Usually the 4th of July comes and goes for me.  I don’t really notice it, except it’s a time to get together with family and friends and picnic and barbeque.  This year I was posting a tweet on Twitter and I suddenly saw the words “Independence Day”, which took me back to the first time that I imagined what it must have been like for the men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. 

I put myself in their place and time – a time when all governments were monarchies, run by absolute rule of the monarch.  What a radical vision for their country they had – to be self-governed!!!  I could almost feel the courage and daring it took to envision the future, gather support for their vision and act in a way that risked their lives and their fortunes as well as that of their neighbors and friends.

It is a template for the starting of a business.  It’s creating something from an idea.  First comes the vision – the what of the business.  What do you want your business to be.  In the Declaration the Founding Fathers asserted “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”   What is your vision for your business?

Next what business problems are you solving for your clients/customers? The Declaration of Independence has a long list of grievances, or problems that it asserts to be solving.

There is nothing in the Declaration about HOW this is going to happen.  As a matter of fact the “How” did not get written down until almost 23 years after the first Declaration of Rights (which happened in 1765) when the Constitution was ratified in 1788. That didn’t stop the Founders from acting on their vision.  They fought a war, they created and attended Continental Congress’s they wrote the constitution – in other words they acted on their vision, before they knew the final form it would take.

The same is true of our new businesses.  The first most important thing is to create a vision of what we want, to communicate that vision to others (marketing) and to hold that vision as truth, before it has taken physical form in the way of products, clients and financial success.  The documenting and cementing of the “how” will unfold over a period of time.

After creating their vision, the Founding Fathers took “marketing steps” by creating a Contintental Congress where they clarified and discussed the next steps to “market” their ideas and make them a reality.  The same is true for our businesses.  Once we have a vision we must be able to communicate this vision to our potential clients and enroll them in the product or service so.  In this way we successfully solve the problems that we set out to solve for our customers and clients. 

Marketing is a two way street.  We communicate our message about our product or service and get feedback from our constituents – much like the politicians of the day communicated their message through the assemblies and got feedback from all participants.

Do we have the bravery and courage in creating our businesses that our Founding Fathers had in creating the government for this country?

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