During his second year at Transplace Inc., Tom Sanderson had a
bit of an identity crisis. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever
accepted one of his business cards. His titles of chairman, president and CEO show that he does wear a lot of hats at the logistics
technology and service provider, but the crisis in question had
nothing to do with his particular positions at all. It had everything
to do with the position of the company as outlined in its mission
statement.
“The mission statement didn’t really communicate what it is that
we were in business to accomplish,” he says.
Written well before he joined the company in late 2003, the one-sentence statement combined a vague declaration of service with
enough company-specific jargon to confuse anyone without a
lengthy in-house tenure.
“That statement was just ineffective in so many ways,”
Sanderson says. “Unless somebody works here, it’s not something
that’s going to carry any broad meaning to a customer or to a
potential investor.”
A company with broad name recognition may be able to sidestep
a similar lapse in communication. But for most businesses, the mission statement is as important an identifier as the inside cover is to
an unfamiliar book — it tells the reader who the company is and
what it hopes to accomplish. If written with enough skill, it can also
serve as a road map to guide the behavior of every employee in the
organization.
“It takes your mind off of the challenges of the day to day and
[makes you] think about where you are heading,” Sanderson says.
“What is it you want to become?”
As he looked over the old statement, Sanderson realized it didn’t
accomplish any of those things, so he sought the help of a trusted
colleague and got to work. By the end of 2006, the duo had written
a new mission statement from scratch, and Transplace’s gross revenue has since increased approximately 10 percent to more than
$900 million in 2007.