The 9 Questions at the Heart of Your Business

This is your business:

Well, it will be.

First I have some questions for you. The better your answers, the more of a business you've got. If you're lucky, the gaps in your answers represent untapped opportunities for growth or security. The alternative is that these blind spots hide the root causes of problems costing you money, time, attention, and reputation.

The health of your business depends on the veracity, clarity, and depth of your answers. In that order.

So let's take it from the top:

Every business needs to find customers, and earn their business. That's acquisition.
How you serve your customer is Fulfilment.
And how you allocate your resources and protect them from losses is Ops.

I like to represent them in a handy triple Venn, like this.

These are the surface area of your business. The layer where it comes into contact with reality. If you don't have them yet then you don't yet have a business, though you may have an excellent idea.

So:
How do you find customers and earn their business?
How do you serve your customers?
How do you allocate and protect your resources?

If it's still early days, ask 'how will you' instead. That's your working hypothesis. I'd start testing it sooner rather than later.

Your business doesn't stop at the surface though. If you scratch below the surface you'll find other questions. More influential questions.

Let's look at where these things overlap.

What are the real tradeoffs of your solution?
How do you deliver profitably?
Where and how do you show up?

In the space between acquisition and fulfilment we have a question that underpins them both:

Force yourself to be honest about what you're selling.

What's inevitably true for you, just as a function of who you are, where you are in the market, and how long you've been there? Are you already succeeding, with endorsements and certifications and guarantees to back up your track record? Or are you a newcomer, able to dedicate your full attention to every customer because you only have so many? Do you have the infrastructure to deliver right away, or is everything tailored to the customer buying? What are the opportunities of where you're at right now?

What are your real strengths? What makes your product or service genuinely excellent? Will it make them money? Will it make their neighbour jealous? What does it say when they give it to someone?

What are the weaknesses of your solution? When is it the wrong fit? What else will it cost them? Will they have to justify it to themselves, or to someone else?

This is your positioning. The specific set of strengths and weaknesses in your product or service that are inherently differentiating. The choice of which tradeoffs to emphasize and how best to play to them is central to both your product/service design and to your marketing, branding, and sales.

Then, where fulfilment and ops meet, we find something founders often don't ask early or often enough:

How do you make more than you spend, and earn the right to carry on existing? How do you not just cover your costs but have enough left over to invest in cracking your next bottleneck?

How do you make something more valuable than the sum of its parts?

'Revenue for vanity, profits for sanity.'
-some guy

Take the time to make sure the math maths. If it doesn't, change your variables.

Now in the overlap for Acquisition and ops we get a fun one:

Do you show up on the conference circuit broadcasting to everyone, or are you headhunting? Is your customer service a profit leader or an afterthought? Are you digital first or in person?

Are your social accounts entertaining, or instructive, or absent altogether? Are you actively contributing value to any groups or communities? How prepared do you show up to a sales call?

Do you pay attention to how it feels to interact with you? What common principles underpin each of these interactions?

How do you choose to show up in the ways that matter to the people that matter?

And that brings us to the heart of the matter. The questions that (should) influence everything that came before.

Who do you serve?
What problem do you solve?
How else do they solve or cope with that problem?

How well do you really understand your customer? Remember that whether you're B2B or B2C, everything is person to person. Whoever is making the decision to pull out the card or wire the funds: that's your customer.

A neurotic, emotional, distracted great ape, just like the rest of us. Cause we aren't rational animals capable of feeling emotion. We're emotional animals capable of reasoning.

Which is great news, because human emotion is the source of all value in the world. Relieve our pain, or give us something we like, and we will value it. We have many ways of rewarding this value, or reciprocating it, one of which is money. It's not even the best one, but it's important to our business.

Thus, we arrive at the point of your business:

All businesses earn their money by solving human problems.

Most problems boil down to some version of vitamins or pain killers. You're either helping them toward an aspiration, or you're alleviating suffering. It's worth your while to know which you are, and I'll give you two guesses which one people pay more for, more consistently.

In a free market we get to allocate our resources according to what we value. ¹ So solve a problem for them, whose solution they value enough to give you money about, and take the time to understand that problem deeply.

The better you understand their problem, and why it sucks, and what they want things to be like instead, the better of a solution you can build, and the more money they will probably pay for it (provided they have/can get the money to give you).

It's possible for you to understand what they want better than they do in the moment. It requires you to leverage your experience with hundreds/thousands/millions of humans who have been in their position with empathy.

Important to note: some people start with a who and work out to their problems, some people start with a problem and investigate who has it. You need both, whichever way you get there. A specific customer with a specific problem.

But to really understand their situation, and the problem with it, you'll also need to understand:

This is your actual competitor space. Not just the direct competitors who do exactly what you do, but different. Everything your customer does or tries to alleviate the pain of having this problem, consciously or unconsciously.

This is also where they're living in the moment they need you. Not just 'it sucks', but 'It sucks, and I tried your competitors, tried lifestyle, medication, a dozen apps, and even that one fad, and nothing worked, so I'm coping by...'. Don't just become an expert in your solution to this problem, become an expert in how they address it.

This is particularly important when deciding your positioning and making tradeoffs in your product or service design.

That's all nine. Pay attention to which ones are easy for you to answer, and which one are difficult. It's perfectly possible to stumble into some success by blindly feeling your way through these answers, maybe even ignoring some of them, but turning the lights on can save you a lot of pain and uncertainty.

And it bears repeating: Veracity, Clarity, Depth. In that order.

I'll take shallow and true over thorough, clearly communicated wrong answers every day of the week.

Strategy, in large part, is about not just answering these questions for yourself now, but in deciding what you want the answers to become. Ideally, you want to design your strategy so that you're developing your strength, while aware of and playing to the tradeoffs you're making along the way.

When setting a strategy, I prefer to take it in almost the opposite order. Try describing your desired end state in the present tense.

Who do you exist to serve?
What problem do you solve?
How else do they address or cope with that problem?
How do you serve your customer?
What are the real tradeoffs of your solution?
Where and how do you show up?
How do you find customers and earn their business?
How do you deliver profitably?
How do you allocate & protect your resources?

This way you're looking at the questions that influence everything first. That gives you the opportunity to spot better tradeoffs to make, and play into them with more follow through.

I'll definitely be returning to these questions in the future. The answers can look radically different depending on where you are in your journey and the business's growth curve. One of the significant sources of friction in small businesses is not noticing the mismatch between the quality of your answers and the quality your business demands to thrive.

Until then,

-J

Thank you for reading.

If you’d like to make it a conversation, please feel free to reply.

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I help entrepreneurs with ADHD symptoms redesign their businesses, strategies, systems, and expectations to better fit their brain at praxisandprose.com