At Dunn CPA Firm, we believe clarity drives better decision-making—and that clarity starts with knowing why you do what you do. That’s why Tom Dunn encourages every business owner to develop both a personal and a professional mission statement.
Your Personal Mission Statement Sets the Course
For Tom, everything started with a personal mission:
“Advance the world around me.”
That personal mission became the lens through which he makes decisions in life, and in business. It also helped reveal one of his most important roles: to serve as the economic resource provider for his family.
If you’re running a business, managing a team or caring for loved ones, your personal mission statement can bring direction to all of it.
Your Professional Mission Grows From Your Personal One
Once you have clarity in your personal life, you can build from it. For Tom, his professional mission statement and what guides the firm day to day is a direct extension of his personal values. It focuses on creating real value, supporting clients, helping people grow and building a business with integrity.
Why This Matters to Our Clients
Our firm’s mission reflects Tom’s core belief: success comes from helping others succeed. That means every recommendation, every financial strategy, every consulting engagement is focused on building clarity, solving problems and creating long-term wins for the people we serve.
Start With Your Mission
As a business owner or entrepreneur, defining your personal and professional mission statements gives you a compass you can turn to every time things get uncertain or challenging.
And if your current business model or leadership structure isn’t aligned with that mission, we can help. At Dunn CPA Firm, we offer more than accounting; we offer strategic consulting to help business owners align their decisions with their goals.
Need help building a business that supports your mission?
Let’s talk. We’ll help you bring clarity to your numbers and your next steps.
“A Personal Vs Professional Mission Statement”
Well, you should have a personal mission statement and a professional mission statement. For me, the personal mission statement was the first thing. It had to drive my entire direction of my life. And then out of that came a role that was an obvious role to play in life that I had identified, which was to be the economic resource provider. For my family.
And then I created a mission statement for how to go about being the economic resource provider for my family. And that mission statement was like a subset or was driven from my overall personal mission statement.
It’s interesting because that mission statement, the business professional mission statement, is a little longer.
The disadvantage of that is I can’t remember it off the top of my head. Like advance the world around me. That I remember all the time. But the professional business for our firm, our mission, it’s the same thing. My mission statement for the firm is the same as my professional mission statement.
It’s a short paragraph, but I always have to go back and find it and read it.
If I ever redo it, I’m going to figure out a way to get it much smaller. So mine got a little bit into a paragraph because I ask everybody in the firm what they thought, and we added this little word and that. But the downside to it is you can’t remember it off the tip of your tongue, like my personal mission statement. But either way, it’s there. And I use it every day. I use my business professional mission statement to run the firm.
And with all the decisions I have to make, all the dilemmas, all the times I’m trying to help a client or a partner here, it always goes back to that business professional mission statement. That’s how I run the firm.
And I teach that to all of my partners as well, because that’s very important, that they to me, that they pick up on that and they understand my personal mission statement which drives them, is basically the mission statement for the firm. It really makes sure that they understand why we’re doing this and that we’re looking for the. Win, win. Trying to help people.
