Creating a Vision and Mission
For any business to succeed, it must know what it is about. It must be able to clearly describe why it is there, and what it is there to achieve. Developing a vision and mission statement is a way of articulating these ideas to yourself, your customers, your employees, and to the world at large.
A Business Vision that Inspires!
If you don’t know where you are heading, then you can make any choice and go in any direction (including backwards). The value in knowing your final destination (your vision) is that you can choose to take the specific paths that lead you there. Your action is intentional and keeps you pointed in the right direction.
Vision statements can take many forms. They answer the question: “What will success look like?” Their main purpose is to articulate the “dream” state of the business. If your business could be everything you dreamed, how would it be? To help you to craft your vision statement, try writing your answers to the following questions:
· Why did I start this business?
· When I move on from this business, what do I want to leave behind?
Radical Thinking
When was the last time you thought about taking your business to new and heady heights, but didn’t actually get any further? Don’t worry, you are not alone.
There’s plenty of business owners out there who let their brains stand in the way of fundamental changes in their business. We either think that we can’t do it, or we don’t know how to do it. Sound familiar?
If you want to do more than grow incrementally then you need to get into some radical thinking. It’s pretty easy to set a goal of selling 10% more, or getting 5 more customers. This is what I call an incremental target (meaning….just a little bit more than last time). This is better than not having any targets, but it does tend to leave you well inside your comfort zone.
Let’s talk about radical targets.
To achieve a radical target implies completely altering the ways things are done, and potentially introducing a new paradigm into the business. To set a radical target you need to make a leap of faith and suspend the part of your brain that reminds you you don’t know how to achieve it.