Vision and Planning

Our company held a business retreat yesterday with the objective to review our organization and set new goals for the next five years. What resulted was a complete makeover of our entire business model. We began with an exercise to re-write our mission statement. In view of all the recent changes in our world we were looking for a very focused statement that we could use to filter all decisions we will make in the future. Here’s the result:

“Michael Smith And Associates is a multi-faceted Christian entertainment and artist development company whose purpose is to present the Gospel in unique ways and to teach Biblical principles through the artists we serve. We strive to do this through excellence in our work, personal development of our artists and ourselves, and by inspiring creativity among us. Our organization is goal and vision oriented with a commitment to growth while being progressive and profitable.”

Setting goals has always been important to me. I have seen amazing things accomplished through setting big goals and then establishing a plan to achieve them. When the dust settled from all our brainstorming and dreaming yesterday we ended up with a blueprint for our future. It is an exciting one that I plan on revealing here in future posts. I believe everyone should have a mission statement that reflects their values and beliefs. We base all decisions on those two things and since our decisions determine the actions we take we should all spend a great deal of time thinking about what we believe. Understanding your purpose as an individual and as a company is crucial to your success but you must have clear goals that you want to achieve, something that will really juice your life if you attained them.

Everyone at our company has a Christian worldview. If you don’t know what your worldview is, or if you don’t even know what a world view is, I suggest you research what that means. There’s tons of stuff on the internet about it and many great books. Chuck Colson’s book “How Now Shall We Live.” helped me understand the concept of worldview and assisted me in establishing and understanding mine. Brad Stine has also been a big help in my thinking on the subject.

With our mission statement carefully thought out and completed it was much easier to set our plans and goals for the next five years. We have some pretty big goals and some very exciting plans on how to achieve them all written out including a calendar of when things should be done. That allows us to track our progress. Now we have a detailed roadmap and a giant target for getting where we want to go.

Now, if I could just get myself organized…

Mike