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Get The Background of The Methodology
Learn The Fundamentals
Entrepreneurial Awareness
The Business Concept Stage
Advocate Stage and Commit
Systematising the business
Copyright © 2015, 2019, 2024 KK Diaz by A-Game Business.
All Rights Reserved.
THE A GAME BUSINESS BLUEPRINT offers a series of logical and self-reinforcing steps that businesspeople, of varying degrees of experience and expertise, can follow to dramatically improve their business performance.
That’s one way of putting it.
Another way is to think of it like this:
The book asks you to think of business as a process that can – and should – be repeated, again and again. The book asks you to think of business, not as a journey to a destination, but rather as a way of living and, crucially, as a way of being in business.
Successful businesspeople don’t actually climb a ladder, each rung conquered and forgotten. This is a common metaphor for success, but it’s simply wrong. Good businesspeople and good businesses work again and again on mastering a set of interlocked process components. They understand that they will need to revisit these components for the entire time that they are in business. They know that it is the repetition of these processes that is, in fact, the essence of commercial life.
Entrepreneurial life can be split into four clear stages. This book takes entrepreneurs and managers through these four clearly differentiated stages as follows:
Who are you as an individual? What is your purpose? What are your values and passion in life?
Too often, these questions are addressed much too late by entrepreneurs. This results in an attempt at commerce that is not properly rooted in the individual’s talents, value set and true personal aspirations. Learning to ask and answer relevant awareness questions at the early stage of business life is vital for sustainable growth.
Right, so you have a business that’s been running for some time now. However, you are struggling to GROW. Why? Because you don’t really understand your own business yet.
You need to explore it from a variety of perspectives. You need to innovate your business model, test it and have others test it. You need to reinvent your business and develop a competitive strategy focused on High GROWTH. And you need to execute it and see how the strategy takes shape in the real world.
It’s time to claim a BIGGER share of the market, and it’s not going to be easy. You need to refine your brand philosophy, to develop a new approach to marketing, customer acquisition, and customer success built on the foundation of long-lasting value-based customer relationships.
This is a challenging, intense phase, and you need to be ready emotionally and practically. You also need to understand and implement the links to nurturing and wowing customers, as well as maximizing customer lifetime value.
Your business is semi-established, and so at its most vulnerable. If you don’t systematize the key elements and processes, the business relies heavily on you, keeping you trapped in the business. This leaves the business at risk of getting toppled by the first challenging wind that blows in.
This stage has everything to do with your team – the human beings working alongside you and the critical business processes that’ll help systematize your business. Your challenge is to develop and refine a systematized way of working that caters to the weaknesses, while exploiting the strengths, of people from all walks of life including your external partners. This is the beginning of your exit strategy.
The above four stages are very different. Even though they may be interlocked and rely on each other, they need to be approached in very different ways.
This book deals with how to think about and approach these four components of entrepreneurial business development. It does this by exploring deeply the details of each component.
Supporting the resources and observations is a series of insights from business experts. I’ve tracked some of these people down and encouraged them to participate in this book. Others, I’ve come to know personally along the journey of entrepreneurial business. Regardless, it’s been a wonderful privilege to hear and experience their insights and add their perspective to The A-Game Business Blueprint. They are, in my view, the force that binds the Blueprint.
Ultimately, this book is wide-ranging, and speaks to established businesspeople and newcomers in the same voice. This is unusual. Orthodox thinking is that business books must be targeted to a specific type of reader. This way of thinking says that experienced businesspeople are fundamentally different to others, and therefore have different information needs. In a sense, this approach is obviously true, but it also misses out on an important reality – the fact that life is crazy, and we seldom get the opportunity to work to a plan. Many of us fell into business via a series of happy (or unhappy) accidents. We didn’t think about meaning and purpose. We didn’t follow a set, considered structure and then move methodically from one phase to the next. We ended up making money in an unexpected way, and now time has passed. Many experienced businesspeople fall into this category. I know I do. The ideas in this book are meant as much for this audience as they are for first timers. Understanding and mastering a set of repeatable processes is relevant to all businesspeople. It offers a vital key to managing the unavoidable ups and downs of being in the market – and these ups and downs are a challenge that never, ever, goes away.
