Cameron Herold explains why founders fail to align their teams: employees can't read your mind. The fix is a vivid vision, a 4 to 5 page document describing what your company will look, act, and feel like in three years. It gives staff a concrete target to reverse-engineer everything from meetings to culture.
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Who is the CEO of a new home being built? The homeowner, right? The homeowner is the CEO. Now, if the homeowner is the CEO of getting their home built, how many of those CEOs have any skill at building the home? Fucking none. Not a single homeowner knows how to build the home, right? So you have an incompetent CEO hiring a second in command who is the general contractor. Now, the key is for the general contractor to understand the vision of what they want built. And for the CEO to say, I have confidence that you can now make my vision come true. You could hand $2 million to the contractor and say, build me my dream home and leave for a year and come back and you go, what did you build me? Because it doesn't look like what I wanted. The problem that we have with entrepreneurs, with all of us in the room or outside, is that our employees can't read our mind. You have an idea of what you want your meetings to be like. You have an idea of what you want your customer service experience to be like. You have an idea of what you want the job sites to be like. You have an idea of what you want your dashboards to look like and your, your culture. But they can't read your freaking mind. The vivid vision becomes a 4 or 5 page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years in the future so that your employees can reverse engineer that 5-page document and figure out a way to make every sentence come true. That's what you're going to start with in scaling your company.
