Answering the 8 questions to state your vision

A technique mention in book “Traction” by Gino Wickman

Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and for many others like me.

This week I was reading the book “Traction”. I spent few days on chapter 3, It talked about finding your vision. It further explains — “Clarify your vision and you will make better decisions about people, processes, finances, strategies, and customers”.

This chapter talks about a tool, where it asks 8 questions to clarify your vision. The questions are as follows:

1. What are your core values?
2. What is your core focus?
3. What is your 10-year target?
4. What is your marketing strategy?
5. What is your three-year picture?
6. What is your one-year plan?
7. What are your quarterly Rocks?
8. What are your issues?

The chapter suggests spending 1–2 days with your team in an off-site session to answer these questions. In my case I did this exercise by myself.

Here are my answers to the above 8 questions.

Core values:

1. Respect for others — Everyone should treat others the way they want others to treat them
2. Integrity — Be true to your commitments
3. Own accountability — You are responsible for your work and team
4. Customer satisfaction — Go extra mile to make your customer successful
5. Continuous learning & Improvement — Learn new skills, Set high standards in your interactions
6. Teamwork — Your work reflects your team
7. People first — Always Focus on your employees

Purpose

Use data, systems, processes to increase profitability in your business

Niche

Repeatable successful project delivery

10-year target

500 employees with 2% attrition

Marketing Strategy

Target Market

• Demographic: Founders, Startups (<$1M Revenue)
• Geographic: Worldwide
• Psychographic:

1. Business which is seeing rapid growth,
2. has few employees to handle the growth surge,
3. are looking for cost effective systems to manage the initial surge, so they can buy time for future enterprise systems

3 Unique

• Increased efficiency in your business systems
• Constant and customized guidance for your business
• Believe in creating long term relationships with you

Proven process

One page illustration — TBD (Need some more sales/time to hammer out a process with consistent results)

Your guarantee

Data based business insights within 7 days of implementation

3-year target — 31-Dec-2024

• Revenue- $ 70,000
• Profit — $ 25,000
• Measurable — 50 clients
• Employees — 2+

1-year plan — 31-Dec-2021

• Revenue- $ 7,000
• Profit — $ 3,000
• Measurable — 10 clients
• Cost — $ 300

Goals

• 4 Tracking systems for startup kit
• 50 email ids of potential customers
• 4 Upwork consulting engagements
• 10 product engagements
• Sales process in place
• 3 testimonials
• 2 clients with cross selling

Issue List

• Not enough traction
• Time management
• Festival off time
• Other person not too responsive on her consultancy projects

At this point of time, I am not too sure if all this makes sense. But the exercise of answering all these questions felt good. I could not believe that I have answered all these questions. It gives some shape to my organization. I have better clarity in terms of where I want to see my organization in next 10 years or what would be my organization’s culture.

Now I have a blueprint to match with my future course of actions.

I still need to read the rest of the book. It might happen that the next chapters might ask to change few things from my answers given above. I will share the updated version in another blog if that happens.

Till then, happy next week. I hope we all gain more traction in our business.

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