4
Navigating a Course
Even when I was already about three years into our first business, I would run a mile from any jargon that sounded like over-the-top Americanisms. You know the type of phrases I mean: ‘vision’, ‘strategic planning’, ‘mission statements’ and so on. I thought these were nonsensical, soft, meaningless verbiage; Californian waffle that I couldn’t relate to, invented by bangle-wearing, perfectly formed people who ate nothing but nuts and berries, sipping on their coconut water. Corporate tripe, it was money for old rope, wasn’t it? But as I matured, I have to admit that my perspective began to shift.
Thinking about it, I realised I’d never get into a car without knowing where I was heading for, simply in the hope that I’d miraculously end up at the right destination. The more I sensed that it’s actually a lot harder to ascertain whether you’re succeeding (or not) in business if you don’t know what the destination is, my ‘let’s drive’ and ‘are we there yet?’ attitude began to slide away. The truth is, when we started out, we hadn’t got a clue where we were going with the business. We set off aimlessly, not tracking our progress, with no sense of direction, and were in danger of ending up in a ditch with a flat tyre and no rescue service to hand. You’d have thought that after all my years at sea I’d know enough not to set off like a ship without a sail. In retrospect, we were enjoying cruising along on the crest of a wave and the perks on the top deck, but like the Titanic , nobody was prepared for the iceberg ahead. In our case (and many like us, to be fair), that was of course the economic crash of 2008. It was a seminal moment in my business development.
The looming disaster made me grow up and focus. It made me realise that, until then, we’d had it easy – and it was easy in many respects because it’s not difficult to flog your goods and services when the market is as buoyant as it was prior to 2008. We didn’t really have to try to sell that cleverly or work very hard, because it was a sellers’ market. Anybody can run a business when other people throw their money at it, which they were doing. Demand outstripped supply, but when the crash happened, almost overnight, everything changed. That’s when it really hit home for me. It was the moment I sat up and took notice of all that ‘namby-pamby’ jargon I’d been so quick to dismiss. The one thing I had learned was that when adversity strikes, opportunity knocks. However, because I’d not engaged with some real fundamentals of running a business, I had no idea of what our vision for the company was, where indeed we were heading for, or what were the ramifications for our employees, ourselves included, who also happened to be shareholders. Suddenly, we were asking ourselves some pretty basic but meaningful questions for the first time:
To survive, we certainly knew that we needed to create a definite plan of sorts because right now, life was tough and not as it had been. Our ship was sinking and we needed a plan of how to get back to the shore in order to survive. We needed to define our ‘vision’, ‘mission’ and ‘values’, not just for our own benefit, but for our staff too. It no longer sounded like jargon, it was a handy lifebelt dressed up in language I still couldn’t really fathom, so reluctantly (but with my growth mind-set slowly developing) we looked for help. I, and my business partners, found that help in business mentorship groups, including the likes of the C-level mentorship programme called Vistage.
Unbeknown to me at the time, Vistage was a global organisation that provided a business mentorship programme with not only its own experts – each group also includes twelve business leaders or ‘C-level’ executives from within its local community. The group members were people just like me, ones that I could relate to, with whom each month I could share the business challenges we faced and receive feedback which prompted deep thinking and introspection and provided the space in which to grow. I began to fully engage with the concepts of ‘vision’, ‘mission’ and ‘values’ because, at the time, I couldn’t give anyone a cogent answer when asked to describe them. The realisation for me was fourfold:
  1. Up until that point I’d been arrogant and somewhat stupid.
  2. I was appreciating more the value of mentorship.
  3. I could no longer ignore finding ways of articulating what were our vision, mission and values.
  4. More than ever in tough times you must invest in yourself and see the value not the cost.
The Vistage mentoring meetups also inspired me to work on my own personal development, something else that I’d previously thought was simply a waste of my valuable time (and money), but in fact, when I saw it as an investment in myself (which would also then have beneficial payoffs for the business), I began to connect the dots. That’s why I understand the small business owners I mentor today are like I was in 2008 – they feel lost at sea and need encouragement to invest in their ‘soft’ skills so that they can see the bigger picture beyond the nuts and bolts of their business. For me, mentorship and personal development were the best investments I’d ever made, partly because they demystified concepts that seemed alien to this Yorkshire lad but more importantly because they made sense. Once I made sense of them, my path ahead became much clearer and my goals were easier to achieve. I realised that I had to be humble and that I didn’t know everything. The truth is, millions of people have gone before us, done that and worn the T-shirt, and their experiences, successes and failures all count. And that’s why we have vision, mission and values. Unpacking the jargon and explaining it in clear, relatable terms is, therefore, an excellent entry point to help us navigate the course ahead.
Vision
A simple vision statement:
We want to double our output within two years and be known as the best in our region.
Vision is not just about your customers.
Vision is a forward-looking statement intended to inspire and give direction to your staff about where you’re heading as a business. For example, the vision of a football team is to win and so it does all it needs to in order to achieve those wins (and trophies) – recruitment, skills training, good management, etc. If a football team consisted only of a group of players who simply kicked the ball about without realising that they needed to score more goals than the opposition, then it would lack vision and have zero chance of being successful.
Vision evolves from having a clear head and goes hand in hand with having a growth mind-set and working on your personal development. Stop being afraid, or cynical; engage with these concepts since they’ll complement and enhance your business development. If your barriers to these are holding you back then you’ll not move forward. I’m not suggesting you start shouting ‘Yee ha, awesome man!’ and high fiving the printer photocopier repair man. If you need to, re-read the earlier chapter on developing your growth mind-set because it’s as good a starting point as any in order to prepare yourself for tackling your vision. If you need to, think of it in this way: when you’re running your own business, ultimately it’s a reflection of you and what you stand for, not only for your employees, but also for your suppliers and, yes, your customers at large. If you’re still thinking that vision, mission and values are a whole heap of baloney, can you truly explain what they mean and why you dismiss them out of hand?
Our current company vision is to make £3m net profit before interest and taxes (EBIT) by 2023. How did we arrive at that figure? That’s our aspiration based on looking at the current value of our enterprise in conjunction with the rest of our staff who participate in our share scheme. We have a very specific enterprise value we all want to reach and we’ve all bought into that process and goal. It wasn’t a figure we plucked out of thin air, it was the result of some serious management consultation and analysis of similar com­panies in our sector. Understanding what our end goal was enabled us to predict the future value of the business. However, you need to start somewhere, so my first piece of advice would be to ask yourself:
  1. What is your end goal? It might be to create a business for life that becomes a legacy for your children and that’s then something you can begin to build your vision around. The important point to bear in mind is that vision can change according to the dynamics of the marketplace. Also, it considers how you and your business are evolving, so you don’t need to stress yourself out by trying to peer into a crystal ball to see what lies ahead in twenty years. Instead, this is broken down into more manageable chunks of three or five years.
  2. What are you seeking to achieve? This could take weeks, or even months, of introspection and debate to define. However, your personal end goals might be similar to the following:
You will have to translate this into a vision that your staff can all get behind, because you earning £0.5m a year probably won’t float their boat. No matter what your goals are, you’ll be more likely to achieve them if you communicate your vision to your employees through extensive and clear communication that resonates with them. Will your vision motivate people on a daily basis and is it simple enough for people to get behind in different departments? It doesn’t need to be complex. Your goal might be to achieve 500,000 active customers within a realistic timeframe, but equally your focus could be geared towards improving sales, creating effective marketing, having a reputation for the best customer service, or making positive and impactful adjustments to your administration. In fact, all departments can work towards objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) on a quarterly basis that relate to each other, so they can measure what success looks like. The important point is that, through consultation, their buy-in to your vision is key to your successful outcome.
From the feedback you receive you can then discuss in detail with your management team how to achieve that vision. If for any reason you don’t already have a management team in place, I advise you to put such a team together without further delay. You’ll not be able to grow and win without one.
Vision is the bedrock of any business and the kick-start to any that finds itself lingering in the doldrums. If, like me, you’ve now come around to thinking what the vision for your business is, then your growth mind-set is already looking healthier than when we started. Remember, ask yourself what your desired end goal is, but take time to reflect on what your vision might be. Even if you do have a strong inkling, you still need some quiet reflection time because if it’s wrong and you’re not truthful, then everything else that follows won’t work. Think big and be brave.
Mission
I’ve struggled with the term ‘mission’ in the past, mainly because there is, in my opinion, some over-intellectualised, utter rubbish that has been written about what mission is. Sometimes books conflate vision and mission, which then makes it more difficult to understand and extrapolate meaning. My straightforward understanding, on the other hand, arises from my separation of the two terms:
It’s not that clever. For example, if your vision is travelling to New York, you’ll ask yourself, ‘Where will I get the money from?’, ‘How long will it take to get the money?’, ‘Will I fly, or take a ship?’ and ‘Where will I book my tickets?’ Answering these questions forms your mission for the vision ‘DESTINATION NEW YORK’. It’s all very well knowing that you want to reach New York, but not if you don’t know how you’ll get there. There’s nothing fluffy in thinking about your mission in these terms and the same applies to your business. It’s about evaluating what you need to do in order to realise vision. When I explain the differences between our current business vision and its mission, it looks like this:
In simple terms, that means that our mission needs to tie in with the end goal. In respect of our customers, such as the emergency services, there are huge advantages in them being able to use drones. For example, a police force can now launch a drone with thermal imaging capability in a missing person hunt at a fraction of the cost per hour compared to using a helicopter. Also, drones are less likely to be grounded due to poor weather conditions or technical reasons, unlike a conventional chopper. We’ve also targeted civil engineering and utility companies that are saving significant sums by using our drones. One reported that they saved £750k in six months with a single drone supplied by Coptrz. Therefore, by focusing on customers who are ready to adopt drones, they reap the advantages we provide. That also means we’ll not chase new prospects where there’s no call for drones and where our mission to revolutionise an organisation using drones is a redundant proposition. We don’t spend time chasing clients that have no need for our services, and that in turn makes us more efficient, and ultimately more profitable. It’s how we’re growing our company quickly in line with our vision. We’re not wasting time on people who are not in that buying mode, because not doing so will make us efficient, more profitable and able to grow the business quickly.
Values
Values are what really underpin a business. Having a set of values that everyone in the business adheres to is the most important element of all.
I’ll be blunt. You might have a worked out a brilliant vision and you’ve nailed your mission, but if your business is populated by a bunch of w*****s who don’t share, or give a s**t, about your values, then you might as well forget it. You’ll never achieve your goals. This applies to any size business, be it a small workshop on the outskirts of town or a mega-rich business in a glass-fronted office block in a city centre.
Let me give you an example. I was talking with the CEO of a multi-million-pound business that simply wasn’t growing, it was stagnating. It was obvious that in the near future, its competitors would have the edge and the business would be in trouble, issuing profit warnings with all the resultant upheaval that would cause internally. On paper, the business should have been expanding, but for some reason its vision wasn’t happening. It wasn’t until the CEO took a closer look inside the business that he discovered where the problem lay, and that was with the sales director. Irrespective of the fact that this person was absolutely killing their targets each month, he acted more like a ‘lone wolf’, constantly working against everyone in his team and lacking any sort of rapport with his colleagues. Nobody could get on with him because of his arrogant and abrasive working practices and, as a result, staff performance around him was extremely poor. The CEO took a very brave and scary decision to fire his star performer and guess what? Staff morale and performance improved overnight and dramatically so. The key lesson was that the business had found it was stuck because its star performer wasn’t aligned with its values. When a business has a ‘cancer’ within, then it needs to be cut out, pronto. Over the next five years this business leapt forward with the CEO buoyed by the realisation that ‘people values’ were everything and the business has since achieved a valuation at the last count of over £1bn.
The question is, how does a business establish exactly what its values are? The answer is, it takes time working them out. Don’t be concerned if values are not always apparent when you start a company from scratch. It wasn’t until just over two years into our latest venture in the drone business, after we’d established a trading history, that we really began to think about what it was that we stood for as a business. We approached our original and newly recruited staff and asked them, ‘What do we stand for? What makes us great, what’s good about us?’ After a while we distilled all the feedback into three things. To this day, we signpost these (abbreviated to ‘GOLD’) on the walls of our offices so that our values are embedded into the working day from the moment we arrive, to long after we leave:
GOLD
  1. Grow: we’re always learning, but we’re also a training business. If for any reason we lose sight of our growth mind-set, then we’ve gone seriously wrong. We know our staff all perform better if they grow, and so we always aim to stretch ourselves and to go outside of our comfort zones. Our mantra, therefore, is to just be curious and to continually learn – otherwise our business won’t grow.
  2. Outwork the competition: ‘outwork’ was a term that our employees felt reflected how we stand out from the crowd. We work hard and we try harder. It’s also about thinking big in what we’re doing, being resilient, consistent and relentless. It’s not about working sixteen hours a day, but about doing the things that count. Personally, I get out of bed at 5am and I think to myself ‘I bet my competitors aren’t doing this’ and I use this time on personal development.
  3. Leverage: we utilise the art of leverage to multiply our output by using outworkers, groups and partnerships.
  4. Disrupt: we’re inventive, ingenious and trailblazing. We now ask ourselves every day, ‘Are we disrupting the market? Are we being brave enough to be inventive, ingenious and trailblazing with what we do?’ We’re not in business to do the same as other companies, so if they do A, we’ll do B, plus C. Discovering new ways of doing business and disrupting the market is so important to us. As is the flexibility to know that if things don’t turn out right, then we’re prepared to fail, not get hung up about it. If we fail in something, we might tweak our approach slightly, but if it fails again, we quickly move on. It’s us being brave enough to stay several jumps, not just one, ahead of our competitors. We’re not afraid to put a few people’s backs up, not because we’re arrogant or adversarial, but because we like to find out who’s really listening to us: whose attention have we grabbed? Because they’re our valuable, niche market, we don’t have to (or want to) please the whole market the whole of the time. Our demographic is the minority. If we tried to serve everybody, we’d serve nobody. Being brave helps us grow, because out of half a dozen new initiatives, four might not cut it, but two might just catch on. No point in flogging dead horses.
That’s what having stated values means to our business. Without these, we’d stop growing. As a priority in any of our meetings about our products and services, we place our values at the top of the agenda and we ask, ‘Are these products and services aligned with our values?’ If they’re not going to help us grow, outwork the competition, or be disruptive, then they’re no longer on the agenda. And the more you embed those values, the more you live them and the more you work them, the bigger your success will be.
Your vision, mission and values needn’t be complicated, wordy or pretentious – plain and simple and to the point is ideal. For example, here is the values and mission statement of the fish-and-chip shop chain Harry Ramsden’s – it’s straight-talking and to the point:
‘To be the best loved Fish & Chips business by offering the best Fish & Chips and best dining experience you can buy at great value.’
You’ll notice that this statement encapsulates in only a few words everything the business believes in terms of its quality and service delivery.
Thinking about your own vision, mission and values statement, what will your customers, suppliers and employees learn about you when they read it?