Use these business vision statement examples to spark ideas that give your business more va-va-voom.
Why Do You Need A Business Vision Statement?
It’s hard to find useful business vision statement examples that you can adapt and apply to your own business.
So that’s where this post comes in – with some examples of business visions designed to whet your appetite and get your creative juices flowing.
I have previously written a post about how to create a business vision, but I didn’t give many vision mission values examples from other businesses.
This post fixes that omission with a bunch of ideas you can use to pick and mix.
For many years, I found it hard to distinguish exactly what the purpose of a mission statement versus that of a vision statement.
That’s because they often get used interchangeably, or worse, confused with one another. So we’ll start with a quick definition to clear that up.
Your business vision statement is a picture of the future world, when you’ve achieved what you want.
In How To Create A Business Vision, I use the example of Martin Luther King Jr. To help his followers envisage a world without discrimination, he described how it would look and feel in his ‘I have a dream’ speech.
So what about the mission statement? Well, that’s about the journey.
Your business mission is an inspiring statement about the work that needs to be done to reach the vision. The Star Trek original mission was often summarised thus: “to boldly go where no man has gone before…”
Because they’re different, you can choose to have both statements. Or you can choose just to have one of them.
It doesn’t matter whether you pick a vision, a mission or both statements for your business.
What matters is whether or not the right people will believe in it, engage and enrol in it, become part of the dream team to achieve it.
Some people prefer to have a separate mission and vision statement.
They then follow this up with a series of statements about things like employee satisfaction, customer service and other factors.
Taken together they all relate to the way in which the company will operate while pursuing its long-term direction.
But the message can get lost in corporate-speak nonsense. It does nothing but dull the senses and turns off the people who are meant to care about it.
Nonsense written by committee is still nonsense, even when it uses fancy words. It’s also garbage that dulls the organisation. It’s a sign of weak leadership.
Don’t do it like that. It’s boring and snooze-worthy.
For your own business, keep it simple, keep it real.
Quite honestly, there is no value in corporate waffle and mystique when running a corporation anyway, let alone a small business with 1-100 people.
So when researching decent business vision statement examples to include in this article, I thought long and hard about what to keep and what to omit.
I have missed out some parts of the corporate vision statements because they’re dull. But where the core idea is strong, I’ve kept that in.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is my justification. I hope you find them useful.
When working with one client, I asked him what his vision for his business should be and he reeled off a huge list of things from his notepad.
If you can’t remember it easily, it’s not a vision, it’s a list or an essay.
So before we look at some real-world business visions, let’s set some ground rules for what is expected from your vision statement.
- Memorable, so it sticks in your mind and can be automatically spoken without having to think too hard about it
- Serves a greater purpose, so that people involved in your business feel proud to be a part of it, rather than just making you rich
- Focused, sticking a flag in the sand to say “this is what we stand for”
- Can be publicly shared, so can’t include expletives or other statements that are illegal, unethical or immoral
- Long-term, because anything worthwhile takes time to achieve; ideally your vision will stretch out to beyond 5, 10, or even 20 years or more
Business Vision Statement Examples
These powerful examples are taken from famous companies. You can learn a lot from these and along with the rules above use them when you develop your own business vision and mission.
Innocent Smoothies
“make natural, delicious food and drink that helps people live well and die old”
Coca-Cola Corporation
- To refresh the world…
- To inspire moments of optimism and happiness…
- To create value and make a difference.
Royal Mail Group
“Our vision is to be demonstrably the best and most trusted Postal Service in the world.”
But… Are These Good Business Vision Statement Examples?
It might seem a little bit tongue in cheek for me to put the Royal Mail Group in the list of inspiring examples above.
But the important point to be made is that delivering millions of parcels and letters is a huge business.
With thousands upon thousands of staff and a heavy legacy of public ownership, it needs a crystal clear direction.
If you were given the job of running the U.K.’s postal service, would you be brave enough to create a bold vision?