Last month I wrote about the last  five years at SIGNAL  

And I shared some lessons that we learned along the way (Read that blog here)

At the end of April, we celebrated our birthday with our customers in traditional SiGNAL style!

It’s safe to say that we had a lot of fun!!  

But milestones are a time for pause and reflection as well as celebration. We’re no longer a start-up, we are an established business. So does that transition mean we are going to do things differently at SiGNAL over the next five years?  

Is our stated mission still fit for purpose?  

We thought now would be a good time to review our original mission so we asked all 42 of our tenants how they think we are doing.  

Our stated mission, set out in 2018, is: 

To Make Whitehill and Bordon the Best Place in the UK to Set Up and Run a Business  

In answer to our question ‘How are we doing?’ 

50 % of SIGNAL tenants said we are on the right track  

50% of SiGNAL tenants said we are nearly there or all the way there!  

So yes, the mission is still relevant and now we can confidently say we are halfway to completion!  

However, the world has changed and the business has changed over those five years since 2018 as I discussed in my previous blog (Read that blog here) so we decided to review the way we approach the mission.  

What we do want to do differently is pledge to tackle the task in a way that creates the biggest positive impact.  

We’ve always been a conscientious company, focusing on people and considering the planet but now we are bringing this culture to the front and centre of our business strategy.

What does this mean in practice?  

As a part of our strategy to focus on positive social impact, we have begun the journey towards B Corp registration, auditing every part of the business for its impact on our planet, both environmentally and socially.

We’re producing our first full Social Impact Report.

We’re launching a community biodiversity programme, whereby our residents can sponsor bee homes, wildflower patches, hedgehog cabins, and bird boxes around our grounds  

We have created a new team competition for the ‘Biggest Heart’. For this new award, team members will be rewarded for volunteering, training, and going above and beyond their job description.  

All team members are encouraged to volunteer at least once a month outside of the business. 

All team members are expected to go ‘above and beyond’ for our customers, but also for all residents and businesses in the town. Anything that moves us closer towards our eventual goal of making Bordon the best place in the UK to own and run a business!  

Some of these approaches are also bringing the business into alignment with the personal values of the team which is essential for motivation and retention.  

I’m confident that this approach will stand us in very good stead for the next 5 years as values-based decisions tend to be the correct ones - and at SiGNAL we believe profit is a by-product of good business strategy, not a goal in itself.  

The fact that we are also planning to double in size over the next three years is more about the business plan than the strategy. Plans fall apart - strategy keeps going.   

I hope you like the way we approached turning five  

How do you celebrate the milestones in your business?