You just never know what pearls of wisdom Joanna will pop up with next. Welcome back for 2010, Joanna!

I recently came across a Harvard blog post by Mark Johnson on reinventing your business model.

A confession: I’m not the full bottle on business models, and have used only rudimentary or ad hoc versions in the past.

But as soon as I read this post, I saw that here was a model I could implement – and so that’s what I am doing right now.

It works like this. First up 3 questions:

1. Why would someone want to buy something from you?
2. How will you make money selling it?
3. What, exactly, are the important things you need to do to pull off the plan?

The answers go into 4 boxes (question 3 is answered in two parts):

Box 1:Your customer value proposition – what is it that you offer that meets a customer’s needs in a way that is different and/or better than the competition?

Box 2: How many can you sell at X price minus Y costs? Johnson has a more complex version of this question, that goes like this (I am quoting here):

• Revenue model – simply, quantity times price
• Cost structure – not only direct costs and indirect costs, but also overhead, which too many companies think of as immutable
• Margin model – though technically part of the cost structure, I break it out separately because all too often companies mistake their margins for their entire profit formula and have tremendous difficulty understanding how a lower – margin opportunities could ever be profitable
• Resource velocity – often overlooked as a profit generator, this measures how many widgets a company can invent, design, produce, warehouse, ship, service, sell, and pay for throughout the value chain for a given amount of investment, for a given amount of time. In some sense, it’s a measure of not how much money flows through your company but how quickly it flows through it.

Box 3: What resources are required to deliver your offering?

Box 4: What processes are required to deliver your offering?

I think this looks like a good model for those of us who tend to avoid models. What do you think?

Joanna Maxwell, Owner, WorkInColour

Have I mentioned that I’m busy, really busy? Well, now I am REALLY REALLY busy and life is so hard, and it’s not fair, and I will never get all this done, and it’s all my fault for taking on too much, and are there really only three weeks to Christmas, and why doesn’t anyone ever help me, and it’s not fair and it’s too much, and I will never manage it all and…

I could go on, but you get the drift, I am sure…

I am busy, that’s true. And I have probably taken on a bit too much, that’s true, too. But the rest? That’s just the story I tell myself whenever the ante is upped and the pressure increases. It’s a familiar story, it’s a strangely comfortable place to be, but is it real? Not really. Is it helpful? Absolutely not!

I’ve spent the last week or so acutely aware that I am just telling and retelling an old story, but still seemingly powerless to extract myself from it. Waking in the night with the story running round my head like a broken record (sorry, malfunctioning MP3 file…). Catching myself at odd moments wailing to myself like some self-pitying child. Playing out a three-act tragedy, with roles for the those little voices in my head – and the Martyr and the Despairing One holding auditions for the lead part. Hearing the rising panic in my voice as I juggle one more commitment or explain to my son that we have run out of juice because I just didn’t have time to buy it. Aware that all this drama was actually preventing any truly creative thought – it was a masquerade, not the real thing.

All this drama had to stop, but how?

Well, I tried ramping up my productivity (with some success) and I delegated things to my fabulous virtual assistant (with some success) and I did breathing exercises (with some success) and I repeated the Buddhist mantra that ‘This too will pass’ (with some success) and I reminded myself that I will have a lovely break after Christmas (with some success).

But the play wasn’t over. At best, I had reached interval…the players were off-stage, but already changing into their costumes for the third act.

Then last night, I saw the word ‘Surrender’ written on a wall. That was it. Not resistance, not submission, but Surrender.

The tension melted, the players left the theatre, I slept through the night. I woke this morning refreshed and with a sense of space around my story.

Today, I can actually do all the work, be creative and productive, reclaim my headspace.

Today I feel free.

Joanna Maxwell, Owner, WorkInColour

For many small business owners, starting a new business was the biggest risk they’re ever likely to take. Today Joanna Maxwell ponders those leaps of faith and encourages others to take the plunge, because they all make sense in retrospect.

I recently rediscovered the YouTube video of Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement address. He talks about his own university experiences, and in particular, his decision to drop out.

This was a big thing for him (he describes it as ‘pretty scary’), because his biological parents had stipulated that whoever adopted him had to agree to send him to university.

Jobs talks about the need to trust himself, to ‘trust that it would all work out OK’. He hung around campus for 18 months after dropping out, taking classes that interested him.

Here’s how he tells it:

“I decided to take a calligraphy class…I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them.

“If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

It’s worth reading Jobs’ speech in full.

And it’s worth thinking about trusting yourself, going with your hunches sometimes, even if you can only connect the (logical) dots with hindsight. When I think about my career(s), I particularly remember my fierce sense that corporate law was not for me – and how long it took me to trust my instinct and actually do something about becoming a writer and an idea sharer instead.

What would you change if you really trusted yourself?

Joanna Maxwell, Owner, WorkInColour

Is Twitter relevant to your small business? Guest blogger Joanna Maxwell shares her experiences with the popular microblogging tool and explains how it’s helped her business.

It seems you can’t turn around these days without tripping over a reference to Twitter. Most people have at least a hazy idea that it has something to do with ‘microblogging in maximum 140 characters’.

I started my social media adventures with Facebook (which I only joined because my favourite online scrabble game went there).

After a while I got interested in social media for my own business and now I’m on Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn, Squidoo, Ning and more…

Twitter in particular has brought me contacts, ideas and information…it’s like a river flowing past my door, that I can dip into whenever I like.

I became so fascinated that I recently wrote an article for the Australian Financial Review BOSS magazine called ‘Beyond Twitter’, May 2009 issue. 

So how do you get started on Twitter? Here’s five tips:

1. Joining is easy at the twitter website. Be careful when you choose a username, because it will appear on every post you make and can’t be changed. If you are joining for business reasons, choose your business name or at least something that won’t embarass you later! (I am on Twitter as @workincolour).

2. Follow a couple of people to start with. This means you will see a stream of their posts and also posts from others that they have retweeted (like forwarding). If any of these look interesting, follow them too. Feel free to follow me.

3. You can search for people here, or search for subjects that interest you here.

4. Stuck? Watch the ‘get started’ video here or find answers to FAQs. One of the best websites about social media is http://mashable.com/.

5. Once you have the look, download a twitter organiser like Tweetdeck which means you can highlight your favourite people and have easier access to all the twitter functions.

The best way to get the hang of Twitter is to jump in and see what you find.

Hope to see you in the twitterverse!

Joanna Maxwell, Owner, WorkInColour

Connect with Joanna on Twitter and LinkedIn

Today we welcome back Joanna Maxwell of WorkInColour to Small Business Owner. Joanna shares how great tapas inspired this post!

I recently had an amazing lunch at Melbourne’s MoVida tapas bar, and the experience reminded me of some great business advice – find what you do really well and focus on improving it, becoming expert at it and making your business or career revolve around it.

Play with it, add to it, improvise and have fun, but stick to a core theme that works for you, that expresses what you are really good at, the ‘essence’ of you.

You see, MoVida does exactly that – they do tapas and other Spanish food, and that’s it. They do it REALLY well, but you won’t find any Asian fusion dishes or middle eastern specialities here.

That said, as chef and co-proprietor Frank Camorra says in the fabulous MoVida cookbook , each dish is handcrafted and slightly different to the rest.

Some ingredients have been substituted for Australian varieties, some dishes have been improvised, some are really adventurous, but it all comes back to the roots of tapas and other Spanish food. The service is sublime and their enthusiasm for the food and the customer’s experience of it is palpable.

Their manifesto:

- Be led by the season and let the produce create the menu.
- Find a source of (regional) inspiration.
- Create but remain true to the source of both the produce and the inspiration.
- Explore and be curious with new techniques.
- Reject pointless complication and embrace the beauty of simplicity.

With not so very many changes, that could be any business’s manifesto:

- Be led by your strengths and let them create your business offerings or career path.
- Find a source of (external, client-driven) inspiration.
- Create but remain true to the source of both your strengths and the inspiration.
- Explore and be curious with new techniques.
- Reject pointless complication and embrace the beauty of simplicity.

Each time I have eaten at MoVida, the dishes are different, the ingredients vary, but the quality is always brilliant and the experience is always ‘essence of MoVida’. That’s why I come back, for their perfect blend of consistency and variety.

How could you offer that, in your career or your business? What is your ‘essence of MoVida’?

Joanna Maxwell, Owner, WorkInColour

Today we’re lucky to have a post from Joanna Maxwell, owner of WorkInColour. Joanna specialises in helping people tap into their creative side and also coaches those looking for a change in career. In today’s tough times, standing out from the pack is more important than ever – so let’s get those creative juices flowing!

I’ve been a fan of Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping technique for at least 15 years. I use it most days for one thing or another. I plan workshops, map out articles to write, prepare my class notes – and daydream possibilities for fixing up the back yard.

Mind mapping has become so much part of how I think that I had really begun to take it for granted. Whereas I used to teach it to every group and most of the individual clients I came across, over the last year or two I had started to think it was as obvious and unnecessary as trying to teach someone how to make a shopping list….

So, for a while I got slack about it. (I even started to wonder if this Tony Buzan fellow was really worth all the fuss – after all, anyone could have invented shopping lists.)

But then a few weeks ago I went to the Happiness Conference in Sydney and heard Tony Buzan give a keynote. I also went to his post-conference workshop and was awestruck all over again with his presentation and examples of the uses for this simple technique. It only seems obvious because it mimics the way we think, the way the brain actually works. That’s the power of it, and its elegance.

Mind mapping allows you to tap into your left and right brains at the same time – to use images and association, logic and intuition, big picture and fine detail all at once. It’s a bit like making a street map to your destination.

(And it’s fun.)

So, starting with my corporate workshop in Melbourne on Wednesday, mind mapping is back on my agenda.

Here are some tips:

• Put an image in the centre for the main idea – add a word or phrase.
• Use a colour to draw a branch out from the centre…add a word that relates to an aspect of your project.
• One word or concept per branch, each branch connecting to the central image.
• Add sub branches around the main ones.
• Let your imagination go – you can always edit later.
• Use pictures to prompt your memory.
• Lots of colour is great.

Check out Buzan’s website for ideas, a gallery of maps and more inspiration: http://www.buzanworld.com/Mind_Maps.htm

Joanna Maxwell, Owner, WorkInColour