Hi everyone, thank you for joining me today for another blog post. I have a privilege, and all of our coaches have the privilege, of serving small business owners. There’s a tool we use in this process that’s super effective and incredibly powerful. That tool involves asking the following question: Where do you want your business to be 25 years from today? We ask people to fill that out and write it down, and it leads to amazing results. We call this the 25-year extraordinary result. In other words, what result or results do you want to have happen 25 years from now? Really it’s about the vision section of your business, where are you going?
For many people, this is challenging, because sometimes it’s hard to think past the next day let alone 25 years from now. Some people are natural visionaries and they just think of the big picture all the time, but for most people, it’s just plain difficult. So I want to talk a little bit about how you go about doing this. This is very important, it’s what strategic companies do. You might be thinking “Oh I shouldn’t do this, this doesn’t apply to me, I’m too small” but please resist the urge to follow that line of thinking. You still need to do this. It causes sort of a trickle-down where if you know what you’re supposed to be doing 25 years from now, you can scale back to 10 years from now, or five years from now, or 90 days from now, and make sure that what you’re doing at those points is connected to your ultimate goal. This is basically your compass regarding where you’re going, so it’s quite crucial. Now, I’m going to give you six steps to think about in terms of how to make this happen. Here goes!
1) 100 – I know 25 years is probably a lot to handle, but we’re going to try 100! Sometimes the only way to complete one brain stretch is to conquer an even harder one, and that’s what we’re doing now. What do you want your business to look like 100 years from now? Think about maybe your great-great- grandchildren. What do you want the business to look like when they are adults? That’s a tough question and it’s going to give you an even harder brain stretch but it’s a great starting point.
2) 25 – So once you think massively in the future by 100 years, you can then pull it down a notch and say okay let’s actually dig into what 25 years will look like. When you start thinking about the 25 years, you need to ask yourself certain questions, such as whether you want your business to be a generational thing. Do you want your family to continue to be part of your business, do you want it passed down to your grandkids? What size do you want to be? Many of our clients say they want to be a 150-person organization or a 1000-person organization, but then we also have people who just want to be a 7-person organization. Where do you want to be geographically? Some people will say they want to be in more locations or go international. Sometimes when we go over this people will say “I might not even be alive 25 years from now!” so they start thinking about wanting to sell their business by a certain point, it forces people to come up with an exit strategy. A lot of people also realize that they want to be giving back in a massive way and they want to have an impact on the world around them by giving back. You should also think about the number of customers you want to have.
Unfortunately, we have to stop here in order to avoid an overly long post. This is a two-part blog series, so join me again next time for the second installment of this post where we’ll discuss the remaining steps. Until then, make it a better than amazing day!
