In design school, I came to appreciate that a well-defined problem is half-solved. Nothing so big as "how do we create world peace?" and nothing so trivial as "how do I cross the street?". Something in the middle is very constructive.
Great questions frame the entire problem-solving exercize. For example, in any professional service, the main problem for the service providers is that when we are not working, we are not making any money. Most service providers operate essentially a fee-for-service, billable hour set-up that has very little leverage and many barriers to scale.
Since I come from the industrial design world where we designed products that come off a production line–I've been interested in the service leverage problem. It's a design problem.
The problem ultimately is that a professional "practice" is missing several attributes that a high-leverage, scaleable "business" has. Michael Gerber made this distinction when he talked about "working in a business" versus "working on a business."
Creating leverage is the Holy Grail of the service world.
So the question: "how do I convert my coaching practice into a coaching business?" actually frames all of my business development activities as it forces me to see the opportunities for leverage and scale that I'm blind to as I practice my service. Now I'm working on building a team, a brand, programs on-line and a capital structure that makes it easy to bring partners on board. That's leverage. That's a business.
From a framing perspective, I like to think that I cannot really ask a question that at some level of conscious I don't have at least the start of an answer. If I can think of a question, I probably have the answer. Or my team does.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
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