What is your company’s mission and vision statement?

Sounds boring, right? What does something so abstract have to do with actually building a successful business?

Well, it’s only boring if it’s fake or disingenuous. Making up shallow platitudes to post on your office wall won’t do much to motivate you if there’s no real fire behind your words.

On the other hand, if your vision statement is real, and comes from deep in the core of who you are as a person, then it will be a driving force that can help you reach the ultimate success in direct selling.

Some companies go for catchy slogans and high-minded empowerment statements. Most of the time, these slogans mean nothing in practice. As the CEO of my own direct sales company, we partnered with a charity to give back and make the world a better place.

We failed.

Where did we fail? It wasn’t our core mission that guided every decision we made in the business. Instead, our mission was just a feel-good afterthought and nothing more. Even though we did 33 million in sales by the second year, we could’ve done much better.

Want to truly crush it in the direct selling business?

You have to have a mission that your entire team can get behind—both at corporate headquarters and in the field.

You want your partners to buy into it and genuinely strive to be a part of what you represent.

You want distributors to get excited about it and even make it part of their own identities.

Look at Trades of Hope (http://www.tradesofhope.com/), for example. They are unique in the direct selling industry because of their higher calling. They’ve created a thriving marketplace for products made by talented artisans in 3rd world countries. They have ignited a cycle of sustainable business that displaces and ends poverty for many people.

By earning a commission off their sales, their distributors have the opportunity to help people around the world while having their own flexible and purposeful businesses and earning income that benefits their own families as direct sellers. How’s that for a company mission?

If you don’t have a vision like this—maybe not as lofty, but at least as passionate and positive—then you are building a business with feet of clay. It used to be that a corporation could focus only on the mechanical process of creating profits and be a huge success, but in the world we live in today, that simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Capital means more than cash—there is a human element to consider, and it’s central to business. Companies that don’t acknowledge this have no direction and no moral compass.

Every new direct sales company should find their true purpose before anything else. They should engage with their community and create and everlasting bond of genuine service. Otherwise, what’s the point of starting a company at all?

A great way to accomplish this is through the use of an engagement tool like the Journey mobile app from Krato (https://krato.com/). With mobile tools like this, you can ensure that every new distributor learns about the company mission, understands why it is so important and hears directly from the founders when they explain what it all means.

It can also be used to make sure that distributors have retained this information, and they can be quizzed on the company philosophy again and again. Further, you can push social media messages and assets to the distributor’s social media network to scale your message. Distributors can email and text with friends and family to share why your company is making a difference.

Of course, technology does not just work on its own. You need to actually have a mission to share for these tools to help you. Otherwise, you’re all sizzle and no steak; all talk, but no real action to back it up.

First of all, ask yourself:

WHY does your company exist?

WHY do you work so hard?

What problems in the world keep you awake at night?

Money alone will not carry you through the challenging times that we must endure as leaders. In fact, that is a common beginner’s mistake that leads to failure: overvaluing money and profits over a higher mission.

Dig deep, be honest with yourself, and capture your TRUE mission and values. Then, have the courage to share it with the world—unedited, uncensored. Only then will you truly unlock the potential of your direct selling company.