I had a moment this week that made me stop for a minute and have a lightbulb moment. I was on a call with someone outside of the Foundation organization and we were talking about what was going on during the disc golf “offseason” and how it seemed like we were so busy. I was explaining that this was kind of a slower time for us from now until February or so and that was when he said something that made me go “Oh! People don’t know what we’re building here.”

He said “I mean you all seem busy because at this point Foundation is almost like a media company!”

This made me chuckle and pause for a second because my initial thought was “Almost like a media company? We’ve been a media company!”

You see when we started getting really clear on what we wanted to build here and what our future looked like years ago, we shifted from a disc golf retail company that used media to market our products to a media company that sells and fulfills the products we promote in house. So this comment was funny to me because we have been intentionally building a disc golf media company for almost 5 years now and yet from the outside, people are just now starting to see it.

This lead me to another thought. Imagine building a house or really any construction project without blueprints. I could start the project and have a really clear idea of what I want the house to look like, how many rooms, how big, etc. and as I initially start and bring one or two people in I am going to be able to communicate that relatively well and all of us be on the same page. At some point, however, the team would grow and the plan would get less and less clear without it being written down. Then all of a sudden I would get frustrated with someone for making a room way too big or doing something completely wrong only to figure out that they thought they were hired to build a strip mall.

Now that obviously sounds ridiculous and the people in the construction industry are probably laughing at my lack of knowledge in that area, but hopefully you get what I am communicating.

You can also take this to directly apply it to my scenario from above. If we as the construction team have really clear plans and know exactly what we are building, that doesn’t mean it is going to be clear to those driving by while we are in the process of building it. Now I don’t think it needs to be, but we do have to be careful because someone might stop and start giving us advice or constructive criticism. Their advice doesn’t seem to make sense but since they are respected in the industry or older than us, we think that their advice must apply to us.

We start to implement their advice or take their criticism to heart and it just is not working. We are frustrated and go back to them with our concerns only to find out that when they were driving by, they thought we were building a car wash when actually we were building a grocery store.

The point I am trying to make is that a lot of times frustration can originate from unclear vision. That is either on the owner of the company not knowing themselves what is being built or on the owner not clearly communicating it to the team or advisors.

So if you are starting a company or you are like me and are in the early stages of growing your business, make sure you take some time to step back, clarify your vision, and ensure that everyone knows exactly what they are a part of building!

Since we are talking about Foundation as a media company, why not share some numbers! I actually pulled all of these together recently for our partnerships page on our site. So shameless plug, if you are looking to promote a product, check out that page and reach out!