Tag: change

Changing the model

Posted on by philipdodson

The current model is we make, create, offer a service and seek to be paid for it. When we seek we often sell, manipulate, in some extremes it’s almost coercion to get paid.

We fix a price and we build our whole business model around an expected return. Businesses go out and seek investors to spend money marketing their offering to people to get money to ultimately pay back the investors.

There is a huge amount of money, time, effort and resources that go into this model of how do we make people pay.

What if we changed the model and created, then gave away our services and let people pay what they thought the value was. So if they felt there was no value then they wouldn’t pay.

What if we focused on creating something amazing knowing that the right people would value it and would pay for it? Sure there is a huge risk, but risk creates an impetus to ensure we create something valuable.

We could be surprised that they would often pay more than the fixed price we’d imagined we could make them pay.

The other thing that would happen is we would all have to focus more not just on creating something valuable but on creating trust and better human connection.

What could a business built on trust, offering value and focusing on human connection offer that a business focused on ways to make people pay couldn’t?

Perhaps it’s time to be brave enough to change to a different model and see how it might make a difference.

After all surely the act of allowing people to choose to decide what to pay is better than making them pay.

Getting back on track

Posted on by philipdodson

We are all human, we are not robots, we are not perfect, we all make choices that with hindsight weren’t the best.

Our initial reactions and our habits often lead us to go off track. It is not that we set out to mess up, no one ever does. It is often when we have allowed anger or hurt or any combination of emotions to cloud our initial reaction to being the wrong choice.

This in itself does not matter, what counts is learning to recognise that we are going off track, recognise the triggers, is then the next step. What we can eventually learn is to handle the situations that trigger these reactions differently. Still, though it requires one more thing once we see the triggers or we recognise that we are reacting badly, that is to get back on track by letting go, by stepping back and changing behaviour, by changing our mindset, by changing the reaction. It is the vulnerability to be able to switch from one course, that we know is wrong, and relinquish to what we know is a better choice.

It requires us to move out of blame thinking, it requires us to step away from having to win, to not being seen as weak by stepping back from an angry reaction. There is nothing wrong with making a bad choice, the damage is done to ourselves and potentially others when we continue to go off track knowingly and stay stuck.

All of this is not easy to learn and requires empathy and patience with ourselves. But like anything that is hard in life, it’s what makes a difference and it’s what matters. For me, this is an ongoing work in progress as someone who has had a lifetime of being right and having to win.