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Excerpt
Sean: How do you craft or help to craft the vision for a team? What does the process look like? What would you say about having to guide them as a business mentor or a coach in crafting the vision? Is it necessary to have a vision, a coach or a mentor for a business person to be able to craft an effective vision?
Jeff: What I would definitely say is that the vision itself is very necessary, but at the same time, what would it be if I could tell you that your vision should fit on two pieces of paper? It should only answer eight questions.
So it’s first one is what is your core value? So we’ve kind of already talked about that before I’m feeling okay. Values of integrity, continuous improvement, simplicity. Things like that. What makes up who you are kind of a thing from a core value standpoint? Second question is, what is your core focus?
From our business standpoint, we don’t have the resources to be the sun with that much energy. We’ve got to focus on a limited amount of resources to say, okay, exactly, what is our purpose, our cause, our passion? What are we trying to do from a business standpoint and exactly what’s the niche? What’s the singular kind of focus that we’re going after? And like we were talking earlier, anytime we’re evaluating something new, a new product line, a new market we need to go back and look.
Okay, does that fit our purpose? Does that fit our niche? Do we want to maybe venture out and widen that or whatever? But still most likely if it’s not fitting that niche, that core purpose of who we are, then it’s not a good fit for us right now.
So again, keeping that laser focus of our core focus right there as a business, then we look at saying, okay, what’s your 10 year target and ten’s really kind of number, but it’s still it’s, it’s the big goal out there to say, okay, this is what we’re trying to reach 10, 15, whatever the year is, it’s still out there on the horizon. It’s still kind of fuzzy. It’s very high level. It’s not a detailed plan or anything.
We’ve got from a vision standpoint, like I said, what’s the core focus? What’s the core values? What’s the ten-year target and the target market? So that really starts building out your vision there.
And then the second page of it, the flip side here is where we say traction. Okay. Where do we need to be? What are our revenues, actual real numbers need to look like? What do our profits need to look like? What are key measurables in terms of number of clients, number of sales, number of products, markets, whatever the case may be?
So having those specific goals laid out really from the idea, again, like I was saying with traction, we’ve got to get everybody working on the same page that we know. Again, this is my goal. This is my objective for this year. And then we’re going to actually bring it back one more time, as in to say, okay, what’s our 90 day plan because really 90 days is what we want to look at.
If nothing else happens, this quarter. If I get these things done, it’s a successful quarter 90 days from now. We’re going to sit there. Okay. Re-evaluate. Did anything need to roll forward? What happened? Do we need to make adjustments? Plan out the next 90 days, what are the goals for the next 90 days?
And just sit there and iterate, iterate, repeat. And then the last one is really a long-term issues list kind of thing, just a running, almost bucket list to say, Hey, what issues are we facing? What issues do we need to deal with? And just have those again, the idea is that, okay, they’re on a list.
