3-Year Picture™

It closes the vision page of the V/TO®, after the ten-year target and the marketing strategy, and the one-year plan on the traction page picks up where it stops. It gets rebuilt at the annual session. The rule is that everybody in the room has to see the same thing, so the bullets get specific. How many locations, which departments exist, and who is doing the job the founder does now.

Three years is the horizon where structural decisions live. Whether you need a second facility, a real finance function or a sales manager is a three-year question, and it gets answered by accident if nobody writes it down. The present-tense wording matters more than it sounds, because it turns a forecast into something a team can disagree with.

Worked example: An engineering consultancy of thirty-five people wrote a picture with two offices, a dedicated bids team and no partner working billable hours. The bids line was the surprise. It meant hiring a proposal writer within twelve months, which had been on somebody's wish list for three years and had never once survived a budget meeting.

Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Vision; Get a Grip, Gino Wickman and Mike Paton