Mapping out your business

This article was first published on 8 March 2017 and has since been updated.

Good day. You’ve landed on this page because you are likely planning out a business plan, thinking of how you will embark on your brand journey and building a brand identity. Or, we may have been discussing how to name your business – wink 😉 or a product.

What’s enlightening is that there are many tools available online for business venture builders. I first discovered Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas through research when I was setting up my fourth business venture in 2015. As an independent and self-funded womanpreneur, my businesses reflect my stage of life. So ironically, the new firm was planned to free us (my co-founder and myself) from being physically tied to an office location as I was in the midst of relocating to another city. A sports and fitness media platform, it was a “dotcom business” hence the choice was easy! We merely added the word ‘dotcom’ to the old company name and voila, we were business ready! Follow this link if you’d like to know more about my business venture journey: Two decades of business venture experience, concised in 11 minutes – LIFE. A POST RELEASE. (wordpress.com).

Back to you.

Where are you at your business planning? Here are some useful tools I used when preparing for my business planning. I also conduct a check point each year end by revisiting our company goals and prepare a vision board that includes where we were yesterday, where we are today, and where do we want to go tomorrow. This helps me in taking stock and visualising what’s to come, always keeping ahead of the game.

Let’s begin.

Mapping out your business

Wikipedia Description: The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template used for developing new business models and documenting existing ones. It offers a visual chart with elements describing a firm’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances, assisting businesses to align their activities by illustrating potential trade-offs.

The nine “building blocks” of the business model design template that came to be called the Business Model Canvas were initially proposed in 2005 by Alexander Osterwalder, based on his PhD work supervised by Yves Pigneur on business model ontology. Since the release of Osterwalder’s work around 2008, the authors have developed related tools such as the Value Proposition Canvas and the Culture Map, and new canvases for specific niches have also appeared.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to be coached by Dr. Sivapalan and Renuka Sen of Proficeo Consulting as a part of the Coach n Grow program. My team and I spent extensive amounts of time and copious cups of coffee thinking about every cornerstone of the company we wanted to build. The Business Model Canvas provided the perfect template. It is also a great exercise to come together as a team, be on the same page and build the venture together. If you don’t have a team (yet), invite a few friends over for a meal. You may not end up with a name for your business, but it’ll be your first pitch in a safe environment.

Quicklinks:

• Create it on Canva

By Business Model Alchemist and pharma industry – <a rel=”nofollow” class=”external free” href=”http://www.businessmodelalchemist.com/tools”>http://www.businessmodelalchemist.com/tools</a>, CC BY-SA 1.0, Link

Designing the brand experience

Inspired by the canvas, we created a few design thinking tools of our own, all of which form a part of the venture building journey.

We began by designing the brand experience:

• Simon Sinek struck gold with asking Why. What is your Why? Why are you providing this product of service? What pains are you trying to solve?
• Who are your customers? What are their demographics?
• What solutions are you providing?
• When will your customers seek you out?
• How will you engage with your existing and prospective customers?

What we wanted to offer with our new “dotcom” venture, was to build a pathway for brands to connect with their various different audiences. While not everyone needs to be a customer of the brand, they surely can still be advocates of the brand. The concept behind this brand experiential journey was to affect and create emotions around the brand as if it were a person. In a world with so many rich new media options, brands must offer holistic and authentic experiences, be omni-present and immersive, leave lasting impressions. What a tall order for a brand let alone an individual, isn’t it? But a brand today, like A.I., represents many. It needs to be personable to a select many, rather than a select few, yet be individualistic and unique in its demeanour.

Back to you for a minute there – is there a brand that you are building?

What characteristics would you like your brand to have?

What kinds of demographics or target audience would the brand appeal to?

The exercise of naming a brand or determining the colour palette of a logo can be extensive and exhaustive, but in trying to understand the science behind it, of which there is, it is also important to circle back the drive and intent of the product or service behind the brand name.

What is it that you are trying to do and why.

Now that we’re back on the why, it drives through the intent and purpose of the brand experience exercise. While all brands are out there to make an impression, not all brands are driven by profit. Most brands built by startups today are purpose-first, they are there to disrupt traditional economies and traditional ways of doing business. Is your brand designed to improve lives? Will it enhance accessibility or give a lesser-known community a platform to voice their needs? What, after all, is your brand seeking to do if not change the world?

Building blocks for the shop front

You have completed the Business Model Canvas and Brand Experience exercise. Next, let’s design the building blocks for your virtual shop front.

Here is basic Site Map to help you plan out the website architecture, the shop front for your business online and the information you would like to present to existing and prospective customers. A website can have more than a function of displaying information about your products and services. It can act as your resume, share testimonials from your clients, share product reviews and provide useful articles to draw in prospective customers. It is a resource centre for your customers as much as it can be a point of data collection for you about your customers. A website can also be an interface that builds a community. That same website can also manage an online payment gateway and customer invoicing.

If building a mobile app, you will need to plan out the software framework in which the mobile app developers will use to build the application. That will require a deeper conversation with an app developer or CTO.

Helpful video links:

Thanks, boys.

Let’s hear it from the next generation of unicorns.

Thank you for reading this post and all the best on your entrepreneurial journey! I hope you have found this exercise useful. It would please me to give some time back to new venture builders. I am available to go over the business model canvas at no cost to you – book a time with me here.