Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

It took me many years to stop apologizing for saying the same things over and over again, year after year, as we built Boloco. As I go through and purge old files in the long wind down process of a 25+ year old company, I often bump into documents, images, and videos that carry such vivid reminders of lessons learned along the way.

In 2011 we were 14 years in and held quarterly leadership retreats for all of our team members with any supervisory or managerial responsibility. Every retreat included discussions on the Mission of Boloco, and in this particular meeting we decided to see how well it was sticking.

For clarity, here is the mission of Boloco:

"To Positively Impact the lives and futures of our people and communities* through bold and inspired food and practices"

Here you see the responses received from some of our most veteran team leads at the time; one of them was even a founding team member.

Not bad, right? All pretty good things. But none of them got it exactly right. Some weren't really close.

You can't repeat yourself enough when it comes to sharing the mission, vision and purpose of your company. It never ends. People always need to hear it. And don't apologize for being a leader who cares about the big "why" of your business.

*"communities" was added years later when we realized that we spent just as much time focused on supporting our communities as anything else we did.