Technology
Setting your sights
How to give your company a vision
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Detroit | September 2008
Page 1 of 2
David H. Segura
Founder and CEO, VisionIT Inc.
Back when VisionIT Inc. was
a smaller organization, founder and CEO David Segura
could easily go out to lunch
with employees and talk about
the company’s vision and goals.
Now with 850 employees,
doing so is more difficult, forcing Segura to find other methods to communicate his company’s vision, including an
anniversary video showing how
the IT staffing company grew to
2007 revenue of more than $107 million, up 373 percent
from 2006.
“Every new team member that
joins our company sees the
VisionIT video and gained a better understanding and appreciation for where the company
started from and where it’s
going,” Segura says. “It allows
us to touch many more people
through that video.”
However, before you can
communicate a vision, you
must first research your industry, create your vision and then
stick with it.
Smart Business spoke with
Segura about how to get the most
out of your company’s vision.
Understand your current marketplace. Initially, you are setting
the groundwork of making
sure you’ve got all of the clear
data and information before
setting that vision.
You’re not always going to
have every piece of information, but you want to try to
gather as much as possible to
then look at and evaluate and
say, ‘This is where we are at;
this is what I have to work
with as far as resources.’ But,
also know that when you are
establishing that vision, there
are still always going to be
some, if not many, unknowns.
But, based on that framework,
you can establish a clear
vision of, ‘This is where I want
the organization to go. This is
how I see it operating. This is
what I see it doing. Here’s the
types of people I see that our
organization will have to
attract or groom from within
the organization.’
A lot of people have dreams
of, ‘I wish I could do this; I
wish I could do that,’ When
you start to really pepper
them with more questions,
you find they haven’t done a
lot of research on that industry — how they’re going to
get there, what the current
trends are.
I think what is important is
doing your research so you
clearly understand what is
happening in that industry
before you set that vision of
where you want the organization to go. From my perspective, a lot of the decisions and
game plans ... that we built for
VisionIT came from a lot of
research and planning and
strategy and then being audacious.
That’s the exciting part of
setting a vision. It is unlimited.
You may not have every aspect of it mapped out, but that’s
also part of the excitement of
setting forth that vision and
the experience and the adventure you go on in fulfilling that
vision.
Don’t overanalyze. Some people
are extremely analytical, and
they can spend too much time,
or they are not audacious
enough that they are so concerned about, ‘That might not
even be possible.’
It’s a nice balance between
doing research and gathering
data, but also timing is so
important and understanding
that there is a time to act and a
time to begin to move forward.
Sure, you aren’t going to have
every piece of data. You can
start gathering that information as you proceed forward.
But, if you stay in the visionary stage too long without
moving forward, the timing of
the opportunities may dissolve
quickly.
