Crafting Effective Vision and Mission Statements

Countless little things come with owning your own business, like making sure the lights stay on or the overhead is paid. Some of the intangible but equally critical elements can get lost. For example, have you spent the time to craft your business's vision and mission statements thoughtfully?

Having clearly defined vision and mission statements is essential to expressing to different audiences what you're all about and how you will achieve what you set out to do. Here are some of the most important aspects to consider when developing effective statements so everyone gets on board and wants to participate in your journey.

Think about these statements as a roadmap of where you want to go and how you plan to get there. The best vision and mission statements have these commonalities in mind:

Defining aVision Statement

State what reality your business is contributing to.

The vision statement is written in the present tense and should describe the larger idea of why your brand exists; it tells a story of how your business contributes to life itself. What does your company want to achieve? What future is your company contributing to? These statements usually begin with the word "to." Vision statements act as a goal for your business to strive toward — the big picture of what you want to achieve, a picture anyone can grasp onto.

Keep your vision statement simple.

Keep your vision statement to about two to three sentences or under 35 words. Start by writing down words that describe what your organization is about, what it does, the feeling you want to portray, etc., using only one-word descriptions. Then, pick a couple of keywords to play around with to formulate the vision statement. Keep it concise, not wordy.

You also want to keep in mind that your vision statement should be simple enough that people can remember it easily, even after not having it directly in front of them. Test your vision statement by asking those in your business to recite it at random to see if your idea is memorable and effective.

Writing a Mission Statement

State how your business will achieve its vision.

The mission statement is a general statement of what your business will do to achieve its vision. The mission statement should be one to three sentences, never exceeding 100 words.

Remember, the mission statement's purpose is to describe the methods behind your company's overall vision. The vision is a static mental image of the reality you're creating, while the mission is a dynamic process of defining the nuts and bolts of achieving the vision.

At Treadaway, our Strategic Branding Framework™ covers creating and defining your Vision and Mission statements while taking it one step further into the attributes your company uses in the marketplace to make each of those statements come to fruition.

Now that you've got an idea of how to create your guiding statements, you need to put them into practice with strategy-backed plans. Here’s how:

Step 1: Develop a Strategy

Use a clearly defined strategy mapped out by defining action steps with your vision and mission. These should be actions and plans of how your mission happens from day to day.

If you need help determining where to start, you might want to consider conducting a Brand Audit to assist in targeting touch points that need to be refreshed.

Step 2: Define Your Goals

Contrary to popular thought, your mission statement should be a goal. Your goal should be clearly defined statements of action that relate to a specific piece of your strategy. Your goals should focus on the most critical aspects of implementing the strategy.

Pay close attention to how many goals you set, as you don't want to lose focus by having too many. Also, be sure that your goals don't interfere with or contradict the other, as this could impede progress without you realizing it until it's too late.

Step 3: Define Specific Objectives

Your goal shouldn't be a to-do list item. It should be a destination requiring little steps to get there; these are your objectives.

Objectives are explicitly defined milestones and a timeline for achieving the goal. If you're not sure where to start, break down your goal into fiscal quarter-based achievements. This structure brings you back to your Goal, to your Strategy, to your Mission, and to your Vision every three months.

Step 4: Create an Action Plan

Action plans are specific implementation plans for how you will achieve the goals within the constraints of the objectives.

Determine what you can delegate, outsource, or eliminate to stay laser-focused on your intentions. It can help to identify stakeholders and decision-makers in your objectives and create buy-in from them.

Step 5: Re-evaluate as Needed

Remember that vision and mission statements are not static and should be revisited every couple of years or sooner to ensure alignment with your organization's position in the marketplace.

Regardless of what they say and when you say it, the purpose is to be transparent and clear in what your business is doing and working toward achieving — aligning everyone toward a future you're creating together.

Above all, follow the core values of your business.

Core values, or attributes, are how you behave while executing your mission — it's essentially your business manners, how you will conduct yourself at each step. Core values should represent your business (not you, personally) and be easy to follow and teach employees to carry out the business's activities.

Vision and Mission statements are essential so that everyone inside and outside the organization understands your business' goals and intentions. That said, don't write a Vision or Mission statement if you aren't prepared to execute it with strategy-backed plans.