Every business needs a vision. A vision is like the big daydream you have in the middle of the afternoon after paying all your bills. It’s about sitting on the balcony of your beachside resort room watching the sunset while working from your laptop. It’s the fanciful but possible potential of your business dreams. It’s not going to happen today, but if you reach for the stars, and work toward it, it could happen.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

* What is your USP? – This is about your products and services now.
* What is in your mission statement? – This is about what you will do for your customers, how and why.
* What is your five-year vision – Where you will be, and how you’ll get there.

Use this information to figure out where you’ll be in five years from now or ten years from now. That is your business vision.

Example:

Acme VA Services will be the top grossing, premier virtual administrative providers in North America by providing reliable, consistent and knowledgeable administrative and author services to six-figure e-book authors.

Once you write a business vision, use it to take action, create a strategy, and formulate tactics to actually reach your vision. Use the vision to motivate yourself, employees and contractors. You know how they say to dress for the part you want? Well, it’s the same with your business vision. If you have the vision to be the top-selling Kindle e-book seller, then you need to act like you already are and do the things it takes to make it a reality.

Maybe money isn’t the most important thing to you. Maybe something else is important to you. If that’s the case, this should show up in your business vision as well. What’s right for one business might not be right for another. Perhaps you want to be able to donate millions of dollars to charity by giving away 10 percent of your profit each year. If that’s the case, and your dream, write it down.

Your vision can include dreams about:

* Finances – This could be about supporting yourself, your family, retirement or supporting employees, contractors, or a community.

* Reputation – This might be about the business’s reputation with customers, employees, contractors and other interested parties.

* Quality – Your vision could be to provide the best of whatever it is that you make.

* Value – You want to give your customers valuable information, products and services.

* Growth – You may plan to double your business in two years, quadruple in five and so forth.

* Passion – You show your customers how much you and your employees (contractors) love doing what it is that you do.

* Charity – You want to be able to donate to and help charities.

* Sustainability – You care about environmental issues or other long-term issues.

* Service Oriented – You care about doing service for others.

* Community Minded – You want to help your community, be it local or within your industry.

You can include any number of other issues that you find important within your business vision. Not everyone is in business only to make money. After all, this is about a vision that you have and it’s personal to you about your path in the world and with your business.