Now, that may seem obvious, but I really dealt with over the past couple of months, the quarter and a half of this year, dealt with struggling to figure out what my vision was for this company going forward, because we’ve been hyper-focused, we were focused last year on getting through COVID and that [inaudible 00:01:16] gave us all clarity, but been focused on just growing this company.
But then at some point you start to question, Okay, why am I growing this? Where do I want to be?” And you start to have other opportunities because as an entrepreneur, as business owners and entrepreneurs, I think a lot of us start out from scratch. You’re starting doing everything yourself, and you start to grow, you get some traction, but you have to be hyper focused, you have to really focus down on just simply making the next check, to be able to pay your bills and just be very focused.
And then you start to get some traction, you start to get some growth and you add a team member. Now, you’ve got a little bit of help, then you add another team member, then you start to have that a little bit of a bigger team. And right now, we’re at 10 people on our team and we’re actually bringing on an 11th next week and we’re just going to post for a 12th position. So we’ve been growing very fast, which is super cool, really exciting and I absolutely love having a team, it’s one of the most rewarding things that I’ve ever done, but it became so clear to me this year that if you don’t have a very clear vision for where you’re going, and if you don’t share that with your team, you can very quickly get lost, drift in the wrong direction, or start working on opportunities that look like opportunities, but they really aren’t.
So I guess, shiny object syndrome. And the thing is after you’ve been so focused for so long as an entrepreneur growing something from scratch, you then because you’re growing, doing well, you start making a little bit of money, you start having money to invest, then you start seeing opportunities that before you would have simply ignored because you didn’t have the time or the ability to invest in them or to take action on them. But now, I was in a position and still am that opportunities would come up and all of a sudden I’m like, “Oh, I could do that or I could do this.” And without clarity of where you really want to be in three years, it’s easy to get distracted and I started realizing that that was happening. So I guess the point of this video is simply to share the importance of having a personal vision and a company vision if you’re a business owner.
And a book that I read that that was super beneficial, I don’t know the author, I don’t remember his name, but it’s called Vivid Vision. I’ll post it on the, I guess, below the video here, but the book is titled Vivid Vision. It’s a short, easy read and it talks about not just having a vision statement for your company, it talks about really taking time, getting deep, getting quiet and thinking about what is critically important to you, where do you want your company to be, and exactly what it’s going to look like in three years from now. He’s specific about making it three years out. So I took a few weeks and went through this whole process. I got quiet early in the mornings and started thinking, “Okay, three years from today, where do I want this company to be?
What do I want it to look like on a super detailed level? Like, what do I want the office to look like? Who’s in the office? How many team members do I have? What are the things we’re doing as a company? What are some of the benefits that our team gets? What are the things we’re doing together?” Just super specific things, like one of the things in mind was I want to have a cool coffee machine in the office. So going through that process was so beneficial, I didn’t realize how beneficial it was until I was out on the other side. And it’s kind of difficult because it makes you ask yourself some difficult questions. We get busy as entrepreneurs, we start doing the thing and we’re so focused in working so hard to make things happen that you can actually stop thinking about what’s important.
You just start thinking, “Okay, what’s the next goal? What’s the next goal? What’s the next goal?” And you get to it, but you start to ignore maybe some other things in your life that are important. So when you take time to get quiet, to really think where you want to be in three years, you start to ask questions of, “Okay, how do I want this business to serve me? How do I want my day to look three years from now? Do I still want to be doing the same thing every single day?”
The answer might be yes or it might be no, but those are really important questions to ask, because if you don’t ask them and then figure out what the answer to those is, you’re going to just keep doing the same thing and you can be three years down the road and you’re either super burned out or you’ve lost traction, or you’re just off in a total direction that you never really meant to go in. Now, that’s one reason, one big reason to get clear on your vision but the other thing that is I think more important as a business owner when you have a team is that when you have a vision for your team company and where you want to go, you need to share that with your team and I did that. This was super uncomfortable for me because I’d never done it before.
And I went through this, it’s a very personal thing to say, “Okay, here’s where I see this company. And guys, I’m going to share it with you,” because honestly, I’m worried about, hey, are people going to like this? Are they going to feel connected to it? Does this make sense to them? But at the end of the day, what I ended up doing, I wrote out this vivid vision, it’s a couple of pages, long, very detailed, I ended up recording a voice memo, putting some background music to it and sending it out to our whole team and we have 10 people on the team right now, like I said. And the feedback I got was amazing, it was really great, I had various individual team members get back to me independently and say, “Thank you for this. I’m 100% on board, I’m excited to move forward with Mayfair. I’m excited to help make that vision a reality.”
So it gives motivation and energy and direction to your team and quite frankly, before I had done, that just a couple of months ago, I could feel that not only was I kind of directionless, but that translates to your team when you’re leading a team, that they expect to get some sort of vision and guidance and clarity. So it’s very practical for you as a business
owner and someone leading a team. And then lastly, from that vivid vision, what we have done over the past couple of weeks is then create basically a company strategy. So this is cool. I learned all this stuff actually by going up to something called Carrot Camp and Carrot Camp is the creation of Trevor Mauch who owns carrot.com.
And carrot.com does real estate investor websites, and real estate agent websites. They started years ago and they’re now up to almost 50 employees. They’re out of Roseburg, Oregon. And Trevor’s just an amazing guy, he’s got a great podcast, it’s called CarrotCast, check it out, he’s got tons of really practical stuff. But I went up there, I did carrot camp, they do a couple of times a year. They invite a small group of real estate investors and agents and real estate business owners up to Roseburg, Oregon, we hang out at their offices and it’s kind of like a mastermind session and it was super cool. And my big takeaway from that, from Trevor was seeing how he’s grown his company, how he scaled it and the importance of having clarity of vision in order to do that, because he has a much bigger team than I do and it just struck me real hard.
It was perfect timing because I had been having a little bit of a uncertainty on the direction to go. Not uncertainty around, hey, we’re going to keep growing our company, but in exactly what way. Because I love what we do and I love the team that I have, and I’m super blessed with it. So anyway, I wanted to share that. So get clear on your vision if you’re a business owner. I think personally, on a personal level, having a lot of clarity is super important. One of the coolest things that happened when I did this and sent it out and shared it with my team is that one team member in particular actually created his own personal vivid vision for his life, where he wants to see himself three years from now, he recorded it, put some music to it, started listening to it on his way to work and he was totally amped up and totally aligned and it’s pretty cool just seeing that.
So hopefully other team members will decide to do the same thing, but I hope that you’ll do this for yourself because it really has been a game changer, I can tell you. I have crystal clear clarity on where I want to go, it’s amped up our whole team, we’ve been more energetic and now we have a plan in place going forward the rest of this year and we’re going to do every year an annual plan and strategy to take things to where I see them three years from now. So hope this is helpful. I know it’s a little bit of a long video, but super important to me and a big influence. So hope it was helpful. Check it out, check out the book Vivid Vision. And thanks for watching, I’ll see you in the next one.