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A Mission Bigger Than You Are For The New Year

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By Lindsey Tolino

Blake Mycoskie’s TOMS is an amazing business feat, no?

It’s a business set up with enough profit margin that a pair of shoes can be given away for each pair purchased. Even more notably, it’s a business that sells itself because customers have an immediate role in the mission through a simple purchase.

It’s amazing how much time and money people donate to organizations they want to support. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 62.2 million people volunteered through or for an organization from Sept 2012 to Sept 2013. Additionally, Americans gave away $335.17 billion in 2013, according to the National Philanthropic Trust.

Why would people give away this much time and money?

It may be as simple as this – for a chance to make a difference.

blue sky

Maybe people do it to feel better about themselves, maybe to become who they want to be, maybe they want to spend time with others who are volunteering, or maybe it’s guilt-motivated. But all of that pales in comparison with the motivation of feeling like you’re making a difference. We all have lofty thoughts and ideas of how we’d like to change the world, but we have limited resources and time. Consequently, we are happy to give to organizations that are changing the world in a way that we’d like to do.

We want to have a role in a mission that is greater than ourselves, that has an impact bigger than ourselves and that benefits more people than just ourselves.

What does this have to do with your business?

When you have a mission statement that your business can accomplish on its own and that benefits only your business, you create no space for customers to play a role in a greater mission. You limit their role to only profiting your business, rather than to being able to change the world with their dollars.

Selling great products with quality service is admirable. But if that is your mission, then it limits your business, your impact and your customers’ buy-in. An internal-profiting, able-to-accomplish-on-your-own-effort-mission is not really a mission, it’s a business goal.

However, if your grand mission is to change the ethical standards of developing world suppliers by the way you do business — how much more motivated are customers to support you?

A mission that is seemingly unattainable and requires support and action from multiple parties creates a clear role for customers to play. When it is clear that you need customers to accomplish your mission (like TOMS’ one for one – no shoes could be given unless they were purchased), customers can see their role and assume it. Where there is no obvious need for customers to get involved, they won’t.

I’m not telling you to create a manipulative business model with a mission that cons customers into buying in. It should be genuine. People can, and are often looking to, sniff out fake promises.

Yet, at the end of the day, do you really want your business to have been all about your own profit? Or do you want it to have made some bigger impact in the world? If it’s the latter, simply say that. Make it your mission. You can’t do it alone. When you create room for others to help, those who want the same world impact will buy in. They’ll support the business and market it with more credibility than you can. You’ll be in it together. Only then will you make a difference in the world beyond your own profit.

The upcoming new year is reminder that the future is a chance to make a change. If your business’s main mission is self-profit, 2015 holds the hope to make it about a bigger purpose.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino is a young creative who helps make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

Image info: Royalty-free image by Ryan McGuire from http://www.gratisography.com/

What’s the WHY of Your Business?

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Influence and Attraction

Purpose, Mission, and Vision

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Whether we’re working with a new businesses, a project, or a team that needs rebuilding, it’s typical to start with purpose, mission, and vision.

You have to choose your future before you can make it happen.

Though we might not fully agree on the exact definition of those terms, a true strategy will investigate, establish, and articulate these foundational ideas of mission, vision, and purpose before …

  • before auditing market share and position;
  • before studying current trends, cycles, and conditions;
  • before making product or customer service decisions,
  • before choosing a core community;
  • before considering processes and systems.

This list represents the “who” “how” and “what” of a business.

What’s the WHY of Your Business?

Making any key decisions without agreeing on mission, vision, and purpose is dangerous. It’s an invitation to hidden assumptions, shallow thinking, and miscommunication. Without clarity, everyone who might help you, your team, or your business — employees, vendors, partners, customers, friends — will construct their own definition of your mission, vision, and purpose.

Next time you want to influence people to support your idea, project, or business venture, next time you want to attract people to participate with you, answer these four basic question sets:

  1. Who are we? / What do we value?
  2. Where are we going / what are we building?
  3. How will we get there / how will we build it?
  4. Why is this quest important? / Why are we uniquely suited to meet this call better than any other?

These foundational questions require priority attention because they build they WHY of your business.
They underpin your best true, compelling story — the calling and commitment — that fuels your business and the people who want to help it grow. Yet, the last of these, the “WHY” fuels is of what moves us and the people we serve to action.

The WHY of your business is the bedrock of influence and attraction.
The WHY attracts people who share your values and believe in what you’re building.
The WHY calls the ideal employees, customers, vendors and partners to pitch in to help you build it.
The WHY is irresistible reason to join you in making something you can’t build alone.

What’s the WHY of Your business?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

What’s the YOU in What You Do?

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Your Strategy Is Uniquely Yours Alone

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I spend most of my days thinking about, reading about, writing about and talking about strategy for individuals, small businesses, and huge corporate brands. When you look closely at what I do, it will soon become apparent that like snowflakes that every strategy is uniquely different and in that way they’re all the same.

True strategy draws from who you are, where you’ve been, what you know, what you’ve experienced, and decisions you’ve made. So even though an individual, a small business, and a huge corporation might all have the same vision, mission, and goals. The opportunities that come to them are as different as who they are and what they know.

A solid brand is like your character. Build on who you are, not on a strategic plan.

It’s a serious risk to invent a brand that isn’t you or the values that your business is built upon. What happens when you do is that the brand becomes a bad facsimile of what you really are. And sooner or later the true you leaks out in some way — you don’t live up to what you invented.

You can’t write my blog post. You can’t give my talk. You can try to copy me, but you’ll always be a copy.
The value in what you do you is your own version of the way you do things.

I can’t be Copyblogger Chris Brogan, Oprah, or even my own mother, but I’m one heck of a Liz Strauss.

The closer we get to understanding who we are and what we value, the more people trust us to show up in ways that we say. They see, feel, and respect that we are living what we’re saying and they know they can trust that. It resonates with others when we ARE who we ARE, not just how we act.

And within us, our businesses and our corporation, the integrity and confidence of know who we are offer rich context that telegraphs itself to anyone who hears any one of us talk or anyone talk about us..

Don’t reinvent yourself. Don’t re-engineer new ways of reaching out.
Reconnect to your values and be what the best version of you is about.
That’s how you’ll attract the people who share those value with you.

It’s the YOU in what you do that makes the brand, the business, and the team work the way it does. No one can compete with that. People can join in, adding to the story and enhancing the mission.

The you in what you do is the ultimate barrier to entry. It attracts opportunity, but defies replication.

Read that sentence again. Information, products and services are all over the world and all over the Internet, but there’s only one YOU. No one can do, see, think or add the difference you make in exactly the same way you do. Anything that isn’t you … isn’t your brand – it’s discounting your true value and values.

That unique YOU is the part that people love, protect, stay loyal to, and bring their friends to experience.

You are the value. You are the difference.

Have you figured out what’s the YOU in what you do?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Be Irresistible: Find the Unique Opportunity that Is Yours in Any Moment

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Ack, What Do I Do Now?!

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Let’s just say it was in the last few years …
My life already had become all about working with corporations and individuals on simplifying their strategic goals. Daily I asked people questions. Sometimes the situation was about an immediate problem. Sometimes it was about far-ranging visions and goals. The questions were the same, the answers were sometimes easier to find than other times..

Five types of questions can get anyone to the best view of the opportunities in any moment:

  • Mission – Know where you are going. What is your specific and ultimate goal? Can you see it. What is your commitment to it?
  • Position – Know the unique place where are you alone are now. What is unique about where you stand in the situation? What do you uniquely bring to the table? How can your perceived weakness be turned into a strength? (if your back is against the wall, no one can come up behind you.)
  • Conditions – Know how change offers you unique opportunities. What has changed that offers an opening, an opportunity, that uniquely suits you?
  • Command Decisions – Know how to focus and sort which decisions move you toward your ultimate goal. Which opportunity moves you toward your ultimate goal? How does your response work toward making more opportunities? Which decisions will build a foundation for stronger opportunities tomorrow?
  • Networks and Systems – Know who will help you execute and how you will keep your process going. Who can help? How can you align your goals with another to make the movement faster, easier, and more meaningful for both of you? Where is the process so strong it’s invisible or so weak that it stand out?

Strategy is a framework for claiming the opportunities that uniquely our own to move forward toward a specific goal in realistic ways over time. Keeping an eye toward our end game — our mission — is only the beginning. If we recognize the unique opportunities inside every change — when we move, when circumstances move, when the people around us move — we can see a clearer way to that ultimate, specific goal.

Have you analyzed your unique opportunities lately?

Be Irresistible

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Are You a Freelancer or a Solo Entrepreneur? Use Guy Kawasaki’s Mantra as He Meant

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Guy Didn’t Mean Don’t Have a Vision or a Plan

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With the start of the Perfect Virtual Manager, I’ve been talking a lot to bloggers. Even more interesting is that I’ve been not talking to a lot of them. I’ve noticed something about people who work outside of a traditional setting. We fall into two categories: freelancers and entrepreneurs. Some think they are one, and they’re really the other. Which one are you? Do you know that for sure?

Guy Kawasaki wrote a wonderful post in January called, Mantras Versus Missions. Thank you, Roger von Oech, for reminding me of it. You see, I think some folks do as Guy suggests — make a mantra — and unfortunately, they stop there. That’s not what Guy said to do. He was talking about replacing a mission statement with something more focused. His mantra was meant as a guiding force, not as a replacement for a business plan.

A person with fabulous skills and only a mantra is a freelancer not a solo entrepreneur.

The two think and work differently.

Do you know how to tell a freelancer from a solo entrepreneur?

Turn the page and I’ll show how.
[Read more…]