A Mission Statement Without Buzzwords

One cool thing about having your own small business is that you don’t have to use the same bland mission statement language that most large businesses use, such as:

The Mission of CorpTech Corp. is to empower our human capital to facilitate the implementation of best-in-class products and mission-critical services, and to seamlessly leverage synergies to provide cross-functional e-solutions.

So here’s our mission statement:

The Brentwood Spirit is devoted entirely to people and events in Brentwood, Missouri. It attempts to reflect the spirit of the community in articles about Brentwood’s residents, sports, schools, businesses, faith community, and charitable initiatives.

Updated Weekly

Most of the sections of the Spirit are updated every Monday morning.

Meet the Spirit Staff

The Spirit is run by Toni and Steve Bowman, who have lived in Brentwood with their two sons since 1996. Toni handles the business side of this Website and Steve is the editor.

Toni Bowman, Business Manager

Though Toni was raised in Alton, Illinois, she has never seen an actual Piasa Bird. Even more incredibly, she’s not been to Fast Eddie’s Bon Air. She has at least been to Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque in Kansas City, where she also earned a B.A.in communications from William Jewell College. Most recently, she managed client billing accounts for an employee benefits consulting firm. Complementing her administrative head is her heart for public service. She has served as a hospital chaplain, a police dispatcher, and a patient advocate in the emergency room at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center. That last one has prepared her for anything.

Steve Bowman, Editor

Steve grew up in Minneapolis where the winters built his character, then apparently froze his character in a giant block of ice. He earned a B.A. in English (“one of the only majors that’s capitalized,” he boasts) from William Jewell College, near Kansas City. He was a newspaper reporter for seven years in Kansas and Missouri, and covered such high-profile events as the annual banquet of the Atchison County Pork Producers Association, where farmers proudly crowned an ecstatic young woman as the 1984 “pork queen.” We’re dead serious. But he has also written articles for The Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Kansas City Star. For the past 18 years Steve has written and edited corporate communications in Kansas City and St. Louis. He worked with brilliant engineers, architects, actuaries and accountants, none of whom knew the difference between “affect” and “effect.”