Let me begin by saying that this article on Faith has more to do with cartography than religion because throughout history a better map and better use of the map have always been fundamental to winning.
It’s also not about “blind faith”: that cancer can be cured with a prayer. The faith I’m referring to is the result of the kind of hard work and hard thought that leaves you convinced that the path you are on is the right path for you and your business for a wide array of tangible and intangible reasons that contribute to a better understanding of reality and a better interpretation of your options.
I’ve been in advertising for a long time now, and along the way I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and developed advertising campaigns for some of the world’s largest, and smallest, organizations in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
When I pour my 40 years of experience into one big pot and boil off all the platitudes, the politics, the process B.S. and all the trendy “me-too” garbage, I end up with one key variable that separates the winners from those who “also ran” and I’m calling that variable FAITH.
Faith is the improbable mixture of tangibles and intangibles that combine to make the impossible a manifest reality in the lives of people and organizations.
Henri Bergson* put it this way: "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
To achieve your goals, popular business theory invites you to (1) start 2015 with a careful review of what went well and what failed in 2014. Show all your work – and explain why! (2) Now compare your 2014 findings to your 2008 – 2013 findings. Use the historical trends you finding in conjunction with your 2015 situation analysis and 2016 market projections to inform and modify your rolling 12 month business plan.
(3) Compare your plan to what others plan to do in 2015 (using competitive research) and infuse your business plan with the “Best Industry Practices” that you can find (splattered across countless websites which suggest they know your business better than you do).
(4) Finally, use steps (1) – (3) above to develop your insightful Marketing + Advertising plans featuring robust strategies and tactics.
The problem with this planning process is that it doesn’t serve most small businesses very well. The large companies I’ve worked with spend upwards of $500,000 a year (in Canada alone) to sort out steps (1) – (3), and then hire an ad agency to sort out and implement step (4). Most small businesses do a review their sales and cursory review of their business terrain and conclude that price is the key variable. So they adjust price and their seasonal or intellectual inventory, and then trudge along the same economic path everyone else is on looking for the same opportunities for growth everyone else is decade in and decade out. These business models do not account for the multitude of variables that they cannot control, but that impact their current and future business plans as much as the known variables.
Faith based plans are inherently more flexible and far more suitable to smaller organizations because faith, when harnessed in order to achieve a clear, unifying mission moves people, moves mountains, joins seas, put us on the moon and has taken Voyageur beyond our solar system.
Business + Thought leaders who possess a deep and abiding faith in their vision and their ethos become an inspiration and a galvanizing force for others.
Faith helps leaders find and then forge alliances with others who have the skills needed to map the various paths between what is now, and what can be.
Faith encourages organizations to embrace a broader array of options because what is impossible today, with the right team, becomes viable tomorrow.
Genuine faith-based business plans thrive on ambiguity. So the more unknowns, the better they fair. Their strategies and tactics are more flexible and are better able to find the path of least resistance for the business to thrive because agendas “compliment” rather than “compete” and the identified paths have fewer competitors.
These plans acknowledge the need to take leaps of faith: and that “to get to the others side you need to loose sight of the near shore”.
Hope and faith, when harnessed properly, conspire in unpredictable ways, to compliment your other “push / pull marketing strategies” and lead the proverbial “camel through the eye of the needle”. Faith based plans provide open-minded leaders with more options and unforeseen opportunities that “arrive” and are “arrived at” in ways and means that need to be believed before they are seen.
I wish you all an open mind, more faith and greater success in 2015.