Why the mission of your company is so important!

Before joining Sencrop 3 years ago, I was previously working in a digital agency and everything was nice there:

• Challenging projects
• Great colleagues & good company values
• A strong relationship with the CEO of the company

But something was missing in my daily job! Every morning, I was asking myself why I woke-up & I was not able to answer this question. 3 years later, I know what was missing: a clear and empowering mission!

Mission, vision, Kezako?!

The vision defines why the company exists and the future it wants to build : it is aspirational, visionary, future-oriented and empowers your team.

The mission is the action-oriented version of your vision: how you plan to achieve your vision.

Both are most of the time mixed into a clear & comprehensive mission statement that explains why the company exists and what you’re building. For product-oriented companies, the mission/vision of the company and the product vision are very close.

Here are some famous examples of mission statements:

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

“To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” — Tesla

“To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” — LinkedIn

At Sencrop, we have a clear mission:

Our mission is to empower ALL farmers to make better decisions and reduce their crop risks, with a positive agro-environmental footprint.

Why the mission is so important!

Your mission drives our company and that’s clearly the most powerful tool you have for many reasons.

Your mission empowers your employees

When you have a clear mission, your employees know why they wake-up every morning and it makes sense to what they’re building: everyone contributes to this mission and know why they are on board and where we’re going.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Your mission helps you focus on the WHY.

When you’re building a product you can build a ton of features but, the only thing that matters is why you do them?

Most successful companies (like Apple) start by explaining why they do something before talking about how and what. There is a famous TED talk “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek talking about that.

Your mission helps you to make choices

In a company life, you have a lot of decisions to make and it’s just normal that you have different points of view. How to take the right decision?

This happened a lot of time at Sencrop and what we try to do is to go back to our mission: what’s the choice that contributes the most to our mission? Our mission is a great way to align people, simplify processes and build better products.

Your mission aligns your employees

If I take the example of Sencrop, we have three main profiles in our company:

• Tech lovers: they join us because we’re a tech company, with a strong hardware and software product.
• Farmers-oriented: they join us because we’re working for farmers and our mission is to help them.
• Environment-oriented: they join us because we aim to get an impact on the environment and it is part of our mission.

It means that at Sencrop, we’ve sons and daughters of farmers (conventional farmers or not), vegans, hunters, zero-waste activists, bio-consumers and naturally, we can think that everything oppose them. In fact, one thing brings them together: our mission.

Our mission helps us to bring diversity in our team and that’s for us, the best way to build a passionate team of missionaries (and not mercenaries).

Some tips if you plan to join a startup

• Always ask the recruiter what’s the vision and mission of the company.
• If you don’t have a clear answer: that’s not a good news, they probably don’t know where they’re going (or at least, it is not perfectly clear).
• If it doesn’t make sense to you: ask yourself if you want to wake up every morning for that.

In the tech eco-system, we’re very lucky: there is a lot of beautiful companies/startups, in all industries, with strong missions, visions and values and we’ll have the opportunity to spend our time on things that matter to us!

And if the Sencrop mission makes sense to you: WE’RE HIRING!