When everything feels urgent, let your mission and values decide
By Martin Newenham
When priorities compete and the workload keeps growing, your mission and values are the quickest way to decide what to do now, what to hand over and what to drop.
Everything on this list is urgent. So where do I start?
As the end of the year approaches, work can start to feel like one long list of competing demands. Marketing needs attention, the finance deadlines won’t move, admin keeps piling up, and your team keeps asking which of it matters most. Everything is shouting at once.
A to-do list can’t settle that for you. It treats every item as equal, and the most urgent things are rarely the most important. What you need is a filter, and most businesses already have one, even if nobody has looked at it for years: a clear sense of what the business is for and how it wants to work. In other words, its mission and values.
What we learned rewriting our own
Rebecca and I have spent the last few weeks revisiting Get Ahead’s mission, vision and values. The old versions weren’t wrong, and they read well on the website. But when we asked whether they helped us make actual decisions, the answer was mostly no.
So we rewrote them to do specific jobs. As we open new regions, our values need to help us judge whether a prospective Regional Director is the right fit. They need to show Virtual Experts that joining Get Ahead means joining a network, not signing up to a job board. And our goals need to keep the two of us focused on a small number of priorities rather than on whatever lands in the inbox.
The lesson was simple. If your mission and values can’t help you make a decision, they’re decoration.
What useful mission and values look like in a small business
A mission says what you do and who you do it for, in a sentence you could say out loud without cringing. Values describe how you work, in terms specific enough to rule some choices out. “Excellence” rules nothing out, because nobody sets out to be mediocre. “We reply to every client within one working day” or “we’d rather turn work down than overpromise” does, and your team can check themselves against it.
You don’t need many. Three to five values that people can remember will do more than a list of ten that nobody can recall. They also need to be written down and shared, so they guide the whole team rather than only the person who wrote them.
A quick test: think of a decision you made last month, perhaps a client you took on or a request you said yes to. Would your mission and values have pointed the same way? If they wouldn’t have helped either way, they need sharpening.
Do it, delegate it or drop it
Once your purpose is clear, it becomes a practical filter for the list. For each item, ask three questions.
Does this move us towards what we’re here to do? If not, it’s a candidate for dropping, however urgent it feels. Does it need me, specifically? If it matters but doesn’t need your judgement, it’s a candidate to hand over. Would anyone notice if it stopped? Some regular tasks carry on long after the reason for them has gone.
What’s left is the work that only you can do and that moves the business forward, and that is where your time should go. As the year closes, it’s also worth asking one bigger question: if you could add one thing to the business next year and remove one thing, what would they be?
Giving your team a message they can use
A clear purpose isn’t only for the owner. When everyone can explain in a sentence what the business does and why, they make better calls without checking back, and they describe you consistently to customers, suppliers and anyone else who asks. That consistency is a large part of what people come to trust.
Try asking a few people in your team to describe the business in one sentence. If the answers vary widely, that’s worth knowing, and it’s a cheap problem to fix. There’s more on getting a team pulling in the same direction in how to improve performance in a growing business.
Where Get Ahead can help
Much of what lands in the “delegate” pile is the work our Virtual Experts do every day: marketing, bookkeeping and finance support, admin, and the operational tasks that crowd out thinking time. They are experienced, UK-based professionals, and your local Regional Director takes the time to understand how your business works, and what it’s for, before matching you with the right person.
If your list feels longer than your week, let’s talk about what’s taking up your time and where the right support would make the biggest difference. Find out more about our services or call 0330 223 7580.
Frequently asked questions
A mission says what your business does and who it is for. Values describe how you go about it: the standards and behaviours you expect from everyone in the business, including yourself.
Three to five is usually enough. A few specific values are easier to remember, and more useful when making decisions, than a long list.
They give you a test for each task: does it move the business towards its purpose, and does it fit how you want to work? Tasks that don’t are candidates to drop.
Hand over work that matters but doesn’t need your personal judgement, such as regular admin, bookkeeping or social media scheduling, and keep the decisions only you can make.
Get in touch: martin@getaheadva.com | Explore our support: getaheadva.com
Martin Newenham is a Director at Get Ahead, where he focuses on franchisee success and process improvement, alongside an active consulting practice spanning retail, technology, hospitality and client services. With over 30 years of experience, Martin has built a reputation for quickly identifying the issues inhibiting growth and working collaboratively with teams to resolve them. His career includes senior roles in Technology, Consulting and Retail, and a broad portfolio of consulting engagements covering acquisition integration, digital strategy, client experience and operational transformation. An experienced business coach and mentor, Martin’s areas of expertise include business strategy, customer experience, organisational change and coaching.
