“The mission says why you do what you do, not the means by which you do it.” – Peter Drucker
In our day-to-day business as manufacturers, resellers, marketers, accountants or whatever titles we hold, we forget to stop and reflect. Why are we doing what we’re doing? Is it purely bottom-line economics? Or are we looking to firmly establish our careers? Or are we motivated to achieve something beyond just money and career? In the daily grind of things, it’s easy to sometimes forget that the main purpose of any business is to provide a certain set of products or services that can fulfill the unique needs of a certain set of customers. If our customers didn’t have a need that we couldn’t fulfill with our products or services, we wouldn’t have a business, or goals, or a mission statement. In fact, it is good to re-visit those goals and mission statements as often as possible to remember the big picture:
- Are our customers happy with our service or product?
- Are we satisfying their ever-changing needs?
- Are we evolving with those changing needs?
The only constant is change and most days it’s easy to forget the big picture because we have so many small moving parts to deal with on a daily basis.
Peter Drucker – the management guru of the 21st century, invented modern day management, as we know it. For all his fame and fortune, the man left behind a simple legacy wrapped up in a world of knowledge. If we don’t have time to read his various books or articles, we can definitely take time out of our busy schedules to answer 5 basic questions:
- What is our mission?
- Who is our customer?
- What does the customer value?
- What are our results?
- What is our plan?
The questions are simple, but by forcing ourselves to re-examine our assumptions, we can focus on why we are doing what we are doing, and how to do it better.
Bluff Manufacturing’s mission statement asserts that Bluff Manufacturing will strive for superior partnering in all channels to fully understand our customers’ challenges and provide innovative solutions that make us the ‘Go-To Company’ in the material handing industry.
Our customers are our distributors and our end-users. Our customers value high-quality, secure docking solutions that can match their unique needs and requirements. Our plan is to constantly aspire to understand our customers’ needs and to create products that surpass safety standards while meeting these needs. Bluff Manufacturing has worked to closely match results with its company objectives. But in order to continue that, it’s important to keep asking these five questions. As Drucker puts it, “Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.” Here’s to profitability in American manufacturing and creating trust-worthy brands.
