Mission Statement: Change The World

Mission statements, when done right, are as brilliant and specific as the North Star, serving as a reliable guide for your journey of many years called "your business" and "your life."   In the past 25 years the consultants in my firm have participated in more than 200 executive retreats and national conventions where the business owners and professional leaders worked very thoughtfully on constructing a mission statement.  We know a great mission statement when we see one.   

What is especially exciting about the mission statement of NetBooks is that the founder and CEO of the company, Ridgely Evers, has a blog and deconstructs his company's mission statement.  If you ever struggled with constructing a mission statement, this is the best way to understand how to construct one with meaning and teeth in it. 

If you are a small business with 50 employees or fewer, you live in the Sweet Spot of Service Excellence that fits with NetBooks and the Ultimate Duct Tape Marketing System.

What is most appealing about NetBooks and their mission is that it works just as well for the small business that has been attracting and serving customers, very well, for 50 to 100 years or more, as it does for the small business that just started in the past five years. 

Here's the NetBooks 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.

Can this be the silver bullet small businesses have been actively seeking? For every business owner who  discovered there was a management, marketing and customer relationship aspect to what they thought was their "main business"  this is a mission may bring a national sigh of relief.   While we think we are in the accounting business or health business or engineering business, for example, we are first in the business of attracting, wowing and keeping the trust of customers. Service and product excellence is now assumed and required to do business and that leaves management and customer connections as the areas we must master as well.

One last thought came to me as we read the Ridgely Evers bio on the NetBooks site and thought about all of the business owners we've coached who are around the same age as Evers and lived many of the same, small business adventures.   The owner of a successful veterinary practice said it best. "This is what they will say about our generation--the boomers and those who came right behind us.  Nobody has ever been ready for us.  We never left anything the way we found it.  All of us had a three word mission statement --Change The World--and many of us achieved it."

We are all rooting for NetBooks to achieve their mission, which will permanently alter the way the world perceives, services and resets business models for the economic engine of this country--23 million small businesses.

Comments

[Matthew Scott]

Georgia,

I have searched and read many attempts at deconstructing a mission statement. Most of them fell short.

Thanks for sharing this message and providing Net Books CEO mission statement with so many of us searching for an example.

Matthew