Establishing or redefining your company’s core values, mission and vision will have a direct impact on increasing top-line revenue as well as profit. Equally important, it will ensure you hire like-minded employees and build a culture of retention and growth. To that end, a growing business may need outside help to define its core values, mission statement, and vision statement. A fractional COO can help in this regard.
Core Values
Core values are the underlying principles that define your company since its inception. They are what makes your company special. In the Harvard Business Review article “Make Your Values Mean Something,” Patrick M. Lencioni wrote, “Values can set a company apart from the competition by clarifying its identity and serving as a rallying point for employees. But coming up with strong values—and sticking to them—requires real guts.”
The values that make your company special should be determined by the CEO or owner and any founders if they are different from the current owner. Core values are determined, in part, by asking “Why did we start the business?” and “What do we want to bring to our customers/ clients?” Determining the answers to these questions can — and should — take some time. Values are the things that should never get compromised. At MNK our core values are (1) work hard, (2) find solutions, and (3) serve others.
Your core values, if carried forward through the company, will have a positive impact not only on your company culture, but also on your bottom line. A company with strong core values will have employees who go the extra mile for customers, clients, and the business. Such interactions lead to increased customer and client satisfaction, which in turn leads to business growth. In fact, a survey on LinkedIn found that, on average, a company’s operating revenues and earnings growth increase by 19% and 28%, respectively, when its employees are strongly engaged with a company’s core culture.
Core values must become an integral part of your company culture. All your employees must be able to carry out these core values. But values must go both ways. If customer service is a key core value, then employees must have absolute backing from management to provide it. It takes only one bad instance to poison the entire value culture you have worked so hard to instill.
Mission Statement
Your mission statement is a summary of your business, your objectives, and your method of reaching your objectives. A mission statement may be the most difficult thing you will need to create because you will have to distill your entire enterprise into a few brief sentences. Your mission statement needs to:
- Identify the corporate culture, values, and outlook of the company and its employees;
- Address the commitment the company has to its stakeholders; and
- Be clearly and concisely written and easily understood.
At MNK, our mission statement embodies the above directives:
To listen, understand, solve, and execute on challenges by being more than just lawyers.
Vision Statement
The vision statement conveys the direction you see your business going. This statement can be a simple, inspiring sentence: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Or, in the case of MNK, “Empowering businesses to become the best version of themselves.”
The mission statement and the vision statement work together to briefly define what your business is and how it intends to move forward. Both the mission statement and vision statement enable potential investors, human resources personnel, and other individuals to describe your company in a quick encounter—an “elevator pitch.” Well-defined mission and vision statements are as critical as anything else you write (or say) about your company because they force you to think in crisp, precise terms about what you plan to do now and in the future.
For more information, please contact us at info@mnklawyers.com.
This material is provided for informational purposes only. It is not intended to constitute legal advice, nor does it create a client-lawyer relationship between MNK Law and any recipient. Recipients should consult with counsel before taking any actions based on the information contained within this material.
