Graham Evans visit

            Graham Evans spoke about the importance of breaking your business down into different layers and visualizing how each layer of your business works on a canvas. First, we took business ideas from those who were willing to share theirs. Then we voted on which business idea we wanted to break down and decided on an idea for an electronics recycling company.

We broke the business down into 9 separate layers on a canvas, Key Partners, Key Activities, Key Resources, Value Propositions, Customer Relations, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure, and Revenue Streams. Each team of 2 was assigned a different layer to fill out. My team got customer relations but we weren’t sure who the customer would actually be. We decided that the company could ultimately go in 2 different directions, it could be a for profit organization in which the customer is the one who supplies the electronics and then expects a cut, or a nonprofit like the recycling of glass and plastics that may ultimately lose money but reduce pollution and have the government as a customer.

After we broke down the business on canvas we could see a more flushed out picture of how the business would work. The problem was that only the person with the business idea had a clear view of how he wanted to monetize, so some of the layers left room for a lot of different possibilities.