Doubling your earnings every five years requires three simple things:
- Improve your ability to know your market
- Modify your vision
- Educate your team
For any company to continue to grow it has to have the right vision, a business plan, and the right values. This begins with having the right team who share your vision, and more importantly your values. A team has comparative advantages, a wider network, novel ideas, and value creation.
What is Your Vision?
- The role of your business in society. How does it impact or contribute to a person’s quality of life?
- Do you have the skills to implement your vision? If not, delegate.
- Inspire your employees to have an owner mentality.
- Provide incentives to create more value for both the customer and the employee.
While attending a wedding recently, I met a woman who I will call Sharon for this example. Sharon had just previously retired from teaching and had a business idea. She was invested in her idea and 100 percent thought it would succeed, but she needed investors in her project. She hired the government career building office to offer her advice. It was free, but they did not cover the basics of building a business from the ground up. I shared that I thought it is best to ask a successful business person or business coach how to create and launch a successful business.
I asked 3 clarity seeking questions:
- Who is her competition?
- Did she have a business plan?
- How would she make a profit?
Sharon did not know her competition, or the cost of operations, building the park, or even the process of hiring employees; she only stated there was not another water park for 50 miles.
Sharon did not have a business plan to show investors that she did her homework and that building a water park would create a profit and how long that would take.
Sharon’s family thought it was a great idea. But any entrepreneur knows that it matters who we take advice from. If her family were successful entrepreneurs, then I’d agree with taking advice from her family.
Although she had a vision, it was not clear. She only saw the end goal of kids having fun at a water park. But any vision needs to include the right people, creating and carrying out the right steps along the way to make business successful and profitable.
Consumption or the consumer drives the market. Find out what the consumer needs or desires and then discover what they are willing to pay for it. It all starts with a clear vision that is carried out by the right people.