The Perfect Business Model
In a brilliant cartoon, Mike Baldwin (www.cornered.com) shows three men standing
at a street corner, each of them wearing old fashioned sandwich board signs. Sandwich board signs are one of the first
forms of guerrilla marketing.
Anyway, the three men are obviously canvassing for money. Two
of them wear Will work for food signs;
the last one just wears a blank board. The bottom line: it is not enough just
to ask for money or clients, you need to have a business model. Think about the
two men with their message Will work for food.
They obviously have a plan.
First, remember the crucial elements of a business model
include:
- identifying
who your customers or clients are;
- identifying
who your suppliers are;
- understanding
the relationship (flow of money and information) between you, your suppliers
and your customers or clients;
- understanding how you are going to reach out to new
customers or clients; i.e., how you are going to market your business in a
cost effective way.
Two out of three of the characters in the cartoon understand
this perfectly.
- Their
customers are passers by on a busy downtown corner in a presumably upscale
area where such passers by would be likely to be the sorts of people who
might have JOBS for them to actually do and money to pay for food to give
them.
- Their
customers who will be giving them food bought from the money generated by
their work are coincidentally also their suppliers—they are supplying them
with JOBS.
- Information
is flowing from them to their customers (Will work for food), their suppliers are giving them odd jobs
to do and their clients are giving them food in lieu of money as a result.
- Their
marketing is adroit: one of the most overlooked factors in constructing a
successful business model is the cost to acquire each customer. If that
cost is very high, your business is cooked before it ever gets started.
For these guys, they are using walking sandwich board signs an old form of
advertising that really works.
In addition, they have cleverly overcome one possible objection: they are
not asking for money which might be used to buy other things; they are
asking for food which their customers and suppliers will know will be
consumed and not likely traded for other substances.
Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Ottawa, Canada.
December 2007.
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/EntrepreneurialistCultureFrontPage.htm
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