Values Shape Vision

"Are you running your business or are your contractors running your business?” 

These words hung and stung in the air. My coach was speaking the honest hard truth, which of course, is what I pay her to do. (And yes, for those of you who are wondering, even coaches need coaches. It's like sports. So long as you're in the game, it's amazing to have somebody to hold you accountable to doing the hard work in order to up your abilities.) This question really made me look at myself. It made me look at where my company was going and where, in some ways, I had lost my way. 

The challenge for us as CEOs is that, in essence, we are the creators of our companies. We're responsible for guiding them and for shaping them into their next era of evolution. For me, the biggest challenge of being a CEO is not the creation part. I live for that part of the work. I love making new things that didn't exist before. I love bringing them to light and life in the world. The challenge for me sometimes is carrying that vision, holding true and fast to it, even as the company evolves, as things grow, as people join the organization or leave it. That vision needs to stay true, regardless. It's my responsibility as CEO to be the keeper of that vision and to make sure that my team understands it, owns it, and can be accountable for bringing it to life in everything that we do.

But where does that vision come from? What makes it worth being a part of? What makes it something that inspires us on days where we are so busy just doing the work? And most importantly how do we come back to that vision when we lose it along the way?

For me, my vision for my company truly comes from my core values. The vision for Fearless In Training came to life after a season of creating enormous amounts of educational content for accounting practitioners. It was something that lit up by passion in a way that I had never known before. It allowed me to tap into a love of speaking and training. But back in 2016, when I was creating content for the company I worked for, I realized that I was only speaking into a certain subset of topics for accounting practices and that much more was needed. However, because of the nature of the company I was working for, we were crafting content all around what it meant to be an advisor. At the end of the day, our goal was to sell software, which meant the topics that I was able to touch on should ultimately come back to core features inside a product.

For me, there was an emptiness to this and I valued content in my own life that dug deeper and was focused on the personal development side of the equation just as much as the hard-hitting business development aspects. I knew that there were a lot of elements around what it means to be an advisor and scale a firm successfully that have that couldn't necessarily be taught in a blog post or a single webinar. I saw a shift happening in the accounting profession where more and more firms struggled to build this skill set, and I wanted to go deeper. I built Fearless in Training to be able to do that. The company came out of my belief in the value of offering more meaningful types of education for entrepreneurs through creating collaboration between practitioners and industry experts. It's also led to our newest training program that we just launched this month called Learning Lab.

There are many other elements of this company that have been shaped through my underlying values too. As a woman in tech, I knew the lack of opportunity that exists for other women looking to build the skill set that I had been able to over the course of my career. In an industry dominated by men, I had been lucky enough as a young woman to have worked for leaders that saw my potential and gave me opportunities. In order to level the playing field, I put a huge emphasis inside my company on a value that we refer to as female first, which means that we primarily hire and work with women or other partners that make equality and inclusion a huge part of what they do in order to increase the visibility of women in tech. This is more than a core value to me. It shapes the vision of what my company has become, where I now have a team of five women collaborating together and we have built amazing relationships with clients and industry partners who feel deeply connected to us because they share this same core value. 

Another value that has shaped my company is the idea of citing your sources. For me, so much of what I've taught and learned throughout the course of my career is the result of work that other people have done before me. Maybe it's just the academic in me, but I've never felt comfortable taking credit for somebody else's work. In turn, I also believe in the importance of collaboration and that if other people are creating great work that makes sense for my audience, it's not something that I need to go out and copycat or recreate. Instead, we put a focus inside our company on collaborating with others so that we can bring even more amazing education to light for the folks that we serve.

It's not just enough for me to sit here and talk about my core values. One of the biggest things I see lacking in organizations is a lack of understanding of what their true values are, and it becomes a barrier to their ability to thrive. Some people think that values are something you create one time and put up on your website or the wall of their conference room. When they aren’t landing clients that align with their values, folks think this is the result of their branding being off or that they simply need to redesign their website and suddenly they'll start attracting the types of clients they actually want to work with. I can speak from experience and say that's not the case. If you build branding that doesn't mean anything to you deep down isn't going to solve and start accelerating the number of qualified clients that come your way. What it comes down to is understanding your values first and then shaping a vision for your company from them to drive actions that align what you believe with what you do.

This is why the first session of Learning Lab that we're kicking off on next week is an exploration in understanding your values and bringing them to light inside of your business. This first session of the program is kicking off on January 28th, and registration for the year-long program is now live. Together we will begin an exploration of what it means to be a business based on core beliefs and it will tie into the next series of content we're creating around identifying your brand story, which will be featuring an amazing collaboration with one of our partners, Emily Soccorsy of Root + River.

What I want you to take away from all of this is that if you're a leader or founder, is that it's your responsibility to guide your organization’s values. If you’re wondering how to tap into that vision, it starts by looking within, and asking: What are the values that matter most to us as a company? My hope is that in uncovering these values, you are able to begin sharing them with the world and with your team so together you can move forward when your mission statement defines your vision that is deeply meaningful to anyone you work with.