A Business Planning Method That WORKS! (Podcast 435)

So the vivid vision is a four or five page written description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. So if we were writing it right now, we'd be leaning out to kind of December 31, 2026, and we'd be describing what our company feels like. Almost as if we hop into the DeLorean time machine, we kind of blast off three years into the future, we get out and we walk around and we describe our company. There's always vision. The problem is that more often than not, the vision's not share. Right again, entrepreneur. The CEO tends to have a vision, but if they don't share it, everyone else is trying to figure it out. It's like herding cats. So in the absence of vision, you're constantly trying to align people, pull them back in place. You're getting frustrated. Why are you making that stupid decision? So like, have you seen the movie the Sound of Music? So there's a very famous scene in the movie where they're having a picnic and they're up in the Swiss Alps or the Austrian Alps. They're singing and dancing, they have a picnic basket. Julie Andrews is playing guitar and she's singing the hills are alive with the Sound of Music. It's a very famous scene. Now, if you've never seen the movie and I said to you, can you recreate the picnic scene? Is it at a park or at a lake or in the mountains? You might say it's at a park. And then I say, what are the kids doing at the picnic? Are they playing baseball, playing croquet or dancing? You're like, oh, they're playing baseball. And where did you get the food? Oh, we bought it from the grocery store. So if you're trying to recreate a scene and you've never seen the movie, that sounds very plausible. Get the food at a grocery store, get all the kids together, have a pick up game of baseball. We'll have it at a park, maybe on the ocean. Sounds great. Wrong scene, wrong movie. So that's what happens in business is entrepreneurs are getting frustrated that these very smart employees, often very aligned employees, are making up guesses because they don't have the rest of the picture right. They don't know what the culture is supposed to be like. They don't know what the meeting rhythm is supposed to be like. They don't see what the CEO can see. So the mission statement, which was really kind of developed back in the 70s and 80s, was a traditional tool where you would get a group of leaders together. They would all put their favorite inspiring words up on a whiteboard or a flip chart. They would vote and debate on what their favorite words were. They'd end up with seven or eight words and they'd mash them up into one sentence. And that became your mission statement, right? Go team. Well, the reality was we all felt like it was kind of cheesy, stupid. It was very watered down, it felt very governmenty, frankly. And it didn't actually explain the whole kind of company. Again, if you're building a home and I said build a post modern architectural family home, that's kind of like a mission statement. But if I give you pictures and drawings and sketches, then you understand so much more of what I want the home to look like. It's a three story, it's got lots of glass, it's facing the ocean, it's got room for family. It's the all I see with the furniture looks like it's very kind of like shabby chic, whatever it's going to be right. There's just so much more to the picture than that one sentence. The one page plan, which was a concept developed by Vern Harnish who originally wrote Rockefeller Habits and then the book Scaling up and then that was actually even made smaller into the vision Traction Organizer, the VTO by Gino Wickman in his book Traction and used in the EOS model. Those are good, but they're a series of goals and focal points for a company. So the one page plan, which is actually 11 by 17, it's really two full pages, has things like your five year goals, your one year goal, your rocks, your BHAG, your core values, your vision. It has key metrics, it has all these different operating points, which is very, very critical. But those are kind of the almost like the architectural blueprints or the plans to make the vision come true. The same with the vto. The Vision Traction organizer is merely a bunch of longer term goals that are going to help you make the vision or the vivid vision come true. What I crafted was that vivid vision concept. We learned it back in 1998, so we've been using it around the world for almost 26 years. This is a different tool that comes before the one page plan and comes before the VTO and it massively replaces the mission statement, which is just completely useless. So the vivid vision is a four or five page written description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. So if we were writing it right now, we'd be leaning out to kind of December 31, 2026, and we'd be describing what our company feels like. Almost as if we hop into the DeLorean time machine. We kind of blast off three years into the future. We get out and we walk around and we describe our company. We don't know how we got there, so we can't explain how we built it, but we can describe every aspect of our company. We can describe what operations looks like, maybe with three or four points. We can describe what marketing looks like. We can describe it. We can describe finance. We can describe customer service. We can talk about our meeting rhythms and our use of dashboards. We can talk about what the customers are writing about us online and what our employees are writing on. Indeed. And Glassdoor. We can talk about our relationships with suppliers and banks. We can talk about the buzz and what the media is crafting about us. We can talk about the entire culture and feeling of our entire company as if we already built it. The key is to only lean out three years. If you go out 10 years or 20 years, you're really kind of starting to think about the bhag. It's just too far out there. It's important to have a bhag, right? To colonize Mars or to crush Adidas or my BHAG is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. But that's kind of like a one sentence long term, big, hairy, audacious goal, the Jim Collins concept. But you're not going to have a plan for something so far out. We don't have a plan to colonize Mars. We have that long term push. The plan is what we're working on kind of over the next one year to make the three year vivid vision come true. I was just speaking with a COO the other day, one of our members of the CEO alliance, and he said his CEO has written about eight pages in rough for the vivid vision. I said, perfect, tell him to stop and let's introduce him to a copywriter that can take those eight pages and kind of consolidate them down to four or five really, really well written pages. And let's get this copywriter to ask the CEO some more questions to better understand some of the areas to really craft something that pops off the page. I've rarely found a entrepreneur who's a great copywriter unless they're kind of in the copywriting or marketing business. Most entrepreneurs, most CEOs can get the vivid vision to a a good solid rough series of bullet points or maybe a good solid rough draft, but the copywriter can polish it and make it pop off the page. So if you kind of lean too far out into the future, it's so far out there that nobody gets that excited about it because it's still seven years away or 10 years away that there's no tension to start working on it. It also just seems, like, so esoteric and so different from what you have today that it doesn't even seem plausible. Right. It's kind of like somebody who has never built their first home. Maybe they've painted a home and now they want to build a skyscraper. It's like, let's start with a home first, right? You're. You're describing something that's just too far out there. And if you only go out one year, if you're describing your company one year from today, it probably doesn't look that different from what you have right now. It doesn't, again, provide enough excitement. So three years tended to feel like about that magic number. We also wanted people to make sure that they don't put the plans in place for three years out. You're going to have the Vivid vision for three years. And it's key to make sure that people understand that some parts of it won't come true until the third year. Some parts of it won't come true until the second year. Some parts will come true in fourth quarter, third quarter, second quarter. The key is to put the plans in place for the first year, and then at the towards the end of first year, you'll put in the second year plans, et cetera, for third year. I have a partner who works with companies all over the world around Vivid Vision. Her name is Jennifer Houde. She helps clients craft their vivid visions. She's currently working on a model where we can take every sentence of the vivid vision and we can come up with one or two projects to make every sentence come true. And then you can end up with a laundry list. So let's say you've got 150 sentences in your vivid vision. You might end up with 300 projects to make those 150 sentences come true. Now, you can rank order those projects as to which ones you should work on first. Very similar to building a home. Most homeowners are super excited about putting in the Wolf stove and the beautiful cabinets and the Sub Zero fridge. But you don't put that in on day one. Even though they're excited and they want to see what it looks like, you got to spend months working on the foundation. Then you spend months putting in the walls and the electrical and the plumbing and the framing. But they're all excited about that damn wolf stove and the stupid cabinets. So we have to remind them that parts of their home aren't going to come true until the 12th month, much like building a home. So the vivid vision is this series of projects, or it becomes a series of projects that you can then create the plans to focus on. And employees can now see what specifically we're doing to make each sentence come true. And they can also get excited about specific sentences or specific projects that excite them that are related to their business area. So they're starting to find meaning in their work. And it reminds me of an old story 100 years ago, these three guys sitting out in the dirt in Barcelona and they're making bricks. And they asked the first guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm making bricks. They said to the second guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm building a wall. I get to make the bricks to build this wall. They asked the third guy, what are you doing? He said, we're building the cathedral called the Sagrada Familia. It's going to be the most incredible cathedral to worship God. And I get to make the bricks to build the left wall of the cathedral. All three of them were doing the same job, but the one who saw the vivid vision, who understood the plans, saw value and meaning in their individual work as a part of the bigger picture. That's the power of the vivid vision concept and how it aligns people. And so what happens for entrepreneurs is they get frustrated that people can't read their minds or I explained that to you. But we don't realize that there were all the other missing pieces. So the value here is the alignment. I've coached clients now in 28 countries to craft vivid visions in their countries. Multiple languages, multiple business types. The alignment power that happens from this is really incredible. I've also seen companies that have used their vivid vision to land bank financing because the bank finally understands what the business does. They never understood the business plans, they never understood the pitch deck, they never understood the spreadsheets. But they read this four or five page description of the company, like, oh, I get it. And they're excited to invest. The second thing is I've seen clients go out or companies go out and land multimillion dollar contracts from customers who were so excited about what the company was going to become versus what it is today. So I'm drinking a coffee right now, and the lid is by Solo cups. So do you know who Solo makes lids for coffee cups? I'm not drinking one right now, but they make them for Starbucks. Now, if Starbucks back in 1986 went to solo and said, hey, we want you to make cups for our little coffee chain, they would have said, yeah, we're not interested. But if they sold them on the Vision three years later for what Starbucks was going to become, and maybe their vivid vision also explained the BHAG and their corporate, they'd be like, I'll bet on you today. That's the power. The vivid Vision also gets employees to quit their jobs and come and work for companies. They'll quit their job and actually walk in a door for a company that isn't what they're going to become, but they're excited about getting to build towards that.

I'm not a micromanager. I don't like micromanaging. I'm very much, hey, here's the goals. Let's go get them. And in order to be that kind of manager, you have to have the right people on the team. Right? Because you can set goals, but if people can't achieve them, then, then what's the point? And you're just banging your head against the wall so.