You may think that mission statements are just something for large corporations, however they can have a benefit to the one person business as well.
A mission statement should state three things:
1) What service you provide
2) Who are your target customers/clients
3) What makes you different from the competition
By spending some time focussing on these three questions, you can find that you have a greater sense of direction when it comes to marketing and explaining what you do when networking.
For example, using taxhelp.uk.com as an example, ‘we specialise in helping self-employed people pay less tax and avoid fines’ answers the three questions:
1) We provide tax and accounts assistance
2) to the self-employed, i.e. one person businesses usually
3) By specialising in the one person business area we are able to bring that experience to helping clients, rather than dealing with many different types of clients and perhaps concentrating on large cases.
Having a mission statement is a great benefit, it enables you to summarise everything when asked ‘what do you do?’ and to focus on areas that you specialise in.
People are usually surprised to learn that specialising actually brings in more business than being a generalist and trying to help a very large range of clients.
One thing to watch out for is how this message is communicated when there is more than one person in the business. For example I was at an establishment in the US recently where the sales person was obviously told they had to say their statement after every sale – except unless they actually believe the statement themselves it can actually damage the brand rather than enhance it!