How to Craft a Powerful Operational Mission Statement

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The Art of Crafting an Operational Mission Statement

In this part, we dive deep into the art of creating a powerful operational mission statement. We provide insights into why a compelling mission statement matters and give you actionable steps to create one that effectively communicates your business's core values and goals.

How to Craft a Powerful Operational Mission Statement – Transcript

So you're thinking about starting a small business, or you already have a small business and you don't know what to do next to make it grow. With so many routes to take and getting a business headed in the right direction, how in the world are you supposed to plan out your actions and know what to do next? 

Research and development, marketing, sales, branding, manufacturing, service products, staffing efficiencies — with so many tasks to complete as a business owner, it's hard to know where to start or what to do next. That's why it's important to define a mission and use it to guide your steps. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a large course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. If that sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe. 

In this video, we're going to be talking about how to define your business's operational mission and get an understanding of how the mission will affect all of your efforts as a business owner. 

Having a clearly defined and well-crafted understanding of the mission of the business is a simple enough task, but it's a cornerstone decision in successfully operating a business. And getting it wrong or not clearly defining the mission can leave you spinning your tires for years without knowing where to steer the ship that is your business. 

If you look online, there's a lot of websites out there that try to teach you how to create a powerful mission statement. or one that will inspire and resonate with your employees and customers. A lot of big organizations have lengthy mission statements with crisp-sounding adjectives that relate to their products and attempt to help their employees and customers understand how they should feel when interacting with the business's products or services. 

I'm here to tell you that in the small business world, at least, this strategy of crafting a visionary mission statement isn't all that relevant. Small businesses should instead be focused on an operational mission statement. An operational mission statement should clearly and concisely describe why the owners of the business created and continue to operate their business. It should be short, specific, concise, and clearly articulate what it is they want to achieve. 

An operational mission statement best follows this framework: I want to accomplish X by Y by doing Z, where X is a quantitative metric that the business is working to obtain. Y is a finite date in the future by which they hope to accomplish that metric, and Z is a description of how they plan to go about accomplishing their mission. 

Let's take a look at a well-articulated mission statement example: Just Marketing LLC exists to generate $500,000 in annual profit in less than five years while helping businesses market themselves effectively and maintaining a 40-hour workweek for all employees. There are three main components to the mission, and each of them clearly outline what the owners of the business are trying to accomplish. 

The first part, “Just Marketing LLC exists to generate $500,000 a year in annual profit,” describes what they're looking to accomplish from a quantitative standpoint. Quantitative goals don't have to take the form of annual profit. It can instead be a finite amount of money or be a specific number of people whose quality of life you're looking to improve. But it's important that this part of the mission includes a countable number and that that number is treated as a pass or fail for whether or not the goal has been accomplished. 

The second part, “in less than five years,” puts the business on the clock. It's important that a goal does not have an infinite amount of time to be achieved. Having a deadline will inspire you to take action. And viewing the quantitative part of the mission as a number by which success or failure will be determined, combined with having a deadline to complete that mission, will help you make future decisions about your risk tolerance. 

If I absolutely decided that I needed $1,000,000 in the next couple of hours, the best option that I could come up with right now to try to get that done would be to go to a casino and place $1,000 on black on a roulette table and then double down on that bet ten times in hopes that I never lose. While my chances of success would be extremely small, they would be better than if I had never acted and simply just tried to think of ways to make money until the clock ran out. 

Thinking about your goal and applying a deadline to it will help ensure that you act and don't let opportunity pass you by as you fail to decide what your next move should be. 

The third part of the mission describes how they will go about accomplishing what they've set out to do, and it's broken down into two parts. Luckily, they're not placing crazy bets at casinos. “While helping businesses market themselves more effectively” describes the value that the business will provide to make money. Hopefully, their marketing abilities are something that they've identified that there's enough demand for and that they're passionate enough about and skilled enough at to meet the demand in a way that they're able to accomplish their goals. 

And lastly, “while maintaining a 40-hour workweek for all employees of the business” also clearly communicates the third goal for this business, this part of the mission is likely speaking towards helping employees not mishandle their work-life balance. If you have any goals for your business that aren't necessarily quantitative or don't even necessarily drive your bottom line forward, they help you to find something you want to achieve or the manner in which you'd like to achieve your other goals, you should still include them in your mission.

So before you start operating a business, make sure that you have defined or revisited the reason for why the business exists in the first place. If you're the business owner, sit down and ask yourself, “Why are you doing the things that you do? Does it make you happy? If you look down the road, what do you want to improve about your life, and how is your business helping you get there?” Answer these questions and write down what you're wanting to accomplish and communicate and be sure to do it clearly, concisely, and, if at all possible, quantitatively, and you'll be able to easily describe what it is you're trying to accomplish to anyone who you'd asked to help you complete your goal. 

Revisit the mission statement of the company quarterly as you develop your quarterly budgets and strategy, and rethink if the mission still completely lists the goals of the owners of the company. As a note, If you include financial or personal goals in your operational mission statement, it may be best to set that as an internal mission statement to keep within your organization and keep your value goals public facing. If the example business were to do this, their public mission statement would simply be “Just Marketing LLC exists to help businesses market themselves more effectively.” 

Okay, got it — make a mission statement with a quantitative goal, an end date, and a plan for how I want to get it done. But what if I don't know what I want my quantitative goals to be? Or even what products and services I'll sell? Not to worry — we'll be talking about exactly that in the next video in the course. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that gives business owners all of the essential information to start and operate their business. We've provided a link for you to get access to all of the free and discounted business tools we mentioned in this course below this video. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next video, and if you have any questions, let us know.