Your business model is your business’s plan to make a profit. It’s an outline of how your business plans to make money which allows you to identify your target market and their needs, the expenses you should anticipate as well as the products and services your business plans to sell. Business plans are important for both new and established organisations, as they help businesses attract investment and talent. Importantly, they help assess whether things are working the way you want them to.
To keep ahead of trends and changes, it’s important to review and update your model. Here are 4 ways to consider reviewing your business model.
1. Customer value proposition
2. Profitability
3. Resources
4. Processes
Customer value proposition
Do you still resonate with your customers and are you taking their feedback into consideration? Reviewing your value proposition is a great way to establish your relevance in meeting your customers’ current problems, or how you can make adjustments to your product to keep improving their situation. Doing customer research to establish what your customers need can help you in this process. It can give you quantified feedback on the specific benefits of your products. You can find some useful tips for this on our blog post How to Drive Sales Through Customer Retention. It could also spark ideas that you may have overlooked initially. Remember to solve real and important problems for your customers, maintain your differentiation from competitors, and remind your customers why they should trust your brand.
Profitability
It’s imperative to understand your profitability for the success of your business. The profit your business makes should be used to help secure growth opportunities. Analyse how your business brings in money and opportunities for growth. Start with a profit and loss statement. If you don’t already have one in place, you can start by individually listing how your business generates income and spends money. Also, consider doing a pricing review to understand if you’re making enough margin to be profitable. Once you’ve consolidated the audit, you can try to eliminate work that costs you money and focus on opportunities that generate income. To get a good idea of how to approach this, have a look at Freshbook’s step-by-step outline on how to check if your business is profitable.
Resources
Take some time to consider if the resources currently available to you are appropriate for your business model and how it’s evolving. Do you have access to the right people, and are you meeting your financial goals? Whether the answer is yes or no, it’s always a good idea to review this aspect of your business. Consider your capacity and demand management, your resource utilization as well as your progress and time tracking. It’s important to establish your actual resource availability and to get a realistic view of your demands and capacity to deliver. Understand what roles and skillsets you need and streamline communication between your employees and the business, as well as with your stakeholders. If you’d like some ideas on how to get started, Planview – a portfolio and work management solutions organisation – has great advice on resource management best practices.
Processes
To run a business, processes are used every day. In the quest for efficiency, it’s important to review them and keep the ones that make sense, and improve the ones that don’t. With rapid changes in technology and the evolving demands of your target market, dysfunctional processes can lead to breakdowns in communication, increased costs, or unhappy customers to name a few challenges. Make this an important step to review to help streamline your tasks and business activities. To get started on this consider these steps recommended and outlined on Mindtools:
Step 1: Map the process
Step 2: Analyse the process
Step 3: Redesign the process
Step 4: Acquire resources
Step 5: Implement and communicate change
Step 6: Review the process
Running a business is hard work, but regularly reviewing your Business Model can make planning for the future easier. Make it a priority to keep up with the ever-evolving needs of your clients, talent, and expectations of any investors so you can stay relevant. Try not to overlook the components that make you successful and how you can upgrade them. Remember, if any of your adjustments need financing that you might not have at the time you can always get in touch with one of our Funding Specialists at Lula to find out how we can help you meet your business objectives.
