Business: the foundation of the BATON framework.
In BATON (Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network) business comes first.
It’s the prime mover of everything else.
Simply jumping into building an audience or creating an offer without bothering to decide what your actual business is foolish. Yet this is what most people do - they just start on social media or patch together a product like a book without thinking through what the business actually is.
Instead we are going to work out our business early on and build our audience, tribe and offer to match our business objectives.
But, first, what actually is a business?
Have a shot at answering this before reading on. It’s a fun exercise.
During my MBA I used to like asking professors this question and got different answers each time. It’s not an easy question!
The best definition I’ve come across is from the author of the Personal MBA, Josh Kauman.
I’ll quote it in full as it’s so good:
Roughly defined, a business is a repeatable process that:
Creates and delivers something of value...
That other people want or need...
At a price they’re willing to pay...
In a way that satisfies the customer’s needs and expectations...
So that the business brings in sufficient profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.
It doesn’t matter if you’re running a solo venture or a billion-dollar brand. Take any one of these five factors away, and you don’t have a business — you have something else.
A venture that doesn’t create value for others is a hobby.
A venture that doesn’t attract attention is a flop.
A venture that doesn’t sell the value it creates is a non-profit.
A venture that doesn’t deliver what it promises is a scam.
A venture that doesn’t bring in enough money to keep operating will inevitably close.
At the core of this definition is the creation of value.
Value is what underlies every business. Don’t create anything that other people value and it’s game over.
The focus on value is also where many young businesses fail - they don’t actually create anything of value that customers want. Stumbling here means failure before reaching the starting line.
The next question here is how we can create something of value. We’ll deploy another framework here in the next step.