You’ve heard the word business model, right?  

But did you know it’s as simple as how your business creates, delivers and captures value?  

Yeh it’s that simple.  

Although I know in reality, running a business is certainly not that easy.  

But what’s really interesting is what is at the core of creating, delivering and capturing value.  

And you know what it is, it’s understanding the problems that your clients face.   

So if you’re looking at moving into a different market, or targeting or working with different types of clients, if they’ve fundamentally got different problems that need solving, then you’re gonna need a different model or a slightly different version of your business model, in order to solve them.  

So a woman who was one of my favorite coaching clients ever, (she’s now out of financial services), is in a business where they do a lot of angel investing.   

So she’s kind of like a real life shark from Shark Tank, it’s really cool.  

Anyway, I was interviewing her recently for my book on value, and I said, “so what makes you, when you’re at that pitch stage and founders are getting up there wanting this angel investment and wanting money to get this business up off the ground, what makes you choose one over the other?”  

And what she said was, “those that can show and demonstrate a genuine problem that a client is facing or potential client would face (and then of course, their business is a solution to that problem), they’re the ones that actually will potentially get to round two, and hopefully get chosen for this angel investment and getting the funding that they need.”  

So she said, “in the absence of showing a genuine problem that exists, and being able to back that up and research and support it, then the chances of getting this funding is going to be almost second to nothing”.   

And I thought, isn’t that interesting?  

Because we spend so much time in the business promoting what we do and how we do it, and how good we are almost like this bright, shiny, glossy brochure.   

But how much time and effort do you put into genuinely understanding what the problems are that the type of clients you work with have, implicitly and explicitly.   

So not only the problems that they’re talking about, and openly talking about, but the problems that they’re probably feeling inside and not sharing with anyone else.   

The ones that are going on deep down inside.  

How much research and time do you spend working out what they are, and helping clients understand that what you do actually can solve a lot of those problems?   

So when you keep this in mind, it makes it so much easier when you’re developing your solution and looking at what your marketing is going to be, and how you bring about that experience and a great experience to your clients, that you go back to what problems am I solving for these type of clients and build it all around that. 

Make that the core focus because that’s what comes about when you’re building a valuable business.  

And after, all right, You are Valuable!