Cameron Herold explains Vivid Vision: a detailed picture of what your company should look, feel, and act like in three years. Instead of vague plans, write 3-4 bullets for each area (sales, marketing, operations, HR, customers, employees) and share it with staff and suppliers. MCI Global used this to grow from $106M to $502M in three years.
Chapters
I look at every business like a jigsaw puzzle. In fact, if I was to look at Titan Restoration, I see it like a jigsaw puzzle. And the way that all these pieces fit together are really critical. Well, for me, the most important part of the jigsaw puzzle is that vivid vision concept, right? It's the. What does the picture on the front of the jigsaw puzzle box look like? You know, if I was to hand all of you a jigsaw puzzle box and it had, you know, 5000 or 1500 pieces in it, and the puzzle was all red, we would have no idea where to get started, right? We'd have no idea what we're building. Well, in our business, we need to actually understand what we're building, and that's going to be this vivid vision concept. Back in 1998, so 26 years ago, I was invited to a lunch up in Vancouver, Canada, and I was one of 120 entrepreneurs that were invited to the lunch. Only 16 of us showed up. And when we got there, we were meeting with this sports psychologist who told us to look into the crystal ball and try to visualize where we could see our company in the future. And as soon as he talked about looking into a crystal ball, he'd lost us. We thought this guy was super flaky, super crazy. We weren't going to listen. We were kind of bored already, even before he'd started. And he was talking about how high performance athletes, how Olympians used visualization every day in their sport especially. And if you look across any sport and you talk to the highest performing athletes in those sports, they all use the process of visualization. Whether it's the high jumper picturing themselves going up and over the bar, or the downhill skier that has memorized the course and stands at the top and skis the course by using their hand to kind of guide their mind, or the gymnast who walks around the gymnastics floor stopping at each spot, picturing herself going through parts of the routine. Every single high performance athlete uses visualization. Well, that was fine. We didn't understand how to take the idea of visualization and bring it into the business world. So he gave us a challenge to come up with one business that used visualization every day, a type of business that used visualization every day. And amazingly, you're actually in the industry. And it was contractors. Anyone who is in the home building or contracting space has to actually understand the vision of what they're building. Right? If I went to Russ and Sammy and said, we've just had this huge, you know, damage in our home. They came and looked at the home and they could see what we needed to build because it was what was already there. Well, if it was a blank wall or if I was building a home, let's say I was. You know, I came to this blank piece of land and I wanted to build my dream home. I could turn to Sammy and Russ and say, I need you to build my dream home. Here's $2 million. I'll see you in a year. That's not enough information for them to go off of. They'd need to ask me a lot of questions, get some pictures from me and talk about design so they could create the blueprints and the plans to make my vision for the home come true. Or if I was doing a kitchen renovation and I was going to gut the kitchen and I wanted some clean, modern, beautiful kitchen, they still need to see some pictures and some drawings and some sketches to do the elevation drawings and the blueprints to make my kitchen exactly what I'm looking like. Right. They need to get inside of my mind to understand what I'm doing. Well, for most of us in business, we don't let our employees see what we're building. We're expecting our employees to read our minds. We're expecting our employees to make decisions for what our company should look like, act like and feel like. But they can't see what we can see because we've not given them what is going to be called this vivid vision document. If I'm thinking about what I want my home to look like, I can describe the kitchen, the bathrooms, the family room, how many bedrooms. There are the lighting. I don't know how they're going to do the lighting. I don't know how they're going to hang the cabinets. I don't know how they're going to do the plumbing. But I can explain what I want my bathroom to look like, but I don't know how they're going to do it. I can explain that it has a wolf stove, but I don't know how to connect one. So don't worry about how you're going to make everything come true in your business. That's going to come later. The first thing you need to do is describe sales three years from now. Describe marketing three years from now, Describe operations. I want you to think about each area of your org chart and write down three or four bullet points about each of the areas. Three or four bullet points around it. Three or four. Around hr. Three or four around operations, three or four around your customers and what your customers are saying about you online. Three or four bullet points about what your employees are writing on Indeed. Or Glassdoor. And what you'll end up with is all of these bullet points in different areas that you can start to pull together into a Vivid Vision document. Back in 2009, I taught this system to the CEO of a company called MCI Global. We were running a session at MIT's Endicott House, which is where I run one of our COO alliance events every year. They're a big convention and meeting planning company. And he was doing 106 million in revenue that year. And he learned this concept and he decided to get all of his ideas for what his company would look like in 2012 and craft his first Vivid Vision. So he got all of his rough ideas together. He then wrote a first word document draft of what his company, MCI Global, would look like in 2012. And he described his company as doing $500 million in revenue. So. So going from 106 million to 500 million in revenue is what he described his company doing three years later. Well, after we actually got a proper copywriter to polish it and make it jump off the page, and we added some design elements to it. Three years later, Sebastian's MCI Global did $502 million in revenue with $108 million EBITDA. He now does well over a billion dollars in revenue, operating in 17 countries, one of the largest convention and meeting companies in the world. And he credits the bibbinvision concept with how well aligned all of his offices are and all of his employees are and how big the culture became within MCI Global. Remember when Steve Jobs came out with his iPhone back in 2007? It was missing the keyboard, right? Everyone in the world said it was never going to be successful because there was no keyboard. He was willing to turn away the whole world because he knew that once you tried it, you'd be completely hooked. That's how we pulled everyone over to the dark side. And now we all use iPhones. Blackberries are kind of like disco, right? They used to be cool. So is disco the aligning force that happens when all of your people can see this Vivid Vision document? They're all pulling in the same direction. You're going to end up sharing it with your customers, your suppliers, your employees, potential employees. Everybody will be able to see what you can see.
