Step 3: Design Your Victory Lap Blueprint

Harry T. Jones
3 days ago
5 min read

Harry T Jones — Finishing well is the season when all your wisdom and experience converges into the most powerful season of your life.

This is Step 3 of a seven-part series on finishing well.

Step 1 was about taking care of yourself so you can serve others. Step 2 was about addressing the issues, relationships, conflicts, and fears that could hold you back.

Step 3 is about beginning to design what we call your Victory Lap Blueprint.

📐 Why a Blueprint, Not a Finished Plan

We use the word blueprint because most leaders do not get perfect clarity all at once. A blueprint gives you something to work from. You should expect to adjust it, refine it and mark it up as you get more clarity. But just committing your thoughts to paper will compel more clarity than you can imagine.

You have reached this season with a lot of experience, relationships, wisdom, and influence. And this is where many leaders get stuck.

🎯 The Bob Buford Question: Success or Significance?

Bob Buford built a billion dollar cable television company in the first half of his life. He was successful. But as he entered the second half of his life, he needed to answer a new question: “How do I move from success to significance?”

In an encore career, Buford went on to found Halftime, an organization that helps businesses and professional leaders think deeply about God’s calling in the second half of their lives. His work has influenced many leaders, including me, because he names something a lot of successful people feel but do not always know how to say.

You are normal when you win at business and still wonder what the next chapter of your life is supposed to be about.

This question is not theoretical. Finishing well is beyond succession planning, it’s about stewarding the season when all your wisdom and experience converges into the most powerful season of your life.

Here at Cultivating Impact, we have watched many founders wrestle with it in our Breakthrough Groups. At our retreats we use several simple tools that help leaders begin putting words around their victory lap season.

✍️ Tool #1: Write Your Obituary

Nothing morbid. This sounds uncomfortable, nobody really wants to sit down and write about the end of their life. But, trust me, it is clarifying.

At your memorial service, what would you hope someone would honestly say about your journey? What might they say about you as a husband, wife, father, mother, friend, leader or servant? What do you hope will last beyond you?

With all your family and cherished friends gathered together, you don’t really want them to carry on about the company you built and the money you made.

You want them to talk about the values you lived, the way you loved God and influenced people. Can you imagine all the people there who have been and will continually be impacted by your mission that you were faithful to even in your finishing well years?

You goal is to give the storytellers at your memorial enough material that they don’t struggle with what to say!

📖 Tool #2: Name the Title of Your Story

Another question: If someone were writing a book about the Victory Lap season of your life, what would the title be? This is personal. The title tells everyone what the book, your life, is really about. What is its theme?

For some leaders, the current title might be something they do not like very much. Maybe:

“He Built the Business but His Family Never Knew Him.”
“She Never Found Time for What Mattered Most.”

Those are hard titles to face.

But the good news is this: your story is not finished. You still have time to write a different title for the next chapter. Maybe it becomes:

“He Learned to Let Go Before It Was Too Late.”
“She Used Her Influence to Bless the Next Generation.”
“He Took His Mission Seriously, But Not Himself.”

That last phrase comes from Mats Tunehag, co-founder of BAM Global:

“Take your mission seriously, not yourself.”

That is a good word for this season of life. We should take our calling and stewardship seriously. But you don’t have to cling to an old role just to prove you matter. You are now prepared for your encore performance!

🗺️ Tool #3: The 10-5-1 Framework

Another tool that brings a lot of clarity in our retreats is to imagine our life in 10, 5 and 1 years.

Start with ten years. If God gives you ten more healthy, productive years, what do you believe He may be inviting you to build, serve, influence, or invest in?

Then move to five years. What needs to happen five years from now for that ten-year vision to be on track? Develop some relationships? Responsibilities to be handed off? What old roles would need to be released? What new platform might need to be built?

Then bring it back to one year. What needs to happen in the next twelve months for you to make your five year vision? What conversations do you need to initiate? Decisions? Who needs to be developed? And what do you need to stop doing?

That is what I like about 10-5-1. It connects long-term calling to a near-term plan. It brings the dream down from the clouds and into your everyday world.

💡 What We See at Our Retreats

At our retreats, these leaders begin to put language to things that have been stirring in them for years. Sometimes its new enterprises or mentoring younger founders. They grapple with the question of whether their existing company can still provide a platform for impact in another role?

That is important. Your Victory Lap Blueprint does not require you to have your entire future figured out.

Just start with what you know and see now. I love the old saying: go as far as you can see and you will see further.

You begin with what you know. You write, pray, talk with trusted advisors, ask better questions, consider possible scenarios. Pay attention to where your gifts, your joy, and the needs around you seem to meet.

Frederick Buechner said it this way:

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

That is worth pondering!

🔍 One More Question We Ask Leaders

If your business shut down in 90 days, why would that be bad?

Do not answer only financially. Go deeper.

What would employees lose?
What would customers lose?
What would vendors, families, communities, and owners lose?

That question can help clarify the real impact of your business. It can also help you see what must be protected, strengthened, or carried forward in succession.

Finishing well is not just about getting out of your business, it’s about making sure the right things continue. Your values, lessons, care for people, commitment to excellence, your faith expressed through work and your impact.