Our vision is to be the world's best marketing management software company.
What I like most about our vision is it enables our team huge scope to apply the vision to everything we do. Even within a small tactical decision an Orbis employee will ask themselves "what would be the world's best effort and outcome for this job?". This aspiration is fundamental to the culture at our company.
A vision statement is the ultimate end-state that management wants a company to be. The vision is a grand aspiration that keeps drawing a team forward. It should inspire continuous growth and development. Being the best in a sector is not something you can attain and then just keep. At any point in time our competition will be doing some things better than us, so our vision inspires us to keep on striving in all areas of Orbis to get ahead and keep ahead of our competitors.
What does our vision to be the world's best marketing management software business mean to the different stakeholders of Orbis?
- For shareholders, it means the best return on capital of all the players in our space. And it also means long term growth and viability. These are measurable objectives. I often get asked 'why isn't your vision to be the world's 'leading' player, or the 'biggest'? Pretty easy really: there is no correlation between long term shareholder value and being the biggest player in a market. Just look at General Motors, or Enron! I believe that in achieving the best long term shareholder value a more sophisticated approach is needed by balancing the desire for rapid growth with the need to ensure long term viability. We want to be in the right geographical markets at the right time; with the right product features and the right partnerships that deliver a unique and compelling value proposition to our clients. Being the best requires us to make disciplined decisions and stay the course.
- For our clients, being the best means providing sophisticated solutions that are easy to deploy, manage and use. It annoys me to hear some of the horror stories I've heard in the last year about some of our competitors' implementations. It annoys me because marketers who are genuinely trying to improve their business don't deserve buggy and hard-to-use systems. They don't deserve to be putting out fires all the time instead of getting on with the job of marketing in a more automated way! At Orbis, we look very carefully at the full lifecycle of our client relationships and at every point provide high value solutions and services that are easy to take up. We do things very differently to our competition and it works.
- For our employees, it means learning and growing both professionally and personally. It means working not only for a company with financial goals but for a company that is making a real and sustaining difference to our clients' businesses and their daily lives at work. If you are going to be the best company in the world at what you do then it needs to be a great place to work! This means we work a lot at our culture, really undertanding our values and the attitudes and behaviours that align with those values. Being the best means investing in our people and rewarding them for not only what they achieve but how they go about achieving it. We know that the right culture is paramount in long term success.
- For our partners it means being reliable and flexible; treating them like extensions of our business and investing time and effort into our relationships. It means being open to new ideas and ways of working together, and it means being loyal.
- For our suppliers, being the best marketing management software company in the world means that we expect the same level of excellence from them that we seek to provide our clients. We work with our suppliers ethically and with long term partnership as our goal.
- For the communities we operate in we strive to find ways to make a positive difference through the use of our time, skills and our financial resources.
Our vision is a constant source of inspiration and direction. There are things we will do exceptionally well sometimes, and other times where we will fall short. But one thing is for sure, the Orbis team will always be moving forward to be the best in our space.
Ciao for now, Grant
