Have you done the mission, vision and values exercise for your business recently? The exercise can be great for giving clarity in setting our business direction. Sharing the results with your network can really help us to understand your business and what makes you right for a particular referral.
Is it time for a refresh?
Articulating your mission, vision and values is an exercise you may have done when you started out. Have you revised it recently?
We have lived through a global pandemic. We are in the middle of a cost of living crisis. We have a war in Europe. Our view of the world may have changed. Different things may be important to us. Your customers may have changed their priorities. Your mission, vision and values need to be relevant in today’s world.
If your business has been running for some time it may have evolved. Your original mission. vision and values may have evolved. Have you formalised and communicated the change?
It may be that new competitors have emerged. Some of these may have encroached in your space. The mission, vision and values that once differentiated you may have been compromised. This doesn’t mean you have to give up on what is important to you. However, you may want to look at how you express them, or demonstrate them.
Your mission.
What is your purpose? Who do you serve? How will they benefit? Getting really clear on this helps us in multiple ways. It should drive decisions on what products or services we offer. It can help us evaluate whether an opportunity is right for us or not. It should underpin our marketing. It’s a key message our network should understand if they are to provide us with the support we desire.
Mission statement examples:
Shopify: Make commerce better for everyone, so businesses can focus on what they do best: building and selling their products.
Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Ikea: Offer a wide range of well-designed, function home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.
TED: Spread ideas.
Amazon: We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection and the utmost convenience.
Vision statement
A vision statement should articulate where you are heading. It should motivate you and your team and ideally your customers to go on the journey. Your vision may be anchored far in the future or be something you want to achieve in 3 to 5 years. It will therefore need revising from time to time. Is it still relevant? Have you got there already? Here are some examples to inspire you.
Asos: Become the world’s number one destination for fashion loving 20 somethings.
Amazon: Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
Oxfam: A world without poverty.
Values.
You will certainly have values that you live by and you may have other values for your business. Have you written them down? Have you shared them? Can you remember them?
Too many people have too many values to be remembered and understood. Five is the maximum you should have. Other things may be important to you but they are not your core values.
You may choose to use a single word or a phrase to communicate your values. Where you choose a word you may wish to define what that word means to you. That becomes more important as your team grows. You will want everyone on your team to interpret and live your values in the same way.
I picked up a great tip from Martha Keith of Martha Brook London. Her tip was to organise your values as a mnemonic that helps you to remember them.
Here’s one example,
HEART: Honesty, Excellence, Approach, Respect. Teamwork
Our is SCILS : Support, Collaboration, Inspiration, Learning, Sustainability.
Communicating your values to your network can really help people understand you and your business. They can differentiate you from your competitors and be the reason people choose to recommend you.
Next steps.
Check that your mission, vision and values represent you and your business now. You may wish to do some research with your customers, advisers and network to see if they are relevant and understood. In my next article we’ll look at living and communicating our mission, vision and values.
