BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

Most business people have a gut feel for what the client wants, which is built up over years of running the business and interacting with clients. However, it is more difficult to distil this sense into three simple, short descriptions of what your client values in your business. But, once done successfully, these descriptions can be immensely powerful in communicating the essence of the business to all stakeholders.

In order to develop a value-based view of your business, you need to ask, ‘What value does the business offer its clients?’ (It should answer the question, ‘What makes your client pay for your services?’) You might want to brainstorm a map of possibilities, but you should distil this down to the three key drivers of value in your business, so as not to spread the focus of the company too widely.

Developing the core value drivers is best done in a workshop environment with your team to ensure buy-in and a shared sense ofthe meaning behind the statements. A suggested process to developthis shared view of what drives the value in your business is:

1. Generate possibilities (of the value drivers): Each individual in the group silently generates concepts that in his or her view represent the value drivers of the business. The person should write each of them down on a separate Post-it, with a detailed description of what is meant by that concept noted down on the back of the Post-it. This should take about five minutes.

2. Group the possibilities: The group members engage in a round-robin feedback session to concisely record and group each possibility with others that have shared characteristics. These possibilities are discussed so that the team has a shared cognition with the originator. Note that at this point the group is not evaluating the possibilities, but rather trying to develop a shared understanding. If the round- robin process prompts new trains of thought causing new possibilities to surface, they should be recorded in a similar manner on Post-its. Obvious duplicates can be eliminated. Normally between two and four broad groups of concepts evolve. Suitable descriptors should be assigned to each grouping on the front of a Post-it with a description on the back of the same Post-it detailing what the group understands by that grouping. These descriptors, assigned to the broad groupings, will be called the value drivers of the business. Try to avoid value drivers that are too general and don’t mean much to anyone, and avoid statements that are true of your competition, as you are trying to find out what it is that makes your clients buy exclusively from you.

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