Business Model Innovation Hub
... where visionaries, game changers, and challengers discuss business models
Your personal business model: Business Model You!
What does your business model look like? Or what does your personal business model look like? Tim Clark - one of our BMGEN core team members took the initiative to start writing a book about your personal business model together with Alex and Yves.
How would such canvas look like? Who are your business customers? Or who are your private customers? What is your personal purpose in life and how can the personal business model canvas help you making better decisions.
Join the BMYou! Hub at www.businessmodelyou.com where you can contribute, discuss and comment on the stuff what Tim, Alex and Yves are writing. You can also look at the (again) fascinating designs that Alan is producing together with Trisha.
In Amsterdam we ran a pilot on business model you! Here we work with artists, creatives, designers etc. on their personal business model. See some pictures here below. 
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Tim Clark on -
Very cool, Patrick!
The idea driving Business Model You! is that by considering ourselves single-person enterprises, we can use the Canvas to develop "personal business models" to improve or even reinvent our work lives.
While editing BMG and making a few minor content contributions, it occurred to me that the Canvas methodology might be applicable to individuals as well as to organizations. This is something Daniel Pandza had mentioned on the Hub as well. I tried it out on myself, and was struck by the power of drawing a personal business model.
What the PBM clarified for me were a couple of things I had gradually been coming to realize while teaching master's level entrepreneurship courses in a business school for the past seven years.
First, even MBA students often lack experience with P&L fundamentals and a strong, entrepreneurial overview of how organizations get started and function. The Canvas seemed like an ideal tool for teaching entrepreneurship basics.
Second, more than the business aspects of entrepreneurship per se, I enjoyed helping students on a personal level, with defining and pursuing their career goals in an entrepreneurial manner, and with developing skills that go beyond business, particularly writing and presentation. Not only did the Canvas help me understand a course correction I wanted to make in my own career, it was clearly a powerful tool to help others with their careers.
So that's how the idea of personal business models based on the Canvas came about. We believe BMY can help a tremendous number of people who are not business professionals: teachers, health care professionals, government employees, social workers, etc. Here's a blog post I wrote for a lay audience that provides an example of a PBM in action.
Hub members who have joined BMY and contributed greatly include Ernest Buise, Jelle Bartels, Mike Lachapelle, and Marieke Post, among others. We now have nearly 100 contributors from 15 countries. And above you can see one book cover mocked up by our design-like-no-tomorrow team of Trish Papadakos and Alan Smith.
Good fun!
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Permalink Reply by Jelle on -
Hi Tim,
Thank you! Great to see we are of some help to you and all the other BMyou-ers.
I attended the meeting which Patrick posted the pictures off. That meeting was really great! People did understood that there business was all depending of their own input and directly saw the similarity between their business- and personal model.
This meeting was a try-out and was already great. It was like a pressure cooker. A lot of those people are struggling with their business and we made them see that there isn't a lot of difference between their business and how they would live their lives. I can imagine how a meeting could be if we put context (where are you at right now) and vision (where do you want to go) before the modeling. That sure would be a great eyeopener!
On the hub of Business Model You there is now a great deal of things going on about vision. It would be great if more people joined also to help to get the canvas right. The 9 building blocks are great but in my opinion needs some reviewing to get the right blocks for the personal (working)life one.
So... everybody who is interested in the Business Model Generation, please join and help us out! It would be great to have anonther book what will make a difference :)!
Best wishes, live your dream,
Jelle
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Permalink Reply by Tim Clark on
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Sounds like a terrific event, Jelle.
Yes, soon we'll be diving into more specifics of using the Canvas for personal rather than organizational business models.
This is where we can create a lot of value for lay readers.
I think most BMG enthusiasts are upper-level managers concerned with strategy in a variety of organizations, businesspeople, consultants, etc. This means we have an enormous opportunity (staggering, really) to bring business model thinking to teachers, health care professionals, government workers — people in every profession. Exciting!
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Permalink Reply by Megan Lacey on -
As the editor of Business Model You!, I thought this explanation might help illuminate the book's ideas and goals:
The vision for BMY is to bring business model thinking to people outside of business: teachers, health care professionals, government employees, and others.
Khushboo Chabria, who joined us yesterday, is a good example of the reader we want to serve. Chabria came to the U.S. at age 11; she's currently a human development and psychology student at the University of California, San Diego. Her long-term goal is to work toward making health care universally available and affordable worldwide. As she recognizes, every health care system in the world—particularly ours here in the U.S.—has huge problems. We believe that one group of people who can benefit from learning to use the business model canvas are those who, like Chabria, hope to devote personal and professional energy to effecting change in troubled or damaged sectors.
BMY starts off by explaining business model thinking and P&L fundamentals in language anyone can understand. We feel this is a viable for readers, again like Chabria, who are likely to complete their studies with little if any business training.
BMY stresses that readers first learn to apply the canvas to their own workplaces before applying it to their personal careers. This way, we are convinced that we can help readers relate their career objectives to greater issues they face both at work and in the larger communities they serve.
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Permalink Reply by Erwin Fielt on -
Thanks for this update Patrick, sounds interesting. I have planed for some time to join the BMYou hub, but haven't taken any action yet. Would have been so much easier to have it under this hub.
In my unit for final year Bachelor of IT students, I address both career and business issues and also always stress the overlap between them and the use of the same tools such as ideation, BMG, SWOT, Blue Ocean or Portfolio Management. Interesting business model pattern in this area are the specialist, the generalist, and the T-shaped professional.
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Permalink Reply by Marieke Post on -
Thank you Tim! I feel very much engaged in the subject, so I very much enjoy contributing. But it always rocks to get credits ;)!
Referring to Patricks post...That looks like one great creative setting! Eager to hear Jelle's experience on this :). I just had an inspriring talk with a known -Internet-BusinessAngel- to whom I also spoke about the purpose of BMY. He was very interested. Mostly because he loves to invest in smart people and small companies, and acknowledges the fact that the human being behind the entrepreneur is the company's most valuable asset. Meaning that if he would know of a guideline, coaching service kind of proposition that would optimize the output of the entrepreneur he invested in, he would be very interested in investing in it as part of the investment in a specific company...Lot of investing involved here :).
Business Model You will most likely further evolve in a revolutionary guideline to help people reckognize their true value and effectuate it to a businessmodel that benefits their own ambitions and wishes in life. I know I am enjoying it already :)
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Permalink Reply by Tim Clark on
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@ Marieke
In a very real sense, for an entrepreneur with limited resources, personality (and personal drive) is the ultimate strategy. How else can he or she attract partners, employees, customers, or investors?
Ernest Buise points out a big difference between applying the Canvas to organizations versus individuals. Organizations can often attract many resources to the KR building block. But for individuals, the KR building block is, well ... you! (hence the "Y" in "BMY")
@ Erwin
We need your teaching approach here in the States. In my experience, business programs here do far too little with personal career development.
And in retrospect, that you're right -- it would have been more convenient to have integrated hubs. Hope you'll join us anyway!
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Permalink Reply by Andrea Rodriguez Rojas on -
I am so curious and excited about this new book, BMY can be an extraordinary tool. I live in Mexico and I want to help entrepreneurs and people to find their real passsion and guidelines in life, I think BMY is a powerfull tool. I still have some doubts making mine, like should I do one for every area in my life (relationships, professional, leisure, financial) or how do you recomend to use the canvas for my personal life?
thak u so mucho!
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Permalink Reply by Tim Clark on
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Andrea, so good to hear from you!
I suggest focusing on your professional life first - considering yourself a one-person enterprise, and figuring out who your Customers are and what your VP is.
Depending on how that goes, you may then want to revisit Key Resources (Key Resources means you personally -- your interests, skills/abilities, and personality) to make sure Key Resources harmonize with Key Activities (sometimes they do not) and that Key Activities are driving the appropriate VP. The new book offers lots of specifics about how to do that.
All the best!
Tim
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