Once you’ve mapped out your industry, develop a set of at- tributes that describe your business. You can also develop a set of questions that a curious individual, potential investor or suitor might ask when trying to learn about your business. Listing the attributes and developing questions and answers will enable you to triangulate the two sets of information with any advertising descriptions you use to describe your business. Once you have a well-developed list of attributes and probing questions that elicit descriptive information about your firm, refine the compiled information. One part of this process is to introduce more adjectives that add dimension to the nouns you developed. But it’s best not to get carried away with gross exaggerations about your services or capabilities, or else your words might come back to haunt you later. Get competent legal guidance for your choice of verbiage and structure. There’s no need to be paranoid about your every word. But you should seek both legal and accounting advice when de- ciding the legal structure for your new business and creating business forms, contracts and other items that describe your product and service offerings. Once released, unfortunately, you can’t get the liability genie back in the bottle. Hopefully, you now have at least a rudimentary understand- ing of what a mission statement is, why businesses use them, why you should have one and how to develop your own. Yes, you can do it, and you can always develop new and improved versions. Good luck. The topic for our next article in this series will be “Navigat- ing the Covid Minefield,” where we will discuss the story of ALOA’s battle with the pandemic. Noel Flynn is a degreed business management consultant with global senior leadership experi- ence, including more than 20 years in manufactur- ing, wholesale distribution and consulting sectors of the security industry. Noel has been a senior executive, officer, board director and adviser to not-for-profit and for-profit companies in numerous industries worldwide. This includes being an ALOA SPAI board member since 2011, and he is also an ACE instructor, developing and teaching business management. Contact him at [email protected] JUNE IS CODE MACHINE MONTH FRA2-Framon #2 Still the most accurate & durable code machine available TKM-100 Originate almost any tubular key in use today FRA-2001 Automatic high speed cylinder key cutting BD955 From Blue Dog Keys Stack On Gun Safes $4.50 each Included! Gcode 21 Powered by Genericode Genericode 21 Now Avaialble! Order Your Update Today! New display including key blank information in the View Key Data screen, Ability to add notes to a vehicle by make / model / year, Updated vehicle data for 2021/2022 models, Thousands of new codes WWW.FRAMON.COM [email protected] WWW.BLUEDOGKEYS.COM [email protected] Used by thousands of locksmiths around the world - EVERY DAY. 989-354-5623 PHONE I 989-354-4238 FAX I 1201 W. CHISHOLM STREET ALPENA MI 49707 Contact BOTH Blue Dog Keys and Framon Manufacturing Company: WWW.ALOA.ORG JUNE 2021 KEYNOTES 23
