Deconstructing a Mission
OK, so we have a mission.
Our mission is nothing less than to revolutionize the way small businesses are managed.
We do this for your company by uniting technology, people, and partners into solutions that are as simple as possible, and as powerful as necessary, to run your whole business.
But what, exactly, does it mean – for us, and for you?
A good mission statement should be clear, aspirational, and useful for making decisions. It should declare core values, and lay out a bold vision for the future.
Let’s see how we did.
We say “small businesses” to make it clear what our focus is. For the record, we define small businesses as those that have between two and about 25 employees (in some cases as many as 50), are owner-managed (and actively so), are owner-financed (no venture capital here), don’t have professional managers (no VPs in corner offices), and are profitable because they have families to feed. If that’s not you, then NetBooks probably isn’t the right product for you.
We say “revolutionize” because we’re keenly aware of the gap between what is and what can be, and that closing that gap truly represents a breakthrough.
We say “nothing less than” because we want to be clear that we won’t stop until we’re done.
We say “technology, people, and partners” because each one is necessary, but only together are they sufficient to do the job. The technology piece is no more important than our support organization (staffed entirely by experienced small business bookkeepers located here in the
We say “uniting” because we figure you have enough on your plate, and we see a big part of our job as putting all these pieces together into a single, cohesive, coherent solution so you can focus on the stuff that really matters.
We say “as simple as possible” because we think that simplicity trumps power. Put another way, when we hit a fork in the road where we need to choose between ease-of-use and power, we do our best to go down the ease-of-use path.
We say “and as powerful as necessary” to make sure we don’t leave out essential capability in the interests of simplicity. It also speaks to the reliability and robustness necessary to make sure we’re there for you (you should see our datacenter).
We say “to run your whole business” because we’re slaying the whole dragon, not just one or two limbs.
Finally, we say “your” because while we want everyone in your operation to use NetBooks, we never want to lose sight of the fact that you, the business owner, are our customer.
Implicit in our mission is that we’re counting on you for your insights, and to tell us when you think we aren’t living up to our goals.
If we do all this, then I think we’ll be doing a pretty good job.
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I think your vision, which is what you want to accomplish, is to “revolutionize the way small businesses are managed.” No one wants a revolution except revolutionaries (and folks who are in a lot of pain).
Your mission is to allow a “small business to manage their entire business with real time visibility and seamless connections with partners, suppliers, and customers.” You could argue that the telephone system gives you seamless connection with your partners, suppliers, and customers but it doesn’t give you real time visibility on your business. And seamless is kind of an overused buzzword. But it may be less cumbersome than “uniting with technology.” Also you leave customers out of your statement, which has to be a significant focus even for face to face retail businesses: in other words, even though they are interacting with the customer face to face they would like to complete that with a range of potential on-line/real-time options for interaction.
Anyway, I think too much of the Office 2.0 focus has been on the Enterprise, which is characterized by well entrenched IT staffs who are resistant to automating themselves out of a job or actually supporting non-employees (e.g. partners, suppliers, customers). I think Office 2.0 will flower first in VSB and SMB settings and you will do well with this approach.
Sean Murphy www.skmurphy.com