Our Vision, Mission and Guiding Principles – From the CEO
PATLive has been in business for over thirty years, serving hundreds of thousands of customers over that time with our automated and human-powered services. We’ve grown up through the evolution of the internet, email, smartphones, instant messaging, texting and coming-soon, AI. As a company centered around the telephone, these shifts have impacted our roadmaps and services in countless ways. But through it all, some core parts of our business have always remained:
Our attention to the customer.
Our commitment to our team and culture.
Our flexibility and adaptability to market demands.
Looking back, it is easy to see our consistency with respect to these attributes – even when we have pursued new courses to keep up with changing needs. We are a company that was built by an entrepreneur, for entrepreneurs. We were designed to help businesses, small and large, with a focus on delivering value, friendliness and trustworthiness. In our DNA, we’ve always known why we were here, even if we haven’t articulated it clearly throughout our history. Even when we’ve experimented with other paths, we have always returned to our roots and our core customer base. Through pandemics, recessions, natural disasters and disruptive technologies – we have always been a group of people that genuinely care about helping our customers grow and succeed in their business endeavors.
Despite this, however, it is easy to get lost in the weeds of delivering these services to customers. It’s easy for any organization, much less a 30-year old company, to focus on the tasks at hand – the plethora of details, workflows, SOPs, projects, etc. that go into the day-to-day operations. In those details, you can lose sight of the bigger picture and think that the end goal is a number on a dashboard, rather than a person with real life dreams and business needs whose problems you can help solve.
This trap is easy to fall into if you don’t have a consistent, overarching and clearly defined vision to keep you focused and remind you of that bigger picture. The reason for your business’ existence. The service you are providing for the greater good. The proof you can hold up at the end of a day and wave around as evidence of a job well done.
With that context in mind, I made it an early priority in my tenure as CEO to define PATLive’s overall vision, and to redraft our mission and guiding principles to reflect our past and our future. To help all of our team members keep sight of the vision we are pursuing and the principles that have helped, and will continue to help us along the way.
The process was harder than I thought. It was important to me that the vision and mission were short and sweet so that they could be remembered and articulated easily. Making something short, however, is way harder than it sounds. Suddenly, each word carries a heavy weight of importance, and what you include or exclude can feel like a misstep if you overanalyze it too much.
Getting feedback from my team was crucial – I wanted to hear from them what they perceived as our best qualities and services to our customers. We have some team members who have been here for over 20 years, so their perspective really helped shape the key values and threads that have been common throughout our history. While these statements are all publicly shared, it is my hope that they don’t feel like a marketing slogan to my team members. Instead, I hope my team agrees that they reflect our unique corporate culture and that they help them remember why and what we are focusing on. As for the public at large, I hope these statements help get a glimpse of what we believe is important and why they might want to work with us as well. Without further ado, I’d like to share our Vision, Mission and Guiding Principles.
Vision
We help entrepreneurs turn their dreams into reality – one conversation at a time.
Breaking this down, I want to start by focusing on the start of our vision – “We help”. To me, these are the most important words in all our statements, and it was crucial that our vision began with them because it sets the foundation of who we are and what we do. We are a company of “helpers”. I’ve worked with lots of people in my career, but nowhere have I found such a unique team of people who just want to help in whatever capacity they can. It reminds me of the famous Mr. Roger’s quote “Look for the helpers”, and it conveys more about our culture and vision than I think any other words could possibly convey.
Visions should be lofty – they are an ambitious destination that is difficult, or impossible, to “finish”. They evolve and live with the organization as it evolves. It is in the vein of this loftiness that we chose to emphasize “turning entrepreneurs’ dreams into reality” as a core part of our vision. Helping someone else accomplish their dreams feels amazing. It is inspiring and rewarding to know that you played a role in their accomplishments, and it is motivating to think that we could collectively improve our society through their successes. Most of our customers are small businesses – the lifeblood of America. They provide the services we need to maintain our lifestyles, they employ us, and they drive growth in communities big and small. To help them means we help our communities, which in turn helps everyone. What could be better than that?
Lastly, our vision succinctly reminds us that our contribution to helping entrepreneurs with their dreams is not done in some grand, sweeping measure. It is instead accomplished through the thousands of small, seemingly inconsequential conversations that we have on behalf of, or facilitate for, our customers every day. It is in these interactions where business is made – where a potential client turns into a customer, where a deal is closed, or a relationship is forged. It is a reminder to us that no matter the technology used, or the services offered, at the end of the day, it always starts with a conversation. It is our privilege to get to be a part of such a crucial aspect of a businesses operations, and we should never lose sight of it.
Mission
Our mission is to make your customers LOVE doing business with YOU by providing flexible, personalized services from our caring team straight to your frontline.
A company’s mission should be a little less lofty and a little more tactical than its vision – more about “how” the organization delivers on its vision rather than what the vision is. My team spent a good bit of time discussing PATLive’s unique methods of delivering our services, including our technology and human-powered offerings. The key themes that were repeatedly emphasized always came down to a few items: flexibility, personalization, and a caring team. These qualities have helped us stand out amongst our competitors, who often try to pigeon-hole businesses into “standard” call-handling processes with robotic-sounding receptionists who aren’t concerned with the outcomes of their conversations. It sounds cliché, but we genuinely care. I have witnessed my team go above and beyond the call of duty so many times and heard so many great stories from our customers that I knew it had to be included in our mission statement.
On top of that, we also recognized repeatedly how important a role it is to talk directly to our customers’ customers. This is a huge responsibility that very few, if any other, industries share with ours. As a virtual receptionist service, we are often the first voice someone hears when they contact one of our customers, so it is crucial that we represent them as good as (or even better than) they do themselves. Whether we are live answering their calls with our human receptionists, or providing the technology backbone for them to conduct their calls and messages, we’re with them on the front line and we wanted to recognize that in our mission statement.
And finally, the beginning of our mission statement is included to make sure that everyone understands how we contribute to making entrepreneur’s dreams come true. The secret sauce to every successful business is having customers that love doing business with them. It’s not rocket science, it’s not some complex process – it’s emotive, because humans are, after all, emotional creatures. Businesses need customers who love them, plain and simple. And at PATLive, we can directly help businesses with that need through our services in a way that most other service providers can’t. You can argue that software that makes a business more efficient, or organized, or cost-effective is important for that company – and you would be correct. But very few raving fans of a business come from the software it uses to run its operations. Loyal, lasting customers come from relationships – and those relationships begin on the frontline. We’re proud to be a key figure in helping our small business customers grow and gain customers who love doing business with them.
Our Guiding Principles
- We figure it out. How hard could it be?
- We answer to our customers, not distant investors.
- We share the data and earn the trust.
- We put ourselves in our customers’ shoes.
- We believe in balance. In our books, in our time and in our efforts and rewards.
- We are open and kind and want everyone to have a seat at the table.
- We never sacrifice customer experience, nor compromise on the quality of our service.
Developing our Guiding Principles turned out to be an easier task than writing our vision and mission statements, mostly because we had more room to express our key priorities and more freedom in the verbiage. But what made it even easier was the fact that so many of my team members contributed to these principles through their stories, experiences and perceptions of PATLive during workshops we hosted to gather feedback about our culture. It was honestly more fun than I expected, and inspiring to spend dedicated time with each other only talking about the things that we loved about our company. We spend most of our lives focusing on the things that need improvement or work, so when we had the opportunity to sit back and reflect on the things that made us successful, the relief was palpable.
I won’t go into much detail here, because I believe the guiding principles speak for themselves and clearly convey our intent and our culture. I will say, however, that I intentionally started all our principles with the word “We” because, much like “we help” in our vision statement, it is the most powerful of all the words. It repeatedly emphasizes our dependence on each other to deliver on all our guiding principles. And yet, it doesn’t remove the individual person and their accountability to the whole. We all have customers to serve, internally and externally, and we all must answer to them at the end of the day.
I have always loved working at PATLive. It hasn’t always been easy, but I love a good challenge. Especially because I love the people I work with. As I look to the future, I am excited to see how our vision, mission and guiding principles ground us and help us make decisions about the paths to follow. Having these statements means nothing if we don’t live them, so part of my goal as CEO will be to hold ourselves accountable to their intentions. I hope that my team sees the truth and potential in them, and that the public sees our actions consistently align with our statements. Thank you for sharing this journey with us.
Sincerely,
Jackie Gonzalez
CEO
