Why Every Great Company Starts with a Vivid Vision

I learned about the vivid vision concept two years prior to me joining Brian. When I joined Brian In October of 2000, he handed me his what he called a painted picture, which was a two page version of the vivid vision. I looked at it and I said, I know how to make this come true. He's like, good, I have no idea how to do this. Every time we got a resume from someone who wanted to work for us, we sent them an auto replying, said, thanks for your resume. We're not going to read it yet. We'd like you to read this four page description of what our company looks like, acts like and feels like three years from now and read this recent article of us in the media. If that sounds like the kind of company that you want to help build, reply with a two minute video of how you can make our vivid vision come true. If we like your video, we'll bring you in for an interview to see if you have the skills. So right away we only started talking to the people who were vibrating like we were vibrating. We became a cult. 1-800-got junk ranked as the number two company in all of Canada work for. When I was COO, we twice ranked the year before two, two years in a row as number one to work for in British Columbia. So we've become this iconic cult. There were only three companies in all of British Columbia. You wanted to work for either 1-800-Goblet Jug, Junk, Lululemon or the Vancouver Olympics because that started in 2006 preparing for the 2010 Olympic Games. Those were the three companies everybody wanted to work for. And it was our cult like obsession with this vision and getting the media to talk about it. So almost like you recognized me talking about my future state as if it had already come true. If the media ever asked us questions, we would talk about the future. We wouldn't say we're going to be. We'd say, you know, this is the kind of company that we are. This is who we're building. And they got so excited about that that they started to communicate like we were. I learned about the Vivid vision concept two years prior to me joining Brian. So. So Ryan and I were in Forum. I had built two EO qualifying companies. I was a minority partner in what is called Boyd Auto Body in Canada. It's now called Gerber in the United States. Big like a $3 billion publicly traded company. But I was one of the partners in that then I was the president of a private currency company. So he watched me building these companies and I was Using that same Vivid Vision concept back with those companies. When I joined Brian In October of2020, he handed me his, what he called a painted picture, which was a two page version of the vivid Vision. I looked at it and I said, I know how to make this come true. He's like, good, I have no idea how to do this. So I joined him. I'd already built franchise companies. I was open to west coast for college pro painters. I'd already done it a few times. So I understood what he needed to get done and saw how I could make it come true. And one of the early things I told him that we needed to do was was turn the company into a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. And we had to get into the zone of a cult, because if we could get that cult like culture, in the end, we could get a lot of people aligned with us. So culture and that kind of belief in the flywheel and obsession with core values was very, very early on. And it was by design. We only brought people to work in the company who loved what we were about to build, who wanted to do something, and they had the skills to make that come true. So we did that very on, I'd say about three years later, once we got to, you know, we went. I joined at 2 million in revenue. Three years later, we were at about 40, 40 million. Around the 40 million mark is when we hit that inflection point where we were winning the awards. You know, we. At one point we had a guy picketing outside of our office with a sandwich board saying, please bring me in for an interview. You know, we. We had become that cult. So I think that was around three years in when the media was writing about us. All the time we'd been on Oprah. It was when the culture really had tipped. But the alignment with Vivid Vision was very, very critical. It was one of the four corners of our jigsaw puzzle. If you were.