Future-Proof Your Company!

I'm going to give you right now one future shaping technique that's going to put you in way in advance or way in front of about 100% or 95% of the other COOs on the planet. This is about future shaping your business. Peter Drucker, one of the best business minds in the world, said that the best way to predict the future is to create it. It's very similar to my vivid vision concept that so many CEOs and companies are using from around the world. And you can use this system inside of your business and inside of your role as a CEO or leader today. So here's how it works. Essentially, at the end of the day, you need to visualize what finished looks like for the goal or the project or the task that you're working on. Maybe it's similar to rolling out the whole vision for your whole company. You need to have a clear vision of what you want complete to look like included in what you want complete for that project or goal to look like. Include how little time and how little money you want to spend on that. So you give yourself a framework for getting it done and getting it done faster. The other thing you can think about is who can you delegate this project to? Because getting it done doesn't mean you having to do the work. It means visualizing what you want it to look like and then reverse engineering the steps to make it come true. So for any goal or any project that I'm working on, I clearly define the finish date, right? As Stephen Covey used to said, begin with the end in mind. So for a project or goal, I visualize the finish date of when that is completed, and then I think about what are all the things that I do to make it come true. Almost like building a home, right? This is a really big project. But if you're building your dream home, you can describe what the home looks like in its finished state. And, you know, all the things that you need to take, all the things that you need to do to get that home built, like pouring the foundation, putting up the walls, putting in the electrical and the plumbing and the drywall, and hanging the cabinets. All of those things that need to happen very similar to a project or a goal that you're working on as a leader, you're working on as a coo, or that your company is undertaking. Visualize the finish date of that project or goal, all of the projects or tasks you need to do to make those come true, and then order those projects or tasks in the order that you need to work with them on. And that's actually going to help you to delegate that work to coach the people that are working on any of those subtasks or projects for you. And, and by starting with the end in mind, by predicting the future and reverse engineering it, you're going to get less or more done by less people faster, and you're going to be able to predict what the future is because you're deciding what it looks like. Years ago, when Brian and I were building 1-800-got junk together, we just completed our first year of building the company together. We went from 2 million to about 6 million in that first year. And our lawyer, Andrew Sherman, asked us, where did we see our company being five years out? And both of us very quickly said 100 million. We kind of looked at each other and realized we'd given the same answer without ever having a discussion. But because we both said 100 million was what we could see in our mind, we figured out how to make that come true. And lo and behold, five years later, we ended up at $106 million in revenue. So if you want some more lessons on how we got to that 106 million in revenue, how we actually dreamed in the future and created that future and made it come true, we watch some more of the videos below. Take a look at my invest in your leaders course. This is the core systems that I use to actually grow management teams and leaders all over the world. Those will help you to be able to figure out how to reverse engineer your future. But deciding on what your future looks like and then creating it is how you're going to become a great leader inside of your organization today.