Your Vision Statement Sucks! How To Make It SPECTACULAR

When you roll out the Vivid Vision, where a lot of people make a mistake is they roll it out and they expect everyone to be just as excited as you are. But it takes time for people to understand the whole document. It takes time for them to buy into the whole document because they're still focused on what today looks like. So the CEO's job is to communicate vision constantly. The first book I wrote was called Double Double right? And Double Double, Chapter one of Double Double was the Vivid Vision concept. And people wanted more information about it. They wanted to understand deeper and how to write it deeper, how to roll it out much deeper on how to connect the customers and suppliers and employees with it. And then I also covered areas on Personal Vivid Visions and Family's Vivid Visions. So there was just much more content that I could deliver in one chapter. So that was the reason for writing the book, Vivid Vision. But I was introduced to the concept 25 years ago now, back in 1998 in Vancouver, Canada, where an Olympic coach was teaching a group of CEOs, much like your Sims distilleries. It was an entrepreneurs organization event. We had 120 CEOs that were invited to the event. Only 16 of us went. And in the first five minutes we all thought it was going to be the stupidest session ever because the this high performance Olympic coach was talking about looking into the crystal ball and visualizing our company in the future. And we're like, what are you talking about? It ended up becoming a very profound concept. I used it to scale up my private currency company at the time. And one of the guys in my forum mate was, was running something called the Rubbish Boys. He rolled it out for his business and a third member of our group rolled it out for his company. And all three of us had very, very big success over the next two years. So I was really hooked on the idea and the concept and then started talking about it on stages. And that's kind of where it started. I was excited that people were latching on to the concept. I was excited that entrepreneurs were using the tool. I was never the smart guy in school. I really struggled in high school, struggled in university. So I always found the cheat sheets. And I saw this as a cheat sheet. I saw this as a way that entrepreneurs are like flies trying to bang their head on the window. And if they keep trying harder, you don't go through the window, you end up dead on the windowsill. And I saw this as a tool to help people. So I was more excited about it where I really Became kind of in awe about it was when it started to pick up globally. You know, I had the governor of the state of Arizona, he asked me to come and sit with him privately in his office to walk through the vivid vision concept and help him craft one for the state of Arizona. I, I had Forbes magazine, the actual physical print edition of the magazine, write a full page article about the vivid vision concept about 10 years ago, like in the actual magazine. That's when I really kind of was like, holy, this is big. I think the vivid vision concept has really taken hold in probably 26 or 27 countries. Some of my other content is not as well received because culturally, the way that you build a company, culture, driving core values, the open office environment, the profit sharing program, building of leaders, the fact that you can go and just chat with the CEO, a lot of that is not as embraced in cultures around the world as it, as it is in North America now taken for granted. But the vivid vision concept strangely has been very well adapted. And I think it's because it is just a leader sharing the vision of their company or a person sharing the vision for their life. You know, all of that is very, very global. One of the things that we learned, and this was again rolling back 25 years, was if you lean too far out, you fall over. If you try to write a vivid vision for five years or 10 years out, it doesn't work. It's too far out there for people to latch onto. So there's a very big difference between a bhag, right? And my bhag is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. That's a bhag, a big hairy, audacious goal. But a vivid vision should be a shorter time constraint. If you only go one year, it's really not different enough from what you have today to provide enough kind of excitement and energy and tension. So we found that three years tends to be the right amount of time. But if you go out too far, not far enough, it doesn't work. Secondly is if you just roll the vivid vision out. So a vivid vision is a four or five page description of what your business or your life or your relationships looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future in writing, that five page description helps other people conspire to help you make that come true. So the more people I share my vivid vision with, the more they can help me make it come true. They see certain sentences that they can introduce someone to, or they can hold me accountable to, or they ask me questions about And I get more excited about when you roll out the vivid vision. Where a lot of people make a mistake is they roll it out and they expect everyone to be just as excited as you are. But it takes time for people to understand the whole document. It takes time for them to buy into the whole document. And because they're still focused on what today looks like, and if you're talking about three years out, three years out, three years out,' and all they can see is today, it takes time for them to get excited about that Future. So the CEO's job is to communicate vision constantly. So a mission statement tended to be, you know, we'd pull our leadership team together on an off site, we'd all put our favorite inspiring words up on a whiteboard, we'd vote on our favorite words. We might end up with six or seven words and we mash them up into one sentence. Go team. That was never enough. Like a one sentence mission statement or vision statement. Didn't talk about your culture. Didn't talk about your meeting rhythms, didn't talk about your office space and your hybrid workforce. Didn't talk about how you live core values and how you embrace your core purpose. Didn't explain it enough. That is not a vision statement. That's merely 10 goals that you're driving towards, which is great. But the vivid vision is a four or five page description of every aspect of your company, as if you're standing, walking around your company three years from now. Almost like we hopped out of a time machine and we're describing everything. We describe our meetings, we describe our offices, not knowing how it came true. But if we can describe it in its future state, we can then reverse engineer every sentence and figure out one or two projects to make each sentence come true. One of the worries that entrepreneurs tend to have is, well, what if people take my vision and they rip it off? So what? They don't have your tenacity, they don't have your team, they don't have your laser focus, and more likely their vision is going to be different. It's kind of like if you had a vivid vision for what an electric vehicle would look like. Not everybody is designing the Tesla. You know, all these other car companies have their electric vehicles and frankly, most of them suck. So don't worry about sharing what your vivid vision is. Stay focused on what yours is. Be cognizant of what the competitors are doing, but be obsessed with where you're going. Culture is what excites people and aligns people and inspires people. I think it's what kind of fuels the conversation. I'll give you an example of where culture matters and where vision matters. 100 years ago, there were three guys sitting on a sidewalk and they were making bricks. And they asked the first guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm making bricks. That guy's not super inspired. He's not super passionate about his role, but he's making bricks. I asked the second guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm building a wall and I get to make bricks to build this wall again. He's got some purpose with what he's doing, but he's not super excited about it. Where the culture really emerges and vivid vision is one part of culture is. The third guy said, they're building a cathedral to worship God and he gets to make the bricks to build the left wall of the cathedral. All three guys were making bricks. All three guys were building bricks for the left wall. But the third guy was inspired by the vivid vision for this unbelievable cathedral. And he found meaning and purpose in his work, which frankly, that vivid vision of what they're building is what has allowed them to build it for 125 years. Some families have had three or four generations of people working on that same vivid vision to make it come true. Vivid Vision document is not written in the order that it happens, right? It's written as a whole, describing your whole business. Your team's job is to figure out what parts to put in place first. What are the foundational parts of your business, right? Like your core values, your core purpose, your interviewing, the hiring of people, the growing of people, the leadership training programs, the alignment with vision, your one year plans, the meeting rhythms. There's like an order of operation, of doing the right things. And that's how you decide what's what are each of the things to make each sentence come true. And which ones should we do in year one? Which things should we do in year two? Which things should we do in year three? And of all the things we're going to do in year one, which parts do we do in fourth quarter, third quarter, second quarter, first quarter? Let's execute on first quarter and keep reminding people of what's happening in year three. So you have to keep reminding people that all of the vivid vision is going to happen, but some of it's not going to happen until the third year. So they don't get discouraged. You also don't want the entrepreneur with their big shiny objects getting so excited about, install the cabinets. Install the cabinets. Like, dude, we haven't even got the floors put in yet. That's kind of the methodology and, and that's the metaphor that I use all the time is, is building this home. At best, you want to be rereading it monthly. And then, you know, Hal Elrod and I co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs together as part of the morning savers. The V is visualization. You could be reading your vivid vision on a daily basis or reading a paragraph daily or listening to parts of it on a daily basis. The more that you as the entrepreneur stay focused on your vivid vision, or the more that you as a human stay focused on the vivid vision for your life or your marriage, the more that you're going to be able to make it come true. So you're always thinking about it, but executing on today. What I do is I first release it to the leadership team and make sure I get buy in from the leadership team. Secondly, I release it to all my employees so I get buy in and alignment with all my employees. So now the entire company is aligned and inspired and excited about the vivid vision. Then we start rolling it out to potential employees so they're excited about what they're joining. Then we roll it out to all of our suppliers. Then we roll it like our lawyer and our accountant and our bankers so they can all see what we're building last. I start rolling it out to customers and then potential customers. So that's kind of the rollout over the first quarter and then every quarter afterwards it's simply emailing a PDF document or the link on your website to everyone and reminding them about the vivid vision. Maybe doing a quick one minute loom video, getting people excited about it and asking them to reread it again and asking them to let you know which sentences they can help come true. To me, what is scarier is having all your employees and customers and suppliers all thinking you're building something very different. The way that you stay patient with everything is reminding yourself with a plan. Like if I came up with 84 projects to do to make my vivid vision roll out, I can then show that 30 of the projects happen in year three, 20 projects happen in year two. And I've got 30 projects happening in year one. So the project plan shows me to not worry that it will be coming. Much like the blueprints of building a home, I now have the plan to make my vision come true. You have to actually roll out the vivid vision. But then we have to have the plans and the people in place and the meeting rhythms to make that vision come true by keeping them focused on the plan. Right? Thinking about the future, but executing on today. Knowing where we're going, but focusing on their quarterly plan, focusing on quarterly metrics, focusing on their top five for the week. So it's always important to know where we're going, but then execute on today. Your core values should be a maximum of four or five core values. If you get more than that, they start becoming. Some of them are aspirational values. My test is you have to be willing to fire people who break your core values, and you must recruit and interview and hire people based on the core values. So 5 tends to be enough. More than that tends to be too many. Core values should never be a single word, right? Spell it out as a very clear, concise sentence or a phrase that everyone can understand that need no explanation whatsoever. So a great example of some core values. Deliver what you promise. Respect the individual, pride in all you do. Find a better way. They're all very clear. You can be willing to fire people who break them. They're super easy to understand. The only time I've ever allowed anyone to have a single word as a core value was one of my clients that I coached for four years. One of their five core values was simplify. It's just perfect, right? Like, but that's the only time a single word's ever been so perfect for me. Next one is, is if. Don't. Don't put a bunch of core values to create an acronym. Like, it's about the core values, not some cute little acronym that you come up with. And I think the acronym often diminishes the core values because people think you're trying to be cute instead of trying to obsess about what really matters. And then think about the order that you're putting them in intentionally. You know, one of my clients had five core values, and their fifth core value of the list was safety is number one. Like, well, if safety is number one, that should be your first core value. Be very intentional when you roll those out. Now, the reason I say that they shouldn't have any bullet points or explanation is they need to be so clear that everyone understands them. You can then have explanations on how we live them. So you might have deliver what you promise as a core value, which is super easy to understand, doesn't need any explanation. But then you could have five bullet points in a document, part of your training program on how we deliver what we promise, right? We commit to goals, and we deliver on our goals. We commit to showing up on time for meetings. We commit to, you know, replying to emails within 24 hours, whatever our commits are. It's like, oh, I understand how I'll use that core value on a day to day basis. I visualize every company like a jigsaw puzzle. The vivid vision is the picture on the front of the box of the jigsaw puzzle. And then whenever we start a jigsaw puzzle, we like to get the four corners first. Well, the four corners of all of your companies are your core values, your core purpose, your bhag, which is your big hairy, audacious goal, and your one year plan that everyone's executing. On the four sides of the jigsaw puzzle are the people systems, the meeting rhythms, the strategic plan or strategic thinking systems, and your financial systems. And then the culture emerges from that jigsaw puzzle approach. That's the way I visualize every company. I'm only running one company. I have products and services. There are parts of that I learned the hard way back kind of from 2000 to 2007, that I am not the company, I am not my brand, that I'm a human who has maybe 100 years to go through this life. And one of the things that I do is I run a company. I'm no longer letting my company define me. I'm no longer keeping that as the center of my being. I think that's one of the big values of having lived and traveled now, you know, I've been to 69 countries, 41 in the last two and a half years. The United States is so myopic and focused on what we do. When you're living globally, when you meet someone, they don't say, what do you do? Like they ask you, what have you seen this week? What have you been doing this week? What are you up to? What are your hobbies like? And then like, maybe at some point in conversation, it's like, oh, what do you do to make money? I think I've really decoupled myself from my company in that it's only one aspect of my life. And then for, you know, if I was running multiple businesses, yes, I would have a different vivid vision for each company. I would a different operating plan, a different team in place, a different P and L in place. I would just think of it that way. This is something that I learned years ago from a book called the Dream Manager. And it said if companies are more focused on helping their employees make their dreams come true, the employees will go through brick wall for you. So part of that is Getting every employee in your company to craft their 101 Dream goals or their bucket list. And it could be a very local bucket list. It could be everything you want to do or try or experience or see in Scottsdale. Like, it doesn't have to be traveling the world. So your bucket list can expand as you decide to expand and as you have finances to be able to do it, or the health to be able to do it. My wife and I each wrote our bucket list. We each have about 150 things on our bucket list. We're constantly working to help each other cross things off our bucket list. And we're living what we call our bucket list life. So we're literally probably every two or three weeks crossing something off each of our bucket lists. And we share our bucket list with the world so that people can either help us make those come true, or we can inspire other people, or they can come with us on some of those bucket list adventures. But like, in the last 12 months, you know, Iceland, skydiving over the palm in Dubai, going on safari in Kenya, scuba diving in the Seychelles, running with the bulls in Pamplona. I mean, the list just was like, crossing it off, crossing it off, crossing it off. And that's partially because we have one and we're sharing those. There's a very subtle nuance here on the buy in as well. I'm not going to change the Vivid Vision to get their buy in. I'll change out the people and find the people who buy in. The vision is the vision, right? If Steve Jobs showed the prototype for the iPhone and said, what don't you like about it? Are you bought into it and they're like, well, it needs a keyboard. He would have designed something very different. He knew what he wanted to design and he found people that were crazy enough to help him make it come true. So the bias that I'm getting is, are you as excited about building this as I? And are you crazy enough to help figure out how to make this come true? And then it's just reminding them that some parts of it won't happen until three years and two years. That's where some of the, the excitement comes. A lot of employees tend to be very disillusioned with entrepreneurs because we have the idea of the week, right? And sometimes we're super excited about the idea, and then three weeks later, oh, yeah, we don't need that idea anymore. They want to just know for sure that we're really locked and loaded on this Vivid vision before they get excited. You Definitely updated every three years. So as you evolve as a human, as your business evolves, then you're going to evolve your vivid vision. But I think it is powerful when you just kind of stay focused on, committed to what feels right. If I'm thinking about how I, as a leader within my company feel on that day to day basis, I just keep forcing that feeling. I keep going back and revisiting that feeling. I keep going like, what are the things that I can do to protect that feeling? Like as an entrepreneur, a couple things that we have to protect on our own are our kind of excitement and enthusiasm around the business, our confidence. You know, we constantly get told it can't happen or not now or no, or we, we stumble into these problems. So we have to protect that. Well, one of the ways to protect that is to stay healthy, you know, to stay fit, to stay mindful, control our diet, to control our use of substances. And again, I learned this twice by having, once having a massive nervous breakdown and once just massively not staying healthy in the growth of companies. I just won't do that anymore. In traveling around the world, I have a backpack and a small little suitcase. I actually have a scale in my backpack and I weigh myself every single morning. This morning I was 182.1 pounds. I'm pretty much at the exact same weight that I was at 30 years ago, but I was 42 pounds heavier than I am today 10 years ago. I just refused to go back there around mindset, around fitness, it has to just stay focused on it and we have to strip our weight from the excuses, right? So I think it's easy to say that, oh, well, life happened and stuff got in the way. No, there's, there's plenty of people out there that are, are, you know, with kids or with a spouse who's sick or with a rough economy that are still living their best life because they focus on that. First I realized that drinking wasn't serving me anymore. Steve knew me in a day when, when I was pretty much not able to do a speaking event unless I had a drink in my hand. I used to think it was funny that I'd walk on stage with a scotch. I haven't had a drink in almost seven months now. And that was something that I had to realize, that it was affecting my life and my relationship six, seven years ago that I decided I wasn't going to let it do that anymore, right? That I was waking up in the morning tired, which meant I wasn't going to the gym. So I wasn't eating healthy, I wasn't feeling good about myself. So I was using alcohol to self sabotage or to feel okay. It was this doom loop that I was in instead of protecting my confidence and protecting the way I feel. Some of the goals that are written in your vivid vision, and again, they're less of a goal, they're more like, I know this is going to happen, I feel this or I want this to happen in such a big way. It could just be, you know, we want our employees delivering on their core promises, or our employees are excited about, you know, our meetings or we actively listen to our customers by X, Y, Z. Those, those aren't massive goals, but they can just be very transformational if there's things you don't do today. And often in the vivid visions, I don't even want numbers in there, right? I want it about the feelings it needs to be about. Like what can you see and feel like? Elon had a vivid vision for the Tesla Model S when he rolled it out 10, 12 years ago. And one of them was that it had to fit him and his family. At the time he had five kids and he was six foot four. So that's why the Tesla Model S, when I sit in it at 6 4, I sit in the driver's seat, I push the seat all the way back and there's still room for a 6 foot 4 guy behind me is because he designed the car to fit his body and his five kids. Three in the backseat, two in the jump seat by the trunk. There's a seven person family. Like the vision was there, but it wasn't like so massive. And I always like to say that if my vivid vision is coming true, December 31, 2024, I write it as December 31, 2024. I don't write it as January 1, 2025. That one day, all of a sudden feels like I have a lot more time left. You know, I say goals are completed by Friday, not by Monday, by the 31st of the month, not by the 1st of the month. You know, it provides a little bit more attention even though it's only an hour difference or a minute difference. Vivid vision describes your entire company. The only time I've ever really seen companies have to massively pivot. There's been two occasions. One was the global financial crisis where people that were in the mortgage and real estate industry just had to do something different because that whole industry got obliterated. The second was, was Covid. You know, my sister's company during COVID was literally shut down. She was doing $1 million a month in revenue with 78 employees. And she ran co ed intramural sports leagues for people in seven cities. And she was not allowed to operate a 23 year old company, went from $1 million a month to zero. She had to massively reinvent. So even though she was locked and loaded on this vivid vision, she had to stop come up with an entirely new vision for a business and 12 months later had created a $2 million company with a million dollar EBITDA. That was a very different business. Then when Covid opened up again, she continued on that business and reopened her init. And now she's merged the two together and operating both. But that's the only time I've ever really seen a massive pivot have to happen is when literally everything around you falls apart. More often than not, it's where a couple of sentences are too hard to make happen or we ran out of time, we didn't have the right people or plan or money in place for something. But that's where a few sentences don't come true. Not the whole vision. Would we rather have everyone completely aligned with the vision and then have to pivot and align them with a new vision? Or we just want a bunch of smart people working really hard and then try to realign them when something happens? It's way easier to get everyone realigned. If they're already aligned with one thing, they can align with something else. Right? It's like the birds that are flying. You just see them all going like this. If they were all going like this, there's no alignment ever. One of my obsessions is that a leader's core job is to grow people. And I don't find a lot of companies out there that are growing themselves. In fact, like, the reality is we make business very difficult for ourselves because most of us don't spend the time on growing the executive function functioning skills of our people. So training them around situational leadership, coaching, delegation, hiring, interviewing, doing top grading, running meetings, managing conflict, managing email, managing projects. If we would train our people on the skills. Business gets very easy. But right now we have a lot of people that might be aligned without the skills to actually go there. It's like hiring a whole bunch of people that can't build a house. They could be aligned with the most beautiful vision and the most beautiful plan. But if they don't skilled at being contractors or doing electricians or plumbing, your house will never get built. Here's what I want everyone to do go somewhere where you can allow your mind to drift for a half a day. Maybe it's a golf course, maybe it's a cottage, maybe it's a ski place, maybe it's a beautiful hotel lobby and you sit by the fireplace. But somewhere where you're not in your office, you're not surrounded by technology, you're not surrounded by planning and how we do things. And then I want you to write down maybe 15 different areas of your business you can describe. Describe the meetings, describe operations, describe it finance, customer service, sales, marketing. Describe your leadership team. Describe your metrics in your dashboards. Describe your relationship with the bank and your relationship with your accountant, your relationship with your lawyer. Describe what your employees are writing about you online. What I want you to do is come up with three or four bullet points for each of those areas. So three or four bullets around customer service, three or four bullets around marketing. If you can come up with three or four bullet points of what each of those areas look like, act like and feel like three years in the future without worrying about how to make it come true. Right? I don't know how to build the walls, I don't know how to do electrical, I don't know how to do plumbing. But I can describe it in detail so that the right who's can come in and figure out how to do it for me. Your job is to come up with enough bullet points that then you can drop those bullet points into chat GPT and say write this as a rough draft with each of these sections as bullet points for me. Then you could hand it to a writer who can polish it and make a pop off the page or get a marketer to leverage AI and leverage their marketing skills to make it pop off the page. Then you're going to pass it to a designer who are going to drop in some photos and some design elements so it feels like your brand or it feels like you. So stay ahead of the curve as a coo. This next video is packed with great leadership lessons for you. It'll really help you as you continue in your growth.