Did you know that a Chief Operating Officer can run most business functions, making them the most efficient and effective tool for any growing business with a limited budget?
An early-stage COO is, on average, responsible for about 7 different business functions. From the anecdotal experience of my peers and me, this usually covers HR, Legal, Finance, Fundraising, Sales & Marketing, Product, and Engineering.
A COO can be responsible for such a broad range of disciplines because they're also responsible for the business's Strategy - aka turning the Founder’s wild and exciting vision into a reality - which has implications for all departments.
In this new series of posts, I'll break down how a COO does this - how do I, a detail-oriented completer-finisher with an unbridled love of spreadsheets, turn a creative, forward-thinking, relatively nebulous idea into a structured and realistic roadmap for success (and how I keep the entire company following that roadmap).
We’re going to follow the same 6-Point Strategy framework that I developed for my best-selling book How To Write Your Strategy. If you’re (like me) someone who likes to read ahead, you can get the whole book for 50% off here for the next few months using code SUMMER24).
All the articles in this series
In the previous post in this series, we looked at how important an end goal can be to even the earliest stages of a growing company’s plans. We discussed how an end goal can impact the day-to-day positioning of a business, how it can even impact your very first attempts at raising funding, and what a COO can do to help a Founder or CEO maximise outcomes in both those situations.
In this post, we’re going to look at the Mission of a company - how a clear Mission Statement can help you effectively communicate your plans to the rest of the company, how it helps you focus your efforts and increase operational efficiency (and therefore profits), and how a COO can help a Founder or CEO translate their rough ideas into a Mission Statement that really works.
Below is the Pay As You Go COO 6-Point Framework for a Strategy that I developed for my best-selling book How To Write Your Strategy. We’re starting on the left-hand side.
What does a COO do in an early-stage company? How a ‘vision’ gets turned into a ‘reality’: what is a Mission Statement?
Your Mission Statement is the reason why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re up all night and every weekend working away at your plans for the business. It’s also one of the key things that tells your customers why they should choose your company over the direct and indirect competitors and it tells your employees why they should be proud and excited to be working with you.
It’s the statement of how you want to make the world a little bit better by having your company in it.
When you’re first starting to lay down a Strategy, your Mission Statement can really help set its direction and it can help you define and prioritise the elements that you may be more familiar with - like the Objectives and the Key Results.
I will emphasise to anyone who will listen that every single thing in your company’s Strategy should be quantitative, objective, transparent. Any team member should be able to become, easily, clear on what is expected of them and what ‘good’ looks like just by reading the company’s Strategy.
Every single thing except for the Mission Statement.
A Mission Statement is also the only thing that I’ll recommend you make qualitative and subjective. It’s the one thing that’s about feelings and opinions, not numerical facts.
A Mission Statement should be
Subjective
Qualitative
Grandiose
A big, sweeping vision for how you’re going to change the world
Why should I care about a Mission Statement?
Because your customers care about it.
A Mission can make you money. Businesses that are built from a Mission attract more customers, keep those customers, and turn them into advocates.
A recent Forbes article quantified the impact of a Mission on company performance, showing that organisations with a Mission are 2.5 times more likely to see revenue growth than those without.
Much more cost-effective than a massive sales team, huh?
How can a COO help you write a Mission Statement?
A good COO is a good communicator, able to excite and unite the company behind a shared dedication to the impact that your company is going to deliver to your customers.
When the market is troubled or the competition is fierce, one of the key roles of the COO is to make sure that everyone in the company is working with focus on the most important goals so that you’re able to weather all of the ups and downs inherent to building a business.
The role of a COO in defining your Mission Statement is to help you get it written down and communicated. That could look like:
Helping you to draft the statement itself
Finding ways to share it, like getting it printed out in the office or having desktop backgrounds or screensavers made with it on
Finding opportunities to talk about it, like during company all-hands meetings or whenever you’re checking in on your goals
Ensuring that it’s a key part of your entire Strategy (we’ll cover in the next post in this series how the Mission Statement determines 50% of your Objectives when you’re setting your OKRs - if you want to read ahead, get your copy of How To Write Your Strategy below for 50% off using code SUMMER24).
What's next?
Now that you’re clear on what a Mission Statement is, why it’s important, and how a COO can help you write one
Next time, we’re going to look at how important clear Objectives are to an organisation and how a COO can help their Founder translate their big, inspirational ideas into clear quantitative measures that will increase employee performance and improve investor engagement.
If you’re a Founder with big dreams and you’re looking for a partner-in-crime who can make those dreams happen, we should chat. At the time of writing, I’m currently taking calls with prospective clients for both Business Coaching and Fractional COO services (though I only take on 2 Fractional COO clients at once, so you need to get in there quickly).
Book a free, no-strings chat with me here:
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