Robert Boyd draws upon over 25 years worth of business experience to share his experlise and knowledge in today’s guest post.

Aligning Values & Vision in Your Business

by Robert Boyd

What was I thinking?

This thought surely crosses every entrepreneur’s mind in the business start-up frenzy, and intensifies and reverberates after the shingle’s been hung and the last business card’s been carefully arranged in its holder.

Many business owners don’t have a business degree, and some don’t have much experience. Tired of 60-hour work weeks for mediocre pay, many employees swap an ID badge for a DBA. But as time ensues, few escape the letdown of seemingly side-stepped dreams. Even fewer escape the knock back to reality. In fact, most new businesses fail. According to the Small Business Administration, only five percent survive beyond the five-year mark. Business experts tout practical reasons for failure, such as poor planning, wrong location, insufficient capital, overexpansion and the inability to stay current with technology. Some even say starting a business for the wrong reason breeds failure. Whatever the cause, fantasies of hundred dollar bills and weekday afternoons in the movie theater dim as exhaustion and reality take root.

Let’s use an example: A transition from a solo psychology practice into a wellness center that offers varied services like nutrition, massage and counseling. Visions of dollar signs and one free Saturday a month jump in the owner’s head. She hires. She gets checks. She fires. She writes checks. She’s tired. She begins thinking that maybe life wasn’t as bad as it was. She wonders what she was thinking.

What were you thinking? What were you thinking? What were you thinking? Why did you shift?

Money and freedom are fine values, and while we may indeed value them for material gain, money often symbolizes deeper values. The truth is, we can make money doing absolutely anything: Selling hot dogs at the beach. Working at the home store. Building skyscrapers. Walking labradoodles. So why this?

A closer look reveals that in the example, under our business endeavor lays the business owner’s personal values. Self-reliance, freedom of choice and equality are fully expressed in the expanded center through the nature of the service (self reliance), the varied services (freedom of choice) and by combining stigmatized counseling services with mainstream, well-accepted services (equality), while only one was expressed in the solo practice (self-reliance). And in this example, the value of money actually came to mean security and freedom, not just money for the sake of having it.

Exercise: Google “values list”. Print it out. Scan it visually and narrow it to fifteen concepts that you value and that guide your actions. Then trim it to five, then three. Entrepreneur or not, determine how your business endeavor expresses each of these values. This may require some reflection, but is an exercise well worth doing.

Our values guide us in both daily decisions and in life-changing choices, including professional success. Reminding ourselves of our ‘why’ pulls us forward when a venture starts to sour or stall. It’s easy to lose sight of your vision with those debt and stress-induced blind spots.

Values infuse passion when little else sustains us. Doing business without them generates the ordinary. Values birth vision. Be extraordinary—in business and in life.

About the Author/Further Resources

Robert Boyd, Managing Director of SportsEquip and an expert in the equipment & surfaces used by elite sportsmen & athletes. Robert has been in the industry for over 25 years providing football goals, tennis nets & cricket equipment to schools, clubs & the general public.

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