In my recent piece, Restaurant Re-Boot, the first step is to “Revisit your Vision”. This assumes that you have a documented vision. If you do not, you are not alone. Many small business owners have not formalized their original passion and ideas into a coherent vision document. A clearly stated vision establishes a solid foundation for a practical road map that leads your intention into thriving reality with a healthy culture.
Your Vision Document is Square One.
Even if your business has been in operation with a vision document, this is a good time to regroup around it. If you feel you’ve lost your way, are not seeing the success you deserve or are feeling stuck in the face of new challenges, I encourage you to go Back to Square One. If this sounds cliché or excessively “back-to-basics”, well it is! And for good reason – creating and following a company vision is an essential task that yields strong results.
The Vision Document…
• Is the heart and soul of the business – it defines your ethos and is unwavering.
• Is a foundation you can return to over and over to help maintaining focus during times of strife and uncertainty.
• Forces you to run your business with authenticity, where values meet behaviour, in service to all stakeholders.
• Establishes and formalizes your identity (who), intention (what), and direction (where).
• Brings alignment, engagement and common purpose to your team.
• Helps attract and keep great employees and customers.
• Defines your core competence, niche and primary focus.
• Acts as a mirror holding all stakeholders accountable to what is important-actions and beliefs. It ss the basis for good decision-making and all behaviour.
• Gives you permission to simplify, simplify, simplify committing to doing less, better.
• Charts a clear course for long (five years+) and medium-terms (three years).
• Can act a as a beacon of hope to guide strategy and action.
• Identifies top priority objectives and keeps you from being too distracted – the critical few vs the miscellaneous many.
• Helps you get unstuck and back on track after hitting road blocks; simplifies complex situations when the s--t hits the fan.
• Leads to the discovery of the root cause of issues and prevents playing ‘whack-a-mole’ as symptoms flare up.
• Is a living, breathing document that should be looked at daily, then reviewed quarterly and annually to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
• Clearly defines marketing direction – target market, market position and brand promise.
• And, most importantly, forces you to define and declare your points of differentiation within the marketplace keeping your business top of mind with consumers.
Bear in mind, the one-page vision document is not the success, but it does point directly to that success. It requires strategy and action to bring it to realisation.
Vision + Action Plan + Measurement + Accountability = Results
In the next post we’ll describe in more detail what a vision document looks like.
Vision + Action + Discipline + Accountability= Results
The next entry will outline more detail of what a Vision document looks like.
Until next time!
תגובות