A few weeks ago, we talked about how company identity can build a competitive advantage and how culture eats strategy for breakfast. I wanted to take an episode to talk about our mission here at Adelsberger Marketing. The mission of Adelsberger Marketing is to make creative work that grows our clients businesses in a culture that values our team and community. So let’s break that down piece by piece here.
One, our mission. Our mission is our overarching component of what we do. And ideally, this is a statement that will never change. It’s an ongoing pursuit with no end date in mind. So we use this as a test to see if we are on track. At our annual meeting to review the year, I use these elements to help us show how our work is fitting into this, or it’s not. The first component there is is, “to make creative work”. Our goal is to make creative work here at Adelsberger Marketing. Not just any work, but creative work. As we move into a new world with artificial intelligence, true creativity will be the last bastion for creative services. But also in our industry, it can be tempting to make work that lacks creativity just to get a sign off from the client. But we believe that good ideas win the day. So we push ourselves and our clients to take the creative approach.
The next part is that, “it grows our clients businesses”. Creative work alone can be helpful or not helpful to a business. We want to channel our creativity in a way that benefits the businesses of our clients. If we are not good at helping build our clients businesses, we are not being useful to them, and that is not a good business strategy. In a culture, I chose to speak about culture in the mission statement because I know how important it is to our team and how important it is to making good work. We want to be the best place to work in West Tennessee, and a huge component of that is building a culture that people are attracted to. I love my team. I want to make their lives better. We respect each other’s time off. We respect each other’s input. We respect each other, period. And sometimes we lose together, but always we win together. I believe it is our people that give us the advantage over other agencies and other businesses in the area.So we wanted this mission statement to make it clear that that is a focus of ours.
We also included the community in the mission statement. I am not from West Tennessee. I am a transplant from Illinois. The community of West Tennessee has been so very welcoming to me, and has allowed me and my family to build a life here. I will always be grateful for that. And part of our mission is to value our community because we see that as core to our identity. We see being involved here, if that’s investment in boards, nonprofits, or our availability for job shadowing and internships, we seek to give back. And besides, because of the gratefulness of the welcoming community, I see that as part of my responsibility as a Christian. We have worked to make this mission statement sticky. It’s on the back of hoodies. It’s on stickers. We use it at our annual meeting. We cover it in onboarding. We want everyone on the team to understand it and work from it. I believe a few things about it. One, it’s the right thing to do. I think we have a moral prerogative to build this type of business. Two, it’s true of our company. I am fortunate that our mission statement lines up with who we are as a company, and it’s part of my job every day to make sure that that remains true. And it will give us a competitive advantage. A solid mission statement that is true and leads to a great culture is going to be a competitive advantage every day, all day.
So do you have a defined mission statement? Do you make it available to your team? Do you make that idea sticky? Do you help them learn it and live it out? Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Where is your culture flowing from? Thank you for watching this episode of the Content Machine Podcast. If you found it helpful, please text this episode to a friend, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
