Start at the End: How Companies Can Grow Bigger and Faster by Reversing Their Business Plan

Chapter 1

The End of Your Business

You now know you must create a vision of your successful business. Without one, you won’t know where you’re headed. Once you have one, you can use it to reverse engineer a business plan for attaining it. As you’ll learn in the following text, there are actually two visions you need to develop.

Your Two Visions

Consider the words of baseball player Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there.”

In the case of both sports and business, he’s absolutely right.

Think about that. How can you achieve your business goals if you’re not crystal clear about what they are?

Therefore, the first step to improve your business’s success is to write down where you want to go. We call this your vision or mission.

I’m probably not telling you anything new. You know you should have a vision statement. But 99 percent of you don’t have a formal, written vision statement. You also do not have the two—yes, two—vision statements you need, nor the specificity required in each.

Let me explain.

The two types of vision statements you must develop are:

1. Your vision from a customer perspective

2. Your vision from a business perspective

Your vision from a customer perspective should explain what you are trying to do for your customers. It’s that simple. Of course, you must know what this is before you can spell it out. For example, one restaurant’s customer vision might be to “serve the best Italian food in this town.” A customer vision ...