Breaking down your vision

If you have been following the series and working through the activities you will now understand your vision and you may well have a short, succinct, well-articulated and easily understood vision statement.

If not, then keep at it. It will come and it may well take time to craft. If, however your vision is well understood, regardless of whether or not you have a single sentence, then you’re ready to move on.

We’re now going to help you break this vision down into sizeable and manageable “chunks”. These “chunks” are the elements which together will deliver the vision. They are also the “buckets” into which you will place your activities and actions.

When we have worked with businesses in the past, we found it useful to categorise in two levels. If it is a business you are starting then your “high level category” list may look something like this:

· Business planning

· Brand identity

· Financial

· Legal

· Logistics

· IT

· Marketing

· Sales & Customers

· Supply

· “Building” the business

· You and your team

You then need to take each “high level category” and break it down further into the elements you will need. For example, if we take the “Financial” category we could have this broken down as follows into sub-categories:

· Funding including grants, sponsors, investor, loan, bursaries

· Financial goals including budget/profit expectations

· Cash Flow (determine the format eg spreadsheet)

· P&L (determine the format eg spreadsheet?)

· Bank account

· Register the company: HMRC requirements/sole trader, NI, limited company etc

· Accountant/book-keeper/advisors

· Accounts with wholesalers, suppliers, venues etc

· Job “budget” template

Personal goals can be broken down in a similar fashion but here it is a little more difficult to be generic such is the variation of personal goals. That said they may look something like this:

· Finances

· Logistics

· Tools

· You and your “team”

· Self-development

With finance not dissimilar to the list for a new business above.

The task this week is for you to create the two levels of categories which you will need to satisfy in order to move you towards your goal or your vision.

Leave no stone unturned and for now don’t worry about priorities. We will deal with that later. For now, we want to ensure a complete list of categories with no gaps or omissions and into which all possible actions with sit. There will be an opportunity to sense check these as we build the details in the coming weeks.

We will continue next week to build up these detailed activities which in turn help to develop your plan. See you there.

For now, let us know your thoughts and or questions, take care and stay safe.