After all, I had been a Corporate Adviser to many start-ups in my previous business - Harvest Business Growth Partners, and we certainly espoused the use of a Mission Statement as a grounding force in the often turbulent waters of early-stage innovative business. This all-encompassing statement was a tool to focus, guide, and help founders hold course, return to source, or pivot as times dictated. 

Very little remains consistent in the life of a start-up – sometimes things develop so quickly your head will spin, sometimes so slowly you will tear your hair out in frustration but ultimately the Mission Statement acts as a home base. The thinking is while chaos reigns and things start to overwhelm, the team can retreat to the comfort of the Mission Statement to remember who they are, what they stand for, and what effect they want the start-up to have on the world. From there sound decisions can be made. While never taking it too seriously, I’ve always seen the Mission Statement as a kind of security blanket for founders to use as they navigate the unknown. 

So why did we not institute an official Mission Statement for Boxdark Industries? We had one, it fitted our purpose and goals for the company. So why not?

The problem was I had never been a start-up founder before, (and this may be a hangover from being on the other side of the coin as a Corporate Adviser), so it was easy for me to see Mission Statements as self-indulgent and even a little arrogant. I felt any start-up team should know and understand their mission but not everything has to be broadcast to the world. Again, the corporate adviser in me was thinking that people just don’t care until you show them something worthwhile, so be humble and do that instead of talking about your mission. It all seemed redundant and a little too pretentious. Think of it as a will to get on with the job and show them as opposed to being a braggart that has achieved little! 

I always saw the Mission Statement’s benefit to my team was as a private reflection and re-calibration tool. And passively it has been, very passively. 

We have never revealed our mission statement, not on our website or in a pitch deck, grant application, or any other literature. Outside of the Boxdark Industries Board of Directors it is unknown, and even from our board members, you will probably get different wording of the mission. 

The Boxdark Industries Mission Statement:

“TO CREATE INNOVATIVE, HIGH-QUALITY GAMING INPUT DEVICES FOR ALL GAMERS.”

So why institute our Mission Statement now?

We established Boxdark in 2016 and quickly got the attention of investors as well as PlayStation and Xbox. Things were moving quickly, and I jokingly (naively) said to fellow shareholders and board members Fred Ottosson and Nigel Cushing that we needed to develop a philosophy as I worried we would not have enough of a story to tell or “skin in the game” to justify our success when it came. I sometimes wish I could go back and eat those words...

In the last five years we have had the rollercoaster ride of highs and lows, we’ve developed 23 versions of the ProSteer with eight prototypes, we’ve taken steps forward and steps back, we pivoted from a license model to a manufacturing model, taken new investors, changed core component technologies more than once, along the way we’ve met some great allies, we changed development partners, tested and re-tested then planned and commenced a crowdfunding campaign and then cancelled it! We changed marketing partners, rejected a major investment offer, moved part of our development offshore, fell short after applying for many grants, and along with everyone else we have endured the COVID19 global travel shutdown (while developing hardware internationally!). We then achieved our full US patent, signed a development agreement with Xbox and we continue to navigate the global semi-conductor shortage and resulting component scarcity and price hikes as our manufacturing date approaches...SKIN IN THE GAME!

Developing a new product from scratch is very challenging. Hardware is hard, we were told more than once that we had chosen a very difficult task and would probably fail. 

There have been dark days filled with doubt when we had little to no funding, and we felt like we were banging our heads against a brick wall! And there have been those brilliant exciting days when we could see the mountain top! We are extremely grateful for this experience and through it all our belief has been resolute.

Now as we near the end of this development and we gear up to take investment to commercialise onto the Xbox platform it has been a time of reflection and planning. What has been revealed is that through all of the successes and failures we’ve had, we have used our Mission Statement as that grounding tool. So, I was wrong, the mission has been the one consistent factor in this journey and all decisions (good and bad) have been made with our core mission in mind and our will to make it happen! We have come to realise it is not window dressing simply intended to impress; it is not a pretentious reach. Instead, it shows we have legs beyond the initial project, that Boxdark is mission-driven and in for the long haul. It is a statement of intent, backed by 100% belief. So it should be “ran up the flagpole” again and again regardless of who else salutes.

Through this journey, I have come to believe all start-ups should have an appropriate Mission Statement. It is not self-indulgent or arrogant. That’s like saying a mountain climber is arrogant for planning the climb and using safety ropes! Those outside the organisation should see the mission. It constitutes the team’s underlying belief in the whole business, not so much for the good times but mainly for the grind, the dark days. The mission statement is the reminder of what you are striving for, and the underlying absolute belief that you can, you will succeed.