Vision
It may seem like an elusive concept, or even a useless exercise, but it all starts with your vision. You either imagine your future or you let the winds of fate blow you along an uncertain path.
You only find success in business if you have a well-conceived plan and you stick to it. It doesn't just happen by accident or dumb luck. It begins with your vision of what you want your company to become. That doesn't mean it's carved in stone. Your vision may change from year to year as you begin to see how much more your business can become, and that's OK. You should expect that. Even Bill Gates didn't sit in his parents garage and dream of having the largest software company in the world. Well, maybe not on the first day. But you have to start somewhere.
So what do we mean by a business vision? Your vision is your dream or hope of what your business will look like at some point in the future. How big will you be? How much will your sales be? How many employees? What new products or services will you sell? What new markets will you enter? What will your costs be? It may be a year from now, or five years, or even twenty years. It's the Big Picture perspective. Just be mindful that, like the weather, the further out you try to predict it, the less certain it becomes. Re-evaluating your vision each year is an important way to measure your success and keep your ambition grounded in reality. What is a reasonable expectation for your business? Some people prefer to use the term objective instead of vision , but it's really the same principle.
We can't give you a vision for your business. No one can sell you your own vision. It has to be yours. You have to own it and believe in it. What we can do is help you shape your vision, to help you imagine it. We can show you how important your vision is in shaping the rest of your business plan and getting your business on the right track.
Only after you have a realistic vision of your company's potential can you develop a strategy for getting there. All the other elements of a business plan flow naturally from your vision. Anything that can't be traced back to your vision is a distraction that needs to be controlled, contained and eliminated if you're going to be successful.
