When working with clients, I often see a commonality amongst them where they are not taking the time to think about the future of the company. They fail to address fundamental questions like:
Why am I in business? Why am I excited about going into this particular business?
How big do I want it to be? Who are the people I will help? What will it look like? What is the “end game”?
It’s this realization that prompted me about this particular mistake business owners make that often prevents them from reaching a high-profit growth point.
Let’s start with defining a mission statement and why it’s important.
Defining Your Mission Statement
It’s important for every business owner to define their mission right away, even if they’ve been in business for many years. Many business owners don’t take the time to go through this process, yet it is vitally important.
Your mission statement answers these critical questions:
- Why does your company exist?
- What problem do you solve?
- Who do you serve?
- How many customers do you want?
- How much money do you want to make?
- What is your core purpose?
An example of a mission statement would be McDonald’s, “To be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience.” Or Google’s is: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
As you can see by these two examples, these statements facilitate the ability for you to connect with your audience right away. They “get” why your business exists! And they “get” why they want to be on the team!
Defining Your Core Values
Once you know what your mission is, you need to ask yourself what are your deeply-held beliefs? What are you going to hold yourself and your employees accountable to when it comes to how they behave when representing you and your business?
The core values are what you hold as being sacred for you personally and for your business.
Core values will:
- Shape the culture of your business
- Determine your business structure, processes and procedures
- Establish a high threshold for your employee’s behaviors
- Set you apart from others in your industry
- Attract the right type of employees and customers
Take the time to write out your core values in clear, concise language so everyone clearly understands what they mean. Add them to your employee handbook and even create a poster hung throughout the company.
What is more important to creating core values is ensuring they are upheld throughout the company. If the day-to-day operations and the way you behave isn’t matching what has been defined in your core values, then your employees and customers will notice and this is actually worse than not having them defined at all. Granted, living up to your core values is a journey. So even if your core values don’t paint an accurate picture of where you are today, it is the roadmap to the destination you desire.
Why You Need to Have Values Plus a Code of Conduct
The natural thing that comes out of your values is to then define a code of conduct. A code of conduct essentially tells your employees how you expect them to behave.
A code of conduct helps everyone understand:
- The right thing to do isn’t always obvious and there are consequences for their behavior;
- There are legal and ethical consequences to actions;
- Colleagues, customers and the community expect you to comply with the laws and your values;
- Tells you how to act ethically, legally and responsibility.
A code of conduct sets the expectations for when bad things happen to good companies.
Unfortunately, no organization is immune to wrongdoing so setting a code of conduct will again make it clear that there are consequences to such actions.
Some examples of people in good companies sometimes do wrong things are:
- For personal gain such as embezzlement, stealing company property or taking vendor kickbacks;
- For the benefit of a third party such as duplicating invoices, commission schemes, and supplier or contractor fraud;
- For wanting to help their own company such as financial statement fraud, bribery, price fixing, or contract bidding fraud;
- For not reporting wrongdoing or asking appropriate management when in doubt.
As you can see, a code of conduct is vital to have in place in any business so everyone is aware of the standards and expectations of them. Failing to do this could cause immense financial losses from legal investigations, lawsuits and loss of valuable customers.
What a Vision Accomplishes
A vision is the simple statement that looks out to the future and inspires your team. Where you mission is what you’re doing today, your vision is defining how you see your business in the big picture down the road.
An example of a vision would be Disney’s, “To Make People Happy.” Or ours at Quantum Ascendance is “To provide people with the knowledge, skills and confidence to achieve professional and personal abundance.”
It’s important to come up with your vision on what you want the company to be in the long term. This also needs to be communicated internally to your employees.
A vision provides you with:
- An aspirational description of what you want to accomplish short and long term;
- A guide for choosing your current and future courses of action;
- Assistance in winning the hearts and minds of your team;
- A foundation to create a winning culture that people want to be a part of;
- Inspiration for employees to give you their best effort.
It’s very important for every business owner to define their mission statement, values and vision in order to create a solid foundation from which to work from. Failure to do so will cause a disconnect between you and your employees as well as your customers.
These kinds of disconnects will most certainly prevent your company from achieving the high-profit growth you desire.
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