Set Your Sights: 5 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Business Mission Statement

Business mission statements are explanations for an organization’s existence. They describe the purpose of a business, its intentions, and what the company can do for its owners, employees, and customers.

Before you print your business cards and sign up for a serviced office space, it’s incredibly helpful to create a clear focus by developing a brilliant business mission statement. Take note of the tips below, and your new business should be headed in the right direction.

Understand the Key Elements

Unless you truly understand what a business mission statement entails, it’s not easy to write one. You might also discover that you fail to answer the most fundamental questions required to give your business purpose and intention.

The most important are value, inspiration, plausibility, and specificity. Value focuses on what your company delivers for your employees and customers, while inspiration describes why people would want to work at your company. Plausibility is a reminder to make sure your business mission statement is realistic, and specificity involves tying the key points of your statement back to the business.

Be Open to Change

While it’s a good idea to keep your business goals open-ended to avoid limiting business growth, it’s important to know that your business mission statement doesn’t have to be permanent. Businesses evolve and change over time, so you can always go back and rewrite it at a later date. Keep this in mind if you’re having difficulty writing your statement due to its perceived permanence.

For example, if your business never used to put the environment first, but now it does, you might like to include a nod to Mother Nature in your new or improved statement.

Don’t Forget the Future

Your business might be new, but it won’t remain new forever. Don’t forget to incorporate your plans for the future in your business mission statement to ensure it remains timeless. Keep your goals open, and don’t limit your success by only considering what you hope to achieve in the early days of ownership.

Keep It Short and Simple

A business mission statement isn’t an essay or business plan that dives into the intricacies of your everyday operations. It’s a short, to-the-point statement that epitomizes why your business exists and gives prospective customers insight into who you are and what you strive to deliver.

If you’re unsure what this looks like, view the mission statements of well-known businesses to gain inspiration. For example, Google’s company mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The company also includes a few sentences about the features they offer and their overall goal: to help searchers form their own understanding of the world.  

Be Unique

Your business mission statement should describe your business, not every other business selling goods and services like yours. Put time and effort into making it unique so that it can never be mistaken for anyone else’s.

Think about what sets you apart from other businesses, and see if you can put this into words. The goal is to have your customers read your statement and see how it perfectly describes everything you stand for and deliver.

Writing a brilliant business mission statement can be challenging for even the most skilled writers, but you know your business better than most. Think about what sets your enterprise apart and why it exists, and you can have this crucial statement written and published before long.