Your Mission is Not Your Vision

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Why you need both.

Vision and Mission are two very different things. And the smaller your business, the more you need them both. Those who have both and live by them always make more money.

Whether you think you do or not, we all run our businesses based on deeply held beliefs. The problem is we don’t do it consistently, but only when it’s convenient. The rest of the time we’re taking on clients, employees, vendors and partners based on the immediate benefit, without regard to whether there is a culture and values match or not. Six months or a year later we’re butting heads with the new staff, avoiding that troubling client, or looking for a new vendor.

Why? Because if you don’t have a clear vision for your own life or business, you’ll become part of someone else’s vision for theirs. Take on a a partner, employee or staff member with a strong direction, and it will overwhelm the weak hold you have on why you exist, where you are going and how you intend to get there. Meandering and random hope are not good business strategies. Get a grip on your vision and your mission, or expect to be pulled in every direction.

Vision = Values
Your Vision statement is for YOU, not for your customers. It is much bigger than your business, reflects your personal beliefs and values and is what would get you out of bed every morning no matter what business you were in. Your beliefs, values and principles don’t change based on your business. Your Vision statement should be the core driver behind who you hire, who you want as clients, and how you will relate your business to the world around you. In most cases, a Vision statement doesn’t tell anybody what you do, only what you believe and value as a business.

This should always be a values-based statement. It’s about your beliefs. Our vision statement for Crankset Group and 3to5 Club is “Live well by doing good.” We could be grocers and say the same thing, because it’s what gets us out of bed every morning. We can unpack that for you for three to four Guinnesses, as to how it impacts every aspect of our business.

Your vision is all about you, and what you believe. It drives you, your staff and all of your relationships forward. You may or may not share it publicly. It doesn’t matter – it’s not for your customer, but for you. Every decision, big and small, should be based on your Vision statement. Every one.

Mission = Marching Orders
Your Mission statement is radically different. It’s not about you in any way – leave yourself out of it. It’s all about your customer and the OUTCOME you expect to give them. Here’s a lousy Mission statement: “We will be the #1 pencil manufacturer with the best quality, highest profitability and the fastest growth.” NOBODY cares.

When people ask “What do you do?” they never mean it. They mean, “What can you do for ME?” When someone reads your Mission statement, they should know exactly what OUTCOME you are going to get them, not what you do.

Our Mission statement, “We provide tools for business owners to make more money in less time, get off the treadmill, and get back to the passion that brought them into business in the first place.” From that, you would never know that we build 3to5 Clubs around the world, have cloud apps, sell books, do workshops and keynote talks and have a sales development series called FasTrak. That’s because nobody cares what we do until they find out what we can do for them.

An OUTCOME is a RESULT expressed EMOTIONALLY. Your Mission statement should give some quick info about what industry you are in, but 95% of it should be about what you will do for me. If I like that potential result, I’ll ask you how you will do it. That’s your cue to talk about your capabilities, quality, growth, etc.

Do you have clients, staff or vendors you’re not happy about? Are you changing courses often? Having trouble finding that one product or service that drives your revenue and growth? It’s almost certainly because you don’t have a clear Vision or Mission statement.

Winging it has it’s consequences. Figure out what drives you (Vision) and what outcome you’re delivering (Mission) and watch your business grow.

To make more money, do as little as possible.

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April’s story of success

Small and local business owners need to choose a very narrow market. When they do, we assure them they will make more money. Here’s a voice mail I got yesterday from one company who went narrow. It’s much more powerful than any theory.

April used to be a solo practitioner. Now she owns a company with a growing number of employees and a business that is exploding. She did it by dropping 99.9% of her potential market and focusing extremely narrowly on only one tiny facet of her market. It happens all the time when we convince companies to focus narrowly. April’s is just one of innumerable stories we hear all the time as we challenge small and local companies to go narrow, not wide.

April used to be a Virtual Assistant, just like thousands of others. And just like thousands of others, all she could say is that she is better than the other thousands, which is what they other thousands would say, too. They all sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Then April decided to stop being a Virtual Assistant to the world like all the other thousands, and started focusing solely on real estate agents.

Narrow and Deep, not Broad and Shallow
But she went even narrower. She took the leap to focus not just on real estate agents, but solely on helping them manage their online services – not the standard SEO or online marketing that thousands do – she doesn’t do that; but just helping them manage their online writing, data and pictures – posting new properties, blogs, data, customer records, potential leads, etc. This is an extremely narrow niche, not just with real estate agents, and not just online, but only a very specific part of the online presence.

This was scary to do, because, as with any really good narrowing down of a business, she was leaving behind 99.9% of the potential customers available to all the other thousands of Virtual Assistants like what she used to be. But as soon as she made the switch last year, she stopped sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher, started making more money and started bringing on real estate agents.

Results Speak Louder Than Words
Soon she had one entire office of 60 real estate agents using her company to administrate their online services, and was bringing on smaller offices as well. She started taking on employees from the thousands of Virtual Assistants out there who had not narrowed their services and were now looking for jobs, and her business has been growing ever since. I got this voice mail from her yesterday:

“I just wanted to let you know how 3to5 Club training is just continuing to change my life. I just decided to meet up with a potential major strategic partner connected to the 60-person real estate office, with much bigger real estate connections. When I explained to him what I’m doing and how I’ve narrowed my business down to only managing online real estate company services, getting that specific – he was so excited he almost did cartwheels. He said, “I don’ t know anyone else doing this. We have to package this for the other offices.

Long story short – he is introducing me to seven other company offices in the next three months. So we will go from having 60 agents to all 560 agents. It’s so great. Honestly, I would not be where I’m at without your wisdom and advice and 3to5 Club’s encouragement and belief in me all this time. It turns out that what we are doing is so specific that it is cutting edge for real estate marketing.

Just wanted to say thank you so much and I hope you have a great weekend.”

Focus, Focus, Focus…
I have NEVER seen a small or local company go narrow and lose money doing it. Never. They always make more money if they stick with it. But I’ve seen more than I can count go out of business by trying to be all things to all people. They rarely make more money. At best they grow their revenue along with their expenses and end up a lot busier, more stuck on the treadmill, with higher revenue but with no more profit. But usually their revenue goes down along with their profit.

Want to make more money? Stop doing everything, and just do one thing. You can do “everything” later, after you build a successful company around one thing.

Stop taking advice from Giant Corporation, Inc.’s story. Take it from April. Do one thing, very narrowly. The more narrow your niche, the more likely you are to make money.

Knowing vs. Knowing

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They’re vastly different things.

The ancient Greeks had two distinctly different words for knowledge. One of them is good for business owners, the other one, not so much.

A Tale of Two Words
Gnosis is the ancient Greek word for “knowledge of the head” – 2+2=4. The sky is blue. Gravity sucks. Plants need water. All good stuff to know, but not nearly as powerful as the other kind of knowledge.

Epignosis is the ancient Greek word for “knowledge of the heart/life”. This is voodoo of a different kind and is much more valuable to the business owner. Epignosis is not something you know to be a fact, that can sit in your head unused for decades. Epignosis is applied knowledge. It’s knowledge that directly affects the way you live and act every day. You don’t know it, you do it.

As a business owner we know things with our head that are interesting, fascinating, boring, essential (profit is good, loss is bad), and some of it very complex. We love complex knowledge – understanding markets, watching trends, researching possible products and services – because it all takes a lot of time to learn and makes us feel smart. Even other people are impressed when we talk from our head knowledge about these things.

Get Real
But Epignosis, knowledge of the life, is a special thing and should be cherished by business owners. It is that knowledge on which we act and build a business. Things like calling people because we “know” if we do, some will buy. Or building connections with strategic alliance partners because we “know” they can rain on us for decades with clients. Or getting out of our office and serving our clients or other business owners because we “know” that helping others get to their goals ensures our own success.

We know that we have Epignosis about something because it affects the way we do things. Gnosis is only about what we know in our heads, but Epignosis goes to the very heart of what we BELIEVE (more on that next week), and it is our beliefs that determine our actions. If I believe bicycling will make me fit, I will do it regularly, not think about it. It’s true Epignosis.

I Say Tom-ay-to, You Say Tom-ah-to
The problem is that we get the two confused all the time. We think that knowing something with our heads (I will be successful if I make those phone calls) is somehow valuable. But knowledge of the head is only valuable when it comes out our hands as knowledge of the life.

Successful business owners have a special relationship with life-knowledge, Epignosis. They go looking for the kind of knowledge that can be immediately translated into action that builds their business. Those that struggle are much more inclined to research, think, strategize, analyze, postulate and theorize. That kind of Gnosis may be very satisfying and impressive, but it will leave you poor. When it comes to Gnosis, the old adage, “Knowledge is power”, is wrong. If knowledge (Gnosis) were power, librarians would rule the world.

In Your Head, Out Your Hands
Life-knowledge makes us do something, not think something. It is at the core of Conation – Committed Movement in a Purposeful Direction (CMPD). Conation is the most important business word you’ve never heard because we live in a world ruled by Cognitives, Thinkers – Gnostics who loving knowing but not doing.

Want to be successful? Fall in love with Epignosis. Every time something goes in your head, figure out how it can come out your hands to help you build a better business. Translate Gnosis into Epignosis – it’s a great way to build a business. Stop thinking. Get moving.

Trapeze Moments in Business

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Leap!

One of the most common drivers of success is how we handle Trapeze Moments in business. All too often the most sensible response is the wrong one.

A couple years ago we were looking to publish Making Money Is Killing Your Business, our first book. It was in the hands of the largest business book publisher in the world. As I learned what the contract would look like, I discovered what a lousy deal every author gets with giant publishers. We would lose ownership of the book to the publisher, get paid a tiny fraction of the revenue, and not see any of it for up to 18 months.

But the alternative was equally uninviting. If we didn’t let the giant publisher own the book, we would have to start our own publishing company with no knowledge of the industry, give up on distribution through all traditional bookstores and spend at least $25,000 on design, layout, websites, printing, and fulfillment.

Two years ago publishing a book yourself was an even scarier option than today – it was a generally new way of doing things. Doing a deal with a giant would save us the $25,000 we didn’t have, and get the book into all major brick and mortar and internet book channels immediately.

We had a decision to make. We believed in our book and that it would have a major impact for small and local business owners worldwide for decades to come, long after a giant publisher would have lost interest in it. But we had no clue how to publish a high-end hard back book and get it out to the world around us. And we didn’t have $25,000 to risk on printing thousands of copies of something that might sell less than 100 copies.

Decisions Based on Where You Want to Be
This was a Trapeze Moment for us. A Trapeze Moment is one of those times in a business where the only way to get to the next place in your business is to let go of something you’re hanging on to for dear life. We had been profitable for a couple years and were “hanging on” to that with a death grip. The last thing we wanted to do was go backwards again and throw another $25,000 at this business.

But businesses don’t grow by hanging on to what they’ve got. They grow by making decisions based on where they want to be, not on where they are. If we make decisions based on where we are, where do we think we’ll be next year? The same place – on the treadmill.

So we dove in once again, let go of profitability, borrowed $25,000, started a publishing company from scratch with no knowledge of the industry, and printed thousands of copies of our book. A year later Making Money Is Killing Your Business was rated #1 Business Book of the Year by NFIB, not because it sold a million copies, but because they believe it was the book that had the greatest impact that year. That was what we were shooting for – a book that transformed businesses, not just an interesting read.

Risks Create Rewards
Two years later we’re into our second printing and book sales are increasing every month, something the giant publishers said could never happen after the first year. The book has been translated to Chinese and is selling well in China. Other translations are on the horizon. Because the revenue deal is so bad with giant publishers, we would have to sell 100,000+ books through them to equal the profit we have realized from the first printing. And we would still not own the book.

As the book gains momentum, we are glad we made the decision to start our own publishing company. Others are now coming to us to publish their books and we have three more of our own already in the works. And publishing isn’t even our core business, just something we did because we had to in order to keep control of a book that is central to driving 3to5 Clubs forward throughout the world.

Leap Forward
Every business has Trapeze Moments. It’s scary to let go of the one we’re hanging on to, do a backflip and trust that as we reach out the next trapeze will be there. But it’s what business owners do. They make decisions, not based on where they are, but where they want to be.

What Trapeze Moment are you facing right now? Make the decision based on where you want to be, otherwise you’ll end up where you are again next year – on the treadmill.

Make the leap!