How to Grow Your Business? Get Unstuck!

The dream of starting your own business dwells in the minds of many: being your own boss, working flexible hours, and feeling passionate about your enterprise are just a few of the appeals. Unfortunately, most are unaware of the steps necessary to achieve this goal, and aren’t prepared for the commitment and sacrifice required along the way. 

Jerry Jendusa founded EMTEQ in 1996, with the original workspace being his basement. Jerry and his partner, Jim Harasha, put in countless hours each week to get EMTEQ fully functioning and drive it to the success it has today. In Get Unstuck, Jerry details his pre-startup business plans, techniques, and experiences. He reminds others thinking of following the entrepreneurial path to take into consideration all the facets of starting a business, and offers advice on how to do so. This advice ranges from choosing the right partner, finding a demographic and marketable niche, to ensuring personal relationships remain intact during and after the process. The book serves to “get out the message to as many business owners as possible regarding starting, growing and exiting from a business.”

Jerry wrote this book intending to “provide a baseline of beliefs from which small-business owners can attain the success that other business owners enjoy.” Based on his story, Jerry wanted “to be able to help other small to mid size business owners think about their businesses perhaps in a different light as growth in business and in life requires a great amount of change and one cannot do it all alone.” His goal is altruistic; Get Unstuckis about helping other business owners on their path to prosperity. 

Since the success of his enterprise, Jerry has created a coaching and advisory business called STUCK, which provides the tools for making key changes to help a business grow and succeed. STUCK was created with the intent of providing tools, techniques, and tips to help business owners find solutions within their business. 

So far, Get Unstuck“has been a great marketing tool to spread our message.  It is a leave behind sample at speaking engagements or is dropped off for business owners that are stuck.” Get Unstuckhas given Jerry and his team at STUCK credibility and provides reference points for it. Jerry anticipates Get Unstuck to continue in popularity and growth, remaining a source of credibility and a resource of insightful business tips. 

Jerry wanted to give back and help other young entrepreneurs on their path to success. He finds it rewarding, the urge to give back was a major reason why Get Unstuckwas written. Jerry wanted to speak to his belief that “every owner at one point or another gets stuck.” 

Patient Centered Strategy: Using Lean to Overhaul the Healthcare Industry

In the world of healthcare, patients are a priority. However, many healthcare systems operate conversely: strategy and management are decided in a vacuum, usually based on the intuition of the CEOs. The lean approach is an entirely new method of strategy that involves rapid plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles, where the needs of patients are tested and immediately acted upon, creating a better patient experience. The lean approach was created with the patients in mind, aiming to enhance their healthcare. This differs from the previous approach on management strategy greatly, requiring immense amounts of effort to define and implement this new technique.

Jeff Hunter was a senior executive at ThedaCare when he first heard of an alternate train of thought regarding management strategy. This new approach to management was completely different to the practices being used at the time, and yet Jeff and his CEO, John Toussaint, pursued the knowledge and understanding of the lean approach. Jeff Hunter was hesitant about this initially, as the immense amount of inertia required to completely uproot and redo the current system was daunting. 

Through enormous effort and time, he mastered his understanding of this particular strategy and management practice and decided to write a book to help others on their journey to understanding and incorporating lean; explaining the many steps, successes, and pitfalls of his own journey. “I was writing this as I was further discovering and developing the system through experiential learning. The content emerged during the writing process,” Jeff muses.

Though ThedaCare already had great coverage in daily management, there was an existing gap in management strategy, and that was where Jeff’s content came into play.

 “The path is not linear, and I frequently had to backtrack. Lean takes time and energy, and there is enormous inertia to overcome. Healthcare systems are also very complex, and, currently, no one organization has completely centered its strategies on patients. But I have experienced enough success to believe it can be done.” Jeff attempts to describe this experience of rerouting the way he understood and thought about something as tacit as management strategy. 

Jeff wrote the book at the urging of the then CEO, John Toussaint, who wanted the book to complement other books on lean strategy. The primary purpose of the book is “to describe the strategic management subsystem that fits within the broader lean management system.” While writing it, Jeff says he often struggled with incorporating more of his story and often had to be pushed away from writing a strictly technical journal. This was useful for him, and he says the writing process made him better. “It made me question what I believe and why I believe it. It made me dig and substantiate. And it made me communicate it in a way that a reader would care.” 

The book has created a platform for both Jeff and ThedaCare from which they can continue to improve and grow. The book was only recently launched but the success of webinars done on the book’s content is an indication of the positive outcomes this book will have on their business.