Brian is a WMA & Founder of Duggan Wealth Management | Forbes 2026 Best-In-State Wealth Advisor (#76) & Best-In-State Wealth Management Team
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There is a certain kind of sign you can usually buy at most home decor stores for a lake house. It says something like “Lake Life.” You hang it on the wall, everyone agrees that lakes are enjoyable and then nobody thinks about it again.
Sometimes I wonder if that is what happens to corporate mission statements.
Companies spend an incredible amount of time and money on strategic planning: retreats, consultants, whiteboards. Six months later, everyone unveils three sentences about excellence, integrity and exceptional solutions. And nobody really knows what any of it means.
I am not against mission statements. A good one becomes part of a business’s materials and influences how people make decisions, how customers experience the company and why they choose to stay. But it has to do something.
Why Mission Should Go Beyond The Product
It took me time to understand that in my business. Earlier on, it was much easier to talk about what we did: investments, performance, planning, products. Those things are tangible and demonstrate competence. They are also a safe place to hide because a business unsure how to explain its value can always talk about the product instead: “It’s cheaper, smarter, more sophisticated.”
Experience has made me more comfortable talking about why we do the work in the first place. Our mission at my wealth management firm is to help our clients “Live Your Mission.” We use those words in every first meeting, not because somebody ordered a nice sign for the conference room, but because it changes where the conversation starts.
We begin by asking what they want to accomplish, which takes the conversation somewhere very different than starting with a portfolio statement. People talk about taking care of their family, helping their children, giving money away, selling a business, leaving something behind or simply wanting to know they have enough. Those are all forms of the utility of money.
Our industry can lose sight of that because wealth management firms are very good at measuring things, like returns, benchmarks and expense ratios. Those things matter. But they are the prerequisite, not the mission.
A fraction of a percent in return is not how we determine whether we succeeded for a family. Did they gain the confidence to retire, help their children or make the gift they had talked about for years? Did their wealth give them more freedom or just a larger number on a statement? Those questions are harder to put on a quarterly report, but they’re closer to why people accumulated the money in the first place.
Building A Mission Vs. Buying A Sign
The same idea applies to almost any business. A manufacturer can explain the precision of its parts, a technology company its software, a restaurant its food. They need to do those things well. But the output alone is rarely what creates commitment.
Think about the businesses you return to again and again. There is usually something beyond the product: You trust them and know what to expect when you walk through the door. The product gets someone in the door; the experience left behind brings them back. That matters because products can be copied and prices undercut, but it is much harder to copy the experience a company consistently creates for its customers.
That is where a mission statement becomes useful. If it is real, it influences the experience a customer has with the company, helps employees make decisions when there is not an obvious answer and affects what the company chooses to offer (and occasionally what it chooses not to).
Customers are pretty good at figuring out when it is nonsense. You can spend a million dollars on consultants and put the mission statement in expensive lettering behind the reception desk, but if the experience on the other side of that desk has nothing to do with those words, you mostly bought an expensive sign.
Differentiating Your Business
There is also a practical reason to get this right. Every business has things it cannot control. For example, for us, it is the market. We can build a thoughtful portfolio, but we cannot control what stocks do next year. If performance is the only reason a client hired us, a bad market becomes a referendum on the relationship.
Every business faces its own version, whether it’s commodity prices, the next platform or the shop that opens down the street. If your relationship with customers rests entirely on what you sell, you will spend a lot of time defending it.
Purpose gives you another place to compete, and I do not mean that in the sense where every company suddenly discovers it exists to change humanity. A company can just make really good parts and make its customers’ lives easier. That is a respectable reason to exist. The mission does not need to sound important. It needs to be true and lived.
The Test For Business Owners
That is the test I would give any business owner. Take your mission statement off the website, take it down from the office wall and look at the company. Would your employees still know what it is based on the decisions they are expected to make? Would your customers know it from the experience they have with you?
For us, I hope the answer shows up in the conversations we have with families and the decisions that follow. Good investment management is expected, but the purpose of the work is to help clients use their wealth to accomplish something that matters to them.
It took experience for us to become confident enough to lead with that instead of performance or products. At some point, a business stops proving it is the smartest one in the room and becomes comfortable explaining why the work matters in the first place.
A mission statement should shape the product, the decisions your people make, the experience you create and the feeling a customer is left with after doing business with you. If you can take it off the wall and your employees and customers can still tell you what it is, you probably have something real.
If not, a decor store has signs too.
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