Good to Great: How to Scale With an Outsourced CFO

We have found that a common challenge for business leaders is to make their vision and passion for the business clear and relevant enough so that it keeps them and their team inspired to perform.

Too often we see business owners spending too much time on the day-to-day tasks. It is easy to lose sight of the big picture and as a result, opportunities may pass them by.

From our clients' experience and even our own, we have seen some effective ways to use your vision and passion to inspire performance.

The more time you spend doing work that is planned, purposeful and systematic the better chance you have at success. Achieving the focus needed to become proactive requires continuous improvement and commitment.

3 Tips To Harness Your Business’s Vision

1. Make your vision compelling and meaningful

• A vision needs to portray a situation that is different and better than today, because if it’s not significantly different and aspirational, then it’s just an observation of today;
• A reasonable time frame (i.e. 2 to 4 years). This will allow accountability as well as making the vision more tangible;
• Financial success is not enough of an inspiring vision. Articulating an aspiration that will benefit more than the company and the individual will have a greater chance of appealing to people’s values, which will build a stronger alignment;
• Focus on winning the hearts and minds of the most influential people in your organisation (this is not limited to senior management);
• Allow people to frame the story in their own way. This will help spread the vision and give it more credibility.

2. Make it easy to follow

• Reward and recognise early adopters of the vision and those that share your passion;
• Link behaviour to rewards & consequences;
• Build the right structures, processes and systems that will support people to achieve the vision;
• Acknowledge that not everyone is up for the ride and you may need to refresh the talent pool;
• Equip people with the tools and resources to achieve the vision that increases both the technical and relational skills required.

3. Take the Lead

• The senior leadership team need to be transparent with their own experience of striving to achieve which includes how they react to failure as well as celebrating success;
• Make a big deal of symbolic acts and celebrate wins.