Setting a vision for your business

This article is for business owners who are struggling to motivate staff to be the best that they can be. Those struggling to create an environment where everyone enjoys coming to work and makes a reasonable income. For me this is the essence of good leadership, creating a secure and enjoyable environment for you and your staff and enable both to have a secure income. Usually the happier you can make it the more money your business will make and more importantly the value of your business giving you the owner options will be greater.

My intention here is to give you a structure to approach vision setting. One that you can use in a step by step guide to structure your own documented plan.

People will often tell me they want to be successful, whether it's an individual I'm mentoring or a business owner I'm coaching. My question to them is 'what does success look like?", and more often the not they don't have a clear picture. They tend to set and work to targets as a way of motivating themselves and staff but have little idea of the destination they are aiming for in the long term. They have some idea but it's sort of out there somewhere in the future and they believe if they just keep moving forward they will eventually hit it. Of course some will, but more often than not they won't, and the definition of success will be changed in their own minds to accommodate the new situation. (Recommend you read Black Box thinking by Matthew Syed to understand this).

To make the point I tell them my "Marines in a wood story". Imagine I am commanding a group of marines on an exercise, holed up in a wood in relative cover on Dartmoor. I tell the section to get their packs on and follow me. Dutifully they will do so, I'm the boss they are a disciplined and well trained force so will do what they are told. I am sure I would not reach the edge of the wood before someone asked me "where are we going boss?" or "what's the mission?". If I told them not to worry and follow me, we would carry on a little further with growing discontent and uncertainty in the ranks. A little further on the guy carrying the rope we had in the section decides to drop it down so that we can pick it up on the way back into our location. Working on the premise that the boss would have told me if I needed it. He has taken a decision to lighten his load so he can be more agile. For him this is a sound decision which he is making for the good of the section. Additionally the rest of the section decide to start drinking their supply of water once again working on the premise that we cannot be out on a long mission as the boss would have told us. Once again a sound idea to keep hydrated so not a bad decision just one being made without knowing the full facts.

As it happens we were out for a least 12 hours and needed to keep our water supply intact, and we also had two river crossings to do so we needed that rope. My chances of achieving the objective had been severely curtailed by my leadership or lack of it. The one thing for sure that I as the leader needed to understand was the objective and the best route to successfully take that objective, with of course minimum casualties. Most important of all I needed everyone to understand fully what we were undertaking so they could use their skills and experience to help me achieve the objective.

If I didn't know the destination I was unable to plan a route, I wouldn't know if I had the right equipment and skills and my chance of success were quite limited. Simply leaving a location and hoping you might bump into the enemy of unknown strength is a pretty sure recipe for disaster.

In a business context this often shows up as a bunch of people turning up to work to do the same job they did yesterday, trying to do it a bit more efficiently. They are making decisions everyday in the belief they are helping the business and often those decisions are not helping you as a leader. When this happens the leadership start to manage rather than lead, staff tend to stop making decisions for fear of getting things wrong and generally everything becomes a bit more difficult to achieve.

Having a clear vision for you business brings a sense of focus, it enables you to make good decisions in the confidence you are going in the right direction. A vision helps you be more gentle with yourself and those who work for you through knowing what to do when on your journey. A vision helps you control the pace of growth, and takes into account how much risk you are prepared to take to achieve the outcome you desire. At a higher level it can give you a sense of purpose, a reason for what you do which is more than about making money.

So the question is where do you start to create that vision for your business. First off, it doesn't have to be the big vision it can just be the next vision. Some people need to work in shorter jumps to achieve an overall vision others can go there in one bound. The choice is mainly down to your attitude to risk governed by where you are in life and your circumstances.

Step 1 - Where is my business today?

Stop and analyse the current situation in the business. Sit down and write down answers to the following:

• How much revenue does my business generate? This is a simple number based on current turnover
• How do we currently use our most valuable asset time? How much time do you spend running the business, developing the business, working on the long term valuation of the business?
• How much true profit do we make? Don't just look at the numbers here you should also consider how much time you spend as a business making it happen. Put a value on that time and subtract it from the numbers your finance team produce.
• What is our current infrastructure? What systems do we have in place? What skills do we have? How many people do we have?
• What is the current culture in the business? Describe in a set of bullet points how the company feels. it is a good idea to get a second opinion on this from someone in the business who can read energy.
• Why does the business exist? So this is a big question, why do you and the your staff get out of bed in the morning?

Step 2 - Understand your relationship with Risk

Risk governs every decision we make, business is a combination of decision making based upon Risk. Every single person has a different relationship with risk based upon both their upbringing and their current situation. As we go through life we learn and understand works and what doesn't work. What we considered a risk in the past is now no risk at all.

Understanding your relationship with risk and if you are part of a board understanding the teams attitude to risk can make your decision making process easier. If we consider risk on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is low risk and ten is high risk. If I gave you ￡10k to invest someone on 1 would stick it in the bank and be happy that it made some interest. Someone on 10 would invest the lot on the sure fired winner in the 3.15 at Kempton that day. Our personal situation effects our risk dependent upon the responsibilities we have and how serious we take them.

For planning purposes lets simply take three levels:

1. Below 5 - Playing it fairly safe
2. About 5 - Prepared to take some risk as long as it can be managed
3. Above 5 - Let's go bugger the risk

Understanding where you and the other board embers are will help you build a better plan.

Step 3 - What do I want my business to become?

This step is where you will need to throw off the constraints of what you know how to do and write down what you would like your business to become. You have the freedom here to choose what you would want your business to look like without the constraints of knowing how to get there. If it was perfect what would it look like?

Let me explain this, if we grow our businesses by what we already know how to do the chances are we may well miss out because our eyes are closed to possibilities. As we grow older there is a tendency to stop learning and stop experimenting. Often this is where you will need external help to challenge your beliefs and to bring a greater range of experience to the process.

One thing I often get people to do is to map out the future based upon today and then build what the infrastructure would need to be like to support that future.

Step 4 - Build your plan

Documented strategy plan to execute, manage and monitor the project execution with clear Return on Investment (ROI), Return on Culture (ROC) and Return on Valuation (ROV)

The documented strategy plan supported by a presentation for the owners/board will explain the Why, What and How of the project. Committing the plan to paper makes it real and helps the stakeholders understand the thinking behind the solution the team has designed.

The paper will have a recommendation for the owners consideration, detailing

• The expected outcome (use the elements in step 1 as a guide)
• The activities which enable the company to deliver the strategy
• The return on investment
• An implementation plan (usually a phased approach)
• How the implementation will be measured
• How the implementation will be managed

Footnote

You will have noticed that I do not recommend that you set a timescale on executing the plan. The trouble with timescales is that you will never do it sooner than the timescale you set. Often elements of the plan will be put off because that is what the plan says when you could do them sooner if the opportunity presents itself.

Finally, get help, this can be a daunting task and there are many people who can and would be prepared to help. They will find it easier if you first ask and second if you have committed some of your ideas to paper. Writing things down makes them real!!