E221: Richard Hill

Richard H1 [00:00:00]:
Now you know I've interviewed over a hundred successful Ecommerce founders on this podcast. And there's one thing that keeps coming up again and again with the ones who have really scaled their businesses and built incredible teams. It's not their marketing strategy, it's not their tech stack, it's not even their hiring process. It's something far simpler. But so many founders get this completely wrong. They share their vision not once a year, not in some fancy mission statement on the wall, but consistently, clearly, and with their entire team. And here's what I've realized.

Richard H1 [00:00:36]:
The founders who do this well have teams that move faster, make better decisions, and frankly, they just seem more engaged. So today I want to talk to you about why sharing your vision matters. What I've learned from guests who did this brilliantly, and most importantly, how you can start doing it this week. Because here's the truth. Your team can't help you build something they can't see. Let's get into it. So I thought I'd jump back on, on this episode and talk about the theme that's ran through a lot of the episodes over the last sort of five years with the successful brands that have come on. And with a couple of episodes I've done recently, really resonating with me, and that's the, the vision of a company and the vision of a leader within a business.

Richard H1 [00:01:22]:
I think, you know, I could count many, many, many episodes that I've done of successful founders talking about this topic. And it's something that's sort of quite close to, however, my business. I think a lot of people maybe work in a job, work for a firm, but they don't maybe really know, you know, how their role impacts the bigger brand, the bigger picture of the company. They go to work, come home. And I met a lot of people through my, my journey, you know, that maybe aren't really that happy with the work that they do and the firm that they work for. And I always think, you know, the, the leader in the business and the business and the management should do a better job because if they understood, maybe how their work would impact and can impact the bigger picture of a firm and how something they're doing as a person in a department can contribute and help the bigger picture. And that knocks onto this, knocks onto that, and that's, that's why we do something. That is why, you know, I think it's really, really important to share the vision of a company and where the company is heading, you know, and that vision.

Richard H1 [00:02:36]:
And I think then team members, in theory and in practice, Very much so. See that on many episodes, then get with that vision. And I think also when you're presenting that vision to your team, you know, it's sort of like a bit of a, oh, I have a. I really like this vision where the company's going or maybe, you know, for a few people that maybe aren't in the right seats and maybe not meant to be with the company long term. Well, that's not a vision that I really buy into. Or so it's sort of. Then you end up with people in the business that maybe want to be there for the right reasons and can see a future for them and how their role might progress in the vision of that brand. So I think, you know, it gives team members some ownership.

Richard H1 [00:03:21]:
You know, I'm doing this and it's contributing to this, which means actually we'll be able to launch this department which will then impact the business and the real vision of the company. There's an episode coming up after this episode, actually, where we talk about vision quite a bit and I think, you know, it's very similar to how I do things here and it is, you know, getting that vision together, but working with the senior team within a business to discuss and come up with the vision. But usually that vision really does come from a founder or two, you know, depending in on your business, of the business, the vision of the business over the next one to three to five years, depending on the industry you're in, things can move very quickly. So we do sort of one year vision, three year vision, one year picture, three year vision. So it's really looking at what success will look like over the next 12 months in the business and what it will look like in three years. And I think, you know, if you're a business owner, leader now, listening, know, do you take that time to really map out and structure what your business is going to look like in one year? And from the top, that might be, we want to be doing 5 million in turnover, but if you're only doing 1 million in turnover, that's a 500% increase. Is that realistic? But if that's what you're after, you know, what are then the measurable things like KPIs, but what are the measurable things that you need to achieve that are going to bridge that 1 to 5 million? So it makes it more realistic rather than going, right, we're going to do 5 million this year, but with no plan. It's very unrealistic, isn't it? And then over three years, you know, we're going to do X, what does success specifically look like in your business one year from now, three years from now? And that might be, as I said, turnover, might be headcount, might be X amount of new products, it might be launching in a different country, you might be, you know, rebuilding your website, you know, re platforming, launching TikTok, you know, so it's really looking at that and I think, you know, I really implore you to spend a few minutes, obviously this is a very brief podcast on this topic, but to spend a few minutes really thinking, right, I'm going to write down what my one, three year vision is, you know, what is that and is it to.

Richard H1 [00:05:52]:
As a founder, there's sort of a personal side to that. So you might want to have more time. So to be able to have more time, you're probably going to get more senior people in your business that can do some of the things that you spend a lot of your time doing, whether that's buying marketing, you know, do you need to do some senior hires to add to your leadership team or to start your leadership team and looking at, you know, different KPIs that you want to share. And then the biggest thing, the biggest, biggest thing is then sharing that vision of the company to the whole company. Might sound quite scary to some of you listening, but I think that first time you do that and there'll be quite a bit of work to present that to the team. But it's like, right, this is where we are, but this is the vision for the company. And a year from now, and you'd maybe step through four or five key areas that you want to work on, you know, whether that's turnover, people, location, you might want to own your own premises, you might want to move, you might want to relaunch X, Y, Z, you know, new lines, depending on what you sell, you know, and then in three years we want to be here, so they'll be like, oh, we're doing 1 million and want to do 5 million in three years. Well, that's exciting, isn't it? And there's 20 of us now, but to do this, maybe not 20 of us in a million pound business, but there's 5 of us now.

Richard H1 [00:07:10]:
And actually there's going to be 10 of us to do this or there's 50 of us and there's now going to be, you know, 100. So then they're seeing opportunity for growth within the business. The different team members that they can then move through the ranks, maybe run their own team, but really you're setting that vision out, but it isn't a sort of set and forget vision, it is a vision that you are referring to, you know, consistently. So the vision is to be, you know, this, this, this business, you know, and you're communicating that in your marketing potentially depending on how you, what, what you want to share. Some of the commercial side you might not want to share, but the vision to be, you know, a specific, you know, to own a specific market share within an industry is fine, but you might not want to say turnover publicly, but internally I think, you know, I've got a lot more comfortable sharing financials in my business. Most people in our business, well, everybody that's in our business, that is in the vision meeting knows some of our financial. They know, you know, certain targets that we have, like how many clients we want, what our typical client retainer values are, you know, what our retained targets are. And people know this so they know that we're driving to hit certain retained values per month in our business, per year in our business.

Richard H1 [00:08:28]:
And obviously and we work on projects as well in our business. So we've got sort of two commercial aspects to our monthly income. But I think the biggest mistake I see is a lot of people maybe do this exercise, but then they don't reshare it and reaffirm it. They just assume that people remember the vision that we shared eight months ago, that's not going to work. And what I really implore you to do is get the company again, the whole company together and reaffirm, go through and every three months. Ideally that's what we do in our business. And a lot of the founders that have been on is right, we'll have a look. All hands off site quite often or usually always in our business.

Richard H1 [00:09:12]:
Obviously different businesses have got different maybe areas in their business where they can do an all hands meeting. But off site makes it a bit of an event within the business where we're having this vision update of the business. Where are we at the beginning of the year? You know, the founder, the CEO set out this, set out this vision to the company, to the whole team. And now three months later, where are we? You know, did we hit this target? Did we hire this person? Did we launch this line? Do you know what we did? We did five out of these six things actually, you know, this, we are moving, you know, we are moving in the direction that we're set out. Six months later we do it again. And then again you can see the traction that we are, you know, working and Traction is a great word because a lot of this methodology is summed up brilliantly in a book called Traction, which I would really, really recommend. I always recommend books obviously at all the episodes and I think Traction might have been mentioned, but Traction, the entrepreneurs operating system, you know, I really implore you to have a look at that. So you know, it's looking at things like what are your core values? But you're doing a lot of this with, you know, you maybe are the leader in the business or you're part of the leadership team, but you're doing this as a group.

Richard H1 [00:10:30]:
Maybe that's the senior leadership in the team. Maybe it's, you know, if it's small company, it's the owner, founder and you know, one or two colleagues and then what's your core focus as a business? You know, that sort of statement. So our core focus is to scale E commerce brands faster. Simple as that. To scale E commerce brands faster. Our purpose is to build an outstanding culture that generates transformative results. So I believe that if we can create a really, really great place to work, we are going to attract talent that wants to be in our business. And then by the nature of having a lot of very, very smart people in the business, and that's sort of, I see that as my job to attract very, very smart people and then create a vision that they want to be part of.

Richard H1 [00:11:20]:
And then after our people stick, stay around, I would say a lot, lot longer than traditional agency because we create this place that ultimately we are always trying to do a really, really good job for our clients. We invest in training for our team, we send them on courses and events and so forth. And we're quite selective on who we work with, client wise to really try and make it a really, really great place to work. And then ultimately you've got a lot of very, very smart people in the room and in then look at creating transformative results for our clients. So that was quite a theme that I thought I'd just quickly jump on and talk about, you know, creating that vision in your organization, but then communicating it back to your team on a consistent basis. I hope you've enjoyed this one. I'll see you soon. If you enjoyed this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released.

Richard H1 [00:12:23]:
Have a fantastic day and I'll see you on the next one.