I’m going to say something painfully obvious. To lead and operate a successful company, founders need to have a clear understanding of what they are building, why they are building it, and for whom they are building it.

Many founders spend sleepless nights stressing over missed deadlines, shortfalls in customer acquisition, failure to close key hires, cultural challenges, or perhaps a larger, lingering fear that something just isn’t working. For leaders struggling with any of these challenges, the first question they should ask themselves is: “What is my Mission and Vision?”

It’s surprising how few founders have written a Mission and Vision statement; what’s not surprising is the impact it’s having on their profits, their team’s culture, and their ability to get a good night’s sleep.

Writing a clear, crisp, understandable Mission and Vision statement is actually incredibly hard. It takes focus. It requires really good writing. It mandates ruthless prioritization and what can feel like a narrowing of scope. But it’s one of the most critical tasks a founder and leadership team can do for their business. So if you haven’t written one yet, prioritize it. And if you have written one, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you’re done.

So, what is a Mission and Vision Statement?

There are many definitions of a Mission and Vision statement floating around out there, but at its core, a Mission and Vision statement is a two-part explanation of why your company deserves to exist.

• Part one is The Mission. The Mission identifies the problem you are trying to solve with the product or service you are building and offering. The Mission is the “What” — “We’re Here to Do/Solve for/Provide X.”
• Part two is The Vision. The Vision informs someone (ideally your customer) how solving that problem will improve their life in a material way. The Vision is the “Why” — “We’re Here to Do/Solve for/Provide X, and This Is Why It Matters to You.”

Together, a well written Mission and Vision statement stirs a sense of inspiration; it helps your customer feel validated and seen (“Wow, they get that I have this problem! They see me!”) and inspires them to envision a future in which you’ve solved this problem for them (Whoa, you mean I would never have to do Y again??). It helps them immediately see the ROI of purchasing your product or service, of becoming a customer.

My goal here is to communicate how crucial writing a statement like this is to your business’ success; it should not be skipped, deprioritized, or viewed as “fluff.” A successful startup requires falling in love with a real problem that currently plagues a subset of customers. To solve it, you’re going to (or already have) request that investors fund your idea (with real life money), and you’re going to ask some really talented people to leave their jobs to come and help you. A clear Mission and Vision statement helps a founder explain why her idea is worth investing in and why people should join her.

Why should I invest all this time and effort writing a sentence or two when there are 1MM other demands on my time?

There are two compelling reasons to write a good Mission and Vision statement as soon as possible:

1. External: It will help you reach and convert customers. Your Mission and Vision forms the foundation of your marketing, and marketing helps customers understand and access products or services they need. How can you reach and convert customers if they don’t immediately understand why they need you? As Mark Cuban said in 2018, “If you can’t create a benefit for them [customers], if you can’t show them why your product is going to be better for them and their life than the other options out there or what they were doing before, you are not going to have a company.” Too many times, I visit a start-up’s landing page and — despite beautiful branding and a lovely, navigable website — I cannot figure out what the company does or for whom they’re doing it. Or, the point of the company requires a few lines of explanation by the founder, which just isn’t scalable. Take a minute and look at your website analytics. How many people are visiting your site and staying? If you’re seeing traffic to your site that then quickly departs, you either aren’t reaching the right audience, or the visitor can’t see a compelling enough reason to stay (which means they’re not becoming a customer).
2. Internal: It will attract the right talent to your organization and provide the foundation on which your entire culture is built. A great quote to anchor you in this thinking comes from entrepreneur Jeff Wold: “If every employee on your team can’t clearly articulate what you do or where you’re going, you’re not increasing your company’s probability of success.” Your Mission and Vision statement is your most effective recruitment tool; it should serve as the foundational reason people decide to join you. You want employees who are as excited about the problem you’re working to solve and the customers you’re serving as you are. It’s really hard to elicit a response from that amazing candidate on LinkedIn if you can’t efficiently communicate the Mission you’re on and why they should jump on board.

Remember that your (even small) organization is both, to quote engineering manager and author, Will Larson, “a collection of people and a manifestation of an idea separate from the individuals comprising it.” A strong Mission and Vision statement has the power to unite your team around an idea that is bigger and more important than any one person. A great Mission and Vision statement can serve as a rallying cry during inevitable pain points in your company’s growth. The language should imbue emotion and motivation; it can and should be revisited when your team is feeling burnt out, frustrated, disillusioned, or misaligned. A strong Mission and Vision statement becomes part of the vernacular at your company, starting the very first day a new employee on-boards to your team.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that writing a Mission and Vision statement is worth your time and effort. Now, we have to tackle the hard part: actually writing it.

Not all Mission and Vision statements are created equal. Avoid these common missteps:

1. The first and most problematic misstep when it comes to your Mission and Vision statement is not writing one. We’ve already covered why that’s a big mistake, so let’s move on to number two.
2. Navel Gazing. This happens when a founder starts describing how amazing their company is instead of showcasing a benefit to their end user. Your Mission and Vision Statement is not an exercise in ego; it’s a love letter to your customer. They should come to your landing page and immediately see the value you plan to offer them (versus hearing about how great you are). One of Google’s core tenets is “Focus on the user and all else will follow; ” Bezos is famously customer-obsessed. Make “user focus” your mantra as you craft your statement.
3. Flowery language. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “To understand is to know what to do.” The only way for you to leverage the material value of a good Mission and Vision statement is to write one that people can understand. This goes for both your customers and your employees. A Mission and Vision statement is an exercise in clear, simple writing. If you need guardrails on your writing, I suggest two tools: (1) The Gunning Fog Index: The GFI is a formula that generates a grade level between 0 and 20. It estimates the education level required to understand a specific block of text submitted to the tool. A Gunning Fog score of 6, for example, is easily readable for sixth-graders. Text aimed at the public should target a grade level of around 8. Simple, understandable, memorable. (2) Imagine each word in your statement costs you $100 out of your pocket. Better yet, actually have it cost you $100/word. You’ll quickly learn to pare down.
4. Getting too attached. As a founder, one of the hardest challenges is balancing your love of your product (it’s your baby!) with feedback from the market. If your customers or employees are telling you that they don’t understand your product, your website, or your tagline, listen to them. Remember, you fell in love with a problem, not a specific solution to it. So take off the blinders! Get a lot of feedback on your Mission and Vision statement and be radically open to scrapping what you’ve written (even if you love it). Your success depends on people comprehending the value of your product or service — so drop your ego and don’t get attached to language that you like more than language your customers understand.

After reading through all the missteps, writing a Mission and Vision statement can seem daunting, but start with a story — your story — and you’ll be moving in the right direction in no time.

Research shows that our brains were built to think and — even more importantly — to remember in narratives. Everyone knows the compelling story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin bringing the promise of Google into existence in Susan Wojcicki’s garage. We know that story because Page and Brin told it to us. It became an inextricable part of Google lore and thus memorable to investors and customers alike. Their story made the invention of a technical titan seem both relatable and doable; it helped us see these founders (now billionaires many times over) as unassuming, scrappy, tenacious entrepreneurs (like you!). It demonstrated that even the most ambitious mission can emerge from the humblest of environments. So before you try to write your Mission and Vision statement, jot down your origin story or tell it to someone out loud. How and where did you come up with your idea? How did the lightning strike — what was the moment that sparked your obsession with this problem? What room were you in, whom were you with, what did you see, smell, think, and feel in those moments? Why were you willing to risk as much as you have to solve this problem? Anchor yourself in the story of your company’s inception, and I can promise that the road to your Mission and Vision statement will be clearer.

So what’s an example of a current company with a really good Mission and Vision Statement?

Let’s take a product a lot of teams use right now: Slack. A simple navigation to their “About Us” page and bam! There’s the Mission and Vision statement, front and center:

Slack’s statement is an artful example of how you can, depending on your product, weave your Mission and Vision into one statement. The Vision here is a future state where your work life is a simpler, more pleasant, and more productive one. It appeals to your experience as a person who is working; the “work” isn’t the customer; you, the worker, are (and slack cares about your work life being easier!). Slack’s mission is to make this dreamy future state a reality for employees around the globe. This leaves space for a second sentence to explain how the tool brings this Mission and Vision to life: “We’re a communication hub that brings the right people, info, and tools together.”

When a Mission and Vision statement is this clear and this simply written, your target customers understand why you exist and can decide if they need you. The Gunning Fog Index of Slack’s statement is an 8.04. Crisp writing like this dovetails nicely into marketing materials, too. Slack’s tagline, “Where work happens” is an equally simple but grippy soundbite made possible by the restraint of the Mission and Vision statement.

Do you already have a Mission and Vision Statement?

Great! Now the challenge is to stress test your Mission and Vision with two questions.

• Question 1: Does it make sense to my target customer? Here’s a way to test this: write down your Mission and Vision statement and send it, with a link to your website, over to someone completely outside of your company (maybe even outside your industry). Can they reflect back to you, accurately, what your company does, sells, or provides, and why? If not, back to the drawing board with you!
• Question 2: Does it make sense to my team? Test this with a simple exercise: get your executive team in a room (or use your next exec team meeting) and ask, without prompt or explanation, that everyone take two minutes to write down your company’s Mission and Vision. Even simpler, ask the team: “What are we trying to solve at our company and who are our customers?” Have them read their answers out-loud or submit in a Google form. How much variance do you see? I encourage you to repeat this exercise with your entire organization to assess how successfully your leaders are communicating the Mission and Vision — the what and the why — down to the teams that report into them. It’s important that your entire company and front line employees, not just the leadership team, are connected to the Mission and Vision and can communicate it to customers.

As we part ways, I encourage you to reflect on this insight from the Harvard Business Review: “Finally, don’t forget that your organization has its own story — its founding myth. An effective way to communicate transcendent purpose is by sharing that tale. What passion led the founder(s) to risk health and wealth to start the enterprise? Why was it so important, and what barriers had to be overcome? These are the stories that, repeated over and over, stay core to the organization’s DNA. They provide guidance for daily decision-making as well as the motivation that comes with the conviction that the organization’s work must go on, and needs everyone’s full engagement to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Read more from Margaret and get in touch with her on Twitter @marggabriel3.