Why Does Your Business Exist? A Christian Business Guide to Creating your Mission, Vision, and Values Statements by Chris Patton. 40 pages. 2017 
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I have read and benefitted from the author’s faith and work blog for a few years now. He writes that you can come to a place where you have a clear purpose for your work in the business and for the business itself. That purpose can be meaningful and can give you the confidence that your impact will outlast your time in the organization. In this short book, he gives us steps to follow to do just that.

The author tells us that while the overall process described in his book is an extensive one, he recommends you compact it into the shortest time possible. He tells us that the steps in the book might stand on their own as individual meetings, or they could be segments of one or more larger meetings. For the purpose of the book, he describes them as individual meetings. At the end of each step the author provides a helpful “Action Steps Checklist”.

The steps are:
Step One: Determine the Team. The first step is to determine the team that will be charged with executing this process.
Step Two: Sell the Why. Get your team together and sell them on why this process is so critical to your future success.
Step Three: Pray Together. The author strongly suggests that once you have the team on board, you stop to pray together before moving forward. He states that if you are convinced that this is God’s business, then you need to seek His wisdom as you proceed.
Step Four: Brain Dump! The idea is to dump every thought or idea onto the table so that you can sort through them to come up with your eventual finished products.
Step Five: Create the Mission Statement. Why does your company exist? That is the core question that a mission (or purpose) statement is supposed to answer.
Step Six: Create the Vision Statement. If the mission statement answers the question, “Why does the business exist?”, then the vision statement describes what the business will look like in the future, where it is going, and/or what it will become.
Step Seven: Create the Core Values. The core values of a business are those qualities that will be true of the business regardless of the market, industry, or timeframe considered.
Step Eight: The Vetting Process. The author strongly suggests that you present your final drafts of the mission, vision, and core values to at least two to three other godly individuals for their review.
Step Nine: Launch! The key is to cast the vision to your employee base first. The author states that your job, as business owner or leader, is to over-communicate your new mission, vision, and values to your entire employee base.

This book provides a very helpful blueprint to follow in helping you determine why your business exists. It won’t take long to read, and the benefits will far outweigh the time you invest in reading the book.
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