[MUSIC] Hello learners. This lesson of our fifth course in our specialization, How to Start a Business, begins our discussion of your first step to prepare your capstone experience and the launch of your business. This lesson provides an overview of the next series of lessons aimed to help you get your mindset readied for this launch. Specifically, at the end of this lesson, you will understand the components of a strategic statement and its role in your business life. Remember, your mindset is a specific state of mind which orients the human conduct towards entrepreneurial activities and outcomes. In order to sustain the courageous persistence that you will need to overcome the challenges and setbacks you will no doubt encounter, you will have to take on the mental attitude that keeps you in a positive state of mind despite any circumstances. You can continually maintain your focus on the beliefs and mental attitude of your mindset by writing them out. And one of the best vehicles to do this is a strategic statement. A strategic statement keeps you focused on the course or direction to your desired goal. In addition to maintaining focus on your mindset, a strategy statement or strategic statement will answer three foundational questions with respect to your business. First, where do your need to be? What passion do you want to fulfill? What problem are you attempting to solve? What will make your business model a reality? Second, what can you do? What resources are available? What opportunities are most accessible? The strategy statement then identifies what direction your action should take to bridge the gap between what you need to do and what you can do. So what are these beliefs, these ways of thinking. What is this mental attitude that you need. Well, we covered these beliefs and mental attitude when we first introduced the concept of an entrepreneurial mindset and its associated process principles. Specifically, in the lesson getting the right mindset, a new paradigm, we summarize the areas of an entrepreneurial mindset covered in that course. We will reiterate the more universal and more important aspects of an entrepreneurial mindset with the components of a strategic statement. At the core of the entrepreneurial mindset, as you well know, is passion. Your passion of course, fuels the creation of some value, some problem that you attempt to solve through the products and services of your business. This corresponds to the mission component of the strategic statement. In addition to passion and the innovation leading to value creation, another core aspect of an entrepreneurial mindset is the pursuit of opportunities. This will be captured by the goals expressed in the strategic statement. Entrepreneurs like you with an entrepreneurial mindset, operate within the new business paradigm. Particularly, the recognition that a startup is only temporary. It's a prototype organization that's used to search for a reputable, scalable business model for your business. Operating within this new business paradigm, also involves the concept of adaptive execution and operating in ways that are unbounded by your available resources. This is what we typically refer to as mitigating risk. These execution areas are framed and directed by strategy and implemented through your strategic thinking. In summary, in the spirit of the idiom that to change one's circumstances, one needs to change one's behavior which requires a change in one's thinking. The first step in preparing for your capstone experience and your business launch is refocusing your entrepreneurial mindset. This focused mindset is articulated in a strategy statement. This strategy statement consists of a vision statement capturing your passion and aspirations. A mission statement that expresses your purpose and the problem you wish to resolve through the value created value by your business. The opportunity that you're pursuing and that you hope to exploit is captured by the set of goals in the strategic statement. These are followed by the aspects of the new business paradigm principles expressed in the objectives. Finally, the last two milestones of an entrepreneurial mindset shown in an earlier slide involved executing actions that influence and impact behavior. And that these are woven into your business strategy. As we conclude our summary, it's important to note strategy and strategic thinking are two different concepts. Strategy is a company's long term position in the marketplace, its vision, mission and basic direction for what the company will and will not do to provide and deliver value to customers. Despite its title, the article we had you read, why small businesses should scrap strategic planning, that article argued for the importance of strategy. The article argued that small growth businesses, small entrepreneurs such as yourself, should not fly blind. Thus implying, that they should have some long-term position, vision or mission. That is, they should have strategy. What the article actually argued against is being bound by a set of actions that are scripted without any real time engagement with the market. Preferring instead the flexibility of having actions reflect the insights of intense market engagement and the trial and error validation of adapted execution. What the author classifies as strategic thinking. [MUSIC]