Guide to Writing a Vision Statement For Your Business

A vision statement helps everyone in your business to be on the same page and aim in the same direction

A vision statement is a future-oriented declaration of the purpose and aspiration of your business.

Your business strategies should be based on your vision since the strategy is intended to achieve the future you want for your business, and thus satisfying your business mission.

Having a great mission statement is important to the business philosophy, it helps you stay grounded and states what your company does and how they do it. But without the vision for the future, there are no goals to achieve, no direction to follow, and no drive to improve. Having a great vision statement is as important as having your mission statement or your goals listed.

The importance of a vision statement in your business

A business without a vision doesn’t know where it’s going. It’s a boat adrift. If you don’t know where you are going, you cant define strategies based on the future. The vision is also a benchmark, a positive description of what a business wants and believes it can achieve in a given period.

Imagine you take a drive while being hungry. You don’t know where you want to go but still drive around town for a few hours, you may finally run out of gas and go fill up. Maybe along the way you decide on a location and go there, but you will waste a lot of time and gasoline. If by the time you get in the car you decide where you want to go you will want to find the optimal path so you save up to gas and time. This analogy is the same for businesses without a vision, you may wander without direction and making emergency adjustments.

So lets take a look on how your vision is supposed to look like:

Your vision should…

Be positive

When thinking about the future you should look on the positive side, no one wants to be working at a business that will be worse in 5 years.

Be brief

It should be one sentence that you can clearly remember and keep in mind when working.

Be reachable

Aiming for the moon is great advice in concept, but you should strive for attainable and reachable goals that your business should aim for.

Be Measurable

In order to achieve goals, you have to keep track of progress. Having a vision statement that can be measured helps you see how far you made it in the specified time. By the end of your determined vision time, you should be able to know the percentage achieved of your goals.

Be comprehensive

Everyone in your business should be able to fully understand your vision on their first read. If you test your vision with someone and they have questions, you should consider rewriting your vision.

Have temporality

It is suggested to establish a vision to 5 years into the future. Imagine your business in 5 years and how does it look like.

Have a brainstorming session with your team

Now that you know how a vision should look like, assemble a business meeting with employees of every level within your business. This should help you get more perspective on how the future of your business should look like. Listen to everyone and write down every idea.

Every idea has to be honest, realistic, and concise. This is why having employees of every level can really help. Maybe the sales department wants to increase sales, and the human resources department wants to have a better workplace for its employees. all these ideas should converge into one solid vision that drives every department of your business forward.

Time to start writing down your vision

Now that you have a bunch of ideas and different perspectives is time to write down your business vision statement. Here are some questions to help you write down your first draft of your vision statement.

• What will my business be doing in 5 years?
• How will we do it?
• What problems will we seek to solve?
• Are there changes I believe my organization can make?
• What is my dream for this organization?