The Process of Strategy Design | Maaike Doyer

I mean, the other question that's just been asked is about, so how do you use it? Because if you stop using business plans, then what is it that you actually do? Well, what we use, a 4-phase process, and what we always do in the beginning is we start to have a look at the current business model. And I know you're a startup, so you don't have a current business model. Although I have I always thought that's a step I should skip with startups. That's what I did a few years ago. However, what I realized is every startup has the idea in their head already. So I always said, like, plot it out, the idea that you have right now. Maybe you have empty spots in the business model. That's fine because you didn't think about customer relation yet, or you didn't think about channels yet. Fine, leave it empty. Don't worry about that, but put the Post-its in there of the things you already thought of. Yeah, like your customer segments, your value proposition, just put it out there. That's the, that's the starting point. For large companies, it is the actual running business model, of course, that you first do. And you look at the strengths and the weaknesses.

Yeah.

Because even as a startup, you have strengths, and those strengths might be your individual strengths or connected with your individual strengths because you have a very big network somewhere or anything like that. And so those are the strengths, and there are always weaknesses. The other thing that we do is we look at the context. So what's happening in the world around us? Is competition, technology, other trends, economic climates, rules and regulation? There always are rules and regulation you need to comply with, right? So, so what is actually happening in there? And what is your vision? We call all these different items a set of design criteria, because if we're designing a better business, it needs to meet certain criteria. So what are those criteria actually? It's the design criteria. Then we'll go into the fun part, and my expectation is most of you are here in the innovation phase right now, exploring what that business model is that could help you. Is that correct? Yeah, what is insanely, insanely important in innovation is that you build multiple business model options. Never do only 1 or 2. Do 6. 15 was one I did recently with a company. 15 business models, and we did that in 1 day, right? So we didn't spend 5 weeks on building 15 business models. No, in 1 day. You need a couple of people with you. Never, never fly solo, right? That's, that's the other thing. You need different perspectives at the table. Build your different business model options and try to find some into-space business model options. Crazy ones. If you've done some crazy ones already.

10x thinking.

Yeah, you— yeah.

Yeah, we call it thinking 10x.

Okay. 10x, 10 times. Yeah, that's good. But one of the questions, the business models that, that, that's with startups works really well as an into space one, because what is your value proposition that you're working on right now?

Clean private place to use the restroom in public.

Okay, clean private place in the public restrooms, right?

Kinda. membership access thing.

Okay. Then, and what is your, what is your USP? Why is it you basically that you can do this? What is the unique selling points? What makes you unique? What is this? Is it something you give them or is it a subscription or is it the space?

No, it's a space.

The space.

Yeah, we have to build it.

The public space. Then the extreme business model that I'm asking you to create is, what if you would not have the public spaces?

Okay.

Which is pretty into space, right? It's not, it's not the 10x, right? It's really like you don't have it at all anymore. And initially people are like, but Maike, hey, that's my whole concept, right? You're throwing away the real value of my concept by throwing away the space. That has been, that's, and then just think about for half an hour. Try to build a business model without, don't think for hours, that's too long. But just for half an hour, 45 minutes, try to build that model without those spaces. I've had many startups that came up with their most brilliant pivots by thinking like that. So bring it into the extreme, do it into space. Another large corporate example for this. a big pharmaceutical we were working with. And I mean, what's the business model of pharmaceutical? They just produce pills and they sell the pills, right? That's pretty straightforward what their business model is about. So I said to one of the teams, you're gonna create a business model. What if you would stop selling drugs? The CEO was in the room. He got up and he said, I don't think you understand our business, right? Right? 100% of our revenue comes from the sales of drugs. Exactly. What if you would stop doing that? I'm not saying we're gonna. It's into space, right? But let's explore this. They had to work on that for an hour and a half. When they did that, they came up with, in their resources, they knew so much about the different diseases. They knew everything about the patients. They knew everything about the hospitals, the insurance company. What if they could wrap all that knowledge into a specific value proposition? And if that would be a value proposition, who could be their customer? And that's how a new business model appeared. And in the end, when we landed back on earth, right, because there's a moment you need to come back to earth, that's pretty important. Of course they didn't stop selling drugs, but they did start this knowledge-based value proposition, right? So, Try to think about those into space times, not only 10x. It's a good one, and that's one of the into space ones that we always use as well. But try to think different ways. I mean, probably most of you have an online business model. You don't? Partly?

Yeah.

But you have the space, so you have some physical space there as well.

Yeah.

I guess a lot of you have an online-only business model. Can you make that an offline business model? Business model. Get it into the extreme. Just explore it for half an hour. Try to build that model. No black hats allowed, right? Remember, it's yellow hats. We're in San Francisco, everybody's wearing yellow hats all the time. So it's about yellow hat, what would be possible. Later on you can compare. So that's important. Another technique, by the way, that you can use is fresh watching. Fresh, we call that fresh watching, like Looking fresh at other organizations. I mean, Uber, everybody sees the successful business model of Uber. Could you take the Uber business model and put that on top of your idea? What will you get if you would be the Uber of those restroom spaces, right?

That's right.

Get that, yeah. And so Uber is a famous one right now, right? Nespresso. And if you look at Nespresso, it's been an amazing business model. It's been revolution in the coffee industry. What can you learn if you would take the business model of Nespresso and put that on top of your business model? Those are the kind of more into space things and different things that will help you to explore just for half an hour. Take a canvas, make a print, throw in a couple of Post-its, and you're done, right?

So. Yeah, could you explain Can you give us the names of companies who successfully— the startups successfully pivoted and become very successful because of pivot?

I know a couple of startups that I've worked with. It's all being filmed. I cannot mention all the names here. That's always the downside of film, right? I mean, Nespresso made a great pivot themselves, by the way, that's publicly known. Nespresso, because they have the machines and they have the cups, and everybody believes that that's the success of the business model. But I don't think that's the success. Because when they started, like, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, they were at the supermarkets with the cups and the machines, just like they are today. They were about to go bankrupt. Wasn't working, the whole model. New CEO came in. What did he do? He took it out of the supermarkets because you cannot get Nespresso in the supermarket. You can buy it online and in Nespresso shops and so on, but not in the supermarkets. So he chose a different channel. And what did he do? Introduced the Nespresso Club, right? Made it premium. He made it— he also made it a club, right? So it's the exclusive membership indeed. It's the premium thing. It's out of the supermarket because If it's in the supermarket, you don't know who's buying your coffee. You have no clue. You have no data. By taking it out of the supermarket, he was able to collect data of all his customers, and he was able to do real tailored customer service, which you cannot do in a supermarket, right? And that's been the turning point, the pivot point for Nespresso. So not changing the product, But really changing the business model, in this case the channel and the customer relationship, that's been the big pivot for, for Nespresso, for example. I always love that example, that it's, it's not only about the product, it's really the combination of all those 9 building blocks that can make success or failure for your business. So keep that in mind as well. So that's innovation. So explore your options. It's fun and it will really, really get you somewhere. Most of the time, large companies, what they do, they go straight into implementation. They're like, oh, I've done a few, I like this one the best, and let's execute, right? That's what you see most of the time. But what we know, and I assume that's what you're doing here as well, validation, right? Get out of the building. Have you been at some classes on Lean Startup and so on already? Yep, a couple of things.

Perfect. There's a really good one about pretotyping, which is kind of—

Perfect. Yeah, it's part of the validation.

Yeah.

Definitely, yeah. And we always see you have front stage testing and backstage testing, that's how we like to call it because we tie it to the business model. And because you know, of course, that these are all assumptions in there and you need to do the front stage testing which is the customer-facing part and the backstage testing, can you actually do this as an organization? Can we actually get it out there? I mean, I know a lot of companies today, especially the large companies again, they all have in their new models big data. Big data is in every business model today, right? And in the key resources, it says data scientists, all those kind of things. Well, if it's a really old-fashioned company, are they actually capable of doing that? Are they capable of attracting the right people and getting them in there, right? It's, it's a difficult thing and something you need to test. Do you have those people actually to do it? So this is this is the process that we typically see that you need to do instead of writing a business plan. We do this, and we use a lot of visual tools along the way. We take pictures of the tools, and ta-da! There's our plan.

Right?

Makes sense. Helpful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, can you explain more about patterns and epicenters and what if?

There are different innovation. These are just a few. There are many more out there that we use. Fresh watching is looking at other organizations. Patterns is as well, can we see, for example, freemium? Freemium is a pattern that we see in many business models today. And so the freemium, the freemium business model. What if you would apply the freemium business model to your idea, right? That's a good question. That's probably a pattern that we see. Another pattern that we see is from owning to using. You see that a lot of companies, it's not about owning something, it's about using something. Can we apply that pattern? And so those are the type of patterns that you can use to just test it out as an option for your business model. AP centers, it typically works really well in larger organizations. AP centers means, Actually, the example that I gave you about the pharmaceutical is an AP center example. They basically took one building block off the business model canvas, cleared out the rest, empty, and then building from that center, from that one building block, what else can I do with this? In this case, it was the AP center resources, but you can also take the AP center customers. Okay, I keep my customer, but I clean my whole business model. What else could I do for the same customers, right? What is another interesting element for these same customers? So that could be, that's an AP Center example. And what if, yeah, what if is the favorite technique, but I think that the what if is what if you would stop with those spaces? What if you would only go online? What if you would only go offline? So really—

What if it takes you again to the blah, blah, blah because you start talking and discussing and you Now you notice that that's the big difference.

It's not about discussing, it's about creating the canvas.

Yeah, but I mean, when we're doing that for a while, we can get out of the line.

Yes, there's a time and place for everything. Fully agree with you. What we typically do is we take 2 hours or so and we're gonna go through what would all be possible. Take a stack of Post-its and just throw Throw them out there on the wall, right? By the end of that, you have 400 or 500 ideas, really a lot. Make sure you have a diverse team. Don't do it, don't fly solo, right? And then we start to cluster, and you end up with probably 10 different clusters or so, between 5 and 15. That's what I see on average in the different clusters, and then you start to build those business models.

Yeah.

Yeah, because indeed otherwise, yeah, we can also do this, we can also do that. On the other hand, you will see down the road new ideas will come in because you learn, you see different things. If you see that happening, build a business model immediately. I mean, there's so many companies, especially again large companies, that they're saying like, oh, we should do something online, right? Because a lot of large companies are not online. Meeting after meeting, we should do something online. I just take an hour, build the online business model, and figure out, is this interesting enough to further explore, or do we stop here and we put it in the fridge, right? It's not the thing for right now. Fine, you just park it. And the other thing that you constantly need to do is you need to check with the design criteria from your first phase, because this is where you set where you want to be. This is your plus, your strength of your company. You want to keep your strengths. You're moving inside a specific context. It needs to fit the context, and it needs to fit your vision, because we come up with— we can come up with really stupid, crazy ideas, but you have a vision that you want to meet, or mission, right? What is it that you are in for?