Why I implemented EOS at Skylight (and what I'd do differently).
September 2020. Skylight is six years old, four floors of rooftop hospitality in Nha Trang, doing real numbers. I'm sitting in the office at 11pm reviewing the third version of a Friday-night schedule the floor manager has rewritten because every senior person's quit. Again.
For two years I blamed the team. Then I read Traction by Gino Wickman with my brother TK over a weekend.
The problem wasn't the team. It was that the team had no system to hold the standard. I was the system. And I was the bottleneck.
We implemented EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) over the next nine months. The team, the same team, started running plays I'd been holding in my head. Nine months in, we hit a Friday night where every section ran clean and I didn't get a single message until close. That night I realized what “the system holds the standard” actually means.
What I kept.
Scorecard. Six numbers, updated weekly, every Monday at L10. F&B revenue, cover count, average ticket, theft variance, complaint count, staff retention. If a number's red two weeks running, it goes to IDS.
Quarterly Rocks. Each section lead picks one to three Rocks. They own them. If they miss, the Rock comes back to L10. No “stretch” Rocks, only what they can actually finish.
Issues list. Everything that isn't an emergency goes here. We work it bottom-up at L10. The discipline isn't writing issues, it's letting them sit and discussing them in the right context.
What I'd cut today.
The People Analyzer template. EOS gives you a 3x3 matrix (Get it / Want it / Capacity, versus Core Values). In hospitality, where I'm hiring eighty people across four sections, that matrix is too slow. I'd replace it with a sixty-second walk-the-floor rubric per shift: did they own a section, did they ask for help, did they leave clean.
The 1-page Vision/Traction Organizer. Beautiful in theory. In practice, we filled it out, framed it, and never looked at it again. What stuck was a single sentence on every section lead's whiteboard: What does winning this quarter look like for your section?
We implemented EOS in the office before we implemented it on the floor. Three months wasted. The day we put a Skylight scorecard on the wall behind the bar, sales target, last week's actual, today's pace, was the day staff started owning the number. Not because we asked them to. Because the number was visible.
Structure is freedom. But only when the structure is visible to the people doing the work.
What's one number you could put on a wall this week?