Visualizing your business blueprint

The foundation of your business includes leadership, culture, process, organization & human resources, finance and accountability.

Your blueprint needs to clearly outline the standards you expect of your entire team as well as yourself, and how you will hold yourself and the team members accountable for performance. It should include items such as:

■ which key performance indicators you’ll use to track performance

■ how you’ll manage finances to support team development and ensure your budget supports growth goals

■ written standardized and repeatable processes

■ how you’ll create an environment that fosters and reinforces your defined culture

■ what you will do to develop leadership skills and capacity to support that culture

It’s helpful to think of your blueprint as the DNA of your business. Just like human DNA, your business DNA has both foundational and operational backbones. Those backbones are linked together by the components of your business that work together in a specific sequence to determine how your business performs.

As you make decisions for a component of your business, you can refer to your blueprint to appreciate the impact that decision will have across all the other components. You can drill down and determine if you’re truly ready to take action or if more work needs to be done. Similarly, if problems arise, you can again refer to the blueprint to determine where the disconnect or improper sequencing is occurring.

Certainly, creating a comprehensive blueprint takes work, vision and patience, but that work pays off in several ways. First, it’s the basis of building a great culture that fosters an environment of growth and team performance and is led by an amazing leader(s). Second, it allows you to make solid decisions driven by a defined culture, repeatable processes, and your finances and measurables—no more reactionary decisions that trap you. Third, it affords you more time to work on the business because all the questions you’re mentally asking yourself now have been answered in writing and can be referenced by anyone on the team.

It’s time to start working ON your business, not IN it

What I’ve learned from running my own businesses as well as the experiences I’ve shared with the thousands of contractors I’ve coached is that without an understanding of your blueprint, it’s easy to get trapped. If you don’t recognize how the sequence of your decisions and actions affects the foundational and operational sides of your business, growth is hard—if not impossible—to come by.

It is simple to escape the trap, but you must dedicate time each week to working on your blueprint. If you do this consistently, in a relatively short period of time you will find you’ve transitioned to working on your business instead of in it. You’ll become a strong leader who has developed a great culture with repeatable processes that are easy to market and sell. You’ll be able to train better and recruit the best talent to fit that well-oiled machine that is now giving you what you wanted from the start: the personal and financial freedom to do what you want, when you want, with whom you want. -