Understanding How To Grow (w/ Frank Rocchio, Lone Fir Creative)

Learn how Frank Rocchio implemented a new framework to help the team at Lone Fir Creative better understand how to troubleshoot and hit their growth goals.

How They Moved The Needle

Two years ago, the team at Lone Fir Creative decided they neederd a framework to help them set goals, so they implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) created by Gino Wickman.

The framework helped them in two core areas: 1) they had a better system to set goals for the entire team, and 2) they had company-wide clarity in what they were aiming at.

The system is made up of goals (primarily financial ones, like revenue or profitability), measurables, and “rocks”: company, department, or individual projects to help hit the goals.

But after two years, they still faced one major problem: they didn’t have a formula to predictably hit their growth goals. For example, they could complete all their “rocks”, but still miss a revenue target. They also didn’t have a clear formula to know how they could predictability hit their revenue goals, or do a post-mortem of what worked and what didn’t.

So Frank set out to layer an additional framework on top of their EOS one, that would help solve these issues.

First, he created a “master strategy document”. This document only contained content about their growth, brand, marketing, and sales strategy. It provided a centralized place where anyone could go to get concise answers and understand the company’s growth strategy.

Next, Frank set out to create a more clear growth formula, something like: “A + B = Growth Goal”. This led to the implementation of 3 new parts:

• Goals: a few primary revenue goals (e.g. $10m in annual revenue with 20% profit)
• Objectives: how they planned to achieve that growth (e.g. increase ACV from 14k to 18k, decrease CAC from $8k to $6k, or increase new business by 10%)
• Actions: what output they needed to take to make it all happen

Together, the goals and objectives made up the quarterly plan. And the actions were the steps needed to put that plan into motion. For example, if the objective was to increase annual contract value (ACV) to $17k, the actions might be:

• Increase product tier pricing from x to x (owned by Product)
• Ship two new features in Q2 (owned by Product)
• Hire one new outbound sales rep (owned by Sales and HR)
• Implement a new ABM strategy (owned by Marketing)

They’d set the objectives and actions with the team’s who would be executing them, so they could make sure what they were aiming at in the goals was realistic, and that they had the best ideas and buy-in to hit those goals.

This provided the team with a clearer formula to drive predictable growth. If they hit their goal at the end of the quarter, they could more clearly see what actions were most effective in hitting it. Or, they could better see what didn’t work. This allowed them to double down on what was working, and stop what wasn’t. This meant they could better predict and forecast future growth.