Vision, Mission, Strategy, Objectives (VSMO)

Early decisions often have an outsized impact on the trajectory of a company. Choosing co-founders, early investors, technical architectures or first employees are all examples. Here’s another one: developing your VSMO framework.

One of the most important things founders can do is establish a strategic framework to guide the company as it grows. Typically, this framework will contain four key elements – Vision, Mission, Strategy and Objectives. A good VMSO provides direction, clarity, focus and inspiration to guide the company through what lies ahead. It is not possible to do this too early – only too late.

For those of you who might be inclined to scoff at mission statements: Experienced operators know that anything that can fully align your company is worth doing.

A strong and well-communicated VMSO creates the backdrop that puts your goals (perhaps expressed as Objectives & Key Results, or OKRs) in context for the team, helping them go fast independently without losing the bigger picture.

I’m going to lay out a few VMSO basics below with some insights gained over the course of a 20+ year career leading teams at all stages of development. Schedule a time to talk with me if you want to go deeper or talk your situation over.

VMSO Elements

Your VMSO will consist of the following four simple and clear written statements representing the company’s position.

1. Vision: Provides a word picture describing the desired future of the organization. Vision sets the future context: “Imagine a world…” I like Kellogg’s vision statement: “A good and just world where people are not just fed but fulfilled.”
2. Mission: Describes the organization's purpose, its reason for existence and the core values that guide its actions. It answers the question, "Why do we exist?" The mission should not change much, if at all, over time. Some high-profile examples:

   Google: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

   Amazon: “To be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”

   OpenAI: “To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work – benefits all of humanity.”

   Atlassian: “To unleash the potential in every team.”

3. Strategy: Represents the approach or plan that outlines how the organization will achieve its goals and fulfill its mission. It involves making choices about where to compete and how to win. Here are some basic implied strategy outputs from the mission statements above.

   Google: Focus on ubiquity, scale and free services.

   Amazon: Customer obsession and operational execution across all possible channels.

   OpenAI: Deep investments in tech and governance.

   Atlassian: Deliver on enterprise collaboration platforms and apps.

4. Objectives: Specific, measurable and time-bound goals that support the organization's strategy. Objectives are concrete steps that, when achieved, contribute to realizing the strategy and, ultimately, the mission. These objectives can translate into company-level OKRs or more tactical goals.

Implementing VMSO

In 2008, I was working at a small software company called Demandforce that was starting to get traction with customers. (Demandforce was the first company in the U.S. to commercialize a customer relationship management or CRM for small service businesses – think appointment reminders, online scheduling and email marketing).

We wanted to be intentional about the way we built the team and grew the company, so a few of us spent a long weekend away from operations to think about where we wanted to go and how we could get there. We developed a rough draft of a VMSO. Today it looks quaint given the technical and market changes we have seen in the last 15 years, but here is what we came up with:

Vision: “A world in which every small business can connect to any consumer.”

Mission: “Empower small businesses to thrive in a connected economy.”

Strategy: Develop and deploy tools that make connections between small businesses and their customers richer, more powerful, and fully automatic.

Objective: Be the #1 player in all major U.S. market small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) service sector categories with tailored CRM solutions.

We took this rough outline to a larger group of team members, led them through our thought process and took input and feedback. We repeated that again and again until the whole company had been given an opportunity to weigh in or ask questions.

When we were satisfied we had the wording right – and more importantly we had the company aligned behind it – we began to use this formulation in investor updates, board meetings and company all hands. We trained new hires with it, talked to partners about it and put it on the wall. That VMSO stayed quite stable for more than four years, and was a centerpiece of a company culture that led us to complete a successful sale of the business to Intuit.

Company Alignment is Job #1 for Leaders

VMSO should be a key component of your plan to get and keep your company fully aligned. Alignment allows you to move faster. It improves trust, engagement and connection, from the C level all the way out to the customer-facing perimeter that is so critical to success. 

Other important operating mechanisms you’ll need to align the team on include Company Values, OKRs or other goal setting frameworks, regular communications cadences, broad information sharing, public awards and celebrations. Finding the right balance for a company at your stage is an art. Experiment until you find a configuration that works, but make sure you update your toolkit as the company grows, because good alignment is a moving target.

If you have any questions about VMSO or ways to gain and keep company alignment, I’m available. Just select a time from my Calendly or drop me a note.

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