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The Business Model Secret Nobody Tells You
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Not too long ago, I found myself wrestling with the question of how should I grow my small business? Should I start an agency? Should I offer courses? Should I start a membership? Should I do training services? Should I productize? Should I do VIP days? What is the right model for me? Now, unfortunately for me, when I was wrestling with this question, this video didn't exist. And so I spent the last 7 years going through these business models, experiencing them, and coming to find out the good, the bad, and the ugly of each of these ways to grow the business. So in that vein, today I'm going to be breaking down five different common personality types that you might have as a leader or a founder or a small team organizer. And for each of those five personality types, I'm going to match you with one of the business models that I think would be the best match for you, having been through offering these myself. To get us started, let's go through the five common personality types of founders and leaders and see which one you fall into. First one up is the architect. The architect might sound like, "I love perfecting experiences, building something that I know when someone is ready for it, they can navigate through at their own time. I feel like a museum curator. I don't need to see everyone's smiling faces to know I've done a great job because building something beautiful gives me the satisfaction I need to feel good about my work." Next up is the fixer. A fixer might sound like, "I love diving deep to solve new and unexpected challenges. Each one feels like a fresh adventure." Kind of like Indiana Jones. I know there's going to be surprises along the way, but I kind of love those surprises because when new things come up, there are new opportunities to learn, to help, and to fix. You think you might be a fixer? Let me know in the comments. But let's move on to the third personality type, teacher. A teacher might sound like, "I love the art of translation. I love taking advanced concepts and making them simple so people can understand, but it's not enough for me to just put that out in the world." When I see those reactions of people just getting it finally after all this time, that's what makes my work worth doing. That brings us to number four, the craftsman. I don't like starting from scratch over and over again. What I really love doing is perfecting my craft. As I go from one client to the next, I just get better and better at doing what I do. My goal is to be so good at this one thing that I am good at doing that I can become a leader in my space and beyond. I know I'll never be perfect, but pursuing perfection in my craft is what motivates me to keep going project after project to get 1% better every time. Last, but not least, we have the host. I don't feel like I do anything special, but I do get motivated and inspired by connecting one person to another. When I see the interaction between two really smart people I know, I feel like the work I do matters. I'm all about creating meaning through friendships and connections and networking, both in real life and also online. To me, impact isn't something I want to do in isolation. All right, now that we have all of our business models and all of our personality types, it's time to start matching them up. As I go through matching these out, I'd love to have you write in the comments below what you expect the matches to be because I'll be curious if we reach the same outcome. With that out of the way, let's talk about the architect. Which business model sounds like the best fit for them? Write yours in the comments. But my answer, it's the course creator. If you are someone who is a tinkerer, who's an engineer, who really likes designing all the nuances of an experience, and you're comfortable with the distance of not seeing that customer, you are perfectly made for online products and so on. Does this mean you'll need to learn marketing in order to get the volume necessary to sell these kinds of things? Most likely. However, your personality type equips you very well for building out this kind of business. The wonderful thing about online products of any kind, whether they're courses, templates, knowledge products, or software, is that it's all fixed. You're designing your Mona Lisa and then you're just selling it again and again. An example offer might be having a $397 online course about how to use Photoshop as a wedding photographer. Because architects have a tendency to go deep and really focus in on designing and fine-tuning technology and things behind the scenes. This business model gives you the most freedom of any of the ones we'll talk about today. In a typical week, your calendar might look something like this. And as you can see here, it is a large amount of time spent on lead generation, building that list, and getting attention, and very little time on client commitments. You have control over your own schedule, which is both a pro and a con because there is so much freedom in this model. you don't have calls or other demands. The challenge is really keeping yourself motivated. This is the type of path to only choose if you are someone who is really good at self-direction. You love marketing and the idea of just consistently working to build traffic and holding yourself to your own deadlines does not feel challenging. This is most definitely the path for you. This schedule freedom tends to attract a lot of people, but it is a double-edged sword and I would say the most difficult part of this model. When you are in the architect lane, you need to be self-driven. Just like an architect working on a building, you could have multiple years being spent on perfecting one product or one experience. And no one is holding you to those deadlines generally speaking. But if you don't meet certain deadlines, your revenue is going to suffer. So, the best architects are ones that are very self-motivated, self-directed, do not struggle with the freedom of open-endedness, and can just keep driving towards perfection little by little by little. If that sounds like you, you're going to enjoy so many advantages down this path in that you can have sales while you sleep. You can have generally a low touch fulfillment with just some minor support and no ongoing client work. And a lot of the things you do can be asynchronous, so you can do them from anywhere at pretty much any time as long as you keep things moving. However, in my experience, there aren't a lot of earlystage business owners that are actually this comfortable with this much ambiguity and open-endedness. So, let's talk about the next category. Next up, we have the fixer. And of all of these business models, can you guess which one the fixer is going to be? Write it in the comments. But for me, the answer is definitely a custom service. If you are someone that loves to help, that loves to solve new things, to dive under the hood, I think you're really going to love the fixer lane. Because you're in the land of custom services, every project is going to be a little different. You'll typically have some kind of sales process where you have discovery where you're figuring out, oh, what could I do? And then you're creating a custom bid or a custom retainer in order to accomplish some kind of custom thing. This makes your sales process more intense, requiring some good communication and diagnostic skills, but it also ensures that you're always getting novelty and something new to solve. Because of the novelty of what you offer, it's also a lot easier to sell this type of business model because you can kind of adapt to any problem you have the skill set for. You don't have to market a particular way. You just have to attract a person that you were able to help in some way, shape, or form. Common offers for this business model might be a monthly retainer where you have a certain number of hours or tickets or widgets that you are getting in that month. Or it might also be a flat bid project such as a custom home renovation where you're making a quote and working through it that way. You might also see some VIP days fall into this category where you say, "Hey, you get to pick my brain for eight hours on anything you want." Even though it's somewhat productized, because it's so open-ended, I would still consider it a custom service. Now, with that, let's talk calendar for this one, because this is definitely the most calendar intensive of any of the business models. A typical week for you might look something like this. If you went the fixer route, as you can see, you might have a handful of sales calls, a handful of client calls, and a lot of deep work focused on your clients. Because you're working in a custom environment, you're going to have a lot of communication with your customers as well, because things are going to come up along the way. Like, if you're doing a home renovation, oh no, lead pipes. uh we have to figure out what that looks like. Expect a lot more communication here than some of the other models we're talking about. What makes this model so great is that you don't need to have a big audience in order to have a big business. You can grow this up very easily, and it's why most people start with this model. I know I did. It's also very hightouch, so you're able to customize everything to each person, building a real relationship with your clients. And you don't need many clients to have a successful business here. Assuming you were one person show, one to five clients would be all you would need to get through your year and have a successful business. Whereas the architect might need 1 to 500 clients to reach the same amount of revenue. However, the challenge with custom services, and the fixer kind of likes this, but it's still something to be aware of, is scope creep. Because things are going to come up along the way, it can be easy to spend too much time on a project, particularly if your brain wiring makes you enjoy that. You can get caught with shiny objects. It can also be a bit of an intense service both on the sales side because there's a lot of work to create those custom proposals which may or may not get uh approved and also it can be emotionally intense from the delivery perspective. You are going to get to know these clients really well if you only have one at a time. And so if they're unhappy with something, if they're struggling, it's easy for it to become personal, which for some people is a pro, but in general can be a con because it can really start to drain you if you don't have good boundaries, which is the key to making this model work. You have to love helping. You have to welcome surprises, and you have to be able to hold those boundaries even when it's a little challenging. Next up, we have the teacher. And of our remaining business models, any obvious guesses as to which one? Yeah, I know this one's not really much of a guess. The teacher is an obvious fit for the training approach. Training is very similar to custom services in that it is a human-d delivered service. But here rather than having a custom methodology and custom deliverables, we've fixed both of those things. We're always doing the same thing in the same way for the same type of person. But when we do it, unlike the architect who's delivering it through a platform, we're delivering it through a human typically. So, we will have a trainer or a team of trainers educating clients on a set thing again and again and again. Training is a less customized form of a productized service, which we'll be getting to soon. And a example training package might be something like this, where we have a $6,000 one-day on-site training where we teach your whole company how to make toast. Now, going down this training route, assuming you are oneperson organization, you will typically have one to four events per month. And in a week where you have an event, your schedule might look something like this. Now granted, in weeks where you do not have an event, your schedule will look a lot more free because you will have that extra time to spend on marketing or on the business work. But as you can tell, this is a far cry from the schedule we were used to back in the fixer and even more different than what we saw for the architect. If you enjoy a predictably irregular schedule and you like to mix it up a little bit about how you spend your days, it's probably a good sign that you will like this training route. And of course, that's not the only benefit of going this training route. With training, you also have the benefit of having reusable materials. So, as you can see here on the calendar, we're not actually spending a ton of time on client work each week because we are reusing the same materials and presentations and just tweaking it for each client engagement, making this a little bit more profitable than what we might have expected from the fixer. We're also able to incorporate fixed processes in this because just like the architect, we are designing an experience for delivering a training and we are just wash, rinsing and repeating it every time. Now, it's not all roses and sunshine in the training land, the main challenge with this is the pressure of performance because at the end of the day, just like a teacher showing up for class, being a teacher in a business context requires a certain level of professionalism and frankly endurance. While you might be able to work wonders with your contracts, if you really want to go down this route, my suggestion would be be sure you are someone who is good at honoring your commitments and you are able to commit to a schedule. It is very hard to have this business model when you are unable to perform on demand. For example, if you are scheduled to present a 6-hour lecture in Vermont on Tuesday, but you don't feel like it, if you are someone that would go anyway, that's probably a good sign the training route is good for you. If you are someone who is more emotional driven and you're like ah if I don't feel it I just can't perform and that this is probably not the right space for you. Oh quick sidebar here. I'm showing you calendars on this view assuming you are a one person or one in a few contractors kind of business because ultimately if you are that small you are signing up for this journey. Over time as you hire these calendar commitments will be spread around throughout your team. I'll tell you today as I am running uh four I think of these business models simultaneously at process driven I don't have calendars that look exactly like the for me personally but if I were to combine all of my team members our calendars do look pretty much like four of these all mashed together. I'm purposely not in this video talking about team growth and what your team org chart would look like. But if you'd like to see a part two on that just write the word uh org chart in the comments. But as you grow, just recognize you can hire people onto your team that have balancing personality types to expand your repertoire. So my personal personality type here, which you might have gathered, is the teacher. That is where I want to be. That's what I want to do. But my team that I'm surrounding myself with, I have people who are hosts. I have people who are fixers. I have people who are architects. Even as a small team, I am purposely balancing out these personalities. And guess what? Because of that, I'm able to expand to multiple business models if I want to. So, in this case, I have a YouTube channel here. I have courses and I have my person who loves being an architect in charge of those courses. And then I have a community, our membership community, the process-driven membership. I have somebody on my staff who is a host personality type. And guess what? He's in charge of that community. I don't want to get too far into the team building side of things because I know if you're at this point, it's probably premature. But just know that our decision today is focused on you because you are the one constant on your team. But just know that this can grow, particularly if you're looking to hire full-time employees down the line. Next up, we have the craftsman. You can probably guess which one that's going to fall into. But if you are a craftsman, productized service is where you'd want to be. I define productized service as a fixed method with custom deliverables. So, for example, if I had a $5,000 brand redesign package, that could be a productized service. in that I have a set way of doing things. I know roughly what the deliverables are like a logo, a website, and so on. But every time I'm doing it, I'm doing it a little differently because I'm working with a different company. If we were to put things on a spectrum, the product high service would be kind of in between training and custom service in terms of rigidity. The week of this perfection motivated craftsman might look something like this. This schedule looks most similar to what we saw with custom service, aka the fixer, but with the notable exception of fewer sales calls because if you are offering a productized service, you're selling the same thing every time. So, typically you will have things be selfch checkout or very, very simple of a sales process because that's why you are productizing. The fun thing about productized service is that this is really the best of all worlds of all of the services we talked about because you can design it to pull from any of the other examples. Some people will have productized services where there's a course in it and then there's a coaching component basically pulling inspiration from the architect and the teacher. There are other productized services that have a fixed teaching and training component that's the same every time just like the teacher would like and then also has some kind of custom deliverable in there which is something that the fixer would like. I designed the schedule assuming that your signature program your productized service had at least one or two calls in the program experience. But the nice thing about this is that this is kind of like Goldilocks. You can make it right in the middle for whatever you find interesting. So choose your own adventure. Now, not to fan girl too much over productized services, but there are some additional pros that you should be aware of when it comes to this lane in that with productized services, you are also able to sell it more easily. It's just so much easier to sell, hey, I will redo your brand, rather than, hey, I do brand stuff. How can I help you? That's kind of what the fixer would say. So being able to position yourself as the person that helps solve a specific challenge in a specific way for a specific person, that's really helpful when it comes to selling, which allows you to again automate this and reduce the amount of work you have to do to sell because no proposals for the most part, which I guess is kind of a second benefit in of itself. No proposals. So you're not spending a bunch of time doing things for free that may or may not lead to client sales. However, there is a dark side to productized services, too. namely that you need to have strong processes to do this. You need consistency. If you are delivering your signature brand design and service, make sure that signature service has a really good flow. As you start increasing the volume here, which you will typically do compared to the fixers, you might have three or four clients at one time. And to keep track of all of that stuff without reducing quality, process is going to be your best friend. So, you know, maybe subscribe to this channel. Um, but that's going to be key. And the second key component of this is make sure you pick a good promise, a good outcome. Uh productized service is about saying, "Hey, here's the outcome. I can get this specific person in this specific way." If you pick the wrong specifics, it can actually make selling harder. If you ever find that your productized service is more difficult to sell than a custom service, that might be a sign that you've stuck your flag in the wrong patch of sand, maybe picked the wrong niche, or maybe you're just not communicating to people who are in that niche yet. But either way, something to pay attention to and definitely something to watch out to. But no need to stress about this. You can always change your niche by changing one sentence on your website. So, it's not a huge commitment if you get it wrong. But just be aware of this and don't let it be wrong for years and years. Not like I'm speaking from experience or anything here. Last but not least, we are left with the only remaining choice, which is the host and the online membership/group program. Kind of obvious here because these are our only remaining options. But if you are someone that gets joy from connecting others together, that's absolutely what you should be doing in your business itself. This group program and membership model is defined by having fixed methods, fixed deliverables and all of it being delivered through human interaction. So kind of like training except rather than me giving it to somebody, I am connecting others for them to experience it. But otherwise very similar in that it's always the same thing for each person. Some common offers that would fall into this category could be something like a $200 a month membership or a $50,000 a year mastermind or a $5,000 a ticket event. As you can tell, there is a wide range that can all fall into this connecting and matchmaking category. When it comes to the calendar, I have assumed in this case that you were going the high volume membership route, but of course there's a wide range here, so I could probably have a bunch of different calendars, but your week would probably look something like this. Note how there aren't really a lot of client calls except for maybe one client meetup or event that you're hosting, but a lot of your time is spent asynchronously interacting in your community. But for all this hard work, what you're getting is a lot of flexibility. You can do this from anywhere. You can do this at pretty much any time. You're able to reuse content. And all you need to be able to do to get consistent recurring revenue is keep driving that engagement and making sure your people are connecting and getting value. But this can also then become a challenge because it's very easy to get on the content hamster wheel with memberships where you're just creating more and more and more content. It's very easy to get on the hamster wheel of engagement where every day you're just responding to messages. Hey Bob, what do you think of this? And trying to drive engagement in your online community or event or mastermind. There really two types of headaches you can expect inside this arena. People headaches and tech headaches. If you are going very high volume, meaning a membership or large community, expect a lot of tech glitches and a little bit of people issues. And if you go very high touch and low volume, such as a high-end mastermind, expect more people issues and a small handful of tech issues. That balance between tech headaches and people headaches is kind of something you get to choose within this category depending on how exactly you structure your offer. In fact, that's a pretty good point for me to just hit on before we wrap up. Each of these models has an implied volume of clients and the amount of leverage you could have. Meaning, how many clients could I serve as just one person? And if I were to plot these on a chart, they look something like this. An architect is someone who was going to be creating something that they need to sell many, many times, which is why they have to spend so much time on marketing. They have a lot of leverage. One person could easily serve a thousand clients in the architect arena, but again, they're typically charging much less. So you need that thousand clients to get what would be equivalent to one client if you were a fixer. A fixer is low volume, low leverage. It's one to one. My time is spent and getting clients in. But for just one client, I could probably get the same results as an architect could from selling a thousand courses. So if you have a smaller audience, I would go for these lower volume options. And you can see the craftsman, the teacher, and the host kind of fall in between here based on again audience size or volume of clients you need. and the amount of leverage you have. On the left side, these low leverage options, if you want to grow them, you certainly can. You'll just eventually need more people. On the right side, you can go quite far before you need to add more people to your organization. So, if you are someone who enjoys big team, you probably want to stay on the left side. If you're someone who kind of hates people and never wants to learn how to be a manager, you probably want to stick to this right side. And again, watch out for that one in the middle because it could go either way. Now, once you pick your business model, the new problem that's going to come up is how do I actually operate this business system in a processdriven way? How do I make sure that if I'm going training or if I'm going custom service, it feels good while delivering it? Because no matter what you choose, it can feel chaotic if you're not doing it right. Right? That's where the blueprint found in the description below for free is going to be your best friend. It is a master class where I go through my A toZ approach to how to systemize a small team. And before you go, I do have to admit that this whole video just stemmed from a conversation I was having with a friend where I was just ranting about how like why do people keep picking business models that suck and why did no one tell me that I would hate this business model before I did it for 4 years and you know this is where this all started. Um so if this is not helpful to you I kind of expected that and if this is helpful to you let me know because that is that is truly shocking. Um, but like, subscribe, share if you feel so inclined, and watch this video next.
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