Origin, mission and vision: aligning your business identity

Executive overview

Investors and customers back founders whose background visibly fits their business. The OMV framework — origin, mission, vision — creates that alignment by grounding your business in a narrative that only you can own.

Your origin story surfaces insights no one else has. Your vision defines the world you want to see. Your mission sets the concrete 90-day to 12-month steps to get there.

The founder whose story visibly fits the opportunity wins the room.

Building your origin story

• Your origin is your last 15–30 years of contacts, insights, highs, lows, and solved problems.
• Unique insights from that background become the foundation of products only you can credibly build.
• Investors back the match between founder and opportunity, not just the opportunity itself.
• Steve Jobs: look backwards and connect the dots — the narrative reveals itself in retrospect.

Defining vision and mission

• Vision: complete the sentence "I'd love to see a world where ____."
• Vision is not something you must do — it's the future you want to exist, whoever builds it.
• Work with a big (open-ended) vision, then a concrete three-year target.
• Mission is what you personally do next: 90 days to 12 months of specific, actionable steps.

Choosing your business design

• Reverse-engineer from your desired future, not forward from your past.
• Two reliable designs: lifestyle business or performance business.
• Lifestyle: 3–12 people, built around fun, freedom, flexibility; punches above its weight in a niche.
• Performance: 35–150 people, external funding (£0.5M–£1.5M), targets £10M+ revenue and a £50M–£200M exit.
• Lifestyle teams are hard to scale beyond 12; performance businesses require a structured leadership layer.
• Decide which design you want before building — the structure, team, and goals follow from that choice.