Express your mission
Before Allen and Grijalva founded G&A Partners, they had an accounting and consulting firm with the tagline, “Making a difference.” Then they came across a business model that would help small business owners be successful with their support. So they joined forces to outsource human resources and administrative issues, freeing leaders to focus on growing their companies.
By building a focus around his passion and setting a goal to strive toward, Allen helps his own company grow, as well.
“In terms of how we’ve gotten to where we are today, I think it starts with having a vision of what you want your company to be and what purpose that company has to fulfill,” he says. “If you don’t have a purpose, it’s hard to have passion for what you do.”
When defining your focus, look at your goals from a couple of perspectives. That will give you both a purpose statement and a mission statement.
“One has to do with what we’re trying to accomplish as a firm, and the other one has to do with what we’re trying to do for the people that we serve,” Allen says. “So our purpose statement, for example, is to help small business owners find time to grow their businesses, take better care of their employees and enjoy a higher quality of life.”
Your purpose statement defines what you do for customers, but you still have to narrow that down. Allen did that by asking what his company could do to achieve its purpose for clients. By working backward from your goal to address what steps will achieve it, you set your strategy.
“What kinds of things can we do to free up a business owner’s time to focus on the most important things that ensure the success of his business?” Allen asked. “What can we do to help a business owner take better care of his or her employees? What can we do to not only provide them more time to grow their business but also more time to enjoy the wealth that hopefully they accumulate? So it’s the purpose that then drives the strategy.”
When you’re setting the strategy to achieve your purpose, you’re also on track to accomplish your mission.
“Our mission statement is what we as an organization are trying to accomplish — and that’s to be the pre-eminent privately held professional employer organization,” Allen says.
These two ways of expressing different goals for different parties are actually closely intertwined.
“If we believe in our purpose statement and we develop sound strategy and we implement that strategy effectively, then we ought to become one of the pre-eminent PEOs in the country,” Allen says. “If we don’t have a deep purpose statement and a strategic plan that dovetails with that and the ability to effectively implement the plan, then the mission statement never gets accomplished.
“One drives the other. The mission statement then becomes how we measure the success of implementing our purpose statement.”
