You don’t need a mission statement in your restaurant, you need something called a promise.

In your business you need at least two, maybe three kinds of promises: customer promises, employee promises or business/operation promises if you’re a larger business with shareholders or partners. At the minimum, replace a mission statement with one well written customer promise.

The difference of a Promise:

I discovered this is about a year ago I was working with a client asking him some questions about his pizza restaurant and how his restaurant is gonna be better or different than all the others. He said “We’re gonna have better customer service”!  Then I asked him what that means. He starts talking about it but none of it meant anything to me.

Then, I told him to tell me a promise you’re gonna make to a customer and he said: “I want to be the the pizza restaurant for families, a place where families feel comfortable”. With a little more work, we created the promise:  

We promise to love your children, even when you don’t (any parent will understand this).

That become the start of a list of promises for all his customers to read.

Through research I see that some newer companies have started to make customer promises instead of mission statements.

Here are a few of my favorites.

• We will always call your order by first name with a friendly smile.
• If it’s not exactly what you wanted we’ll make it right.
• We won’t start cooking till you order.

These are promises and they make people feel safe, they give people freedom to try new things.  I get excited when I hear customer promises.  It lets me know they care!

Final Thoughts:

I highly encourage you go back to the previous video if you haven’t watched it yet about vision, mission, goals, projects, tasks and action items. Replace mission with promises and figure out what your vision is then write some promises to your customers. Write some promises to your employees, if you’re struggling attracting the best employees maybe you’re not clear enough at how well you want to treat them.

If you have some partners or some investors maybe some business promises like: We promise to provide financial statements by the fifth day of every month”,  “We promise to be open and transparent with all business dealings”. Something that makes your investors feel safe.

Put your promises on a wall and your website where customers can see them.