The Tricky Art of Finding the Right Business Model for Effective Leadership

Feb. 18, 2013 - PRLog -- One of the biggest problems in building your business comes with deciding which business model to incorporate.  Choosing the right business model to grow your business to the next stage is tricky and can be challenging if you don’t look at the right questions to answer.

         Some of the more obvious questions to ask yourself when pondering which business model you want to incorporate are:

         *Where do you want to go with your business?

         *How do you want the business to look?  

*What results do you want your business efforts to achieve?

         *What’s the fastest way to utilize the resources that you already have?

Those questions are good starting points.  There are other questions that aren’t often looked at, questions centered around how the model you pick affects you personally.  Questions like:

         *What do you want to spend most of your time doing?

         *What is the most important part to you of your business, in your opinion? e.g. The growth?  The lifestyle?  The work?

         *What is the most fulfilling part of running your business, and what would it look like if you did more of that?

         *How much do you want to work?

         *How much money do you want to make, versus how much time off do you want?

These personal questions aren’t always easy to answer truthfully, but they’re probably more important than the strategic questions.  

For example, one of my clients was really struggling with working in general.  After a closer look,  she determined it was the marketing she was resisting.  The more we snooped around, it became very clear that she thought she should become a renowned guru.  She felt a lot of outside and inside pressure to do so. Clearly she had the skills, talent, and her company was positioned in a place where she could really take off, but she didn’t.  She kept stopping herself.

Once we took a closer look, it became apparent that to become famous did not meet the needs of her top values.  In fact it didn’t even come close.  When we explored further, her need to have more white space—time that wasn’t scheduled, was more important. Time for her to do her art meant a lot to her, and the idea of getting consumed by her business halted her efforts to build the business.

After she determined that what she wanted was a handful of clients and some group meetings that she could facilitate, it was a snap to come up with a different business model that required much less time building the business.  This realization got her the results that she wanted with a smaller amount of effort plus created a lot of time for her to do other things that brought her happiness.

When you ask yourself personal questions before growing your business to the next level, you will have more of the information that you need to pick the business model that works better for you and your lifestyle.