Building your business starts with you: your vision and your mission. I tell this to people all of the time and I usually end up getting a lot of questions as to why can’t those things wait. They want to focus their energy on marketing or business strategies and don’t understand why I press so much for them to first figure those two things out.
My answer? It’s rather simple. If you don’t have a vision and you don’t have a mission, what’s at the core of your business? Products you sell or services you provide aren’t the driving factors here. Think about why you started your business in the first place. Why did you do it? What did you hope to accomplish in doing so? What things do you stand for? What morals and values do you hold? All of these things are answered by your vision and your mission. They tell people, and help to remind yourself in tough times, this is who you are, this is what you’re here to do.
Now, it can get messy when trying to decipher the two from each other. Visions and missions are very similar, but they do have their distinct differences, and you absolutely need to have both. A vision is usually a grander picture of the future you wish to see for yourself that is created through your business. The mission then supports that vision and helps to keep you aligned day-to-day with all of the things that it will take to reach this idealistic future.
Figuring out what exactly your vision and mission are is not an easy task, that I understand. It’s hard to look not where you are right now, but beyond to a successful future version of your business and circle back around to try and figure out how exactly to make that version reality. But, as I always say, we have to do the hard work. We have to get tough and face ourselves and what it is we really want out of life through this business so that we can tell that to the world and help them to know us a little better. Because when people know who you are and what it is you do and stand for, that gets people to come back again and again better than any product on the shelf could.
You have to do that hard work yourself, but I can help to kickstart the process by giving you three questions to ask yourself:
What is my business? What is it’s entity? What do you provide the people with?
Who is it that you help by providing them with a product or service?
What promise do you deliver and what transformation are you creating for your customer?
Once you think you have the answers to all of these questions, we can begin working on the larger pieces. Think back to your vision. This is going to be the larger picture you have for the future and how you are going to use your business to make an impact on people and the world. Your mission gets clearer and more specific about what makes you and your business unique and how you conduct business so that it reflects back to that vision.
When we stop looking to outside sources and copy-catting the neighboring businesses to try and be successful and start looking inward towards the true core of our business, that is when we can find what our vision and mission exactly is. And when we know and can communicate it out to the world, our customers will also know what sets us apart and that is what creates those lifelong customers.
Strategies can wait, marketing can wait, hiring of more employees can most definitely wait. What can’t wait is your vision and your mission, for these two things are the foundation of any business and without them, you have no real guiding factor which can leave us lost and stuck in a state of trials and failures. Do some digging, find out what really defines you and your business, and put it out into the world. The world will thank you for it.
