Enliven Your Business Vision

They say all decisions are based out of fear or love. In business, I'd venture to say entrepreneurs start out of fear or excitement. As exciting as starting a business is, a hard truth is-- some of us started our businesses out of crippling fear. The fear that we wouldn't be able to get (or excel in) a traditional job, or the fear that we'd never get ahead financially while working for someone else, drove us to starting a business of our own. But even businesses that began out of fear, were born out of a vision.

When my stepfather was a young boy he'd buy lollipops on one side of the bridge, walk across the bridge and sell them on the other side. He had the money and ability to buy and sell and his simple vision became a small business. For someone else, their vision may be to see children cured of Malaria, which may lead to them starting a medical organization that researches and treats those with the disease. Your vision can be simple or complicated, but it's quite possible that it's time to change, update, or realign with your vision.

As the leader, your vision is what guides your company and decides where it's going. 

Do things need to change? Have you fulfilled the original vision of the company and now it no longer fulfills or serves you? I use the example or Urth Cafe often because their owners shifted their business from selling fair trade goods with coffee and sandwiches to being a cafe that serves fair trade, organic foods with a few goods. They updated their vision to meet the demands of their customers without abandoning their vision of offering fair trade goods. Maybe you need to change your company because it isn't successful in its original form.

How do you know what your vision is? 

Write down your original vision. Has that vision been fulfilled? Decide, based off what you've learned it takes to run your company over its years of operation, what you'd do differently. Do you need to update the vision so it works in the market today? Write a living vision about who you are in relation to your company. Map out all the arms of your company (sales, marketing, products, etc). 

Identify what parts are your strengths; in what areas of your day and your company do you excel? Identify how much time those areas take. Identify what parts you have to do, meaning the oversight of each arm, because it's your company. Delegate all other things, especially things that are your weaknesses, but still oversee them. Be specific about to whom you will delegate each task and then implement it.

You have permission to delegate the parts of your business that aren't working for you. Your business' future is in your hands. Update your vision, try something new, and do more of the things that are working.