Aligning Your Company’s Vision, Goals, and Growth – Eugene Terk

Growing a business tends to feel like constant chaos. So how do you keep your company aligned? Our guest will tell you all about it!

Meet Eugene Terk. Eugene is the Vice President of Business Development, as well as the General Counsel for a software development company called Align. Align is a strategic planning and execution software for small and midsize companies that are looking to calm some of the chaos that oftentimes happens when you are scaling quickly. Eugene’s role in the company is to help founders, leaders, C-suite executives, teams, and business coaching clients implement good business habits through a software technology platform so that they can achieve their goals faster and run more efficiently.

Eugene thinks that small business habits can make all the difference when it comes to setting and achieving goals.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the importance of aligning your employees with your vision, the benefits of goal-setting, the power of discipline, and why you should work with a professional coach.

If you want to learn more about goal setting, make sure you tune into this episode to hear what Eugene has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Eugene Terk

💡 What he does: He’s the VP of Business Development & General Counsel at Align.

💡 Noteworthy: Align is a growth management software for everyday focus on the right things. It has helped thousands of companies in over 70 countries reach success by focusing on what matters most.

💡 Key Quote: “Creating that sort of culture of execution and culture of accountability in any organization will drastically improve the likelihood that you’re going to achieve those goals and get to the level of success that you see for your business.”

💡 Where to find Eugene: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Align your people with your vision. Aligning your employees around a shared vision is critical to the success of your business. When everybody is on board with the company’s goals, they are more likely to achieve those goals. So, give everyone on your team a chance to participate and voice their ideas.

Eugene explains, “For us, I think it’s a culture issue. I think it’s giving every person an opportunity to voice their ideas because I think, and I’m not judging anybody who does it the other way, I just think that there are oftentimes when there are great ideas, you hire really smart, talented people to serve in various roles in the organization, even though they may not be part of the leadership team. They also probably have a much closer connection to your customers, to your strategic partners maybe, they may be hearing things in the marketplace that senior leaders don’t have as close of a connection to, and so I think it’s always good, I think to have as many voices at least participate in that process.”

Companies that set goals are more likely to achieve them. Goal-setting is one of the key principles of effective business management. If you want to achieve big goals for your company, the first step is to put them into words and write them down. This will help guide your focus to create new behaviors that will ultimately allow you to achieve those goals.

Eugene says, “Certainly, we know that companies that set goals, at least in our software, are more likely to achieve those goals. It’s just like anything else. I can say that I want to lose 10 pounds, but if I put a sticky note on my mirror every single day that’s reminding me to do 100 pushups and to go get on the treadmill for 30 minutes, I’m more likely to achieve my goal than if it’s just sitting in my head and I make a lot of excuses and don’t do things on the regular.”

Discipline is key. Whether you’re looking to achieve big goals for your clients or introduce a new habit into your company culture, discipline is vital. If you want to make progress, you need to take action. And discipline will help you take action regularly and consistently. Eugene says,

“That’s really the power of discipline and putting these good habits into practice every day or at least once a week. And whether you do that through our software or some other tool, as long as you can do that, I’m fairly confident that you’re going to see powerful and beneficial results in your organization.”

Working with a coach helps yield greater results. There are many benefits of working with a professional coach. From being more productive to improving performance, you can make greater progress with someone who holds you accountable. Eugene explains, “Those companies that have the benefit of working with a coach typically do better, they achieve more priorities. They’re having more huddles; they’re completing more tasks, and it sort of makes sense because you have an outsider who’s holding you accountable.”

Top Quotes

“I think the pain points that we most often encounter is sort of this desire by a business owner or a senior leadership team to think more strategically about the business. I think there’s a lot of very successful companies and business owners that have for far too long just been sort of in the weeds in the operations and the tactical side of the business, and so what we often see is we have visionary founders and CEOs who, at the time are spending 20% of their week on strategy and 80% of the time on operations and tactics. They haven’t been able to sort of elevate themselves to think more big picture high level.”

“I think putting things down in a visual way where everybody knows their numbers, whether it be a software tool, or an Excel spreadsheet or paper, whatever if everybody has visibility into how well everyone else is doing, you’re going to create a culture of accountability. That’s not to say that I’m going to shame someone who may be falling behind. The purpose is I want to help them.”

“We generally see that there’s two types of employees. They are those that want to be held accountable, and they appreciate a methodology or a framework by which they can objectively prove that they are A players in the organization. […] There are other employees that want nothing to do with sort of this level of accountability, and they used to be able to hide behind the fact that there wasn’t this much visibility into every employee’s performance and execution. And so once you sort of shed light on that, that sometimes helps you identify individuals that probably aren’t the right fit for your organization and the culture that you are trying to grow and build within your organization.”

“The B-HAG, as I have been taught, is your Big Hairy Audacious Goal. It comes from Jim Collins. And it essentially is another way to describe it as what is your North Star? What is your 10, what is your 20, what is your 30-year goal? If you look out on the longest time horizon that you could imagine for your business, where do you see yourself?”

“It is a super simple and super powerful tool within any organization. So a 15-minute daily huddle, some people refer to it as a stand-up, or it’s kind of like scrum if you’re in the agile system, but it’s essentially a daily meeting where everyone gets together, either virtually or physically, if you’re back to an office, and everyone shares their ‘What’s up?’ information.”

“In addition to just everybody telling everyone else what they’re working on, you also get to share a little about yourself. It’s helping to build the culture within the organization.”

“One of our core values is ‘get shit done.’ And that’s what we’re trying to help companies do. The more you can achieve, the odds are the more success you’re going to have in your business.”

“Everything in life is sales. So it doesn’t matter whether you are a litigator standing in front of a judge or a jury, what you essentially are doing is selling your client’s side of the story so that the judge buys what you’re selling rather than what your opposing counsel is selling.”

Links

Align Website

Email Eugene at eterk@aligntoday.com