When developing your vision you must stay in touch with the real world, try to find a niche in the market place, i.e. some aspect of the business that your competitors are not meeting. Go around and visit these stores which you perceive as your competitors and ask yourself, how am I going to take business away from these stores, what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses and how am I going to use that to my own advantage.

After figuring out the niche you need to consider the store location that will best exploit this niche, location is very important in retail and you should spend a lot of time looking into the ideal location. There are different types of locations you can consider, the following are common locations:

Each location type offers different advantages and disadvantages, consider the following when choosing a location:

• How many and what kind of business and office customers
• How many and what kind of residential customers
• How many and what kind of drive through customers
• How many and what kind of walk through customers
• Road access
• Does it require heavy promotion
• Neighborhood situation
• Nighttime situation
• Any new developments which may effect your business
• Weekend customers
• Rent
• Parking availability
• The number of competitors in the same area

Your vision should be as complete and clear as possible, ask yourself what is it I am trying to achieve here, we recommend that you spend some time developing your vision before making any financial commitments. In the retail business you should include the following in your vision:

• Market niche
• How to deal with the competition
• How to exploit competition weaknesses and avoid or use their strengths
• Location of store
• Customer service level and ways
• Type customers you are going to serve
• The level of personal involvement
• Outside visual appearances and exterior sign design
• Color matching on the inside and outside
• First impression upon store entry
• Inside store mood lighting effects (for convenience stores, bright white works well)
• General aisle layout and presentation of goods
• Inside colors and texture
• Window displays
• Inside spacey or crowded
• Interior state of things
• Tidiness and Neatness
• Brand name use
• Your brand use
• Price Tags and Stickers
• Customer service level
• Competition
• Niche market
• Floor coverings

While developing your vision it is a good practice to go around different retailers in the same field as you to try to find how they approached the points above, take the positive parts and leave the negative parts.