Great leaders understand how to create a business vision, and they recognise that it’s the key to achieving great things.
Developing and growing your business is a big journey. and your vision is your destination. This article will show you how to create a business vision that is well-written in order to motivate you and your team.
Get it right and it can inspire you to achieve great things. Knowing how to create a business vision is also a key part of developing an effective business plan.
How To Create A Business Vision – It’s Not About Your Profit!
Too many times, business owners tell me that their business vision is to turnover £5M and give them £1 million profit every year for their personal income.
If you cannot see beyond what’s in it for you, then your staff will see right through you too. People do not care about how much money you make – your business vision needs to focus on something that really matters to them in some way.
A powerful vision will also tell the outside world what you are all about and might even serve as a tag-line for your business in marketing.
At Google, the biggest search engine on the Internet, their vision is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
So when the guys and gals at Google decide how they will sort the results of searches, they put a real priority on making results relevent and readable, so that the information is accessible and useful to them, even translating pages into your language if you want.
How accessible and useful is that? Simply brilliant and all stemming from that one simple vision statement.
It’s a really simple and powerful vision and I love it because of that. It leaves you in no doubt what they set out to do every single day and it also hints at how they may evolve over time.
One of my favourite examples of a vision, although not from business, comes from Martin Luther King Jr. In his “I Have A Dream” speech he describes his vision with details that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. How many people has he inspired with just this speech, I wonder?
Watch the video of him delivering this speech here and listen carefully for the details of his vision.
Within 12 months of him making this speech, an amendment to the American constitution was made that legally introduced equality for the black people of America. His speech moves me deeply every time I hear it because of the depth of thought he has put into crafting every word of it, as well as his passionate delivery.
This beats hands-down the corporate visions and mission statements that seem to be created by a committee of tired old grey suits, trying to please everybody in the meeting. The result is an obscure statement that uses lots of hollow words without real meanings all strung together to say nothing but sound impressive.
Something like “To facilitate the delivery of optimal solutions to suit our customers’ every needs” is just like a bar of slippery soap. There is no way you could identify what industry or business this came from and so you get nowhere.
How Big Is Your Business Vision?
Depending on the scale of the business vision you have and how different it is to how things are at the moment, you may need to brainstorm options for what your business can become. Most people have not spent the time to do this and as a consequence they do not have that laser-directed sense of purpose that gives the most successful people their focus every day.
A well developed vision will be something that you can talk through and explain how it gives a great customer experience, how it ensures your market share for years to come and how it makes your business a great place to work.
How To Create Your Business Vision…
To create your business vision, start by thinking about what it is you choose to be. Then work through and put down all the things that your business will have to do in order to achieve this. Don’t just stop at words like “great customer service”, think about what it will really mean you will do as a business. Make it come alive so that you create on paper an inspiring future for your business.