|
By Bob Norton
Designing a business is
more art than science because it is something that takes lots and lots of
real-world experience. Personally I do not think you can learn it at any
university, or by any amount of study, until after you have spent many years
working in management to understand people and business well. It would be
like someone reading for ten years about painting, without ever picking up a
brush, and then when they finally pick up a paintbrush to paint their first
person or landscape; and expect to paint a masterpiece. Pretty unlikely
huh? We may be able to teach “strategy” in school, but even that is just a
small part of overall business design.
I suspect most people do
not even consider “business design” a process because few people get to the
point in their career where they can understand all the skills or
disciplines needed to actually do it. Business design is NOT just a flash
of inspiration, or how you will charge and make money. It is the complete
strategy for sales, marketing, finance, operations and product development,
which are tightly interconnected, and must all work together, smoothly to
create any real value for customers and stakeholders. As Edison once said,
“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. Nothing could be truer
about the business design process.
We spend at least the
entire first day at our,
CEO and Entrepreneur Boot Camp – The Art and
Science of Business DesignTM
teaching these first four steps of the Rapid Growth By DesignTM
process, so I don’t want to pretend you can “get it” all from reading the
few pages here. This is at least an entire large book by itself; however,
what I can do here is summarize the first four steps at a very high level.
My hope is that reading this can open people’s eyes to the fact that
business design is its own process, art and science and must be done very
early when founding any new business. Doing anything else first, except
market research, is almost always a complete waste of time and money.
Many executives seem to think of business design as
coming up with a “business model”, but this is only a small fraction
of a complete business design. A complete business design must
include far more, including a complete strategy for each discipline
needed to run the business. Without all these areas working together
there isn’t any business. |
CONTINUE HERE FROM
The C-Level Advisor Newsletter
For purposes of this
discussion let us consider the inner concentric circle of the vision pie
below as the definition of a business design. Therefore:
DEFINITION:
A Business Design – The sum of the complete strategies for each of the
business disciplines required to deliver a product or service to the market.
We can assume the tactics
can be driven by, or fall out of, the strategies developed. Certainly, this
is best at any early stage of development. This is a simple,
straightforward definition and very useful for our purposes. Note, however,
that this definition does not mean the business design actually works, only
that you have “a design. A successful business design process would also
need ways to test, or validate if the business design will actually work in
the real world. More on this later.
So let’s say you have a
widget you invented that you want to sell. Let’s even say it is a
mousetrap, and you have already figured out that the saying: “Invent a
better mouse-trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” became
completely invalid somewhere around 30 years ago when people had too many
options and very few driving needs left to serve. You probably have also
figured out that due to overly fragmented marketing channels and other
factors today, narrow niche-marketing is the only way to go, to both get
established and avoid direct competition with larger companies. If you do
not believe this you must read the book “The Purple Cow” which explains
clearly the breakdown of the traditional advertising model product/business
launch.
Since it is probably unfair
to define this without an example I hope you enjoy reading this, somewhat
comical, yet vastly incomplete business design example designed to
demonstrate the minimum level of thinking that might be appropriate after
running the four-step business process design cycle (coming soon) just once
or twice.
Overly
Simple Business Design Example:
The Mouse House
Tagline: We Catch ’em Quicker and More Humanly
-
Product
Development Strategy –
Done in my garage and testing and improved over the last six years since I
inherited my uncle’s wheat farm with the largest mouse population per acre
north of Mexico. Product tested and proven to catch a mouse every four
days with enhanced bait recipe and instant superglue technology triggered
by the slightest movement inside the “Mouse House”. Fully designed and
tested. To be refined and improved, based on customer feedback with new
version expected twice a year and product-line extensions using same
patents. Add the “Double-decker Mouse House with Lemon Scent” unit in the
second year to allow cleaning and disposal monthly instead of weekly. In
year three, add waterproof, non-disposable multi-unit Mouse Condo unit for
outdoor perimeter population reduction to break reproductive cycle up to
300 yards outside grain factory walls. Upsell this to grain factories we
already have as customers. Offer monthly pickup service at low cost to
collect these mice and sell them to labs for drug and cosmetics testing.
-
Finance Strategy
- Use personal savings to make the first 5,000 units, sell them and double
the production order each time with the resulting gross profit, living off
spaghetti and my spouse’s salary for first 18 months of operation. Get
90-day payment terms from manufacturer in exchange for volume guarantee
over 2 years. Offer 5% off for a 50% deposit with full payment within 20
days. Hire a bookkeeper and bring in a local accounting partner to do
monthly books and taxes annually after market is proven and revenue is
going. Sell company to first corporate offer over $6 million for patents,
or $2 million plus a royalty for five years of 5% based on sales
projection at the time of offer. Excel spreadsheet budget and revenue
projection generated to verify all this works financially.
-
Marketing
Strategy – Go after
grain processors who would need over 600 units per year. Develop the
market research myself with help from brother-in-law, who is a VP and
Brand Manager at Proctor and Gamble in the household cleaning products
division. He sold his table wax business to P & G five years ago and is an
experienced entrepreneur. Possibly sell on the Internet to identify
additional types of people and niche markets that we do not understand
(idea flow). Investigate direct sales to small and medium sized
commercial property exterminators who may have high volume and be able to
offer a better guarantee as a competitive advantage if they leave our
traps behind with their logo and phone number. Use Internet leads to
investigate and test other additional market niche ideas. Investigate the
restaurant, water park (Jumbo Rat House product) and low income housing
apartment markets in year two after initial base of customers is
established and revenue reaches $1.6 million. Investigate public relations
potential getting support from animal rights groups and others who protest
poison and slap-trap solutions.
-
Sales Strategy
– Direct mailer waves with telemarketing follow-up during prime mouse
season each year to all 5,356 grain processors in the midwest breadbasket,
where the mouse problem is largest and cats are too well fed to solve the
problem. Expect a 0.5% response rate to each four-page color direct
mailer campaign to wheat warehouses and wheat processing factory
operations directors. Send a free sample case of 12 units with follow-up
calls weekly to insure testing is completed over 45 days. Expect a 32%
closing rate from the free trial case to regular customers generating an
average of 200 units per month at a gross profit of about $150 per month.
Implying a 5-year customer value of $150 X 12 months X 5 years = $9,000
and an average fully loaded customer acquisition cost of $720. Get
customers on an automatic monthly reorder plan with 10% discount offer to
keep staff needs predictable and at minimum level. Assume telemarketers
cost $15 per hour fully-loaded with 33% of that being commission based on
sales.
-
Operations
Strategy – Outsource
production at $0.23 per unit locally for first 6,000 disposable units sold
at $2.00 each. Order in amounts of 100,000 from overseas bidder in China
who will produce for $0.02 per unit plus $0.02 cents shipping to U.S.
after reaching 24,000 units per month with local manufacture as backup and
fill in for some orders given the 45-day shipping time. Hire an office
manager to take customer service calls for first six months and scale
internal staff as needed, hiring a manager when we reach three phone
support people. Use outside telemarketing group if sales ramp quickly.
Drop ship directly from manufacturer in minimum quantities of 60 units.
Visit customers for feedback and product improvement ideas annually. Take
Internet and phone orders at 30-unit minimum shipped from our office
weekly.
You see that idea is to
develop an idea of how everything in the business will work at a fairly high
level so we can begin to iterate the business design from some initial
assumption point. Few people will know everything to come up with all this
stuff without some help from others though, but the assumption is, this help
is not a lot of time or expense at this stage.
The sad fact is, most
businesses should not be run as originally envisioned by the founders for
two main reasons:
1) You
never, never, ever know enough when you found a business not to make many,
many adjustments along the way, and
2) It
is highly unlikely the founder has exactly all the right experience for this
new business across the many business disciplines needed.
With the many thousands of
business models possible for any given product or service expecting to pick
the “best” purely based on one person’s previous experience out of the gate
is almost absurd. Only if this business is tremendously simple and the
founder has spent decades in that exact niche could this really be
possible. However, even then the odds are many unknowns will be learned
early on that will necessitate the business plan and model being adjusted.
In fact, one of the traits common to all successful entrepreneurs is lots of
flexibility to adjust their business as more information becomes available.
Very little is written in stone in the mind of a good serial entrepreneur
and they are always open to discussions with people who know more than them
about certain areas. The key here is to accept that you do not know
what the business will look like in a few months and iterate from there.
I have had the pleasure of
working with many entrepreneurs over my career and generally my experience
is, they are focused more on the technology or solving some problem
(hopefully), more than on the design of their business. Typically, the
business model is the result of the entrepreneur’s most recent experience,
as opposed to the result a structured and thorough process that can be used
to optimize any new or existing business. The idea being that MY IDEA + MY
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE = GOOD BUSINESS DESIGN. In fact this is almost never
the case early on. Very, very few businesses have launched and succeeded
with exactly the strategies they had when the founder(s) started in their
garages. Anyone that tells you otherwise either never did it, or has
conveniently forgotten all the major and minor adjustments to the business
model they made along the way.
If the entrepreneur’s last
company used direct sales, and the founder is a technology-focused person,
(a very common scenario) then guess what the sales model is likely to be?
Yes, direct sales will often be the only one considered until a deeper
management team is brought in. Oops! – But who will they hire to run sales
with this assumption from the start? A sales VP with mainly direct sales
experience of course! And will this person recommend using another type of
sales approach? Not very likely is it? Do you see what happens? This is a
slippery slope and the business model can actually becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy based on very early bad assumptions. In fact, this seemingly
little slip-up very early on often dooms a business before it even leaves
the garage!
If the initial business
model assumption is wrong, it is certain to cost lots of time and money to
figure out. So, it is actually better to assume almost nothing early on in
the business. I have seen so many companies that are completely dead, and
they just don’t know it yet, because they have a simple bad assumption in
their business model design, and are totally committed to that incorrect
assumption or model. Some actual examples I have seen presented by smart
people with the wrong experience for the business to make these decisions
include a company trying to sell an enterprise software product at a $5K to
$10K price point with a direct sales force. Unfortunately, it is commonly
accepted that anything less than $100,000 price point is the “valley of
death” for enterprise software direct sales due to the huge sales cost,
overhead and long trail cycle of corporations using these products. Yes,
there may be exceptions, but I wouldn’t want to bet a year of my time or any
of my capital on being that rare exception.
Another example was a
company that wanted to sell a $10,000 product, where there was already a
perfectly good $500 solution available in the marketplace. They basically
seemed to believe that rich people were idiots and would pay the extra
$9,500 for some extra convenience and an unnecessary feature or two. I am
sure they are either gone, or soon will be. What were they thinking? How
did this happen? It seems they hired a technical person with exactly the
wrong skill-sets, and he came up with a big Unix box solution, basically
because that was his technical expertise. It was exactly the case of the
carpenter fixing everything with a hammer. The best solution was more
likely a $300 piece of hardware with some customer chips in it.
I actually saw both these
companies present at different university enterprise forum start-up
clinics. All I can do is shake my head, knowing no matter what I say to
them, the odds are they already have their minds made up to pursue a futile
business model. I have seen this so many times and I know for certain they
are DOOMED if they follow this plan. It will just take them about a year
and their life’s savings to figure that out. This is because by the time
they figure this out, they will have burned up six months of their personal
funding (which is likely almost all they had), hired the wrong people and
not made any real progress figuring out what their real business model
should have been to leverage their idea. Another dead start-up! This is so
sad, and so totally avoidable if founders are willing to step back, take a
month to investigate the market and “Design the Business” properly for that
specific market-need, BEFORE they start investing significant resources.
What this means is that they also must be open to listening to others who
have “been there and done that” and/or have different experience sets. That
is not to say they should take everything they hear as gospel, many people
without the right experience, including most venture capitalists will try to
alter a business model to their liking, but the entrepreneur must get many
data points and likely move towards the ones offered by the most
experienced, successful people.
Consider for a moment all
the things we as individuals do not know! It is pretty sure that today no
one can even keep one-tenth of one percent of the knowledge available to
mankind in their head! Scholars say the last “Renaissance Man” existed in
the early sixteen hundreds some time. This was the last century in which
anyone alone could claim to be an “authority on everything”. Today, four
hundred years of collecting knowledge later, we now double human knowledge
every few years! How can anyone be silly enough to think they can know
enough across a whole industry plus management, sales, finance, marketing,
technology and operations to actually design a business alone? Let me tell
you I have never met anyone who can, and I do not think they ever have
existed, or ever will.
How many elements of the
business will be challenging? Today sales and marketing are almost always
challenging because people are overwhelmed with options. Are you pushing
the limits of logistics, technology or the need for capital? If these
disciplines would demand a top person to do when you get there, you will
certainly need a top person to contribute during the business design phase.
Typically, you will need at least three or more likely five, experienced
management level people along the way. This is not to say you need them
full-time just contributing as you gather your market research and iterate
your business design. You may need many more in a consulting capacity for
some quick answers, but often this can be over lunch and by picking peoples’
brains in exchange for past or future favors. However, this is only if you
want to be successful – if you plan to fail one will certainly do just fine.
Consider for a moment what
each of us has “NOT learned” from a mathematical perspective, or as a
percentage of all human, or even just business, knowledge? I would never
dream of designing a business alone without the expert help of several
people who are more experienced than I in other areas. But who? Where do
you start? As you have seen who you start with will be a huge factor in
where you end up. Yes, it is key to understand this is an iterative
process. You have to start somewhere, and without being too committed in
time and capital invested. So it is an unavoidable logical conclusion that
business design MUST be an iterative process by its nature and this fact
that one person cannot do it alone. You need to iterate through several
versions of business design over and over again, getting half way closer to
your goal each time, but probably never finishing. In fact, this process
must be repeated FOREVER, because the market, technology, landscape of
competition and other factors, which are totally out of your control, are
constantly changing like the weather. So every business must be repeating
this process regularly. Today this is one of the chief objectives of the
CEO that was not needed 50 years ago. Keeping your business design
up-to-date, based on rapidly changing market conditions and circumstances is
a never ending process.
If you think about it you
will realize, if we only use the things we have learned before, which we
just agreed, I hope, is a small fraction of 1% of available information, we
are almost certain to NOT have the proper business design. This does not
even take into account, the fact that this is a different place and time.
The obvious truth is, when you objectively consider it, it is very unlikely
that the exact model of sales, marketing, operations and other disciplines
at the founder’s last company, or even all their previous companies, are
anywhere near the optimum ones for this new business. If you accept that,
then you must realize that every business is totally unique and needs to
have its own custom business design with the input of many experts in
appropriate fields.
Since no one can reasonably
even claim to consider business options that they have no previous
experience with very well, it is not only difficult to design a business
without a good team, it is literally impossible, except in the very
narrowest of circumstances. And I would argue in such circumstances this
would not even be true entrepreneurship, because it must be an exact clone
of some other simple business. So, it follows that any founder who says
they have designed their business before they have a full team involved and
lots of market research completed cannot possibly be on the right track.
Every business could be
said to have been “designed”, but the question is how many options were
considered and how many people, with how many sets of professional
expertise, were involved? Given any technology, product, challenge, problem
or “core value” that you have to deliver to a market, there are literally
thousands of ways to construct a business to extract value from this core
value, expertise, product or service (the center core of the vision pie) and
I’ll show you why shortly.
|
|