Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Profit Driver #3: FUNCTIONS

“Capitalism has turned human beings into commodities. To the owner of a restaurant: the cook and a bag of potatoes are equally important.” 
~Mokokoma Mokhonoana


Well, of course a cook is much more profitable than the sum of the meals that could be cooked from all the potatoes in the bag (even if they may, sometimes, cost the same... :-) ). And this is because they fulfill radically different functions:
- a cook's function is to ensure quality meals, to manage a team of aides, to come up with new recipes, all in order to secure a repeatable positive customer experience etc.
- a potato's function is to be cooked and served in one single customer experience event.

That is the reason why a law firm will always earn more profits than a construction company with similar headcount - the market pays better for a perceived higher function that drives more value throughout the value chain.

Also, this is the reason why education is expensive - education amplifies a function so that it may earn more for its carrier.


Translating this to a lean start-up world, this gets very difficult to crack. A lean start-up has to make very tough choices not only about the risk priorities, about the assets to build, but also about the best functions to perform.

The original Business Model Canvas captures the function on the left-hand side: the Key Activities and the Key Resources.

The Lean Canvas instead replaces this with a different, more focused approach: the biggest areas on the left side of the canvas are called Problem and Solution. So a clear proposition emerges: split your start-up into a Problem Team and a Solution Team. 

Now, strictly in terms of business functions, Ash Maurya argues that a lean start-up should only employ the 3 most critical ones:
- Development (solution engineering)
- Marketing (customer understanding)
- Design (embeds design thinking into the functions above and makes them "sing" together in harmony)

Not coincidentally, the three quoted functions have the highest profit potential of all functions. Any other support function (finance, administration, legal etc), at the lean start-up stage, should be carried out by the founders.


So, don't start up by stocking up on your cafeteria supplies, by renting out the nicest office space or by buying that ever-present ping-pong table :)

Monday, November 11, 2013

Profit Driver #2: ASSETS

If I collected all the diamonds in the world, I'd have no 'income' but I'd have a lot of 'assets'. Would my company be worth nothing because I have no income? A lot of Net companies are collecting assets. They have to be measured with a new set of metrics.
~Vinod Khosla




Such is the case with a start-up. More specifically, a lean start-up collects a lot of diamonds: these are the nuggets of insights, knowledge and wisdom that are the main outcome of the experiments conducted on their business model.

Everything, in a lean start-up, is targeted at maximizing learning:
- formulation of falsifiable hypotheses
- splitting into problem team / solution team (same thing for the interviews)

The lean stack promoted by Ash Maurya is a very useful tool by which the knowledge gathering process is managed.

Knowledge may be the most important asset in this stage, but there are others too:
- the recruiting process is not merely important, but fundamentally vital - it can literally make or break the start-up;
- the ability to pivot the business model, to continuously weed out potential waste.


One more thing
You may have noticed that I have not included in here the "classic" assets: IT infrastructure, patents, products already designed / built etc.

That is because I believe that, at a start-up stage, such "hard" assets are actually liabilities - they hinder innovation, they are a trap of past thinking and habits, they entice you to reuse sunk (and maybe failed) efforts, they force your solution into an already existing mold.

This is the innovator's dilemma applied to start-ups: you may become captive not to your existing market (because you don't have one yet), but to your existing asset base.

You have to keep pivoting your asset base and you best do this when your asset base is intangible. Your "hard" asset base should, for the time being, stay on your P&L (as a rental cost), not on your Balance Sheet.

Next week, on Profit Driver #3: Functions!