Vision, Mission, or Values?

What comes to mind when I say “vision”? What is the mission of your startup? A roadmap? or even the values you hold with the team.

Vision is something much more important than all the things mentioned above.

Mission is what your enterprise exists for. For instance, you need a bank for financial fraud and to open a deposit.

Values are a set of ideologies and rules that allow you to keep the spirit in the team and not disintegrate it. It’s like the principles, such as “never harm anyone” or “we provide only something valuable to a buyer”.

Values and mission are crucially important as well, but today we’ll talk about the vision, ’cause it’s the first step in building anything.

Vision is the vector you are moving towards and the endpoint in which direction you’re going. When you have a vision, then everything becomes clear. You understand the meaning of your company, and you immediately understand what is necessary and what’s not.

In other words, it’s a picture of what your organization wants to achieve. It gives employees a sense of belonging to something important.

Your vision should be greatly huge, so when you hear that you’re getting some goosebumps. The goal must be bold, sweeping, and large enough to inspire.

It also should be abstract and straight enough to clearly understand the direction.

As you might understand, it shouldn’t be formal. You’re not creating it for “big bosses”, you’re creating it for you and your team.

Let me give you an example. When we look at Apple, we immediately understand that this company is built around the innovation and vision that Steve Jobs had in the beginning. It’s innovation.

Apple’s vision statement is “to make the best products on earth, and to leave the world better than we found it.”

Got it?

For some of us, it can be a meaningless sentence that gives you nothing. But for Steve and for Apple, it’s everything.

When they want to produce a new product, such as a recent Apple Vision Pro, they first look if it’s co-related to the vision. And in most cases, it is. Including the fact that it has ‘vision’ in the name ;)

The whole world waits for them to come up with some new product. And the vision of Apple is the main reason why it’s the biggest company in the world.

No matter what the vision of the company is, it must correlate with the vision of each department, and it must be realized by everyone involved.

When the whole team understands what all the efforts are for, truly great things are born

And as Henry Ford once said, “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”

Great quote, and it truly expresses the main statement that I wanna convey.

How to Create The Right Vision?

Alright, now let’s talk a little bit about creating the right vision for your company.

As I’ve mentioned before, your vision should be pretty abstract but straight enough at the same time. It should give you goosebumps and inspire the whole cooperative to achieve the impossible.

With this set of rules, you can already experiment and try different versions of your vision.

By the way, you definitely shouldn’t do it alone. The vision should represent the idea of a company, of a product, or of a team, not just yours. Keep that in mind.

The vision should be open and explicit to everyone, not just developers and directors.

You can also test the vision. If I ask 25 random people about my company, will they give me roughly the same description?

Probably, your company isn’t that famous to be known from a mile away. So, in that case, I’d recommend you show the people your landing page, so they will be able to understand your product.

When I open a random page on the web, my first question is “Where am I?”. I randomly got here and want to know who you are, your offers, and how they can be useful to me.

So yeah, after the first several seconds, it would be pretty simple to understand the vision of the company, even if you haven’t used their product. Just a landing or an ad would be enough.

Almost Forgot

I wanted to say that nowadays leaders are too concentrated on the strategy, the structure of the company, and the revenue. Of course, all of these metrics and stuff are crucial, and there’s no business in the world that wouldn’t care about them.

However, the thing is that most of us are losing this sense of “startups”. It’s firstly your way to build ‘something’ from ‘nothing’. You implement your knowledge and skills to produce a meaningful product. Then you think about how to put value in the eyes of potential clients.

It’s a breathtaking journey that all of us, as entrepreneurs, are so happy to go through. So, don’t forget why you started. And don’t forget about the vision.

In fact, sooner or later, you might need to change your vision one more time. So you can always keep this article as a guide and use the same principles!