The One-Page Business Profile: Clarity That Could Save Your Revenue & Sanity

Transcript

G’ Day.

My name is Mike from Lone Wolf Unleashed, and today I’m going to walk you through the one pager that could save your business and perhaps your sanity as well. Let’s kick off by saying that most solo operators can’t explain their business clearly in an emergency or rarely at all.

I was on a call last week with a lady who runs her own business.

She tried to have her business systemized with another local provider and they didn’t deliver something that was particularly good, which was disappointing to hear. And the biggest problem that she said to me was, I just don’t know where to start. Everything is very overwhelming. I just can’t get it out of my head.

I don’t know where to begin with doing this properly.

She was in the middle of doing a contract negotiation for some sort of software that’s quite niche to her area, and she just didn’t know the types of requirements that she would need to be thinking about as she went into that discussion. Her documents and everything were all in different places and not very well organized, and it was chaos.

And I get the feeling that there’s a lot of businesses like that out there. So today I’m going to walk you through the first P of my 4PS framework, and that is profile. We are going to profile your business.

This is the first step to breaking down the complexity of what your business is. Now, if you’re a solo operator, your business may not be very complex, and that’s okay. But this is a starting point.

We’re going to get in a helicopter and we’re going to fly over your business and we’re going to understand what makes your business tick.

And it’s a starting point for us to be able to break down so we can drill down into different areas of your business to try to get it to perform really well. This is what I’ve been leading companies through for the last 10 years.

We always start really high to get a really sort of good picture about the value that your business delivers. After we do that, we can very specifically target areas in your business that might be quite painful.

And in this case for you, ones that drain and become a time sucker. All right? We want to get rid of that monster and we want to turn it into a trained thing that delivers value to you, the business owner.

Not just value in terms of money, but value in terms of the time that it allows you to do other things. Okay, Remember that purpose, that purpose that you study your business for. Remember what you told yourself?

You told yourself it was going to be for flexibility and for freedom. Okay. Might not be going so well right now. And we want to get there and I’m going to help you do that. So let’s get into it profile.

I’m going to get into the psychology of why we don’t do this. So there’s going to be some things here. Documentation is really hard. Documentation takes time. Number one, the it’s all in my head delusion.

We think that we will remember everything because we built it. Our business feels too simple to document and that’s a lie. I’ll tell you why.

Everything that you have to take effort to remember something is effort that you could be putting into something else. So if you have it documented somewhere, you don’t need to think about that. You just know I can go there, I don’t have to think about it.

It’s why certain people wear the same thing every day, right? They know where it is. They’ve already decided what they’re doing. They don’t have to remember, they don’t have to think about it. They just do it.

So your simple business that has all of these moving pieces that you’ve internalized can now be let go. And that is quite fraying. Then there’s the imposter syndrome angle. So writing it down, it makes it real.

So some solo operators are afraid that their business looks too small on paper. But I’m going to give you something that’s going to set you free from that. Okay? Clarity beats complexity every time.

So a clear one pager will beat a vague 50 page business plan every time. There’s no doubt about it. If it’s clear, I can act on it. If it’s vague, I don’t know what to do with this person I’ve spoken to last week.

They have all these things going on in their head. They can’t seem to be able to get it down properly. This is going to help you get through that. Okay. The next one is the I’ll never need this myth.

It’s not just for emergencies. This is going to help you onboard contractors. It’s going to help you get bank loans.

It’s going to help you in partnership discussions and it’s going to help you sell the business. It will even help you with your personal life and it’s going to help you with your annual planning and saying no to out of scope work.

This is going to help you be really clear about what your business is doing to achieve your goals as a solo operator. So here’s the profile document. There will be a Link to this on my website, by the way. Lonewolfunleashed.com 4P profile.

That’s 4P profile, section one. Okay, we’re going to identify the what right? One sentence business model. Here’s the formula. Okay? I help specific.

Who achieve specific outcome through your method. Okay, so a bad example is I provide business solutions. Really vague. Look, you’re running a successful business.

You know what it’s like to target a specific market. You should be able to know this straight away.

I help overwhelmed dentists automate their patient booking so they can focus on dentistry, not administer. Right. Really specific. And this is gonna become your filter for everything. Now, we have a real value proposition, okay? It’s not marketing fluff.

It’s the real person and it’s the real reason people pay you. It’s the expensive problem that you solve. Okay? It’s the why you versus others, et cetera, et cetera.

The real value proposition is clients choose me because I fix their issues without requiring meetings. That’s an example. Then there’s the target market truth. Okay? Not who you want to work with, who actually pays you. Look at your last 10 invoices.

What do they have in common? Include the psychographics, what keeps them up at night, what red flags have you learned to avoid? All of those things.

Now we have section two, the value flow. The value flow are your processes.

So I’ve broken down on previous episodes how to do your first process map and what processes are and why they’re really important and what goes into them. All those sorts of things. Your value flow is the bridge between your supplier and your customer. It’s where value is created. It’s your magic.

And here you’re going to list the major ones. Okay, we’re not talking about specific tasks, we’re talking about.

Okay, how do I deliver an example here on that link of my website, there’s going to be a link to a Google sheet with some examples in it. Okay, so this is an example from Sarah’s WordPress care. One of her processes is client acquisition and qualification.

There’s another one for onboarding and site audit, another one for monthly maintenance cycle. There’s also key inputs and key outputs. What do I need from my client to be able to make this a success?

Do I need access to certain platforms, things like that? What are the key outputs?

Okay, Secure site maintenance, a monthly report, peace of mind to our response, guarantee those types of things, and then what are your critical dependencies? Okay, so for the value creation within your core processes, we’re Talking about the three to five things that you do to create value.

So it’s not detailed, it’s just the major buckets. So you might have different services or different adjacent services that you offer your customers.

You know, I think that pretty much any business should have, you know, an acquisition process or something like that. I think that’s definitely one of the major ones. But there’s also the how you deliver.

So if you’re delivering a service, you might have an onboarding and then you’ll have your type of delivery service. You might have issue resolution and support.

If you’re doing physical product, you might have a delivery literal pick pack, Tolkien deliver, returns type process. If you do have a physical product, you might want to look up the SCORE framework S C O R framework.

It’s a supply chain operations reference model, I believe it’s called score model. That leads you through some of the major processes that go into delivering physical product.

Each one of these processes becomes the next p in the four Ps. Okay? They’re your processes. So here we’re dealing with profile. The next one we’re dealing with processes.

So you can already start to see that this is becoming your scope for the next layer down. Okay, we’re starting to break it down into little pieces. Isn’t this great? We’re getting clear, we’re getting clarity, right?

We’re only in section two and we’re already starting to get good clarity about how to go for the next stage so we can continue to understand and optimize and systemize your business. So the example flow, you know, there’s some other examples here there.

So there’s intake and discovery, there’s solution design, there’s implementation, there’s quality checks, there’s delivery and handoff. Those might be some of your major processes that you go through. Put some notes against each of them. Give a summary about what it is. Right.

So for Sarah’s WordPress care, her client acquisition and qualification process, her notes against that are LinkedIn outreach and referrals. So where are the clients coming from? What channels are they coming from? Give some additional context.

It doesn’t have to be an essay, just some quick notes. Then we have the value outputs. So what goes out? So I touched on those before. Then we have a supplier reality check.

So what are my critical suppliers or partners to deliver this? What breaks if they disappear? And here we’re including software vendors, contractors, service providers, et cetera.

And critical means that the business will stop without them. Not, oh, I can start this video player in a different Application on my computer. No.

If I lose access to my CRM, this business is going to be in trouble, and it’s a fire that I really have to concentrate on putting out. Your CRM should definitely be listed on there.

So some other examples there might be your payment processor, your email service, or the one contractor who knows your entire system. The process preview. Okay, so we’ve named five to seven core processes, just names, and then we’ve put some notes against them.

They’re your value creation engines, and then they map on how you deliver value, so lead to client onboarding, service delivery, et cetera, et cetera. So this is dealing with operations.

Okay, so we have core services, tech stack, info architecture, all those types of things that we need to be thinking about. What are we actually selling? So the core services, what are we actually selling?

So for Sarah’s WordPress care, she’s selling monthly maintenance, emergency fixes, site audits, speed optimization, all those types of things.

Her notes then include what percentage of her revenue is monthly recurring, and then the price ranges or the rate structure of how she’s actually doing that. Then we have the tech stack. Okay, so under operations, the section and then the field is Tech Stack. What’s the value that we have in there?

Again, it’s not every tool. It’s just the major ones. You know, a whole bunch of different tools that she uses to deliver her core services.

And then underneath that we have another one for info architecture. Okay, where do the client files live? Where do the templates live? All those types of things are listed here.

Now, you have some options here because some of these things, your business might have a lot of different things that has to be listed that are critical. You don’t have to put all of this in one field. You can just copy the field multiple times down and make some different notes against that.

That should not be a problem. So then underneath that, we now have another section, which is financial flow. So this is looking at the money. All right, show me the money.

These are your revenue streams. Okay, so the first one under there is revenue streams.

We’re gonna follow the money through the value chain, which way the money comes in, which process generates revenue. So if you’ve got a different core process for each core service, and you’ve got that as a service offering, which is generating revenue, you’ve got.

You’re going to put down your different types of revenue streams in there and the amounts. Okay, then we have the cost structure. Again, under financials, what’s the cost structure? What are the fixed costs that Hit every month.

What are the variable costs? What are the hidden costs that you forget about, I. E. Your time that you spent building that silly automation that you never ended up using.

What real hourly rate do you have after all those costs? Which processes are profitable versus necessary evils? Okay, in retail they have a thing called a loss leader, right?

So you might have a necessary evil that you use to then deliver higher value services later on. So in retail, your loss leader might be your chocolates at the front of the store.

People come in for chocolates, they buy other stuff that’s of a higher margin. There’s those types of things that you need to be thinking about. Then we have your different banking and tools. Where’s the money sitting?

Do you have different accounts for different purposes? What payment processes are you using and what are their fees? And then what accounting software and key reports are you running?

So this gives us an idea about how you’re breaking down, how you’re tracking that and then how the money flows through. So I’ll give you a really simple example. For my business, I have a transaction account that my expenses go out of and my money comes into.

And then I have a separate tax account where I reserve any goods and services tax GST or pay G payments or superannuation that needs to be paid. Okay? So it’s basically money that’s not mine that I get paid.

So the client will pay me, let’s say $3,300, 10% of that, $3,000, which is $300, which is on top is GST. So that’s going to move into my tax account.

So I’m going to just really briefly outline that in the banking and tools there under the financial section. Then after that we have continuity, planning, right?

So if nothing else, okay, if we have to run on the absolute minimum right now because something’s happened, I’ve got a very minimum thing. You know, I’ve broken a leg, I’ve done whatever it is. How do I manage my business when I have very limited capacity?

What are the key relationships that I have? So list out your top clients, list out your top suppliers that you might need to deal with. Backup is Mike, who’s a contractor.

So three of those is 35% of her revenue. So she wants to keep them happy, right?

So the backup is, I can get Mike to do it because it’s gonna be worth maintaining those clients because they make up such a large chunk of her revenue. Then underneath that we have access protocols. So who has access to what? So what kind of permissions are we looking at?

And that’s just in case of personal emergency, right? If something has happened to you, how do we know what needs to happen with your business and your accounts and all those types of things?

Then we have work in progress. So that’s the last one.

So she’s got here, check notion, active projects, maintenance, monthly maintenance, first and third month support tickets, blah blah, blah, blah blah. Keep a short list of active projects or maintenance cycles so nothing gets missed.

So what you can do now is you can map this into a simple diagram that shows you this. So one box for each major step in your value creation. Where the arrows show the flow, suppliers on the left, customers on the right.

You’re on the magic in the middle. And this is your business at 30,000ft.

We’re basically flying over and we’re just picking out that those major landmarks of your business that we can spot. Why does this matter? So we’ve got now something that shows where your value is created. It reveals where the bottlenecks and dependencies are.

And it’s starting to identify which processes need to be documented first.

Because you are in your business all the time, 100%, you are already acutely aware of the types of pain that you’re suffering when you are trying to deliver. You’re already going to be thinking about the types of processes that need to be looked at first in this list.

So when we go to break down and do a decomposition of your processes into sub processes, we’re going to start to be able to really target and make sure that we cover off on those pain points straight away. We’re also going to be able to get from there a really good picture of how you use your time and how long different things take.

So what comes next after this? So what is the profile to process? Bridge, as I said earlier, we have now the profile has set up the process documentation. It has provided us a scope.

So each box in your value flow is now a process map that we can develop out. So the profile shows the forest and the process now will show the trees. The profile says what?

And the process says how Underneath all of this we’ll have our performance metrics that will measure these things. So now we can have a prioritization matrix. We’ve covered this on an episode as well. You can go back and listen to that.

It’s where I discuss how to form up a backlog of your different opportunities.

So we’re going to put on our backlog here which processes are the critical path, which create the most value, which Cause the most problems, document them first. So now we can have an example connection. What does the profile say? Onboarding creates first impression process details.

There might be a 12 step onboarding workflow that you have for your business. Right.

So we’re gonna throw those 12 steps onto a process map with your different dependencies and how it flows and how the tasks flow from one to another. And then the third P in the four P’s framework is procedures. Those will be in detail for each one of those tasks. Then performance tracks those.

So what are some examples of how this provides value and clarity? So we have a consultant, we’ve mapped their value flow and we realized that 30% of their effort created no value.

So we killed a reporting process that clients didn’t read and it freed up 10 hours per month. Why do I know? Because that consultant was me. I did that last year. Oh, I have a backup already prepared. I don’t have to worry about this.

Let me get on the phone. This clarity has allowed us to be proactive. Being proactive like this is not a waste of time. Even if you never use it, it is insurance for you.

You spend a small amount of time so you don’t have to worry later. Okay? So you can set yourself up to succeed at a later date where your competition would have failed. This is creating a competitive advantage.

This is why this is the one pager that you could save your business because it’s providing you clarity that you can act on.

So there are some key things here that when it comes to value flow mapping that I’m going to share more next week on when we cover the next P, which is processes. But some really, really quick stuff. We don’t want to go into too much detail on those. We want to save those for the procedures.

We want to make sure that we don’t miss our dependencies. We want to make sure that we’re not forgetting the customer journey.

When we model a process, it’s an internal process of the things that you are doing. Sometimes we can lose sight of what the customer is experiencing. So how do we implement this? So you can go to my website.

I mentioned Before, Lone Wolf Unleashed.com, loneWolfUnleashed.com 4P profile that will provide you a link to the Google Doc where you can take a copy of it and start to work in it yourself. I’ve already got that started for you so you can get started on that today. The week one challenge is you need to block 90 minutes out to do this.

Just fill in the main components, that’s 25 fields is on the example that I’m looking at. It should fit on a landscape document. Think through all the key processes that you deliver value through with your business.

Identify those five to seven core processes. Don’t over complicate it. Just fill in the basics. Then there’s the connection test. Can someone see how value flows through your business?

Could you describe it to your grandmother? Do your processes map to value creation? Are the dependencies clear? And then the question is, is do you know what you’re going to document next?

So this is how it all connects to the four P’s. Okay, it’s cascading now. We’ve just done profile. It’s now going to filter down to process where each major value creation step is, is done.

Underneath that are your procedures which will then lead into performance which measures the value. So think about, you know, what data is coming out of this, what do we need to be able to track?

So now you should have in your mind what documentation priority you have, which process you’re going to document first that creates the most value, which process fails you the most often or a process that you want to delegate first. A process that you want to automate portions of. Now we have clarity. So here are my closing thoughts on my closing rant.

The value flow reality is this. Most solo operators have never mapped their value flow. They are too busy working in their business and not on their business.

This is the beginning, the profile is the beginning to working on your business, creating systems that work for you, that free up time so you can go and do other stuff of higher value. This works. This is a system that works. You cannot improve what you cannot see. The profile makes it visible. So now you have strategic power.

Value flow equals your model visualized it shows where to focus your improvement efforts. It’s going to reveal opportunities for automation and delegation.

Just like I said, we’ve done an episode on that about how you can calculate the benefits of that so you can prioritize well and it helps you identify what is core versus what is noise. You might get to the end of this and go, you know what? Two of my core services just aren’t working for me.

They’re not even getting me extra business and they’re losing me money. Why am I doing this? Cut them. If you’re losing money on them, cut them. You’re immediately better off.

Refer those soul sucking clients to your competitors. I’m not sure this is a good fit anymore. My prices are going up. I don’t think I can help you. Here’s someone I can refer you to.

So what is the freedom angle here? Clear value flow equals easier delegation. It’s easier automation. So get started today. Head over to my website.

You can get that lonewolfunleashed.com 4p profile. There you’ll be able to get access to the Google document where this template and examples live. So you can do it for yourself.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.

You could have been doing so many other things other than listening to me rant about how to get clarity on your business and how to save your business. And for that I thank you.

I’m opening up an expression of interest to a community I’m creating for solo operators who want to set themselves free from their business and get their business under control. You can sign up for that Lone wolf unleashed dot com. There is an expression of interest button there that you can press to sign up.

Basically the premise is I will help you do all of this, all the different layers of the four Ps and we can share with each other about what is working and there’s going to be accountability there to say, hey, look, you said you’re going to do this thing, let’s crack on and do it.

So if you’re interested in doing that, in transforming your business and therefore transforming your life, I’d be really excited to be able to work with you on that. And that’s going to do us for this week. Thank you so much for joining me today and I’ll see you next time.

Until then, live larger and switch off sooner.