Creating a Vision

Creating a Vision

Introduction:

As announced here, I plan to share my whole journey into company building with Break The Box transparently. Success, failures, breakthroughs and stupid "#€ decisions. This is the first step in that journey. Happy to have you here, now let's dive in!

Before we dive in, I want you to know that we will discuss this topic and many others LIVE next Friday on LinkedIn. You can join us and watch us fail on stream here.

Your WHY

This is a question that you will ask yourself a lot in your start-up journey.

Either because you got frustrated with nothing working as it should that day or because things are not going fast enough (things never go fast enough).

It's also a question that colleagues, investors and, most importantly, your potential clients will ask you.

Ultimately, if you don't figure out your WHY, you will pilot a ship without fuel or destination, get discouraged and quit early.


Everything is on fire, and I don't know where I am. Get used to that feeling :D


And let me get this clear: I don't mean your company's WHY. I mean yours, yes Carl, you, personally. Your vision and drive will be the difference between your company ultimately failing or succeeding.

Here's what we did.

Everything in business depends on what we want and need as people. So when I sat down in our first KickOff with Sara Storm , we wanted to understand what drives us and where we want to be as people.

STEP 1

So the questions on the whiteboard were:

In 1, 3 and 5 years from now:

  • Where are we?
  • What are we doing?
  • How much are we earning?
  • How do we feel?

This is how that went :)

STEP 2

Using my variation of the Ikigai framework, I created this graph, where we then placed our summaries of desired states.

This was based on:

  • What skills do we possess
  • How do we want to work (WoW)
  • How much we want to earn (yes, again, fiscal accuracy is necessary when making business plans :) )

We ended up with a board looking like this:

That's what step two looked like, enhanced with some no-gos :)

So now we are figuring out what we want to do, how we want to work, where we want to be, and how much money we want to make.

As part of this exercise, we identified areas so far beyond our desired state that we had to write them down. Also crucial to make sure that you won't get entangled with stuff you don't want to.

STEP 3

Now that we're starting to understand where we want to be let's overlay that to our possible Customer Profiles.

Those are profiles and market segments we addressed before; we know their pain points and know we can deliver on them.

This is what this mapping looked like:

TAM outlines and trends

After these were mapped, we added the last three layers:

  • What possible business models do we see?
  • How does the market look today (competition), and what's offered per ICP?
  • Where can we make the most impact?

STEP 4

So now we start to bring it all together.

What we managed to solidify by running this workshop:

  • Our ideal state as people
  • Our USPs to the market we are addressing
  • What we can deliver without compromising the first point
  • Who do we want to work with, and why
  • What model should we pursue to serve both us and our target audience


After that session, we had a concrete idea of what, how, and WHY we went into the venture we did. I now have ironclad confidence that what I am doing aligns with my goals and values, and that's something I can throw my full weight behind.


In summary

  • Start from your personal goals and aspirations
  • Map both to competence, WoW and Earning potential
  • Overlay that mapping to who your potential customers are and their needs.
  • I've included the short guide here.




About me

Hi. I'm George Storm

I'm an Advisor, Investor and CEO.

I write about Company Building, Revenue Operations and Enterprise sales.

In this newsletter, I am documenting my journey with Break The Box , building a new SaaS company from scratch.

If you'd like to join us and see what we do, you can find us here.

We're also going LIVE on LinkedIn every second week

You can find more of my content here:

Podcasts/Interviews/articles

LinkedIn

TikTok

Youtube




Just because it's good and well worked through, it doesn't have to be complex... I really like the simplicity, yet powerfull approach you share with us.

Carl Wilhelm Hagander

Founder - AI Agents - Flexibility - Future of Work

1 年

"I mean yours, yes Carl, you, personally.?" I feel attacked! I agree, tho. Running a start-up is like piloting a ship without fuel or a clear destination, but having your "why" gives you direction. It means the progress you're making is in the right direction, and that even if the exact harbour might be unclear, the general land-mass isn't. P.S. I also love how you're documenting this journey. You're not just showing the part that's usually glossed over and hidden away, you're also using a public eye to keep yourself accountable. Love it!

Sara Storm

Founder | SaaS Growth Strategist | Investor, Author, Advisor and Speaker

1 年

I don't think people understand how transparant we will be.... ?? ?? ??

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