5 Steps to Build a Bigger, Better Future | On The Homefront With Jeff Dudan #99

Hey everybody, Jeff Duden here. Welcome to the homefront. I've got a very important message for you, especially for those of you who have a business idea that you want to execute on, or maybe it's something that you've thought about or it could be any aspect of your life really. I'm going to give you five steps, five important steps that you can use across anything that you're trying to accomplish to create a bigger, better future for yourself. Okay, so number one is create a three year painted picture. Cameron Herold wrote a great book called Double Double and inside of that he talks about creating a three year painted picture. All this is is a three to five page document where you describe in great detail everything that you plan or can dream to accomplish over the next three years inside of your business. This is where you speak, a bold future. This is where you create the little nuances. This is where you define how much, how many by when, who's it going to impact and what it looks like when you get there. So you create this bold future and then you document it. You can Google three year painted Picture by Cameron Herold and lots of examples will come up and I encourage you to use this method of a three year painted picture to give life to your ideas. Number two, plan for your crisis. Once you decide to embark upon a journey, a three year journey, you've got to understand that there are going to be inflection points, that there's going to be crisis points where you're going to find entropy, meaning things are breaking, things are not keeping up, you're starting to have exceptions with customers, you're starting to fall behind and there's just friction everywhere. People are wearing too many hats. Look, it happens in every business. But first time entrepreneurs, they don't realize that this is a natural thing. Many people start a business or they go on a journey and they think it's going to be a linear progression. It's never linear. If you look in my book Discernment, I use something called the sigmoid curve, which basically says it's like an S shape. So every inflection point, whether it's at the beginning, at the middle or near the end, first you've got to go down, you've got to make different investments, then you start to climb up and when you get the entropy, it's time to break it all apart again. So I'm going to suggest that at least twice, if not more, during that three years, you're going to need to challenge everything. You're going to need to take everything in your business. That includes the people, the processes, the technologies, your beliefs, your original assumptions that you had. And you're going to need to throw them out of the building, put them out on the curb, look at where you need to go next, not where you've been, and then only bring the things back into the building that are going to get you to that next level. This is a difficult discipline. People that break their business intentionally are the ones that have experience because they understand. Like, if you. If you get set in your ways and you have sacred cows and you're not thinking and you're not challenging that your business growth is going to be stifled. That's why Elon Musk crashed so many rocket ships. He said, look, we have to learn. So we're just going to start launching them, we're going to send them up, and we're going to blow them up. But every time we do, we're going to learn something. And that has allowed him to build businesses faster than almost anybody else in the world. And that's no exception for you and your business, whatever you're trying to do. So plan for your crisis, understand your inflection points, and never let a good crisis go to waste. And if one, if your business is kind of stuck in the mud and not going anywhere, then you need to create that crisis, put it all out, examine everything, and move forward in a better direction. Number three, I'm going to tell you, you need to curate two stories. The first story is your origin story. When you're launching a business, starting a business, you need to use the law of attraction, and you need to be able to communicate who you are, how you got to where you are, and why you're doing what you're doing, and why it matters. Your origin story is important. It could be 30 seconds or it could be 30 minutes, depending on whether you're talking to a group, whether you're talking, whether you're doing a presentation, or whether you're meeting somebody on the street or in an elevator. Your origin story matters. People do business with people. The second story you need to curate is your brand impact story. Look, why does this business even matter? Who does it matter to? How does it work? Like, when you know, when we do something, how does it impact all of the stakeholders? And you need to articulate, if in multiple scenarios for multiple stakeholders, why your business even matters. What is the problem it solves? What is the change that it makes in the world? And how does it make people's lives better? So two stories. You and Your brand, and they need to be aligned and it needs to make sense and they need to go together. People don't understand oftentimes they lead with features and benefits. People don't want to hear that. They don't want to understand what, who am I dealing with? What does the company stand for and when something goes wrong? Because it's not if, but when something goes wrong, who am I going to deal with and how are they likely to resolve the situation with me? That's why your story matters. People need to know who you are. You are the lead character in your story. You are the pioneer of your brand and it all has to work together and you have to be able to articulate it not once, but plan to do it a thousand times. So get good at it. Number four, commit to a set of values and a set of principles. Look, you know, principles and values are simply the rules of your relationships. How are you going to solve conflict? How are you going to deal with the things that pop up? And it's at every level, it's in all relationships. You have to understand what you stand for and what the company stands for, and as importantly, what it will not tolerate. And this is critically important. People think it's the soft stuff, but it's not. Because the values and your principles are used in your strategic planning. It helps you understand, like which way you need to go and it will help you break the ties. It helps you break the ties in your strategic planning. It helps you break the ties in your products, it helps you break the ties in your customer set, and it helps you break the ties in difficult situations. Sometime maintaining a reputation within your industry or marketplace is going to cost you a little bit of money. And, and if you're not sure exactly what to go. Is this a transactional situation? Is this a relationship situation? What's the impact going to be long term? You can lean back into your values and your principles and just ask yourself the question, why do we start this business in the first place and in perpetuity? How do we want this company to interact with the broader market and the people that it encounters? And that's where your values and your principles are going to matter. And by the way, depending on what kind of business you have is going to determine what, what kind of values and principle you got to get the values and the principles aligned with the type of business that you have. Enough about that. Look at Zappos. There's great examples of that out there in the world where people have set a set of principles or values in place and they've honored them, they've been true to them and it has been instrumental in them building great companies. Okay, number five, heading towards the end now. Now that you have created your three year painted picture, now that you understand that you're going to have to break it to grow it, because there's not going to be any breakthroughs until you have some breakdowns. And if one doesn't happen, you need to create one. You've curated your story so you understand who you are. You've curated your brand story and the impact that it's going to make. And now you've set up a set of values and principles. You think you're ready to go? Sure. I'm going to challenge you as number five to double your plan and try to figure out how to do it in half the time, gun to your head, somebody's going to push you off a cliff. The people you care about are at risk. You have to do it twice as big. And half the time, how can you do it? People don't challenge themselves enough. You're probably thinking too small. You're probably thinking too conventionally. You're letting limiting beliefs sleep in. I don't have enough resources. My family never did this. Nobody's ever done this before. It'd be good enough, enough if I can just get to a safe place and get my bills paid or create an income or whatever it is. Look, you look, the reality of it is you're probably only going to get halfway there. So if you want to get to where you want to get to, you got to double your goals and it has to be great. If you get 50% of your dream, of your vision, of your bold future that you wrote down, and it's still great for you, you're probably getting close to thinking big enough. So those are five things. Those are steps that everybody needs to go through on a continual basis as you're building, as you're growing. And look, I just challenge you today to think bigger. Create a dream that's big enough for other people's dreams to fit inside of it and create a future for yourself and everyone that's connected to you that would have never been if you didn't have the courage to write it down, have the courage to speak it, and then have the guts to commit to it. Good luck.