Choosing a Mission Statement

One of my first tasks for building out my new Indoor Air Quality Consultancy was to put together a mission statement. This seemed easy enough, innocuous... It was hard, really hard. I would have much preferred to name the company first, but it makes more sense to focus on what we're going to do rather than coming up with a fancy name and wasting more money on another domain name right away.

The first thing I did was start with word association and thinking about what words resonated most with me in what I'm trying to build here:

Building, Creating, Establishing
Healthier, Happier
Home
Empathy
Love

My goal with $COMPANY is to take my growing knowledge of indoor air quality and its effects on human health and help design a plan for people to remedy issues found in their homes that could be negatively affecting their health. A mouthful, right? This is why a mission statement is so important.

Our approach with our customers starts with empathy and learning their concerns and listening to them. We will work with them to assess their situation and build a plan that will help them move to a happier and healthier life.

So, here were the front runners:

We are on a mission to create a happier, healthier world - one home at a time.

It's broad and leaves a lot of room for me to align what the company ends up doing to the mission statement. Happiness is something that we could infer would come from being healthier, but is not something that we are directly involved in helping with.

Building a healthier community - one person, one home, one remedy at a time.

I liked this one because it talks about community and ties the health of an individual to the health of a community. It does this while also describing the way we do that, focusing on the home and creating remedies for issues found there. Remedy is a word that I might want to replace though, because it has a medical connotation, which is not something we want to be tied to.

Creating a healthier world - one person, one home, one remedy at a time.

Similar to the previous one, this broadens the idea scope to the world instead of just a community. I think I'd prefer to focus on a community, given the in-person nature of the consultations. There could be a possibility of franchising this out over time, broadening the scope, but each franchise would still be focused on a specific community.

Building a healthier world - one home, one remedy at a time.

Once again, broad scope of world, but switching out the verb from "Creating" to "Building". I find that Building feels more accurate for what we're doing, since we're not creating anything from scratch but rather helping to build something up. I want to focus on the people though, so dropping people from the second half of the mission statement doesn't feel right.

Health starts at home - we make that a reality.

This one has a hyper-focus on the home and health, but I don't think it explains what we do. It falls short of connecting how we make a healthy home a reality.

Health starts in the home - we are on a mission to improve people's health, one home at a time.

This one does a better job of connecting what we are looking to do to improvement of health in the home. But it lacks how that builds a stronger community.

Happiness and Health - we are on a mission to create a happier, healthier world, one home at a time.

This is the last one that is on my brainstorming list. Once again the scope is very broad here, focusing on the world, rather than a community. I'm continuously drawn to the word "community" over "world" as I'm reviewing these.

It turns out I'm not feeling any of the ones I had prepared a week or two ago. It's amazing what a little time and distance can do to your thought process. But we know we like the following items:

Community
Contribution of personal health to a healthier community
Building > Creating

Using the above items that we know we like, let's try this again:

Building healthy communities starts with one: one home, one individual, one change.

Mission Statements can change in the future, but I like that this one focuses on community by starting small, one change, one individual, one home. It also solidifies in my mind that I'm starting with one in building this company.