Unleashing Your Brand's Potential: The Crucial Importance of a Powerful Brand Vision.
How will your company get to where it needs to be if you don’t identify where it is going?
Having a brand vision seems like common sense, right? Wrong. You'd be amazed at the number of owners and leaders I've worked with who are not actively living their brand vision or sharing it with their employees. I've concluded this happens for three reasons: leaders don't know their brand vision, don't feel their team is privy to that information, or completely lose sight of their original brand vision amid growth. No matter the reason, this is detrimental to the development of a business. In the triangle of success below, brand vision is at the top. Yet, most owners and leaders over time reverse this order. Placing the most emphasis on low-value daily tasks.
Talent retention
Great employees are career-oriented, driven by forward movement, and goal and objective-oriented. When your company doesn't have a vision, great employees will leave out of the frustration of feeling like they're not growing. Bad talent will stay, whose primary concern is collecting a paycheck and putting in as little work as possible. Five or ten years down the road, you've cultivated a workforce of underperforming talent. I've experienced this first hand. I will tell you that getting out of a deep hole of bad talent is exceptionally challenging, if not impossible.
Sales
Leaders who don't have, lose sight or don't want to share their brand vision often struggle with upward movement. This happens for two reasons: as noted above, you don't have the talent you need to grow your bottom line, or if you manage to retain good talent, they're not working in unity for a common goal. Let's discuss the latter.
Imagine going head to head with your most significant competitor in a game of tug of war. On their end, ten individuals, on your side, one. Your one employee can fight with every ounce in their body to win the war, but no matter what they do, they will never be able to outperform the other side. That's what happens when teams don't have a brand vision. You cannot make a dent in your financial goals because you have a group of employees tugging in different directions. However, when the brand vision is clear and shared freely, employees work together to form a united front.
Clear vision can be challenging. The more money I raised in my first company, the more fearful I became of leading my company in the wrong direction. Having a board of directors with strong opinions and being a new entrepreneur, my vision became blurred in fear of not selling to everyone. I've also been on the other end of this scenario where I was responsible for growing a company for an owner with an inconsistent brand vision. Just as we'd veer right, we'd be barked to go left. The journey was unnecessarily challenging in both instances and resulted in the above scenarios.
Increasing certainty in your brand vision comes with experience, but experience takes time that most do not have. The best thing I've done to overcome this obstacle is to work with mentors, advisors, or consultants to help gain the education and confidence needed to get extremely clear on my vision. Here are my top 3 musts for crafting and maintaining a clear brand vision:
Work with a consultant, coach, or advisor to help craft a brand vision based on your company offerings and customer audience. A brand vision relies on your customer and your offerings; if you hire someone who does not emphasize what you are actually selling and how that is beneficial to your customer, RUN.
Work with a consultant, coach, or advisor on an accountability plan. This plan should involve weekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings to ensure the brand vision remains clear to owners, executives and employees.
Work with a consultant, coach, or advisor to tweak the brand vision if issues arise. Sometimes, a brand vision does need to be adjusted, especially when a market unexpectedly gets disrupted. Inexperienced entrepreneurs and leaders often jump to rash decisions, which compromise the company's focus and team morale.
Notice how my three suggestions all include working with someone else? That's not a cheap ploy to plug my services; instead, it's from my been-there-done-that failures and successes. If you find yourself struggling with your brand vision, book a 30-minute call with me, and we can discuss laying a strategic roadmap that will ensure clarity for you and your team. It's free, and if I don't feel like I'm a good fit, I'll help you find someone else who is.