Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model

Breaking through to get from Plan A to Plan B or Plan G is about discovering or developing a business model that really works. This won’t happen by duplicating the models already in existence. Draw on them, yes. Play “me-too”?—generally no. If those are working, who needs yours?

The questions you cannot answer from historical precedent lead to your leaps of faith—beliefs you hold about the answers to your questions despite having no real evidence that these beliefs are actually true.

To address your leaps of faith, you’ll have to leap! That is to say, you must experiment. That may mean opening a smaller shop than you aspire to operate, just to see how customers respond. It may mean trying different prices for your newly developed gadget to see which price makes sales pop.

Next, consider what we call antilogs: predecessor companies compared to which you explicitly choose to do things differently, perhaps because some of what they did has been unsuccessful.

consider the analogs to your idea, successful predecessor companies that are worth mimicking in some way.