How to create a vision that pulls your business forward
Most business visions are written to be approved, then filed. A useful one does something different: it makes decisions easier before they arrive. What separates a vision that pulls from one that decorates, and how to write the first kind.
Beverley Corson, Founder of Founderise
, 4 min read
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I have read a great many vision statements over the years, and I have noticed that I can usually tell within a sentence whether the founder who wrote it still uses it.
The ones that have been filed tend to share a quality. They are true of almost any business. "To be the leading provider of…" "To delight our customers through…" You could swap the company name and nothing would break. They were written to sound right, and they do, and that is the whole problem. Nothing that sounds right about every business can help you decide anything about yours.
The ones still in use are stranger. They are specific, sometimes awkwardly so. They describe a business that does not exist yet in enough detail that you could recognise it if you walked into it. And the founders who wrote them reach for them, often without noticing, when a decision comes up.
That reaching is the point. I want to try to describe what makes it possible.
Push and pull
There are two ways to move a business forward, and they feel completely different from the inside.
Pushing is effort applied to the present. It is the founder working harder, chasing the next client, solving the next problem, dragging the business a little further along by force of will. Almost every established business was built this way, and it works, up to the limit of one person's energy.
Pulling is different. It is when the business has a destination clear enough that the destination itself starts doing some of the work. Decisions get easier because there is something to measure them against. The team moves without being told, because they know where towards. Opportunities that would once have been taken are declined, without much agonising, because they lead somewhere else.
A vision that pulls is one that does that. Not a statement of values, not a slogan, but a description of where the business is going that is concrete enough to have gravity.
What a pulling vision contains
When I work with a founder on this, the version that ends up useful almost always answers a few plain questions in specific terms.
What does the business look like in three years? Not in aspiration but in fact. Roughly how big. Serving whom. Known for what. Structured how. The three-year horizon matters, because one year is too close to be different from now and ten is too far to feel real. Three years is far enough to imagine a changed business and near enough to start acting on it.
What is the founder doing in that business? This is the question most visions skip, and it is the one that most often decides whether the vision pulls. A founder who cannot see their own role in the future business, or who sees themselves doing exactly what they do now, has not really described a different business. They have described a larger version of today.
What will have had to change? The gap between the business you have and the one you have just described is the strategy. If there is no gap, the vision is not doing anything. If the gap is enormous, it may need to be brought nearer. But the gap should be visible, because it is what the vision is for.
Why does it matter? Not the mission statement version. The honest version. What is it about this future that makes the effort worth it to you, the person who has to lead it? A vision the founder does not privately care about has no pull at all, however well it reads.
Written this way, a vision is rarely elegant. That is fine. It is a working instrument, not a plaque.
Why this is the first step, not the last
There is a temptation to leave vision until the plan is done, as a kind of summary to put on the front. I have come to believe that gets the order backwards, and the RISE methodology is built on that belief: direction first, in a stage we call Re-Vision, and only then the choices about how to get there.
The reason is practical. Every decision in a strategy is a trade-off, and trade-offs need a reference point. Should we open a second location or deepen the first? Should we hire a salesperson or a delivery manager? Should we take this large, awkward client? None of those has a right answer in the abstract. They all have a right answer relative to where the business is going. Without the vision, you are making them on instinct and calling it strategy.
With it, a surprising number of them stop being decisions at all. They become recognitions. Of course we do not take that client. Look where we are going.
The test
Here is how to tell whether a vision pulls. Take a real decision the business faced in the last month, one that took a meeting or kept you awake. Put it next to the vision. Does the vision make the decision easier? Does it point one way?
If it does, you have written the useful kind. If it is silent, if the decision is just as hard with the vision in front of you as without, the vision is not yet specific enough to have gravity, and it is worth another pass.
I have written more about what happens once direction is set, and why even a good strategy dies without a rhythm to return you to it, in how to create a business strategy that lasts longer than January. The vision is where that work begins. It is also, in my experience, the part founders most enjoy once they let it be specific, because it is the one moment in planning where you are allowed to describe the business you actually want.
Write that one. Then work out what it would take.
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