Do you think in Multiples?
By Nina Kaufman, Esq.Are your business plans big enough?
Author and entrepreneur Michael Gerber wrote, Businesses fail not because their dream is too big, but because their dream is too small and too realistic to sustain the life they want.
Simply put, the measure of your success (financial and otherwise) is in direct proportion to how big your vision is. It’s the Multiplier Effect at work.
If your business and work centers on you and what you earn—you delivering the service or product, you handling sales, you taking care of bookkeeping—you’re working at a factor of 1. You. So capacity is limited. Time is limited. And what you can charge is limited.
But that’s not where business growth lies. Business grows in multiples when you impact more people, in a bigger way.
Try this on for size:
Envision a mission that’s IMPOSSIBLE for you to achieve on your own.
Ask yourself:
- How does my company and its products or services make the world a better place? Look at Toys ‘R’ Us: “To put joy in kids’ hearts and a smile on parents’ faces” (What’s better than that?)
- Is the mission quantifiable? See Facebook: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” (no limits there!)
- Does the vision have a multi-generational future—that is, can it outlast you, the founder? Nike’s mission: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world” (That can go on forever.)
- Is there risk involved? Check out Amazon.com: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Anyone playing shrinking violet there?)
One of my mentors, world-renowned motivational speaker Les Brown, had a mission: to train 100,000 Voices of Hope outside of religion and politics.
Ya think he could do that speaking to one person at a time? Nope.
To achieve that amazing goal, he needed to think beyond just himself. He’d need staff. He’d need to find ways to train large groups of people at a time. To capture and share his intellectual capital in ways that weren’t time- or location-bound. To nurture strategic partnerships. And to develop the revenue models that cultivate the next generation of Voices of Hope.
Are your business plans based only on current capacity?
Or is your thinking big enough to welcome more?
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