Business Design and Entrepreneur Coaching
Proactive
What is Business Design? Most people start a business with a skill, a passion, or an idea. They start with a solution, hope it is what future customers will need and pay for, and set out to prove themselves right. This often leads to skipping research or running with the assumption that a great idea is all a business needs to (eventually) succeed.
Business design is the strategic process of figuring out what your business actually is: who it serves, the problems or unmet needs it solves for those audiences, how it makes money, and what the customer experience looks like from first contact to loyal repeat buyer.
It’s the foundation that everything else is built on. Business design are the strategies and tactics – unique to you and your business – that set you up for success.
No matter what you think you sell, you actually sell value, desirability, trust, accessibility, usefulness, good usability, and quality.
Strategize, plan, and take action to ensure you deliver those well and often. Potential and current customers wonder if you deliver a decent return on their investment in you. That requires business design.
Every book about business, customer experiences, marketing, sales, and product management reminds you to understand your customers. Understand them and their tasks, perspectives, and needs. Work in iterative cycles behind the scenes using prototypes so you don’t release products or services that are unlikely to work well for your target markets.
Your first call is free.
To help you know if our coaching is right for you, the first half hour is free. You’re welcome to talk about any topic on your mind.
We do not force clients into packages or programs. Our coaching is pay-as-you-go, use it as you need it. We recommend at least one hour per month (or two half hour sessions), but you choose the cadence. Some clients see us weekly. Some clients change the cadence based on their needs and what’s going on in their business.
Individual coaching, advising, and projects
Since 1995, we have been helping companies of all types plan, launch, and grow. Clients have included:
- Online sellers and eCommerce sites, from car parts to horse riding gear to luxury jewelry to camera equipment, and many more.
- Professional services, from accountants to web designers to lawyers to landscape architects to consultants, freelancers, and many more.
- A web hosting company.
- A SaaS for dog boarding.
- A trading cards store.
- An event planner.
- A home inspection company.
- A pharmaceutical company trying to improve their claims and returns processes.
We don’t push everybody through the same program. We don’t give everybody the same advice. Everything in our business design service is personalized and customized based on your business, stage, needs, goals, and your personality.
You might need a lot of business design coaching, or you might only want to understand why your conversion rate is low. You might need help planning a new product or service, or you might only want to examine how to automate your business or where AI tools fit in best.
Thoughtful use of AI, LLMs, and automations.
We’re increasingly seeing startups and small businesses wondering how to use AI. How can you automate more of your business without losing the personal touch that’s more likely to make the sale? How can you speed tasks up, increase their accuracy, and reduce your manual work?
And just as importantly, where should AI, LLMs, or automations fit into what you offer potential and current customers? Do they want AI tools? How? Where? Which AI features will alienate people and be a downgrade? We don’t want to guess. We want to know before we make the wrong decisions.
We bring systems thinking and service design to every engagement.
That means understanding your entire Experience Ecosystem: internal people, processes, and systems as well as customer and user experiences, decisions, workflows, and tasks. We investigate relationships, collaborators, knowledge, habits, and where trust is made or broken.
Resist the temptation to put some tape on what’s broken, and kick it down the road with “we’ll fix it later” claims. Let’s dive in and address all of the root causes, symptoms, consequences, and outcomes.
Program
Our Phoenix Flight Collective™ (PFC) program has three levels based on where you are in your business’ creation or growth.
Level 1 is for founders and entrepreneurs still planning what startup or business they will create. They wonder who is the best target audience, what can we solve for them, how will we make money, and how can we compete against others. How will we deliver value and quality to an audience with standards and expectations.
Level 1 might include validating an idea, but before we validate anything, we need to research, strategize, and plan. Rushing into validation tends to lead to false validation, which gets expensive fast. Level 1 helps people focus on what their future business will be.
Level 2 is for founders and entrepreneurs who are getting ready to launch their startup or business. This stage covers planning for launch, the actual launch, and getting the first customers. We’ll look at how to continue researching and understanding your target markets, competitive landscapes, strengths and weaknesses, marketing plans, and more.
Level 3 is for founders and entrepreneurs who have launched their business, converted their first customers, and are scaling, refining, pivoting, improving, measuring, monitoring, and more.
Optional anonymity.
We’ve noticed that many people testing new ideas, considering entrepreneurship, making mistakes, feeling stress or burnout, or struggling with fears and other feelings would prefer to stay anonymous. They don’t want to be in a Slack community, Zoom call, or Maven cohort with their full name displayed there for everybody to see who they are, what they are running from, and what they are running toward.
Our PFC program is inside of our Discord community. This means that you can use any name and any avatar. Nobody else needs to know who you are, where you are, where you worked (or still work), etc.
Individual and group support at every level.
All three levels include group calls, a coworking Discord channel, and accountability. Mastermind group vibes with networking opportunities. Find new people to collaborate with, bounce ideas off of, and learn from.
Each member receives one hour of coaching per month, used in one appointment or two half hours. This gives you a space to discuss private personal or business matters, and anything you need help with but don’t want to share with others in your group
Example: Startup that couldn’t find product-market fit
In 2023, a startup came to us because they had some funding and an idea to help millennials save money. But no matter what they designed, it failed testing. Users didn’t want it. The startup had done some coffee shop interviews, so that the data that said that people weren’t motivated to save was a root cause they could solve. They wanted to build a motivation platform.
They hired a UI and branding company to do eight user interviews with New York City millennials all making around the same amount of money. The 36-page report was like survey results of “three people wanted this, two people said this.” The startup had no idea which action to take or how.
They were lost, and hired us to conduct research with 35 members of their target audience across America. We essentially invented their entire business from identifying their behavioral typologies/ICPs to mapping the ecosystem, defining the main features, creating a product roadmap, and more. We helped them understand their target users and their problems.
We saved them from continuing to go in the wrong direction, and set them up to go in a better direction.