While the Road to Nowhere was a beautiful place to run, the road to nowhere in business is a bad place to be, and it’s unfortunately a road that way too many companies, entrepreneurs, and business leaders find themselves hopelessly lost on.

A critical flaw that hampers many start-up companies is an inability to know who they are and what they do. Start-ups are often hastily assembled after all and fuelled by ambition and aspirations of world domination, however these dreams rarely have early substance and can rapidly turn into nightmares if companies don’t know what they do or what the target is. This problem is only worsened when companies face adversity due to lack of direction and start to chase the market or competition when they still haven’t established what they do or understand their own position in the market. If you don’t know who you are, where you are, or what you do, how can you possibly know where you’re going? The answer is you can’t, and I refer to the incessant spinning of wheels that results from this situation as being “lost on the road to nowhere”.

Now before I go any further and for full transparency, I’ve sold my fair share of air over my entrepreneurial career, and I can look back now at some of my greatest successes and scratch my head (and even cringe) when I review the road traveled and wonder how in the hell we managed to get by. That said, despite our lack of corporate maturity at times, we always had a plan and never resorted to flinging poo on the wall to see what sticks. Being driven without purpose, or having purpose without passion, are both losing scenarios. I am and always will be the guy who promotes rolling up your sleeves and getting to work, but the foundation of any business needs to be rooted in substance. And you need to be able to communicate your purpose to your customers and champion your ideas and vision.

Have you ever read a company’s website and struggled to understand who they are or what they do? Is the company’s mission and vision clearly stated? Do they appear to be empty words on a screen? I’m always amazed when a company lists all the elaborate and cryptic things they do without any focus or clear communication of a cohesive vision. I liken this to sitting down in a restaurant and being handed a 10-page menu that contains no culinary focus. I don’t know what restaurants you eat in, but if I’m handed a menu of that sort, I normally leave because I know the experience will be bad and I’m likely to be served sludge.

There’s an old saying that “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will suffice” and this is so true. If the destination is unknown, how will you ever know when you arrive? How will your customers follow you? My advice is simple: know who you are, always have a plan, revisit the plan often and revise it when necessary, seek scrutiny and don’t revel in your own great ideas, communicate well, be humble, under-promise and over-deliver, stop chasing what everyone else is doing and be yourself, never waiver in what you do until it’s time to shift gears or pivot, and always – and I mean always – have an exit strategy.