Organize your company with a Strategic Plan (Mission and Vision Statements)

In this blog, we have presented different tools that help entrepreneurs to organize the actions they must undertake in order to obtain their objectives. Therefore, I have presented how to manage risks, Blue oceans and the business model canvas. Today I will talk about another tool that I think it is very useful and is elaborating a strategic plan. There are different versions of how you should do it, but I will present the one we have used.

The first thing you must do is define the Mission and Vision Statement of your company. These two concepts have been widely discussed on the academic world, specially the last one because every company wants to be “the best”, “the largest”, “the most important” and not every company can occupy this place.

In spite of critics I think it is very important that our company establishes a Mission and a Vision Statement because it gives an identity and a path it should walk.

If you already have a Mission and a Vision statement for your company and you want to create a Strategic Plan, it is important that you give them a look because these elements are the starting point. Review its relevance today because it is very likely that you are going to have to adjust them to the present moment. Only until you have defined these two elements you should continue.

If on the contrary, you have never defined these two elements on your company I recommend you to take into account these guidelines. The mission statement should describe the reason why the company exists and answer the following questions: what do we do?, How do we do it?, For whom do we do it? And what values    are we bringing?

On the side of the vision, this element answers where do we want to get and it is necessary to establish a time limit and also answer where does the company wants to get, how does it wants to be recognized by clients, employees and society and what value proposition it is giving to society.

Having defined this elements, you can continue with the ones I will mention in my next post.

Image taken from Flickr.com