Few companies, whether small, medium or large, across all industries achieve success due to a lack of vision or a dream, according to an American entrepreneurship guru.
At the NowInfinity International Conference in Hawaii last month, small business visionary and author of the E-Myth Michael E Gerber said while he did not have to know anything specific about a business, it was highly likely the owner’s picture of the company was absent.
“The reality is most of us aren’t looking at the visual, the emotional, the functional, the financial reality of the company [or] our brand becoming the world’s leader in what we produce,” Gerber said.
“It’s called the model. The dream. The vision. The purpose. The mission. The picture.”
When Gerber initially saw clients to help improve their businesses, he said he immediately picked up on a pattern.
“What I saw in every one of those businesses – and in every industry, it didn’t make a difference what they were selling – was that they decided to start a business, they went to the business store to buy a jigsaw puzzle, took the box to their business, dumped the pieces of the jigsaw on the floor and threw away the cover to the box,” he said.
“They didn’t have a clue what that jigsaw was going to look like. The thing that was missing in every single one of those companies was that they had no picture of what this company was going to look like when it was finally done.”
In addition, the number of business owners who had a liquidity date was very low, he said.
Gerber asked the room to really think about the message their businesses were sending.
“What is your brand? What are you telling the world? What’s the meaning of your company? What’s the meaning of the work that you do? What is this all about in the end?” he said.
“Do you realise how absolutely mind-blowingly significant this is to every single one of you?
“The meaning of your company resides in the meaning of our lives and the meaning of our lives resides in the way in which we look at our lives, begin to understand our lives in a more meaningful way?”
