No matter what stage you’re on in your entrepreneurial journey, I strongly believe that it’s important for you to recognise the personal values that mean a lot to you, and to have a strong sense of purpose in the business that you own and operate.
The reason for this is that, while we all begin our journey with a unique sense of passion, focus and belief which serves us well in the early days, over time this often begins to fade, diluted by the growing number of new team members. Unless we set a guiding star against which those in the business can navigate, against which we can recruit new team members, against which we can make contextual decisions about what business we want to take on and how the business should evolve, then we’ll find ourselves in difficulties. We become distracted, not aligning ourselves with why we actually started the business, what ignited our passion, or where we found the focus and belief to get the journey under way.
In the corporate world it’s common to have a ‘vision, mission and values statement’, but these are simply words that come down from distant board members to be written on an office wall, and often the true culture and behaviour of team members has no correlation to the statement. This shouldn’t be an exercise in stating how you’d like your business to be, but rather an ongoing effort to ensure that the business and team members are consistently guided by the principles agreed and demonstrated by the behaviours in the business.
Establishing business ambition
Some people have a very clear idea of what their business’s ambition and purpose is, while others lack a certain clarity and direction. There’s a classic story about a cleaner at NASA who was once asked to describe there job, and replied, “My job is to put a man on the moon.” The clarity of purpose within NASA as an organisation at the time is clear.
While we may all be trying to put a man on the moon, we must still be clear in our ambition and purpose. So what is yours—what are you trying to achieve? What are your big, scary goals? What is your dream? Find a way to answer these questions and articulate that as ‘why’ and ‘ambition’ for your business. This is not what your business does, or how you do that— that is its essence. Rather, it’s your overarching ambitions for what you want to achieve.
Essence
The essence of your business is how you describe and set out how you are going to achieve your ambition. It will become a really clear statement about what you set out to do.
In considering your essence also stop, reflect and think about whether you have truly defined your ambition. If you have then it should be a relatively straightforward exercise to set out how you are going to achieve that ambition. Remember, however, that you should not be constrained by what you simply do now. This is about what the business needs to do to achieve its future ambition. Approaching it this way will provide the business and the team with focus on not just what you are doing now, but also what you need to be doing in the future.
Spirit
Every entrepreneurial business has a unique sense of energy to it, and a sense of emotion. Effectively, a spirit which defines how people behave and interact, and which separates it from the interchangeable corporates. At Evolve, our spirit embodies being caring, positive, passionate and empathetic. Reflect now on what defines the energy of your business.
Spirit can be a little harder to specify than essence, because it refers to the feeling people get when dealing with your business or when working there. It’s created by ensuring that what is important to you is thoroughly instilled in the culture of the business, and hiring people that fit with those principles.
Beliefs
Your beliefs should be the guiding principles that you and all of those in your business follow, that you want to see demonstrated day in, day out, be that in the interactions with your customers or the way in which you and the team interact with each other.
- This is an excerpt from Warren’s book, Evolve to Succeed, which is available here.