Posted by Chris Kampfe

A few weeks back, our President asked me to help create a visual representation of his vision for our company. At a stage when we are tightening our future direction, it seemed a good time to make sure everyone in our organization understood what that vision is.

I decided to draw some inspiration from a book that I was recently turned on to called “The Back of the Napkin,” by Dan Roam, in which Roam contends that any business idea can be conveyed more clearly by pictures.

The task at hand for our company was a difficult one, being that we work within the payment processing industry – an environment surrounded by major players who make the rules, and bizarre language and acronyms that explain the rules. Going into the project, the level of difficultly to explain the complexities of the industry in a drawing seemed somewhere between running a lemonade stand and landing on the moon.

[The hoops a small business must go through to get a merchant account. The hoops get smaller and smaller, and once through, many companies leave you on your own.]

Not that I disagree with Roam’s philosophy by any means, but some things are brilliant in theory and slightly more difficult in execution – kind of like Democracy.

Our vision was, and is, to empower small business owners to grow their businesses into their dreams. But in a market that lends its success more from serving large corporations than “Ma and Pa” businesses, we know we have our work cut out for us. This was all the more reason why being able to communicate our vision became so integral to our focus and energy going forward, not only to our employees, but to our customers.

[The small business owner finds out how the PaySimple solution is helping other businesses.]

After a few pencils (and erasers) were reduced to nothing, we eventually found our “ta da!” moment, and the complexities of our company’s vision were able to be condensed into short slides with little more than stick figures and speech bubbles.

The process of recreating the vision in a predominately “visual” setting was not only an introspective look at how we viewed the greater responsibility of the company, but also a great tool to test different ways to communicate with our co-workers and external business partners.

You would be amazed at the amount of passion, motivation, and productivity can come from people who understand and are unified behind one vision. And when you have that many motivated people being productive, the only output for your company is growth.

[Home, Sweet, Home!]

I’d definitely encourage anyone to give it a shot with their own business… if only to play with crayons for an afternoon.

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