SME Success Guide brand vision

Rule 3: Have a formal, long-term vision (and don’t forget it)

Building a successful business isn’t just about what you do today. Make time to create a formal, long-term vision of where you want your business to go and what you want it to look like one day. Most importantly, always keep your vision in mind.

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SME Success Guide brand vision

In partnership with

Cerb-logo

It’s one thing to have a general ambition for your business, but real value can be added for those that have taken the time to establish a defined vision. This can give more than just direction. It also helps to align decision-making with goals, motivate employees, and strengthen coordination efforts. Your vision could be customer-focused or mission-oriented, but it’s important that it allows your staff, team, and customers to understand the purpose of your business.

With this, though, comes accountability. You need to hold yourself and your business accountable for keeping the vision alive and working towards achieving it. Using an OKR (Objectives & Key Results) and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) model could be an effective way to track and measure how you’re doing. Try to make sure these indicators aren’t vague by including as many points of reference as possible (for instance, number of employees, amount of markets being operated in, etc). These can be changed but should hopefully provide a useful guide for how your business is performing against it.

When you encounter challenging circumstances, which you may do in an uncertain post-COVID-19 world, your business’s formal, long-term vision can provide a valuable anchoring point for decision-making processes. And while it can be easy to get into a flow of taking each day as it comes, taking time to formally review your progress against this vision can be extremely useful. At these points, ask how is the business is doing? Do you need to change your strategy of implementation? And is the vision still valid?

This a very important process that, alongside things like financial planning and following a recruitment strategy, can be hugely beneficial to your business in the long term and should be repeated on a fairly regular basis.

Free webinar

We partnered with Bastien Hibon, Co-founder of brand agency Brand Cornac, to produce a webinar that discusses the importance of small and medium-sized businesses having a vision, and gives a step-by-step guide on how to build one.

You can watch it below, or read the blog.

Six Rules for SME Success

Small businesses will be the driving force behind the UK’s recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

To support businesses through this period, Allica Bank has produced an independent report in partnership with the Centre for Economics & Business Research (CEBR). We have identified six key business drivers that will empower SMEs to succeed in a post-COVID world.

Each rule is backed up with actionable insight, expert analysis, and data from over 1,000 leading UK small and medium-sized businesses.

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We’ll email you the guide to the address you provide below.

“Your long-term vision defines where you want your business to be, while your business plan lays out how you’re going to get there. In times of uncertainty, you may need to change your business plan to fit the circumstances. But never forget what you ultimately set out to do.”

Toby Mason
Chief Operating Officer at Allica Bank