The One Page Vision sheet is a great way to crystalize your idea so you can communicate it effectively. 

This is the most simple expression of your idea and often the hardest to nail because we are all walking around with way too much information that no one else has. A good exercise is to think about how you would explain your business on Twitter, keeping it a high level concept and staying away from words that describe features. Using my company as an example, "Switch Bakery is making food that is good for your gut, gluten-free, and adding vibrancy to every day life."

This is not a "mission statement", but is a request to step back from the idea, goals and strategies and simply answer, "What do you want?" If you got exactly what you wanted, what would that look like? I could spend an entire day just on this topic and while it seems like a funny exercise, it will become one of the most powerful tools to understand nearly every facet of your business. Your mind can only create what it can imagine—by figuring out what you want, you are painting the picture in your mind of success that your subconscious will use as the goal, pulling you towards it.

What does this look like? Take a separate piece of paper, open a note on your phone, or record a voice memo really describing your idea from the way it feels, how the world looks with it in it, to "who’s it for?", and "how big?", making it as complete as you can, then distill it down to a single sentence and put it on your Vision sheet. You should be able to see how every facet of the business would be different just based on what your vision of success looks like-strategies and tactics change, where you put your focus also changes. I see Switch Bakery as a vehicle for sharing food that fuels mind, body, and spirit. Where people leave feeling better than they did before eating; where they feel nourished. A place where we can express joy and kindness and create community.

This is a simple statement of how you are bringing value to your customers, what sets you apart and delivers your concept. Ultimately, what you are trying to get to is something that reads like a tagline. Our core value is about making sure that we are creating healthy food that you can afford to eat every day.

Ideas that we are going to put time and energy into should be solving some problem that you have identified. This is often something you experienced yourself and so you set out to figure out how to fix it, or something you observed. It is very common that people think their idea is solving a whole bunch of problems, which may ultimately be true, but this is dangerous because it is hard enough to effectively solve one problem and communicate that to your market, every additional problem steals some of that focus and clarity. My recommendation is to write out and identify the biggest problem you set out to solve. Ideally this should also be the one that you can communicate effectively and execute as well. 

We started Switch Bakery because Amanda found it impossible to find food that worked for me when I was really sick and wasn’t able to cook for our family. We combined her love of baking with my knowledge of food and health to help others who might not have the ability to do all of the work we put in to address it ourselves.

This is the why you are doing what you are doing—what is driving you to solve this problem? Your purpose statement should be the foundation which everything is built. Our purpose with Switch Bakery is to help people feel better, healthier, and happier; also to help families with children, siblings or spouses who have dietary restrictions or illness feel empowered to feed and share food that is nourishing and comforting. "Gluten-free food to fuel your life".

Describe your product, solution or service. This is how your idea addresses and resolves the problem you identified above and why your idea is different. At Switch, we like to say that we aren’t a morning bakery, where you go for treats to go with your coffee, but where you go for food for the rest of your life. We use single products like a tea cake, sandwich, or pizza to help people think about how they could use our products in their own kitchen. In a café we would get the best of both worlds, support life at home while offering a place to go for something more where people don’t have to worry about the quality of the ingredients and can lean into the dining experience.

How will you define success? What are the key activities you expect your customers to take, based on your value proposition and what are the data points you can follow to gauge your success? Clarifying these activities and metrics will allow you to be laser focused on development, as all work should drive people to one of these activities, make it easier for them to accomplish one of them, or remove barriers that are keeping people from engaging in them. We are really trying to build a healthy community with Switch, so the metrics we want to track are repeat customers, how long do people participate in the Bread Club after signing up, and customer referrals.

Here is where we get a stark look at what you actually need to do to build your vision. There is a lot of information out on the internet about how to decide on a revenue model and pricing structure and you can spend an endless amount of time thinking and rethinking. Most people have an idea of their model and how to price their product and services, based on market research, competitive analysis, a hunch, but your model should line up with your value proposition, address the problem and lastly, your vision.

If you have a vision to build a $100 million company based on a $5 per month recurring subscription model, means you have to build the infrastructure to target, build up to and support 2.2 million monthly customers (taking churn into account). Just going through the exercise of lining up your vision with a model can be an inspiring or sobering reality check. Looking at it this way also gives you a moment to think about what you need now and going into the future. Your pricing also has to line up with your value proposition and address the problem.

At Switch, we were looking for high-quality and affordable, a difficult needle to thread. If we had applied traditional bakery economics our bread would be priced at $30 or more because of the high cost of the ingredients combined with more labor to produce than a typical bread product. In places like San Francisco or Los Angeles, you can spend that much on gluten-free bread, but it makes it difficult for regular families to feed everyone with that kind of cost. We opted for a lower price point and really worked on our processes and recipes to lower the cost in order to gain more consistent and loyal customers.

What are the primary resources your idea needs to reach its potential? This is a top five list of the things you most need, such as funding, physical space, prototypes, or human/employee costs, marketing, intellectual property protection, servers, whatever your top resources, outside of what you have will you need to pull this off? Packaging, shipping and an affordable production space are our primary resources, as well as sourcing high quality ingredients.

Who are you creating value for? When you envision the problem you are solving, what does the person who has that problem look like? What is their age group? Are they professionals, mothers, affluent seniors, passionate nichers? Like problems, you may have more than one in mind, the one you identify here should map directly to the problem you identified. If you are feeling a bit more advanced, you could map additional problems to additional customer segments for the future. Just remember, the more laser focused you can be, the more likely you'll be able to find and reach your customers. Our customers split between health-conscious adults and families with one or more members with health issues or dietary restrictions.

Within your customer segments lies a group of customers that are your early adopter groups. Your first customers are often your most vocal and potentially valuable for growth, if leveraged properly. Who are the people most likely to take a chance on you early on? Typically, these are a subgroup of people that feel the problem most acutely—they know they have the problem and aren’t satisfied with the solutions right now.

Your customers are not the only important relationships, key partners can include suppliers, joint venture partners, community advocates and organizations that make up your ecosystem. Identifying these partners, whether you have them, or want to find them will allow you to see more clearly how they add value, help you optimize, grow your market, reduce risk and give you very important resources. If you don't know them, identifying what kind of partners you need will help you focus on who will be a good partner.

Chances are someone is already trying to solve your exact problem in one way or another, so where are your customers going to address their needs today? This is a slightly different perspective than just, "Who are your competitors?". Your competitors are certainly important, but their may be other people out there working to solve, or solving some piece of your problem that is important to recognize.

Pick the top three competitors or places other people are looking, not by size necessarily, but by a combination of how effectively they are reaching their market and how many things you think they are doing right. It is easy for us to look at other bakeries or even other gluten-free companies, but I’m interested in looking at grocery stores and places people go back to eat over and over again. The former addresses how people are looking to get food for their week or month and the latter is tapping into what makes people happy and comfortable.

Where will you reach and communicate with your customers from awareness to after they purchase? This is a good time to use your competitors as market research and see where and how they are reaching their customers. With social media, you can even glean how effective those channels are by looking at the engagement for posts and ads they produce. Other things to look at are the existing routines of your customers and what medium best allows you to communicate our value? This goes back to my approach to existing alternatives above. We also have used farmer’s markets as an effective channel to build a following before we have a physical location for people to visit. So many people build something and then wait for people to show up—look for ways to reach people, get them interested and excited by what you are doing so when you arrive fully formed, you have people who have been waiting and already communicating or participating in your idea.

Setting a date is vital to your progression, as they say, nothing creates productivity like a deadline. This is one of the core components of my Rapid Vision Development work, setting a date gives you something to work toward, increasing creativity and giving everything a sense of urgency. Nearly every entrepreneur suffers from the same disease, called "It's not ready". This is code for "I'm not ready", but this is a trap, we are never ready, just as you can never prepare to be a mother or father for the first time, there is no "ready", there is just launched, or not launched. We took Switch from idea to launch in 30 days, spring boarding off of all of our previous experience. You'd think this kind of timeline would be stressful, but we simplified everything down to the essence of the model and knew what we wanted to accomplish, the rest was ticking off tasks. Not everything can be launched in a month, but more than you think and I believe that with the right planning you can take any idea to revenue generating launch in three months or less.

What is your horizon for reaching your vision? This isn’t the launch, this is when do you declare success based on your key metrics. You will almost always be wrong and nearly everything will take longer than you ever dreamed, but if you don't set a timeline and set yourself to reach it, or gain a greater understanding why you can't, you will continue to just limp ahead. 

Are there any important dates in the calendar you can use to give your business a boost or dates that represent significant milestones? I want to have a café by June 2024, which is pretty aggressive, but it doesn’t have to be open, just a solid location all our own. I would also love to find a pop-up spot in Monterey by Spring Break. This doesn’t have to be a permanent place, but somewhere people can discover us beyond the two market days we are doing.

It is important to capture your stage at the time of filling out your vision, so you can come back, duplicate and revise later, or just reminisce. Be proud of where you are now, there is no shame in being "just an idea", or having launched but still working for market fit, or even pivoting. Your stage acknowledges what got you here and your work on this sheet represents how you are preparing for the future.

Print out the canvas from the link above, fill it out, and tape it to the wall. Feel free to revisit any time you feel like something is changing and see how it impacts the other cells. Ideas are not static from paper to being out in the world so this is intended to act as a waypoint, not an immutable bible.