Three Faces of Business

The three faces of business. You're putting energy into three seemingly disparate areas. They all form a single whole.

1 ️Survey

2 ️Standardization

3 ️Mining

Exploration

Looking for new paths. You're exploring. Technology. Customers. You verify the news. The output of the survey is concepts that could make money in the future. Most of your exploratory activities fail, and it's normal.

Standardization

You create products, services, templates, standards... from found concepts. That you have a concept is one thing. A completely different thing is that you have a product/service that you can sell.

Mining

You have a product or service. You tune processes. You optimize metrics. You attract customers. You sell. You sell. You sell. Mining brings money.

And now hand on heart. Where are you not paying attention today?

1. You only deal with mining! And so you mine and mine and mine... until suddenly there's nowhere to take! And you are surprised that things that used to work... no longer work. Times have changed. The store has no one to sell to. A bunch of cheaper competitors have emerged.

2. You're not extracting enough. This is what's happening to us. And other small innovative companies. We jump after the next shiny thing... and instead of staying with the existing area for a while (years) and mining it to the death, we move on. We leave money on the table.

3. You don't standardize. You learn to do something. Instead of upgrading it, you jump straight to mining. So you do it extremely inefficiently, you depend on specific people, services have a high error rate, your entire business is based on one handwritten diary, etc.

Exploration, standardization and mining. To make matters worse... each area needs a different setting of people. People who are good at surveying... they just can't pull things together and solve metrics. Concepts fall out of them and not finished products. People who are good at mining... where they keep track of metrics and dig into the details... they don't have the habit of constantly failing to try something completely new.

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You need all three

Business has three faces. Mining ensures you prosperity. Exploration and standardization gives you a future. They all form a single whole.

80% of House of Cutter projects are in the Exploration phase.

👉 We do customer research.

👉 We orient you in the situation.

👉 We verify business ideas.

It's foolishly following up on fast financial metrics — as opposed to performance marketing, for example.

Have you ever done marketing, branding or strategy? Haven't you been looking for a new product or service direction for years? Maybe you have neither the people nor the competence to do that today. Once you have a proven concept, you can standardize and mine it.

We're just going to speed things up.

⬇️ CHECK OUT THE CASE FILE ⬇️

PS: I took over the concept of the three faces of business from Simon Wardley. He calls it Explorers, Villagers and Town Planners.

“He who would run his company on visible figures alone will soon have neither company nor visible figures to work with. “
-- W. Edwards Deming

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Reading for the weekend

The Corporate Life Cycle

Challenging reading. Aswath Damodaran outlines how the lifecycle of products and services works in companies.