De definitieve gids voor bedrijfsplannen en bedrijfspatronen

Het hele universum is gebaseerd op patronen
. Bedrijven en startups
spelen dus ook een rol. Bedrijfsplan en bedrijfspatronen spelen een grote rol bij het
onderscheiden van marktleiders van
andere soorten bedrijven en helpen hen hun merk te laten groeien .

Vraag je je niet af
wat voor soort ondernemingsplan voor bedrijven of welke patronen
succesvolle ondernemers volgen, waardoor ze
hun zakelijke ideeën kunnen omzetten naar een geweldig bedrijf?

Het was als een mysterie voor mij, vlak voordat ik dit vond ...

The secret behind a successful startup is
to follow a proven growth hacking strategy
and concentrate on four important elements:

1. Develop a lean business model (You can get help from business model Canvas)
2. Follow the right business model pattern, also known as Business Strategy, tat enables you to innovate, and add value to the market.
3. Invest time an effort in market intelligence, and conducting comprehensive market research about your rival, your customers, and your own brand.
4. Only implement the right Growth Hacking Strategy that matches your business pattern, and help you get more customers.

In This article,
We focus on business plan, and business patterns,
an I will take your hand and walk you through every single steps to help you learn:

• What type of business plan should you develop?
• What business pattern or business strategies works for your business?

Lets jump right in.

What is a business plan?

There are dozens of academic explanation of what is a business mode
And what is not,
But the best way to understand a business model
and it’s components is to refer to The New, New Thing
By Michael Lewis.

Here is how he describes it: “All it really meant was how you planned to make money".
That’s it.

Let me give you an example,
When Microsoft wanted to capture the market,
Their business model was to sell software for $120
That cost fifty cents. So that way, they make enough money
to pay the sales people, producer, and keep  the lights on, and earn profit.

Well, that was a simplified version of a business model and there are, indeed, a lot more into it.

In reality, your business model is a set of assumptions about
what your business will and won’t do.
The main reason that I call it theory is that what you think might work for your business,
Or the way you want to grow your business,
May change over time,
So, you need to test your business ideas, and see how viable they are.

two essential components of business model:

A business model, has two essential components

• The first part is all about making your product
  or turning your business idea to a tangible sell-able solution.
  That include activities like designing it,
  purchasing the raw materials,
  engineering, coding, outsourcing, and building it.
• The second component of your business model
  is all about finding the best way to sell it.
  That includes activities such as customer discovery,
  reaching out to potential customers,
  Pricing, and delivery of your product
  Or rendering your service.

Thanks to business model canvas,
You can craft a lean business model on a piece of paper,
and in no time. [I have already explained everything about business model canvas here]

Now that you understood the difference between business model and business plan,
It’s time to get to the third piece; Business Pattern.

What is business model pattern?
aka Business Strategy?

before we get to the details of business pattern, watch this video.

Here is a simplified definition of business pattern:
“When you work on your business model canvas and it’s 9 building blocks,
you may find similar behaviors or arrangement of building blocks in different businesses models.
These similarities are called business model patterns."

Well if that’s too academic for you let me explain it with different terms
as understanding business strategy or business model pattern is very easy.

When you observe different types of businesses,
You can easily see that they all follow different patterns to sell their products.
One business may offer exclusive products.
Another one may do the opposite and offer low price services,
A business may distribute its product directly, and sell it through website
While another type of business leverages on channel partnership, and sales force.
Some businesses do copy cat, and some innovate.
A group of businesses may do everything in-house, and another group may outsource lots of their work.

These are different types of patterns that businesses use. they are also known as different business strategies.
Makes sense?
Good.

There are plenty of business patterns or business strategy that you can implement in your business
But you have to make sure that you are using the right pattern that enable you to scale easier.

If you have difficulty coming up with new business patterns,
this list should be very helpful.

In this article I’ll walk you through five different business strategies,
and business model patterns that you can use to implement in your start-up or business.

I’ll also provide you with real business plan examples
and support you to develop your business plan,
and define the right business pattern that help you grow your business 10x faster.

The first business pattern has more than 1 side.
That’s why it’s called

Multi sided Platform business model

Multi-sided business strategy is designed for
Businesses that serve minimum two customer segments,
through one platform.

Normally online businesses, that focus on B2C and in a few cases B2B segments
tend to use multi sided business model pattern
to attract visitors with one stunning offer,
and engage them with their platform,
while they target the other segments to pump in money,
and invest in the platform to use their database, and reach out to customers

How does Multi-Sided Platform business plan work?

The main characteristic of Multi-sided platforms business plan,
known as multi-sided markets,
is having two or more distinct but interdependent groups of customers.

In fact, this business plan ties the customers segment together,
so the platform is valuable to one customer segment ONLY IF
 the other groups of customer segment is actively involved.

The value that multi-sided business models bring to the table
is through attracting more users and
facilitating interactions between different customer segments,
also known as network effect,
otherwise there will be no business.

There are plenty of examples,
but two good examples are Facebook and Master Card.

The main questions that you, as an entrepreneur, or marketer,
should ask yourself about multi-sided business plan are:

• How big is our target market (for both sides of the platform)
• Do we want to target Mobile users, or desktop users?
• Can we attract sufficient numbers of customers for each side of the platform?
• Which side is more price sensitive?
• Can that side be enticed by a subsidized offer?
• Will the other side of the platform generate sufficient revenues to cover the subsidies?
• What are the core services that we offer on platform, and generate revenue?
• What add-value services should we include in the platform, that do not generate revenue
• How should we monetize the platform?

Let me share a great example of multi sided platform with you that you use on a daily basis.

Google is a multi sided platform.
When you look at google’s portfolio
and the number of services it provides,
i.e. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Search, AdSense, AdWords, Google Plus, Startup Incubators, etc.
You can see an inevitable element that’s included in every single product
and that element generates huge portion of Google’s revenue; Advertisement.
Their platform is free for everyone,
but if you want to use their platform to reach out to free users, you need to pay for it.

Although most of Google’s revenue comes from advertisement,
they have raised the bar to a totally different level
and made it difficult for smaller advertisement platforms
can not compete with them.
In fact, they main factor that differentiates google’s business pattern
from other advertisement channels , apart from its size,
is obviously the intelligence and insights that google leverages on.

Let’s have a look at google’s unique selling point.

Google’s Value propositions:

Since google have access to all user’s data, move, searches, and online behaviors,
We can easily say that Google’s business model is empowered by its Value Propositions.
Google’s business model is based on
providing extremely targeted text advertising in the digital space.

Google has leveraged on this quote from Winston S. Churchill:
“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."

The general rule f thumb for every business is that
you need to have a unique value proposition for every single customer segment,
and never generalize everything.
That’s why Google has several value propositions for different user segment.
Let’s examine the further.

Google’s Value Proposition for Webmasters.

One of the most important elements that help business grow,
and get more customers is how visible they are in the eye of search engines.

In fact, when it comes to Search Engine Optimization,
online businesses try different ways to increase their ranking, but the first thing they do
is to register their website, and submit their business in google’s database.

Since this service is free, almost every webmaster is using free submission,
and eve reporting services from google to track its ranking in google.

Since google has a huge database of webmasters,
They came up with a unique value proposition that targets webmasters.

The first Group that google targets is website owners, known as webmasters.
The main benefit that google gets from is
the ability to expand its reach beyond its platform,
And show advertisement across the internet,
But still manages every transaction, reporting,
and advertisement serving mechanism from its platform.

Google’s value Proposition to them is that
we enable you to make money by monetizing your contents.

Google enabled bloggers, content publishers, and journals
to earn money through its AdSense service,
where you, as a content publisher, can place google Ads on your website
and show them your visitors.

In return, google will share with you a percentage of revenue
made from user engagement with ads on your website.

This way,
google’s business model is not limited to showing ads
on its pages such as search engine, Gmail, etc.

Now, if you use business model canvas template,
and place value propositions, and customer segments,
It will all look like this.

Google’s Value Proposition for Advertisers.

There is a second target group that google pitches with a different value proposition
and that’s Advertisers.

Google’s business model and its value proposition to advertisers
depends heavily on the number of visitors it can attract.

Since Google’s considered to be the most visited search engine,
achieving good results is inevitable;
In fact, it’s something that Bing and Yahoo have been struggling with.

On the other hand,
Google’s AdWords service encourages businesses and individuals
to promote their service using google Ads.

Advertisers get a chance to optimize their online advertisement campaign
and search for related keywords and demographic target
that increase the chance of user engagement.

On the other hand, Google’s ensures advertisers
that their investments are safe as it only displays their Ads
when users search for their target keywords.

Finally, Google Ads are shown to users who use
any of its services as well as it’s network of content publishers
who earn from AdSense service.

Google’s Revenue stream.

Google business model is definitely a multi-sided platform that has a noticeable revenue model.
Google’s business model is about making money from 1 segment “Advertisers".

It’s obvious that the more Ads it displays to Web surfers,
the more revenue google generates from advertisers.

Another Differentiation factor that put google in a good position
is the fact that Advertisers can not buy advertising space from Google
and they have to go through a bidding process set by AdWords.

While advertisers optimize their ads based on
their keywords,
demographic, and other factors,
AdWords looks into the popularity of the keywords ,
broadness or narrowness of the target audience
and propose a biding price. 

The rule is simple: The more popular a keyword, the more the advertiser has to pay for it.

On the contrary,
google subsidizes free offers to another two segments: “Web surfers and content owners, also known as webmasters“.
Indeed, google’s revenue from AdWords allows them to continuously improve their free offerings
to search engine and AdSense users
which motivates even more content owners to become Google AdSense partners.

The main reason that I used Google’s example is to show you the type of opportunities
that a multi sided platform business pattern brings to the table.
You have to look at your business model and see if this is the right business pattern for your business
or you need to choose a different business pattern.

Long Tail business model

Is Long Tail business model suitable for you startup business plan?

Have you heard about selling less of more?
That expression comes from long tail business models
where the main focus of the business is on producing large number of niche products,
each of which sells infrequently.

When it come to sales and revenue,
the aggregation of sale from each niche items is producing a great deal of profit.

If your business, or start-up fall under Long Tail business model pattern category
you need to get the following factors under control.

1. Since your production volume is high, you must be able to decrease inventory costs
2. To increase revenue, you need to have a strong platform that delivers niche items to potential buyers.

You can easily use Pareto analysis to monitor your progress.
In fact it is a common practice in businesses with long tail business model
because the top 20% of products can generate most of the revenue if they are sold in high volumes,
where the remaining 80% of products contribute less to the total revenue.

If you’re wondering whether you should implement long tail pattern in your business,
your business matches the following criteria.

1. Either your Value Proposition is about offering
   plenty of not popular products with less hit
   that co-exist with popular products who generate high revenue.
2. Or your business strategy is
   to facilitate and build your business based on user-generated content.

Let me give you an example of long tail business plan:

In traditional business plans of publishing industry,
majority of hard-working authors who had spent days and nights crafting their masterpiece
have had to go through series of strict reviews by publishers.

Obviously, only those manuscripts that were promising a great revenue
or at least meeting the break even point had a fair chance to get published.

How Long tail business model transformed publishing industry?

With traditional monopoly that publishers had created,
the publishers were mostly interested in quantity of sales
and pieces of works that can be sold to large groups
So, if you were not offering such a content,
you would have been out of the equation.

Today, companies with innovative business models like Lulu
started to incorporate long tail business model in their business strategy
but they have chosen to leverage on user contents, and engaging with authors.

Although Lulu’s business model was implemented while ago,
I found it very interesting when I first used it in late 2009.
In fact, I was amazed by the fact that they have turned around
the entire selective process of publishing industry
by introducing a “Market Worthy" concept.

The beauty of business patterns is that you can have different business patterns for each business model.
Although lulu . com maakt gebruik van lange staart business patroon, Het maakt ook gebruik van de multi-sided platform
to connect authors and readers and promote its products.
By giving anyone a chance to bring their work
and get published
they managed to address the barriers of traditional publishing business models.

Offering authors the right tools to craft, print, and distribute their work through their online marketplace was an absolutely bold move.

Unbundling Business Model

let’s take a close look at the third business model pattern:
The “Unbundling Business Model."

You may consider using unbundling business pattern in your business if
your business have these three different characteristics:

• Customer Relationship businesses: This is where you are searching and finding customers and trying to either build relationship or strengthen your current customer relationship. Most companies do have this first criteria, but the devil is in the details.
• Product innovation businesses: The role of this division is
  to design and develop new and attractive products or services
  to differentiate your offering from others.
  This is where innovative business models come to the picture,
  and copycat business models are out of the equation.
  
• Infrastructure businesses: This part is responsible for building
  and managing platforms for high volume and recurring tasks.
  

How to write your business plan based on Unbundling Business Pattern?

If you meet the above criteria
You need to examine a few other factors before using unbundling business model pattern.

By the way, your business can easily have single or multiple business entities.

Because unbundled business patterns have their own economic, competitive, and cultural imperatives,
they are mostly implemented in different entities of a company to prevent conflicts.

As i mentioned earlier, unbundling business patterns should have 3 essential characteristics.
To analyse your business and decide if unbundling business mode is the right business strategy,
at first you need to look at your core businesses from 3 angels:

• Economic
• Competitive
• And Cultural perspective.

Let me break it down for you:

Free Business Model, aka Freemium

It has been validated by many marketer and economist
that offering anything for FREE has always been an attractive Value Proposition.

In fact, the market demand for offering with price of zero
is much more higher than the demand generated at one cent.

Now the question sis whether freemium business model is
something that helps you grow your business or not?

How can you offer your service for FREE?

The question that comes to entrepreneur’s mind is
“How do we offer for FREE and still run a profitable business?"

Let me take you through three Amazing strategies
and business model patterns that enable you
to offer free products or services and still generate revenue.

These 3 innovative business models have different underlying economics,
but they all share follow one simple rule:

“There has to be at least one Customer Segment that continuously benefits from the free-of-charge offer"

The three startup business model patterns are:

• Advertising-based: which is ablt offering your product for free based on multi-sided platforms that we discussed in this article, and generate revenue from one customer segment.
• Freemium Model: that refers to the concept of offering free basic services and charge for premium services, like upgrade, premium membership, or exclusive content.
• Bait & hook business model: that enables you to offer a product for either free or at cost as your bait (sometimes called as the initial offer) and hook customers to return to your brand and make repetitive purchases

Let’s examine them, one by one.

Advertising-Based: A Multi-Sided Platform business plan

As we have discussed above,
one of the globally recognized companies that relies on advertisement is Google.

You have definitely seen other forms of advertisements on TV, Radio, websites, etc.
because for fact, advertising is an amazing source of revenue that
enables you to to offer free services in your startup business plan.

The platform is designed to offer free service to one customer segment
and attract as many users as possible through free products and services.
On the other hand, the revenue is generated through the other customer segments
that are interested in interacting and advertising to the free users.

Facebook is  a great Example

Since one source of revenue for Facebook is advertisement,
their Business Model follows the freemium business model pattern too.
In fact, it’s not just about having huge number of free users
since Facebook, as the largest social network, had reported to have over
200 million active users in 2009 but users were less responsive to advertisements.