Salutations friend! In today’s episode, we’re discussing why vision is such an important part of growing a successful business! If your business hasn’t been growing either in the direction or speed you would like, despite your best efforts, today’s conversation about vision might be what you need to shed some light on the situation.
Salutations, friend! Welcome back to another episode of The Profit Scale podcast.
In today’s episode, we’re discussing why vision is such an important part of growing a successful business! If your business hasn’t been growing either in the direction or speed you would like, despite your best efforts, today’s conversation about vision might be what you need to shed some light on the situation.
Here's a quick overview of the points we're going to discuss in today's conversation:
Today's discussion will help you get clear on what your next steps should be to move your business forward. Hit play, and let's get started!
Links:
For today’s podcast episode, we are going to get clear on where you want your business to be.
Have you been feeling the following towards your business?
Fret not! Let’s see how our topics can help you get over these feelings and get to where you want your business to be.
Salutations friend and welcome to an episode of The Profit Scale! This is the podcast for service-based coaches, consultants and creatives looking to stop living from paycheck to paycheck, pay themselves more, and scale their business beyond the 6-figure plateau without the overwhelm of 60+ hours work weeks.
I’m your host and Income Strategist, RJ Connell. If you are looking to collect more coins, stop dropping coins, and grow your business sustainably, then you, my friend, are in the right place! Turn up the volume and lean in because we are about to get started!
Salutations, friend! It is your Income Strategist, RJ Connell. Today, we are going to talk about one of my favorite topics to discuss — vision.
If you have been feeling that your business is not quite growing towards the direction you want, despite your best efforts, today’s conversation might be what you need to shed some light on the situation. Not only are we going to talk about why vision is important and the role it plays in scaling your business, but I will also break down three different kinds of it today.
Before we get started, I created a worksheet to help you make today’s conversation actionable for your business. This worksheet is a part of my Systems That Scale Framework. This is a signature framework that I use to help coaches, consultants, and creatives just like you, to pay themselves more, stop living from paycheck to paycheck, and create sustainable growth in both their income and impact.
The Systems That Scale Workshop will be on Saturday, April 18th. I would love to see you there, friend. When you register for it, you can get access to the full workbook right away.
You can click the link in the show notes to download the worksheet and to register for the workshop, or you can visit rjconnell.ca/7 to access both the worksheet and registration for the workshop, and get access to the full workbook.
Okay, now that you have your workbook handy, let’s dive right in!
A few weeks ago, in Episode 5, we talked about the difference between working as the CEO and as an employee in your business.
One of the key roles of a CEO is that they must cast a vision. The direction, trajectory, and alignment of the business towards the greater goal is their responsibility. In this case, that means you! When I talk about casting a vision, I’m not talking about cutting up magazines and gluing pictures to a pretty board. Creating and casting a vision goes far beyond that. It requires you to think strategically, to apply foresight, and to think intentionally about where you want to go and what it will take to get there.
People often confuse having a vision with having a goal, but they are two very different things, so let’s define the two.
A vision is a clear destination for your future. It aligns with your deepest values, beliefs, priorities, and it reflects who you want to be. It deals with trajectory and aligns your everyday actions towards your intended destination. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak. While your vision can involve accomplishments, it is more dependent on who you are and the level at which you show up than it is with what you accomplish.
Now, a goal is different because it is a specific accomplishment that moves you closer to your vision. We tend to set goals around things like revenue, email list growth, conversion rates, social media growth, media exposure through interviews and PR, and so much more. But each one of these goals is usually only a means to an end. It is not usually the end itself, and that is where understanding the bigger picture comes into play.
The accomplishment of a goal is dependent on the things you do while the fulfillment of a vision is dependent on who you become.
Let me give you a quick example of what this could look like. I had a client who was struggling to make money in her business.
When we started working together, she had already paid several thousands of dollars for several programs and coaches, yet was still missing something — a key component for her business.
Now, her business was making money. She was working with clients and was able to secure a few consultations a month through word of mouth alone, yet something was missing. That missing component was a vision — one that was specific to who she was and the business she was building.
As with all of my Systems That Scale Clients, the first component of the program is clarifying the vision. She was so used to working with coaches and consultants that gave her tasks, and strategies, and a bunch of action items, as though simply answering the question, “Where do you want this business to be in 5 years?” was a challenge.
When you start to think intentionally about your vision — what is possible, what your business can become, what global impact you can have, or the family tree that your success will forever change, these thoughts are automatically impeded by the question, “How?” When we do not know that, and we cannot see each step on the path towards fulfilling it and making it a reality, we subconsciously reject and categorize it as impossible or unrealistic.
You may even think that you are dreaming too big and find yourself asking, “Am I allowed to want this? Is this too much to ask for?” Maybe you are scared to dream too big and end up falling short or failing, so you convince yourself that you never really wanted that much in the first place and you condense your level 10 vision of running a global business to an achievable realistic level 2 vision of working with local clients. This thought processing happens so fast. Sometimes you do not even realize that your vision is bigger than what you are currently striving for until someone challenges you.
That was the exact situation my client was in, but the Systems That Scale program challenged her to step out of the trees and dare to imagine that there was a forest beyond them — a bigger picture and the reason behind why she was doing the work that she was. Everything changed for her once we clarified that vision. We aligned every action towards it, and that is where the goals and strategies came into play. The work we did of shifting the focus and starting with her destination — her vision in mind, took her from earning a couple hundred or maybe $1000 a month to consistently signing 5-figure deals.
When you are operating your business without a vision, you end up moving from task to task, goal to goal, and accomplishment, to accomplishment, before you realize that you are going in a direction that you did not intentionally choose. You end up moving in what I call horizontal motion, instead of forward motion.
Horizontal motion keeps you busy. It keeps you knocking items off your task list. It keeps the money rolling into your business, and at the end of the day, you are still moving. There is progress, but it is not always forward progress.
Vision takes all your horizontally aligned tasks and flips them 90 degrees, so that they are vertical and start moving you forwards, upwards and towards the destination that you set for yourself. A clear vision should be at the foundation of every piece of strategy you apply in your business.
You should know how your email marketing strategy, income strategy, conversion strategy, hiring strategy, client retention strategy, and every other strategy, move your business, as a whole, closer to your vision.
Now that you understand why having a vision is so important for your business, here are the 3 key segments that it needs to cover — your business as a whole, your team, and your clients. I’m going to break down each one of these areas to help you jump-start the process of either creating your vision or clarifying the existing one for each area. Your worksheet is going to make it a lot easier for you to follow along, so whether you downloaded the worksheet or the workbook, make sure you have it handy for this part.
Segment 1 is vision for your business as whole
This is the vision where you step out of the role of an employee into that of the CEO and begin to establish a destination for your business. It gives direction for the other two areas we are going to cover, and ultimately, it helps both you and anyone who joins your team understand how their daily actions are helping to move the business forward.
The vision you establish will become the foundation for the strategies you apply and will help inform the systems you implement when it comes to your marketing, customer service, opportunities — ones that you accept against the ones you reject, and so much more. Establishing the overarching vision for the business means having a clear understanding of the “why” behind every action you take, whether you are a solo entrepreneur, or you have a team of employees that works alongside you..
The simplest way to establish a vision is to answer these questions:
These are going to help you identify where horizontal motion may be at work in your business, and once you have identified it, you can then begin to change it. You are going to ask and answer these same questions for the other two segments we are about to cover, but the perspective on each is going to be slightly different.
So let’s talk about segment 2.
Segment 2 is vision for your team
This segment is often overlooked in the online business world. We rarely think about what we want for our employees or the culture that we want to establish within our businesses.
Making sure that you have a vision for your team is crucial to building a business that has the capacity, the human resources needed to grow your business.
There are two different perspectives when it comes to the vision for your team. First is identifying the roles you need and the type of person who could fill it in. While you can always train someone to develop the skill set needed to execute a job, you cannot train someone to have the personality, desire, and willingness to work alongside you and your team.
The culture you want to create is important to keep in mind because the culture of the company has a huge effect on the engagement, fulfillment, and performance of your team members, which ultimately will affect your revenue.
The second perspective for your team vision is to align the work your team members are doing to support their ambitions. As the CEO, it is important to remember that this is your vision. The people you hire to work alongside you and support the vision, will not likely share that same vision as you. If all you offer them is a paycheck, someone is always willing to pay more. Hence, when you are willing to partner with your team and ensure that the work they do within your business is also supporting their ambitions, their job becomes a lot more than just a paycheck. It becomes an advantage for both you and them.
When it comes to establishing a vision for your team, here are the questions you can ask to help you begin the process:
Segment 3 is establishing a vision for your clients
Lastly, that brings us to the third segment, which is establishing a vision for your clients. You have likely begun doing this by clearly outlining the benefits of going through your coaching program, hiring you as a consultant, or why you are the best event decorator for the job.
You should be clear on both the features and the benefits of every program, product, or service that you sell in your business. If you are not already, that is the first place I want you to start. You should identify the transformation that you take your clients through and the benefits of working with you. However, provided you are already clear on those things, I want to challenge you to take it a step further, look beyond your clients making that initial purchase with you, and identify the benefits of continuing to work with you.
What does your client have to gain or lose by working at a higher level, renewing their contract, or signing a retainer with you? Do not just think about the benefits you offer now. Think about what you can continue to contribute if they choose to keep on working with you.
That type of vision allows you to continue supporting your clients on their journey to their destination, and it allows you to better communicate why continuing to work together is beneficial for them, which ultimately results in more coins for your business as well.
Establishing a vision for all three segments will not only help you grow your business in a way that’s not only sustainable but also intentional and strategic. Taking a few minutes regularly to ask and answer these questions can make a huge difference in the growth of your business.
While I believe in establishing a vision now, as in today, I also know that a characteristic of a vision is that it evolves. As you move closer to your vision, it will become clearer and your destination might change slightly, as you become better able to align yourself.
It is normal for your vision to evolve, and what you established today during our conversation is not set in stone.
There is room for your vision to grow as you do, and as your business does.
So let’s recap what we covered today.
We defined vision as a clear destination for your future that aligns with your deepest values, beliefs, and priorities, and reflects who you want to be.
We talked about why it is important and the fact that it will become clearer as you move toward it. What you establish today will evolve with experience and grow as you do. Nonetheless, it is still important to declare your destination, and you do that through vision.
We also discussed the three key segments that you need to have a vision for.
Each of these segments works together to help your business grow both in impact and income. While they are just as important, they also play unique roles.
If you have not yet downloaded the worksheet, click the link in the show notes or head over to rjconnell.ca/7 so that you can start to put today’s conversation into action for your business.
I’m so grateful we got to have this conversation. Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast because, in next week’s conversation, we are touching on a topic that is a sore spot for a lot of entrepreneurs.
We are going to talk about an experience in business that we have all had at one point or another. Some of you might even be going through right now, so make sure to check it out next Monday when it drops. You are not going to want to miss it!
Friend, thank you for joining me here for today’s conversation. I would love to hear your feedback and what stood out the most to you from today’s episode. Head over to our IG page @rjconnellofficial and join the conversation!
I will see you at the same time and place next week. Until then, I wish you coins, confidence, and all the bags!