Writing a mission and values page with AI is a Skill: one well-built prompt turns your founder story into a mission and a short list of values, and the whole job takes one sitting of about an hour. You walk away with a page you can publish, written in plain words a customer would actually say, with no "excellence", "integrity" or "innovation" in sight. The mission says who you serve and what changes for them. The values say how you behave while you do it, each one backed by a real decision. The AI is good at finding the pattern in your story and cutting it down. You are the only one who knows which decisions were real.
- Shape
- Skill
- Sitting
- one sitting
The shape: Skill
This job is a Skill because everything turns on one prompt and the material you put in front of it. There is nothing to connect and no steps to automate. What decides the result is whether the AI writes from your story or from every mission statement it has ever read.
Ask an AI for "a mission statement for my landscaping company" and it will return one in seconds. It will promise to "deliver exceptional outdoor spaces with integrity and care", and so will the next ten companies in your town. That is the corporate fog. It reads as if nobody wrote it, because in a sense nobody did.
The fix is to give the AI the story first and forbid the fog words outright. Your founder story already holds your mission: the problem you saw, who had it, and what you decided to do. Your values are already in the decisions you made along the way, especially the ones that cost you something. The AI's job is to find those and say them plainly.
If you have not written your founder story yet, do the founder story job first. Its interview transcript is the best input this page can have. Once the prompt works, keep it, and run it again when the business changes direction.
What you give the AI
Gather these before you start. Each one is a thing you can copy and paste, not a feeling you have to describe.
- Your founder story: the long version, or the interview transcript it came from. If you have neither, write five lines on when you started, what you did before, and the moment you decided.
- Who you serve now: one plain line naming the customer, such as "homeowners with older houses in the north end of town".
- Three decisions that cost you something: a job you turned down, a price you refused to cut, a shortcut you will not take, a policy you kept when it lost a sale. One or two lines each, with what happened.
- Five customer lines: sentences from reviews, emails or thank-you notes, copied word for word, that show why people pick you.
- What you never want to be called: the words you hate seeing about businesses like yours, such as "cheap", "luxury" or "one-stop shop".
- Your current about page: so the AI can see what you say now and keep any line worth keeping.
- What stays off the page: anything private from the founder story, such as family, health, money or a former employer by name.
The three decisions matter most. A value with no decision behind it is a wish. A value with a decision behind it is a promise a customer can test.
What comes back
Paste this prompt into ChatGPT or Claude, then paste your material underneath it.
You are helping a small business owner write a mission and values page
for their website. Write only from the material below. Invent nothing.
Step 1. Before writing, list:
- The problem the business exists to solve, in the customer's words.
- Who it serves now.
- For each decision listed below, the rule it shows the owner follows.
Show me this list and wait for me to correct it.
Step 2. When told "write it", produce:
1. A mission of one or two sentences, under 40 words, saying who the
business serves and what changes for them. First person plural ("we").
2. Three to five values, never more than the decisions and customer lines can back. Each value is:
- a short label of two to four words,
- one full sentence that states the rule plainly,
- one or two sentences giving a real example from the material,
- one line starting "Which means we don't" naming what the rule rules out.
3. A closing line that points the reader to how to start working with us.
Rules:
- Banned words: excellence, integrity, innovation, passion, journey,
committed, dedicated, world-class, exceptional, solutions, empower.
- No value that any competitor could also claim without changing a word.
- Use the customers' own phrases where they fit.
- Mark anything you inferred rather than read with [CHECK].
- Keep these topics out: [paste what stays off the page].
- Plain words, short sentences, no slogans.
My founder story:
[paste]
Who we serve now:
[paste]
Three decisions that cost us something:
[paste]
Customer lines:
[paste]
Words we never want used about us:
[paste]
Our current about page:
[paste]Step one is the part people skip, and it is the part that saves the page. The AI shows you what it thinks your rules are before it writes a word of copy. If it read a decision wrong, you correct it in one line instead of rewriting a whole value later. Then type "write it".
What you get back is a mission, three to five values in a fixed shape, and a closing line. The fixed shape (label, rule, example, what it rules out) is what keeps the page out of the fog. A rule with an example is hard to make vague. A rule that names what it rules out is a real choice. For a live example of beliefs written as choices, see our own manifesto, which pairs what we believe with what we turn down.
How to judge it
Read the whole page once, then go value by value. Reject a line, or the whole draft, when you see any of these:
- The swap test fails: put a competitor's name in place of yours and the mission still reads true. Then it says nothing about you.
- A fog word slipped through: any word from the banned list, or a cousin of one such as "outstanding", "seamless" or "best-in-class".
- A value has no example: the rule sits there alone, or the example is a general claim like "we always go the extra mile".
- The example did not happen: a story, a customer or a number that is not in your material. Every [CHECK] mark you cannot confirm goes.
- The "which means we don't" line is empty: it names something nobody would do anyway, such as "which means we don't do bad work".
- The mission is about you: it ends on your goals or your growth instead of on what changes for the customer.
- It promises what you cannot keep: "always", "every time" or "guaranteed" on something you cannot actually guarantee.
- It sounds like a lobby poster: read it out loud, and if you would not say it to a customer standing in front of you, it is not ready.
A good draft usually needs one or two of these fixes, not a rewrite. If it needs more, the material was thin. Add a fourth decision or more customer lines and run it again.
What stays with you
The AI can find the pattern in your story. It cannot tell you whether you will keep the promises it writes down. A values page is a public commitment, and a customer who reads "we tell you the price before we start" will hold you to it. Publish only the values your whole team already follows on a bad week, not the ones you hope to grow into.
The examples are yours to check. A customer, a former employee or a partner may recognize a story even without a name in it. Ask before you publish anything a person could see as being about them.
Anything legal or regulated stays with you too. If you work in health, finance, law or another field with rules about claims, a value like "we always get you the best outcome" can read as a promise you are not allowed to make. Check those lines against your field's rules before the page goes live.
The final cut is yours as well. The AI will tend to keep five values because you allowed five. Three that are true and specific beat five where two are padding.
An editorial example
This is an invented business, used only to show the job. Say you run a three-person bike repair shop in a mid-sized town. You paste your founder story, which says you started after watching a bike shop sell a teenager a new bike when the old one needed a twenty-minute fix. Your three decisions: you tell customers when a repair costs more than the bike is worth, you stopped selling the cheapest bikes because they kept coming back broken, and you never book a repair before quoting it.
In step one, the AI lists the rules it sees. It reads the second decision as "we only sell premium bikes", which is wrong. You correct it: the rule is that you only sell bikes you would be willing to fix. That one correction changes the value from a price position into a promise about repairs.
The draft comes back with a mission about keeping the town's bikes on the road instead of in the garage. One value reads:
Fix it if it's worth fixing.
We tell you when a repair costs more than the bike is worth.
Which means we sometimes talk you out of paying us.
Another value uses the phrase "honest from start to finish", which fails the swap test, so it goes. You publish three values instead of the four the AI wrote.
That is where the example stops. Nothing in this example is a real business or a real outcome.
Where the words go after
A mission and values page is rarely the only place these words live. Once it is done, reuse them on purpose so they stay consistent.
| Where it goes | What to use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| About page or its own values page | The full mission and all values with examples | A customer comparing you with others reads this |
| Homepage, near the bottom | The mission sentence alone | A first-time visitor gets the why in one line |
| Job listings and new-hire onboarding | The values with their "which means we don't" lines | It tells a new person how decisions get made |
| Your voice guide | The banned words and the customer phrases | Every later page sounds the same |
The value proposition job is the natural partner to this one, because the mission says why you exist and the value proposition says what a customer gets. The banned words and customer phrases from this job also feed straight into a brand voice guide.
Of every job on this list, social media is the one that comes back every week, and Boomp is software that does that one for you. See ten posts made from your website, free
