One Major Factor That Goes Into Building a Business Model that Works

Your business model describes how your business creates, captures, and delivers value. There are key ingredients that go into its development, including purpose, offerings, strategies, infrastructure, organizational structures, and operational processes and policies.

While there are many factors that go into developing your business model, there is one key ingredient often overlooked by entrepreneurs: Your Inner Entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs often try to execute a business model that worked for someone else but become easily frustrated when it doesn’t work for them. After hours of trying to execute their model, they wonder why their results aren’t the same. Despite implementing many tactics, the entrepreneur becomes discouraged, worn out, and exasperated.

This dynamic happens when the entrepreneur does not consider how they are naturally hardwired and how their hardwiring impacts the execution of that model. Hardwiring is natural to who you are. It is present just underneath the surface. It determines how you give and receive information and one of the filters through which you see the world. If you have taken any number of behavior-based tools, such as DISC or Meyers Briggs, you probably have some insight into your natural hardwiring.

When working with my clients, one of the first steps is to help them understand their unique hardwiring. After explaining components that make up a person’s hardwiring during a recent event, one of my clients approached me. With a big grin on his face, he remarked that what he learned in just one hour explained why he and his brother didn’t connect on many things for the last 50 years. He now had a brand new insight and adjusted the way he delivered information so he could communicate much more effectively.

Another entrepreneur had a business where he fixed computers. As you can imagine, it was very detailed work. However, this entrepreneur loved the part of his job where he hunted down the next business deal. He was consistently energized by that kind of activity. So when he came back to his business and was working on the detailed parts of his business, he often procrastinated. He also had to summon up a lot of energy to perform this detail and routine work. It was no wonder that he had a hard time staying focused and his results suffered. He was trying to execute a business model that was not congruent with his hard wiring (part of his Inner Entrepreneur). To a person who is energized by new ideas and needs to be consistently challenged, the execution of the routine part of his business model was boring to him yielding less-than-favorable financial results.

The activities that energized him were a clue to aligning his natural hardwiring and the execution of his business model. Once he created awareness of how his natural hardwiring influenced his execution of that model, he made a few modifications.

He shifted the way he worked and created a crew of people who enjoyed the detailed work, but didn’t like hunting down new business as much as he did. Armed with this new perspective, he built a compatible business model that worked for him, utilized his crew’s innate hardwiring and strengths, and better served his clients.

One small change to your business model and how you execute that model can be the difference between standing still or utilizing your innate strengths to build a business that works!