Posts tagged vision
Business Plan: “Yes”
May 20th
Imagine this scenario: Like 9.5% of the American population, you are unemployed.
You have been looking for work for the past 7 months, but there is nothing out there. You have been told that you are under-qualified for some positions and over-qualified for the rest. Seven months of networking and interviews and hustling, and still no dice.
Then one day, you wake up and you are suddenly the most popular, personable, funny, charismatic person on the face of the Earth.
You don’t know how it happened, but you can inexplicably tell jokes like a seasoned stand-up comedian, and you have a clever comeback for every conversation. As your reputation spreads, you are asked to attend parties and meetings and business functions and get-togethers. You are invited to weddings and conferences to give speeches. You’re a publicity phenomenon.
At first, you love the attention and you accept every invitation you are offered. And why wouldn’t you? You’ve got nothing else going on. You get to meet new people every day (some famous, some not), and you are wined and dined every night. Sure, some of your new acquaintances aren’t people you would normally hang out with, but that’s the price you are willing to pay to see and do things that most others only dream of. ”Carpe diem!”… “To infinity and beyond!”
But there’s a problem.
Soon, your schedule becomes impossible to manage. Opportunities of all types keep coming through the door but you physically can’t keep up. Anything short of cloning yourself means you have to turn people away; you will have to say “no”.
The bigger issue is that you have cultivated relationships with people along the way, and now they expect you to attend everything they invite you to. You’ve developed a reputation of always saying “yes,” and you’re afraid of what might happen otherwise.
The Real World
This same scenario happens to businesses every day. The economy takes a nose dive or a key client goes away. The easy reaction? “Say yes to any opportunity that comes our way!”
In a way, it’s completely understandable. You can’t just sit around while the ship is sinking beneath you. Entrepreneurs have to do something (anything!) to stay afloat and ensure your business lives to see another day. So you take on clients and work that you may have turned away a year or a month prior.
But what happens when you are one of the “lucky” ones who makes it through the storm with a portfolio full of difficult clients or customers? When times were tough, they were the ones who helped keep the lights on. But now that things are picking up, you have new, bigger, more interesting opportunities.
So what do you do? How do you choose?
The answer depends on your values.
It always surprises me how few companies can answer the following question: “What is your primary goal? What do you want to achieve in the long run?”
The most common answer I hear (“Well… to do more business, I guess.”) reminds me of a passage from Alice in Wonderland:
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Chesire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Without an end goal in mind, it is impossible to be anything but reactionary to the business opportunities that cross your radar each day. And when that is the case, it really doesn’t matter how or why you choose your clients/projects, because there is no way to decipher the good from the bad.
Question(s) of the Day:
How do you decide what new business opportunities to pursue, or are you just saying “yes” to everything? And is your decision-making process based around your company’s end goal?
Vision and Teams
Mar 5th
The reason entrepreneurs are often referred to as “dreamers” and “visionaries” is because of their ability to see the end product in their minds before it actually happens. These are the people that make things happen; the ones that find a problem, envision ways to create solutions, and create teams of talented people to do the work.
Our primary purpose as entrepreneurs is to transfer resources out of an area of low yield and place them into an area of higher yield.
“Visionless” Tasks
As the leaders of companies and organizations, it is our job to engage and enable ALL of our team members to do their best work ALL the time. That sounds like a tall order (because it is), but it’s the way organizations succeed.
When you shift away from this model, you end up paying people to do something they don’t know how to do, or worse – something they aren’t passionate about. In other words, you waste your money, and their time and energy.
The best leaders are the ones that can not only envision where they want to go and how to get there, but can explain it to their teams so well that EVERYONE can see exactly what they need to do to on an individual basis.
Employees that can’t see the big picture only focus on the small tasks that are assigned to them. No higher-level thought goes into their work. They aren’t actively engaged in looking for a new, better, or faster way to reach the goal. They just do what they’re told and move onto next item on the checklist.
Yesterday, I wrote about the value of self-starters to an organization, but without a clear vision from the leader self-starters are useless. Without a clear vision to work from, self-starters may actually push an organization in a completely different direction.
If you own a business or lead a team:
- Do you have a vision of where you want your organization to be tomorrow/next month/next year?
- Do your team members know what that vision is?
If you’re working for a “visionary”:
- Do you know what the vision of the organization is?
- Do you know what you need to do to get there?