s a rule, I very rarely write forewords. But sometimes circumstances dictate that a rule must be broken. Such is the case for Clockwork, Revised and Expanded.

This book will change your life. I don’t say this flippantly. I say it with great pride. Mike and I share the same passion for helping entrepreneurs succeed. It’s my life’s passion. It’s his.

What makes us a match made in business heaven is that I help entrepreneurs in stages one and three and he bridges the gap by helping entrepreneurs in stage two.

Not familiar with the entrepreneurial stages? Let me explain by first asking a question. Are you running your business or is your business running you?

If you are a typical business owner, your business is running you.

There are three stages in a business’s life that every successful entrepreneur experiences. Stage one is when you are scratching your head thinking about starting a business, stage two is surviving the startup stage, and stage three is the growth stage.

To successfully launch at stage one, you must determine if entrepreneurship is right for you. This is the Entrepreneurial Leap stage (which is why I wrote Entrepreneurial Leap). To successfully navigate stage two, you must extract yourself from being the linchpin of the business so it can run without dependency on you. This is the Clockwork stage (which is why Mike wrote Clockwork, Revised and Expanded). And in stage three, you must scale with an operating system that harnesses human energy. This is the Traction stage (which is why I wrote Traction).

I have lived the journey myself—all three stages. I know firsthand how difficult the entrepreneurial path can be. And I’ve dedicated many years to the research and development of an operating system for business. I call it the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).

As a company grows from ten to hundreds of employees, your business demands an operating system. You need to build a leadership team that works cohesively. You need to unify all elements of your business to work together, seamlessly and progressively, to break through and enjoy the next stage. You need disciplines and tools such as scorecards, issue lists, vision planning, people systems, and documented processes. This is the stage of growth where businesses will generate tens, even hundreds, of millions in revenue.

If you haven’t started your business yet, you need to evaluate the options and prepare accordingly. You need to know the essential traits you must have to increase your odds of success. In stage one, you need to go in prepared, not just go in. Like a recipe, if you use the right ingredients, you have the potential to cook up a masterpiece. But if you don’t have the correct ingredients, regardless of your efforts, you don’t have a shot.

After the Entrepreneurial Leap stage and before the Traction stage there is a stumbling block. An entrepreneurial hurdle of sorts. This is where the odds are most stacked against you. It is where you, the entrepreneur, are pulled in countless directions. You are trying to do the work and have others do the work at the same time. This is when you may feel compelled to revert from having employees to just doing everything yourself. You tell yourself it would be easier. You think “no one can do what I do.” You wish someone would clone you.

When you arrive at this stage, you need to stop being the only leader and let go of the reins. It is a scary, treacherous time, and sadly, most entrepreneurs never make it further. Most stay stuck in stage two forever, an entrepreneurial purgatory. Or they give up and return to the solopreneur ways and days. And that’s why I believe Mike’s work in Clockwork, Revised and Expanded and my work are a perfect match. With this book, you will breeze through stage two.

Stage two is very much a state of mind. You must transition from doing the work (or making all the decisions for others doing the work) to true delegation—the assignment of outcomes. You need to design the vision for the company and orchestrate all your resources to get there. Then you must get over yourself and let your team carry that vision to reality.

The belief that one day your business will just start running itself, by itself, is a fallacy. You won’t wake up one day to find that everything in the business just clicks. You aren’t one big client away from a successful business. You aren’t just one more year of carrying the business on your back before it takes off. Things don’t switch overnight or suddenly come together. Transitioning your business through the Clockwork stage is a process. You will slowly remove the organization’s dependency on you as your business starts to run itself.

What you can change immediately is your mindset. You are building a company. Not working for a company—building it. Your company is a puzzle and your job is to put the pieces in place.

Are you ready to have your business run itself? Ask yourself this simple question: If I left my business for the next four weeks without any physical or digital connection to work, would the business survive?

In Clockwork, Revised and Expanded, Mike suggests that the four-week vacation is the ultimate acid test for a business that runs itself, and I concur. For more than twenty years I have taken the month of August off. It’s called my “one-month sabbatical.” I did it through the entire process of building EOS Worldwide from one person to two hundred people. You can do the same. And if you feel that you can’t leave your company for four weeks, or even four days, we need to fix that.

Throughout this book you will discover simple techniques that ensure your business grows, breaks through, and runs on automatic. You will learn how to find, serve, and protect the heart of your organization. You and your growing team will root out Time Piles, areas where your business has bottlenecks in need of improvement.

If I may be so bold, I would like to offer some points of consideration and summarize the above. If you are considering starting your first business, then read Entrepreneurial Leap. You will be far better equipped to have a successful start.

If you are positioning your company to surpass ten employees, then read Traction.

And if you are in stage two, where the business is just you or a handful of employees—if you can’t leave the business because it is constantly needing you, if a four-week vacation seems like a pipe dream—then read Clockwork.

Entrepreneurial Leap is where you start, Traction is where you finish, and Clockwork, Revised and Expanded is what bridges them together.

In these pages you will find the missing link that will prepare your business and your mind for the next stage of growth. You will make the transition from serving your business to it serving you. You are about to own a business that runs itself.

I wish you tremendous success. You deserve it.

Gino Wickman, author of Traction and Entrepreneurial Leap