How To Communicate Your Vision with Your Team

You’re finally thinking about your exit strategy. You’ve identified your personal goals, your business goals, and you have a clear vision about what you want for your business.?

Now you need to take the final step: communicating your vision with the team who will be helping you fulfill it.?

When a team fails to understand the owner’s vision, they often feel confused and directionless.?

Employees tend to ask too many questions or the wrong ones. They can’t make any individual decisions with confidence.?They seem needy or overly cautious.

But when a team clearly understands the vision of the business owner, they feel empowered.? They start to ask you the right questions. They can take initiative and bring in new, original ideas to help you reach your business goals even faster.????

Communicate Your Vision?

Communicating your vision may sound like a basic owner responsibility, but you might be surprised at how many don’t take the time to do it.??

This isn’t because owners are intentionally keeping their employees in the dark. Most of the time, they either assume their employees already understand their vision, or they haven’t even identified their vision for themselves. Either way, a lack in this area will be a major issue for your team.?

Communicating your vision must be done in a way that’s relevant and actionable to your team. One of the most practical methods is by sharing your responses to these core vision discovery questions:?

1. Why are you building your business?
2. How do you make money?
3. Who are your customers?
4. What are your values?

Communicate Why You’re Building Your Business

All of your best reasons for building a for-profit business are unapologetically selfish, which is not the same as greedy. You want something better for yourself, your family. You might frame it as wanting to be your own boss, or to be the one who decides what to do with profits, but somewhere in there, you need to come first.

The mistake many owners make is to tell themselves that they are doing this for their employees or their families. The employee may benefit in the long run, but it is the owner taking the risks. Denying that reality is not healthy or realistic.

The primary benefit of owning a business is that you are in control of the options. Your priorities and values matter. Embrace your truth, and your family and team will be more likely to support your goals.

Communicate How You Make Money

You may know exactly how your business generates profit, but your employees may not be so clear.?

Are you an asset rental business? Or, do you sell services? Resell products? Capitalize ideas?

Is profit based on transactions? Or projects? Or customers? What is the relationship between revenue and COGS (cost of goods sold)?

Does this seem obvious? Trust me, it isn't. Truth be told, many business owners cannot accurately answer these questions. To be fair, the ideal business design has changed over time. Regardless, without a simple, clear mathematical formula for making money, employees will struggle to help you reach your goals.

As your team becomes clear on your business model and how it is supposed to work, they can help support it. When your employees know how you make money, they can spot the right opportunities and develop the right processes.

They become empowered.

Communicate Who Your Customers Are

You cannot cater to everyone. There’s a direct correlation between having a well-developed exit strategy and having a well-developed NO filter.?

When your team knows exactly who your ideal client is, they have both the clarity and freedom to help you build the right systems and processes to support to that client.?

Clearly informing your team who your ideal customers are has one hidden — and powerful — benefit. It also tells them who your customers are NOT.??

Knowing this saves your team from pandering to every prospect that comes in with money to spend. Because they know who the business wants to work with, they’re empowered to help you focus your business’s energy on the perfect clients.?

You will build the right kind of business, sooner, and more profitably.

Communicate Your Values

Today, people place a lot of emphasis on company values. But to be perfectly honest, it's the owner's values that matter most. After all, your company should not have values that differ from yours.?

You need to make your value system crystal clear to your team, so they can work within it to help you achieve your goals.??Those values become criteria in everyday decisions, which in turn lead to long-term results.

When you express your personal principles, your team has a much better chance of aligning their work and actions to them.?

Putting It All Together

Communicating this vision to your team is a vital step in making both your long-term and short-term goals a reality.?

From a practical standpoint, a clearly shared vision eliminates a lot of headaches and problems in communication. From a legacy and exit strategy standpoint, it offers you the chance to achieve your vision with the people who want to help you get there.

Remember, it’s one thing to have a vision and legacy for your business; it’s another to achieve it. Setting this plan in motion puts you on the right side of destiny.