EntreLeadership - #382: How to Be a Vision-Driven Leader with Michael Hyatt

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

The legendary Zig Ziglar once said, “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” It’s a strategy that bestselling author Michael Hyatt would describe as operating without a vision—and one that’s not going to end well if your goal is to scale your business. Tune in to hear Michael explain why establishing a vision for the future of your company not only communicates where you’re going as an organization but also builds focus and engagement on your team. And guess what? Those are the things that will take you wherever you want to go.   entreleadership.com/podcast The Vision Driven Leader by Michael Hyatt Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Daniel Harkavy Full Focus Planner Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt Compass Membership https://visiondrivenleader.com/entreleadership Vision Scripter Tool 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell The Ultimate EntreLeadership Reading Guide 25 Things You Can Delegate To A Social Media Strategist from BELAY Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   As an Amazon Associate EntreLeadership earns from qualifying purchases.   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was in a coaching conversation with a business owner the other day, and we were walking through some of the powerful questions that every business leader should be answering. Question one was, why do you exist as a business? And they had to answer that question. Question two was, what do you stand for as a business? And they were able to answer that question as well. And then the third question I asked him was, where is your business going? And I'll never forget. They looked at me and they said, I don't know.

From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast. where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Alex Judd, and the answer to that question of where are we going is found in your organization's vision. And today we talk to someone who's both a practitioner and a teacher on this topic of clarifying and executing on a crystal clear vision. Today we're talking with Michael Hyatt. And while Michael Hyatt has had a lot of success in the arena of vision and growth with the company that he's currently running, it's a lesson that he actually learned from a failure

when he tried to start his first publishing house at 31 years old. We started back in 1986, and we had the good fortune of publishing Oral Hersheyers' biography. Now, he was the famed pitcher of the Dodgers, and they had just won the World Series. He was a household name. Everybody'd heard of him. The book rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list,

and it was there like for seven months. And so it brought in a ton of cash, a lot of notoriety. And one of the things that happens as you become successful is you start attracting a lot of opportunities. But if you're not careful, opportunities or distractions show up on your doorstep, and you can't tell the difference between opportunities and distractions. So distractions masquerade as opportunities. So it happened to us.

So we decided, you know, we were bulletproof. We could get in anything. Everything we touched turned to gold. So we thought, we'll publish reference books. We'll publish gift books. We'll publish children's books. We've even published a large Bible project. The problem was it fractured our.

focus, it dissipated our resources, and that business went bust. And the reason it happened was because we didn't have a vision that we're starting with. It would be akin to deciding you're going to add an addition onto your house. And as long as the Home Depot truck shows up and keeps unloading lumber and sheet, rock, and nails, you just keep building and adding on. And that's exactly what we did. There was no blueprint. There was no plan. And we failed for a lack of vision, which is exactly, interestingly, what the book of Proverbs says, that without vision, that people perish. That is so fascinating.

And I think it's one of those things that in leadership courses and classes and books, we read about it all the time. You have to have a vision if you're going to be an effective leader. But so often it seems like this mystical thing that no one knows what it actually is. So can you set the record straight right now? When you say you need to have a vision as a leader, what are you actually talking about? Yeah. Well, what I'm not talking about is a vision statement.

You know, we've been told that we need to have this short, kind of brief, almost slogan or motto that we could put on a coffee mug or that we could, you know, put on a bumper sticker. But we can't. That's not robust enough. So when I talk about vision, I'm talking about a vision script. And specifically, I mean it this way. It's a written document that's three to five pages in length. Okay. So it's going to be more robust, not a short, pithy thing, but something that's really thoughtful that describes a future state.

It outlines a clear, inspiring, practical, and attractive picture of your organization's future. Now, here's where it gets fun. It describes a reality as you see it three to five years from now, and it's written in the present tense as though it's already happened. Now, when you begin to do that, when you begin to visualize something like that and write it in the present tense, that's the first process of creating anything. And I basically learned this process, the big idea from Stephen Covey, who said begin with the end in mind. And so to start a business or to even run a department that's a part of a large organization without a vision is kind of a fool's errand. You know, if you think about leadership, leadership presupposes that you know where you're going, that you're going somewhere and you know

where you're going. But if you don't know where you're going, how can you lead anybody there? Yeah. So it's got to start with vision. You jumped into those four terms already, clear, inspiring, practical, and attractive. I want us to jump into kind of the tactical of what those words look like here in just a bit. But I love the fact that you say that this is robust. So it's not a pithy statement. Is catching that vision? Is that something that comes from, is it a skill that can be developed?

Is it a wiring? Is it a gifting? Is it a personality trait? Because sometimes we call people visionary and it just makes it seem like, okay, well, they're a visionary, which means if I'm not a visionary, then I can't do this. Right. And so a lot of people give up before they start because they think of somebody like Steve Jobs. That's right.

You know, he could stand up and not only hold the stage, but, I mean, he had you totally into that reality distortion zone that was actually vision. You know, his wife famously said at his memorial service that Steve not only saw reality clearly, but he saw what reality lacked and why it was imperative to bridge that gap between what he saw and what could be. So every other cell phone manufacturer saw that the market was saturated, that every cell phone that could possibly be invented had been invented. But Steve said, nope, I got a different idea. And it was the iPhone, as we know it today. And it changed everything, right?

I mean, that's like the most profitable, certainly. I don't know if it's the largest. Android has an incredible saturation. But I kind of think everybody who has an Android sort of aspires to an iPhone. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they just wish they had one. But he solved a problem in such a big way. but you don't have to be Steve Jobs.

I love this story. When Steve Jobs passed, I can remember because I'm a total Mac nerd. But everybody was saying the tech press, the stock market was saying, well, that's the end of Apple. You know, maybe they'll coast like Microsoft for a while because they're so big, they have so much cash. But Steve's gone. The company's vision left the building with him. Well, there's this guy named Tim Cook, you know, who by most accounts, if you looked at him or heard him speak, you think, you know, he's not as charismatic. He's not as visionary in the sense that we typically mean.

mean, you know, somebody that's really, you know, articulate and all this. But the truth is, the company's prospered more under him. He had vision, but a different kind of vision. So he had a vision for optimizing the supply chain, for being able to produce these crazy, wacky things that Steve Jobs came up with. He was able to find the suppliers, orchestrate the supply chain, and get it at a price that would allow them to market up and make incredible margins. So he's every bit the visionary. Anybody can be a visionary. All you have to do is no recipe. Okay, so when you say know the recipe, what does that mean? Like, how do we start to build that skill set? How do we start to think in terms of the future of where we're going?

Yeah, I'll give an example. So, like, I've always thought of myself, I've had this story my whole life that I'm not very handy. You know, I'm not very good with my hands. And if I need something electrical done around the house, you know, I call an electrician or if I need something built, I call a contractor. So I decided I'm doing this upgrade to my studio, you know, because I've been hibernating in there during the pandemic. And so I decide there's a chandelier. that needs to be moved out of my studio and a normal LED light put in. So I said, I can figure that out. And I literally, last night, turned the electricity off, rewired the new light fixture,

and had it on it. And I was so proud of myself, which just goes to show you that if you have a problem and you're willing to search YouTube, you can figure it out. That's right. Well, vision's no different. It's a skill that anybody can learn. You don't have to be Steve Jobs. And I outlined the whole process from start to finish in the vision-driven leader.

I wanted it something that ordinary people, mere mortals, could start from scratch and build a compelling vision of a bigger, better future that would allow them to build something that was sustainable, that was beautiful, something that they, you know, could be their legacy. And I love that from a leadership perspective in the book, you really kind of framed this not as just an opportunity for your company, although it is, but it also seems like it's a responsibility. Total responsibility. If you don't have a vision, you might end up like my first company did. where we just crashed and burned, you know, because we didn't have a vision, we didn't know what we were building toward. I don't care if you're a startup. If you're, you know, mid along in the life cycle of your business, or if your business is kind of a zombie organization and almost dead, a vision will reinvigorate it.

You know, I get so many stories throughout the book about this, but a vision is the thing that inspires people and gets your organization aligned so that you can execute. Everybody wants more execution. They want more engagement. but that doesn't happen without alignment. If your company, if your people are just executing without alignment, you create a lot of sideways energy, not everybody's rowing in the same direction, and it just ends up being a lot of busy work.

So alignment's important, but what do you align around? You align around vision. That's why vision is essential. Without vision, no alignment. Without alignment, no execution. We run into small business owners all the time at events that we do or just around the country, we'll meet them, and they see this necessity of vision. And then it's almost like because they realize they need one, they make one horrible mistake.

They Google, how do I do company vision? And it's like Google, if you go to Google, it's like there's billions of people out there saying that they have the right way to do this. And it's like, you don't need a vision, you need a mission, you don't need a mission, you need a purpose, you don't need a purpose, you need a manifesto, you need a vision statement. And there's all this semantics and jargon around all this stuff. But I think the words that we hear so often is vision, mission values. and then I know you add the word strategy in there as well. And your book really clarified for me better than anything I've probably read in a long time what the four of those things actually are.

So can you lay out the difference between vision, mission, values, and strategy? First of all, vision, each one of them answers a question. Okay. So vision answers a question, where are we going? It defines the destination in advance. So every year my family drives from Nashville, straight south on I-65, through Birmingham, southeast from there to Rosemary Beach on the Panhandle of Florida. So the vision is to have a family vacation with my extended family.

We do this every year. Extended vacation, that's the vision. The strategy and how we get there, usually we caravan and we go on I-65. But sometimes there's road work. Sometimes there's, you know, a big crash, something that causes a detour. And that's like strategy. Because strategy answers a question, how? How do we get from where we are now to this destination that we've envisioned in our vision

script? Okay, so strategy is about how. Mission answers the question, what and why? What is that we do on a day-to-day basis, and why do we do it? What motivates us to do it? And so I have even the formula in the vision-driven leader for what a mission is, which is different than a vision. But then the question is about core values.

What are they? They're about who we are and who we're becoming on this journey to this destination that we've called the vision script. I think about that outline in the context of how we operate here at Ramsey. solutions. This is something that Dave and the operating board, I think we're intentional about very early on in the business. I know they were. And it's like our vision for our business right now, and there's a lot more kind of explanation around this, but where we're going in terms of a metric is we want to have 5x by 3x. So we want to 5x our top line revenue with 3x the number of people over the course of the next five years is what we're looking at.

That's nice. And it's like everyone's aligned around that. And then we've got our mission, which is to provide common sense, biblically based education and empowerment that create hope for everyone in every walk of life. We've got core values and then obviously the strategy is changing day to day. But it's amazing, like you said, the word alignment, how people start to naturally, individuals in the meetings start to naturally fill in the gaps of where they fit into those things when those things are actually stated. And people are able to govern themselves in that kind of system. It's why when this country was founded, the U.S. was founded, it was founded on a constitution.

It was predicated upon the idea of self-governance. Now, we've lost a lot of that over time, but people said, you know, if you have a basic document that we can align around, people will govern their own behavior and adjust accordingly. Same thing is true when you have this core ideology in your business, when you've got a written vision, a written mission, written strategies, and, you know, written core values. All of those are important. But one thing that's important to say, too, and particularly as we've come through the pandemic, we've thought about this, people said, well, gosh, you know, everything's changed. Should my vision change? Actually, no. If you're talking about three to five years from now, maybe you have some clarity about where it could be and the possibilities.

And so maybe you want to fine tune it a little bit, but it doesn't have to change. But your strategy can change anytime conditions on the ground change or whatever the strategy isn't working. Again, going back to my example of going to the beach, you know, if I encounter road traffic, I don't give up on the vision. If I encounter a detour, I don't give up on the vision. Yeah, it's not like you just tell your family, hey, we're not going to the beach anymore. Sorry, guys, there's traffic. That's right. The strategy's dead.

No, you figure out a different strategy. And usually the first strategy you try doesn't work. But you've got to hold tenaciously to the vision, but you've got to be flexible with a relationship to your strategy. Ooh, that's good. Tenacious to the vision, but flexible with the strategy. I love that. Why is it, do you think, that people hesitate to clarify vision or what gets in people's way

whenever they know this is something important, but so few actually do it? Well, I'll tell you the funny thing is I think a lot of people go into sort of self- psychoanalysis. You know, why am I so reluctant to do this? Why would I do this? Look, I'm going to tell you the hack that'll get through all that. Number one, book an appointment on your calendar. Get away for a half a day and commit to writing down your thoughts. And I can guide you through the process with the book. And in fact, I've got a tool called the Vision Scriptor tool that'll make that possible and it's free. And I'll tell you how to get it, you know, toward the end of the show. But one of the great things about it is if you commit to that half a day, getting alone by

yourself and just write down. Thoughts disentangle themselves passing over the lips and through pencil tips. I don't know who first said it, but I totally agree with it. And so if you start writing it down, you will get clarity. You've got to get it out of your head onto paper. As long as it's in your head, it's going to be kind of ambiguous. It's going to be impossible to share it. And it's just not going to be concrete enough for you to get excited to work toward it. But when you start to write it down, that's the first act of creation is to speak it and then to begin to write it down. And it's amazing how in the process of actually putting words to paper, sometimes that can dissipate some of the fear surrounding vision.

Totally. And especially if you're okay with it not being perfect. Look, you're not Moses. You're not in the mountain. You're just a guy or a gal that's trying to write some things down about what you see three to five years from now. And it's interesting. Once you get that first brain dump, you know, kind of get it out of your,

head onto paper, then you have the luxury beginning to massage it and to tweak it and to fine-tune it. And more importantly, the vision has to start with you as a leader. It can't be outsourced, can't be delegated. It's got to start with you. But it certainly can't end with you. You got to go back with that draft, and that's what I call it a draft. It's not the perfect vision script yet. That's good.

If you get it 60 to 70 percent, that's good enough. Go back to your leadership team, whatever it is. You may have two people reporting to you. You may have 20,000 people reporting to you. but whatever your leadership team is, usually a small group, but if you're a solopreneur, you could do this with a mentor or with a peer group like a mastermind, but get together with them and say, look, I've been thinking about the future. I jotted down a few thoughts.

I probably don't have all this right. There's probably some things I'm missing, but I need your help to help bring this into reality, but more importantly right now, I need your help and fine-tuning this so it's clear. So then you begin a conversation. Then you begin to cascade this down in the organization, and I have an entire chapter based on this on how to sell the vision. But cascading communication is the technique where you start with the highest level of leadership,

then you go to the next level. And so the cement's very wet at the top, and it begins to dry as you move through the organization. But before you roll it out to your entire team, what you want to do and you want to state that, you know, multiple times every year, you want to keep revisiting it. But you don't want anybody surprised

in your leadership team by what you're going to share with the whole group. It's got to be totally vetted so that everybody owns it and you start with alignment from the top and all the way down to each success layer. But I know one of the things that you highlight in the book is that everything you're talking about right now, from the cascading communication to the going out and getting the vision to making sure people are aligned around the vision, that really demands people take on the

role of leader and not just manager. That's right. So can you explain or distinguish the difference between those two? Yeah, you know, there's been a debate for probably 20 years now about the relative value of managers versus leaders. And when I started my career, all the books that were being written were about management. And then at some point, it might have been with John Maxwell in the late 90s. He shifted the language to leadership. And then there was this big distinction. Here's what I believe. Both are important. Leaders are important. Managers are important. In most organizations, it's one and the same person. It's the CEO. In some organizations like mine, we have a COO, my daughter, who's more the manager, where I'm more the leader. But leadership is really about, and visionary

leadership is about the future. Management is about executing that vision in the present. The vision is about painting a picture for an ideal, bigger, better tomorrow. Management is about optimizing systems, you know, securing resources, getting everybody marching in the same direction so that you can accomplish that vision. Both of them are important. Now, at Apple, there's a good example, before they were bifurcated. You had Steve Jobs, who was the role of the visionary leader. You had Tim Cook at that time, who was the more managerial person who optimized the systems

and all that. And then when Steve died, tragically, then Tim was able to take over and become the visionary, which I think proves that it's a role. It's not something that's just native or natural to who you are. They're not born. They're made. But it sounds like, especially if someone's in the driving seat of owning a business and leading a business, they do need to be playing that visionary role. Is that correct? They do. Vision is important. And again, I just want to emphasize both are important because you do not want an entire company full of leaders with no managers. You're going to have more ideas than you can execute on. You're going to have 30 different companies.

Exactly. You're not going to follow through. Yeah. So leadership is something, it's got to be where it starts because the leader, in essence, or the leadership team has to define that destination. And if an organization has no vision and all they're doing is managing, I promise you, they're going to be working too much, they're going to be working all the time, they're going to be burning out people.

They never know when they're done. That's right. You know, it's just like if you start to build an addition onto your house, and as long as the truck shows up with the sheetrock and the nails, you keep building. You know, when is the house done? How do you know when you've gotten there? If you don't start with a blueprint, you're kind of in trouble. Gosh, I'd love to hear when you started the Michael Hyatt Company, and I don't know how big your team was whenever you first started. Me.

It was just you. Yeah, okay. Okay, so maybe at that stage, and then maybe you're adding a couple people, right, as you're growing. And I'm sure, especially as you start to add people, you have. this understanding that I need to have vision for where we're going. Right. And I need to be able to cast a future for these people that are now following me, not to mention my customers as well, who are starting to buy into what we're doing and following our brand. And at the same time, you're the face of the company, you're the content creator of the company. I assume you're

the producer of the company. You're like everything you're creating is coming through you. And that's a direct parallel to so many of the business owners that we see today that it's like they're on this treadmill of working in the business. And then you tell them, well, you're You've got to have a vision. They're like, well, when am I supposed to do that? Right. So how did you solve for that problem at that stage of business, Michael? Well, one of the things I started doing about 20 years ago that is akin to what I'm talking about when I say, you've got to have a vision script for your business, is I created a life plan. It wasn't something I came up with on my own.

I had an executive coach, Daniel Harcovy, who worked with me on that process. And we ended up writing a book on that process called Living Forward about how to. I've read that book. It's outstanding. And it was really, really powerful to walk through that plan. I did with a mentorship group. Thank you. I knew that things certainly went much better with my life when I had a written life plan.

Because then all of a sudden, you know, I could envision the marriage I wanted and the relationship with my kids and my health and all that kind of stuff. It's no different when it comes to your business. So when I started the Michael Hyde Company, I said, I've got to have a vision. Because I didn't have a vision in that first company. I learned about vision when I started running Thomas Nelson publishers, and we had a vision script there. And so then when I started my own business, I said, I got to figure this out. I mean, I know I'm seeing through a glass darkly right now. I'm not going to get it perfect.

But really, it's been about the evolution of my vision at Michael Hyatt and Company has really been the evolution of possibility. I have a bigger idea of what's possible today than I did 10 years ago when I started the company. But I think that's where people grow in their vision. It's not that their vision needs to change, but their sense of what's possible changes. I've had so many times, I mean, I remember when I first started, I thought, man, if we could ever get to a million dollars in revenue and then we hit that.

I thought, well, if we could ever get to $10 million in revenue, where we got to that. You know, and at each step, my vision expands. So people can expect that. That's so good, though, because if your vision doesn't expand, then that's where the company plateaus. Totally. And we run into a lot of small business owners that they would literally identify as what we call accidental CEOs, right?

It's like they started a company probably because they couldn't work for anyone else. They were unemployable. And so they start this own company, and then suddenly they're looking behind them and there's like people working for them and they have a payroll and they're supposed to have core values and they're like, what the heck? And they sit there and they're say, I literally started this to pay the bills and put food on the table for my family. And they look up and they're now running a $5 million organization. And it's like, well, you did that. Congratulations. And now you've got 20 people working for you, too, or something like that. And so they feel this need to expand their perspective.

Yes. But a lot of times they struggle to do that because they're stuck in the place of where they were. So how do you start to do exactly what you're talking about where you expand and broaden your perspective of what's possible? Well, I think one of the things you've got to do is give yourself permission to dream again. This is where it starts. And I think that, you know, in a sense, our educational system is kind of an exercise in shutting down our dreams. I mean, you ask the average five-year-old, I'm not unique in this perspective, but you average five-year-old, what do you want to be when you grow up? You know, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a fireman or, you know, I mean, some big thing. I want to play professional baseball or whatever.

And pretty much we ring that out of them by the time they graduate from high school. school. You know, we get the dreams out of them where they're no longer dreaming. And the essence, the essence of entrepreneurship is you solve problems at a profit. And you've got to dream about solving bigger, better problems. You know, if I could solve this, what would that mean for my business? What would that mean for the future of my employees? Because all of your people have dreams. They have dreams for their personal life. You've got to continue to grow your business. You have, I'll say this, you have a moral obligation to grow your business. The status quo is not acceptable. Now, I'm saying that as an entrepreneur who is committed to serving other people.

My people want to grow. They have dreams for their families. It's going to require them getting raises, getting promotions, an organization that's continuing to grow. Plus, when my organization grows, that forces me to be a different leader than I was 12 months ago. You know, our business grew 60% this last year. I'm a different CEO today than I was last year. And I better be a different CEO next year than the one I am today. It requires my growth, but that starts with vision. And I can't imagine. You talk about the way you're serving the team and expanding your vision, but then also the customers. I mean, there are people that know about Michael Hyatt today that didn't know about him three years ago because y'all were committed to growing.

That's right. Yeah, and I think it begins with that, you know, the commitment to growth requires a vision. And I think that, like so many other things, we just have to set aside time to do it. You know, taking time to be the visionary, you know, you said a phrase, just a moment, moment ago working in the business versus working on the business. Well, the whole process of envisioning the future is a working on the business kind of thing. You know, I think the average entrepreneur starts a business with this idea of freedom. You know, freedom and money. I want to be free and I want to make money. I'm tired of working for the man, right? The problem is they wake up to this, as Michael Gerber says, this entrepreneurial nightmare five years later. That's right.

And now they have the worst, most onerous, most demanding boss they've ever. ever had, and he greets them every morning in the mirror. You know, it's them. So how do we recapture that freedom? Well, I think it's, again, we've got to visualize something different in the future three to five years. If you're in a business where you've kind of lost control, where you feel overworked, underappreciated, where your margins may have even shrunk over the last few years, and you're thinking to yourself, they're just days when I visualize being a solopreneur again, or going back and getting a job and not all having all this to worry about. The difference is, if you get a vision, What could your life look like three to five years from now?

If you had a business that served your life and not a life that served your business, that all starts with vision, imagining something different. That's so good. You've got to have an online presence today to be successful in business, but it takes time. We don't have time for it. We got all this other stuff to do. So if you're like me, you need a team to help you with this. You know, if you need help with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, well, guess what? our friends at Belay Solutions, they've got the answer. They actually have social media strategist

who can help you out. You know, if you need to schedule content and engage with your online audience, they can do that. If you need to respond to online inquiries and get feedback from clients and share customer success stories, yep, you guessed it. They've got you covered there too. But that's not all they can do. So today, Belay's actually offering a free download of 25 things that you can delegate to a social media strategist. You may not even know all that. You may not even know all that. the things that can be delegated. And there's a lot of fear around delegation. Is it going to work right? Are they going to say it the right way? Hey, they've taken all that into consideration. And in this free guide, they're going to teach you what you should be delegating in exactly how to do

it so that you can get back to doing what you love the most, which is running and growing your business. To get this free resource, just text the word belay to 3196. You get this free resource today. That's B-E-L-A-Y keyword belay to 31996. Check it out. Okay, say you coincide with a business owner and they're talking to you, maybe it's on an airplane or something like that. And they've got a lawn care company. This is textbook for so many of the people that we meet at events and things like this. And they started the company doing the thing, right? They were doing the lawn care. They were fixing the HVAC. They were fixing the plumbing. They were the tactician that was doing the work. And then their team grows because they do great work and they're expanding and they're growing. And you're talking to them. And it's like, okay, well, You know, where are you at now? What's the stage of business? And they say, well, we're a $10 million business. We've got this many employees. And then you say, how are you spending most of your time? And they say, well, I still do a lot of the long care. I still do a ton of the plumbing. I spend 75% of my time doing this. Why is it that we do that, first of all, why do we get stuck just still doing the thing when we definitely don't have to?

And then how is that hamstringing the growth of that individual's business? Yeah. So, you know, this is I mentioned Michael Gerber a few moments ago. And he says that's why most entrepreneurs fail. They start out as a technician and they can never jump or make the leap between a technician and an entrepreneur. They're running, not owning, as Brian and Shannon Miles. That's right. Talk about it. I know you've had them on. So you've got to be a business owner instead of just somebody that's running stuff. But again, I think it's in our discomfort zone, that whole idea of vision. And what's comfortable is what's familiar. And doing the work is what's familiar. Most people fail when they get a promotion. Why? Most people don't fail. But the,

of those that do fail, the people that do fail is they can't stop doing the old job, right? And that's why the further people move up in an organization, why they're so stinking busy and overworked because they haven't jettisoned what they were doing in favor of the new stuff because they hang on to it because it's familiar. It's like comfort food. They hang on to it. They won't let it go. But you've got to let go of that stuff and be willing to be uncomfortable by trying to

envision the future. And again, it's a skill you can develop. It's like anything else. You know, it's hard at first. Like what I used to do interviews like this. I mean, it scared me to death. Is that right? I didn't sit the night before.

I didn't want to do them. You know, it's just like, oh, my gosh. But it's a skill like anything else. Now I actually look forward to it. That's good. That's a positive thing. But it's a skill. It can be developed.

You probably never had that. Yo, that's false. That's 100% false. I get nervous every time I sit down in this chair. Okay, so when we actually start to practice and sit down and work on the business and maybe get a cabin out of the woods or go to the mountains or go to the beach or something and say, okay, I'm going to do this vision script thing. Give us a, put a little bit of meat on.

When you say I want people to have a vision script, what are you talking about there? Okay, so again, I'm talking about a written document set three to five pages in length. So you're going to start, you know, with your computer open to a word processor or a Google Doc or just use an old-fashioned, you know, notebook, a legal pad. And you're going to arrange it under five categories. So every time you think of something you would want in the future, like stand in the future three to five years from now, describe what you see. And we want to do it around four different sections. So first of all, your team. Your team is critically important because your team is what allows you to bring that vision into reality, right?

If your dream doesn't require a team, your dream's too small. Okay, but you're answering the question, what do I want with regard to my team years from now? Years from now. And you've got to get in touch with what do you want. I mean, nobody can tell you that. You got to come up with that. What do you want? What does the culture look like?

What would be a culture that would get you excited about getting up out of bed in the morning that would make you proud as the business owner that you could say, yeah, I created that, you know? I've seen leaders before hesitate to answer that question of what they want because they feel like it's a selfish question. Oh, it's the least selfish question you could possibly ask. That I mean to scold you, but I mean, think it's great. Yeah, explain. So think of it this way. Another thing that I encountered when I was at Thomas Nelson was that I got this culture that just no longer. served the people that worked at the company or our customers. So the way I described that,

I started writing everything down I thought about the culture that I thought was dysfunctional. And I said this culture is, first of all, it's not transparent, it's opaque. In other words, we couldn't get any information out of management, out of leadership. If we wanted to know something, and we were a publicly held company at the time, we had to read it in the Tennessean after it already happened. You know, so there was just like, we were kept in the dark all the time. Another thing I didn't like was there was this incredibly hierarchical relationship, So nobody would, everybody's afraid to make a move without getting the approval of management. I said, I don't like that.

So I identified about 10 things that I didn't like about our culture. And I said, this is what sucks about our culture. And this is what I want to change. Then I went up. And again, I'm envisioning what I want. I said, well, if it's not going to be an opaque culture, what do I want it to be? I want it to be transparent. I want people to know our operating results, how we're doing.

So they're not left in the dark. And then I said, okay, I don't like this organization's hierarchical. What do I want? I want something that's collegial, you know, where we all feel like we're on the same team and we're working together and there's not this, you know, real apparent hierarchy that keeps people kind of frozen and afraid to move. So I went through that. So that's what I'm talking about when I talk about envisioning the future of your culture or your team. What kind of people do I want to attract? That's another key question in that team section of the vision script.

What kind of people do I want to attract? What kind of people do I want to retain? What kind of capabilities do they have? So that's like the first section of the vision script. That's so good, though, because even that exercise that you just laid out with the two columns, it's rooted in possibility. Because I think so often people focus on what do I not like. Yes. And they spend all their time just saying all the things that they don't like, but they never actually answer the question of what would they like to see.

Well, that's what's what you're talking about? Yeah, it is. And the question that will change all that, if you ask yourself the question, what would this make possible? So you see something that's not great and you say, what would this make possible? Like when we decided to build a world-class culture of Michael Hyde & Company, and like Ramsey Solutions, we just made the ink list of the best places to work in the U.S. That's right. So you're doing it.

You're stepping into the vision. But that's when we envision it said, what would make our place a great place to work? So we started envisioning, what would the benefits have to look like? So like at our company, we have unlimited PTO. People can take off as much time as they need. The truth is, we still have to beg people to take off. It's so stinking responsible. We give people a 30-day paid sabbat.

every three years. We pay 100% of their health care. You know, we do all these things because we're trying to create this culture that we had in our vision script. And it's paid off in spades. How cool. How cool. Okay. So we start with team and we list out what we want to see three to five years for now. Just dream. And I know in the book, as we walk through these categories, you make it pretty evident in the book. You want people to write in present tense. Yes. So what does that look like when we're writing in present tense about what we want to see in the future? Yeah, like you might put something like you might have a bullet that says, we attract a level talent at every level. So it's not we hope to or we envision one day when we'll get to that place and we can really pay them.

No, you say, we do that right now. You could say about your team, we have a culture that makes people die to come to work for us. You know, they can't wait to come to work. And the truth is for any position that we'll advertise at Michael Hyatt & Company is probably true for Ramsey Solutions. We'll have 80 to 150 people apply for every position. people are beaten down our doors. But that was all encapsulated and written in the present tense. And this is kind of a brain hack.

And one of the things I've learned from brain science is that your brain can't differentiate between something vividly imagined and something actually experienced. This is why performance coaches have athletes envision things like putting on the green or throwing that perfect pass or whatever it is because it trains your muscle memory even though you're not actually doing it. gosh, that's so true, though, although we would never sit on a putting green or we would never think about shooting a basketball shot and envision failure and think that's a good strategy for success, but so often with regard to business and our team and the people that we work with every day,

the first thing we envision is failure and then we expect it to go differently. We stay focused on the problems and you get more of what you focus on. And what you focus on gets bigger. That's why the vision has got to be the most compelling thing. It's got to be front and center because that's what's going to pull you into the future. And by stating it in the present tense, it's that little creative aspect of beginning to bring it into fruition, beginning to get yourself, and this is important, to believe it. It's our limiting beliefs that so often hold us back. And to give ourselves the permission to believe this future that we're creating and to believe in it and speak it to our teammates and constantly be talking to them about it.

That's what begins that creative process of moving your organization into that more compelling, bigger, more beautiful view of your company. And before we move on from team, I assume that whenever you clarify that vision of this is the team that we want to be and we are going to start taking steps in that direction, my assumption is that it becomes very clear, very quickly, who doesn't belong in that ride with you. Yeah, the thing I didn't say earlier that's important is a vision script will serve as a filter. What I didn't have when I started that publishing company, because I didn't have a vision,

I didn't have a filter. there was no way to differentiate between opportunities and distractions. So that's one of the first things the vision does. Second thing, though, is it gives you a filter in terms of hiring and retention. It will attract the right people. It will repel the wrong people. And so the more you can talk about vision, people will self-select out of your system or self-select into the system. But the vision is what you want to have people selected in.

Not because you pay the best, although hopefully you pay competitively. Not because, you know, you have the most beautiful facility, although Ramsey's solution is pretty amazing. But because you've got a culture, because you've got a vision that is the most compelling thing. People are signing on not because of who you are right now, but because of who you've articulated about who you want to be. Man, that's so good. I had a friend that after college, and I love that you use the John F. Kennedy example in the book of us saying we're going to go to the moon. Because I had a friend out of college, he went to work for SpaceX. And he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, I mean, he was going to work 90, 100 hour weeks.

and they just, I mean, they beat the snot out of them there, right? Like, and they just, I mean, they just churn. But I asked him like, well, why would you sign up for that? And he said, the pay is really good, number one. But he said, number two, it's like, I get to be a part of something that's making a difference. And like we're going somewhere. It sounds like that's what you're talking about. Totally.

Like, once you get the vision script done, we can go back and talk about the other parts of it. I'll just, just quickly. It's a product. That's the second section. Yeah. Team product. Sales and marketing. Okay.

And then impact. Yeah. Okay. But once you get this and once you get a fine-tuned and once you've rolled it out to your organization, it's not a one-and-done thing, right? You've got to continue to speak it. You've got to continue as a leader. Talk about the destination because people are solving problems every day. People get discouraged.

People lose sight of where they're going. And if you as the leader don't continue to make the future present by virtue of repeating it over and over again, people lose a sense of meaning. And when people are disconnected from their work, I mean, Karl Marx, of all people, observed. this early on when he wrote his manifesto. He basically said the problem with workers today is they're alienated from their work. They didn't understand the big picture. And if we want to keep our economy free, if we want to keep our country moving forward as entrepreneurs, it's incumbent upon us to make the vision clear so that workers have a sense of meaning and a sense of engagement about their work. That's on us. And so you can't speak the vision to frequently. So in January,

I went through our entire vision script as I do every year with the entire team. We had our annual team meeting and we were rolling out our goals for 2020 and all that. And I just read through it with enthusiasm. If you're not enthusiastic about the future, you need to start over. You have to be excited about it. That's right. But I did that. And so I had a customer support person who came to me afterward who'd been with the company about three months. And she had tears in her eyes and she said, thank you. Thank you for that. She said, honestly, my work is really hard. But now all of a sudden, I feel connected to where we're going. I understand how my role contributes to the whole. And she was very moved by it. And it just reminded me that as leaders, we can't speak the vision too much.

So in the middle of Great Recession, 2009, I guess this was, I had an executive coach who came to me and said, look, we're going into a very difficult time. So this was like right on the cusp. We had just kind of gone over the waterfall. We knew we were in some economic difficult times. She said, I want you to keep speaking the vision until you're so sick of it that you're about to throw up. And I said, okay, so I did that. So after about six months, months, I came back to her and I said, Eileen, I am so tired of talking about the vision. She said, good, you're half done. Keep doing it. And she was right. Because in difficult times, I don't care if it's a pandemic, it's a recession, it's just a tough time for that company, whatever it may be.

If people don't get the vision, they don't have anything to anchor their work to. That's right. And then they start getting distracted or they start to focus on what's on the news or start to focus on their own worries or anxieties. And I mean, it can, yeah, exactly. And it can be a really healthy thing for people to say, okay, I'm pursuing something. Everything else may be going crazy right now, but I'm pursuing something, and that makes a difference. Okay, so we talked a little bit about having the vision for your team in this document. The next one that you said we need to focus on is the vision for the product. Explain what that means. Yeah, so think of your product three to five years from now, or maybe your service. It may be a combination of the two. But I like to

think a product, not in terms of the actual artifact or the widget or the thing, but what's the impact that it's heaven on the lives of the people that use it. Because none of us buy products for the thing, right? You know, we buy the product because of the benefit or the promise or the solution to our problem that we think that that product is going to bring to us. So what is that your product creates? What does it solve for your customers? So, for example, and this is really our mission statement, Michael Hyde & Company,

we help overwhelmed but successful high achievers get the focus they need to win at work and succeed a life. So all of our products, I don't care. what they are are designed to do that, to help them get focus because focus is a superpower. It's everything in a distraction economy. And that's our unique calling, our unique mission. So I want to make sure that all our products, whether it's the full focus planner, whether it's a book I write like Free to Focus, we have a membership called The Compass Club that's all about people getting and retaining focus. So everything in our organization is about focus. But that comes to life in products. What do we envision three to five years from now?

I've seen people engage in kind of the big picture three to five year conversations and the way they engage with those conversations, maybe with regard to the topic of product or service, is they start by brainstorming what could we do instead of what we want to do like you phrase it. Can you speak to the damage that that might do or why that might actually diminish or deteriorate our focus? Well, it's not a bad place to start. I mean, it's got to start with dreaming. And when you're dreaming, not everything you dream about is actually going to come to pass or something you want to pursue as you've thought about it more. So like I started college as a music major because I wanted to play in a band and become famous and that was my dream. But once I got there, I realized, oh my gosh, there's a ton of competition. And no, this is not really the life that I want to sign up for.

And so I, you know, I changed. I shifted my dream and all that. So I think it's, you know, that's just part of the process. But I think that people have to start with that dreaming process and then get it more fine tune as they, as they kind of move through the process. That's good. Okay, so product and then sales and marketing is the next one. What do you mean by having a vision for our sales and marketing?

Yeah, so how do we kind of reach our constituents or bring our products to market? What does that process look like? And we're in such an amazing time in terms of marketing. You know, our company, the way that we market is so different than I envisioned, you know, 10 years ago when I started the company. That's the stuff probably didn't exist 10 years ago. Oh, my gosh. You know, just all the technology. And, of course, we've learned so much, you know, during the lockdown in terms of, you know, virtually communicating to people and all that kind of stuff.

But what do you envision for your company in terms of how you're going to reach people? Is it going to be through live events? Is it going to be through online marketing? Is it going to be conventional, you know, traditional kinds of advertising and all that? What kind of role do you to assign to marketing? One of the things that we've said inside of our vision script for Michael Hyden Company is that we see marketing as a noble position. And so selling is also something. noble because we are able to reach people and connect them with solutions that solve their real

problems. So we never want to be ashamed of sales or marketing or sell from our heels. We want to sell from our toes, lean into it because we're helping people find the solutions that they crave. That's right. That's what Dave teaches us all the time here is that to sell something to someone is to serve that person. That's exactly right. Sales is service. And then finally, the vision that we want to have for our impact. And this is where sometimes our mind can most naturally go. It seems like depending on how you're wired, but it also seems like sometimes we have a capacity to think too small about the impact that we want to make. We do. That's why three to five years is such an ideal time frame, because I've heard somebody say, and I think it's true, that we tend to

overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in three to five years. So impact would be anything that could be measured, that is objective, that could be verified that's important to your business. It might be revenue. It might be profit, which I like better than revenue. It might be web visits, unique visitors, and maybe podcast downloads, whatever it is. Put it down there so you can inspire yourself and inspire your team and know what to work towards, but you're exactly right. Impact is the result of the right team, the right product, the right sales and marketing that shows up in impact. We'd want to get it first, but it's the result of those other things done right. And I know you detailed this a lot in the book, and people

can walk through this to really know this process and understand this process and you provide a bunch of tools as well. But once we write this script, this vision script, and we say, okay, I'm ready to take it back to the team and get their feedback, get their buying, get their input, how do we know whether or not we've done it correctly? How do we know whether or not it's going to be an effective vision for the next five years of business? Because that's a pretty big commitment. Yeah, you'll know in about five minutes. Because as you start sharing even that rough, sketchy draft, If they don't kind of sit up, start getting excited about it, you probably haven't thought hard enough about it. Sometimes it happens because we're thinking too small.

You know, it's not different enough from the current reality. It's people I kind of go like, well, yeah, okay, 5% increase, 10% increase, you know. But if you start dialing it up where it's in their discomfort zone, but not in their delusional zone, you know, where it's really crazy, then all of a sudden inspires them. And like when I went back, one of the first things I did when I was running this small division at Thomas Nelson Publishers's first division I ever ran was the division was up. upside down. I went back and with a vision script after I'd spent a little time thinking about it, it accelerated progress towards a turnaround. That's what a good vision does is it accelerates progress. Once you get clarity on the destination, you end up with a lot fewer cul-de-sacs, a lot fewer dead ends, you end up making progress because you see the path more clearly

when the destination is in view. Gosh, I love that. Accelerates progress towards the destination. That's huge. I know you were telling me before we started that, You've got some special tools that you wanted to share with the small business owners that listen to this podcast. So tell them how they can take advantage of those and also get the book, Michael. Okay, so buy the book, the vision-driven leader at whatever retailer you want. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, books a million, wherever. Better books are sold. And I would say it's a good book for you, the leader, but it's also a good book for you to read with your team.

Totally. Because I think it applies to every level of the org chart, too. It does. Yeah, because you want whoever's running marketing to have a unique vision that they can articulate in a vision script for their organization, who is ever running sales, even finance. Every divisional leader in our company has a vision script for the entity over which they preside. Okay.

So buy the book wherever you want. Then come back to this website, visiondrivenleader.com, and here's the important part, slash entre leadership. Visiondrivenleader.com slash entree leadership. The reason is that when you're turning your receipt number there, you'll just have to type it in. You're going to get access to over $200 worth of free bonuses that will help you develop a vision script faster and easier than you could do otherwise. And one of the tools that we have there is a

tool called the vision scriptor tool. And it's like having an assistant, somebody who's like a consultant, me, walk you through the process, ask you the right questions to prompt you so that you're not just looking at a blank computer screen, but that you actually can just answer these questions. And if you do that, and it'll take about half a day, then you'll have a vision script. You'll be like 70 to 80% of the way done, but you'll have something perfect to take back to your team and begin the fine-tuning process. Yeah, I was looking at that tool just before you came in here, and it was just crazy how it's like, man, if I fill out this PDF, if I take the time, which that's a big if, but if I take the time to fill out this PDF, I will end with an entire

packet of material that describes my vision for the next five years of my business, which is a huge deal for people. It is, and you said something very important, and that is the scheduling part of this is a tough part. What gets scheduled gets done. If it's important, get on your schedule, because Your calendar's never going to open up where you've got time to do this kind of work. The working on your business stuff has to be. As a business owner, it's got to be a priority. And you'll know it's a priority when it's showing up on your schedule on a regular basis. But it starts with this visionary kind of process where you set aside some time to create this vision script.

That's right. Before we end today, I'd like for you to talk directly to the small business owner because you even alluded to it before. A lot of the exercises and the work that you're talking about going through represent discomfort for people, meaning that they're going to face a lot of resistance as they step into this. And I know you talk about this in the book. Give them a little bit of encouragement to wade through this as to why it's all worth it, Michael. Yeah, I think as a leader, the most important thing you can do is continuously put yourself in a position of discomfort, where you feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Once you stop feeling those positive indicators, positive indicators

that you're in the discomfort zone, you stop growing. And growth is uncomfortable. So, welcome those kinds of emotions as indicators that you're on the right path. Constantly be putting yourself in a position where you're stretching yourself. If you don't, you will become the lid on your business. John Maxwell talks about that concept in the 21 irrefutable laws of leadership, the law of the lid. You will become the lid on your business. You've got to keep growing, but it begins with vision. That's what keeps you advancing, keeps you growing in pursuit of this destination that's out there.

Well, Michael, thank you so much for your time today for this. message that is so crucial for small business in this season, but then also for leading a company in alignment with the message that you teach. Thanks so much. Thanks, Alex. In the time that I've spent with Michael, I really believe that he is one of the most focused and intentional people that I've ever met. And I think the reason why he's able to have such a crystal clear level of focus and intentionality is because he's crystal clear on where he's going. That's the power of being a leader that has a vision. And so I would tell you that if you're at a stage right now where this conversation hit home with you, don't put this off. Don't make this something that you'll

focus on next month or next year. Make this something that you are about right now because the people that follow you will benefit from your clarity of vision. And one of the things that we discussed in that conversation with Michael was the fact that if you're going to expand your vision, you have to expand your capacity, your mental capacity, your spiritual capacity, the way you look at the world. And one of the ways that we know you can do that is by increasing your knowledge. And the best way to do that is the old-fashioned way of picking up a book and reading it. That's a novel idea, isn't it? Just quieting down for a second and opening up a book to say, I'm going to intentionally invest thoughtful time into growing myself as a leader right now.

We think that powerful things happen when you choose to make that decision. why we created the Entree Leadership Reading Guide. It's a list of 100 books that we believe will help you expand your vision, increase your focus, and improve your productivity. So if you want to get this free guide, I want you to text the phrase 100 books to 33444. Again, that's the phrase 100 books, 100 books, all one word, no spaces, to 33444, or just click the length that's in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership Podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25, Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the length that's in the show notes. And be sure to follow us on social

media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Ken Coleman Show. Are you doing what you were born to do? I'm Ken Coleman, host of the Ken Coleman Show, where I give you practical advice to help you discover your purpose and then map out a plan to get you there. From accounting to advertising, from plumbing to production, you were created to fill a unique role and the world needs what you have to offer. Join me on the Ken Coleman Show wherever you listen to podcasts.