Within your business plan’s executive summary, there are three key elements that should appear. They are:
- Mission
- Vision
- Goals
Your vision should state where you want your business to be in the future. It is important to recognise what the purpose of your business is, and why you are in it. It states something that you aspire to achieve.
Your mission, on the other hand, is the ways in which this vision will be achieved. These will form the foundation of who you are as a business, your market positioning, and what you promise to your customers.
Management Consultant Wendy Fogarty gives an example of the relationship between vision and mission in her own business called Important and Imperative Business Solutions. “Our vision is to be your commercial success partner in business,” she says. Her mission is as follows: “the way that we aim to do this is providing a range of management service solutions to establish small businesses that drive business performance and achieve real results.”
Your business goals are inextricably linked to your vision and mission. By using SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound) Goals, you can create targeted statements that can be achieved within a certain time frame (both short term and long term) that will feed into the accomplishment of your mission.
“Once you get that core right, and you know who you are in the marketplace, and where you want to be, how you’re going to do it, and then what goals in the short-term and the long-term you need to have to be able to achieve it.”
Make it your personal mission to create a business mission, vision and SMART goals as the foundation of your business plan. This article is based on an extract from the MentorNet mentoring program session on Business Planning, which was presented by Wendy Fogarty. For more information about HerBusiness’s mentoring services, see the Mentoring section of this website. Or, click here to enrol in the upcoming Business Plans Made Easy course.
This article was co-authored by Elizabeth Rowe. Elizabeth graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (English Literature) at the ANU and a Masters of Media Practice at the University of Sydney. She is currently completing an internship with HerBusiness.
