Preparation
Exercise: Fill in your 3-year Story Grid
All right, team. I'm really excited to share this. One of my favorite things to do, one of the most rewarding things I get to do is help founders, CEOs, and leaders get their vision out of their head and turn it into a work that can be shared.
Whether you've got a clear vision and you need to communicate it, or whether you want to collaborate with your team to develop it, whatever the case may be, this has proven incredibly valuable.
We're going to look at these five different areas:
Financials
Employees
Customers
Products and services
Press
The answers to the questions we ask in each area give you everything you need to get your 3-year vision started.
So this is really exciting, but there are a few things I need you to know going in.
Principles to use to complete your story grid
Principle 1: Embrace the "ugly first draft"
In terms of the process for this, I want you to embrace the ugly first draft. You don't need to be perfect. You can come back later and tweak this. So for right now, we're going to answer these questions to the best of your ability. Spend 10 minutes writing, then maybe you'll come back and edit it for no more than 10 minutes. And if that really doesn't produce the answers you want, you can always come back and spend 10 minutes weekly on revisions. Most of the time people get a really strong version in the first draft or the second draft, but you're free to iterate on this until you feel it's really where it needs to be.Just don't get hung up today listing everything out.
Principle 2: Keep it to essentials to get started
You want to keep it to its essential points.
Principle 3: Imperfection is OK
It's okay if it sucks for the first few revisions. There's no reason to sit there judging it. Keep moving.
Principle 4: Refine it over time
You can make small refinements over time.
Principle 5: Dive in - section by section
All right, so are we ready? Let's do this. Here is the 3-year story grid, one of our favorite tools. And one of the best ways you can get clarity about your vision, and we're going to go through these sections one by one.
Financials
All right, we're gonna start with financials. So for financials, in three years, if things go as you intend them to go and everything works out, where do you want your revenues to be?
Target revenue
In three years, are you looking for a double-double? Are you looking for an overall 30% growth rate? What level of revenue do you want to have? Take a few minutes, think about it. Pause the video and answer that question.
Profit
The next one follows from that: what level of profit do you want to have? Both a raw number and a percentage of profit can be useful to get clarity about the business you want to build. Are you going to use EBITDA? Are you going to use some other calculation to figure out how profitable you are? And how much profit do you want left over after you take cost of goods sold out of your revenues? So again, take a few minutes, consider it, answer that question.
Growth
So, The next question is, what type of growth do you want to experience? Do you want to just have a steady rate of growth that's relatively small? Are you trying to do a double-double? Are you trying to get a certain percentage rate of growth year over year, that you're on this trajectory for? You've gone through that trajectory over these last three years and now looking into the future, this is your new trajectory. What are you going to be experiencing in three years? Again, I'll pause, or you can pause the video and get that one answered.
Cash on hand
The last question under financials is, how much cash do you want to have on hand? How much cash do you want in the bank? It's so easy to forget about this question. When we're building a vision, we think about all the great aspirations - make sure you're also thinking about the financial situation you want to be in. This is a really great category to go through. It's one that early in my career, I think I tended to ignore a little bit - and that cost me. I was so hyper focused on what the company looks like and the creative parts of the vision that I'd sometimes leave this out. Now we'll move on to the next section.
Employees
Think about who you want to make up your company.
Employee experience
Whether it's people that are present today and they're developing, or whether it's new hires: Who is going to be making up your company? And what types of things do you want to hear them saying?
You can start with three simple bullet points, and if you can come up with more, keep it going. If you feel that creative groove, keep it going, but at least get three good ones down. What types of things do you want people to say about working at your company? Pause the video and when you're ready, let's move to the next question.
Culture, capabilities and interests
So on this next question I actually introduced that one kind of blended with the first question: Who are the people at your company (in a little more detail)? So, What types of skills do they have? What types of interests do they have? What are the things that engage them, and how do they engage? What types of people are you attracting and retaining?
Again, start with three bullets. See if that gets things rolling. If it does: great, you can keep going. If you have three, you can move on to the next question when you're ready.
Future testimonials to tie things together
So the last two questions are the same question. I want you to answer it twice.
What would make you excited to think about people at your company saying about working for your company?
Is it that it's a great team or it's such a fun place, or they're loving serving your clients or customers? Come up with a couple of imaginary quotes that you're looking for out of your team in this three-year vision. And you get to make anything up; don't hold back and don't tell yourself, "oh, then they'll never say this. I can't make it happen. "Go ahead and really outline what you truly desire inside your company via these quotes from your employees.And again, these are quotes that you are creating in your head, they haven't been said yet.
REMEMBER: This is a way for you to think about the company you want to create.
Clients
Let's talk about your clients, your customers, whichever language you use.
Your market
I like "clients", a lot of people like "customers", but either way let's ask: What types of things they're saying about your company?
Again, use the three bullets approach. It's a great way to make up the testimonials you want to get. It's a great way to visualize the target and answer the questions for your team:
Where are we trying to go?
How do we want to make it easy for everyone in our company to understand the level of service we want to create?
These quotes are a great way to do that. So once you're done providing client quotes, we'll move to the next question.
Your ideal customer
The next question is: who are your customers or clients? What type of customer or client are you attracting and retaining? Are they a particular size company, a particular industry? What are the things that make them up?
TIP: it can be tempting to go into deep demographics: you don't need to go that deep right now. You just want to give yourself enough clarity that it becomes easy to talk about.
Like we did on employees, we're going to ask these same two questions.
What types of things are your customers, your clients saying? ... to the press? ... to each other about you? What are they saying at industry events about your company in your vision?
Remember: this is your vision; you get to make this up. Don't low ball your expectations here. Really lay out what you want them to be saying in three years about your company.
Products and Services
All right, we're going to move to the products and services category.
Described
What products and services will you offer? Are they the same as they are today? Have you expanded?
Again, three bullets to describe them is a great way to start, but to into as much detail as you have top of mind ...or can get to by getting started with this.And if you don't know, you can always come back and revisit it.
Your unique excellence
I find this next question really powerful. What's unique about your products and services? What stands out in the market?
If I were to say "Our products and services stand out in the market because..." How would you finish that sentence? So go ahead and add that to your grid.
What "wow's" are your clients and customers expressing about your products/services?
All right, this next question is another really powerful one. I've turned around projects by asking these questions - projects that had been in the gutter or were highly at risk: What are the wow statements people will they be having about you?
What will they say to each other? And what they might say to the press? When they're looking at your product or your service and they say, “holy shiitake, these guys are ____" What goes to fill in the blank? What is it that you want to really stand out and resonate with them that gives them these aha moments about how great your company is?
So again, you can pause the video and pick up the next question when you're ready.
Last question: What do your delivery or service processes look like?
Describe those with at least three bullets. Again, you can go a little farther if that's useful. And if you feel the creative juice is flowing again, pause, and then we'll pick up the next section.
Press
Outstanding: you're doing great. You're pulling your vision out of your head. You're starting to get more clarity around it via this story grid. The last category is the press.
Press coverage
The very first question here, I want you to think about who in the press writes about your industry, or whether they write about you today or not. Where would it be cool to see your company talked about? Who is doing the talking? Is it a particular television show? Is it a particular magazine? Is it the Harvard Business Review? Is it MIT's Sloan Management Review? Is it Inc. Magazine?
Whatever the case may be. Go ahead and put that down .
Press Content
So for these media outlets, what are they saying about you? What are they writing in the media about your amazing company? Is it how you've brought this vision to life?
Remember, we're thinking about this vision coming to life. What types of things will the media be saying about you?
Future Press Quotes
To round this section, and this exercise out, I'm going to challenge you to give me two quotes from the media in this future world, this future state. What are the two quotes that you want to see in the media?
So very similar to the last question, but I'm gonna press you to provide two great quotes that will appear in an article when you've realized your vision.