Creating a vision statement for your business is challenging. It’s hard to distill what you do, your values and future goals all in a couple of sentences. But the vision statement is important. It’ll guide and inspire your team and create a corporate identity that will distinguish you from the competition. Our free vision statement template for Word helps you go through the steps necessary to deliver that vision statement. Download our free vision statement template for Word now and get started.
What Is a Vision Statement?
A vision statement is a written document that defines the purpose of a business and what is set to achieve in the future. This written declaration guides the strategic planning direction of an organization and describes the long-term goals of the business in a short, easy-to-understand way.
Think of a vision statement as the high-level pitch for the future of the business. It should define what the business plans to achieve over the next five or so years. It takes all the goals and objectives a business has and places them in one impactful statement.
This will then rally the troops, so to speak, and have them all work together towards a common goal. A vision statement is more than a pithy declaration of intent, it’s a guide for everyone to follow and collaborate to achieve the business goals.
Why Use a Vision Statement Template?
Our free vision statement template for Word facilitates the process of creating a vision statement. It outlines the steps and provides some guiding questions to get the conversation started. Then there’s a place to put your answers, which will lead to creating a vision statement for your business.
The vision statement won’t only guide the team, but also management when developing strategic issues, especially as the business goes through significant changes. It also gives management a measuring stick by which to evaluate performance standards.
Beyond the business’s strategic goals, a vision statement creates a framework for ethical behavior. While this might not be front of mind for management in its plans to grow, ethical issues can seriously disrupt the business and take it off track.
The vision statement can also help a business enlist external support to help it achieve its five-year plan as well as create closer and better relationships with customers, suppliers and other partners. Therefore, the vision statement is not only a great internal tool but a public relations asset as well.
Of course, a vision statement isn’t a plan. To turn that vision into a reality requires project management software. ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that has powerful portfolio management tools that help you make strategy plans, organize resources, monitor costs and more. Track all your projects on one roadmap, so you can make sure your entire portfolio is on track and aligned with your overall business goal. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.
When Should You Use a Vision Statement Template?
The vision statement can be used at various stages of a business’ life. It’s not a bad exercise to engage the whole organization at the start of the business. You need to have a common goal and a short, precise vision statement at the beginning of a business’ operation can pull everyone together.
That said, a vision statement can be created at any time. It’s often used when a business is starting a new strategy, maybe launching a new product or it could just feel as if it’s treading water and needs to refocus. All of these are good reasons to create a vision statement, whether that’s to define a new path, redefine an old one or just get people all on the same page.
How to Use This Vision Statement Template
You’ll want your vision statement to be brief, but powerful enough to communicate its message. That’s not as easy as it might sound. You’re going to need help. A vision statement should be a collaborative effort between multiple company stakeholders. It’s going to take time. To ensure that your vision statement is the best it can be, you’ll want to follow these steps and use our free vision statement template for Word.
What Is the Mission of Your Company?
Break down the mission of your company. This process, unlike the final product of a vision statement, can be long and verbose. You can start by collecting a list of keywords that define your product or service. Think of adjectives that describe the mission of your company but avoid jargon that will muddy the waters of your vision statement. Most businesses have a mission statement, which can then be used to jumpstart this first step toward defining your vision statement.
What Are the Core Values of Your Company?
Next, think of the core values of your company. In general, a vital workplace will have these five core values: compassion, accountability, healthy competition, personal growth and wellness and equality. Yours might include other core values. Whatever they are, this is the time to identify and list them. They will be a guide to everyone in the company as they work together to achieve whatever vision statement you come up with.
What Is the Value Proposition of Your Brand?
A value proposition is a simple statement that summarizes why a customer chooses your product or service over the competition. It’s a way to differentiate yourself from others and show why you’re the best or unique at what you do. This will be an essential part of your vision statement as any long-term plan will build on this platform that you’ve already created for yourself.
What Business Goals Do You Expect the Company to Achieve in 5 Years?
Now, we’re getting to the heart of the matter. The vision statement should inspire your team to deliver on long-term goals. At this point, you want to define what those goals are. It should be a target set in the future that you intend to achieve over a specific period. This can be anything from improving a product or service, increasing sales or extending your brand into new markets. Whatever those goals are, be specific and realistic.
What Is Your Vision Statement?
This is the hard part. You’ve done the homework; you have the various elements that will inform your vision statement. But writing it will be difficult and should take time. Again, the vision statement is brief and powerful. In a sentence or two, you want to not only communicate your long-term goals but inspire the team to get excited about them. It’s a tall order, but the time and effort involved in writing, rewriting and reviewing will pay off.
Related Business Planning Templates
Once you have written a vision statement, you’ll need to get down to the real work of making plans to achieve those goals. ProjectManager is powerful project management software that can help get you there, but if you’re not ready to upgrade, we have dozens of free project management templates for Excel and Word that can help you get started. There are free templates for every stage of the project. Here are a couple that will help you achieve your vision.
Business Plan Template
A vision statement is inspirational and our free business plan template for Word is practical. It includes your vision statement as well as your mission statement, value proposition and core values, but adds market analysis, marketing strategy, operation planning, financial projections and more to get you on the road to success.
SWOT Analysis Template
Use our free SWOT analysis template for Word to evaluate your position and develop a strategic plan to fulfill your vision statement. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and our template is a grid so you can identify each of these areas with examples to help you get a better idea of where you stand as a company.
How ProjectManager Helps You Achieve Your Business Vision
Our free templates can put you in a position to achieve your vision, but they can also frustrate you and even get in the way of your progress. That’s because templates are merely static documents that cannot be used collaboratively and must be updated manually. That’s a lot of wasted time and effort. Project management software can streamline those processes. ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that turns your vision statement into an action plan. Our tool not only helps you plan but manage your resources to keep you on track and monitor your progress in real time.
Use Resource Management Features to Stay Productive
Our Gantt chart helps you plan, manage and track human and nonhuman resources, but that’s only the tip of our resource management features. We make it easy to assign team members by making their availability open to managers and then there’s our color-coded workload chart, which helps you see everyone on the team’s allocation in real time. You can then balance the team’s workload to keep them working at capacity without burning them out so they stay productive.
Track Goals With Real-Time Dashboards
Whenever you need a high-level overview of your project, just toggle over to our real-time dashboard. It automatically captures live project data and displays it on easy-to-read graphs and charts showing cost, time and more. It’s like an instant status report. Unlike lightweight alternatives, you don’t have to waste time setting up our dashboard. It’s ready when you are. If you need more details, just visit our reporting tool to get status reports, portfolio reports and reports on variance, timesheets, workload and more.
Related Business Content
There’s more to running a business than having a good vision statement. You can find more content on business-related topics on our site, which is a hub for all things project management. There are weekly blogs, guides, tutorial videos and free templates. The following are some of the business posts we’ve made recently.
- How to Write a Business Case (Template Included)
- What Is Proof of Concept (POC)? Examples for Business, Software & More
- Business Project Management Basics
- What Is a Vision Statement? 25 Vision Statement Examples
ProjectManager is cloud-based project management software that connects teams whether they’re in the office, out in the field or anywhere else. They can share files, comment at the task level and stay updated with email notifications and in-app alerts. Join teams at Avis, Nestle and Siemens who are using our software to achieve their vision. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.