It can be tricky, but it definitely is something to answer, if you want to feel like you’re following a path towards success.

A Few of My Business Models

For example, here are a few business models that I’m currently executing against to make business for myself:

• New Marketing Labs is a marketing consulting company. It follows the service model. Charge clients for services and deliver against the promises made in the contract. The basics of the model are to charge companies for service, to pay employees to execute the service, and make small profits off the margin.
• [chrisbrogan.com] is a media platform. It makes some money via affiliate ads like my support of Thesis (affiliate link), but more so, it’s a media hub that lets me point towards projects and ideas I think are interesting. It’s lead generation for my professional speaking. It’s lead generation for NML. So, the site isn’t the business model, exactly, but it’s part of other models.
• Professional speaker – I make money off speaking professionally to companies about marketing, online media, community, sales, lead generation, and topics like that. It’s a simple model, where you make money for intellectual property, but it’s a tricky model in that you have to be there to earn the money. It’s an “active income” model.
• Third Tribe Marketing is a media model as well. Build an active community, give it useful information, provide it lots of resources, and make money off the membership dues. This is a bit more passive (I’m on there daily for 1-2 hours a day), but it’s a little easier than flying all over the world speaking, so it’s a great business line to add to what else I’m doing.
• Books and other media. You don’t get rich selling books. But they’re great lead generators for other business.

So, those are just some of my own business models. In there, I didn’t mention events, which can be a good model for earning money. I didn’t talk about informational products, which can be lucrative. I didn’t talk about a lot of ways one can make money.

Find Models and Mentors

One of the best things you can do for yourself, should you want to improve your own business, is figure out models and/or find passive mentors. For instance, when I read Business Stripped Bare, by Sir Richard Branson, I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit in how he likes to organize his companies. I thought, “Wow, I’m not crazy.” It’s not like I spent any time across a table with Sir Richard. I simply read his book, took scores of notes, and then tried applying bits of his ideas to my own work, and found out what worked.

I do this with as many business books as I can get my hands on. I look for the bits I can apply. I also do that with blogs, and I do it with videos (you do watch TED, don’t you?).

Figuring out models is tons of fun, too. For instance, I had a great talk with John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing for some content I was building for Third Tribe, and John was talking about how he built out his training package, how he built a network of people to refer business into, and some of the other facets of his business. It’s all very replicable, all without ripping off John, and all something you could build towards growing out another niche.

I had a great talk the other night with Joe Sorge (I’ve talked about Joe’s business before), where I riffed some of my new business ideas off him, and he gave me his experiences back. It was immediately apparent that Joe was far more than a guy who sold hamburgers. The more we talked, the more I realized that he had a lot of experience in picking apart business models and finding inspiration to make them succeed.

Modeling Your Own Business

Ray Kroc used to quiz MBA students as to what business he was in. Everyone thought he was in the hamburger business. When I heard this, I thought, “A-ha. No. He’s in the franchising business.” But no, I was wrong, too. Ray was in the real estate business. McDonalds owns more real estate (more PRIME real estate, by the way) than even the Catholic Church. When you look at a business, the model isn’t always immediately apparent.

What’s your business’s model? How are you looking to make money? What is the longer-term vision behind your company? Have you modeled it?

Here’s a hint, by the way: in doing this, in taking out a piece of paper and writing down what you think your business is, if you can’t describe it in just a few words, it might not be a very successful model. Further, if you don’t work on ways to emulate some of the more successful models that are out there, you might be missing the opportunity to learn and piggy-back off the success of other pioneers.

Ted Turner turned billboard profits into a media company by having the vision to see that he wasn’t in the billboard business. What business are you in? How wide can you cast your vision, while still keeping the model simple?

The Internet has given us simple means to create businesses out of nothing. But to sustain them, we need solid models. What’s yours?

As With All Things, Goals First

I decided to tell myself the story of me, the story of me for the next few years. This comes from my experience with Don Miller’s book. In my efforts to determine how to conduct my business and my life, I started with goals. I won’t share the details, but I have goals for (in no order):

• New Marketing Labs.
• Books and other publications.
• Professional speaking.
• My new business (not yet announced, but maybe by end of week) and related projects like Third Tribe Marketing.
• [chrisbrogan.com] – some changes coming here.
• Work/Life balance
• Fitness/Nutrition

Those are the major buckets, at least. And I cut those down from 17 projects. I killed about 10 over the last two days. That was first: deciding what goals would yield the best rewards for me (I measured “best” by happiness, satisfaction, money, time).

By starting with my goals for those various buckets/roles, I can then ask myself every time something new comes in: “Does this contribute to the success of my goals?” Having the answer this this is golden.

Actual Paper

I use paper when I redraw. I quite literally draw little pictures with circles or boxes, and I do lots of simple math (I really only know how to do simple math, but if I wrote just “math,” you’d think that I was doing something huge).

On paper, it’s a lot easier to see what’s working for me. For instance, I’m a believer in the mindset of having multiple revenue streams. I have a job (president of New Marketing Labs), but I also make some of my money speaking professional, through my affiliate programs, my books, and through a few other sources.

When I put down what I could make from where, it helps me understand where to focus some of my attention to achieve my revenue goals. But then, I have to overlay the “time” goals, the happiness goals, etc. With PAPER, it’s a lot easier to overlay information for my consideration. For instance, I can draw a little “$, T, H” symbol for money, time, happiness and determine which meets more of the criteria. Make sense?

Silence

This part is the hardest for me. I don’t really handle silence well (thinking about you, Alanis). But I can’t do what I’m doing to redraw, answer emails, tweet, and all that. I paused a lot of the external noise so that I could find some silence. I’m still doing it as I type this. And yet, I sneak back into my noise because that’s part of my job, and thus, at present, I have to maintain some of it.

But, if you asked, silence would be a vital element to the process, and I’ve done what I can to silence the noise when I can.

Lots of Questions

I described the process to a friend the other day like this: “You might see a chip of paint peeling on the wall and think, ‘huh, this wall needs painting.’ I look at the chip of paint and think, ‘should this wall even be here? Should *I* even be here?’”

I look at the frames through which I see things. For instance, do you see yourself as an employee or a leader? I know some people who make amazing employees, but who are horrible leaders. I’m not even the best leader (Justin can tell you that), but I’m a great operator/thinker/tinkerer. I’m the kind of person who can see something unique, noodle it into a working prototype, and then get others to weaponize it (most of the time). Knowing this about myself lets me know which types of businesses I’ll be better suited to create/operate.

What types of questions are helpful to redrawing?

• Does this make me happy?
• Who am I doing this for?
• Does this add to my primary goals?
• Where am I? Is this where I want to be?
• If I stop doing this, what really happens?
• What would be totally fun? Can I feed my family doing that?
• What would my ideal day look like?
• How many airplanes do I really want to be on in a given year?

These are somewhat from my perspective, and somewhat generic. You can make your own questions. They’re free. The answers sometimes cost money, but the questions are free.

Action Plans

Goals without plans are meaningless. Plans without deadlines and measurements are wishes. Thus, I have plans in place. They are very flexible plans, and they rotate on a few of my goal/measurement hinges from above, but they are clear and I will know if I achieve what I set out to do.

The thing is, I know that I won’t be successful if all I do is write out some new plans about my business. It won’t work. I learned that from reading and exercising what I learned in Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath. So, I have to build the entire frame of what I do. Here’s some of what’s included in that framing work (in no real order, and in no real system – YET):

• Put time blocks in place for correspondence. Stop checking mail 45,974 times a day.
• Set time limits on RSS reading.
• Start my day with fitness, not email.
• 2000 words a day (some days, I did 4000; others I did 0. I want to steady-state this).
• Mind everything I eat.
• Move daily.

You know, things like that. But then, I also have real live plans with numbers and dates attached to most of those. Like weight goals, fitness goals, etc. So that’s the most important part.

Finally, Check-Ins

In this case, I mean check-ins to reconsider how I’m doing with my framing. I have mine set for every four months. That way, I can analyze a bit at a time, without tweaking it so often that I feel I’m not getting any traction. But without checking in, I don’t get the chance to see if this is all making sense and heading towards an end goal.

That’s the stuff I’ve put into it.

Your Mileage Will Vary- Try Anyway

Lots of us get stuck and stay stuck. Lots of us worry about things outside our control. Lots of times, we’re looking at that peeling chip of paint and not the wall, the house, the town, the land. But we can choose to redraw. We can choose to really look at every decision we’re actively living with, and see whether there aren’t better ways to reach our goals.

Does this make sense to you? Have you ever tried a process like this? How did it help?

How have you come to the decisions you’ve made right now, and what do they mean to you?

But there are lots of ways to use it. Do you need to find more case studies? Here’s a simple search for case studies: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”case+study”+filter:links

Do you want to know who’s talking about burgers near San Francisco? http://search.twitter.com/search?q=burger+near:SF+filter:links”

Want some negative proof? I sniffed around for “site sucks” – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”site+sucks” – to see who’s saying what about bad websites (note: don’t forget to speak the way your tweeters would speak).

Maybe you’re in pharma? I checked out “allergies plus meds OR medication – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=allergies+medication+OR+meds”

There are lots more opportunities to consider. One of my favorites? http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”looking+for”. It’s like permission to sell. Right there. (If you’re not a jerk.)

Oh that Twitter. Such a silly tool. Why even bother? (Keep telling yourself that.)

Bonus Round

Save your searches. Cook them up and put them in your Google Reader or your Seesmic Desktop or your Tweetdeck. Build STATIONS around these kinds of searches. Build response protocols for them. (I’ve barely scratched the surface, but wanted to start somewhere).

And you? Success stories?

I just went to a few blogs in a row to get a sense of it. Here are some of the ratios I saw, with self-referential in the left, and about others in the right:

* 9:1 (not saying who)
* 1:9 (my blog)
* 0:10 (Christopher S. Penn wins most selfless).
* 0:10 (Julien Smith is the same.)
* 1:9 (Brian Clark).

Those were just a few I checked out. Most were heavily weighted towards talking about others (though often citing examples from our own perspective). But when I go look at corporate blogs, and/or less focused blogs, the ratio changed a great deal.

How does your blog stack up? How do your tweets stack up? How much are you promoting others?

Photo credit visualpanic

Your Blog as PART of a System

In the drawing above, I list your blog as part of your content ecosystem. Here’s why I recommend you start thinking this way: because your blog is only one destination and it’s only reaching one channel of a much larger opportunity and demographic. The minute you see your blog as only “a” channel, that’s when you start thinking of other outreach opportunities.

This, by the way, is the logic behind Steve Jobs’s iPad. He didn’t make it for us. He made it for your mom, for the photographers, for people who want a big shiny viewing device for downloaded movies. It’s another way to build a channel for people to buy stuff off the iTunes store.

Now, with that in mind, the easy first step is to strongly highlight the opportunity to get your blog sent to people via email (more people use email than read blogs). That’s the easy opportunity. From there, start asking yourself how else you can build out your content delivery, both offline (print, perhaps, or publish a book) and into new channels online. Then, think about products.

Your Content as Products

Think about the various ways your content can fit into different shapes as a product. For instance, is your content suitable for audio? Have you considered recording and giving away (or selling) an audio version? I’m working up some audio projects for the commuters in our lives, not to mention the fact that Trust Agents and Social Media 101 are both available via audio download.

Can you take some of your projects and turn them into slide decks and make them available to the public? Or look at Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism. That’s a project that’s gotten Brian tens of thousands of placements in presentations over the last few years. Every time I see that wheel come up, it’s a chance for us to go back and check out Brian’s blog.

What other projects can you think up based on your products?

Education: The Power of Events

Online or off, some of what you’ve created would be good for educational opportunities. What could you turn from a few blog posts into a helpful class? You might have to give more thought than what went into the original posts. There’s a gap between “informative” and “educational” sometimes (unless you’re Whitney Hoffman, who writes very thorough posts), and you have to tighten that up.

This might be turned into a live event, like a teaching opportunity. It might turn into online courses. It might turn into a private membership site like Third Tribe. But education is a really good opportunity to spread your content into a new ecosystem. And, if you get really clever, you start wondering if your content might make a good part to someone else’s parts and that it might together form a larger opportunity.

Partnerships

My friend, Matthew Ebel is a professional musician. He creates music, tours, and does all that, but he also offers his services to conference and event producers. Imagine the difference between attending an event, versus attending an event with engaging live music. Matthew can add this to a conference experience. However, as a guy who runs conferences for a living, I’m very unlikely to call up a musician to perform. I would, however, call my event planner and see if she knew someone for the event.

Thus, it benefits Matthew to partner with event planners, so that he can book more gigs at conferences. Make sense?

Partnerships with your content work the same way. There may be part of the story you’re great at and parts that others are better at explaining/providing. For instance, if you’re yet another social media blogger, how much more powerful would your site and content become if you partnered with an SEO professional, a digital marketing professional, and a graphic/interface design specialist. You’d have a killer teaching/educating/selling opportunity for people looking for the larger picture.

See how killer this one step could become?

Ecosystem Thinking

This, to me, is where things get powerful. Once you see your platform as an ecosystem and not the parts, your possibilities to grow and develop more business value. Can you see it? Look beyond your blog as being the core of things. Think of it as an outlet. From there, things get exciting.

What say you?

Disney, where I am this week, has a concept called a Moment of Truth. A moment of truth is “any time a guest comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression.” Note that it’s “an impression.” It can be good; it can be bad.

Why “guest?” Because guest is much more hospitable than “customer.” What “experience?” Because experience covers so much more than “service.” Service is important, but there are many other parts of the experience than just that.

Can you see how that opens up the game? Can you see how this position, this mindset gives you so much more to work with? Let’s just walk through it a bit, using a few examples: a hotel and then a small publishing company.

Guest Experience for a Hotel

Let’s break out the different phases of a hotel experience:

• Prospecting – guest wants a place to stay.
• Research – guest compares information for selection.
• Purchase – guest pays for a room.
• Arrival – guest reaches the facility.
• Checkin – guest secures room.
• Entry – guest steps into the room.
• Inhabitation – guest’s stay at the facility.
• Error handling – anything that goes wrong.
• Checkout – guest leaves the facility.
• Aftermath – any contact with guest thereafter.

That’s pretty much all of it, right? Now, how many ways could you brainstorm to make this better, if I put you in charge of guest experience design?

You’d start at prospecting, of course, because this is where you’d find new ways to share with your guest why you’re the right choice. You’d use listening tools to find potential guests talking about traveling to the locale where you have a hotel. You’d think of ways to make that prospecting experience better.

Walking through it, you can just see it. How would you improve the guest’s experience at check-in? What could you do to improve the “inhabitation” stage? What else?

It feels obvious. But is that just me?

Guest Experience for a Publisher

Again, let’s break down the components of the experience.

• Prospecting – guest wants information/content.
• Research – guest investigates possible sources.
• Purchase – guest pays for products (services?)
• Consumption – guest absorbs the information.
• Aftermath – any contact with guest thereafter.

Now, with publishing, depending on what kind it is, might have more than one kind of “guest.” If it’s a magazine, advertising sales might be another kind of guest experience. Finding authors/creators is another type of guest experience. We’d have to add other components. But you can do that without me having to type it all.

What could you do to design a better “purchase” experience, for instance? We sell magazines as annual subscriptions, and we sell books as a single unit purchase. Why couldn’t someone subscribe to a book? What would that experience be like?

The Method Is What We’re Taught to Pursue

We learn our times tables. We learn the 50 states (in the US, at least). We are taught all these rules, these patterns, these systems, these methods. Musicians learn their scales. Painters copy the Masters. Copy. Learn. Make patterns.

Repetition. Finding grooves. Fitting into our assembly lines. Aligning to the way we understand how to measure.

Method. The process by which we get somewhere. Kempo karate is a method of fighting. Kicking the other guy’s ass is the goal.

You see this, right?

“New” is Rarely a Byproduct of Repetition

Except when it is. iPod was a whole new way of framing the music story: 1000 songs (not megabytes and gigabytes). iTunes store not just an orphaned player. Wheel and single button, not a slew of buttons.

And the Nano is the baby of the original, but the iPhone is nothing like the original, except they removed the wheel and left only one button. New. Again.

Now, repetition isn’t the only facet of method, and method isn’t bad. I need to be clear about that. But focusing on perfecting one’s method isn’t as useful as focusing on solving for the goal.

Pursue the Goal, Not the Method

I addressed the International Association of Business Communicators at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, a painted lady teetering between demolition and emotional buttressing. The room was, as it always is, filled with that mix of the converted, the confused, the naysayers, the proof (that it all works), and me. Me, the street preacher, the jester, the irreverent, the addle-brained and yet target-minded sayer of what everyone swears they already know and blogs that they’ve seen it all before. Common sense. Be human. Be real.

I imagine some of them at their desk today, looking at their monitor, digging into their email, looking at their stats, settling back into the warm cottony folds of what they know how to do, what they were taught to do, what they practiced and repeated and did again and again. Trenchwork, some of it. And some of them are damned pleased and okay to be pleased by performing it.

But some of my people, some of those who saw something, felt the sparkle, caught a whiff of what I’m cooking, they got what I was saying. Old roads have precious little to do with new paths. What came before doesn’t have to explain what should be done next. We don’t have to repeat repeat repeat repeat.

I read once that every cell in our body completely recycles every four days. Perhaps I have it wrong, but when I think of that, I’m caught. I wonder why my scar from cutting my left ring finger while pulling a fern out of the ground during a Boy Scout survival weekend still persists. I wonder why I still have cowlicks in my hair. If every cell is new again, why can’t I be someone else every four days? But this is a side thought. This is a distraction for you to ponder. Scientists need not apply: I’m a disciple of accepting mystery instead of seeking truth. (Delusional, maybe, but pleasantly surprised? Yes.)

Methods change. It’s not that you shouldn’t learn methods, but rather that you should be ready to switch methods by facing the goals.

And Here At the End, The Goal

You will do so much more with your pursuits should you become a pursuer of the goal, and not a student of the method. Okay, SOME of you will. Others, you need the repetition, the ritual, the comfort. That is so very okay. Religion is all that. Okay, most religion is all that. Most religion is the method.

Seek the goal. The goal is equipping people. The goal is satisfying need. The goal is seeking to better others. The goal is to provide. The goal is to make everything work better.

See how that works? Think about your goals. Think about your company’s goals. What if you threw out EVERY method you were using before this very moment? The goals would still be there.

What if you left email behind and used ONLY voice? Could you still reach your goal? What if I stopped blogging and only sent you emails? What if we all shut our computers off? (Not sure we could ever get that genie back into the bottle.) What if we switched to mobile-centric design?

Goals. Not. Methods.

And you said…

Photo credit Dru Bloomfield

Is your negative commentary helping them make a buying decision? I’ve rarely seen the tactic work in traditional advertising. You can graze them a little bit. For instance, I’m a bit fond of the GM commercials where they point out that they have better mileage than other cars that seem to get credit for good mileage. That’s a kind of gentle sleight.

But if you’re spending your time crapping on others in your space, I’m curious how you think that will translate to a win for you.

You read a lot of blogs. What do you think?

Photo credit Josh Liba

Having an email address is great. Publishing a phone number is great. Being able to reach me on Twitter or Facebook is wonderful.

But I’m finding such value in the use of our contact forms. We are getting work from them, and it’s paying off.

Note: the forms are SIMPLE. If you look at my contact form, you’ll see how simple:

I don’t want every little detail from you. I don’t need you to prequalify yourself as a paying lead. I’m just asking for basics. Heck, we only ask for 3 things total at the New Marketing Labs form.

Are you making it easy for people to connect?

photo hosted on flickr

Instead, I prefer to compete with myself.

When I win business that other digital media groups were also trying for, I never think of it as winning from them. Instead, I just feel like I finally got a proposal to sound even a third as enthusiastic as I sound in person. When someone else gets a great big feature in a magazine, instead of feeling angry or sad or like I lost, I think to myself about how I can achieve more and deliver more results, so that it’s obvious next time that I be called for a story.

Competing with one’s self is far more fulfilling. You control more of the variables. If you want to find more success, throw yourself into your work, into doing big things that matter, into helping your clients succeed. That’s so much easier to conceptualize than thinking about racing against some other person or group.

If you’re trying to catch up to my numbers (and ask yourself why, because the numbers aren’t what matter as much as how you leverage them), you can’t control what I’m doing. So, every little variable I add messes up your effort to catch up or pass. Meanwhile, you’re not paying as much attention to you as you are to me, and are thus not focused on the part you can change the most.

No one ever won a race looking sideways.

Remind yourself of this often. Competition was given to us by our overlords. It was put in place because in situations where someone fabricates a competition, invariably, a third party benefits from BOTH parties’ efforts more than you. Most times, when you’re feeling competitive, you’re being played.

So instead, work within yourself. Work your variables. Work on those things you can change. Work to improve your skills, your thinking, your ability to serve, and your capacity to complete more than you could before. Execute. There are so many talkers that by just doing, you get the chance to win.

It’s much more fun this way. Believe me.

Photo credit peregrine blue