Business Plan – The Vision Statement

“I have a dream!” This famous phrase by Martin Luther King motivated millions and unified the most different thoughts into a force working toward a unified goal. Your Vision is none less powerful or important. The Vision Statement is how you see the future business environment and how your company fits into that environment. As a dream, it is not specific, nor does it need to be crystal clear but it should allow others to understand, in general concepts, how you think the future will look.

Your dream does not have to be widely accepted by others, if it were then you would not have a differentiating factor, you would not be visionary, you would not be a leader, you would be the masses. It does need to coherent with the business you are creating or the way you are restructuring. Several years ago I restructured a steel manufacturing company.

The company had seen falling sales and the 80 year old owner wanted me to help him restructure before handing the company to his children. He thought about investing in newer more efficient ovens and automating various parts of the process. While at dinner one evening I asked him about his vision of the future. Shortly, I understood that his vision did not have the wide scale production of Italian steel. His thinking was that it would be too expensive, given energy costs, to compete with less developed markets.

Over the next several weeks I worked a plan based on his thoughts. It included shutting down the ovens and developing a niche division of the company as the primary business. It was not an easy sell. The business he had created had provided for numerous jobs in the community would be cut by 70% over the next two years and their were no guarantees that the niche business could actually bring the company to the current status.

He finally embraced the plan. Today the company still has not returned to its previous number of employees but is significantly more profitable and boasts worldwide dominance in what was once an afterthought of a business. The old gentleman has passed away but his children still operate successfully the company.

You must have a Vision, and everything you do must be compatible with that Vision.

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