Okay, so there’s what goes on your website as your highly-polished vision and mission statements, but when it comes down to it your business mission statement should really be just one line. This is the internal mission statement which could perhaps also double-up as being your mission statement proper, which you’d use in the famous elevator pitch, for example.
This one-line business mission is important because it’s what will get you through some of the bad times which are sure to come your way. To make a sports analogy – some of the greatest sportsmen I’ve followed over the years have gone through some major slumps which in some instances resulted in supporters and the media writing them off. These sportsmen then invariably make an impressive comeback and from my vantage point I attribute that to them having gone back to basics.
These “basics” are what you’ll need to revert to during the leaner times, but you need to establish them first so that you know exactly which target to aim at when called upon to return to basics.
So how do you go about formulating your all-important one-line business mission? It’s not as simple as it sounds because I mean I know exactly how “about us” pages discussing what your business is all about stretch out to 500 words or more. There is a natural inclination for business owners to want to give their potential clients and even their partners as much information about what they offer as possible. So you naturally don’t want to leave anything out.
However, when formulating your skeleton mission you shouldn’t think of it as leaving anything out. You should rather think of it as coming up with a concise and powerful one-line description of what you originally set out to do when you were embarking on your business endeavour. While “making money” would perhaps be the most honest one-line mission anyone anywhere could ever come up with, in this particular situation that won’t really help. You have to add a method to it and ask yourself how you originally planned to go about making that money.
There’s no shame in it at all – if anything that’s the sole reason why any of us are in business and if we’re not in business for ourselves then we work for those who are in business for that very reason.
So in formulating your one-line mission, complete the sentence “Our aim is to make money by…”
Now, to refine it and make it more concise, simply answer the question “What is YOUR BUSINESS?” to which question some of the best one-line mission business answers would be something like nursing home abuse lawyers. This professional one-line business description says it all, doesn’t it and it’s a great example to go with? Nothing would need to be added by way of more information unless the prospective client was explicitly enquiring about the specific details which would relate to their specific case.
Otherwise just one line which is all of four words long tells all involved everything they need to know and that’s the importance of determining your one-line business mission.
