For Great Ventures™: Start with Passion, Vision, Opportunity, and Uncommon Offering

The starting point, or turning point, for all great ventures occurs at the intersection of passion, vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering.  You can have a good venture without all four components.  However, in order to create or have a great venture, you must nail each component.

Passion is the fuel of your enterprise.  It gets you through the tough times and amplifies the possibilities in good times.  All great ventures require action on the part of employees and customers to make them great.  Action is driven by both the logical and emotional aspects of a situation.  One might even argue the emotion is the more powerful driver for any action.  Thus, passion or some powerfully compelling emotion will raise the ceiling of possibility on any venture.

The Container Store is a great example of using passion to fuel a great venture.  They started the business with a passion for customer service and built their team with that in mind.  The only hired people who were self-motivated and team-oriented around their passion for customer service.  Then, they designed their training, processes, and compensation systems to fuel that passion for customer service and not to work against it.

Vision sets direction and targets on which to direct that passion.  Passion is great but, without guidance and direction, it won’t amount to anything more than cheerleading.  A vision sets the path for a great venture but a compelling vision connects with the passions of people and energizes that journey. 

Alan Mulally, Ford Motor Company President and Chief Executive, talked about overcoming the challenges of the great 2009 recession when speaking at the 2010 North American International Auto Show.  He said…

“I just can’t share clearly enough how important it is … to have a compelling vision,” he added. “If you don’t have a plan to deal with current reality and long-term growth, it is absolutely terrifying and you come close to losing your company.”

Opportunity is the space where passion and vision come together to stimulate the voluntary exchange of currency.  In this space, people have an explicit or latent need that must be met and they are willing to exchange currency to meet that need.  The currency is often in the form of money but could also be time and energy in spreading and sharing the opportunity with others.

Finally, the uncommon offering comes when you combine passion, vision, and opportunity in unique and useful ways to separate your venture from all the other things going on in this world.  This product or service package creates immediate value and helps you attract, get, and keep ideal customers and clients.  These ideal customers and clients then provide the booster power to propel you toward your compelling vision.

The Cheeseboard Pizza Collective in Berkley, California is a great example of an uncommon offering.  They are in a very common business – selling pizzas.  However, they have combined passion, vision, and opportunity to provide an uncommon offering.  Instead of providing a variety of pizzas on a menu from which to order, they offer one unique pizza each day as their only menu item.  These pizzas are vegetarian and use high-end ingredients and sell for twenty dollars a piece.  They frequently get people lining out the door and down the street to order their one pizza each day.

It takes time to find the right intersection of passion, vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering.  However, this combination is what determines your ceiling of success.  Thus, you must find ways to regularly, and rhythmically, work on getting them right.  When you do them right, you open up grand possibilities for your venture!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.