You will often hear the word ‘mission’ in branding and figure it’s a bit of a cliché but having a more compelling mission statement is so important in times of struggle as it can act as a jolt back into action when you lose momentum.
Sidenote: Mission vs. Vision
Your vision statement is the BIG idea; it describes where the company wants the world, the country or a community to be as a result of the company’s products and/or services. A mission statement is the roadmap for the company’s vision statement.
Done right, a mission statement can be the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning – and here’s 5 key ingredients you need to make that happen for you and your team.
Just like setting goals you want to make sure they have certain pillars to help you achieve them – but not to fast or too easy. So we add these 5 key ingradients to make them SMART goals.
The same goes for your mission. Your mission also needs to be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
Let’s look at each one and see how you could apply it to your mission statement.
SPECIFIC
Rather than just saying you want to help businesses grow or you want to save the forests, try adding how you might help them grow. Are you finding new ways of achieving a common goal?
For us its helping small business owners discover their unique competitive advantage. We have a unique and trademarked process so we can be specific.
You might have a different way of doing things, a different way of dealing with people or a special piece of equipment you use. The key is different or unique.
MEASURABLE
How do you measure how close you are to your goal? Without some form of metrics how will you ever know how far you have to go?
Adding metrics and numbers to your mission will make it compelling. Like Parkinson’s law we will fill any available time we have, so adding metrics to measure success by will keep us on track.
ACHIEVABLE
It’s important to make your mission achievable, but not too achievable.
You may want to consider the metric by which you will measure success – for us its to help 10,000 small businesses by 2030 – so we can work out that we need to help 1 business a day. That sounds more achievable than 10,000.
If we said we want to help 10,000 businesses this year it would be an amazing goal to have but completely unachievable for us without making significant change to our business model.
RELEVANT
We can have ambition without relevance – that’s a fact. So when you are putting together a compelling mission you have to make sure it is actually valuable to the target.
We are on a mission to help 10,000 small businesses discover their unique competitive advantage by 2030.
Because when you find it and you know what makes you truly different (besides your personal DNA), you can clearly communicate your value in order to grow faster.
Ask yourself, ‘what impact will this have on my target client?’ because it needs to be relevant and valuable.
TIME-BOUND
Parkinson’s Law is the old adage that work expands to fill the time allotted. Put simply, the amount of work required adjusts (usually increasing) to the time available for its completion.
If your mission is not bound by time, its a dream or a vision.
To be compelling and have purpose in itself it needs to be time-bound.
We are on a mission to help 10,000 small businesses discover their unique competitive advantage by 2030.
This is the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning and because it’s specific and measurable we know when we need to put our foot on the accelerator or when we can invest time in other areas that might help us get there faster.
It helps us make impactful decisions.
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