DISCOVER WHAT DRIVES BUSINESSES INTO THE FUTURE
Thoughts of May:
When in history did 2 ml of liquid have such a profound effect on our lives and economies?
What if social media was still social?
What has stayed stable? Never mind.
Brighter Days ahead. And summer’s coming as well.
PROGRAMMES
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BUSINESS UNMODELLING
Dissect what Drives the Performance of Businesses
Why Business Unmodelling?
We hear a lot about Business Models these days. Building businesses has become a spectator sport. As it is required for a proper sport, everyone in the audience has an opinion.
Much of it is seductively simple. “Hey what’s your business model?” “His business model is E-commerce.” “They are the Facebook of Industry X”. “Have you already heard about the next Google?”.
The term “business model” has become a kind of silver bullet to all of our challenges. Some of it comes with three-step methodologies, packaged into easy-to-digest block diagrams with repeating taglines. And sometimes we even come across “movements” that we can join.
But if it’s really that simple, why do we need that much advice? Amazon for example lists 40.000 results for the term “business model”. Then there are another 10.000 results for ‘design thinking’.
So what’s the problem? The problem is, we can’t boil a complex business down into one word or a checklist. Neither is a great idea or definition sufficient to build a profitable and sustainable business.
Each business is unique and each business has different drivers of success. If we don’t understand these drivers, we will end up comparing apples with oranges. To have an impact in reality, any great idea needs to work within the constraints of the specific environment the business operates in.
This is because essentially, businesses are made up of constraints. Those constraints are for example customers needs, our available resources, our suppliers, competitors or available technologies. The task of the entrepreneur is to find solutions to problems within these constraints.
Let’s say we come across an article that tells us what made Apple successful. What this article really is telling us is what made Apple successful under those particular circumstances. To understand whether there are any lessons to be learned for our business, we first need to be sure to understand what our business is about, and what constraints we operate in.
This is why here we take a step back to dissect what makes businesses successful. We explore the various building blocks, and we highlight the ones are have the biggest impact for a particular business. And of course we show how they change.
We ask, “what are the real drivers of the performance for a business?“
In other words we unmodel the business.
SPOTLIGHT PROGRAMME
Enter this Pogramme to uncover how the Business Environment has shifted from Competitive Advantage to Intangible Economics
Read about identifying the strengths of businesses, about value propositions, and sources of competitive advantage in these articles and posts.
Positioning
and Identifying Success Factors
Clarintelligence provides Clarity and Intelligence to help executives lift the full potential of their businesses.
It was founded by private equity professional, turned publisher Martin Hoffmann.
Don’t bore the ceo
My career in private equity started with a frustration and an insight at the same time. I soon got over the frustration. The insight stayed with me and grew to this day. This insight also pioneered the way for Clarintelligence.
As a rookie private equity professional, working the first week in my new job, coming with a bag of due diligence experience, my boss asked me to prepare our questions for the Management Q&A of a company we wanted to acquire (if you are not familiar with private equity, think of the Management Q&A as the first date after which both parties can decide whether or not there is a potential for marriage).
I did research on the business. Based on my previous experience I proudly came up with the list of 15-20 questions that any diligent consultant would come up with.
My boss politely suggested that I could throw this list into the garbage. To have a fruitful conversation with the management we needed to focus on the three to five questions that are most important for that particular business. And then we needed to go deep on them. This is what we did. And we managed to speak to them eye to eye, not only learning a lot about the business, but also positioning ourselves as a valuable potential partner.
So hats off to anyone who knows how businesses work. This is important. But the true art lies in finding those factors that have the biggest impact on the future of one particular business. So do more of fewer things, of the important stuff. Get to the questions that matter.
And be sure to not bore the ceo - or anybody else for that matter. If you are the ceo, recommend this site to everyone around you, so that they don’t bore you (though you don’t have to be ceo to recommend us, we appreciate any recommendation).
If you want to fly, find the X-Factor
This is why at Clarintelligence we help businesses identify and focus on those elements that have the biggest impact on a businesses’ future. We help them find the X-Factor.
By doing so we help executives develop strategies and adjust their businesses to a changing world.
We start by dissecting the components that make up successful, profitable and sustainable business models and how these components are changing in our dynamic environment. Based on these insights we then move on to helping businesses develop the right strategic options, so that they get ready to become airborne.
"The name of the bird tells you nothing. You need to talk about the feathers”
Richard Feynman
Who We Are
Martin Hoffmann
This is me writing here. I founded Clarintelligence drawing on my experience as private equity professional. In private equity I was fortunate to work with a variety of businesses. This means that I was able to draw connections between different business and detect common patterns. I was also fortunate to work with these businesses from a board level perspective. This, again helped me focus on what matters for a particular business. This also helped me learn not to ask stupid questions because senior management - as the name implies - tended to be much older and experienced than me. By now, I am one of the older chaps. As bad luck would have it, today’s business world is changing so rapidly that I basically had to remain in the learning mode, trying to keep the questions focused and smart.
I have also contributed to Entrepreneur Magazine and Equities Magazine. This probably won’t help you in any way, but I thought I’d mention it since we don’t know each other that well yet, and this is social proof that tells you I make at least that much sense that the editors there decided to deal with me.
Robot
