Strategyzer Webinar: Ways To Present The Business Model Canvas

Hi everybody and welcome to the Strategizer webinar Ways to Present the Business Model Canvas. I want to thank you all for being here and we look forward to a great session with you. We'd love to have you follow us on Twitter rategizer and have you join us in the conversation either during or after the webinar. You can use the hashtag Strategizer Webinar. My name is Benson Garner and I'll be your host and your presenter for this webinar today. I'm a business design consultant and I'm a member of the Strategizor content team. I help companies of every shape and size, big, small, and everything in between to design or even redesign their business models and their value propositions. And at Strategizer, I also help to create content for the Strategizer Workshops, the online course strategy Strategizer blog webinars, and I contributed to the most recent book of ours, Value Proposition Design. You can find me just about anywhere online just by googling my name, Benson Garner. All of my social media handles are just my name, Ensongarner. And if you have any questions about this presentation or maybe about business modeling or value proposition design or anything like that, you can feel free to reach out to me either via social media or at my email address. And you can also schedule a free phone call with me just by simply using that short URL there. Go to my webpage and you can schedule a free phone call with me. Now, the information that I'm going to share with you in this webinar comes from years of practice and experience, both my own and Alexander Osterwalders and the entire team here at Strategizer. This is stuff that we've learned from being in the field with clients and from delivering workshops all over the world. And I'm going to share with you today some mistakes that you can avoid and some best practices that you can implement related to presenting your business model or your value proposition canvases. Now, if you joined us for this webinar, then it's likely that you've spent some time designing a business model using the Business Model Canvas. And maybe you've been working on this business model for a few weeks or maybe even a few months, and now it's time for you to share that business model canvas or your business model with other people. And so you've invested a lot of time in this and you want to be sure that you're doing it right. And so hopefully that's what we accomplish Here today is to deliver some information that will help you to deliver a clear and compelling story and message about your business model and your value propositions. So I want to start by talking about my friend here, Ivan. And Ivan represents many of us, myself included, when we presented our business model canvases for the first time. Now, whether we were presenting those canvases to our teams or maybe to our managers or board members, maybe even to investors, we all made a number of mistakes and we're just going to call those mistakes presentation killers. And if you've had to present your business model canvas before, then you're probably going to be able to relate to these, maybe you've even made some of these mistakes yourself. But if you haven't presented your business model canvas yet, then you're going to want to listen up because we're going to share with you some presentation killers, as I mentioned, that you're going to want to avoid. Now, the first thing, and probably the biggest mistake that we see most or many people make, is that we see people reveal their entire canvas all at once, right when they begin their presentation. And this is what we call cognitive murder. Like I said, it's one of the biggest mistakes that we see people make when they present their business model or their value proposition cameras for the first time. The reason we call it cognitive murder is because our brains can't handle all of that information all at once. What's going to happen to your audience is that when they see all of that information on the canvas on screen, they're either going to simply listen to you and they're not going to read the information that's on the slide, or even worse, they're going to tune you out and they're going to try to read all of that bullet pointed text that you see there in the business model canvas. So you absolutely want to avoid this. And again, we call this cognitive murder. So the other thing that you're going to notice here is that that often we've got a tendency to include way too much information and detail in our slide and usually that's in the form of bullet points. And so what we want to avoid here is having too much granularity, too much detail. It's not appropriate for a strategic presentation like this around your business model. And all of that extra information, you know, it really belongs in some type of a separate business document or maybe an appendix somewhere. But, but all that granularity, all that detail is just going to confuse your audience and it's going to make it so that your message about your business model or your value proposition is unclear. So another thing that we see all the time is people putting way too many ideas into one business model canvas. So, you know, you might have several different ideas about who your customer might be, maybe different value propositions you want to offer. But rather than putting all of those ideas into one business model canvas, it's better that you separate those ideas out into completely separate canvases, and you should present those canvases separately as well to keep the message about those various ideas crystal clear. So now, if we look at this specific canvas a little bit closer, we're going to see that our friend Ivan here, he's got a customer segment, dental clinics, in this case, and he's got a corresponding value proposition. But what we don't see is a corresponding revenue stream for that value proposition. Now, this is a big problem because it means that the mechanics of the business model actually don't work if you've got a revenue stream coming from this customer segment who you're providing a value proposition to, Even if that's a free revenue stream, you need to put it in your business model canvas. If you don't do that, you essentially commit the mistake that we call an orphan element. And an orphan element is essentially what when you've got elements of the business model canvas that don't correspond to all of the rest of the elements within your canvas. So again, we call those orphan elements. And it's a mistake that's really easy for people to make. And we see it all the time. You don't want to have unfinished ideas within your business model canvas. Now, the next thing that we really want to avoid doing is mixing the present and the future state. And again, we see people do this all the time. They want to tell elements of their business model that have to do with today, and they also want to tell elements of their business model that have to do with tomorrow. So they mix the present state state with the future state in the same canvas. And what that does is it causes our audience to have a difficult time really understanding the business model. And so if you want to share elements of the business model that are taking place today or the current state, as well as elements that are going to take place tomorrow or in the future, then what we need to do is have a very clear method for distinguishing between those two things. And we can do that either through color coding or we can simply create two separate canvases. So have one canvas for the current state business model and a whole different canvas for the future state business model. Now, the next thing that we see people do all the time, and, you know, I'm guilty of this as well, is that oftentimes we either get nervous during our presentation or we get derailed from the presentation because an audience member asks a question. And what we end up doing is we end up giving into this urge to do what we call blah, blah, blah. We ramble on about irrelevant things or even relevant things, but those things are maybe going into way too much detail or way too much granularity about the business, and you don't have some type of a visual on the screen to support what you're discussing. And. And so you fail to sync what's going on on your canvas or what's going on on the screen with the message that you're trying to tell your audience. And so, again, things start to become unclear to members of your audience. So let's review real quick what we've learned so far in terms of presentation killers. So the first thing that we learned is that displaying the entire canvas all at once is cognitive murder for your audience. They can't process all that information all at once, and so they're either going to avoid listening to you and read your slides, or they're not going to read the slides and not have the support of the visuals to reinforce what you're saying out loud. The next thing that we talked about was this idea about, you know, this concept of having way too much granularity, way too much detail in. In your business model canvas. Then we talked about having way too many ideas in one canvas. We want to separate our ideas either into separate canvases or have some other way to distinguish between which ideas are which within the same canvas. Then we talked about orphan elements, where we have elements of our business model canvas that are not connected to one another, and so therefore, the bigger story is not connected, and so the message becomes unclear for your audience. We then talked about mixing the present state and the future state into the same canvas. And then lastly, we talked about this urge that we have to often engage in blah, blah, blah, and share either irrelevant information or information that's just too much for the presentation that's not synced with what's going on on the screen. Now, a quick bonus tip for you here that you're going to want to avoid is, and we've seen this a lot, actually, in many very big organizations, even Fortune 500 companies, where a manager will ask you to provide your presentation ahead of time. Now, you want to do this in a very particular way. If you send your presentation prior to your presentation. What we often see people do is they'll add in slides with a bunch of bullet points on it because they're not going to be there to actually deliver the presentation. Otherwise they'll, if they're very graphic or visual presenters, like we are at Strategizer, they deliver the presentation without any explanation of what's on those slides. And both are a problem. What you want to do is you want to either send the slides with your presenter notes so that the, you know, that manager, whoever you've delivered this document to, has some context around the visuals. Otherwise you want to create a totally separate, you know, a separate business document kind of outlining what it is that you're going to be talking about in your presentation. And that would be a totally separate type of document. But you absolutely don't want to deliver your entire PowerPoint deck or Keynote deck with, you know, without any context of what's going on on the slides. So now, rather than making all of those mistakes like I have myself and like many other people have, have made and killing your presentation, you'd much rather give a killer presentation. And so now what we're going to do is talk about a few ideas of things that you can implement and create within your presentations so that your business model story or the strategy of your business is effectively communicated to your audience. So what you're going to want to do, if you choose to use the business model canvas in your presentation, you're going to want to start by telling the story and by layering in the elements of the story one at a time. And we use post it notes often to do this just by virtue, you know, because, because of the fact that this is a design tool, we typically use post it notes to design the business model. And so we also use Post it notes when we present. But in this case, so if I go in and I kind of start, retell Ivan's story, we want to start layering in these, these elements one at a time. So we see that Ivan here, he's targeting the indigent population with corrective or preventative oral care. And these indigent individuals are really hoping for better oral hygiene and they want, you know, ultimately better smiles, you know, and we're going to reach that indigent population through oral care clinics and through their caseworkers. Now, you can see here that I've used an arrow to show some direction from the value proposition being delivered through a channel to that customer segment. And then maybe the next thing that you're going to want to talk about is how this is going to be a free service to this indigent population. And then the next thing that Ivan's going to want to do is he's going to have to talk about how this business actually makes money. And that happens through claims and billing to Medicaid. And then of course, he's going to start layering in all of the next pieces of his business model canvas once, one at a time. As he goes through the story, he's going to use arrows to effectively show kind of the direction of how things are flowing within this business model. And so again, he methodically develops the story while he systematically syncs his comments and layers his post it notes onto the canvas one at a time. And you'll also notice that he's significantly, significantly cleaned up this canvas. He's consolidated his ideas. He's very careful to follow each of those ideas throughout the entire canvas, making sure that, you know, like I said, that he's syncing every single element of the business model that's being layered onto the canvas with the story that he's telling. The other thing that you'll notice here and that you'll want to do in your own business models is you're going to want to use effective color coding to convey different messages around different elements of your business model. Now, in Ivan's case, he used a color code to distinguish between value propositions and customer segments. But bottom line here is you want to use an effective color code to tell different elements of the story that convey different messages about the business model. And then you're going to want to color, you're going to want to follow that color code throughout all of the building blocks of the business model canvas. So another thing that you can do to dramatically improve your presentation is to use just a few descriptive words like, for example, better smiles. And you're going to want to do that with an even better idea, which would be to add a visual or some type of a graphic along with those short descriptive words. So better than just simple descriptive words would be, you know, like, better smiles would be better smiles with a visual of a smiley face. Now, there's actually some science behind this that proves that simple visual elements alongside simple descriptive words will help your audience to connect the message better in their heads. So, you know, just take my word for it. I won't get into all the science here, but take my word for it. If you want to have a better presentation, make sure you keep these elements of the business model very visual. So rather than Having a canvas that looks like this, you'd want it to look something more like that. And then, of course, again, I said it before, but you'll notice that this canvas has been significantly cleaned up. It makes the business model story a lot more concise and to the point. He avoids all the extra granularity and detail, which is also going to help you to avoid that tendency or that desire to blah, blah, blah, because you don't have the information there on the screen, you can't really talk about it. Now, another thing that's going to greatly benefit your audience when delivering a strategic presentation around your business model is to distinguish between what you hold today as an assumption and what you actually know to be true or what you know to be a fact. And you can just do that verbally. You don't have to use check marks and question marks like you've seen me do here. That was just for purposes of the illustration. But you want to verbally communicate to your audience which elements of your business model you know today are facts and which ideas are simply assumptions that you're going to have to test and you're going to have to, you know, collect more information and data around. So to repeat, you want to distinguish between assumptions and what you have evidence for or data to support, or what you know to be an actual fact. Then you're also going to want to make sure that you add interest to your story by bringing in relevant multimedia content. So you're going to want to use things like, you're going to want to use things like videos, pictures, charts and graphs. You know, anything that you can use to better convey your message and make your presentation a lot more dynamic and interesting. Now, perhaps the most important component of all of this, and the most important thing that you could do to improve your presentation, is to properly construct a story around your business model using effective plot structure from the beginning to the end. You want to create suspense just like Alfred Hitchcock would in your. In your story. You want to be able to lead your audience from one idea to the to the next. So to repeat that, you're going to want to make sure that you construct your story around your business model. You know, actually tell a story, how the business works, follow proper plot structure from the beginning to the end, right? It's got a beginning, it's got some rising action, it has this climactic center, and then there's the falling action and the end of your presentation, or what's called the exposition. So you're going to want to follow proper plot structure and of course, you want to create some suspense. Just like Alfred Hitchcock in his movies, you want to create suspense that's going to pull your audience through the story and through the entire presentation. So to recap very quick, some of the best practices that you can implement to make your presentations better in order to create a killer presentation that's going to land well with your audience is you're going to want to first tell a very cohesive story by syncing your comments with your post it notes as you're laying there, layering them onto the canvas one at a time. The next thing you can do is you can use effective color coding to clearly distinguish between different elements of your business model story. You're going to want to use very clear, simple visuals along with short descriptive words to keep the story clear, to keep every element of your business model clear. That, and that'll make it simple for your audience to digest and it'll be a lot more memorable. Of course, you want to be very careful to keep things concise. Don't get too granular, don't get too detailed. It'll cause you to get sidetracked, it'll cause your audience to get sidetracked and it'll distract and deviate from the story or the thread that you have going. Now, of course, you also want to distinguish between what we know to be a fact and what we just simply believe or what is an assumption. We want to implement relevant multimedia content, pictures, images or sorry, pictures, movies, graphs, charts, anything that will tell a better story and add some dynamic, you know, some dynamic content to the presentation. And then lastly, you want to follow proper plot structure and make sure you create some suspense that's going to pull your audience from one idea to the next and pull them through the entire story and through the entire presentation. Now, another bonus tip for you. You don't actually have to use the business model canvas or the Value Proposition Canvas to tell your business model story. It's an analytical design tool. It's not a formal business document, and it doesn't have to be included in your business model presentation. I would recommend that if your audience doesn't know the tool, doesn't know the business model canvas, that you don't use it at all. Otherwise, if you've got time and you want to use the business model canvas, then, then take a little bit of time and introduce your audience to the business model canvas or the Value proposition canvas before you start using it. That way your audience has some familiarity with the tool. They understand the building blocks and what everything means as you're walking them through your presentation. Now, if you do all of that, then you're going to get a big thumbs up from your audience, big round of applause, you're going to, you know, your presentation, your message is going to land well with your audience. You're going to get the resources that you're looking for, whether that's funding from investors, maybe that's, you know, you know, you've convinced your manager that you need to hire more people or whatever it is that you need to be able to make this business model a success. Now what I want to do next is to provide you an example of how we would actually walk people through a story around the business model in a very effective way. And you're going to notice that as I tell this story around Hilti, a tool company that I've avoided many of the mistakes that I mentioned earlier and I'm implementing some of the, you know, those best practices that I mentioned. So Hilti is a really interesting company. They manufacture and they sell light machine tools for builders or construction workers. And their business model looks a little bit like this. So like I said, they sell high end machine tools directly to builders or construction workers through a salesforce and also through retail stores. Now, primarily the relationship with these builders or construction workers is very direct, one to one relationship. We've got a salesperson who is selling those machine tools directly to those customers, except for of course, in the event where they might go into a retail store and purchase a tool. And for those high end machine tools, Hilti earns a transactional revenue or revenue every single time a builder purchases one of their tools. Now, in order to be able to manufacture and sell tools, of course Hilti is going to need factories to be able to produce those tools. And of course they rely pretty heavily on their brand name, which really resonates with a lot of builders and construction workers. And then of course, critical activities that they've got to perform, manufacturing of the tools and then of course, selling directly to builders and construction workers and they partner with other factories and manufacturing plants to be able to create those tools. And those elements make up the majority of the cost structure. Hilti Manufacturing and Branding now, in Hilti's story, there's a substantial problem that they developed over time. And that problem was that over time, manufacturers in Asian countries were able to start manufacturing almost as good quality tools for a lot cheaper using low cost labor in these, in these Asian countries. And so Hilti had to essentially figure out how they could regain competitiveness in this market where, you know, the manufacturing of tools is being, you know, the cost to manufacture tools is being significantly reduced by getting cheaper labor in Asia. And so what they did is they went out and they started observing customers and what they learned was pretty phenomenal. And it absolutely shifted not only the business model of Hilti, but also their value proposition. And I want to talk about that for a second. So what Hilti realized was that a customer's biggest job that they were trying to get done is not necessarily to buy tools, as you might suspect, especially if you're, you know, the company selling tools. Of course you think that your customer's biggest job to get done is to buy tools, but it's actually not. The biggest job that needs to get done here is that you've got to manage, maintain and replace tools. So think about it. You've got to have the right tool at the right place at the right time on these job sites, otherwise you run into issues. Now, Hilti also found a different customer segment that they needed to target in this new, you know, in a new business pursuit that they were going to go into. And that customer was the construction CEO who's looking to find, find and execute contracts. He's got to respect deadlines and he's got to plan and manage a fleet. Now some of the pains related to those jobs that that construction CEO is trying to get done are the upfront investment in tools. Oftentimes tools will break, or sometimes tools will grow legs and walk off of a job site, which will lead to delays in getting the job done and constructing whatever the building or structure is, which is going to in turn create penalty costs. And this is very stressful for a construction company CEO. Now that CEO is hoping to find profitable contracts. He wants the safety of his workers. He wants access to the newest tools, he wants the cost for his tools to be predictable, and he wants 100% uptime on a job site. So the question Hilti has now is what value proposition can they design in order to solve those problems, those jobs, those pains, and the gains that that CEO is looking for. Now I'm going to show you a video here real quick to introduce the idea that Hilti came up with to solve the jobs that this construction CEO had.

Have you ever wanted to just focus on your work and forget about administrative issues and managing your tool fleet? If so, tool fleet management, Hilti's long term tool usage service is for you. We take care of your tools while you focus on the job. Hilti helps assure that your team will have the Best tools, each unique and labeled using RFID and an inventory number so you can maintain control of your tool fleet. If something breaks down, no problem. Hilti has another way to make your work easier. We repair or replace your tools quickly at no additional cost. Hilti will also update your tools on a regular basis, all with the latest generation models. All this on a single monthly invoice. This will seem incredible to you, but the benefits don't end there. The more you choose Hilti, the more Hilti services benefit you. Like Tools on Demand, Hilti's new service reserved for customers with at least 10 tools. Now you can put high performing Hilti tools to work when and where you need them. We call it Tools on Demand. You'll call it Smarter business. Tools on Demand is ideal for handling planned peak periods on the job site since it meets your demanding tool needs all the time. Tool Fleet Management and Tools on Demand from Hilti. Two services with a single objective to maximize your productivity to help you save time, resulting in low management costs. Now your tool crib can evolve with your business.

So Hilti's solution to this problem that this construction company CEO had was to design a fleet management system with Tools on Demand. And what that does for the construction company is essentially what they're providing is no cost to replace or repair a tool and they provide a subscription model. And so that alleviates the pains of the upfront investment in tools and also the pain of broken tools or tools that walk off of a job site. In terms of gain creators, Hilti through this new value proposition is providing access to modern fleet immediate tool replacement. And it allows for sound cost management in terms of tooling a construction crew. Now if we look at both the business model canvas and the value proposition canvas together, recognizing that we kind of have to zoom in and zoom out of the two by changing the value proposition, we actually also change the business model of Hilti. And so again by zooming in to the value proposition canvas and then zooming back out, we'll recognize kind of some new elements of Hilti's business model that have to be understood and accounted for because of this new value proposition. So what once was a very product centric company is now a very service centric company. And I'm now going to layer on the new elements of the new business model as it relates to this new value proposition of online fleet management and Tools on Demand. And again, remember I told you that this required Hilti to identify an entirely new customer, the construction company CEO rather than the individual builders or construction workers. Themselves. Now we're still going to reach that CEO through our, through our salesforce. But now we're also going to create a new element here for this online fleet management system and tools on demand through a website that allows the CEO to be able to schedule when and where he needs his tools and what types of tools are needed. And the relationship of course is still very one to one between our salesperson and that construction company CEO. But now the revenue stream, rather than being transactional in nature, is recurring via subscription model and the size of revenues are much higher now than they used to be. But because we're having a CEO now engage in a large long term contract with the company now on the backstage of the business or from an infrastructure perspective, some of the things that Hilti's gonna have to do here is of course they've still gotta manufacture and produce tools, but now they have to have this new fleet service that's actually delivering tools on demand to job sites all over the, all over the world. And so in terms of resources, they're also going to have to change the way that they do inventory. They're going to have to stock a lot of inventory to be able to provide tools on demand to construction workers all over the place. And that's going to account for a new component of cost will be a lot a service related cost rather than, or in it, rather in addition to the manufacturing and the branding costs that they've already encountered. Now I've got a couple of additional resources for you. Hopefully by going through a quick example for you, you were able to see some of those recommendations for things to avoid and things to include in your presentations in action. But if you still need more, you know, more guidance, I've got a few more resources for you. Like I said, you can go to our business model hub. It's kind of a forum of sorts where there's a lot of practitioners asking and answering questions with one another. You can always attend one of our public master classes that we hold frequently all over the globe. And of course, if you need training in house, you want a certified trainer to come into your company and provide training for you and your team or maybe your executives. We also provide that as well. And you can find any of those resources to avoid these presentation killers and to provide a killer presentation@stragizer.com training you can find any of those resources. Now I've got an exclusive offer for you for attending our webinar today. And that offer is that if you go online to our website to that same link, strategizer.com training you'll find our online course. And if you purchase our online course, business models that work and value propositions that sell before Sunday night at midnight, we're going to give you a free project in our Strategizer web application. That web application allows you to design business models and value propositions online with your, you know, with your team. You get an unlimited number of canvases and an unlimited number of collaborators or people that can join in your project. So the cost of the online course is $499.99 or $500. And if you spend that $500 on the online course, we're going to give you free access to a strategizer project for one year. That's a $299 or $300 value. And again, that offer is good until Sunday night at midnight. That Sunday, November 22nd at 11:59 p. Pacific Standard Time. Now, with the course, what you're going to get is 100 bite sized learning pieces with 21 lessons on six absolutely crucial topics to designing better business models and value propositions. That content is going to come in 62 videos over six and a half hours of very high quality video content and as well as some additional text that you can read, PDFs, that you can download, posters, graphics, exercises that you can go through. And you're going to get instant access to that course as soon as you sign up and that course never expires again, you're going to want to go to strategizer.comtraining to purchase that online course. And if you purchase that online course before Sunday night at midnight, we're going to give you free one year of free access to the Strategizer web application. Now all you've got to do is purchase the online course and then send your receipt directly to me. BenTransOnTruthGizer.com and I will be sending out an email on Monday morning that will give you instructions on how to activate your free access to the web application. Now, if you are in a company and you want to train more people, you know, up to say 10 people, we have another offer for you. It's the same online course, but that will come with a facilitator. And so we want to offer you a facilitated online course experience for you and your team of up to 10 people. And if you want more information on that offer, all you need to do is send an email to salestrategizer.com and simply ask them about our facilitated online course for you and your enterprise team. So, just as a quick recap, today we talked about some presentation killers. We want to avoid what we call cognitive murder when we throw the entire canvas up on the screen all at once. We want to avoid putting too much detail and granularity into our canvas. Sorry, putting too much detail and granularity into the canvas. We want to avoid putting too many ideas into the same canvas. We want to avoid creating orphan elements which are elements of the business model that are not connected to others. Avoid putting the future state and the current state of your business model into the same canvas without somehow distinguishing between them. And we want to avoid that tendency to engage in irrelevant blah, blah, blah, and instead to deliver a killer presentation. We want to layer on the Post it notes into our canvas one at a time as we're telling our story, making sure that we're syncing those Post it notes with what we're saying. We want to make sure that we use effective color coding to distinguish between the different elements of our business model story. We want to make sure that we use simple graphics and visuals along with very simple, short, descriptive words. We want to make sure that we avoid too much granularity and too much detail. We want to distinguish between what we know as a fact and what we believe or what we hold today as an assumption. We want to integrate relevant multimedia content, whether that's videos or photographs or images, charts, graphs, all things that are very effective in conveying a specific message and adding some, you know, some interest and making your presentation very dynamic. And then lastly, we want to make sure that we are creating good plot structure and creating some suspense that will take our audience from one idea to the next in our story. Thank you so much for joining us today. Again, my name is Benson Garner. I was your webinar host and your presenter today. You can feel free to reach out to me on social media, Ensign Garner. You can find me just about anywhere on the Internet if you just Google my name. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions. Bensonrategizer.com and of course, you can also feel free to schedule a free phone call with me if you'd like me to answer any of your questions or help you out with your business model or value proposition design. And again, thank you so much for attending the Strategizer webinar today and we look forward to seeing you next time.