Hello, everybody. We’re going to talk today about the basics of a business plan. This is a straightforward, simple but nonetheless effective way to check if your idea for a product or a business could actually work and become a viable business. The lean canvas is pretty well known in business circles. It pretty much is what it says on the tin. It’s a very simple way of checking whether your business is viable, with all the key elements you need to consider in order to see if you actually could have a proposal for a proper business here. We’re going to go through the nine sections of the lean canvas, some in a little more detail than others. Some are more important than others.

Starting with the first one, this is one of the most major, common and obvious fails with anyone who tries to start a business. It’s really strange because you wonder how this was ever thought not to be an issue, but the first thing is a problem. You have absolutely no business without a problem to solve. We often have this, particularly in Cambridge but in lots of other places. People come up with a whizzy piece of technology and they think it’s great and they want to make it into a business, but the unfortunate thing is, it might be very pretty and look nice, but it doesn’t actually do anything which is of any value for anyone. So you need a problem to solve. Is there a real-world problem which your business, your idea or your product could actually solve? Someone has got an issue, a problem, a pain point, and you have got to solve it. Interesting, isn’t it, if you look at it in that way. We tend to take the businesses around us for granted, but now look at it this way. What problem are they solving for you? Start to analyse how business works. So the first thing you need to think about is the problem.

What problem are you solving? A couple of examples from me. My company, Creative Warehouse, what problem do we solve? People have brilliant innovations and ideas for businesses, like many of you folk do, but they really struggle to communicate them. They’re not mass communicators. They don’t necessarily have the way with words we do, and also design, images, pictures, that sort of thing. But also, it’s not always just the headline problem which is useful and important to you. It’s sometimes really handy to think about a series of problems which a business is solving. Now here, if you don’t know Cambridge this is outside King’s College, and this is a Voi scooter. We are one of the test beds for the scooters which are being trialled across the UK, so there is the Voi scooter. That’s an electric scooter. I actually use them. What does Voi scooters solve in terms of the headline problem? What’s the headline problem that it solves? The simple problem it solves fundamentally is getting around, isn’t it? If I want to get from one side of the city to the other, here’s a little scooter, but then you’ve identified an auxiliary problem. Which is, driving around, the place is gridlocked all the time like many modern cities, so it’s actually a convenient way to do it. It’s eco-friendly as well, so you think, oh, I’m not just getting around, but I’m getting around without being stuck in traffic and also it’s green. So there you see you’ve got a range of problems being explored there. There’s a headline problem which, if you’re considering a product or a business, you think probably now that is it, but are there subsidiary problems as well? It will help you if you think, can you cluster together both the headline and some of the other problems? You don’t need more than three or four but think of the problems your business solves. You don’t actually need more than one. Google is effectively one problem: I need information off the internet – there it is, and it’s done all right for itself. Voi scooters have got several problems which they solve. So have a think now – you’re all thinking about potentially a future in something business-wise.

You might have a product. You might have an innovation. You might have a business that you’re considering starting or, if you’re not at this point, think about what you could. Now think just for a couple of minutes about what problem or what problems it solves. Just have a couple of minutes now to think about what it is you think could be a business – something you have, some innovation, some idea, maybe a product, maybe a vision. What problem, what real-world problem would it solve which people would be willing to pass over their hard-earned cash for and that you can then solve it for them? Have a think for a couple of minutes. That is your fundamental: there is no business without a problem. You might have a great idea, but unless it addresses a real-world need where people are willing to part with their cash in order to ease this pain point, this problem, you don’t have a business.

Moving on with the lean canvas now, if the problem is our absolute fundamental and our foundation, the next thing that that leads us to is target customers. Your problem should naturally lead you on to who is going to benefit from this. Really, really important to think: who have I got in mind? It’s often said in business that if you target everyone, you will reach no one, so you have to have someone in mind or some people in mind. Sometimes you can have groups of people, but you’ve got to have them in mind. Let’s have a look at target customers then and explore that through some well-known businesses. What about Wetherspoon’s? Tell me who Wetherspoon’s target customers are first of all. What are Wetherspoon’s target customers? Who are they? It’s people who are budget conscious, isn’t it, first of all is what they do. That probably is the fundamental – there’s value for them in appealing to people who perhaps don’t have a great deal of money, don’t have a lot of resources. But then there are segments to the Wetherspoon’s audience as well. This is where you think about your target customers and whether it’s just one group or whether there are different groups you can appeal to. Of course, if you can appeal to more than one group, you’ve potentially got more income. For example, why do Wetherspoon’s open at breakfast? Wetherspoon’s obviously think, start of the day we’re not selling much in the way of beer, but we’re selling a lot of breakfasts, and that’s a profitable segment, but then how does it switch? Through the day you get families, and you get lots of different people, but what about night? How does Wetherspoon’s often switch at night? They do this particularly well here in Cambridge. They’ve got a big city-centre site in Cambridge. During the day they’ve got these different segments of their audience. They’ve got the breakfast crowd, which is good food – people all the way through are looking for value, but to start with they’ve got the breakfast crowd. Then through the daytime they’ve got, as you might say, pensioners, families coming in. At night they’ll often target students and night-life type people as well. So segmenting can help your business.

Think: I’ve got a target customer but there’s more than just this particular target customer. You can segment them by age, geography, where they live, their social class, their background, profession, purpose, income stream. Interesting example is Uber, target customers for Uber. Now there are two target customers for Uber, and one of them is often forgotten. What are the two target customers for Uber? Two target groups of customers, I should say. There’s one obvious one, isn’t there, which is of course you – you, someone needs a ride somewhere. There’s a problem they’re solving – I need to get somewhere – it gets me a taxi straightaway. What’s the other target customer? Often forgotten, because I bet none of you do this. Basically, the drivers. Don’t forget Uber makes its money from not just getting passengers but getting drivers as well – makes money on both sides as well. So think about your target customers. I’ve got this idea. I’ve got a problem. I think this is a real-world problem. Who has this problem? Who has this problem? Wetherspoon’s, they can see the problem is that some people don’t have a lot of money, so they want to appeal to people on limited means. How can they do it? Breakfasts and then daytime service and then in the evening, to maximise their market and use of their space. Uber? Well, of course people need to get around, but also people can then make money off people getting around by using their car as a taxi. So what segments could you have? Again, spend a couple of minutes now. Think about the target customers that your innovation and your idea might be targeted at. Can you get in mind…? Sometimes for this people sketch out little avatars, people they have in mind. What does this person look like? Have an idea who your target customers are. Have a couple of minutes to do that, and again, try and define it, because if you appeal to everyone, you’ll generally get no one, unless of course you’re Google, which proves the rule – the exception that proves the rule. Just think about who your target customers might be and whether there are segments within those.

When you’re starting off with a business, you’ve heard of the concept of beach-heading? You’ve got an enormous beach to aim at, but it’s a military concept. If you put all your forces across the whole of this beach, they’ll be spread too thinly and they’ll be picked off, but if you put a large amount of effort into one place and then punch out from there, that’s a common strategy with getting a business going. So having to define your target customers from the start, that really does help you. If you’ve got lots and lots of them, think: where might I really get traction to start with? Therefore I might get word of my business out there and therefore more people might come to me, and I can spread my offering when I’ve got a bit more money and a few more staff. Refining your offering and working out who you’re going for first of all can really help you. Okay, so that’s target customers. We’ve got the problem and we’ve got the people who have it, and that should therefore logically take us towards the solution. How are you going to solve this problem that the people you’ve identified have? This leads you towards the structure of your business, the form it takes and how it’s going to operate.

It is good to compare and contrast, so if we look at solutions, one of my favourite compare and contrasts is Uber and Voi. Now from our previous discussions about Uber and Voi, fundamentally they both solve the same problem, don’t they? Fundamentally it’s: I want to get from here to there, but notice the two very, very different solutions and the two very different structures of the business. Which of those two has to invest in lots and lots and lots of mechanical hardware for their business to work, and which uses a franchising, licensing model for people to use their own mechanical hardware for it to work? No-brainer? What’s costing Voi a lot of money because they keep being thrown in the River Cam and generally disappearing?! So Voi have to invest a lot of money in buying these scooters and maintaining them, which means that they’re struggling to do well. Uber have taken a different approach. They have decided to invest lots and lots in technology in order that customers and drivers can be matched up together. They’ve rather cleverly got the drivers to use their own hardware, their own cars, to do the job for them. Clever stuff, isn’t it? So there are different solutions, depending on the problem, and this is only really guided by what your research, your thoughts, your hunch and your desire to do with your business is. There are different solutions to a problem. In my case with Creative Warehouse, for example, there are lots of different companies which are rivals to us. Some of them have big offices and they charge lots more money than us, but I still think we’ve got just as good, if not better, staff, but we do it with a more disparate model. We all work from home. We don’t have a big office. We’ve got one when we need it. It’s much more flexible and informal. That’s my way of doing it. So there are different solutions to the problem that you’re solving.

Primark – there’s an interesting example, Primark. What’s the problem Primark are addressing first of all? Cheap clothing, yes – they wouldn’t use the word ‘cheap’. I suspect they’d probably use the word ‘value’, value clothing, so there’s the problem. That leads to the target customer, which is people without a great deal of money, and their solution of course is to have a ‘oomph’, massive stores in the high street, but then they don’t need to have that solution. They could have done it online. That was just their choice, and they don’t really do online, Primark. You’ve got lots of competitors online, but still people like to go into stores, so there’s all sorts of different solutions. The thing to think about with your solution is: what does that lead me to in terms of the structure, the look of my company? As with Creative Warehouse, we all work from our own homes. That’s easy, so we have minimal overheads, if any, but we all look after each other. That means we can undercut a lot of the bigger companies but still provide a really good quality of service. That’s good for us. Uber, they’re helping people get around but they’re doing it by lots of software, technology, and then linking up drivers and passengers. Voi do it by investing in scooters. It’s interesting. You can identify a problem but still come up with various different solutions.

Have a think again for a couple of minutes now about the innovation you’re planning, your idea for a business. How is your business actually going to be structured? How will it look? What form will it take? Are you going to have physical offices? Nothing wrong with that if you want them. Do you need them? They cost money of course. Is there another way of doing it? What would you need in terms of hardware or software? What would need to go into it? Have a think about that for a minute. It’s an interesting one because solution, it’s not always obvious, not always obvious at all. All right, see how it’s progressing. We’ve got the problem which takes us to the target customer, so we see what problem we’re solving, why people will pay us for it, and we see who those people are. We see how we’re going to put our structure in place in order to deal with it – our solution. But you might have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t communicate it properly, you’re going nowhere. This is where my area of life comes in.

So the next thing we need to look at is the value proposition. Now the value proposition is the absolute gold standard of communicating the importance, the value, the worth of your business, but the clever part is you do it in very simple, straightforward, appealing and often emotional terms. The idea of this is that you can sum up the soul of your business, why anyone should be interested in it, in no more than – wait for it – nine words. Nine words maximum, and that should still help us understand exactly what your business does, in an instant – just nine words – and make us interested in it, make this appeal, find the appeal. So how do we achieve this apparent miracle, which is one of my favourite parts of the business world? We adopt a heroes and villains approach. The hero is you coming to our rescue to solve the problem that the villain has posed, which is the issue which they are struggling with. So villain is the problem you’re solving. The hero is you riding to our rescue to save us from this problem. Remember in this, you’ve only got nine words. You’ve got to give me a clear understanding of what your business does in only seconds. Modern attention spans are short. You’ve got make me go, ‘Oh, that looks interesting,’ and draw me into finding out more. It’s quite a challenge and I quite enjoy doing this when I’m doing business communications.

Here are three examples. First of all, I’ll give you the headline core value proposition, and then you see how it works for a business. Here’s your first one: Save money without thinking about it. There is six words, just six words: ‘Save money without thinking about it’. What does it tell you about this business? Well, it tells you that it’s obviously some sort of financial product which helps you save money, so you know straightaway what it does. Does it make you interested? Who doesn’t want to save money without thinking about it? Does it prompt an emotional reaction? Yes, I feel good about that, thinking that my money was being saved without me having to make any effort. Is that a real business? You bet it is. There’s an app called Digit which does exactly what it says on the tin. It keeps a check on all your spending and your income, day by day by day, builds up a picture of it and squirrels away what money you can afford at the end of every day. That is their headline value proposition: ‘Save money without thinking about it’. Just six words identifies the problem – it’s really hard to save money because I haven’t got much of it and there’s loads of calls on my purse. They’re the heroes riding to our rescue to save us from this problem. They help us save money. Says what it does and also makes us think, hey, that sounds cool! Prompts a reaction in us. Clever, isn’t it, in just six words. That’s the headline or core value proposition, and you’ll see under that there’s another paragraph of about 20 words, which is where they expand on it, and you can have one of those afterwards, but the really important part is the headline.

In modern life it’s all very, very busy. People only look for a few seconds before deciding whether it’s something they’re interested in, so you have nine words. You’ve got to hook them from the very start. So that’s Digit. Have a look at another one: ‘Make your website better instantly’. Just five words this time: ‘Make your website better instantly’. They’ve told us what they do – the problem is your website’s not performing the way you want it to do. It’s not getting you customers. It’s not getting you interest. This lot are going to be our heroes. They’re going to make it perform better instantly. Does it make us go, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting’? Yes. Does it draw us in emotionally, say, ‘Oh, I want some of that’? Yes, it does. Is it a real business? You bet it is – Crazy Egg. They do a heat map of your website, tell you where’s working, where isn’t, where people are clicking, where they’re not, where they’re interested, where they aren’t. They can tell you in an instant how to make your website better. In just five words. Five words – problem, that your website’s not working. Heroes, Crazy Egg, saving us from the problem. Five words tells us what they do and makes us go, ‘Oh, that’s clever – I’m interested in that.’ If I can make my website better instantly, prompts a happy reaction.

Final one: ‘Tap the app, get a ride’. Simple as that. I’ve mentioned it a few times. What’s the problem? I need to get somewhere. Here’s the solution, the hero coming to my rescue to save me from the problem. All so very simple. Wow! Is it lazy? Prompts an emotional reaction. That of course is Uber. Again, you see there’s a paragraph below that, but the headline is really important because the headline grabs your attention, draws you in, just like with a newspaper. Oh! Makes you look further, draws you in. So that’s your core value proposition, and when I’m doing business communications work, this is where I and Creative Warehouse start with any company. It’s a curiosity of communications, but often the fewest words take the most time and the most effort because nailing what you do – and all of those have got brilliant technology, massive, brilliant technology – nailing what you do in just a few words is really, really hard. So of course, I’m now going to set you the challenge. See if you can come up with a core value proposition. I will confess, these things often take me three or four hours, let alone three or four minutes, but sometimes they can come just like that. Think if you can get yours.

Heroes and villains approach: what’s the villain? The problem you’re solving. You’re the hero rescuing us from it. You’ve got nine words maximum to draw me in, tell me what you do, loud and clear, and make me feel a happy, warm buzz of emotion that you are going to be my saviour in this problem, in just nine words maximum. That’s the core value proposition and that is the foundation of all your communications for your business, how you tell people what it is, why it’s magnificent, why it’s worth investing in or being a part of. The next thing we need to look at on our lean canvas is this fellow, the unfair advantage. Life is hard. The world is tough. If you come out with a brilliant innovation but you can’t protect it in any way, someone will copy it and nick it and they will steal all your honour and glory, not to mention money. So you have to find a way to make what you have got difficult to either buy or copy. You want your unique ability, your unique power with this business, to be very difficult to copy or indeed to be bought out. How do you do this? Let’s think about unfair advantage. Oh, God, that is an unfair advantage – don’t know why I chose that slide. Anyway, thinking about unfair advantages, just a thought: Primark – we did Primark earlier on. What was the Primark unfair advantage? Well, of course, it’s value, also known as cost, so that’s obviously their unfair advantage, and nobody has matched it or really tried to match it. Go to the other extreme. What’s the John Lewis unfair advantage? You wouldn’t find an £8 hoodie in John Lewis, would you? What’s their unfair advantage? What are they known for? Why do they survive, even though the high street struggles? Yes, quality and service, isn’t it? It’s quality, taste and service. They like to be the up-market one. People don’t just like to shop there – they like to be seen to shop there. Cambridge, you can’t get into John Lewis because there’s all these people who want to show off that they’re shopping at John Lewis. Yes, so it’s quality, but it’s important to think about your unfair advantage.

What have you got that cannot easily be copied or bought? Some other thoughts: University of Cambridge – what’s their unfair advantage? Interestingly, if I compare and contrast it with Anglia Ruskin University, which is the other university in Cambridge. Yes, Anglia Ruskin have done very well. Cambridge of course have got the history. They’ve got 800-plus years of history, which understandably then brings a lot of wealth and therefore brings a lot of prestige because you can go back through the years, and they’ve got the Nobel prize-winners and all that sort of stuff. Can’t be bought, can’t be copied, so it’s a really useful unfair advantage. Anglia Ruskin, a much more modern university, how did they find their niche? Going to be a pretty big challenge, isn’t it, coming into Cambridge, setting up a university in the shadow of the University of Cambridge. Actually, they’ve done it brilliantly and I do enjoy working for Ruskin sometimes because they have set themselves up to be a terrific vocational university. Whereas Cambridge does a lot of degrees that might not actually have much in the world of real applications, Ruskin do fantastic degrees for young people who know what they want to do and then get off and do it. The other thing that Ruskin does very well is it’s a great part of the community. The University of Cambridge less so. Anglia Ruskin are very embedded with the local business community, really embedded with the local societies, charities, organisations, which is an interesting way of doing it. So their unfair advantage was to become much stronger in the community and much more down to earth, if you like. They didn’t even try to compete with Cambridge, but their unfair advantage was something completely different.

Then of course my baby, Creative Warehouse. What’s our unfair advantage? We get lots of competition. I decided it would be two things. We talked about price earlier on. We don’t have a headquarters, so I can keep prices down but really, I didn’t want to compromise on quality, so here is our unfair advantage – it’s our team. Here’s three of them. You’ve only got to look at their brief bios. John is former deputy editor of the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4 and has been through some extraordinary broadcasting. Lucy’s ex-‘Guardian’ and ‘Times Educational Supplement’ and ‘Independent’, and Mark was the head designer of Cambridge University before he founded his own studios and then rather daftly threw in his lot with me. So think about what your unfair advantage is. What could it be? It could be price. It could be service. It could be the quality. It could be simply that you have a technology so brilliant that no one else knows how to make it work or copy. Google is not far off with sort of thing. You need some form of unfair advantage, so have a think for a second. Have a couple of minutes to think about this. What unfair advantage could you build into your business to make it very difficult for anyone else to replicate exactly what you do?

The next thing we need to tick off on our lean canvas is channels. Again, we’ve got to get the word out about your business, otherwise your business isn’t going to have any customers, and that wouldn’t be a terribly good business. That’s business 101, by the way, important tip that you need some customers. Channels: how are we going to get the word out about what you do? There’s a potential here for creativity, which we’ll explore in a sec, but if you want to bring your offering to the world – you’ve got a fantastic offering, something you’re already working on – what channels do you use? How do you tell the world about it? Remember as well, you’ve got your target customer particularly in mind, so where are those target customers most likely to be susceptible to get your message? Quick question for you: what is the best possible channel? What is the one that people react to best, which they love? Which in my experience, once you’ve had this work for you, it’s almost certain you will get the deal – you’re pretty much there. What’s the very, very best form of channel for people hearing about what you do? This is something which I base pretty much all of our businesses on at Creative Warehouse, and it’s personal recommendations.

There is no power like personal recommendations. It really is remarkable, and that is what I based Creative Warehouse on – personal recommendations. Really, really, really important, and really important because you can’t buy it and people only tend to give it because they’re putting their own credibility on the line if they genuinely believe it, so channels-wise it’s really, really important. So, if you can get personal recommendations – and that normally comes from doing a good job and helping people out and making sure they’re loved and looked after – that’s really, really important. Really important, okay, so you’ve got a whole range of different channels. Actually, what I did was I went round and did free hour or two-hour workshops on business communication at various business parks or accelerators or laboratories here in Cambridge, and within a few weeks had lots of business for it because people immediately picked up that I knew what I was doing. I was willing and keen to help them because I didn’t just try and sign them up from the start. I listened to their problems during the Q and A and I offered solutions. They kept in touch. We kept working together, and suddenly lots of business, so there is creativity so well identified there as well. So word of mouth is your best, which of course then means you’ve got to have good customer service, do what you’re doing well.

There’s lots of different channels. Don’t always leap to advertising, not even necessarily social media. You can be more creative than that. You can give talks. You can do workshops. Business organisations will take you to do that for free. They understand that they are getting something, their members are getting something, and you’re getting a platform, so that’s quite useful for you as well. Let’s move on to our final bits of the puzzle, of the lean canvas. The next one we’ve got to think about, number seven, is your cost structure. Now we’re getting into more the minutiae of the business, but obviously it’s important because if you are spending lots and lots and lots of money on making a business work, but not getting enough money in, then you’ve got a problem with your business. With the cost structure you tend to think of the biggest cost first of all. For most companies, most businesses, what’s the biggest cost going to be? You’ll be very unusual if you’ve got an organisation where it isn’t salaries and staff, so that’s probably your most important one, but then think about what else you’ve got. Of course, the picture there shows you why the high street is in so much trouble, because you’ve got these wonderful old buildings which are really, really expensive to rent or at least look after. Then on comes the online world and completely undercuts them and they’re really, really struggling. So got to think carefully about your cost structure and how you can make it work for you.

Interesting example with cost structure, for example with YouTube. YouTube’s massive. It’s the second biggest online site. It’s got about two billion users, so it’s second after Facebook. It’s absolutely massive. Obviously, it’s got lots and lots of potential for advertising to bring money in. No one knows really, apart from the owners, who are Google, whether YouTube is profitable. Interesting, isn’t it? They’ve got all these people who use it. It’s massive in terms of profile. It’s really, really important, really prominent, but it’s suspected probably it doesn’t make a profit. Why doesn’t it make a profit? What is the biggest cost for YouTube after staff and why does it struggle so much to make a profit? You’ve got this enormous, monster social media platform and yet if you look how much money Facebook and Co make, YouTube probably doesn’t. Any guesses why? The overheads of sustaining the amount of video that people put on there are absolutely immense in terms of storage and electricity, power, running costs, so it probably doesn’t even make a profit. It’s interesting, isn’t it? This enormous flagship social media site – Google tend to run it because it’s so prominent and so useful for them, but it probably doesn’t make them any money. So you’ve got to think carefully about this business of mine – it might be a brilliant business, but if it’s so expensive to run, how am I ever going to make it work as a business? My example with Creative Warehouse, how do I make it work, the business? Well, I wanted to make sure we could charge reasonable amounts because in Cambridge the start-up entrepreneurship space is massive. I like working with them because they’re really interesting, they’re dynamic, they’re innovative. It’s generally interesting people, but they don’t have a lot of money when they’ve only raised seed funding or a few million pounds, so I wanted to be able to keep our costs down to work with them. Which meant no headquarters, no swanky headquarters, nothing like that. People who could work happily from home. As you’ve probably seen from the bios that I showed you earlier on about the unfair advantage, my team are all of a similar age to me – 40s, 50s. We don’t really have to work too much. We’ve probably got a home life. We’ve got hobbies. We like to do two or three days of a week, so we’re happy to work from home, and with family go out, do other stuff, and then do our work as well. So think about your cost structure. It’s all right to have a great business, but you’ve got to make sure that you’re not costing yourself so much to run it that you can’t actually make a profit out of it, so think about that.

Then linked to that is our revenue streams. These two go hand in hand. How much am I going to spend on running my business? Now how am I going to get the money in? What’s my revenue streams? How am I going to get the money in? You’ve got to get more money in than you’re spending, so let’s have a look at revenue streams as well. Obviously, you want as many revenue streams as you can, and sometimes it’s more subtle than the obvious example of what your revenue streams might be. Uber – we’ve done this already – what are the revenue streams for Uber? Well, everybody always says of course the passengers. Yes, they get a cut of that, but they get a cut of what the drivers are paying as well, so they have a dual revenue stream. Even then, Uber are only just struggling into profitability now because they spent so much money on tech. Tech is really hard, and also now they’ve got lots of competitors who’ve realised they can do the tech as well, so Uber may be struggling. So how do you get the money in? Let’s look at more subtle examples. Tesco: first of all, a really easy question, no-brainer. You know what Tesco’s main revenue stream is, but what else does Tesco do to bring money in? What other little side hustles does it have to maximise its revenue? What other revenue streams are there for Tesco? They’ve got out of just doing groceries. They’ve diversified, as you say, into mobile phone service, into banking, petrol, all that sort of thing, yes. So the revenue streams, you’ll often have one very obvious one, as with Uber, as with Tesco, but then there’ll be other ones as well. Here’s one close to my heart and I hope some of yours as well: Liverpool FC. What are the Liverpool FC revenue streams? How do they make money? You’ve got the merchandise; you’ve got the hospitality; you’ve got the TV licensing deals. What they’re doing is they’ve got a very well-known, very popular brand, and of course they’re looking across the piece: how many revenue streams can we actually set up from this?

Let’s do a quick little exercise now just for a minute. Just have a think how you could make sure you have more than just a single revenue stream for the business you’re thinking about. What revenue streams could you use? What revenue streams could you set up to get money coming into you? Just have a think about that for a minute. We are almost at the end of our lean canvas. That’s eight of nine, so the final thing, which is not terribly exciting, but we’ve got to do it anyway to make sure our business is working, it’s not going to bankrupt us, and it is going to make us loads and loads of money. The final thing to think about is key metrics. You’ve got to measure certain significant things about your business to make sure it is actually working as a business. So, key metrics-wise, think about what the most important things are. Is it number of customers? Is it number of subscribers? What is it? Think about the key metrics for Uber. Well, I’ve used Uber as a case study all through, so the key metrics for them, obviously they need a load of drivers or they’re not going anywhere, and they need a load of passengers using a load of drivers. They’ll have an idea of all of those particularly from their app, which is a massive piece of technology, which is why they spend so much money and why they might not even make a profit. But anyway, key metrics for Uber: drivers, passengers, people downloading their app. Yes, think about the key metrics.

What are the key things that you need to measure to make sure your business is working? Keep an eye on the money that’s coming in, the money that you’re spending, and the key metrics, whether it’s sign-ups, whether it’s Nobel prizes, whether it’s student surveys or whatever. That was it. That was a whistle through the nine areas of the lean canvas, so to recap. Problem – there is no business without a problem. What’s your problem? Your problem then leads you to the target customers, the people having this problem. That leads you to the solution. The shape of your business – is it going to be a diaphanous thing or is it going to have an office? How’s it going to work? Value proposition – you did really, really well with that – nine words maximum to sum up your business. Unfair advantage – how are you going to make sure you’re winning and also can’t be copied easily? Channels – how are you going to get the word out there? Not always obvious, not always advertising, not always social media. It can be more subtle than that as you picked up on – good. Cost structure – how much money are you spending to do your stuff? Revenue streams – how much money are you bringing in and how can you maximise those to make sure you’re profitable? Key metrics – the way of keeping on top of all that, measuring what you need to measure just to make sure your business is okay.

Do keep in touch with me. I mean it – I like hearing how people get on, and get in touch if I can help with anything else.

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