Without Vision, the People Perish (Businesses, Too!)

Credit: 123rf

There’s much truth in the old proverb, “Without vision, the people perish!” Small business owners, should regularly remind themselves of their BUSINESS VISION and consider if they’re still on-course and on-time. Moreover, consider if their VISION has consequences not only for themselves but their customers, employees and their family!

A small business needs vision; however, to help ensure that vision comes to pass, it should be documented with a well-written Operations Manual. A business operations manual is a written vision of how a business looks, functions and, most of all, its purpose. An owner can keep adding to that vision, one-step-at-a-time; therefore, nothing is left to chance.

If an owner can see it, they can write it down! American automobile executive, Lee Iacocca says, “The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen!”

Are you a Small Business Owner?

What causes someone to wake up one day and decide to build a business of some kind? What was it that made them think it could be possible? How would they fund such an effort? And why should anyone in their right mind take the risk?

What was YOUR dream business? To build things? For what purpose? And who would you expect to buy the things you build?

Or maybe it was a SERVICE or an IDEA you planned to sell to others? And what was it you needed to know to begin such a perilous journey into the life of business ownership? Again, without vision, a dream perishes by having no direction, no purpose, and no plan.

The knowledge of how to accomplish a dream/vision requires an accumulation of experiences:

• Gaining skills one might not currently possess;
• The determination to keep taking the next step(s) forward, no matter what the obstacles;
• Business expertise, or knowing someone who had done it, to help other people of VISION!

Over the past 25-plus years, we have remained determined to learn the necessary skills and the right information to build a business that could afford to hire others who could help us accomplish our dream — that vision. Failure was not an option!

Resources | Help for Small Business Owners

Take advantage of all the resources available out there. The Internet is a veritable smorgasbord of unlimited information about how to build, grow and sustain an extraordinary business. The resources below are only a few but were extremely useful to us over the years, and now we highly recommend them. These resources helped us in building an extraordinary, totally-systemized, lean-operating business. In addition, they also expanded the vision for seeing a greater purpose for our vision. Therefore, we sold our printing company and turned our full attention to our software company, Ebiz Products LLC, a while back.

• The E-Myth, by Michael Gerber – This was the book that started Philip Paul Beyer’s adventure into business systematization!
• The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber
• Trade Magazines – A treasure of information for business success seekers!
• Mentors: Another proverb tells us, “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.”
• Trade organizations – Take part in your industry’s national and local trade organizations!
• Other business resources, i.e. technologies, statistics, historical facts, etc.

Is a Book in Your Future?

System Busters: How to Stop Them In Your Business is a book I wrote after reading The E-Myth and other insightful counsel resources mentioned above. Most importantly, the actual doing, putting into action and completing goals set by the vision, takes commitment and persistence. The book says, “We did it” and also, HOW we did it.

Visions of Others | May or May NOT be Helpful

Before seeking counsel from a business consultant or coach, ask them. “Have you actually done it? Have you built a business and seen it grow and thrive?” If yes, ask them to share with you how they did it, and ask to see the written operations manual on how that business operated from front to back, from the time it opened for business in the morning, until it closed for business at night.

Finally, to grow, organize and sustain a business, you MUST do it via systematization! Systemology, changed my life, many years ago — pumping new blood into my vision, and giving our business reason to hope for a better future!

Did I mention—Great Systems Work!

The building in the YouTube Video — Tour of Lean was the former home of the printing business I founded in 1988. I passed the baton to my sons Paul and Barton Beyer in January 2016.