WHAT IS A VISION STATEMENT?

By Katherine Arline

A carefully crafted vision statement can help you communicate your company's goals to employees and management in a single sentence or a few concise paragraphs. While a well-thought-out statement may take a few days or weeks to craft, the result will be a tool that helps inspire strategic decision making and product development for your business for years to come.

Why is this important if your company is already successful? According to a recent study that appeared in the Harvard Business Review, up to 70 percent of employees do not understand their company's strategy. Failure to understand your company's position can lead to poor decision making at all levels of an organization. For that reason, the first step toward crafting a vision statement is to take a careful look at where you are as a company, your place in the industry and your realistic goals for the intermediate and long term.

Vision statements are aspirational; they lay out the most important primary goals for a company. Unlike business plans, vision statements generally don't outline a plan to achieve those goals. But by outlining the key objectives for a company, they enable the company's employees to develop business strategies to achieve the stated goals. With a single unifying vision statement, employees are all on the same page and can be more productive.

Linsi Brownson, founder and creative director of business strategy group Spark Collaborative, said a vision statement is an opportunity to revisit what first fueled your interest in starting or owning the business. "The best way to begin is to reflect on some of the most significant events or ideas that have impacted the company so far," Brownson said. "It often dates back to the owner's childhood interests or experiences that ignited a passion, which ultimately led to the creation of the company."

So, what should a vision statement contain? "A high-quality and inspiring vision statement for a small business should have two key characteristics: It needs to state where the company wants to be in the near future, and it also must have a level of excitement and motivation to it," said Andrew Schrage, founder and CEO of financial consulting firm Money Crashers. "Use your company-culture description for more details on the goals and direction of your  business. "