The crowd of budding entrepreneurs is growing fast as it has started becoming a more acceptable choice of career in society. The first image that pops in one’s mind when they imagine an entrepreneur, is a young, charming person with expensive gadgets, superior technology, and a high bank balance. The reality is often far from this romanticized idea of what entrepreneurship truly is. Therefore, this acceptance comes at the cost of propagating a contorted view of doing one’s own business, one that conveniently ignores the challenges and numerous hurdles faced by an entrepreneur.

The truth is that not every business becomes an automatic success, especially when the people driving it are acting in auto-pilot mode.

For any successful business venture, irrespective of scale, an essential factor is its strategy. An SME’s leader must be aware that the service or product he is selling is going to face competition in the market. They need to rise above their limited perspective as a business owner and achieve the ability to view their enterprise through the lens of a consumer.

When an SME leader stands in the shoes of their consumer, they realize that the first thing that a consumer looks for is the personality of their enterprise. The personality of SMEs defines who they are, why they are in existence, and where they are aiming to go. The main two representatives that encompass the personality of an SME are Vision and Mission.

Often incorrectly used synonymously, the vision and mission statements are two distinct aspects of an enterprise. I shall attempt to elaborate with a quick primer on these two salient components of a successful SME.

The mission statement of an SME represents the cumulative of its goals and values in the present time. A mission statement describes precisely what the business does. It includes the short-term goals of an enterprise, along with the plans devised to ensure the fulfillment of those goals. The trick to identifying the perfect mission statement for an SME is to highlight its USPs to show the consumer why it should be chosen over all other alternatives.

On the other hand, a vision statement is a future-oriented, comprehensive glance into an SME. The concretized ethos of the business along with its purpose should be highlighted in its vision statement. The leader of the SME can take more liberties with the vision statement and include their realistic aspirations and future goals. The key is to design a vision that inspires confidence and trust in the consumer.

The process of building a vision and mission does not end after writing some abstract words. The entrepreneur must ingrain the spirit of their SME’s mission into the entire team and align all their activities to the vision of the SME.