A business mission is a brief statement of something the business is working to achieve. Business mission statements are used to focus the effort of everyone working in the business. A business mission is like a “smart goal” for the entire organization. It’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.
Should your business have one mission statement or multiple mission statements?
A business can have more than one mission statement concurrently. However, to really work on multiple missions concurrently a business requires more bandwidth, which means it should have enough people with autonomy and leadership to actually do them. Otherwise, multiple missions merely distract the team. If, as a business owner, you have multiple missions you need or want to achieve, but not enough people to do them, you need to prioritize them and work on them either one at a time or one primary mission and one mission to advance as resources are available to use up whatever spare time exists.
In the military, each unit is tasked with a single mission at a time. If that unit has sub-units, it can then provide more narrowly-scoped missions to each of them to support its own mission. In business, this translates to having autonomous teams who are capable of achieving a mission. The more of those you have in your business, the more missions your business can be pursuing concurrently. However, those missions should be in support of your highest level business mission or missions. You should only have multiple concurrent business missions if you have the capacity in place to have different people pursue them.