team to see what they were missing, she started adding an empty chair at the conference table for their weekly tactical meetings. On the backrest of the chair, facing the table and the team, she taped a large piece of paper with the word “PROCESS” written on it in big, bold letters. The team found it odd when they came in for their first meeting with the new seat at the table, but they proceeded as normal.

When it came time in the agenda for issues solving, for each issue they prioritized to tackle where she felt the real issue was their lack of Process, she would point to the “Process Seat” and ask the team, “Is this issue actually “their” fault?”

Much to the team’s surprise, the more often she did this, the more they realized that if they focused on process, rather than the dozens of different “symptoms” they often focused on and talked about, their issues list would be much shorter, they would be fighting fewer fires, and they would have more time to elevate to a more strategic focus on growing the business.

As the meetings progressed over the following few weeks, the team became more and more aligned around the reality that many of their issues were rooted in a lack of clear, optimized processes that their employees could easily follow. That gap, a result of their procrastination around working to improve their process documents and training, was creating the bulk of busy work that was causing the majority of their frustrations.

A key question to ask yourself…

If somebody were buying your business and they asked to see your process playbooks and training, would the quality of those documents, whether digital or physical, allow you to negotiate an increase in valuation because they are of such great quality and impact, or would the buyer see them and be able to negotiate a decrease in value because they are so weak or non-existent?

Let that question resonate. If you know that your business would be more valuable with optimized process playbooks and training, and if you know that your current state process playbooks are not helping increase the value of your organization, then what are going to do about it? As a leader, it is your job to make decisions and take action.

The Solution…

While your organization is completely capable of documenting your processes on your own, the reality is, you probably dabble in process at best. Because of that, you will likely spend anywhere from nine months to nine years getting your processes documented, and you will almost certainly end up with a mediocre result. It is not your expertise or what you do every day. The time, energy, and fully burdened payroll it costs you to take the “do-it-yourself” approach will likely produce a very low return on investment.

What if there was a better way? A way to get full teams of people within the organization involved and engaged in helping not only define and document your processes but optimize them along the way…reducing wasted effort…improving the steps and handoffs…establishing clear triggers and optimal outcomes…improving scorecards and data through a better understanding of process and what to measure.

What if you and your teams could do that in just 90-to-120-minute breakouts, engaging team members all the way from leadership to front-line employees, spread over a 2-day period, as part of a workshop facilitated by a Lean Certified expert? What if that facilitator would then take all of the work done over those two days and produce and deliver your process documents within just 7 days of the onsite workshop? Would that be easier than the “do-it-yourself” approach? Having your process document in hand, and truly optimized, in just nine days, versus nine months to nine years?

Our friends at Process Optimizer® do just that. They have helped hundreds of companies using EOS, Scaling Up, Pinnacle, and Next Level Growth create outstanding playbooks for a fraction of the time and expense those companies would have incurred doing it on their own. In addition, they also remain engaged as a resource for an entire year following the delivery of the documents to make sure that you and your team have everything necessary to get your processes fully implemented into both initial and recurring training as well as ongoing continuous improvement. As with anything, it’s not about the idea or the tool, but how well you optimize and operationalize it that makes all the difference.

Next Steps

  • Learn more about Process Optimizer®

  • Not ready to reach out to the Process Optimizer team just yet? Take our Business Health Checkup and see how you score, especially in the section on Playbooks. We won’t bombard you with unwanted emails. You’ll just get a great self-assessment of how you’re performing and, only if you want it, a free, no-obligation call with one of our elite Next Level Growth Business Guides™ to discuss your results and learn some things you can do to Take Your Business, and Your Life, to the Next Level™.

  • Meet our team of Elite Business Guides 
    If you want to go fast, go alone.
    If you want to go far, go together.
    If you want to go fast and far, go with a Guide.
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Getting Rocks Right

December 2, 2020• Entrepreneurial Freedom, Issues, Process, Vision

Setting great Rocks is one of the most difficult and misunderstood elements of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®), but getting them right is the difference maker to ensure you achieve your business goals. 

(more…)
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Hard Work Doesn’t Always Work

November 4, 2020• Entrepreneurial Freedom, Issues, People, Team Health

Hard work is an inherent part of what makes every entrepreneur tick. It’s that mindset telling us if we just keep working harder and harder we can accomplish anything. It’s true — but only to a point.

(more…)
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