Paul Tiffany - Business Plans For Dummies

A vision statement not only points the way to the future, but also makes you want to get up and go there. It represents your company’s best hopes and brightest dreams. An insightful corporate vision is much more likely to develop out of a diverse team of hard-working women and men than to spring mysteriously from an inspired moment in the life of a leader.

The best way to create a meaningful vision statement resembles the best way to create a values statement. Just follow these steps:

1 Select a small group of dedicated employees from various levels across your company.If your company is small, get the whole gang together. If you’re the chief cook and bottle washer all in one, you can represent yourself, perhaps recruiting your significant other (or maybe even Mom … OK, not). The more people you involve, the broader the perspective you receive and the better the chances of creating a vision statement that truly reflects your company’s future.

2 Have the group re-read your company’s values statement and review the list of stakeholders, both internal and external, who have an interest in your company.

3 Begin a verbal free-for-all.Allow everybody to volunteer personal opinions and ideas about the company’s future, form, and direction. Start taking down a list and forming it into a cohesive statement.

4 When the vision team feels comfortable with the results, add the finishing touches to get your vision ready for prime time.

Although it may be only a couple of sentences or even just a phrase, the vision statement is the compass that provides your company’s direction into the future. Spend enough time with your statement to make sure that the north on your company compass truly is north — that it does indeed point in the direction in which you want to go.

Brush, rinse, repeat? No. As a rule of thumb, you should assume that your vision statement could serve the company for the next decade. But does this mean that you can never change the statement? Again, no; the disruptive times in which we currently exist has put just about everything in flux. But vision statements are not like your underclothes: you should change it only if business conditions truly warrant a new course of action. Keep in mind that the ideas you capture in your company’s vision statement aren’t meant to be crossed out or rewritten on a whim; they represent the lasting themes that guide your company at any time and under any circumstance.

But only diamonds last forever. If a changing environment throws you an unexpected curve, by all means alter your vision to reflect the new reality. You should craft your statement in such a way that it’s flexible to respond to a changing environment. If the words no longer have meaning for your company, they become useless. Again, the company’s vision statement is useful only to the extent that it has the power to move your people into the future, and words alone rarely do that. So don’t just talk the talk — you also gotta walk the walk.

Money categorizes you. Values define you.

Chapter 4

IN THIS CHAPTER

Putting together a mission statement

Tying strategic goals to your mission

Setting goals and objectives that make good business sense

In Chapter 3we show you how to create your vision statement. That exercise is focused on the aspirational aspects of your business. When done right, it allows you to define a future that comes from the heart, inspiring your co-workers as well as customers, suppliers, and just about everyone else in your stakeholder network to act in a manner that reflects the core values of your organization. Now it’s time to fire up those brain cells and get down to the specifics of just what you plan to do in the here and now that will bring in the customers and light up the cash register.

This is done through your mission statement. You probably already have a pretty good idea of what you want your business to become. But how do you make your idea a reality? You start by defining the business activities that your company plans to engage in, the goals that you expect to meet, and the ways in which you’re going to measure success.

In this chapter, we help you create a basic overview of your company and its activities, and we guide you as you shape your expectations into a mission statement. We introduce business goals and objectives and show you how to use them to measure the results that you expect to achieve. And we help you prepare to set your company’s goals and objectives and look at how you can use them to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your future business.

Mission statements originally were associated with religious or military organizations, but they began to catch on with business types when the U.S. government declared a mission to the moon in the 1960s. Mission Impossible became a big TV hit around the same time, and viewers began to understand how an explicit description of what an organization did would benefit everyone involved. The public sometimes was (and is) not quite sure of just what a firm does (“Dad… is General Dynamics some military guy in Greece?”). Perhaps even company insiders needed a better explanation of just why they were there and what they were expected to do.

More and more companies, in fact, post their mission statements for everyone to see. Some companies put mission statements in their brochures and even on their letterheads. Almost all now include them prominently on company websites. In fact, you can do an online search for the name of almost any business, large or small, using terms like “mission statement,” and you’re likely to find what you’re looking for.

What many companies are finding out is that a mission statement can be a powerful tool to communicate the economic purpose of the business to people both inside and outside the organization. It establishes who you are and what you do.

To be effective, your mission statement must

Highlight your company’s business activities, including the markets that you serve, the geographic areas you cover, and the products and services you offer.

Emphasize what your company does that sets it apart from every other business out there.

Include the major accomplishments that you anticipate achieving over the next few years.

Convey what you have to say in a clear, concise, informative, and interesting manner (a little inspiration doesn’t hurt, either).

A mission statement doesn’t need to be long. In fact, the shorter it is, the better. Even so, the task of creating one can seem impossibly daunting — the Mount Everest of business-planning chores, right up there with that vision thing we encounter in Chapter 3. One reason is that a mission statement has to sum up some pretty grand ideas in a few sentences. Another is that writing a mission statement requires business planners to ask themselves some fundamental questions — and come up with solid answers. And don’t forget, your mission statement should closely reflect the values and vision you set for your company.