Why I Came to Traction as an Operator (Not a Founder)

Traction is a business book written by Gino Wickman that outlines the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)—a practical framework designed to help leadership teams gain clarity, discipline, and consistent execution. It’s widely used by founders, operators, and leadership teams who want a shared operating system for how decisions are made, priorities are set, and work actually gets done. While often associated with fast-growing startups, I came to Traction from a very different angle: as an operator evaluating whether legacy businesses without modern structure could realistically be transformed.

I didn’t come to Traction because I was overwhelmed, burned out, or searching for motivation.

At the time, I was reviewing nearly twenty businesses a week and speaking with five to ten CEOs who were looking to retire—or simply get out—because they were exhausted. Over and over, I saw the same pattern in these evaluations: founders running companies without systems. Not just outdated technology, but no real structure for how the business ran day to day. Everything was reactive. Everything was firefighting.

I came to Traction because I was trying to understand whether broken businesses were actually fixable.

I was analyzing how to buy and operate legacy companies, businesses that had been around a long time, employed good people, generated real revenue, and yet had absolutely no modern operating system. What I was looking for wasn’t inspiration or mindset shifts. I was looking for a cohesive theory of operations—something I could point to and say: this is why we’re doing things this way, and this is how it all fits together.

Traction kept showing up. Blog after blog, operator after operator—especially those who bought businesses rather than founded them—kept pointing to it as the framework that actually worked in the real world.

What stood out to me immediately was that Traction wasn’t just a list of best practices. It was a system. It had clear building blocks. It showed how vision, people, data, meetings, and execution were meant to connect. For the first time, I could see a step-by-step way to take very old companies and bring them into the twenty-first century without relying on heroics.

That mattered—because what I was seeing inside these businesses was risky.

The following blog series is real world example of implementing Traction in legacy companies. The good, the bad, and the road bumps of transformation.

Molly Louthan