# Mission Statement Template

**Businessman Talk · businessmantalk.com/strategy/mission-statement/ · v1.0 (August 2026)**

Paste into Google Docs, Word, or Notion. Fill sections 1 to 3 in one sitting, alone, in under an hour, then score the result in section 4 before you show it to anybody.

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**Business:** ________________________   **Written by:** ________________   **Date:** ____ / ____ / ________   **Next review:** ________ (one year on)

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## 1. The four answers (one line each, no editing yet)

Answer all four before you write a sentence. Answer them as plainly as you would on the phone.

| # | Component | The question it answers | Your answer (one line) | Test it has to pass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | **What you do** | What do you sell or do, in plain nouns? | | Names the product, service or activity clearly enough that a stranger could tell the industry. "Empower", "elevate", "transform" fail this line. |
| 2 | **How you do it** | What is the method or difference that makes the offer yours? | | A method, not a value. Usually a *by*, *through* or *with* clause. "Human ingenuity" is a value; "same-day callouts" is a method. |
| 3 | **For whom** | Who is the customer? | | Narrow enough to exclude somebody. "Everyone", "the world", "people" and "communities" all fail. |
| 4 | **Why** | What changes for that customer? | | An outcome for *them*, distinct from the act of selling. Not "to be the best at it". |

*If you cannot answer one of the four, leave it blank and date the blank. A blank is a finding. An invented answer is a problem you will carry into the sentence.*

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## 2. Assemble the sentence

Put the four answers end to end in the present tense, in one pass, without tidying:

**[Business] [what you do] for [whom] by [how], so that [why].**

**Draft 1:** ____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

Reorder the clauses once the content is right. "By" often reads better earlier, and "so that" can become "so". The one rule that does not move: fill all four blanks.

**Two illustrative fills** (invented for this template, not real companies):

- "Ledgerly gives freelance designers one place to send invoices and chase them, so that getting paid takes minutes instead of evenings."
- "Ferndale Bakery bakes bread overnight for local cafés and households, so that every loaf sold in this town was made in it."

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## 3. Cut to length

Count the words in draft 1 and write the number down before you cut. Remove adjectives before you remove facts.

**Draft 1 word count:** ______   **Final word count:** ______

| Length | What it usually means | Do this |
|---|---|---|
| Under 15 words | A component has dropped out, most often the customer or the why | Put the missing component back before you shorten anything else |
| **15 to 30 words** | The working range: short enough to repeat, long enough to carry four components | Stop here |
| 31 to 50 words | Qualifiers have arrived that nobody will remember | Cut one claim per component and re-count |
| Over 50 words | This is a manifesto, not a mission statement | Move it to a values page and start again from section 1 |

**Final statement (present tense, 15–30 words):**

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

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## 4. Self-score against the four components

Score your final statement 0 or 1 on each component, using the same rules used to score 100 large companies' published statements (method note: `mission-statements-2026.md`). Score what the sentence says, not what you meant.

| Component | Scores **1** when | Scores **0** when | Your score |
|---|---|---|---|
| **What** | The product, service or activity is named in terms that identify the industry | Only abstract verbs appear — empower, elevate, inspire, transform, reimagine | |
| **How** | A method, means or differentiator is named | A value stands in for a method, or nothing is named | |
| **For whom** | A beneficiary group narrower than humanity is named | The beneficiary is universal, or absent | |
| **Why** | An outcome for that beneficiary is stated, distinct from the activity itself | The statement stops at the activity, or at being best at it | |

**Your score: ______ / 4**

**What a score of less than 4 means.** It means the missing component is missing, and nothing worse than that. Go back to that row of section 1, answer it, and rewrite. Do not fill the gap with an adjective.

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## 5. The two tests before you use it

1. **The stranger test.** Send the sentence to someone outside your trade and ask what they think you sell. If they cannot say, the *what* or the *for whom* is not doing its job.
2. **The swap test.** Put a competitor's name at the front. If the statement is still true, it is describing an industry rather than your business. Add the detail they could not honestly claim.

**Read aloud to:** ________________   **Words they stumbled over:** ______________________

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**Stop rule: when the statement scores 4 of 4, fits inside 30 words, and survives both tests, it is finished. Every further edit after that point makes it longer and less repeatable.**

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### Filling notes (delete after use)

- **Write it alone.** A committee resolves disagreement by adding clauses, and clauses are exactly what section 3 removes. Bring the draft to the team at section 5 and no earlier.
- **Present tense throughout.** The mission describes the business as it is today. Where it is going is the vision's job, and the vision is written separately.
- **The four components measure completeness, not quality.** A statement can score 1 of 4 and still work for the business that wrote it. The score tells you which question you have not answered in public, and that is all it tells you.
- **Fred R. David's nine components** — customers, products or services, markets, technology, concern for survival and growth, philosophy, self-concept, concern for public image, concern for employees — are an audit list, not a writing template. Run them after section 3, keep the two or three that genuinely differentiate you, and leave the rest to other documents.
- **Rewrite only when the business changes.** Once a year, read it. Change it when what you sell or who you sell it to has actually moved, not because the sentence has grown stale to you. You read it far more often than your customers do.

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### What the four components look like in the wild

These figures come from an original dataset of the S&P 100 compiled for this site: every statement read from the company's own page or filing on 29 or 30 August 2026, quoted verbatim, and scored on the same four components above. Sampling frame, coding rules and the single-rater limitation are in the method note.

| Measure | Result | Base |
|---|---|---|
| Publishes a labelled mission | 44 | 100 companies |
| Publishes a purpose instead | 30 | 100 companies |
| Publishes neither | 26 | 100 companies |
| Median length | 16 words | 74 statements with text |
| Middle half of lengths (Q1 to Q3) | 10 to 22 words | 74 statements |
| Falls inside the 15-to-30-word range | 37 (50%) | 74 statements |
| Shorter than 15 words | 33 (45%) | 74 statements |
| Longer than 30 words | 4 (5%) | 74 statements |
| Names a **why** | 64 (87%) | 74 statements |
| Names **what** the business does | 40 (54%) | 74 statements |
| Names **how** it does it | 24 (32%) | 74 statements |
| Names **who** it is for | 20 (27%) | 74 statements |
| Carries all four components | 4 (5%) | 74 statements |

Two things to take from the table while you fill in section 1. The **why** is the component almost nobody omits, and the **customer** is the one almost everybody does, which is the reverse of the order most people find difficult. And the common failure at these companies is a statement that is too short rather than too long: 33 of 74 fall under fifteen words, against 4 that run over thirty.

These are a hundred of the largest listed companies in the United States, whose statements are written by committees for audiences of hundreds of thousands. A four-person firm faces a different writing problem, and the rates above do not transfer to it. They are here as a benchmark for the score in section 4, not as a target.

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*The four components, the length rule, mission versus vision, and 22 worked examples: businessmantalk.com/strategy/mission-statement/ · Dataset and method note: `mission-statements-2026.csv` · Free to copy and adapt for your own business; please keep the source line if you share it.*