High Impact Growth Strategy #2
Build a compelling vision
There is a way to transform your business into a vehicle for getting what you really want in life:
Replace yourself with others.
When you do, you’ll have a windfall of new free time. Whether you use that time to celebrate life with your family, dust off old personal dreams, or optimize and grow your business, it’ll be your choice.
But how will you ever replace yourself and be free when you’re the “only one”who can make decisions?
Likewise, your employees can make decisions for you, but only after you’ve built (and documented) a clear vision of what you want your business to look like when it’s a completely finished product.
Your vision becomes the "destination" for your company. When a decision is called for, your employees simply evaluate their options in light of your vision. Using this process…
They can make the right decisions every single time, constantly bringing your business closer to your vision.
Which means they can replace you, and you can be free.
Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, was once asked, "To what do you attribute the phenomenal success of IBM?" Here’s Watson’s reply:
IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done.
The second reason was that, once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act.
The third reason IBM has been so successful is that, once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place, and how such a company would have to act, I realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.
Each and every day we attempted to model the company after the picture of how it would ideally work. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had needed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.
This "picture of how your company will ideally work" is what we call your Strategic Vision. It’s a very clear set of standards, describing what your business needs to look like, ultimately, so that you can achieve your personal mission.
What’s more, your Strategic Vision is a tool for measuring your progress toward your vision. It’s a template, insuring that the time you invest in your business produces what you want from it.
It includes standards such as:
- How much do you want your business to be worth?
- When do you want it to be salable?
- How will you determine the selling price?
- Only when you’ve answered these questions can you really determine…
- What your gross needs to be…
- What your net needs to be…
- How many customers/clients it will take to achieve that gross…
- At how many dollars per customer/client…
- And how many employees it will take to get and keep those customers/clients…
- And this will give you a much better idea of:
- How many products or services you’ll need to offer…
- How many employees it will take to produce that kind of volume, with that kind of product line, with that many customers/clients…
- How you want your customers to feel when they do business with you…
- What standards you’ll insist upon - in the areas of cleanliness, reporting, management, hiring, firing, training and everything else…
- When your business will fulfill your vision…
Once you’ve built your vision, keep your long-term dream for your business in mind, while at the same time managing your company on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis. That’s how you arrive there.
Imagine your company approaching the fulfillment of your vision… how proud you’ll be to bring people into it, and show them how it works.
You’ll own a company that people want to go to work for. A company that operates so well, it becomes the benchmark that your employees measure all other companies against. And a vehicle for enriching your life - rather than consuming it.