Mastering the 5 Parts of Your Infopreneur Business
(Editor’s Note: Heather Carine will speak at the AIIP 2024 Symposium and at the pre-symposium Business Jumpstart Bootcamp in April.)
Information professionals love to connect dots.
When I read Josh Kaufman’s description of his concept of the five parts of every business in The Personal MBA, I loved the simplicity and the ease of connecting the dots. Kaufman distills the five parts of business, each flowing into the next, down to:
· value creation
· marketing
· sales
· value delivery, and
· finance.
This “five parts of every business” concept applies to all businesses, regardless of size and the number of years in business. The great challenge, and satisfaction, for independent business owners is that they need to master each of these steps, including the ones that are not their strengths.
As independent business owners, our focus is more often on the value delivery, which Kaufman describes as “giving your customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied.” In many respects, value delivery is the easiest part of running an independent information professional business.
For most businesses, the most challenging task is value creation. Kaufman defines that process as “discovering what people need or want, then creating it.”
Value creation sounds like the domain of start-up companies, or the work of the sales and marketing team. As independent business owners, we are the people responsible for discovering what our clients and potential customers need and want.
Another way to think about value creation by small service businesses is to consider: what does your client value and what kinds of value are you offering your clients? Very rarely do clients explicitly tell you what they value, and the thought of asking your clients directly may fill you with dread.
Sure, business customers value your expertise, but that is only one of about 40 kinds of value that a leading consulting firm has identified. The values range from objective, such as acceptable pricing, to the more subjective, such as reduced anxiety.
The better you understand the first step – what your clients value – the easier it becomes to describe your business in terms that align with your clients’ needs and wants so as to attract interesting work from the clients you want to work with. Understanding your clients’ business values helps to convert from a lead to a sale.
Your ease of doing business helps form part of your value delivery, which goes well beyond your specialist expertise and any deliverable project report. Put simply, the more you know about what your current and potential clients value, the easier it is to attract the client, convert to a sale, deliver on what they value, and get paid what you deserve.
The “five parts of every business” is a basic business concept, one that should never be lost sight of. It all starts with value creation.
I look forward to sharing some tips to help you understand what business customers value in the AIIP Business Jumpstart Bootcamp and the AIIP 2024 Symposium.
Heather Carine is the founder of Carine Research, Australia’s only independent investigative research firm specialising in market, competitive and corporate intelligence. She joined AIIP and started Carine Research in 2006.
