If you’ve ever sat through a leadership seminar, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the demonstration. A facilitator sets a large glass jar on a table. Next to it: a pile of big rocks, some gravel, some sand, and a pitcher of water. The facilitator fills the jar with the big rocks first — it looks full. Then the gravel goes in, filling the gaps. Then the sand. Then the water. Everything fits.

Then comes the twist: reverse the order. Pour the sand and gravel in first, and there’s no room left for the big rocks. They simply don’t fit anymore.

Stephen Covey used this illustration in First Things First to make a simple but uncomfortable point: if you don’t decide what your big rocks are and put them in the jar first, your life — or your business — fills up with sand. Not because the sand is worthless, but because there’s an infinite supply of it, and it will happily consume every hour you give it.

That illustration is where our name comes from. Big Rocks Engineering exists as a daily reminder that our job is not to stay busy. Our job is to identify what actually moves the business forward, and to protect the time and attention it takes to do that — on purpose, before the sand shows up and takes the space instead.

The Status Quo We’re Pushing Against

In manufacturing, the sand shows up constantly, and it wears a business-casual disguise. It looks like urgent emails, expedite requests, a machine that needs attention, a customer call that runs long, a fire that needs putting out. None of it is fake. All of it is real work. But if you let it set the agenda, you never get to the handful of decisions and initiatives that actually change the trajectory of the company.

The default posture in most operations is reactive — respond to what’s loudest today, repeat tomorrow. We built a different cadence on purpose, because reactive companies don’t grow; they cope.

Building a Cadence Around What Matters

A name on a wall doesn’t change behavior. A rhythm does. So we built our operating cadence around two recurring meetings, at two altitudes, across all five of our companies.

• Weekly Operating Meetings. Each company runs its own weekly operations meeting — tactical, focused on the current state of the business: throughput, quality, schedule, safety, people issues. This is where the gravel and sand of running a manufacturing business get handled, in their proper place, on their proper day. It’s necessary work, and giving it a fixed time keeps it from bleeding into everything else.
• Monthly Planning Meetings. This is where the big rocks actually get named. Once a month, our leadership team sits down with each company’s General Manager, one company at a time, and works through a simple but disciplined agenda:
  • Review last month’s three Big Rocks. Not five. Not ten. Three. We ask what actually moved, what didn’t, and why. No spin — just an honest look at whether the most important work got the attention it deserved.
  • Discuss the three core principles. Every conversation runs through the same lens: Employee First (are we taking care of our people), Continuous Improvement (are we getting better at how we do the work), and Customer Growth (are we deepening and expanding the relationships that fund everything else). These three principles are the filter every Big Rock has to pass through.
  • Select the next three Big Rocks. Based on that review and that filter, the GM and leadership team choose exactly three priorities for the company to focus on over the next month.

That’s it. No sprawling initiative lists, no twenty-item action plan that nobody remembers by week two.

Why the Constraint of “Three” Works

The limit is the point. Three forces real prioritization instead of the comfortable illusion of prioritizing everything. It’s uncomfortable in the room — GMs often want to bring five or six things forward — but that discomfort is exactly what keeps the jar from filling with gravel before the rocks go in.

It also creates accountability with a natural rhythm. Thirty days is long enough to make real progress on something substantial, and short enough that nothing sits unaddressed for a quarter while everyone assumes someone else is handling it. Each month, the scorecard resets, but the standard doesn’t: did we move the three things that actually matter.

What This Has Actually Bought Us

Across five companies with different products, different customers and different challenges, this cadence has done something a shared name alone never could: it’s kept every GM’s attention pointed at the handful of decisions that compound, instead of the hundred decisions that don’t. Employee-first initiatives get real air time instead of getting perpetually bumped by whatever’s on fire. Continuous improvement projects get
sponsorship and follow-through instead of dying in a drawer. Customer growth conversations happen on a schedule, not only when a contract is up for renewal.

None of it removes the sand. The day-to-day demands of running a manufacturing business never go away, and they shouldn’t — that’s the business. But naming the company after the discipline, and then building a monthly ritual that forces the discipline to actually happen, means the sand no longer gets to decide what we work on. We do.

That’s the whole idea behind the name. Not a metaphor on a wall — a habit, repeated every month, across every company we run.