Many of us have seen or at least probably are familiar with some of the cooking shows on various food networks. A common approach to making a competitive dish for the judges is something called “deconstructed” where the contestant cooks take something like a sandwich and separate all of the parts and showcase them that way – the bread, the sauce, the meat, and the vegetables or garnishes, for instance. Sometimes it’s an intentional approach to a dish, and sometimes it is a “Plan B” when the main effort fails to comes together as a finished product.
That seems like an approach we can use for taking a look at our vision or guiding concept for our aging in place or remodeling business. We can start by taking a look at what we think our vision is and pulling it apart to see how all of the various parts go together to form a homogeneous concept. As we get ready for launching a new year, this is a great time for such an exercise. This way, all of the marketing we prepare, our website, our social media, and our business model can be based on a solid concept that we are confident expresses what we want to achieve.
The corporate, personal, or company vision – depending on the size of our business and the number of people that the vision applies to – might be referred to as the vision or sometimes a vision statement. Calling it a vision statement can be confusing and misleading because it is far more than a simple statement or a sentence. It contains many ideas, sentences, thoughts, and words. Thus, it isn’t a “statement” in the typical sense of being something short and easily used as much as it is a statement of values, direction, purpose, and history rolled into a single expression.
By the way, the vision statement is not designed to be published or shared with the public although many companies do it. A vision is meant to be personal to us and what we have in mind for our business. Don’t invite public criticism by sharing it with people who may not understand what we are attempting to accomplish, how we formulated the idea for of business, or our personal journey that got us to where we are.
So we take our vision which is a written declaration or summary of what we intend to do, our purpose, our motivation, our history and how we got to this point, the product or service that we offer, where we provide our goods and services, our general pricing strategy, how we embrace and incorporate new technology into what we do and offer, what will allow us to expand our business, resources or assets that we need to acquire, our core customers and clients, basic values, and what differentiates us from similar or related businesses.
Then, we take a step back and evaluate the various components of our business. We deconstruct our vision and look at each part of it.
Our vision forms the basis of our overall business plan. The vision is the engine that drives the business. The mission stems from it to provide a very brief way of expressing to us on a constant basis, and our team of strategic partners or employees, what we are all about and how we deliver our vision to our clients.
As we pull our vision apart and look at each part of it, we can decide if we are happy with what we have prepared. Does it truly fit and describe what we intend to do, is it expressing what we are as a business in the way we want it said, and are there any important elements missing? If there are too many “ingredients” we can eliminate some at this point also.
By reverse engineering what we have prepared, we can look at each segment and determine that it is a relevant and accurate depiction of what we want to deliver to the public. Then we can put the pieces back together and have a coherent vision that describes our business in a way that motivates and excites everyone that has access to it – especially us.