Tweaking The Business Model – And Why We’re Tweaking Ours

In case you didn’t know what we do professionally (and seriously, quite a few people don’t – including many of our friends & family!!!), we run our own business, Kinetiva – a professional services company.

What this means is that we provide a “one stop shop” of web design & development plus marketing consulting, graphic design and technology support services for solopreneurs and micro-businesses in the health & wellness and consulting/professional services industries (quite a mouthful – no wonder we’re changing it!).

But, that’s all about to change…

Jonathan and I have been hard at work trying to figure out what’s wrong with our business. Not that anything is actually “wrong” – we’ve seen no decline in clients or projects since the recession and business is actually pretty good…

The thing that’s wrong is that neither of us really wants this to be the permanent future of our business – and the even bigger problem to date has been that neither of us has been able to articulate what else we want it to be.

But now we have and the following tweaks to our business model are the start of implementing that…here’s what we’ve done:

1. Changed our primary revenue model from services to products
2. Switched the focus of our key audiences
3. Revised the resourcing model for how we recruit, leverage & incentivise key resources across our business

On a practical level, this is what it means:

Rather than being a “service-based” company (which provides the full range of professional services like graphic design, web development, business consulting etc.), we’re moving to a “product-based” model – with our core offerings being digital & physical products. Our services will still be available but more as a secondary proposition rather than the main thrust of what Kinetiva does.

Whilst we continue to work with certain businesses – such as fitness pro’s, personal trainers, life coaches and other individual professional consultants – we’re also going to be focusing on building up the existing communities which we’ve previously seen more as side projects/personal hobbies – so that means we’ll be really focusing on creating and growing the Location Independent community (me) and the Aspiring Illustrators & Artists community (Jonathan).

Additionally, this will also hopefully funnel new clients towards our services – although the main offerings for these communities will be the products we offer, specifically created for them.

In theory, it’s quite a radical change – in practice, not much has actually changed!

We’re not doing anything hugely different than we were on a daily basis – except perhaps reducing our marketing efforts to our previous main target markets.

Why have we done this?

Neither of us has been 100% happy with the overall proposition of Kinetiva for a while now; I’ve never seen myself running a professional services company and neither has Jonathan.

It’s not that we don’t enjoy the work and the clients we work with – in fact we’re still offering the services we provide but will be much more carefully selecting who we work with and the projects we work on – but it’s about more than that.

Running this business doesn’t light a fire in either of us. We know this because, given a choice, on any one day you can usually find us both working on the things we do feel passionately about – and that’s the location independent and illustration projects.

What we’ve both finally realised is that it’s silly to try and resist this pull – and combined with the fact that we’ve finally sat down to create a revised strategic blueprint for achieving what we want to with Kinetiva – we’re ready to make the change.

We know this is right because we’re already feeling more enthused, more excited and more focused than ever – so it’s full steam ahead with the implementation of all of this and exciting times ahead!

I think it can best be summed up by this question, which Jonathan Fields asked recently on Twitter:

Significance check-in – Would you be proud to have your current profession go down as your life’s work?

A couple of weeks ago, we’d have answered “no”. Now we can answer a resounding “yes”. Can you?