How To Turn Your Business Vision Into Reality

Often I work with teams that build a vision*.
*if you haven’t got a vision and you feel like you need one get in touch with me or check out my blog, there’s a few blogs about building visions.

For now I’m assuming that you have a vision in place, you’ve answered the question of why you exist, you’ve answered the question of what you want in the next twelve months and you’ve got a plan for how to do it.

As part of your vision, I recommend (and a lot of leadership teams agree) a destination – a vision of where they’re getting to and a “From/To” story:

“We’re moving from this type of business to this type of business”.

That story might involve the types of client relationships you want to have, the model you want to have, the structure you want to have,the culture you want to have and all those components. So let’s assume that that is built and it’s in place.

If it’s not, please get in touch!

Even once you’ve built that and put it in place, so many leadership teams get stuck and don’t know how to move forward, and the cost of that and the impact of that is that their business stands still and stakeholders start asking questions.

The way I help them move forward is to put a plan in place to operationalise and execute their vision.

I do that by building a plan for each year – and what you need to decide on is three things.

Firstly is – what is your revenue and your profit goal for year one?
And what is the theme for year one?

A couple of clients I’m working with for example, the theme for their year one is to fix the foundation. The foundation is essentially the customer experience from beginning to end of how they experience what you offer.

And for a lot of these clients it’s about year one being about not a big jump in revenue or profit, but fixing what’s already there.

So you then nominate up to five key projects that are important for you in the year – aimed at fixing those foundations with your specific goal in mind.

Let’s say then in year two you are about launching, or your theme was lifting profit. Let’s say you’re going to lift profit by 10% and you’re going to shift your revenue base as well by 20%.

So it’s a big jump in that second year and the theme for that year is about launching new game changer products and services so one of the projects might be for example, a repositioning in the market – launching X product which will drive the revenue, and shifting culture and behaviours that are more in line with the innovation that’s required to deliver.

Let’s say in year three we’re going to keep revenue flat, we’re going to drive another 10% profit, and we’re going to do that because we’ve fixed the foundations, we’ve got now a customer experience that you can just pour clients onto, and it works right? Like water.

You’ve got game changer products and services that are now a year into market where you’ve got some client case studies and some reputation that’s built around them and so in that third year you can start to scale.

What you’re not looking for is potentially in that year more revenue but you’re literally looking for that to be more profitable. So you’re going to have some specific projects that are linked to that, it might be about your sales capability, it might be some specific marketing campaigns, that are then about scaling what works in the foundation that you’ve built.

In each one of these years the team works on the execution of the plan, and the way I help them do it is by by having a ninety day meeting every quarter, to work out which specific projects they’re going to work on to execute on the theme. Whether they be “Business as usual” projects or projects that actually move you forward towards the vision of the year.

If you’re stuck, and you’re not sure how to move forward as a team to achieve your vision, this is a quick way to address it.

Make your vision a reality by every year choosing a specific goal, a specific theme and a series of projects to help you move forward.

Teams can do amazing things when they’re all galvanised around a shared purpose, and if each year you can create and deliver a shared purpose with your team and get teamwork built around it using my multiplier model, it’s amazing how much you can change your business in a three year timeframe.

I want you to think about how this applies to you and your team. Think about your current vision and what you might do in this current year around what your theme might be, what your goal might be and what your project might be and if you find yourself having any trouble putting this together, please get in contact with me directly and ask questions. Otherwise, get out there and make your vision a reality.