What’s in a mission?

Nine years ago, when Alpen Lily began with a single, solitary client, I was nowhere near having formed a mission statement. At that point, I had already built a set of principles through my web development career, but these principles lived in my head and were nowhere near print.

In my defense, I was a full-time stay-at-home mom with a 3-year-old and 1-year-old at that time. I was too busy juggling diaper changes, story times, and sneaking in work during nap time to even consider a mission statement. And as Alpen Lily grew, my time was focused on clients and not company culture or business planning.

Fast-forward to today. With some relative normalcy in my schedule and family life post-COVID – and with an incredible team by my side – I decided it was time to put those principles on paper and on our website in the form of a mission statement. In the long run, I believed this was an important benefit for our existing clients, not just capturing new ones.

A mission statement is a declaration of what your company does and why it exists. This message is designed for internal and external audiences; it should ignite interest in the organization as it builds its brand. The best mission statements both educate and inspire. – Business News Daily

So, I started my mission to write a mission statement by consulting my dear friend Google. I scanned the internet for inspiration and took pen to paper, which is my absolute favorite method of brainstorming. (Check out this article on Science Daily about the power of writing on paper for brain activity.) Then, I spoke with our team about their goals and how they’d like to see Alpen Lily Web Studio progress into the future.

With this information, I arrived at a somewhat-long, but simple mission statement:

We aim create an exceptional digital presence for our clients, through

• Thoughtful analysis of their unique needs
• Delivery of top-quality products and services based on current trends and best practices
• Respectful consideration of time and budget via efficient processes and procedures

With this, I’d like to share each aspect of Alpen Lily’s mission and how we arrived with each of these tenants.

Thoughtful analysis of unique needs

“Thoughtful analysis of unique needs” is an important part of what Alpen Lily offers: custom website solutions based on the unique needs of our clients.

Throughout my web design career, I’ve struggled with this question: Do we create a website one-size-fits-all product that can be used by a specific industry, or do we remain a service-based company that provides customized website solutions to our clients?

Over time, I’ve realized an asset we bring to clients is an ability to analyze their organization and recommend a solution. This recommendation is based on their budget, target audience, their internal capabilities to edit their own website (or not), design goals, availability of photography, and so much more. This process relies heavily on our years of experience in web design, as well as an ability to keep an open mind to fresh possibilities and solutions for our clients.

While the one-size-fits-all product is never entirely off the table, I think that’s an entirely separate business. With Alpen Lily, we’re going to stick to our strengths, and solidifying this portion of the mission statement was incredibly helpful to that end.

Delivery of top-quality products and services based on current trends and best practices

One of the many things I appreciate about Alpen Lily’s team is our collective hunger for knowledge. As you might expect, it’s an absolute necessity in this field of work; technology is ever-changing. We make it a priority to attend webinars, talks from experts, and conferences. We are continually sharpening our toolset as it relates to WordPress, website accessibility, design, search engine optimization, and more.

We take the time to learn about industry trends and best practices because we love the process of learning. It comes easily to us. We make it a priority. Thus, it landed in our mission statement.

Our clients can rest assured that we’re putting our best effort toward staying abreast of the latest in web development, so they don’t have to.

With this tenant, each new Alpen Lily project is better than the last. When we launch a website, and the client stays on as a WordPress support customer, they benefit from updates to their website based on these new trends and best practices in website development.

Respectful consideration of time and budget via efficient processes and procedures

The final tenant of our mission statement is related to both our clients’ time and budget.

With respect to “time,” one of our major goals is to make the website development process easy for our clients. This requires consistent communication and check-ins. It requires knowing when to communicate something to the client and not getting bogged down in the details in those conversations. It requires doing things correctly the first time, and if there are mistakes, fixing them quickly and efficiently. Many of these skills come with experience, trial and error, and understanding the degree to which an individual client would like to be involved. We also must remain organized on our end, so we can effectively communicate with our clients.

Which brings us to budget.

When I was the one and only Alpen Lily developer, it was relatively easy to stay organized and keep things efficient for clients. As we’ve grown, it has become critical to develop a system of processes and procedures that promote efficiency. This ensures we’re on the same page as our clients, and (perhaps more importantly) we’re on the same page internally.

We’ve implemented the use of project management tools like Basecamp, Google Sheets, and Slack to keep things running smoothly. We’ve set up processes that we can replicate from project to project to keep hours to a minimum for our clients. In the process of building a website, we consistently discuss how we can build it better and more efficiently.

Conclusion: In the end, mission statements are useful

Since the formation of Alpen Lily’s mission statement, I have returned to it several times when making decisions. It has influenced how we write our proposals for new clients. It has affected how we serve our existing clients. I’ve turned down projects where I don’t believe it’s possible fulfill our mission.

It took all of nine years for me to sit down and write our mission statement, but it is definitely better late than never. If you have questions about our mission, or how we can help you better fulfill your own, please contact us.