Creating Your Mission Statement and Personal Tagline

One of my favorite business leaders, Jack Welch, observed:

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion."

When Jack Welch General Electric after a 20-year tenure, GE had gone from a market value of $14 billion to more than $410 billion, making it the most valuable and largest company in the world. Jack Welch understood what having a mission statement could help to accomplish.

Your mission statement and tagline are tools that help you to express your values and vision in such a way that your associates, business partners and clients come to totally understand what you stand for and how you plan on delivering your promises. You can use a mission statement to differentiate yourself from your competition as well as directing your actions in such a way as to help you achieve your goals.

Your mission statement and tagline are essential ingredients of scripting your irresistible offer. Some loan officers prefer to combine the mission statement and personal tagline together. We believe this to be an exercise of laziness more than anything else. Your mini-mission statement, tagline or touchstone can not adequately express the ideas behind your mission, nor is it intended to. We will first examine constructing a mission statement and then tackle the issue of creating a tagline.

Your Mission Statement 

A mission statement is a clear, brief reflection of why you are in business (you can also have a personal one). It must contain your reason for being in the business and describe the business that you are in. Your mission statement should act as motivation for anyone connected to your business. It must be short enough so you can easily repeat it to your customers and referral partners. A mission statement should:

Study mission statements, but make sure your statement is yours and not some other company’s mission. And try to include ideas that your competition will have difficulty duplicating. But even if they can there’s something about being the first to say it. Who first completed the feat of crossing the Atlantic Ocean by plane – of course is was Charles Lindbergh. But who crossed it for the first time flying westward (against the wind, a much more difficult task)? Our guess is that you don’t know but rather than keep you in suspense it was Beryl Markham. Remember it’s important to finish first.

Try to include meaningful or measurable criteria to illustrate how you implement the values you include. For example, your commitment to communicate may be demonstrated by you having multiple phone lines, a real person attendant as opposed to an automated one and a guarantee that you will return messages and e-mails daily. Mentioning your moral or ethical position, public image, target market, specialization, geographic domain and your expectations of growth or profitability are helpful.

Every loan officer should construct a mission statement. Having a mission statement will also benefit you in the direction of strategic planning and execution. When making critical decisions ask yourself how this action contributes to my mission. If it does, execute it. If it doesn’t, bypass it.

The mission statement can range from a very simple to a very complex set of ideas. For some, a mission statement will represent the broadest perspectives possible but others will want to take an approach of being very specific. One of the most visible businesses globally, Disney has a one sentence mission statement:

“We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere.”

The Center for Business Planning offered two hypothetical mission statements for a fictitious airline at their web site, www.businessplans.org. The first sample is more specific:

Airco, Inc. will be the 'guaranteed' on-time airline. Maintaining the most efficient equipment in the industry, we will target a customer base of mainly young businessmen and offer them the lowest cost service on the west coast, with an objective of a 20% profit before tax and a 30% per year revenue growth.

And the second more general:

Airco, Inc. will be recognized as the most progressive enterprise in the transportation business. We will offer our customers cost effective transportation service within geographical areas and market segments that can benefit from our services and will insure a return on investment and growth rate consistent with current management guidelines.

Sometimes one mission statement is not totally practical. You can also create multiple mission statements to address broadly separate issues of your business model. America’s Mortgage Broker (“AMB”) offers two mission statements. After reviewing them we think you will agree that consolidating these two distinct ideas into a single mission statement would be awkward. The first is their consumer mission statement:

AMB seeks to help clients and referral partners to reach their financial goals. Our capacity to provide competitively priced mortgage products, quality service and personal attention should only be surpassed by our ability to listen, give excellent advice and place the needs of others above our own. We measure our success by customer loyalty, rather than by customer satisfaction.

And the other mission statement is for AMB’s employees:

AMB’s most important resource is “You”, the person who makes or facilitates a sale. Therefore, AMB commits to nurture you in acquiring essential knowledge and in developing effective marketing, sales and presentation skills. We will create and share operational principles and teambuilding skills that you can easily replicate. We will provide you with a broad lender and product mix assuring you access to the resources you need to achieve your highest level of success.

Tools to Help You Create a Mission Statement

FranklinCovey, one of our sponsors, has a Mission Statement Builder page on their web site (www.franklincovey.com/fc/library_and_resources/mission_statement_builder). This exciting, informative and interactive exercise will go a long way towards helping you in the perplexing task of creating a mission statement. Before taking this exercise I suggest you read “How to Write a Mission Statement” by Janet Radke (www.tgci.com/magazine/How%20to%20Write%20a%20Mission%20Statement.pdf)

Your Personal Tagline

According to Wikipedia a tagline “is a variant of a branding slogan typically used in marketing materials and advertising.” In creating your tagline you must strive to create a memorable phrase that sums up the tone and premise of your service. Below are some examples of famous movie/television taglines:

Notable corporate branding taglines include:

We believe you should attempt to create a touchstone when coming up with you tagline or mini-mission statement. A touchstone is a term coined by Mark Joyner, author of “The Irresistible Offer” and he observes:

[A touchstone is] One of the three elements of The Irresistible Offer. It communicates the essence of your offer in less than three seconds.

He suggests that your touchstone should touch as many of following four points as possible:

The eMortgageProfessor touchstone, “eMortgageProfessor – where 30 minutes a week generates $30,000 a year”, touches two of the four points. What does it cost? Thirty minutes and week. What’s in it for you? Another $30,000 per year. That’s enough to spark interest and furthermore expresses an extremely high return on investment offer!

In creating your touchstone, tagline or mini-mission you must use:

The Importance of Branding

Logo creation and implementation can have a dramatic impact on your business. It makes it easier for someone to remember you. If you have a logo, make sure that it aligns itself with your mission statement and tagline. For instance, eMortgageProfessor uses the image of Einstein to convey the value of its training. Here are some resources that you can use to create a logo:

After you have created your logo it is time to start spreading it around. The best place we have found for custom embroidery clothing and other items is www.queensboro.com. They will not create a logo for you but they will review your logo for free, confirm that it meets our standard-size free logo requirements, and, if necessary, recommend special treatments to make your embroidered logo shine.

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