After catching the entrepreneurial bug 4 or so years ago I had become prone to starting companies. No matter what the end results of these ventures were (some good, some bad), I’ve always jumped in for more. It’s really a lot of fun and you get to learn so much more about running a business than the guy that spends 20 years daydreaming of starting a company when the time is just right. Looking back I pulled off some pretty ambitious stuff for a single person, but hindsight is 20/20 and there are definitely many things I should have done differently.

There is a resounding importance in these mistakes - having a vision. Vision is what allows seemingly overwhelming and impossible ideas to come to life. They say it in all the books on goals as well as driver’s ed, and its true - look where you wish to go not at the obstacles your trying to avoid. It’s what you need when you want something as crazy and obstacle-filled as running a successful business to happen for you. You internalize it and let your mind do the work at all levels of getting you there.

The awesome and slightly erie part is this methodology can get you the results without you even realizing it, kind of like putting your mind on autopilot. Once you have your destination the rest of it is just figuring out how to get there. I’ve been doing this with my Tilted Pixel venture since it started last summer and it’s working remarkably well. It’s also what allowed me to put together CustomBar, an extremely ambitious piece of software that I developed for two years.

With CustomBar I employed the strategy of having a vision without even realizing it. I knew very well what I wanted and I was extremely excited about it. Even in the early development days when the program was a simple white bar that could display a window when clicked and then crash, in my mind it was a fully skinnable plugin-enabled scriptable application that would solve an overwhelming amount of usability problems with Windows (which continue to plague it to this day). That’s what got me there to finishing the app, including having a very large help file written for it.

The problems arose where my vision ended. While I had dreamt up a technologically awesome tool, I had never come up with a parallel internalization for the business. I had never clearly visioned how I would be marketing and selling this application, or what I would benchmark sales results against. I didn’t know where I was headed with this aspect of the business and the result was an underwhelming marketing campaign. I made some money of course, but I also left much of the product’s potential on the table.

Clarifying/Shifting the Company Vision Over Time

With Tilted Pixel I’m a little more concious in my maintaining the vision of my company to ensure that I do cover all conceivable aspects of the business. I am also far more flexible in how this vision can change and I constantly seek input from the external environment. I probably could have saved myself a year of CustomBar development and had an even better product if I had sought much larger feedback in the initial stages and released a beta far before I had finally felt the program to be “ready”. I try to avoid repeating mistakes so this time I am involving my clients at a much deeper level early in the game, and constantly evolving the vision of Tilted Pixel. This has had terrific results and really allowed me to gain and understanding of where and how I should be focusing my efforts.

One of the major flaws in business plans that gets talked about often is the questionable accuracy of any future predictions in the plan, especially for start-ups. This is to be expected as no one is psychic, but it becomes problematic when a business owner insists on following this wonderful plan while the landscape completely changes around him or her. Be flexible and don’t let real opportunities be passed by through hanging on to how you initially dreamt things up.

The end result right now is that I feel like I am very much in a car headed towards where I ultimately want to be. As I go forward my destination becomes visible with increasingly clarity and I can make adjustments to my course based on the new information that is visible to me. It’s allowing me to do bigger and better things, without necessarily more resources.

To incorporate this into your own life, read and practice. There are countless resources out there on goal setting, but ultimately you have to get your mind used to thinking in certain ways to see results and that’s achieved by doing it constantly.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Business, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.