Define Your Company’s Mission and Make Sure Every Employee Knows It
This article has been written by Nicolas Cohen, co-founder of A Little Market and daphnipolitan.
If I had one single thing to recommend to a start-up it would be to define a clear and honest mission (mission is not a baseline or a marketing concept) and make sure it is well understood and shared by everyone in the company.
I have co-founded A Little Market in 2008 with the idea to help small creative people to sell their handmade products through a dedicated marketplace. We wanted to build a product for and with our sellers. As a consequence, we were dealing with tones of specific requests and were happy to say “Yes” every time.
In 2012, it started to be a super mess. Too many projects, too many priorities, too many KPIs, too many things to do. The team was lost and frustrated. Our reflex was to review the roadmap, change the organization, re-prioritize but it was not working.
Our Artistic Director, proposed a different approach : working on “who we are and what is our mission”. What? We know who we are and what is our mission!
She started with a simple survey asking each employee to define in one sentence what was our mission. What a surprise!!! No one was really clear about it. People were not very far of course, but there was no clear common definition.
We spent weeks to define our vision, our mission and our values as a company. Here is the result:
- Vision: We want to make the economy more human.
- Mission: We help small local businesses grow by connecting them to their clients.
- Values: Conviviality, Simplicity, Boldness, Authenticity, Continuous improvement.
From there, everything got clearer. We decided to stop every initiative that was not contributing to our mission. Our design, our tone have to represent our values. Even our recruitment process was easier.
Today, 4 years after, when we ask our buyers and our sellers to define us, here is what they say: local, human, simple, accessible, authentic.
Not too bad, isn’t it?
>> read Nicolas’ biography
Nicolas Cohen, Co-Founder of www.alittlemarket.com
Nicolas was born in a small village at the east of Lyon. He is Judo black Belt (second Dan) and a big fan of the amazing football club : Olympique Lyonnais (Juninho is the best for ever).
After graduating from the ENSAM engineering school and HEC Entrepreneurs, he went to London to work at Renault in Finance. He came back to France and moved to Alcan. After 2 years of Powerpoint and Excel night parties, he asked the President of the company to provide him with a cell phone, a car, a laptop and a customer to deal with. He spent 5 years there. At 30 years old, Nicolas Cohen and Nicolas d’Audiffret decided that it was time for them to try to “change” the world. They co-founded www.alittlemarket.com in 2008. In 2014, they sold the company to Etsy.com that went public in 2015.
He is the happy husband of Jennifer and the happy “gaga” father of Julia and Flora.
