Or, what are you doing, where are you going, and how do you plan to get there?  Many well-intended folks have made the honest errors of forming committees, conducting focus groups, haggling over minutiae, and taking months to write elaborate mission, vision, and strategy statements, only to set them aside as unrealistic, too complicated, or out of touch with the real world.  Conversely, others have written excellent statements and then erred in their implementation by allowing the statements to become trite platitudes with no real force or meaning.  There is a better way!

What is a Mission Statement?

Before you can write one, you must understand exactly what a mission statement is, and what it does.  A mission statement is a pithy summary of what your business ought to be doing.  When a NASA space shuttle blasts into space on a new mission, there are always several mission specialists on board who have lists of objectives they intend to accomplish on their journey.  Their missions are what they are supposed to be doing.  The mission of my practice, Senior Partners, LLC, is to:

Provide the Finest Relationship Experience in Our Market

We know that we are in competition with Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, Edward Jones, and a host of other big name wire houses and investment firms.  They have thousands of employees; I have twelve.  They have research departments; I have a paraplanner.  They have advertising budgets; I rely on word of mouth.  They have fancy downtown offices; I am in the neighborhood. They are household names; I can provide a superior relationship experience.  Neither can Merrill nor Fidelity match the experience I can deliver to their clients, and we win them away, everyday.  We don’t do this by dropping their entire $1 million 401k rollover into a mix of our own proprietary mutual funds or one of our cookie-cutter managed stock portfolios (we have neither). We do this by spending a minimum of an hour and a half in every client meeting to make sure we understand the client’s needs and deliver value to their portfolios.  We do this by serving them freshly ground Starbucks coffee with steaming baked pastries in the morning, and piping hot homemade cookies with herbal tea or an icy cold glass of milk in the afternoons, all delivered on our finest china.  We do this by finding them unique investment alternatives to traditional stocks and bonds so that their portfolios are well diversified.  We do this by sending a car to pick up elderly clients or drive them home when the sun sets before their appointment ends.  And, we do this by taking a slow, step-by-step, rather than a quick, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, approach to bringing on new accounts to ensure that both the client and the firm are a good fit for each other. In short, we make our clients feel special (and they love us for it), and we deliver real value to their financial lives (and they thank us for it).

Why a mission statement?

It is a rallying point and a decision screener.  First, a rallying point.  People have trouble getting excited and committed to vague notions of purpose.  They want to know what they are supposed to be doing, so that they can accomplish their tasks, find satisfaction in their work, and enjoy the fruits of their labors.  Without a mission, the people become listless, robotic, time card punchers, longing for quitting time, and daydreaming about the weekend.  Give people a mission they can sink their teeth into, and watch them take pride in their work.  Watch them keep their coworkers on track.  Watch them self-start, continuously improve, and set their own goals.  A mission statement is a framework for self-fulfillment.  Every organization needs one.

Second, a mission statement is a decision screener.  Every decision gets screened by the mission statement.  If it doesn’t serve the mission, we don’t do it.  Everything we do must be consistent with our mission.  As I have coached my team on the mission of our practice, they now bring far fewer decisions to me.  They know we’re in the relationship business.  They can now make many decisions on their own because they have the tool to do so.  It’s the mission statement.  They are empowered.  The practice is empowered.  The client reaps the rewards of an efficient, focused, savvy investment advisor, who knocks the ball out of the park every time he meets with them, because his staff has his back.  If you don’t have a good mission statement, you won’t make the best decisions.

Stay tuned for Vision and Strategy, which will be addressed in subsequent posts.