Hey, it’s Bob Negen. And in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore how you build a business that you truly love.

Quite often as entrepreneurs.

We let circumstance dictate how our business grows. Dan Kennedy, the famous marketing guru Dan Kennedy said, entrepreneurs are often guilty of building houses they don’t want to live in. And I think that that happens all the time that I know what happened with me. Right?

A shiny object comes along and there we go. Somebody thinks I should open another store. Wow. That sounds good.

There we go.

You become consumed by your business and you don’t take care of your family. All of these mistakes get made because you’re not intentional about how you want to grow your business. Building a house that you don’t want to live in. I talked to a very successful merchant several years ago, and he readily admitted that building his chain of stores cost him his marriage and he deeply regretted it.

So how do you build the business of your dreams? How do you build a business that you love? Well, it’s starts with the end in mind.

You write a book from beginning to end. You build a business from the end to the beginning.

And it starts with writing a vision statement.

A vision statement is a document a written document written if if from the perspective of a moment in time. Usually, anywhere between three and ten years out Lafar enough out that you’re not worried about how it’s gonna get done. So all you’re worried about is what you want to build where you what you want to feel how you want to be. And it’s written from that perspective. You know? I’m sitting on the porch of my house on the lake. I am sitting on a mountain with my wife or my husband.

I am floating down the river with my family.

So there’s this you you’re putting yourself in this moment in the future where you want to be. And then in detail, you talk about what your business looks like, what your life looks like, how it feels, And then that vision statement, that emotionally compelling picture of your future becomes your north star.

And vision statements are incredibly incredibly powerful.

This isn’t “voodoo, woowoo” stuff. This is stuff that was actually created by scientists.

By engineers when they were building the Apollo spacecraft.

You don’t just say, I’m gonna build a spacecraft and start in and figure it out. You have to start with the vision. This is what we’re gonna do and then you backfill.

That’s the process.

Start with the north star, and then you know where you wanna go. And Susan and I learned about visioning from Ari Weinzweig.

Ari is the co-founder, the Zingerman family of businesses.

He has been the keynote speaker at the Retail Success Summit. Seven, I think three times. He’s one of my favorite business thinkers. And Zingerman’s built there. It’s probably a hundred million dollar a year business right now.

Using vision statements. And Susan and I went to Ann Arbor and spent three days in a workshop with Ari, writing our vision for WhizBang! Training And during that process, we really learned how incredibly powerful the process of really understanding what you want first and then doing the work to get there next, how powerful that truly truly is.

When somebody joins a platinum mastermind group, the very thing first thing they do is they write a vision statement.

We can’t help them get there and they don’t know where they wanna go. If you were to come and do a full day strategy session with us here in the offices at WhizBang! Training, The first thing we would do is write a vision statement. You know, it’s that powerful because once you know what you want from your business and your life, you can reverse engineer it, start to develop the skills, start to develop the mindset, and it gives you that long term perspective. Right?

You don’t get caught in the weeds. Or you do get caught in the weeds, but when you get caught in the weeds, you look up you look up, you see your north star and you know where to go. So incredibly powerful. So if you feel in the weeds right now, the first step, and it will be a really emotionally liberating process is to write a vision statement.

If you don’t know how to write a vision statement, you can Google Zingerman’s vision, and it will give call you up an article from Inc magazine where Ari explains how to do it. But again, super super powerful, powerful process, super super important document for your growth. And just a great way for you to get a handle on what you really want out of your business and your life.