16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Re-focus your business plan and achieve the success your business deserves Business owners, and their teams, often lose their way in the midst of the day-to-day stress of generating sales and profits. Whether your goal is selling millions of your product, expanding operations to a new location, or generating more profits, Start at the End offers a unique approach and action steps for business owners and entrepreneurs to redevelop your business plan and achieve ultimate success. You'll learn how to re-create your long-term vision and then make continuous progress in achieving that vision while continuing to hit your short-term goals. Start at the End offers inspiring stories of other entrepreneurs who have achieved significant success in this area, as well as easy-to-follow exercises and next steps. * Shows how to develop a realistic business and financial model based on market data * Explains how to identify and pursue new opportunities, raise capital, and build growth strategies Start at the End gives business owners a chance to take a step back, re-evaluate your business, and redesign your business plan to achieve the success you dreamed of when you first launched your company.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 276
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Ähnliche
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The End of Your Business
Your Two Visions
Through Your Customers’ Eyes
Through Your Investors’ Eyes
Courage and Congruency
The Hero’s Adventure
Plans Rarely Come True
Chapter 2: Confirming the Opportunity
Pivoting
SWOTS Are Dead; Do a “SO” Analysis Instead
Judging Your Opportunities
What’s Next?
Chapter 3: Goals and Milestones
How to Reverse Engineer Your End Vision
Breaking Your End Vision into Smaller Parts
Your One-Year Vision
Your Quarterly and Monthly Visions
Chapter 4: Achieving Your Financial Metric Goals
Measuring Success
Why You Need KPIs
Building Your Scoreboard
Chapter 5: Achieving Your Business Asset Goals
Business Assets via Project Management
Entrepreneurial Project Management
Choosing and Managing Your Projects
Why Great Project Management Will Change Your Life (or at Least Your Business)
Chapter 6: Systematizing Your Business
Introduction to Systems
What Systems to Create in Your Business
The Process of Creating Systems
Getting Started with Systematizing Your Business
Making a System the Status Quo
Chapter 7: How to Out-Market Your Market
The Most Important Number in Your Business
Your Marketing System
How to Optimize Lead Generation
Chapter 8: Securing and Locking Up Your Customers
How to Optimize Conversion Rates
How to Optimize Transaction Prices
How to Optimize Lifetime Customer Value
Breaking the Camel’s Back
Chapter 9: Developing Your HR Plan
Identifying Roles and Needs with Organizational Charts
Your Endgame Org Chart
Your Current Org Chart
Your Annual Org Chart and Determining Your New Hires This Year
Hiring New Employees
Getting the Most Out of Your Employees
Chapter 10: Documenting Your Strategic Plan
The 10 Sections of a Strategic Plan
Keeping Your Plan Current
Chapter 11: How to Progress Even Faster
How to Identify and Build Projects into Your Schedule
How to Eliminate Time Wasters
How to Hold Effective Meetings
How to Achieve More by Doing Less
Five Steps to Effectively Delegate
Chapter 12: Becoming a Better Leader
Motivating Your Employees
Training and Mentoring Your Employees
Conducting Employee Performance Reviews
Firing Tactics
Chapter 13: Multiplier Tactics
Leverage the Pareto Principle throughout Your Business
Do More of What Works
Develop an Advisory Board
Build Nanosystems for Systematic Improvements
Use the Improvement Matrix to Enhance Your Products and Services
Hang out with Winners
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
Praise for Start at the End
“Did you ever wonder how some entrepreneurs have created businesses that ran by themselves, grew consistently, and sold for tons of money? Fortunately, Dave Lavinsky has created a book that outlines the steps to join this special club.”
—Robert Levin, Editor-In-Chief, The New York Enterprise Report
“Is your business stuck? Dave Lavinsky shows you how to Start at the End and achieve your dreams!”
—Barry Moltz, Small Business Speaker and Author
“If you want to build a sellable company, Start at the End will give you the road map.”
—John Warrillow, Founder of The Sellability Score and Author of Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
“A company needs a big vision. And then it needs a plan for reaching that vision. Read Start at the End and you’ll quickly gain both these essential items.”
—Adam Toren, Coauthor of Small Business Big Vision
“As a business owner, I wish I had read this earlier in my career. Start at the End makes so much sense, yet it’s difficult to do tactically without this book. This book makes your business plan and dream come to life. Read it, then do it.”
—Adam Shaivitz, Founder of Accelerate Performance Sales Consulting and Author of Selling Is Everyone’s Business
Cover image: © Ron Chapple Studios/Jupiter Images
Cover design: Micheal J. Freeland
Copyright © 2012 by Dave Lavinsky. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Lavinsky, Dave, 1970-
Start at the end : how companies can grow bigger and faster by reversing their business plan / Dave Lavinsky.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-118-37676-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-42173-4 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-41744-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-43446-8 (ebk)
1. Business planning. 2. Success in business. 3. Small business–Growth. I. Title.
HD30.28.L387 2013
658.4'01—dc23
2012022849
Introduction
If you’re like most entrepreneurs and business owners, when you first started or purchased your company, you dreamt about the finish line; specifically about how your life would be radically better once your company became a huge success.
However, soon after you launched, many of you became trapped in daily, weekly, and monthly struggles and goals: generating more sales and profits, improving employee performance, and reducing your hours and stress. At some point, virtually all of you became 100 percent focused on these short-term goals and lost sight of your long-term vision. As a result, your chances of achieving your original dreams have significantly decreased.
This book will help you turn that around.
How can I be so sure? For nearly 15 years, my company Growthink and I have helped more than 500,000 entrepreneurs and business owners start, grow, and exit their companies. Our core focus has been creating business plans that identify where companies want to go and the specific steps they need to take to get there.
We have created business plans transforming struggling companies into highly profitable ones and flat companies into high growth ones. One of our clients came to us a few years ago when the client’s company was generating a few hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue but losing money. Today, this client generates more than a $100 million in annual revenue and is incredibly profitable. You can achieve such growth as well with the right plan.
I didn’t always have a winning formula for creating business plans. In fact, as a serial entrepreneur I’ve had many failures among my many successes. I developed the right formula with the help of one of Stephen R. Covey’s key principles. Specifically, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the second habit he explained was “Begin with the End in Mind.” Covey stated that the key to success lies in being able to answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and then visualizing yourself achieving it. My answer to this question fluctuated over time. But it always involved a scenario in which I achieved total success, perhaps becoming a professional athlete, a highly successful businessperson, or even the president of the United States. Over time, as I learned my strengths and passions, I readjusted my answer to this question, visualized it, and progressed toward achieving it.
We have applied the begin with the end in mind concept with great success to help our clients achieve enhanced growth and profitability. That is, to create a winning business plan, you need to start by precisely identifying your business’ end game and then start working backward to achieve it. Yes, you need to start at the end (catchy book title, huh?) and reverse engineer the success you have envisioned from that end point.
This is what you will learn in this book: How to identify what you would like your business to become and the steps you must take to get there. As you will see, you will need to shift your thinking and strategies to achieve your vision. Simply following conventional wisdom or common sense will get you common results, which means failure in most businesses, not the success you deserve.
I find it interesting that, although businesspeople often make correlations between sports and business, few businesses apply the start at the end principle engrained in sports. Let me explain.
What is the New York Giants’ goal?
The answer should be easy. This team’s goal each and every year is to win the Super Bowl. There’s no question about this. Every player shows up for preseason training with that goal in mind. Every practice drill is performed with that goal in mind. And every game is played to win, because a win will put the team one step closer to the Super Bowl.
So, what is your company’s end goal? Can you answer this question without missing a beat? Do you clearly know and understand what your organization has set out to achieve? And, equally as important: Does every employee in your organization know what this goal is?
The answer, as for so many organizations, is probably no.
But don’t worry—we’re going to fix that. Asking this question is a true eye-opener. In the pages of this book, we’re going to uncover your answer, and when we do, your business’s revenues and profits will start to take off.
Why? Because you will uncover the precise steps you need to take to achieve your end goal. You will become more focused on what really matters, inspiring your employees, and everyone involved will start making decisions that help lead the company toward its goals.
In this book, I will help you determine precisely what you’d like your business to ultimately become. You will be forced to think about your last day in business: the day you sell your company, take it public, hand it over to your children, or a similar scenario. You will also identify many of specific details of that day. How many employees will be there to say goodbye? How many customers will you be serving? What will your annual revenues be?
Once we have this detailed vision of the end, we will work backward to create a plan for you to achieve that success. Along the way, I will give you many tips and strategies you can start implementing right away to improve your sales and profits. Realizing short-term goals are crucial to long-term success because they keep us focused and energized and compel us to move towards our ultimate goal.
I want to reiterate this point: By the time you complete this book, you will have a business plan or road map for growing your business. It will include the traditional parts of a business plan, such as your marketing plan, HR plan, and financial plan and projections. Along the way, however, I will also give you marketing, leadership, and other tactics not only to put in your plan for the future but also to employ right away. I’m sure you like to see immediate results as much as I do.
In fact, when I make business decisions I always weigh both the short-term return on investment (ROI) and the long-term ROI. For example, I recently hired a firm to produce and run radio advertisements for Growthink. From a long-term ROI standpoint, I realized I wouldn’t receive measurable results for at least six months, and full market saturation might take over a year. However, because the firm had great expertise in crafting compelling radio ads, I realized I could immediately get short-term ROI on the engagement by using their messages in my e-mail and online marketing. Short-term ROI and long-term ROI; that’s what I demand and what I promise to give you in this text.
Here is a preview of what’s to come. We will start by determining your endgame, that is, what you would like your business to achieve for you. Notice I said achieve for you; your business should work for you, not the opposite.
Next, we will determine the best opportunities to pursue to grow your business and attain that vision. We will then create a step-by-step action plan for you to follow by breaking down your long-term goals into shorter-term actions. Then, we will focus on improving each aspect of your business. We will systematize key functions, improve your marketing and HR plans, and give you tactics to maximize the productivity and success of your organization. Finally, we will organize everything into a business plan that will guide you and your organization to success.
This is not a book simply to be read. Instead, it offers an interactive experience to help you improve your business. To this end, you should do the following to get the most value from the book:
These guidelines will not only allow you to generate a business plan that leads to the long-term success you desire; they’ll also help you start increasing your revenues and profits right away. Once again, long-term and short-term ROI.
Much of the excitement you had when you first launched or purchased your business might be gone. You’ve now faced the sobering task of managing your company on a day-to-day basis. Fortunately, this book will rekindle your earlier excitement and your entrepreneurial spirit. It will help you regain focus and achieve the success you dreamt about when you first launched your company. You will determine exactly what you’d like your business to become and reverse engineer that success. At the end, you’ll have a business plan and road map to build the highly profitable and successful company you had envisioned.
Buckle up. Your business is about to take off.
Chapter 1
The End of Your Business
You now know you must create a vision of your successful business. Without one, you won’t know where you’re headed. Once you have one, you can use it to reverse engineer a business plan for attaining it. As you’ll learn in the following text, there are actually two visions you need to develop.
Your Two Visions
Consider the words of baseball player Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there.”
In the case of both sports and business, he’s absolutely right.
Think about that. How can you achieve your business goals if you’re not crystal clear about what they are?
Therefore, the first step to improve your business’s success is to write down where you want to go. We call this your vision or mission.
I’m probably not telling you anything new. You know you should have a vision statement. But 99 percent of you don’t have a formal, written vision statement. You also do not have the two—yes, two—vision statements you need, nor the specificity required in each.
Let me explain.
The two types of vision statements you must develop are:
Your vision from a customer perspective should explain what you are trying to do for your customers. It’s that simple. Of course, you must know what this is before you can spell it out. For example, one restaurant’s customer vision might be to “serve the best Italian food in this town.” A customer vision might be more complex, as of one of my clients, Dakim, which is to “give every senior the essential tools to maintain their brain health in order to get the most out of life and help prevent the threat of memory loss.”
Your vision from a business perspective needs to explain what your organization is trying to achieve financially.
Of course, it’s great to provide the best Italian food ever. But if you go out of business while doing so, neither you, your employees, nor your customers will be happy. Therefore, you need to clearly identify your long-term vision from a business perspective. For example, do you want to sell your organization to another company eventually? Do you want to sell it to your employees? Give it to your children? Take it public? Continue to run it and reap ongoing profits?
In any of those cases, you must identify the core financial metrics and business assets your business must achieve to realize this vision. For example, how much revenue must you be generating at the time of sale to make the purchase price appealing to sell your company? How big must your customer base be?
Let’s get started by documenting both your customer-focused and business-focused vision statements.
Through Your Customers’ Eyes
To reiterate, your customer-focused vision should explain what you are trying to do for your customers. What do you want them to gain, feel, achieve, do, and so on?
To help you understand how you might articulate this goal, the following are some famous examples of customer-focused visions (that some firms refer to as missions):
Search engine Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Nonprofit lending organization Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.
Renowned retailer Nordstrom’s mission is to offer the customer the best possible service, selection, quality, and value.
The critical question you need to ask to create your customer-focused vision statement is: What one thing are you trying to do better than anyone else in serving your customers? For example, a good customer-focused vision statement could be “to provide the most environmentally friendly cleaning products” or “to provide the highest-quality automotive service” to customers.
It’s also critical to add a number of customers and an end date to your customer-focused vision statement whenever possible. For instance, a financial services company might determine their mission is “to help 1 million homeowners improve their lives by getting out of debt by 2025.”
You should judge your customer-focused vision statement against these questions and modify it as appropriate:
For example, let’s judge Nordstrom’s mission of “offering the customer the best possible service, selection, quality, and value” against the following questions.
Customers are clearly inspired by Nordstrom’s mission and generally pay higher prices for the superior service they receive.
Employees are also inspired and empowered by the mission, shown by the countless stories of employees going out of their way to satisfy customers. In one such case, a customer e-mailed customer service about a wedding gift purchased from Nordstrom he received years before. The gift was smoked salmon that he hadn’t yet eaten. His e-mail inquired as to whether the salmon was still edible. Because Nordstrom no longer carried the product, the Nordstrom employee responded by going to a local fish market, purchasing a new jar of smoked salmon, shipping it to the customer, and telling him to throw the old product away.
Although the mission doesn’t specifically state that Nordstrom’s business is retailing, it does clearly state that it provides its customers with the best possible service, selection, quality, and value.
Nordstrom’s mission is both realistic and believable. Although providing the best possible service, selection, quality, and value is challenging, it is attainable.
Nordstrom’s mission is clearly in line with its values and culture. Nordstrom values “fair and honest dealings with our customers, coworkers, suppliers, competitors, and other business partners.” Its culture includes acting as a family business, empowering employees, being honest, recognizing great employees, and having fun, among other things. Nordstrom’s mission and its values are clearly congruent.
Take a minute now to write down your customer-focused vision statement.
Through Your Investors’ Eyes
If your company has investors, their goal is most likely for your business to become wildly financially successful so they can cash out and earn a solid return on their investment.
However, your goal should be to achieve financial success even without investors. After all, a business can’t achieve its customer-focused vision if it goes out of business. In such a case, it can’t serve its employees or fulfill the personal desires that prompted the start or purchase of a business.
Because of this, you need to create your business-focused vision statement to show:
Let’s look at each of these points in detail.
The Endgame You’d Like to Achieve
There will come a time when a business owner will leave the business, for many potential reasons. The business might fail, the owner might die, or the owner might sell the business. At some point, the owner will leave. Period.
It’s ideal for you to leave the business under your terms. Let’s define the endgame you’d prefer.
Typical endgames or exits that most entrepreneurs and business owners desire include:
Selling the business to another entity
Taking the business public
Giving the business to their children
Selling or giving the business to employees
Take a moment to think about which endgame or exit you would most like to achieve. Then think specifically about your potential date of exit and the amount for which you’d like to sell your company (or its real market value if you don’t sell).
Armed with this information, now write down the endgame you’d like to achieve. Although we will fill in additional details later, for now, I just want to know (1) the date of your exit, (2) how you will exit, and (3) the dollar amount of your exit. For example, “on December 31, 2018, I will sell my business for $40 million.”
The Financial Metrics and Business Assets You Need To Achieve
Now, to realize this endgame, you need to identify and achieve the requirements for success. For example, let’s say that you would like to sell your business for $40 million. How much revenue must you be generating at the time of sale? How many customers must you be serving? How many employees will you have?
When you’re trying to determine what your business needs to look like to earn a $40 million (or whatever amount you chose) payday, you need to consider two separate factors: financial metrics and business assets.
Financial metrics are the actual numbers that gauge your performance. Common measurements include items such as:
Dollar revenues
Dollar EBITDA
Percent market share
Number of subscribers/customers
Number of new leads
Percent of upsells
Number of customer complaints
Financial health ratios such as your current ratio
Business assets are the elements you’ve created that give you future economic benefits; they allow you to achieve your financial metrics. Business assets include items such as:
Customers/marquee customers
Products
Services
Technology/intellectual property
Distribution network
Location(s)
Reputation/brand (trademarks/copyrights)
Team/employees
Financial savings via processes
Systems/processes
Strategic partnerships
Plants, operating equipment
Vehicles, furniture, real estate
The ability to understand financial metrics and business assets has a positive effect on most entrepreneurs and business owners. It forces them to stop focusing solely on financial goals (such as growing revenues and profits) and to figure out what business assets they must build to achieve those financial metrics.
Now that you understand these concepts, let’s take a moment to envision the financial metrics and business assets you have achieved and built at the time of your exit.
Let me give you a fictional example. I have a small company that sells organic sunscreen. My business-focused endgame is to sell my company for $40 million on December 31, 2018.
Working backward, I know from reading industry trade journals that businesses in my sector sell on average for two times revenues. To realize my $40 million sale, I need to be generating $20 million in annual sales.
I would like to generate 25 percent earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) because that would appeal to both myself and an acquirer. So, my EBITDA goal is $5 million.
Because the wholesale price for an average bottle of organic sunscreen is $7, I will need to sell 2.85 million bottles per year to generate $20 million in sales. Because my average customer will buy 4 bottles per year, I will need to serve 712,500 customers.
To achieve these financial metrics, I will need to build significant business assets. To improve our marketing, I will need to hire a vice president (VP) of marketing who has experience taking a brand national. I will need to hire a director of public relations (PR) and social media as well as a team that reports to the director. I will also need to build a customer service team. And I will need to hire a chief financial officer (CFO) to raise money as needed and manage our finances.
To ensure uninterrupted product supply and excess capacity when needed, I must increase the size of my U.S. plant and contract with an overseas manufacturing facility. I must hire a plant manager to manage these operations.
To sell 2.85 million bottles, I will need to be in 1,200 retail locations that can sell, on average, 1,000 units per year and 6,600 retail locations that can sell, on average, 250 units per year. To accomplish this, I will need to secure six distributors and get direct accounts with select retailers such as Trader Joe’s and Costco.
To sell the desired units, I will need to diversify my product line to appeal to various segments (e.g., men, women, children), so I must create these new products.
Finally, to allow the business to scale more quickly, I need to create standardized processes and systems around how employees are hired and trained, products are manufactured and quality control testing is completed, customer feedback is handled, new retailers are attracted, products are shipped to distributors, new suppliers are found and negotiated with, and new product ideas are identified and created.
To recap, the business assets and financial metrics I need to achieve are as follows:
Financial Metrics
Revenues: $20 million
EBITDA: $5 million
Number of customers: 712,500
Business Assets
Products: three new products created specifically for men, women, and children
Distribution network: 7,800 retail locations; 6 distributors; direct accounts with Trader Joe’s and Costco
Locations: two manufacturing facilities
Reputation/brand: national awareness developed through PR and advertising
Employees: Hire VP of marketing, PR/social media director, customer service manager, plant manager, CFO
Systems built: marketing, production, customers, distribution, shipping, purchasing, new product development
Now envision your company at its exit. What financial metrics do you need to achieve to realize the endgame or exit vision you specified previously? What business assets do you need to build to produce these financial results?
Go to www.startatend.com to download the worksheet for creating your vision statements and document your desired financial metrics and business assets at exit.
Courage and Congruency
Now you’ve created both your customer- and business-focused vision statement, including your (1) endgame or exit vision, (2) the financial metrics you need to achieve, and (3) the business assets you need to build.
It’s important to understand that your vision statements must be aligned. You’ll never reach your business goals if you don’t hold true to your customer-focused vision. And you must build the right business assets to serve your customers.
In addition to ensuring your visions are aligned, your visions must become part of you, your company, and your company’s culture. To achieve this, read your vision statements to yourself daily. Bring in key employees to share your visions with them. Make sure to display your vision statements for all employees to see. Post the customer-focused vision statement on your website, and share it with partners, vendors, and customers.
One company that lives their customer vision well is Zappos.com. In a daring move, many years ago Zappos eliminated its most profitable segment: drop-shipping. To avoid stocking every product, certain items were purchased on the Zappos.com website but fulfilled by manufacturers (a process known as drop-shipping). Although this was very profitable for Zappos because it incurred no inventory and storage costs, it resulted in a mediocre experience for customers because Zappos couldn’t control when items were shipped.
But because Zappos’ customer vision is “to provide the best customer service possible,” it realized it couldn’t offer this service. Although Zappos’ short-term revenues and profits were hit, which put it on the brink of insolvency, long term the company flourished, aided by throngs of fully satisfied and zealous customers. Zappos’ success resulted in a sale of more than a billion dollars to Amazon.com.
It takes courage to share your visions with the world. It forces you to take a stand. And often it presents a grandiose vision. Others may scoff and think you can’t achieve it. The good news is that those aren’t the people with whom you should associate anyway because they won’t help you achieve success.
Once your vision statements become part of your company culture, magical things will happen. You and your employees will be more inspired and employee decision-making will be improved because they will be guided by your visions. There’s no job manual for any position that covers every contingency. As a result, we’ve all heard stories of employees doing the wrong things, or going to extremes to do the right things. The latter is done when employees are guided by the right vision.
Note: Some parts of your business vision may not be appropriate to share with others. For example, you should share with employees that your goal is to achieve $X in revenue by Y date. But you may not want to share with them that you hope to sell the company at that time (they may get nervous about job security). Likewise, sharing financial metric goals with customers may not be appropriate.
A quick rule of thumb is to share any and all information you can with your constituents (employees, customers, vendors, etc.), except those items which might be misconstrued. To reiterate, telling an employee your vision is to sell your company might give that employee concerns about job security. Sharing your revenue or profit goals with customers might make them feel you are in it for the money or are offering higher prices than you should.
The Hero’s Adventure
The screenplay is complete.
