Value Enlightenment

In the last ten years I have met with hundreds of executives and business leaders. My criteria to respect these people were about their ability to explain their business value proposition and their professional values. 

I consider a business value proposition to be the economic driver why people exchange money to retrieve the value in the shortest time possible. Professional values are much softer and important to understand the longer term perspective and personal motivation of the person.

Unfortunately only a handful people could express their values in profession and life in a very comprehensive way within a crystal sharp context.

Not many people consider a value proposition to be that important, nor do people value their own function within the company, the umbrella effect maybe. But, if you don’t value yourself or your work, how will you value someone else?

How do you find value and get the benefits from it? The following roadmap helps you to retrieve core-value; navigating your company to become the next billion dollar company:

Finding core value starts with scarcity!

Too many companies have too many heads, opinions, processes, structures, plans, pigeon holes, time, money and people! Have a vision to wisely re-distribute your assets and create a structure where people are forced to do more with less. Suddenly things will become much clearer for everyone involved. You will direct more focus to identify the exact value of a technology, system, service, supplier, customer, employee, simply by being forced to do with less.

Scarcity forces efficiency!

Becoming more efficient as a business person or as a company means that you create a mindset or culture to find shortcuts, go quicker than others, and find black holes that enable warp speed. Efficiency is a result of scarcity as it forces you to create a laser sharp focus on the one and only thing that you consider to make you different, better and faster. 

Drop everything else. Stop putting effort in mimicking competition. Start challenging industry peers and standards.  You have to develop the ability to visualise the things you value and make you different. The objective is to find a unique market position, invent new technologies, scale your sales distribution, ultimately creating sustainable value!

Efficiency turns into commodity!

Efficiency frees up time to think more and do less. Thinking, analysing and re-thinking will help you to find that something which was so obvious that nobody considered it to be important or wasn’t complex enough. It was considered to be something not well-defined, difficult to swallow, too small, unimportant, not understood; completely undervalued!   Finding core-value is not about searching for a needle in a haystack, rolling up the sleeves and pretending to be more active. No!? It’s about taking a step backward, freeing the time to look beyond the complexity and seek the simplicity, authenticity and efficiency, the threesome of a commodity, something ultimately everyone needs and wants to find.

The only thing not at your side: creativity, the point of inspiration! It could and will most likely take you years to truly find and get to the point of value enlightenment. From that point onwards you’ll start to simplify your value proposition. Suddenly everyone understands and knows exactly what you are selling, trying to achieve. Some immediate benefits are that your customers will make buying decisions much faster. You will have to invest less in advertising, as you will not pay for the 50% of people that are not interested in your value proposition. And if you have to pay for it, you will be able to negotiate that part down to zero. You want to stop selling to people who are of no interest to you. It will allow you to find scalable distribution. You gradually start to transform your value proposition into a commodity. Others will start to copy you now.

Commodity finds critical-mass!

We started with scarcity, then freed time through efficiency, simplified and visualised the value proposition to realise a commodity, and we now get to the final stage: achieve critical mass. Commodity allows you to reach critical mass as ‘efficiency’ helps you to scale your distribution, investments and resources. Simplicity on the other hand; simplicity simply sells! Examples of billion dollar companies that have found their core value proposition and reached critical mass in less than a decade: free search sells (Google), paid music sells (iTunes), liquid energy sells (Red Bull), desktop productivity sells (MS Office), online telephony sells (Skype), applied innovation sells (HP), etc.

Critical-mass generates serious wealth!

Last but not least, reaching critical-mass generates wealth. Wealth for everyone involved in the value chain starting with the founders that finally found their core value proposition and are looking for the next one. The investors that initially didn’t understand the idea and never made enough money available to their portfolio of invested companies, and suddenly face a serious valuation of the company, having forced scarcity upon the founders for many years. The government and their VAT systems grabbing money out of the transactional value chain. And most important, the consumer retrieving and appreciating the value-add and their willingness to pay money, sometimes a lot of money, for it.