Career Planning – Your Model Pt 3

Last year I spent some time learning about business modeling after reading Business Model Generation. When I spotted Business Model You by the same author on the shelves over the holidays I immediately grabbed it, it promised to be the answer to my planning problem. Business Model You takes the exact same approach used in Business Model Generation but with a very key twist, all of the exercises involve discovering yourself, your abilities and your passions. You can read about the why and see the results of the first part of the book in Part One and the second in Part Two.

At the end of the previous section I had a couple of purpose statements that I felt pretty neatly outlined what my focus should be in my career. I felt very clear on the value that I provide, the customers that I can help and what activities I can use to connect those two together.  I played around a little bit with these purpose statements until I got comfortable with and felt confident enough to move forward to the next section.

Where Part Two was all about the deep psyche dive, Part Three is mostly very strategic. You are revising or reinventing your work life, combining the two previous sections, your originally developed model with all of the potential changes you identified in the course of writing your purpose statements. The first chapter in this section throws you head on into the reinvention process by challenging you to alter your perspective on your own self-imposed boundaries, opening yourself up to alternative realities beyond all of the rules and definitions we all label ourselves with based on our perceptions of our talents and potential.

From there we move into actually redoing the original business model.  I was really hesitant about jumping into this not feeling like I completely understood what to do, I was surprised to find that they actually gave you specific questions for each different area on the canvas. Questions like – Are you interested in your work? And if you answer no then they tell you exactly what you need look at to help you make changes.  These diagnostic questions really came in handy in fact they were really invaluable to helping me get through this process. I don’t think that I would have been able to navigate as quickly and easily through this stage if I hadn’t had five pages worth of questions and hints to help.

You end up with a handy chart of things that you want to add, remove, increase and or reduce in your building blocks. For example in Key Partners I discovered that I really need add a new mentor, my current mentor has left the company, and that I also need to increase the amount of time I spend growing my team, they are huge support system for me in my career and I need to balance that out with how much I’m supporting them in their careers individually.

You also take a look at how these different items you are adding or removing and how they affect each other; in the Value Propositions block I had noted to reduce my technical work which takes away from the time I have to better understand company initiatives and provide training and support towards fulfilling those.  And that in turn actually connected back to Key Resources block where I stated that I’d  like to  reduce all of the work in the Realistic category (coding)  as it’s my least favorite. I also found a connection from my desire to reduce the amount of stress from miscommunication to adding in clear communication channels with executives.

The section ends with some examples, one I found really interesting was for JD Roth who went from selling boxes to being a blogger to being an author and super blogger, showing and all the steps that were modified on in between those three stages of his career plan. I’m just swimmy with ideas now.

The next (and last) section is on learning how to make it all happen.  It looks pretty interesting with topics on determining your business value and how to test your model in the market. More on that next month.

My slightly modified business model canvas is pictured above.