Use Your Vision To Guide Your Decisions
Join Carter Schelling to learn how you can use the last weeks of summer to prepare for a powerful 2024, by utilizing your vision of the future to guide your present decisions.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Welcome to studio 3655. I'm Carter Schelling, director of business development for Martin Healthcare Advisors. I also have my own consulting firm, 3655 Incorporated, where for the last 43 years, I've been helping business owners build extraordinary companies in ordinary industries. One thing we've learned that if you want to build an extraordinary company, it really helps to lead with vision. So, this show and the next two are dedicated to showing you what that looks like. How to lead your own life and your company with a vision for the future that helps you really have the opportunity to be extraordinary.
Now, why are we doing it now in August when people are on vacation? They're not even paying attention to business. Why don't we just do like a, you know, a Barbie movie or something? Okay. The reason is years ago, one of my directors said, "Son, Labor Day is really New Year's Day. You got to be ready." I thought, "Oh, okay. I mean, I can be thinking about next year now." Well, yeah. I mean, you're probably going to take some time off maybe with the family. Steal a few moments to ask yourself, what do you want for yourself and your people in the future?
You may have a little bit more time to really think about things in this quiet period compared to the normal busy transactional office work we live in. Ask yourself and if I start with my world today, August 18th, 2023, where do I want to be four months from now? Where do I want to be in 24? What do I want for myself and my people in 2025? How about 26? Now, we're getting out there. We're getting out there. Here's my challenge. Ask yourself, what is my vision for what I want to have and be on December 31st, 2026, over three years from now, what we found is if you put the time in to really be specific and powerful about what you want, that act alone dram dramatically increases your ability to achieve that goal.
And what do I mean by your world? Let's say I I'm an owner of a single clinic and have been for many years. And I decide on the beach, okay, enough of this. I spent all my time doing fairly menial things. I'm on a treadmill. I'm done with that. Somehow December 31st, 2026, I'm going to own three clinics, have an operations manager, and every calendar quarter I'm taking two weeks off. Part of me says, "Are you nuts? Are you crazy?" Part of me says, "Oh man, that would be so cool.
That would that would be so cool." What's interesting is that focusing on that, looking at your world from this place backwards rather than from this place forwards dramatically increases your ability to be successful. But you have to make that vision your partner in your everyday work. And by that I mean when you come upon a decision you have to make a choice you have to make rather than making that choice with just the information from today. You need to have that information in one hand and the information of what you want in the other and ask yourself how can I make a decision that serves both.
That's how you begin to move forward. Let me give you an illustration of how that helps you, helps you do the right thing. You know, I'm a consultant. I work with business owners. Let's say that two business owners come to me on the same day and say, "I have a u referral source and they're giving me trouble. You know, they're difficult. They don't communicate. Their patients don't stick with me. I've gotten business from them in the past, but I need to fix them. I need to fix that.
Okay. How many clinics do you have? I have one clinic. They both have one clinic. They both have the same question. I should be able to help them both at once because it should be the same answer, right? Until I ask them, "Where do you want to be?" December 31st, 2026. Let's say it's Bob and Karen. Bob, I I'll help you in a minute, but where do you want to be? December 31st, 2026. I've been a one clinic company for 25 years. I'll be happy to still be a one clinic company.
I just want to fix this referral source. He really bugs me and my people are upset. Okay, okay, got it. Thanks, Bob. Karen, where do you want to be? December 31st, 2026. Oh, tell you the truth, I was on the beach and I got fed up and I said, "I'm going to be three clinics. I'm going to have an operations manager and I'm going to be out of here two weeks every quarter." That sounds familiar. Okay. Can I give them both the same advice? No. Okay.
No. All right, Bob. He's not going anywhere. We have time to spend on this referral source. So, Bob, tell me more. Maybe we can make a visit. Maybe we can convince them. May maybe it's part of our problem. Maybe we can interview our staff. You have time to fuss with it to try to retain this revenue cuz you're not going anywhere. Karen. Karen, dump him. Look, three clinics in three and a half years is a big jump. All right. You need to right now let that turkey go and go out and find two people who can find you more referral sources who can be your liaison with those referral sources and build your practice so you can expand it tangentially around your current footprint.
You got to go Karen or you'll be out of time in about 30 minutes. Your goal sets the pace at which you must solve problems. And I got to tell you, down here, we're mostly solving problems. All right? And in many cases, we're solving the same problems over and over and over again. We need to be able to pull back, pull out, pull up, and make sure we're doing the things that are going to make a difference. Peter Ducker, the famous consultant, once said, "You do not become extraordinarily successful by doing things right." Everybody said, "What?" You become extraordinarily successful only by doing the right things.
Doing the right things. Because some things get you here and some things keep you here. And you got to choose. But unless you have this in your hand, you don't know which is which. Making your vision your partner helps you in a lot of ways. And first of all, it helps you see what the right things are. It helps you see what is more important if you're committed to that goal. The second thing making the vision your vision your partner does for it helps you spend more time doing those things.
How does it do that? You take your vision, you write it out, you stick it to your monitor, and then every few hours, you ask yourself a simple question. Certainly, at least at the beginning of each day, you ask yourself this simple question. If I want to go from here to here, what must I accomplish today to achieve my vision on time? What must I accomplish today to achieve my vision on time to break out of this and actually make this possible? Although when I first thought it up, it seemed pretty impossible.
Sorry. See what the right things are. Spend more time doing them. The last thing you need to get from taking your vision and making it your partner to make this journey successful, you need to use it to have more energy to do these things. Well, now you know your athletes. Once upon a time, I did stupid things. One of the stupid things I did is I competed in triathlons without training. Okay? Which means I got creamed. And I was doing one in San Diego and I just ran out of gas, you know.
I was walking the run and I was so slow that early finishers were coming back from the finish line walking by, you know, waving to me say, "Hey, keep going. Keep going." I'm going, "By the way, where's the finish line? I can't see the Where's the finish line?" And they said, "Oh, it's only 1.8 miles from here. It's not that far away." And you're going to love it, man. They got a band. They got champagne Gatorade. They got race volunteers in hot bikinis. It's terrific there.
That made me find the energy to kick it in and finish the race. I don't know where I found it, but I did. Now, if they'd come back and said, "I don't know. It's pretty far. I'm not quite sure. It's pretty far away, though." I'd go, "Oh, man. I'm done. I am done. I'm going to park it right here. I don't have the energy to finish. Knowing what you're after, knowing how important this is. Being able to touch it, feel it, smell it, taste it. When you have those days where you don't want to get out of bed to solve the problems of today, it'll get you out and get you going.
It'll give you the energy you need to overcome the obstacles to your goal. Now, next week we're going to talk about is how do you use that vision to lead your team so that they can help you achieve that extraordinary goal. And then in the third week, we'll talk about how do we create a structure that makes that vision real, available, and a powerful aid to you literally on a daily basis on your quest for what you want on December 31st, 2026. Thanks for your time today. I'll see you next week.
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