This course is based on the BATON framework.
This is a business framework I’ve now taught to 30,000+ students who are starting their first online business. It’s based in my more formal learning whilst getting my MBA. It’s also the framework I use when working with clients to launch or improve their online businesses.
BATON stands for:
Business
Audience
Tribe
Offer
Network
The 5 steps of BATON can be broken down into:
Business – creating a product or service people want or need
Audience – attracting attention to your product or service
Tribe – establishing demand for your product or service with a smaller subset of the audience
Offer – selling your product or service to your tribe
Network – scaling the business to increase revenue
Most online business courses will jump your straight to the Offer stage - selling products.
I believe this is the number one reason why most of these courses fail their students.
Offer is sexy - it’s about money. So it’s much easier to sell courses and coaching for - the promise here is the end result of money, income and freedom.
However, it’s unrealistic.
Having a successful Offer, something that people actually want to buy, depends on first laying a foundation.
We start right at the beginning with Business: working out what actual value we are offering the world.
This sounds simple. And it is. But everyone skips it.
Affiliate marketing is not a business. Crypto is not a business. Drop-shipping is not a business.
These are all mechanisms that can be used inside a business but they are not themselves a business. Don’t confuse the tool and the outcome.
We instead start by working out exactly what value we can put out in the world that people are happy to pay us for.
This is the focus of Module 1 and arguably the most important part of this course.
We’ll be asking questions like:
What value can you create and deliver to the market?
Who is your market?
Do they want or need your service or product?
A lot of entrepreneurs don’t stop to actually consider these questions!
We’ll work through all of this in Module 1 to generate business ideas that match not only your skills but also what the market actually needs.
After that we move into the second step of BATON: Audience
Audience is where we start to get ourselves and our work in front of potential customers.
We will not be selling directly.
Selling directly to a cold audience requires advertising, which requires high budgets and high skill. It’s viable but it is not the method we will be following.
Instead Audience is were we show the world what is is we have to offer via content marketing.
We’re going to use free channels to begin to talk to the world and build up our audience.
Some good news: when used correctly, AI has made this process easier than ever before.
Importantly, just having an audience is not enough to build a business. There are plenty of influencers out there who have large audiences but make no money. We’re not trying to become influencers!
We’re not building an audience merely for the sake of having an audience but instead as a stepping stone on the way to having a sustainable, income generating online business.
Building a large engaged Audience for zero cost will be explored in depth in Module 2.
The next step in BATON is Tribe.
Our Audience follows us and consumes our content. But it’s passive.
Our Tribe on the other hand have actively raised their hand and said “yes please, I want to hear more from you”.
They move from passive to active, showing that they are interested in our value.
The marketing definition of Tribe comes from marketing expert Seth Godin -
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.
Think about the various tribes around you. They come in the form of religions, political parties, sports clubs or fans of particular products ie Nike vs Adidas, Coke vs. Pepsi, Apple vs. Android.
Your tribe will be the people who resonate with you, your message, your product or service. By resonating with you, they have signalled they are interested in what you have to say.
In practical terms we move our Tribe members off Audience platforms like social media and into more “protected” spaces where we can directly talk to them.
The average human is bombarded with 5,000+ sales messages per day, primarily on busy social platforms like YouTube and TikTok. If we want to sell to these people we need to get them into a quieter space where they can hear us.
We’ll cover how to convert Audience into raving fan Tribe members in Module 3.
The fourth step of BATON is Offer.
Once we have a tribe of people who trust you they have given you permission to make them an offer.
You are a business. There’s no point in having a Tribe of raving fans if you have nothing to sell them.
We want paying customers. Without customers there’s no revenue and no business.
In the Offer section we look at what valuable products and services we can provide to our warmed up prospects.
Making the sale at this point is much simpler than if we have tried to immediately jump from Business to Offer. We’ve instead used Audience and Tribe to engage, build trust and filter to the best prospects so that the sale is much easier.
We’ll cover how to build a killer Offer in Module 4.
The final step of BATON is Network.
Once we’ve got a successful Offer making sales we have a choice.
We can automate everything and happily collect the profit.
Or we can scale the business so that it makes more revenue and grows.
Generating your first $ is the hardest $ you’ll ever make. Going from $1 to $10 is easier and $10 to $100 is easier still.
Once you’ve proven the value of your Offer and have a market willing to pay you it’s much easier to scale the idea up that it would be with a new business.
There are two basic ways to scale.
Horizontally
Vertically
Horizontal scaling is selling the same offer to more people. This happens by opening up and growing your Audience.
Vertical scaling is selling more to the same people. This happens by fleshing out your Offer with more products and services, up-sales, down-sales and cross-sales and other methods to increase the revenue per customer.
We’ll discuss all of this in Module 5 where we scale your existing online business using Network effects.
You don’t need to know the ins-and-outs of the BATON framework. Just know that it underlies this course and how we’ll be proceeding.
Each Module represents a stage in BATON and will start with a quick recap to frame your thoughts and keep you focused on what we’re building.
The main reason I wanted to expose the skeleton of the framework is so that you know what we are building towards. Because we don’t leap immediately to selling some people may find this approach slower than the are used to.
This pace however is intentional. We’re following the mantra of “measure twice, cut once” and spending more time preparing a valuable offer rather than blindly pushing ahead with a business that nobody wants.
Let’s now get stuck into B, Business, the focus of this Module