30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 16

Yesterday: Sit down and read over your mission statement. Does it still accurately reflect your business and it’s aspirations? Polish it until it does. If you don’t have a mission statement, now is the time to write one!

Before we started working on this step of the 30 day small business cleanse, we really didn't think that we had an official mission statement. Like a lot of small businesses, we started off with an idea about what we wanted to do and we just started doing it. In fact, I'm not even sure that we really knew that we were starting a business when we started our business. A friend of ours was organizing a pop-up shop and asked us if we wanted to participate. At the time, we'd just started working on some linoleum blocks using photographs that Rosemary had taken of neon signs. So we thought, well why don't we just turn them into cards rather than prints and sell those. We printed them by hand (literally with our hands!) and that was the beginning of Ink+Smog Editions.

Ink+Smog Editions in the beginning.

Fast forward three years and here we are, still working with urban imagery, still crushing on neon signs, still interested in the city that surrounds us. As we've grown and changed, we've developed what we like to call our elevator speech. Our thirty second spiel about who we are and what we do. But we'd never really thought about it as a mission statement. But it is. In a nutshell it explains who the company is and what we're interested in. We probably couldn't have come up with a better mission statement if we'd sat down and tried to come up one.

One of the really interesting parts of this 30 day project, is that it is giving us the opportunity to connect with our company. We're sitting down to do work only to realize that we'd been slowly working on or thinking about a lot of these things over the years and in many cases, we've already down at least the foot work if not the actual work of the assignment. This project is bolstering our confidence in part because we're realizing that even though we've never sat down and worked on some of these points in as concrete a way as we felt we needed to, we'd often done the work more organically along the way.

Today: Catch up and relax! Take some time today to tie up the loose ends from any of your earlier projects. All done? Then relax!

Oh we are so looking forward to this! Baby cuddles here we come!