Vivid Vision, the COO role, and the secret formula for business growth

Executive overview

Most businesses run on a one-sentence mission statement that fails to align teams, attract the right people, or guide daily decisions. The Vivid Vision fixes this: a four-to-five page written description of your company as it will exist three years from now, written as if you're walking through it.

The CEO writes it alone, then shares it with employees, candidates, and suppliers. It polarises — and that's the point. Pair it with the F×F×E formula (focus × faith × effort) and a strong second-in-command, and you have the operating system for scaling a company.

A vivid vision that repels the wrong people is more valuable than one that pleases everyone.

The Vivid Vision framework

• Drawn from how Olympic coaches use visualisation and how homebuilders translate a homeowner's vision into blueprints workers execute without supervision
• Lean out three years and describe every aspect of the company — culture, meeting rhythms, office environment, customer relationships — as if already built
• The result is a four-to-five page document, then polished by a copywriter
• Format is flexible: written narrative, press release, newspaper article, speech, video, or audio recording
• The CEO writes the first draft alone — getting too many contributors produces a generic, compromised output
• Roll it out to the whole company off-site; expect 10–15% to self-select out — this is healthy
• Update it quarterly: highlight completed sentences in green, in-progress in red; reverse-engineer goals from each paragraph into project plans

Using the Vivid Vision to hire and align

• Send the Vivid Vision to candidates before any interview; only bring in people who reply with genuine excitement
• This filters out misaligned candidates before wasting interview time
• Share it with suppliers and customers quarterly, not just employees
• A vivid vision also works for individuals: describe your future self across relationships, health, finances, and fun, then share it with people who can hold you accountable — or help make it happen

The COO role

• High-performing scaled companies almost always have a CEO/COO "two in the box" model (e.g. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg)
• The COO handles everything the CEO is weak at or dislikes; scope varies by company — finance, marketing, and operations may or may not report in
• Harvard identified seven distinct COO types in "The Misunderstood Role of the COO"
• Requires very high trust between CEO and COO — the relationship is the foundation
• The COO Alliance (minimum: $5M revenue, 30 employees) exists specifically because no peer community existed for second-in-commands

The secret formula: F × F × E

• Focus: are you working on the critical few highest-ROI activities, or distracted by busy work and social media? Rate yourself 1–100%
• Faith: confidence in yourself, your market, your team, your model — losing it shakes everything. Rate yourself 1–100%
• Effort: entrepreneurship is a 5-to-9 job, not 9-to-5. Rate yourself 1–100%
• Success = the multiplication of all three: 50% × 50% × 50% = 12.5% chance of success; 98% × 98% × 98% = 94%
• A small drop across all three compounds fast — optimise all three simultaneously

The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs

• Co-authored with Hal Elrod; Hal contributed the SAVERS morning routine: Silence, Affirmations, Visualisation, Exercise, Reading, Scribing
• Cameron contributed the rest of the day: leveraging a second-in-command, focus systems, and productivity habits for founders with ADD
• Core principle: put systems in place to be hyperproductive despite distraction

On advice and coaching

• Most business advice is opinion without data about your specific customer, lifetime value, acquisition cost, or business model
• Before seeking a coach, define what you want to learn and what gaps you need to close — then match the coach to that need
• Generic advice (e.g. "advertise on Facebook") ignores whether that channel fits your audience or economics