Business is all about being able to look forward and come through from where you are in the present. Sean Hutchinson, CEO/Partner of SVA Value Accelerators, talks about the Company of the Future in the value accelerator. He shares the intensive work his company has been doing with pivoting owners to advance towards their goals in the future. The Company of the Future is that strategy where you will have to think of the current and future state of your business. Get down into it as you answer the question of “Where are we going and how are we going to get there?” Sean breaks down the two tools that can help you find the answers to these questions: the graphics game plan and strategic doing.

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Company Of The Future: Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

We’re going to go through and do a continuation or a deep dive from an original episode with Sean Hutchinson of http://buildvaluetoday.com/ (SVA). He’s the CEO and partner. What we’re going to be talking about is the value accelerator methodology, Company of the Future. Sean, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Bob. It’s good to be here.

Let’s talk about the Company of the Future component.

As a reminder, a few principles from the first episode that we did. We have three classes of owners, three categories. We’ve got the explorers, we’ve got the pivoters and we’ve got the triggers. Explorers are seeking information and insights. Pivoters are working on value accelerator actively and intensively. Then the triggerers are owners who are looking in the short-term to transition ownership of their business.

Company of the Future is in the value accelerator. We’re working with the pivoting owners. Company of the Future is a strategy. Think about the current state, future state when you’re doing strategy, you’ve got two questions to answer. They’re simple questions. Where are we going and how are we going to get there? That’s all you need to answer. We created Company of the Future as a 90-day sprint and what we ask our clients to do is concentrate on those two questions.

They’re going to continue to run their business, it’s not like we’re going on a 90-day retreat. What we are focusing on in terms of value acceleration is where are we going as a company out of all the options out there? Where do we want to plant our flag? How do we want to create a direct path or at least a path that can efficiently get us there? Then what resources are we going to need both in our company and from outside of our company in order to activate that pathway?

What I’m going to describe to you are two things after using a few visuals here. I’m going to describe to you two tools. One is the graphic game plan and the other is called strategic doing, which is an agile strategy methodology. We believe in agile strategy and, I want to say as many times as I possibly can, this has a strong bias for action. The reason that we call it strategic doing is because strategic planning doesn’t encourage anybody to do anything at all except plan. Think about being in an action mindset throughout this entire process. That’s what’s going to count.

I want you to imagine that we have a picture from the Kepler Space Telescope that shows us all of the Milky Way at one time. What is that going to look like? It’s going to look busy. That’s the marketplace. When you’re looking at your universe of options, the marketplace is noisy. It has a lot of things flying at you, a lot of motion, a lot of dynamism. It’s hard to pick a spot that looks good. The first thing you’re going to have to do is chaos reduction. You’re going to have to learn what the essence of leadership is and that is k...