Small Business Growing

Your Business Vision: You can – and should – do this! (Part 1)

Of all the things you can do to either start or grow your small business, defining a vision may be the most important. 

This series is for you if you either don’t have a written vision, or if you need to revise or reinvent it.

The idea of a vision scares off many small business owners.  It seems too intangible and impractical…like “nailing jello to the wall”….it can seem unrealistic or unattainable, and disconnected from the pressing realities of everyday business.

All understandable concerns.  But in this series I will offer the perspective that a vision is your most basic and necessary requirement.

Most business owners already have a vision, though it is often not written.  It is wrapped up in the dreams and hopes, and practical goals that provided the initial provocation to start the business.

But it often stays at that inner gut level and never is worked on and developed, extended, and refined into something that can be a powerful part of the business.

It is probably impossible to provide a single road map to a great vision, and we won’t presume to do that.  Each business has its own history, leadership, industry, challenges, and other distinctives.  In addition, there is the question of how you construct a vision that has buy-in from other team members, when you are more that a one person business.

What we hope to do is give you food for thought, along with a number of practical strategies to apply in your own way.

As a starting place, before we get into several action type steps that get very specific, I would ask you to go back and “locate” that initial motivation along with the dream that was part of your reason for starting the business.  Somewhere within all of the thoughts, feelings, and motivations that impelled you to start your business, there is your vision.

Maybe it will morph or even transform if you stay with this process.  Or maybe you will just add another level off depth to an already great vision.

On the other hand, maybe the really powerful vision for where your business is going is yet to be clarified.   We’d love for this series to be a provocation for great things yet ahead.

Whatever the case, don’t give in to the impulse to think of all of this as intangible or impractical.  Keep is simple, but that does not mean to keep it shallow.  If this is right to you, do some serious thinking, and as we move forward I will offer more practical moves to get the vision into a workable and actionable state.

And If you don’t have an established business, but are in the formative stage of making that happen, do the same thing.  We’ll pick up at this point with the next post in this series.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 9:33 am and is filed under Growing, Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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