vice and verse

Crystallize Your Vision of The Successful Business

So how do you determine critical, actionable assumptions in your business? You should start by crystallizing your vision. This is an important part of success anyway. In fact a classic book that studied many of the most successful entrepreneurs in history highlights this exercise as the single most important thing they did. “Visualize every detail of your business when it’s successful. You should be able to answer questions like:

• How will customers discover us?
• What will be their first experience? 
• When will they realize they’ve found something great (what specifically will they be doing)? 
• Why will they think it’s great/important? 
• Why will they think it’s better than the old way?
• How will they describe us to other people? 
• How will their experience evolve with our business?
• When and how will we generate revenue? 
• How will we reinvest that money to accelerate the business? 
• Why will the whole model be repeatable and scalable?

Document every detail you can possibly imagine that describes your successful business. The more you visualize it, the more you will really begin to believe it. This will help you generate the authentic passion needed to raise money, attract talent and partners… It will help you connect to the emotions that are so critical to getting people to take a leap of faith on your vision.

Time for a Reality Check

Now stop drinking your own cool aid! Document everything that will need to go right for this vision to be a reality. What are the core assumptions that if proven wrong will make it completely non-viable? These are the assumptions that will be critical to validate. These are the things that will cause you to need to course correct. The earlier you can see the realities that affect your assumptions, the sooner you can get on the right track.”