Making your life better blog

4 things you need to know about your mission statement

Business continues to be tough.  We hear and have been experiencing a reticence from Customers to purchase products or make financial decisions about their individual situations or ones their business might have.

Between the internet, newspapers, television and radio we are bombarded on a regular basis from all sorts of enterprises making promises and offers.  After a while all of these offers start sounding the same.

We at Stage 2 Planning Partners have been spending a fair amount of time thinking about how to differentiate ourselves from others who might sound very similar to us.  As part of our analysis of who and what we are we thought it would be a good idea to revisit our mission statement.

What is a good mission statement?

The first step in analyzing our mission statement was to see if we used it internally, or if we could even remember what it was.  Unfortunately, we failed this test miserably.  No one could remember our tag line was financial strategies for life or how this “mission” really fit in with what we did on a daily basis.

Because we failed miserably in having a good mission statement we thought it would be a good idea to review what in fact a good mission statement is.

• A good mission statement is short, no more than seven or eight words.
• A good mission statement can be measured and answered with a yes or no answer.
• Everyone in the company knows what the mission statement is.
• The mission statement is woven through everything the company or firm does.

In our case the only part of the four points that we were successful in was the length of our statement.  Yes, financial strategies for life is short, but it can’t be analyzed with a yes or no answer.  Since no one could remember our mission statement it certainly wasn’t be woven into our fabric of service.

Our mission statement

After discovering that our mission statement wasn’t helping us in any way, we thought it would be important for us to change our statement with one that can be used on a daily basis and would have impact both with the people in our firm and with our Clients.

Our new and hopefully last mission statement is we make our Clients lives better.  This statement can be answered with a yes or no, it’s short and it can be weaved easily into every conversation we have with our Clients.

Now when we meet with a Client we can ask them if we are making their life better.  If the answer is yes, we can continue on with what we’ve been doing.  If the answer is no, we can suggest changes to get the answer to yes.  This allows us to regularly check in with our Clients to make sure that we are exceeding expectations they have about the services we provide.

Another great use of our mission statement is with potential Clients.  We now can go through the services we offer with someone who might want to do business with us.  As we go through the services we now ask the question “will this service make your life better?”  If the answer is yes, we’ll spend more time talking about that service.  If the answer is no, then we’ll move on to the next service we offer. 

Sometimes we get to the end of our conversation with a potential Client and we haven’t mentioned anything that would make their life better.  This tells both the Client and us that our firm is not the right firm for them at this time.  If, in the future one of the services we offer would make their life better, then a new conversation might be in order.

What you might want to do

I strongly suggest you revisit your own company’s purpose.  Ask yourself if your present mission statement is simple and can be answered with a yes or no question.  If you can’t positively answer the question above, you might want to think about ways of changing your own mission statement so it will be used in your company on a daily basis.

Because we are a regulated financial services site, if you would like to comment, please write me at jpatrick@stage2planning.com.

Josh Patrick

Securities and Investment Advisory Services offered through NFP Securities, Inc. (NFPSI), Member FINRA/SIPC. Stage 2 Planning Partners and NFPSI are not affiliated.
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