The 20 Year Question

(Mondays are Lynn Miles Peisker days at The Daily Blur. Lynn serves as the Executive Sister and Chief Plate Spinner at the Imagination Advisory Group. Check out her growing archive of posts here.)

“Where do you see this company in 20 years?  Where do you want it to be?”

I asked my brother those questions one day while we were riding in the car together.

I asked because it’s a little easy to get caught up in the day to day activities of the business without pushing the pause button to consider the bigger picture.

It’s a little like parenting.  We get so busy with the urgent that the important can be over looked.  Keeping little people happy, safe and healthy can consume all the energy in the household, leaving nothing left for casting a vision for the future.

The same is true for business.  Answering calls, staff turnover, sales projections, bids to prepare, work to get done.  The daily urgencies cloud our long-term vision.

As my youngest child quickly approaches his high school graduation day, (36 days to go – somebody’s counting and I’m not going to say who!), my husband and I realize more than ever that a long term vision is essential to success.

We talked early on about the kind of grown-up people we wanted to raise, what qualities we hoped to see in our children as they grew into adult hood.  We strove, with God’s help, to make decisions that would guide their lives as influencers in the world.  We kept them safe and healthy, but not always happy. That’s because our ultimate goals were long term goals, accomplished in the small decisions one day at a time.

Apply this end-game parenting strategy to owner-operated businesses.

What do you want your owner-operated business to look like when it’s all grown up?

Give it 20 years.

• Do you want a business you can sell to fund your retirement?
• Do you want to be ready offer public shares?
• Do you want a business to pass on to your children to run?
• Do you want to live comfortably, make good investments and simply close the doors when you are done?

There are no right or wrong answers to the 20 year question.  The only wrong answer is no answer, because if you don’t know where you are going, how on earth will you ever get there?

The 20-year dream of our company has now been hashed out, talked over and sketched out on a piece of spiral notebook paper ripped and crooked.  It’s been scrawled with an ink pen with lines that squiggle on the page a bit.  A couple of additional items have been added on and an idea or two has been scratched out.  A few names of second generation candidates have been bandied about.  But they need to finish school first, or at least start school.  We don’t have all the specifics.  But we know the framework.  We know what our business will look like when it grows up.

We’ve got a vision for 2033 and we wrote it down.  All that’s left is the 20 years of diet and exercise of working the plan.  But we’re lucky, because unlike my current fitness plan, the food is delicious and the workout exhilarating.

How about you?  Tell us about your company in 2033.

For more about setting your goals for the future, click here.

For more about Tim’s Thing and naming Tim’s Thing, click here.