Often it’s not a lack of money or ideas that holds businesses back from achieving their full potential, but the absence of vision.
Vision is the overarching long-term ambition that drives an entrepreneurial venture forward. It encapsulates what the business is about, and why what it does is important. It is the guiding light that keeps the business focused and on track, allowing you to spot and take advantage of the opportunities ahead, and to sidestep the pitfalls that lie all around.
With a vision, you stand out from the ‘vanilla businesses’ that all are doing and offering the same thing. And this draws others to you, whether it’s potential business partners and investors, would-be customers or clients, and even employees, in a virtuous circle that generates momentum and success.
Every owner starts out with a vision for their business. It’s just that over time, the burden of day-to-day firefighting and dealing with the minutiae of the ‘here and now’ rather than ‘what could be’, shrinks and shrivels once grand plans into nothingness.
But if you can hold on to that vision, it gives you clarity, the ability to see through the fog of the everyday, so that you recognise what is important and what is not.
If you feel you’ve lost your business vision, it’s good to know there are things you can do to regain it.
1. Take a long hard look at your business and what you want from it. Does your original dream still excite you? Or, after five or ten years’ trading, have you moved a long way from it? If so, recognise that fact and acknowledge that you can either reinvent your existing business, sell it or wrap it up and start again with something else.
2. Begin to think beyond the ‘now’. If you want to regenerate your vision, spend time looking to the future at what your business could be like. When you have so much on your plate, this can seem like taking your eye off the ball, which is scary. But if you never look up from the day-to-day, how will you ever have a vision beyond that, let alone do anything about it?
3. Reignite your passion for your business by setting yourself new and exciting goals. Don’t just accept that you are where you are. Be ambitious for the future and aware of the present constraints and opportunities you are facing.
4. Get inspiration from others who have successfully rediscovered or reinvented their vision for their business. Read their stories and learn from them.
5. Stop being, as Michael Gerber puts it in E-Myth books, a ‘technician’ who works ‘in’ your business, as this is one of the biggest barriers to developing the vision you need to drive it forward. Switch your mindset so that you start working ‘on’ your business instead. It’s the only way to achieve the success you envisaged when you first set out on this journey.
6. Re-energise yourself as a person. Start by taking a look at how you’re living your life, then find ways to de-stress and reinvigorate yourself – physically and mentally. And use any success, business or personal, no matter how small, to boost your energy and momentum.
7. Believe in yourself and find the courage to do something differently, even if that involves getting out of your comfort zone. There may be times when you get things wrong and make mistakes, but that too can be a positive experience, if you learn from it and move on, wiser and stronger.
8. Look for advice and direction from a good business coach and mentor. In business, we’re often too close to our situation to see what is obvious to others, and a third party perspective from someone with the right experience can give you the much-needed clarity to rethink your business vision. A coach will also hold you to account, making sure you don’t slip back into your bad old habits and thought patterns.
As your vision regains strength, you will begin to see a more positive future for your business and start to feel that what seemed like impossible dreams can actually be achieved.
It’s time to take off the blinkers.
Further reading on running a business
