If you’ve heard the phrase “10x your [traffic, leads, etc.]”, you’re already familiar with how impactful having a big vision can be. Think about some of the world’s most powerful business leaders. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ vision was for Amazon to be the “everything store” – literally a store that sells everything – and today, Amazon is one of the richest retailers in the world. Elon Musk’s vision was for humans as a “spacefaring civilization,” enabling his company SpaceX to become one of the most successful commercial rocket launch companies in the world. Bill Gates’ vision for Microsoft was “A computer on every desk and in every home” and I am certainly typing from one now. I can only guess that Steve Jobs and Apple were trying to bring the computer to our pocket.
The massive success of entrepreneurs like these is truly inspiring, what started out as big hairy audacious goals has turned into global phenomena that influence billions of people around the world. Leaders like these inspire my own vision at 321 Web Marketing.
What leaders like these have in common is that they’re focused not on incremental growth, but on exponential results that’s more like a 10x impact versus 2x. If you want to learn more about this subject, check out 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less, by Dan Sullivan, one of my favorite reads in 2024. To achieve 10x the results in the same time it takes another company to double their growth, you have to have a big vision. That’s why most companies, even growing ones, stay small. They just want modest success. For every Amazon or Tesla, there are millions of small businesses on the brink of failure.
I’ll share some of my personal story to explain how our results-focused mindset, with an emphasis on exponential growth, has transformed our company.
1. Start With a BIG Vision (or think of it 11 years later like me)
The best companies state big hairy audacious goals that hold them accountable for the innovation and results they want to achieve. For Google, it is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Better late than never, for 321 Web Marketing, it is “to be the best digital marketing agency in the world.” This took some real soul searching into what I wanted for my business but was too afraid to ask.
Immediately upon sharing our vision to be the best digital marketing agency in the world with our team, there was a sense of excitement. If the vision feels too big, then it probably is the right size. Can we really do this? The answer is yes, but we are all going to have to take daily steps to get there.
When you’re creating your BIG vision, think beyond what you want to happen a year from now, or even 5 years from today. Think ahead at least a decade or more. Imagine the best thing you’d like to see your company achieve but are too afraid to even write it down because you are being modest about your ambitions.
2. Focus on the Crucial 20%
To achieve 10x results, you need to identify actions that aren’t going to accelerate your results. Think about letting go of 80% of the things you could spend time on that aren’t going to push you toward your biggest goal. The 20% that’s left should be high-impact and relevant to your goal.
The best way to explain this is that there are a million and one ways to grow my business by 5% this year. But if I am asking myself how to grow my business by 10x in the next few years, the options reduce dramatically. For me, it was the realization that the only way to grow was to
- Best People:
Hire an entire business development team, dream up bigger packages and remove our smaller deals from the pipeline. Expand our marketing and management training program. - Best Processes:
Map out all processes and improve our team’s process wiki in one single place with documentation and diagrams. - Best Tools:
Enable marketing managers with a free marketing tool suite that they would normally have to pay a lot for.
We empowered everyone to brainstorm their ideas, to help identify the things we could do that would push us further ahead more quickly. We’re constantly having small team and all-team meetings to reinforce our focus on our big vision, and to share big ways that can get us there.
3. Create a Roadmap
With your BIG vision at the top, work your way backward and map out your milestones that matter. This will help your team understand which actions to focus on to continuously move toward your BIG vision in a shorter amount of time.
You need to be constantly monitoring and analyzing your results so you can quickly pivot and keep an eye on fast growth. That requires transparent, and sometimes hard, conversations with your team. Empower everyone to provide feedback that could prove critical in transforming your processes to make your operations more efficient as you work on your goal.
We also use the SMART goal framework for each quarter and a weekly scoreboard so that we know what specific goals we want to achieve and how they are progressing. If we fail, we know we need to revise the goal in some way. Sometimes, we ditch it altogether to focus on something new, using what we’ve learned in our next steps.
Already, our BIG vision roadmap has helped achieve our annual revenue goal in just 6 months. More importantly, we’ve delivered BIG results for our clients, like an average of 400% jump in search results and increase in 50% of sales from digital marketing year-over-year. That’s led to more referrals for our firm, which is helping us move toward our goal.
So, what’s next?
We are dedicated to helping our clients achieve their BIG visions, through digital marketing strategies that make a significant impact. We’ve helped clients go from the 100th search result to a top 3 search result in less than a month. We routinely help clients strategize content marketing calendars that help them 10x their social media followings in mere days. Our web developers can turn poor-performing websites into top search results by identifying the most important updates to prioritize.
I can proudly say, we’re well on our way to achieving our goal of being the best digital marketing agency in the world.
If you want to have a conversation with me about your big goals, feel free to reach out over LinkedIn.
