Business Model You - Tim Clark, Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur

Are you dissatisfied with your work? Do you feel you are not supposed to be doing what you do? Dreaming of a new career?

Not everyone is able to get a life-long career right. But don't worry: if that is the question, or it is simply a case of reinventing your role in your work, you have come to the right place!

See in this summary of the book "Business Model You", the one-page method to reinvent your career.

About the book "Business Model You"

The book "Business Model You" was originally launched in 2012 and written by Tim Clark, with Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur as collaborating authors.

The work uses the Canvas method, a widely known business model to designate the purpose of a company, only this time to seek the professional purpose of a person.

In addition, it has 328 specialists from 43 countries who contributed to its creation.

About the authors Tim Clark, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

Tim Clark is the main author of this book. He is the leader of the personal business model movement (which we will teach here in this summary). Tim is a writer, ex-business man, and also a business professor in Tokyo.

Alexander Osterwalder is an entrepreneur, speaker, and writer. Ph. D. by HEC Lausanne, he is also a co-founder of a non-profit software company that dedicates its efforts to combat HIV / AIDS and malaria around the world.

Yves Pigneur is a professor at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and has taught at several other colleges. Chief editor of the local academic newspaper, he is also a writer.

To whom is this book indicated?

The book "Business Model You" is suitable for those who wish to change careers or restructure their current life plan, with a more concrete vision and aligned with their professional dreams.

Main ideas of the book "Business Model You"

• Canvas is a powerful tool not only to align elements of the company but also of the individual;
• To obtain or reinvent the career of your life, you must essentially identify your personal and professional purpose;
• You must be open to change to reinvent your current personal business model;
• The step of change, in fact, is the time to act and make everything happen!

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Overview: Canvas

The book starts with the following guess:

"You are reading this book because you have been thinking about changing your career."

If this is the case, you have come to the right summary!

But first, it is important to know what a business model is. This term corresponds to the way that a company sustains itself financially.

It has 9 components:

1. Customers;
2. Value offer;
3. Channels;
4. Relationship with customers;
5. Revenue sources;
6. Main resources;
7. Key activities;
8. Main partnerships;
9. Cost structures.

If you want to know more about each component and how to build a business model for your company, check out our summary of the book "Business Model Generation".

For the book "Business Model You", the business is you!

In this way, the above components are modified to other correlated aspects. We'll talk about each one below:

Key features (Who are you / What do you own)

In this area, you should write down your skills and competencies, your personality, what interests you, and your baggage: knowledge, experience, networking, etc. These are the resources you can work with.

Key activities (What you do)

This field refers to your actions, according to your resources. What you do, according to the book, "evolves naturally from who you are".

One tip is to fill in the tasks you perform at work, especially the most important ones and the ones that differentiate you from your other teammates.

Customers (Who you help)

Here you must remember the people who depend on you for their work. Who does your task help? Which people depend on their role or benefit from their work?

Some examples: your teammates who need your task to do theirs; your supervisor/boss etc. Write down all the names of these people.

Value Proposition (How you help them)

Think: how will your customer, or the person you help, benefit from? What problem will be solved and how? What were the results of your work for that person?

Channels (How they reach you / How you deliver)

Filling in this field helps you to define your communication. The trick here is to be able to sell your "way of helping" and thus get paid for that help.

As an aid, the recipe book "the marketing process", composed of 5 questions:

1. How do potential customers find out how you can help them?
2. How will they decide to purchase your service?
3. How will they buy?
4. How will you deliver what your customers bought?
5. How will you ensure that customers are happy?

Relationship with customers (How do you interact)

Here, the book provides a series of questions, where all answers must be noted in this field, such as:

• How do you interact with your customer? Personally, by email?
• Are you more interested in increasing the number of customers or having customers satisfied with your service?

Core Partnerships (Who helps you)

Reflect, in this area, on all the people who support you in your journey of professional growth. Who are the people who are on your side, that is, your support "sponsorships".

They can be counselors, friends, family, co-workers, and so on.

Sources of Income and Benefits (What do you get)

After thinking about the benefits others receive, it's time to think about what you gain from your own work.

And that can encompass a number of factors: any cash gain, benefits, such as health insurance or even professional recognition and personal satisfaction.

Cost Structure (What do you offer)

What do you have to accomplish what you do? Money? Time? Effort? Energy? All that?

The objective of this field, according to the book "Business Model You", is that you list all non-refundable costs:

• Travel, travel and leisure expenses;
• Training or subscription fees;
• Expenses with internet, telephone, transport;
• Stress.

Overview: Reflect

The book presents some methods for you to identify satisfactory and unsatisfactory points in your life. One of them is the Wheel of Life, where you separate a circle into 8 parts and fill each part by the level of satisfaction with a certain aspect, among these 10 presented:

1. Fitness / Health;
2. Career;
3. Wealth / Money;
4. Personal growth;
5. Fun;
6. Love;
7. Friends family;
8. Lifestyle;
9. Creativity / Self-expression;
10. Home.

Another method of reflection is to understand who you were before you were 20: what you loved, what were your hobbies, what did you like to do in school / college.

Having identified these points, you have analyzed your current satisfaction and your childhood. Hence, it is time to identify its positive points.

Define what you are today and describe with a sentence what excites you about these roles. For example:

• You are a Father / Mother, and it gives you pride, happiness, encouragement;
• You are a Speaker, and it awakens you a sense of recognition, attention, planner;
• You're a musician, and that's a good thing because you bring people together with your art.

After listing all things, analyze what each thing has in common and find out what your career should have to get you excited in the same way.

This way, you will be joining your interests, your personality, and your skills, identifying the "central point" of your career.

Overview: Review

After reflecting on your purpose, your personality, and who you are, which is fundamental to defining your life's career, it is time for you to review your personal business model.

For this, the work provides you with 5 steps to "guide you to a new Canvas."

1. Design your personal business model as it is today: if you filled it out while reading the first overview, then this step is done;
2. Identify the pain points: where are your pains? At what points do you feel dissatisfied?;
3. Ask diagnostic questions: ask if you are interested in your work, in your clients, if what you are really valued (the book provides you with numerous questions with starting points for solving them);
4. Modify the components and evaluate the effects: after answering the questions from the previous step, list what you think should be modified, added or removed, to improve your work and your level of satisfaction;
5. Redesign your model.

Overview: Act

The book provides a schematic for you to know how to do research with customers with your business model prototype, and then start to execute the final "product".

This test consists of the following steps:

• Select potential customers to test each part of your personal business model;
• If there are change feedbacks, make the necessary changes. After that, test with other customers;
• If at first everything is right with your model, try to validate it for a customer. If the "sale" is successful, then you are ready;
• If it is not validated, you need to go back and make changes.

It is important that, while customers are analyzing your product, you are not part of this process, so that they can identify the necessary points of improvement for themselves without disturbing you. So stay away!

If you are an entrepreneur, understanding your personal business model can result in understanding other people's business models, such as future employees. In the interview, it will be easier to identify points aligned and misaligned to your perspective, for example.

In general, understanding your personal Canvas refers to knowing if you are on the right path if the career you are on is the right one for you.

It is to understand what points you should improve in your current job.

Or discover, after this deep and extensive process of understanding about your 'professional self', that a career change is necessary for your well-being.

What do other authors say about it?

In the book "Geração de Valor", Flávio Augusto says that winning thoughts are more likely to generate positive results. Whereas, trivial thoughts generate only trivial results.

For example, instead of asking yourself, "Where can I learn to think victoriously?", Ask yourself "Who can I learn from?" Flávio says that "it is only possible to learn to have a winning mentality with the winners".

In the book "Dream Big", Cristiane Correa complements the idea of personal strategic planning and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a process of continuous improvement to achieve her goals. His ideas were inspired by the views of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in Brazil.

The authors of "Innovatrix", Clemente de Nóbrega and Adriano Roberto de Lima, say that the most important is in the innovation of business models. When it comes to innovation, many have product innovation in mind. It is undoubtedly important, but insufficient to sustain a business.

Okay, but how can I apply this to my life?

This summary had several practical tips for you to build your personal business model:

• Use your creativity throughout the process;
• Include all the people, places, spaces, that you can help;
• Determine the type of problem you are going to solve/are solving;
• How to be found by other people? Show your work!
• Fill in your Canvas and increase the chance of having new career opportunities.

Now it's your turn to put each one into practice and reinvent your career!

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