Starting the Year with V2MOM
“Whether you’re starting a business, working to create alignment within your team or organization, or tackling a personal challenge or goal, one principle holds true: Start with a beginner’s mind and a blank sheet of paper.” Marc Benioff, Founder & CEO of Salesforce.
Setting Goals and Achieving Them
One of the methods that the eGuide team uses to set goals is V2MOM, a framework originally created by Founder and CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff that helps businesses plan out their goals, strategies, and approaches for seeing their achievements through. V2MOM stands for: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures
In Benioff’s book Trailblazer he recounts a flight in which he was seated next to a founder of a startup that was without direction. On the back of a beverage napkin he helps guide the CEO through the V2MOM exercise, ultimately extracting what was most important to the business, and a roadmap on how to get there.
So how does V2MOM work, and what is it about?
Visions
In the case of small businesses or emerging organizations, the vision (or the "North Star") should be able to account for the many unexpected changes and tribulations ahead.
For businesses and organizations that are just starting, don't get too deep into the specifics — have high-level and realistic goals. For more established organizations, try developing a vision that pushes your business to the next level.
When writing your vision, think about:
What do you want to accomplish? (Keep it to 1-3 sentences)
What impact will it have on your company, employees, customers, and community?
How can you make it inspiring, fun, and creative? It can and should be a reflection of you.
At eGuide a few of our Visions for 2021 are:
To be a sought after consultant for grassroots nonprofit organizations by leveraging experience with technology to impact positive change in organizations
To educate and empower small business and nonprofit leaders
To act as a small business guide for emerging and self funded businesses in marketing, technology, and leadership
Values
Values represent the principles or beliefs that are most important as you pursue your vision. Companies use their values to make clear decisions to support their vision. They can include words like “trust,” “customer success,” and “innovation.”
For example: Johnson & Johnson has an unwavering value of customer safety. In 1982, during a tampering crisis, it pulled Tylenol off retailers’ shelves, costing the company $100 million. A costly move, but one that symbolized their steadfast commitment to their business values.
When writing about your values, consider:
Which three values are most important as you pursue your vision?
How can you describe those values so that everyone is clear on what it means to live them?
How will these values guide your everyday decisions and tradeoffs?
eGuide’s Values Include:
Embodying our core values every day: Do Something That Helps Someone. Have Fun, Be You. Learn & Teach. Finish What You Start.
To foster a community through partnership
To always be improving
Methods
Methods represent the actions you take to achieve your vision. A small business should consider methods like the hiring of a team, rapidly developing the product, and building partnerships that help support, and will eventually achieve, the initial vision.
Another way to think about methods: when the US wanted to put someone on the moon, they had to account for the astronaut's survival. Some of the proposed methods were developing alternative liquid and solid fuel boosters, engine development, and unmanned space explorations to scout out where they were going.
Think about the specific actions that your company or team needs to take to achieve the vision. As you write out your methods:
Think carefully about what actions you need to take to achieve your vision.
What 5–8 things do you want to accomplish?
Do your methods align to the company's V2MOM? Your manager’s or business owner's V2MOM?
Prioritize the order of your methods with the highest priority method at the top
Keep your writing simple and inspiring
eGuide’s Method Examples:
Provide turn-key web design solutions via Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify that educate small business owners to better understand branding, user experience, SEO, and software tools.
Read, retain, and reference leadership literature, podcasts, and videos in a concise and useful manner. (Kind of like this blog post!)
Communicate a partnership approach to existing and new clients no matter the size of the opportunity.
Obstacles
Obstacles are things that block your progress, get in your way, or make it difficult to accomplish what you’ve outlined. Identifying obstacles before you jump into your work helps you anticipate challenges and proactively consider how to overcome them.
Businesses always have obstacles like time, money, hiring the right people, getting internal support, ensuring teamwork, getting to market, or leading by example.
Think about the most pressing obstacles you can think of that will get in the way of achieving your Vision? How might you overcome them? When writing your obstacles, think about:
What’s going to make accomplishing your vision and executing your methods difficult?
What do you need to be mindful of to overcome your obstacles?
What specifically can you do to overcome your obstacles?
Some of eGuide’s Obstacles:
Balancing time between client project work, internal projects, and development projects.
Keeping a pace of posting without getting fatigued.
Monetary investment required for certifications and partnerships.
Measures
Measures tell you and others when you’ve achieved success or successfully completed your methods. They focus on the measurable outcomes of your work, not your day-to-day activities. Methods can be treated as a benchmark for your goals.
Your measures could look like these:
Hire 200 people in our first year.
Launch our product prototype before the end of the second quarter.
Launch our website by February 1.
For each of your measures, how can you clearly define success? When writing your measures:
Think about how you know when you’ve been successful.
Focus on measurable outcomes, for example, “80% of managers rated as highly effective.”
Make sure your measures are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (or SMART, if you'd like to use the acronym).
Measures for eGuide:
One (1) coaching blog post per month (Check!)
Create Proposify templates that can be used for turn-key solutions
Increasing subscribers for eGuide newsletter and further segmenting to further identify target audience. 3% growth monthly.
You Have A Plan - Now what?
We’ve all been there - you go to a workshop, or attend a seminar, or read a really good book, and think, YES! I am going to put this into action tomorrow. Flash forward a few months and the concepts get fuzzy, the plan never came to fruition, and the intention is lost.
So how do we get from inspiration to activation?
Find your accountability partner. For eGuide we reference our V2MOM in our team meetings, and even if we may have missed an objective one month, we bring it back to life in the next one. Having that accountability factor helps to move the dial forward, sometimes slowly, but always forward.
There are some great tools that can bring V2MOM to life. We prefer Trello, and lo-and-behold there is a template already created and ready for you to clone and customize!
If you are more of a spreadsheet type of person, you can use our template HERE
No matter the platform, the same rules apply:
Make it a living document
Build-in accountability through calendar reminders, team meetings, or third-party check in.
Don’t be afraid to continue to adjust. Just because it’s done doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. We are not saying change your vision every month, but when it comes to methods, obstacles, and measures, the more realistic you are, the better the performance will be.
While the bar for 2021 is set super low coming out of 2020, we challenge you all to visit your vision, work through what values mean the most to you, chart out some methods of getting from “Point A” to “Point B”, be real with what obstacles you may encounter, and keep yourself accountable with measures.
