A restaurant can sell delivery, meal kits, or cooking classes by breaking down its business backward from the final dish. The "one step back" method helps small businesses find new revenue streams hidden in their existing processes during a crisis.
One powerful method in crisis anytime is to repackage our offering. I call it business as usual in unusual circumstances. What's our core competency? That's the business as usual. But how can we repackage it to cater how the market has shifted? Well, a technique to use is one step back. I call it the one step back method. Here's the real simple drawing, and here's how it works. We start actually at the end. What is your current final offering? Consider a restaurant, for example. Restaurants are highly affected right now, and the final offering or the final deliverable is they deliver food to the tables. They put food on the table for the person to enjoy. Well, if we go back one step, what happens immediately before that? Well, the food is carried to the table. It's delivered to the table. So now another alternative option is delivery of food. Realize that when we offer a final product or service, that's actually a culmination of many, many products or services. So immediately before, for a restaurant, it could be the delivery of food. There's one restaurant I just heard of recently that had a great strategy. They teamed up, they partnered with a food truck. They are making the food and the food truck is going to neighborhoods delivering the food. But what happens one step before the delivery of food to a table? Well, it gets prepared in the kitchen. Well, there's another potential new product. A restaurant could share its 10 or 15 most popular recipes with instructions on how to prepare it, video training, maybe even live courses where you Zoom in and people can cook along with the chef at the restaurant. That's something you could sell. What happens one step prior to that? Well, the food is procured. So the raw ingredients, the meats and vegetables and so forth, maybe those ingredients can still be procured and then, sold to the customer to do the recipes, or maybe they can just buy it on their own. And what happens one step before that? The goal is whatever your business is, write down what your end deliverable is and then consider every significant and important step back where a mini product or mini, uh, offering is being culminated to this end product. This will show you all the options you have to repackage, uh, what you have to offer in these unusual circumstances. For more tips like this, you can go to mikemotorbike.com. I've also set up a dedicated page called recessionresponse.com. I hope this helps. Remember, small business owners, it's time for us to stand up, step forward, and kick some ass.
