Fall Back in LOVE with your Business

Remember when you first started your business? It was exciting, exhilarating and fun. You couldn’t wait to go to work everyday and you felt so energized by it all.

As you are in business for a while and things start to get routine, you may begin to feel it all getting boring or burnt out from the frustration of dealing with the same issues over and over again. No one is immune to the problems of running a business – client dilemmas, employee complications, service headaches – even in a well-run company these things happen. After continuously solving issues, you tend to lose your stamina for doing it or maybe even lose heart.

Any long-term relationship (which is what you have with your business) has its ups and downs. You need to be able to rekindle the romance, think back on days when you were filled with wonder and joy with the relationship, the anticipation of a big sale, the excitement of growing the company, proudly seeing your clients and employees succeed, and the fullness of having a healthy profit. 

Go back to your mission, vision and core values. They are there for inspiration when you are not feeling good about your business. Review them and ask yourself are they still relevant? Do they stir up the feelings you want your team to identify with your company? Are they speaking to the culture of your firm? Do they resonate with your way of thinking, how you solve issues and how you treat your clients and employees? Do they capture the passion you once felt for what you do?

If you don’t have a mission or core values mapped out, no sweat, the exercise of creating them will bring back those feelings of why you started the business and how far you have come. It will also provide you with a reminder of how passionate you are about what you are doing.

Your mission statement communicates the purpose of the organization. What is your why? Need some inspiration on your mission either to develop one or check that yours is on point? Check out Simon Sinek’s classic TED talk  How great leaders inspire action.

Examples of mission statements:

• “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” …
• “Spread ideas.” …
• “To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” …
• “To build the web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”

The vision statement provides insight into what the company hopes to achieve or become in the future. 

• BBC: “To be the most creative organization in the world”
• Disney: “To make people happy.”
• Google: “To provide access to the world’s information in one click”
• IKEA: “To create a better everyday life for the many people”
  

The core values reflect the owner’s core principles and ethics. 

James Clear offers a list of core values to help you get started. Take a look and see what resonates with you if you can’t think of any on your own.

Those you hire should exemplify these values and if you hire right, they should feel like they have found ‘their people’ when joining the team. As for clients, if they are the right ones, they, too, will match your core values.

Take some time to reflect and fall back in love with your company and the passion you had when you started. You, your team and your clients will be glad you did.

Want to talk more about mission, vision and values – or any topic about running your business? Let’s chat.