Making your mission mean something
Thoughts on the value of our mission at HeyBryan
I met the challenge of writing my first mission statement with about the same level of enthusiasm as a root canal on new years day. I’m sure I wasn’t alone with that thought. The evangelized combination of Mission, Vision, and Promise seemed little more than an eye-catching statement for an investor presentation. Something that felt distant from the day-to-day life of the business.
As I dug deeper into the mechanics of how these things worked, the patterns began to emerge. I developed an even more cynical view after the realization that so many missions are templated epithets filled with adjectives and false aspirations.
It took a while to overcome buzzwords and appreciate what an effective mission statement could be. Better yet, to develop the understanding required to create one myself. A company’s mission should be no longer than a single line and be something the entire business believes in. If it inspires confidence to become an industry-changing statement, then even better.
Understanding what makes you different
HeyBryan originated from one simple idea: Make it easier to get small work done around the house, and easier to find work with your handy skills. From there, it was on the team to find a solution to this industry-wide issue. Yet, to do so takes more than the end product execution, and that’s where identifying a mission comes in. There is a generally negative perception of the industry, from both sides (customer and expert).
The lack of trust, respect, and fairness within the industry are some of the core drivers that are why home maintenance in its traditional form no longer fits into modern-day expectations.
We want to change that.
Our misson is to improve the perception of the home maintenance industry
This was crafted to help shape the business as a whole, to inspire every future creative and product decision and define how we present ourselves to the world.
HeyBryan is currently a small player in the very competitive and growing home maintenance technology market. Our product currently offers much of the same solution. They have had the time, money, and resource to improve. We can (and will) strive to achieve the same level of polish, functionality, and features as everyone else, but that won’t be the differentiator.
Where we differ is that while most focus on changing how the industry operates, we are changing how an industry is perceived.
To achieve this we must aim to bridge the gap between both parties. Be useful and human, and to create something that people want to be part of. Use positivity and enable a different view into the home maintenance industry. The clue is in our name — HeyBryan. This comes from two core insights: Voice-operated assistance (Hey Siri), and the fact Bryan Baeumler (popular Home & Garden TV personality) himself is inundated with home-based requests. “Hey Bryan, can you fix my…”
What these both have in common is the awareness that conversation and human interaction is key to fostering a positive and long-lasting relationship with our users. Not to mention the value in a well-known industry celebrity placing both his trust and likeness in our product. If we’re to take the mission to heart, then we also need to look at what our product offers. The elevator pitch. The “what do you do?”
HeyBryan connects people with handyfolk to complete work around the home.
While simplifying the offering to a degree, not much has changed since the original idea. To an impressive extent, we already have achieved this. The question is how do we match the description of the business to our mission. Our mission is why we do this. We connect customers with handyfolk because it makes getting things done easier and offers extra income to the expert. The better the experience, the better the perception. HeyBryan survives not by how many tasks are complete, but the experience of the tasks themselves.
Connecting your mission with real execution
Mission statements can often feel completely alien to the day-to-day experience of work. ‘Empowering the power of changing change’ or something equally nonsensical, can feel pretty irrelevant if your daily challenge is to keep the status quo.
The challenge is to take that core belief and translate this into key questions related to every area of the business. If we want to improve the perception of an industry, our role is to identify what should improve to make it happen.
When we support our customers, do they come away feeling resolved and happier?
When we market to users, do they feel enriched by relevant and interesting content?
When we build products, do they improve the experience of home maintenance?
We’re looking at positive opportunities to improve your home life, for both customers and experts. How can we make the prospect of a home maintenance task both simpler and even enjoyable?
We create a series of ads designed to raise humor and relevancy into our dry and difficult industry.
By crafting a human tone of voice and sending from a real address, we’ve seen a huge increase in responses to our email marketing. What we now see more of is a genuine conversation.
We hear about family plans, dreams of moving and a lovely amount of general well-wishes. Admittedly, a few of these are asking to be removed from the mailing list, but any news is good news, right?
HeyBryan not some faceless corporation, but human and tangible. We’re real people, in an industry built around very personal interactions. There is a huge degree of implied trust expected and required from our business. Our customers trust us to get the job done and experts trust us to get them the jobs. The more personal and honest we can be, the more trust we build.
To better serve growth and core measurable metrics, we should know why people use our product. What can we do to ensure the experience advertised not only solves a problem but changes the expectation of the service. This is why our mission is synonymous with our marketing. It shapes our voice, our vision, and our content.
The product is more than the app
When we speak of our product at HeyBryan, it is never purely in relation to our app or a specific feature. The home-maintenance industry is about as personal as it gets from a demand-service experience. As such, when we view our ‘product’ what we’re considering is the entire experience of a task. The website can facilitate interest. Our app enables booking, management, and completion of the task. However, neither match the importance of real-world user experience, once the task is booked and an expert comes round. That is as vital as it can be unpredictable, and invaluable to the overall perception of the industry.
Given the unpredictable nature of the real-world task, what we can accommodate is our customer support. We can have the best app in the world, but if there’s no one to pick up the phone if something goes wrong, we fail as a business.
Thankfully, something we can at least control is the app itself. Every single update and new feature should adhere to our mission. We must break down perceived barriers to communication and connection. Make it easier to get things done and create a better experience.
Giving the customer more control and experts more opportunity to earn is all down to building trust and rapport between the two. Currently, there is a structural power imbalance inherent to the experience. Experts know what they’re talking about (hence the name) but customers don’t have that expertise or understanding in the value of the work required. HeyBryan must educate our customers on the true cost of home-maintenance work to remove the impact of a system out of their control. For our experts, we work to ensure only those who value their work and the homes of the customers they visit are on the platform.
We’ve all experienced the pains of miscommunication, tones being misread in emails, and resentments built out of lack of contact. The exact same can be said for the home industry. Frustration comes from lack of response, lack of clarity, a misunderstanding over job complexity and cost. In so many cases an issue through a job can be resolved by open dialogue.
Here at HeyBryan, we look to see how our mission can direct change up and down the KPI chain. For example: Improved chat functionality, leads to improved communication, which improves the perceived expectation of the experience.
There is a direct tie between this, building retention and all the other lovely KPIs. To only focus on the end product without considering the reason behind it can lead to missing a greater opportunity. It’s one thing to tell someone to do something, it’s another to inspire them to do so.
We have to ask ourselves whether using our product improves the view of the home-maintenance industry. If not, why not? How can we make that experience better?
Enhanced customer control is crucial to that. We have fundamental measurable data points to improve, but there’s more to it than that — we have the challenge of trust. By enabling communication, the trust will follow.
Trust, communication, positivity. These are all core tenets of our brand and business, and all borne out of our original mission statement. A company mission is exactly that: It’s relevant to the entire business. A valuable and legitimate mission is built from a genuine desire to solve a core industry problem. If successful, the mission creates a believable story and goal.
The perfect combination
One thing not mentioned here is the value of information and data. Data is a crucial aspect of any successful business, and at HeyBryan that’s no different. It helps identify opportunities, validates assumptions, appeases budgets and tickles investors.
It helps craft effective KPIs and can direct the future of the business. A mission exists not to differ from the data, but rather help create the data. A mission is there to support and generate the figures required.
To achieve these targets requires an impactful mission. One that inspires everything we do and persuades users to choose our product over anyone else’s. It’s the thread that binds all elements of our outcome. Crafting a solid North Star Metric is vital to a growing business. What an effective mission can provide is the inspiration to meet these goals. Internally from an operational perspective and externally from a user base experience. It’s that shared vision and expectation created from the outset and then delivered by our company that makes the difference.
KPIs and metrics make us a business. A great mission makes us human. It might even change the perception of an industry.
