Do Business Better

7Vision

The Farm

The farm where Lori and I live was an absolute showplace. The place had imagery straight out of a painting: cattle grazing in beautiful, rolling pastures outlined by painted board fences. Immaculate landscaping. Pretty, historic barns. A stately, old, professionally decorated house. You'd call the place a country manor.

The only problem: The picture I just described is how the farm looked in the 1970s. We bought the property in 2006!

The place had been vacant for a decade. The decade before its vacancy, the elderly owners were failing. The barns, house, and grounds had deteriorated from neglect. The house was livable—the heirs had left the utilities on—but extremely dated and in need of extensive renovation. Same for the barns and the grounds. Even the crop fields required a lot of TLC.

I was raised a few miles from the property. I remembered it in its grandeur. My wife didn't. The first time she saw the place, she said no. The second time we looked at it, the vision began to click. We saw past the cobwebs, as they say. Our cobwebs were dilapidated buildings, drainage issues, and all manner of infrastructure.

A couple years, a couple hundred thousand dollars of renovations, and thousands of hours of manual labor later, we had a show farm again.

I told you this story because visualizing what something can become, versus what it currently is, is vision. Most people cannot do this.

Partners with Vision

My wife and I live and work together. We run my business, ...