Don’t Become Vision and Mission Impossible
I’m sure that many of you know that there are plenty of important factors to consider when creating your business venture like financing, legality issues, partnering arrangements, services, products and marketing just to name a few.
It is also equally important to establish a good strategic plan and outline from the beginning of your start up. One simple procedure that can help you stay focused on your company goals and structure a clear standard for your venture is by creating a vision and mission statement.
Vision and mission statements are important because they help provide a simple outline and also they generate the base to construct your strategic planning upon.
Large corporations often spend a lot of human capital and resources to create a vision and mission statement, which they usually use as more of a marketing tool or public relations tactic rather than trying to create a true destiny for their firm.
Since we are small entrepreneurs just starting out we’re not going to waste a lot of capital on strategic management teams or consulting firms in order to say that we have the best mission “slogan” in our industry, which is what many of these big companies ultimately aim to do, you know “keeping up with the Joneses.”
However the young entrepreneur can learn and also benefit from the true underlying value of these statements and create your own to post on websites, place in marketing materials or just to keep between you and your partners in order to make sure that you guys are constantly following the original “idea” of the firm.
So real quick, here are the basics to remember when trying to create your statements. The Vision Statement should be done first before the mission statement and it should be short, precise and to the point. When creating your vision statement the main thing to remember is this phrase is trying to answer, “What do we want to become?”
Many of the best vision statements are only one to two sentences long, so remember it isn’t the length that’s important but rather the content. A clear vision statement will also build the foundation for and lead into the Mission Statement.
Instead of focusing on what you want your business to one day become, your mission statement should focus on the question, “What is my business or what is my business’s mission?” The mission statement is generally more in depth and much longer than the vision statement, but you don’t want to go overboard and write a publication article either. Once you create a good mission statement, more in depth strategies and ideas should begin to flow a little easier.
Basically your mission statement will deal with the present state of your firm or the reason for its creation, while the vision statement focuses on the future state of the business, saying where we want to go.
These two statements are both fairly short in length, but they are extremely important when starting a venture. Even if you don’t have a vision and mission statement and you have been in business for a while, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go back, analyze your firm and create the statements.
Also remember the statements are not just for show or for fun, they should be truthful, honest and once they are created you should eagerly seek to follow them. When you have a clear idea of your business’s “Vision” and “Mission,” succeeding becomes a little easier because it helps align your intentions and goals with the firm’s industry and product.
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