Stephen Kelly breaks vision into three parts: a concrete rallying cry like launching millions of businesses, specific milestones you can tackle tomorrow, and a do-first mindset where execution comes first. Leaders should lock onto the what but stay flexible on the how, letting teams find their own path to the goal.
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Tim. Hello Evan, Stephen. I have a question about tactical execution against the vision. A strong vision sets direction and enables the whole business to focus on outcomes. But what are your top 3 recommendations for creating a vision that has high tactical value? In other words, a vision that everyone knows what to do with and how to execute.
Yeah, I think with the vision, it's really important to have a clear sort of end result and outcome. What is it? You know, your, your mission is about launching and helping millions of entrepreneurs. Sage's vision will be to launch the next 10 million businesses and create the foundation for millionaires to go and help their communities and create huge prosperity and job creation. So the clarity around that mission, that rallying cry, is really important. And it has to be end result bound. So what are we going to do by 2020, and how are we going to change the world, and how are we going to get rid excited. And then I think you need to bring it down to some very tactical things in terms of getting back to what we talked about before. It's not about the old world. It's not about think, feel, do. It's about do first. So what is the kind of thing we're going to do tomorrow to achieve that? What are we going to do next week? What are we going to achieve? And get really tactical and really focused. And then I do think it's really important in this business that a business is fully integrated now. It's not Marketing's an adjunct, it's not an afterthought, it's right at the heart of the business. And how do you think about being where the audience is and being part of the conversation throughout? And what's that journey look like? So simply, 3 things. One is have a big vision, big rallying cry, know where the journey is going to take you. Number 2, kind of be really clear about what the milestones and the steps are there. And then number 3 is just get on and do it, you know, crack on. And do, feel, think, engage, be part of the conversation.
My perspective, just to add a little bit on that, is I would be attached to what you're trying to do, but not how you're going to do it. Because the how changes a lot, right? And if you have a clear vision— so I want to help entrepreneurs, right? I believe in entrepreneurs. I want to help a billion entrepreneurs. That's our big, you know, what I'm all about. That influences down to a tactical level, because anything that I do has to have big-scale values, right? So doing one-on-one meetings, probably not doing that anymore unless that person has an ability to go out and reach millions of people, right? So I'm doing much more in the public eye, uh, when I'm directing my team, right? Somebody helping me with my YouTube videos, or somebody helping me on my social accounts, and somebody helping with my website. Having that big vision helps align them for what we all want to do, but I'm not locking them into how to do it. I want them to be creative. I don't want to just give them always, here's what you have to do, 'cause then you're working with a bunch of task managers instead of people who can actually lead projects. And so your vision in my mind helps you create the big picture of where you want to go, but then when you drill down, it can give you ideas. And I see it more as the lens through which you see the world, as if I'm going to make this next Instagram post, is this believe or not? Is this YouTube video believe or not? Do we believe or not? Does it tie into our mission or not? But then not restricting people to say you can only do this, you can only do these 3 things, because there's probably a lot of things that if you can unlock the creativity of the people on your team around the mission that they all understand, then they're gonna surprise you with a bunch of amazing initiatives that you would've never come up with yourself, because hopefully they're better than you at the skills that they know, and that's why you brought them on in the first place.
Yeah, and the other thing, you know, this vision is hallucination without execution. So to your point, Evan, it's all about, course correction, you know, it works. And what I would say is on a Sunday night, you know, you're probably catching up on the paperwork and all that sort of stuff, but also just carve out like 30 minutes to reflect on what's really gone well this week, what worked really, really well, actually what didn't go so well, what are we going to change next week, how are we going to do it differently? Just an example, I hadn't met Evan and my life was a lot poorer 18 months ago. Now Evan on his business plan probably never knew that I'd existed. And we got together and we thought, actually, let's have some fun together. Let's actually— we've got such alignment between our mission and our purpose and sense of purpose. We want to change the world. So why don't we do something together? We just started— why don't we just do, you know, a Google Hangout together? And obviously we love doing it. You probably get that. We really enjoy it because it's all about serving you guys and making a difference and supporting a billion entrepreneurs is awesome. But also, hopefully we're providing some value. But every time we do one of these, Evan and I kind of reconnect. What's the big issue out there for the next one? What can we do better? How can we serve you as an audience better? We never stop learning. You know, we always kind of at the end of it beat ourselves up. How can we do a better job for you guys? And we're never done on that journey. So it just shows you it's more about execution, getting on with stuff and then staying true to your vision. Being a company with a heart and just pursuing your passion.
I love it. Somebody, somebody wrote romance in the comments there.
