The mission statement of a company provides the foundation for everything that is to come. It’s a road map for success, surrounding what the business does, who it does it for, why it does it, and how long as far as its objectives are able to take them.
Without this statement in place, every decision made by management would rely on an assortment of external factors and outside considerations that cannot be relied upon.
A company’s mission statement typically addresses which of the following questions?
This article will break down what different aspects of these questions mean when deciding upon the correct mission statement.
Do You Have a Mission?
A mission statement is an objective summary of the business you are aiming for. The best way to make sure that this statement meets these four points is to review the following questions. Do these apply to your life as a business and in regards to your customers?
Is it something that can be achieved without having any negative effects on the company? Will this benefit your employees and its customers in the long run, or will it bring harm over time from implementing or approaching something along these lines?
What Does Your Company Do?
The first thing that you need to keep in mind when thinking about your company’s mission statement is what you do. By looking at a mission statement, you will be assessing whether your company is solely an assembly line that produces one specific item, or is there some kind of innovation involved.
If you are an assembly line, you will be evaluating the benefits that this operation has brought to your customers and what it has done for them in the past. You may not have had a great variety of different things for sale before to which customers could possibly turn to take their money.
By creating the item that has been already on the market, you are now covering a wider range of products than before if only by virtue of having something similar but with improvements.
If you are going after innovation, you will be assessing whether your company is working to bring something that was previously not in existence with your business into being.
This would include things like a new kind of food, a different way of doing organization, or even a new way of living. You will have to evaluate what the benefits and costs of this kind of innovation are from both an economic standpoint as well as from an environmental or health perspective and how these would affect both you and your customers in the long run.
Will Your Company Benefit Your Customers?
The second thing that you need to look at when constructing your mission statement is what your customers stand to gain from having this item or service. Does your company derive its value from having customers? If you do, you will want to make sure that the item or service that you are providing will be able to be sold in a way that benefits both parties.
The best way to ensure this is if your company’s operations provide something for the customer which is of more value than what they paid for it. For example, if you were selling a vacuum cleaner, you would want to make sure that the vacuum cleaner will be able to better clean the home of your customers than what they can do on their own.
You will also want to find out what their needs are like, and how you can address those needs. For instance, if your customers have pets that shed a lot of fur, you would want to provide them with a vacuum cleaner that is able to clean up after the animals.
If they are in need of more space, you may also want to create some kind of larger home appliance that can be used for purposes such as an oven or even a television. By looking at this from the perspective of what benefits your company and its customers from having this item or service, you will be able to determine how it will affect them in the long run.
Will Your Company Benefit its Employees?
The third point to remember is that the customers should benefit from having you in the marketplace as well. Depending on how successful your company is, there will be a certain amount of work involved. This can be seen by looking at the number of employees that you have as well as at their standard of living.
If they are not making enough, they have a reason to be unhappy and may look for more work elsewhere, which could lead to the downfall of the business.
