The Shape Of Your Business Model
People have an amazing sense of perceived value. There’s a point, irrespective of how much money they have, where they look at a product and say it’s just not worth it.
Kenneth Bartley Boudrie, 1986
What shape is your business model? (Have none? Start a written/digital version on the business model page). Is your business model round, square, … a pyramid, … a fan, or an amorphous blog of patterns & activities?
In researching business models, besides finding that there is a lot of conversational & article references to them, there also are visual representations in all shapes, sizes, and of course colors. Upwards of three million images of “business models” are online (May 2009).
The definition of a business model may not really capture the complexity, unless you’re talking about a child’s lemonade stand. So how can we look into business models?
Certainly the shape that the model is shown, when put on paper (or image), is not important. Hopefully if you could, you would not use two dimensions, or even three dimensions, to describe your business model.
It’s a 4-D world of models
In case you don’t remember, the fourth dimension for most people is time. The other three are height, width, and depth.
A seasonal or cyclical business has a sort of four-dimensional business model, but that is not the important part. What’s key is that any business changes over time, from a starting (and known) state to future states (some known/planned, some unknown).
An easy example of a changing model is from today’s headlines: the automobile business model. Is the future business model one where electric cars & battery technology are the most dominant factors? It’s unknown, but it is clearly not a static model.
And at the end of the day, for many organizations, there is a goal. The purpose may be to sell the business, to create a single event (such as a large expo or international gathering), to pass legislation, to create a steady-state non-profit towards a social purpose, or any of thousands of goals that have come as part of an organization’s vision.
Future posts and pages will expand on the categorization of business models, and the ways to use the time element – the fourth dimension – to shape and grow your model of doing business.
