How to grow your business with the Business Model Canvas
What are the biggest barriers to growth in your business?
We’ve seen it time and again– business owners are so focused on the day-to-day running of the business that they lose sight of the bigger picture. Planning for the future, adapting, setting goals and creating a growth plan are all things they want to do and often talk about, but struggle to find the time for.
Of course, to build a successful business, we need to prioritise delivering for customers. But to grow an organisation with intention and purpose, there should be a clear focus on the vision and what lies ahead.
Sometimes this can be as simple as looking at things from a different perspective to create space for new ideas to take root and grow.
The 9-step process to success.
When you’re thinking about growth but struggling to make the time to plan for it, the Business Model Canvas is a great place to start.
The Business Model Canvas is a powerful tool for designing, challenging and improving your business model. It enables you to map out your entire business model in a simple, visual, one-page format.
The BMC helps capture everything as-is. Think of it as your entire business at-a-glance.
The canvas offers a visual overview of your business model broken down into nine basic building blocks:
Customer Segments
Value Propositions
Channels
Customer Relationships
Revenue Streams
Key Resources
Key Activities
Key Partners
Cost
With the canvas, you could have your whole business plan mapped out in as little as 10 minutes. Thanks to its simple visual format, the canvas is easy to iterate, adapt and change, making it a powerful tool for strategically mapping your business model and planning for growth.
Here’s how the Business Model Canvas could help you remove barriers to growth:
Discover how your business creates, delivers and captures value.
The Business Model Canvas focuses on growing a business built with customers at its heart. This tool is centred around a business’s value proposition– in other words, how a business delivers and creates value for its customers.
The canvas enables you to hone in on your value proposition(s) and develop new ones, promoting growth with viable products and services customers want.
Collaborate on the business with teams and key stakeholders.
The canvas is a collaborative tool best used in teams and a catalyst for opening up avenues and opportunities for growth that might otherwise go unexplored.
Mapping out the business model will lead to new ideas and ‘what ifs’ to explore with your team and key stakeholders. It also offers a creative space for highlighting problem areas, tackling barriers to growth and rapidly generating potential solutions.
Communicate your business to stakeholders, advisors and partners.
Business growth is often fuelled by external advisors and lenders, and the canvas is a valuable tool for sharing a business model with people outside of an organisation.
Offering a quick and easy way to communicate your business to key partners and stakeholders, the BMC helps others gain a high-level understanding of your model and how it operates.
As a central source of truth to share externally, the canvas could help potential investors see the viability of your business model and support your next funding round.
Explore and develop new business ideas.
The Business Model Canvas is, first and foremost, a tool for designing, challenging and improving your business model. This makes it the perfect tool for generating new ideas for growth and expansion.
The canvas works on the notion that a business model isn’t static but fluid. It is constantly adapting and improving in response to political and environmental changes.
Using the canvas to map out future growth plans, you can visualise how to adapt and innovate your model to facilitate growth.
Grow your business with our free 3-day email course.
3 days to a winning business model.
Eliminate the guesswork and design a winning business model with our email course– A beginner’s guide to the Business Model Canvas.
Our free 3-part course will teach you how to use the Business Model Canvas to create an innovative business model that disrupts the market and stands out from competitors.