March 19 2021
How to choose a business model?
How to choose a business model that will allow you to optimize your assets and multiply them, as well as organize your company to secure its growth and the wellbeing of your employees? Management and marketing experts recommend to focus on what makes your brand unique, allows you to declass (or at least overshadow) your competition and ensure profitability. Simple? Only at first glance.
What’s a business model anyway?
A business model is not only a brilliant idea and determination of a target audience and distribution channels. Without getting sidetracked with issues closer to philosophy than marketing and management, before selecting a business model you should answer numerous important questions. In this post, we will focus on 20 most obvious questions. You should do your best to find the right answers and consider their final form. The best (or not) years of your life depend on it. Make yourself a gallon of coffee and find a quiet place – it’s time to face the truth.
See also: Seven questions you need to answer before renting an office
Your checklist
- What do I know about my customers/end-users? Who are they in their professional and private lives?
- What are their needs, habits and attitudes? At what stage of life will they be when they find my offer?
- What unique values do I want to provide (e.g. efficiency, user-friendliness, reliability, flexible use, meeting emotional needs)?
- Am I meeting real and conscious needs or will I be creating them?
- Why have I chosen these to be my values?
- Why should the customers choose my products or services?
- How will I convince them to trust me?
- Who are my competitors? What do I know about them?
- How do they reach their customers?
- Does my idea stand out against the competition?
- How can I prevent (or at least restrict) the competition from copying my model?
- Is my model scalable?
- What distribution channels should I choose?
- Why should customers buy my products or services?
- Where will my actual profits come from?
- In what market will I operate and what is its value?
- How do I plan to promote my products or services to attract customers?
- What organizational structure do I need to implement my business plan?
- What professionals do I need in my team to achieve the intended objectives?
- How do I get funding to start my business?
It’s not over yet
Once you answer the questions above, new ones will pop into your head. It’s a good thing. Jot down every question you can and find answers – that way you will create the outline of your business plan. Providing honest answers to the questions above will provide a good point of departure for building your growth strategy, regardless of the type of company and whether it has a B2C or B2B model.
“It may also be a good idea to come back to these questions several times and listen to what other people think about your business idea. They will not fall prey to wishful thinking, which often prevents us from noticing obvious possibilities and dangers” adds Marta Kamińska from Solutions.Rent.
Read also: How to promote your company online? Six ideas
A little tip
In the future, think of these questions as your checklist or an internal audit of a kind and come back to them regularly, even if your entire company can fit in a backpack. It is not by coincidence that the question about funding is the last on your checklist – coming up with a profitable idea for meeting customer needs is much harder than obtaining funding in the form of a loan or a grant.
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