The vision of my business

According to the online entrepreneurship dictionary, the business vision serves as a visual manifestation, an ambition and a representation of what the company intends to achieve later in time, both in the short, medium and long term.

Its main purpose is to serve as a guiding principle when making decisions and methods of action in the future. Your company's vision statement is the description of your company over time and is based on your company's mission.

It lays the foundation for all future planning of your company, and clearly expresses the potential you expect from it in the future. It sets out your concrete perspectives and serves as a springboard for everything you plan to do.

Don't limit yourself by modestly and austerely elaborating your vision, imagine an ambitious future for your company and put it into a sentence. When your employees and associates read your business vision, they should be able to imagine a future where your company has succeeded and prospered.

General characteristics

You can use the vision to describe the future of the company as a whole, or just to define a specific aspect. It should answer the question "How far do I want to go?

Don't forget that when you compose your vision statement you should state the answer to the above question about where you want to go, without mentioning how you are going to get there. It doesn't require specifics, so don't be afraid to imagine, without restrictions and with ambition, the bright future your company can bring with it.

The business vision is not a step-by-step manual that shows you how to achieve your goals. Keep in mind that, although the vision statement does not show you the steps you will take, it does state without abstractions the path of your business plan.

The vision statement differs from the mission statement in the approach it uses. The mission is external, particularly to customers. While the vision is for you and your employees, that is, with an internal focus.

Within the vision itself you can include the time frame in which you want to fulfill it or not. You should keep in mind that usually, when you do not set the time, you tend to extend more the fulfillment of the objectives.

Examples of business missions

When the time comes to create your business vision, help yourself with your core competencies. These can serve as a starting point to express your values. Don't make the mistake of only considering one or two years ahead, expand your horizons much further.

Fictitious examples

Here are some examples of business visions that do not exist to serve as a guide for you to make your own:

• As a 5-Star Hotel in the Manhattan area, I will offer stellar service with amenities suitable for any customer.
• In the next 5 years Web Services will be earning over 500 thousand dollars a year providing hosting and web design services with the best quality and prices in the market.
• Within 5 years the Association Against Gender Violence will have proactively helped prevent gender violence and create happier and more prosperous communities.
• All of these examples are not real, but they give you a general idea of how you can shape your vision. You don't always have to put the time span in the same statement, but this can be very useful, especially for small businesses.

Real examples

Examples of business visions from real companies. You may notice that these do not use a specific time frame for the fulfillment of the vision:

• The Alzheimer's Association's vision is "A World Free of Alzheimer's."
• At the beginning of Microsoft's founding, the company's vision was: "To change the way we work and provide every desktop and every home with a computer".
• Microsoft's most current vision today is: "Empowering people thro