7 Steps To Create Your 3-Year Vision
The problem with having a vision is that for many people, a “vision” of what their business “could be” seems too uncertain and nebulous for them to really get their head around. The idea of creating a vision can be overwhelming, and it causes people to quit working on their vision before they even start. In my experience, the way I’ve overcome this with business owners is to take it down from a “vision” to a “3 Year Vision”- putting a vision into a 3-year timeline brings it back down to earth and makes it a little easier to grasp.
Whenever I start working with a business owner, I ask them 3 questions:
What do you sell?
Who do you sell it to?
What are you trying to build?
Really what I’m getting at with question number 3 is, “What is your vision?” I want you to be able to paint a really clear picture of what your business will look like 3 years from now. I want it to be specific and detailed. The reason I want you to have this is simply because, if you don’t know where you’re trying to go, then you don’t know which direction to walk in. If you spend too much time looking at the ground and never look up to see which way you’re heading and making sure that you are moving towards something you want to be moving towards, then you’ll eventually get lost, or wander off a cliff. Creating your 3 Year Vision is a way to “look up” from the day-to-day of running your business and be intentional about what you’re building with it.
Let me give you an example of how a 3 Year Vision works in a business:
I have a client who I’ve been working with for years now. When I first met him, he was really struggling with his business. He had some struggles around making sales and managing employees and the day to day parts of running his business, but more critically he was struggling with getting his head on straight about what he was doing all that work for. It was obvious to me that he didn’t have a clear vision of where he was going, and without that, he was like a hamster running in a wheel- doing a lot of work, but not making any real progress. This was wearing on him, and he was rightfully frustrated.
I asked him a simple question: ”In 3 years from now, what do you want this business, and your role in it, to look like?”
After some pushback from him and encouragement from me, he began to give it some serious thought, and what he came up with was, among other things, that he wanted his business to have tripled its revenue in 3 years. At first glance, it seemed like an impossible vision. This business owner was up against a lot of internal and external challenges with their business. But, writing this vision down gave him a chance to focus on the steps he needed to take to make that happen, and get really clear on what he needed to spend his time, energy, and resources on, and what he didn’t. It brought opportunities and challenges into focus and gave him a sounding board for making decisions.
It’s been about 3 years since I had this first “visioning” conversation with this client, and today his business has more than tripled its revenue. How? Clarity around the goal, careful planning on how to get there, and discipled execution, among other things. But it started with clarity around where he wanted to be- his 3 Year Vision.
We all do the things we do every day for two reasons; 1) we have habits around those things, and what we did yesterday we will do again today, or 2) we want a different outcome and so we’re doing something we haven’t done before in hopes that we will accomplish something new. In business and in life, a creating your vision is a way to get really intentional about what things you do and don’t need to be doing. A vision is your starting point.
So, if I’ve convinced you that you need to sit down and create a 3 Year Vision for your business, here are the basic steps:
How To Create A 3-Year Vision
Block out some time on your calendar. Maybe enlist the help of someone else, like a mentor or coach. I find it’s really useful to have more than just one person when you’re doing these visioning exercises.
Come up with a “wish list” of everything you want for your business. It should be long and fanciful and idealistic, go ahead and write down your “stretch goals.” This is time to dream. If you’re having trouble getting started, here are a few prompts
How many customers
Employees
Revenue
Free time
Products that you’re selling
Mark everything on your list that you’d like to see some movement on in the next 3 years. You can indicate it with a star, or by circling it, or underlining it. Now, be a little more realistic here then you were when you made your initial “wish” list. For example, if you want to take 4 months a year off for vacation, but you just started your business last year, that might not be realistic in the next 3 years.
Write a very clear and concise statement for everything you’ve marked about exactly where you’re going to be in 3 years. This should be really specific and measurable. For example, if you want to make ultimately be making $10 million in annual revenue, then maybe you want to be at $3 million in 3 years. So, you would write that statement like this: “I am making $3 million in annual revenue.”
Put all of your statements from step 4 together. All of these statements taken together are your “draft” 3 year vision. It’s a “draft” instead of a finished 3-year vision because you need to look at all of this together as a whole to see if there’s anything that’s conflicting or misaligned, or that could be combined into one statement, etc.
Live with your draft for a week or two. Sit with it and see how it feels, play with it, tweak it, edit it for a couple of weeks, and schedule some time on your calendar to come back to it to finalize
Finalize your vision. Once your 3 Year Vision is finalized, it’s time to create a plan to accomplish that vision. I call that your 3 Year Plan. I’ll save that for another blog post.
How often should you do this?
This is something you should do a lot- I recommend at least once a year, maybe once every 6 months depending on your business. The first time you do it, it will seem like a big task, but once you have a vision written down, it’s is huge improvement over not having ever had one. But you really start to see the benefits and things really get good when you do it over and over again.
If you have questions or would like some help with your 3 Year Vision, get in touch with me and ask me how I can support you.
