All of my clients, and many of my contacts know that I am a big fan of the Business Model Canvas method of business planning! In this blog I’d like to introduce it to you and hopefully encourage you to adopt it – whether you are a committed planner – or you’re not really “into” planning.
All businesses need to plan
You may be a confirmed planner, or you may be a bit hit and miss. It’s certainly been harder to plan when there is so much uncertainty surrounding the pandemic and the economy
But here’s the thing – putting a plan in place doesn’t mean you have to stick to it come what may!
Imagine you want to go on a journey to London from Edinburgh.
If you don’t have a plan then you could jump on a random train and see where you end up – but it might be Cowdenbeath! (nothing wrong with Cowdenbeath)
You might end up in London but it might cost you a fortune, or take you several days.
Far better is to assess options and make a plan. Get a train at 9am on Thursday at a cost of £100 return – arriving in the afternoon in London. You can then organise your meetings, or your visit to the Tower of London or whatever you plan (!) to do whilst you are there.
Of course – things can go wrong! You could miss the train. There could be adverse weather or the train could break down. But in most instances you will be able to find a way to still get there (mostly) on time, by varying the plan slightly. For example – you wouldn’t just go and sit on any train at Waverley Station and hope it reached London, you would seek the best alternative to the train you had missed.
So – as I said – you may be a committed planner (I talked about commitment last week) – or you may need a little persuasion to plan in these uncertain times.
The next barrier is – where to start, how to do it and a reluctance to produce a lengthy document which will simply lie in a (figurative) drawer until next year – rarely seeing the light of day!
Old Dusty Documents
So – I propose a tool!
The Business Model Canvas
This is a flexible, easy to use tool which ends up on a single page. Yes you will probably have supporting documents to accompany it – but the point is that your plan can be stuck to your wall board (I’ll talk about online tools shortly) so that you can refer to it constantly and even make quick changes as the economic landscape changes.
The point being that you are much more likely to revisit this plan than the dusty document in the drawer.
It is also super-easy to add or subtract elements from your business e.g.:
- Add a new product stream
- Remove a channel (useful at the start of the pandemic)
- Change a system or process
You can make changes and quickly see the potential results of the change.
If you have discrete parts of your business, or perhaps locations or even departments – then these can all be modelled separately as required.
There are 9 elements:-
- Value proposition – what are you really providing for your customers?
- Ideal Customer – who are your best customers?
- Channels – how do you deliver to your customers?
- Relationships – how do you attract and retain your customers?
- Key Activities – what are your core business processes?
- Key Resources – what do you need to run your business?
- Key Partners – who else can help you to grow and sustain your business?
- Costs – what are the costs of your resources and partners?
- Revenues – what revenues will you earn?
In summary – understand WHAT you are selling, to WHOM, WHERE and HOW – then how to support that with resources and partners. Then you establish the cost of that infrastructure – fixed and variable – and the revenues to be gained.
And the key thing – no wordy paragraphs – each thought is captured on a post it note!
Simple!
You can use an online tool such as Miro (free version available) or stick it on the wall
If you work with others then you can have sessions to get everyone involved – either with post it notes on a wall or online with Miro!
It does take a little bit of getting used to – it took me a couple of session initially to “get” it but once you understand the simplicity and the way you can easily capture and flex your business plans you’ll never go back!
Here is a quote from someone who attended one of my workshops, when asked what they had got from the session: “Not feel so overwhelmed by the thought of a business plan, but knowing there is a simple & flexible method using the Canvas Model.”
I have just taken on a client who’s a startup who was completely panicking as she had been asked for business plan and she didn’t know where to start – we are now working on her plan. The benefit is – having got the plan in this format it is much less intimidating to transfer relevant information to a bank form for example – simply opening up the form online is daunting, and coming up with a plan on the fly is impossible!
If you would like to know more then please do get in touch.