Develop your vision

Does your company or branch have a vision statement? If you expect your employees to succeed, you owe it to them to create a clear statement of what you want them to achieve (not a rah-rah, feel good message).

by James J. Ambrose

Your company may have a vision statement, a mission statement and a shared values statement. Maybe they are displayed in bronze or fancy wooden plaques in the lobby. Most likely they were developed in the early ’90s after the company spent a great deal of money and held many meetings, then rolled the statements out with great fanfare. They were designed to influence employee performance and earn your company a checkmark on your customers’ quality audits.

If they are working for you in your branch, terrific. If not, they need to be replaced with something that will work.

How do you get started preparing a vision statement? Let’s not overcomplicate this. The formula for achieving it is simple.
• Achieve a clear understanding of where you are.
• Create a clear image of where you want to be.
• Develop a complete plan of how to get there.
• Execute and measure, execute and measure, execute...

Without a clear understanding of where your branch is today in relation to all the other distributors within your market, it will be impossible for you to create an image of where you want to take the branch. For example, let’s say your passion is winning foot races and you decide you want to run the mile in under five minutes. Let’s assume you achieve your goal. That makes you fast. But does it make you a winner? Before you can determine what you need to do to win races, you need to know what the other runners are doing. Once you have that knowledge, you can set correct goals for yourself.

I often hear from a new or unenlightened branch manager that his goal is to grow the business by perhaps 8 percent a year over the next three years. If this is an $8 million business in a $400 million market, I am not impressed. He has not spent enough time determining where he is in the total picture and developing a vision that makes sense in the context of his market.

Without facts about where your branch is today with respect to your particular market, your management capabilities and the quality of your people and processes, you’ll find it very difficult to create a vision of where you want to go.

You need to think through your branch business and piece together your vision, including:
• Market position
• Market sector and market share goals
• Financial performance goals
• People development

After looking at your branch from the 5,000-foot view and understanding where you are in relation to the market and your competition, after understanding your operational capabilities from the ground-level view, and after a thorough understanding of your personal performance measurements, write out a statement on what your vision is.

Let me throw out a “straw man” to give you ideas. Let’s assume you are in the wholesale paint business. Your vision could be something like this:

“Triple Z Paint Distributors will...
• Be the premier distributor in the medium and large industrial MRO market with more than 30 percent in market share.
• Be the premier distributor in the commercial construction market within a 25-mile radius of the branch with at least 40 percent of sales over the counter to small and medium contractors.
• Maintain at least a 95 percent rate out of stock to target customers.
• Maintain 30 percent margin out of stock.
• Attain overall margins of 22 percent.
• Improve net profit performance by at least 20 percent every year.
• Train and engage employees in functional and cross-functional process-improvement teams working independently from management involvement to continuously address ways to improve customer service and branch profitability.”

This statement makes it clear to your team that this is what you want to achieve. Because you built this goal after a thorough 5,000-foot analysis, you can expertly answer the “Why?” question about any piece of the statement.

I know this doesn’t sound like those typical touchy feely vision statements you have read in company lobbies. But isn’t it a heck of a lot easier to understand? Wouldn’t this make it easy for your employees to buy into where your leadership is directed?

Leave the poetry in the lobby for suppliers and customers to see. Make this your meat-and-potatoes vision statement. It has practical meaning and is useful.

The next step is quite important. Hold a full branch meeting and communicate the vision — both the what and the why. Prepare good presentation materials, but don’t cloud the content with a big show. Be succinct.

Explain that it is based on market analysis, conversations with customers and suppliers and evaluation of financial performance incentives. State that this is where everyone’s energy should be focused.

Present it as a platform for review and comment; let everyone know you will revise it if necessary based on company-wide feedback. Thoroughly discuss every piece of the statement. At the end of each section, ask for discussion and a vote of agreement. Ask for this again at the very end. Conclude by asking for support in reaching these goals.

You should realize that not a darned thing will be done by anyone to change what they do just because you all agreed on a goal for the branch. It is your job to start and influence the activity. You’re the leader.

Adapted from “5 Fundamentals for the Wholesale Distribution Branch Manager,” written by James J. Ambrose and published by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. For information, contact www.nawpubs.org.

Ambrose will lead an all-day seminar entitled “Business Leadership Skills for the Industrial Distribution Manager” Nov. 22 at the I.D.A./ISMA Fall Convention in Chicago.

This article originally appeared in the I.D.A./ISMA Fall Convention 2002 issue of Progressive Distributor. Copyright 2002.

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