Your Mission

You can’t share what you don’t have.

There is a story I have used in seminars for years about light bulbs. A man who built a very valuable name in real estate was known for talking about the small details in his buildings, and one of the details he came back to was a light bulb that had gone out. To him a dark bulb in a hallway was literally a dark spot on the name. Whatever you think of the man, notice what that did inside the organization. Every employee and every contractor knew that the detail mattered and would be enforced, so nobody cut corners. That is a mission doing its job, and it was never framed on a wall.

Mission is philosophy you can hand to someone

For most small business owners, the company philosophy is the same as their own. You run the business the way you think it should be run, and while it is just you, that works. The moment you hire one person, or bring in a subcontractor, or let someone else answer the phone, your philosophy either travels with them or it does not.

That is the mission. Your vision is where the business ends up. Your mission is how it behaves on a Tuesday. It is the answer to the question your newest employee is asking silently on their third day: “What actually matters here?” If they cannot answer that, they will fill it in with whatever they learned at their last job, and your customers will notice before you do.

The book calls this the internal brand, and I want you to see how it links to the vision lesson. The internal brand is the vision, the mission, the values and the belief system that guide daily operations. The outside, the logo and the truck and the website, is only a reflection of the inside. When the inside is fuzzy, the outside cannot be sharp for long.

What a real mission sounds like

Look at the founders of large companies rather than the companies themselves. Mary Kay Ash built a cosmetics company around a very clear philosophy about how people, mostly women, should be treated and rewarded, and you can trace her personal beliefs straight into how the company operated for decades. Look up her story. Then ask yourself whether that philosophy had anything to do with her success, and whether her famous love of one color had anything to do with the marketing. Then ask your best-run competitor what they do on a bad day, and listen for the rules underneath the answer.

What you will find is that a real mission is a set of plain instructions about behavior, nothing like a sentence about “delivering excellence.” We call back the same day. We leave the job site cleaner than we found it. We never tell a customer something we would not tell our own mother. We explain the price before we do the work, every time. Those can be taught, checked and enforced. “Excellence” cannot.

Here is a test. Read your mission to a new hire on their first morning and then send them out. Would they know what to do when a customer is angry, when a supplier is late, when they could cut a corner nobody would ever see? If your mission does not answer those, it is a slogan.

Writing it so it travels

Start with behavior, not words. Think of the last three times a customer was delighted with your business and the last three times one was upset. What did you or your people do in each case? Underneath those moments are your real operating rules. Write those down as short, plain statements in the language you would use out loud on a job site.

Then check each one against your vision. If your vision is a high-end shop with customers who never ask for a second quote, and one of your rules is “always match the competitor’s price,” you have found a contradiction, and the customer will feel it before you fix it.

Finally, keep it short enough to say. A mission that needs a binder is a policy manual. Three to six sentences is plenty. The measure of success is whether your people can repeat it without looking, and whether they act like it when you are not there.

This week

Write your mission as a handful of behavior statements and read it aloud to one other person, an employee, a spouse or a friend who knows the business. Ask them one question: “Based on this, what would you do if a customer called at 5:45 on a Friday with a problem?” If they hesitate, rewrite until they answer without thinking.

Writing it takes two or three hours and costs nothing. Getting it into the heads of the people who work for you is the ongoing cost, and you pay it in repetition: say it at the start of jobs, point to it when things go right, and point to it when they go wrong. A dark bulb is only a dark spot if everybody knows it is.