Bianca Lager's Advice on Business Vision
Hey everybody, welcome back. This is Bianca Lager, and I'm providing you advice on the decisions and leadership problems that are clogging up your mental inbox. So let's get you to inbox zero.
All right, the question of the week is: "I started my business with the clear vision of what I wanted it to become (don't we all), but as we've grown, I feel like we're strained from the original mission to chase more immediate revenue. I want to get back on track, but I'm worried about how my team will react to a shift in priorities. How do I steer the business back in line with my long-term vision?"
Okay, I love this entrepreneur question. Entrepreneur king or queen here, love to see it. This is so common and so necessary sometimes, I think, on both sides of the coin. I mean, listen, this is the business - you need to make money. And a lot of times, what we think will sell or what we think the market wants is not what it wants, and so you start doing what the market wants and you start making money. But it's not really what you wanted to do.
Now, I mean, there's two ways to think about this, and it really depends on a lot of the details and the circumstances here. So I'm gonna kind of paint with a broad brush. This is a pretty broad question, I guess. But I think there's two things that you need to think about:
1. You really kind of need to do some sitting down, do some soul searching of like, what don't you like about what's happening? Do you not like the fundamentals of what's going on? Like, what's your difficulty? Is it because you don't like what you're doing now? And is it you personally or the company? Is it the work that you find yourself participating in creating that you just don't enjoy? And that's fine, that might be a very real thing for you to kind of come to terms with.
2. But I mean, you know, looking at the question that says you strain for the original message, chase immediate revenue. Okay, so is it that you feel like you're going off mission? Like maybe you started a company creating healthy snacks for kids, but suddenly here you are selling things with sugar in them, and you're kind of like, "Oh, like this is not what we wanted to do, but it tastes good, that's what people are buying." I don't know, that's a pretty complicated business actually, but I think it paints a really good picture about what we're talking about here, where it's like, my mission was actually to deliver healthy snacks, and I feel like what we're doing is not doing that right now.
And so, I think you would look at that in a couple of different ways. I think that if I'm a founder of that snack company and all of a sudden we are getting into candy territory, or getting into territory where it's not exactly what we signed up for, what we intended to do, I think understand like where the bar is and what your measurement is, and if you are overall going to that right place. Meaning like for the healthy snacks example, if you are a company that gives a better alternative than maybe some of the more processed foods that kids eat, then you are closer to that mission than you are farther away.
So there is something to look at first with you personally. I think, are you not enjoying yourself? That could very well be too, right? If you're running a company and suddenly you're doing things that you're uncomfortable with and it feels like we're creating products or we're doing things that is so far away from the things that I'm used to having in control with, that can feel really scary. That can feel like this isn't your company anymore, it wasn't your vision. But also the actual outcome of what's happening with the product. So is it a you problem or is it the product problem that you have a problem with?
Either way, I think you get the point that it really is a perspective conversation with yourself. And I mean, here's the thing about chasing immediate revenue - it could definitely get you into major trouble because sometimes what you end up doing, especially in the early days, is that you customize a lot. Every customer comes to you and says, "Yeah, I mean I like what you do, like love the healthy snacks, however, can we drop the carrots and add some chips in there? Just cause like, you know, if we sell to the school district, like they're never gonna buy that, like it's just they have too many carrots," whatever, right?
I think that it's a really easy thing to do to be like, "Sure, sure, sure, yeah. I know chips for you, but we do carrots for everybody else," right? And then all of a sudden you have this operational and non-scalable nightmare where essentially you're creating this like one batch for this one client that has chips while everybody else gets carrots. That's what you want to create. Sometimes more and more people take the chip options, and then your business does just shift to, "Okay, we sell snacks with chips, but maybe they're a little bit healthier chips," you know?
So I think that's how you have to understand the pivots of your business and to go the market is going to respond. But be also very conscious of not catering to every single client that comes your way with a special request. They're all special unicorns, and so that can feel like a really big deviation as well when all of a sudden you think you're kind of just doing a bunch of different things for various people, but you really aren't back on track with the original thing of, "Hey, I was just trying to sell some like hummus and carrots packaged together," right? And now we're kind of doing all this other stuff.
So, you know, at the end of the day, I think that there's a couple problems for you to think about:
1. The soul searching of yourself to consider whether you just personally aren't liking what you are doing, whether you just fundamentally disagree with the products, or you're just like, "I just never wanted to sell chips. Like why are we selling chips?" The answer to that maybe is because they sell better than the carrots, and so that soul searching comes down to: Do you wanna be a chips manufacturer? Are you somebody who is going to live to respond to the market and find a way to improve that market closer to what your original mission was? Or are you out? Are you just like, "These people want chips, you know, that's not what I do. Also carrots, but I'm gonna have to scale down maybe because the market that wants the carrots is a lot smaller than the market that wants the chips." So you have to readjust your goals to kind of think about, "Okay, carrots only."
Now all of these things, all of these soul searching things, these are important questions for you to ask. These are important perspectives and things to think about. I think the best thing that you could do to help you figure this all out is talk to your team. I'm hoping at least you have at least one person on your team, if not two, that you can rely on and trust, and you can have an open and candid conversation. And now this is a theme that I talk about a lot in a lot of different ways, is that you have to trust the people on your team and you have to be vulnerable to them.
Now, you mention here in the question about like, you're worried about how your team will react to a shift in priorities. That tells me a couple of different things maybe about you:
1. One is that, well, first of all, you are considerate, or that you're aware of the maybe reactions or some sort of... You have some sort of emotional intelligence, you're reading the room in some way that like, "I wanna bring this up but I feel like they're not gonna like me bringing this up." That could be true for a number of reasons. It could be true because you always change your mind. You might be one of those bosses that are all over the place, and so you're like, "I cannot yet again tell these people we're going in a different direction," okay? So you could be conscious of that, and congratulations for acknowledging and understanding that you're maybe this is gonna drive people nuts.
2. But you might not be a person that is very trusting or very vulnerable with your staff, and that's a problem as well. This is a problem because you're going to have self-doubt, you are going to make the wrong decision, you're gonna mess up, you're going to not always have all the answers. And as you grow your business, you need to count and rely on the people on your team very, very intimately sometimes and very vulnerably, and to say, "I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing."
Okay, the camera died, but I'm back. So the next part I was gonna make is that you might not be, you know, by the conversation of "I'm worried about what they're gonna think, shifting priorities," you might be a leader who kind of has a lot of guards up around your staff. And you think that you're the person that always has to have the answers, and you're sort of not really very trusting actually of the staff that you have. You might be worried that they either won't like what you have to say, they don't trust what you have to say, or that you don't have confidence in what you're saying, or just that, you know, they're going to say, "You know, this person sucks. I'm out of here."
I think a couple of different things. I think, well, in terms of something that I speak about a lot, which is having really powerful, trusting relationships with your staff can make or break the success of your business. You are not an omniscient, all-knowing being, and the people that are doing the work in your staff know a lot more than probably you do at this point. They're talking to customers, they're interacting, they're taking orders, they're, you know, doing whatever, right? And so, you know, it's really important to build really close, trusting, and quite vulnerable relationships so that you can have these conversations and you can say, "Hey, like what do you think? You know, I'm kind of feeling like we're getting away from this original mission. I feel kind of weird about, you know, how we're chasing revenue. What do you think? Do you think it's working? Are we sort of selling out here? Are we kind of missing the mark? Like, what do you think?"
The people in your team might be as principled as you, might be as, you know, like, "Yeah, you know, I do, I feel like we're selling these products like these potato chips. Like, we don't wanna do potato chips. Like that's not what I signed up for. What are we doing?" Or yeah, they push back and they say, "Well, potato chips sell and we're making money, and isn't that what we wanna do? This is a business. Like, what are we doing here?" You know?
So, so that is a conversation to be had internally, and I think the first step is to have it with the few trusted people that you have, hopefully somebody on your senior leadership staff. And if you don't have anybody yet like that, or if you haven't established relationships, this is a really good opportunity to open up to somebody. Somebody that you think can handle this conversation, say, "Hey, you know, I'd appreciate your professional maturity here. You know, this journey as, you know, everybody's boss here and just trying to create this company, I'm really questioning some things about how we're creating revenue, and I wanna hear your thoughts."
And boy, do people love giving their thoughts, and they have them. And I think you should respect the people on your team and know that they might have better answers than you. And don't worry about just like, I know, and this is so common as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, you wake up and you're like, "This is what we have to do. We've been doing it all wrong." And yeah, you're right, nobody wants to work for that person. Nobody wants to work for the person that's constantly changing their mind, kind of being a crazy person, right?
So have this as an open dialogue, an open conversation. Get the temperature of the, like, most trusted people that you have at your company. And then if you guys think it's necessary, open it up to others. But the conversation could end there. You know, you guys could make this decision, kind of say, "I think we're actually okay," or, "No, you know, we should explore some ways that we can kind of carefully go back and steer our way back to that original mission."
Just, you know, fight the urgency of changing things tomorrow. Fight that, and fight it with everything you got, okay? The best thing that you can do is really consider what your options are and strategize what you want to do going forward.
So again, to kind of recap:
1. Go over your own personal understanding of how you feel about your work, how you're showing up every day. Is the fundamental of your difficulty in your sort of lack of confidence of what your business is doing - is it have to do with your, the personal work that you're doing? 'Cause there's ways to fix that. There's roles to be played, there's delegation to have, there's ways to go about that.
2. Or is it the fundamental of the products and how you're coming to market? And if you are coming to market in a way that you feel is challenging or that you don't like, then again, that next step is to look at the trusted people on your team. Make sure that you have candid conversations and vulnerable conversations around your thoughts and get their feedback. Understand what they're saying, talk to the people that are talking to customers, and get feedback there and understand, you know, what your potential options could be and what that would look like and how that would impact revenue.
These are the things that you have to decide, and then you have to decide what your goals are. And I think that at this point, it sounds like you have a fairly mature company. That it's not just your company anymore. You do have to understand that this affects your customers, your team. So, you know, are your personal feelings about the products that you're bringing to market - can those be re-strategized or reworked into your strategy in a careful and deliberate way rather than, you know, reacted, a reactive way?
So good luck. I think this is a really interesting and, and you're definitely not alone. There's a lot of people out there and entrepreneurs - please chime in because I bet there's a lot of people who have gone through this to say, you know, "Totally, I started this company and I thought it was gonna be one thing, and now it's totally another thing." That pivot might be okay, or that pivot might not be okay with you, but do take time to consider what the options are. And do, do, do build those trusting relationships with your team regardless of this challenge or others. That's always gonna serve you well. You can't take this alone.
So anyway, thank you all again. I'm Bianca Lager. If you wanna learn more about me, please visit BiancaLager.com. Follow me on socials. You can find me mostly on LinkedIn, Instagram. It's been a pleasure to help you out with the advice and issues, business decisions that clog up your mental inbox and get you back to inbox zero. Talk to you next week. Thanks guys, bye.
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