About Valuepreneurship^®

What will it bring you – the significant outcomes

• Attain beyond objectives set – be it wealth, growth of an organisation, position, results…
• Build valued relationships and Trust Capital^© – be respected, trusted and admired. Deal with people with ease and confidence, be they customers, bosses, teams or personal relationships.
• Win the collaboration and co-operation of everyone you encounter, beyond conflict.
• Set a path with re-vitalised personal purpose – work with immense pleasure, build a personal legacy of value impact, live in joy.
• A fully available ‘mind’ – Deal with every situation with a stilled,centred mind and great personal efficiency – Work and live free of fears and barriers.
• A strategic mind and thinking – availing opportunities, achieving results beyond limits and constraints imposed by the world or by yourself.

Outstanding Leadership which distinguishes the valuepreneur^TM:

• Strategic Leadership
  Shaping an agile visionary with a built-in GPS for changing markets and values, taking full advantage of opportunities for growth, expansion and success.
• People Leadership
  Inspiring and instilling engagement, excitement, creativity, innovation, collaboration and co-operation in people to take responsibility, apply their talent, bring excellent outcomes and achieve personal best.
• Customer Leadership
  Building ‘Trust Capital^©, outstanding relationships beyond the reach of competitors, understanding real value and building perfect responses and solutions to serve that value.
• Personal Leadership
  Sees own potential beyond barriers, constraints, fears and norms. We smash the status quo, become an obsessive bringer of value – respected, admired, advocated and surpasses limits of achievement.

Valuepreneurial behaviour

We’ve had the age of the entrepreneur, it worked, but it’s done, dusted and over.

The new age belongs to a new breed of person, a star, whether they own a business, or involved in any creative, professional, public service, charitable, sporting or artistic pursuit. I call this star the valuepreneur, i.e. the one who is obsessed with, aware of, sensitive to, driven by and responds to the real value of whoever he or she is serving. In organisations, this may be our customers, bosses, colleagues, team members, suppliers etc. but in the broader sense everyone we have a relationship with or are concerned with or concerned for. It is a position of the highest integrity, and there is no conflict between integrity and being wealthy, on the contrary.

Entrepreneur v Valuepreneur^TM – A 180 degrees reversal

The entrepreneur says what products can I make, who can I sell them to and how much sales and profit can I generate. The self-motive is paramount here. The valuepreneur says, who is out there? What is their real value? What products or services can I develop to respond to and serve that value? They don’t put profit first. Here is the fascinating observation – Who will you prefer to buy from? The entrepreneur who was trying to sell to you or the valuepreneur who was not thinking mercenarily but understanding and addressing ‘your’ value. It’s a no brainer. So, who will be wealthier in any-case? Valuepreneurs don’t chase profit, yet they make a lot more of it than entrepreneurs. Finally, who will be more fulfilled, recognised, respected, advocated and even advertised by others?

A transformational story – Recently, I was in Frankfurt coaching / developing a group of high potential youngsters in their late twenties, all graduates of top universities in Europe. They were a mixture of Dutch, German, Swiss, French etc. and now work for one of the biggest global IT corporations in the world. I was teaching them ‘value leadership’, and I asked one young lady, Klara, what are you working on at the moment. She said I’m on a project developing digital apps and gave me a brilliant technological description of the apps, the data, the platforms the software etc. – it was impressive, but I yawned. I pushed further and asked her, so what? So, what does it bring? She answered it is an easy method for making payments which is faster and more convenient’. We are getting closer to value but still far away from it. I asked what impact does it have on whom? – She answered, ‘I suppose it helps our clients who are banks to help their customers’. Not bad, but nowhere near enough. She also felt she couldn’t go any further in trying to answer my question and maybe wasn’t even sure what I was getting at. We broke for lunch, and as it happened, I was having lunch with her boss’s boss, a senior director and I asked him what Klara was working on and the same questions – what, for who, why etc. He gave some fascinating answers and cutting a long story short, coming into the post-lunch session I said Klara do know on what you are working? – Your client is one of the largest retail banks in South Africa. They’ve launched a new strategy, increasing business by expanding services to a fast-growing market segment of poor farmers and small traders in the most rural areas of the country. They don’t have credit lines available to them and transact in cash. However, in travelling to the city to buy fertilisers, feed or stocks, they lose two days of yield on the farm or income in their shops. In essence, now your app helps them to buy without leaving the business and manage their cash much better. So, what you are really bringing is improving the livelihoods of these poor farmers and traders. She gazed silently, and I knew it had a profound impact on her, and she said I had no idea’. So, what she was ‘doing’ was developing digital apps for banks. But ‘why’ she was doing it, i.e. what she was ‘bringing’ was improving the livelihoods of poor farmers and traders – this my friends is ‘value’. Also, let’s be clear, by taking this story with a strong emotive impact I’m not saying that value is associated only with social or charitable effects. However, it does help to illustrate the point, the direct result to her client, the bank, is to grow commercially, gain market share, strengthen their brand and be more profitable. i.e. value is the net impact to whom we are serving.

A week later, Klara wrote to me saying that nothing had changed about her work or what she was doing, but everything had changed about how she was feeling. She felt more energetic, enjoying her project, going to work was no longer a chore. She has brought a couple of great innovative ideas to the client, feeling more engaged and confident. Her skills, talent and knowledge, seem to have a greater meaning and application. Nothing is mundane anymore as her mind is always on the end outcome, the impact of her digital apps and not just the technique. This story is only one example. I see this change in people regularly as their ‘purpose’ reshapes through the value they bring.

It is believed that ‘entrepreneurs’ are born, I can confirm ‘Valuepreneurs’ can be made.

Behavioural Technology

All valuepreneurship programs and the book is full of simple, immensely practical and immediately applicable models and techniques. People are easily able to apply real-life examples using these techniques to their own situation and generate incredible results and outcomes.

Below is a brief introduction to one of the models. Its application is given extensively in the book and the programs.

The VORO^© model

Value Onions and Response Onions
An obsession to discover value and a dedication to building perfect responses to it

To understand value, think about the customers’ value shaped like an onion. Let’s call this the value onion (see diagram below).

At the core is the actual product or service itself. The further away we go from the core, and as the layers become bigger and bigger, they represent more and more value to the customers. The bigger the layer, the greater the value to the customer.
In the diagram below look at the Value Onion on the left. Let’s say if this the Value Onion for Virgin Atlantic’s customers then the analysis is a follows:

 

I am not saying that the core is un-important. By making the core (the product or service) the smallest part of the onion, it is far from unimportant. It’s fundamentally important. After all, if the core is rotten, the whole onion will be rotten.

In other words, there is no compromise with the brilliance of the core. It’s not even up for discussion. If there is a problem with the core, you need first to fix it and get it to be second to none. Quality is no longer a differentiator. It’s not even a point of discussion. It’s a must, a given, the starting point. If you can’t get the core to be perfect, then give up and do something else. Then why am I making the core, i.e. the product or service the smallest part of the onion – because to the customer in itself it represents least value.

When was the last time you said excitedly that my car has four wheels or that I got a meal in the restaurant, or that I had a room to myself in a hotel? These are products or services, and not exciting in themself. Yes, there can be no compromise with the quality, because if it were a bad room, you would comment on it, but you wouldn’t get excited about it if it were good. So what would you get excited about?

If the decor and the view in the hotel were so inspirational that it would help you to be more productive, or after a long journey you arrived refreshed and could concentrate in the meeting because the car had a massager in the seat, and so on. Are you getting this point? It’s not what it is but what it delivers in the end gain to the customer. The massage chair is not the layer of value; the layer of value is a productive meeting despite a long journey.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say I can fly from London to Los Angeles in 11 hours direct. How many airlines can do that? They all can. But if I am travelling with my family, one of the outer layers of my value onion is entertainment for my thirteen-year-old son. Because you can imagine eleven hours in a metal cylinder can be tedious and uncomfortable. Now, the airline (Virgin Atlantic)needs to grasp this and outer layer value in other words very high value to me.

Virgin Atlantic needs to understand this value and exactly where it sits on the value onion. Having fully understood my value onion, it should now develop matching responses, layer by layer, to every layer of the value onion. And this we will call the ‘response onion’.

In our example, the matching response tothe value of entertainment could be the latest Xbox games in every seat, pre-released and not available to the market for another three months. Now, when my son gets off the plane at LA does he pick up his mobile and excitedly say to his friends back in London, “Hey, guess what, I just flew 11 hours direct”? No, this is not exciting. Now, he picks up the phone and says to his friends excitedly, “Guys, guess what, I just played the latest FIFA game, the one you’re going to play in 3 months! Wow, you should see the graphics on this! The clarity is crazy, and they’ve got all the latest players in there.” This is exciting. It’s exciting for him, and it’s enjoyable for my wife and me. Not only to see the joy in his face but also that for 11 hours we can get on with our own thing, a movie, champagne, etc.

The next time, which airline will I choose? And, for that end gain, for that value, would I be happy to pay a little extra to fly to LA? 50 USD? 80 USD? Why not?

The model, along with many others, is developed for practical application in the book and the programs. We quantify and calculate value on the value onion and systematically build response onions and all the ensuing investment in other tactics to make it work.

Summary:

1. There are two onions in business, indeed in life, the value onion and the response onion.
2. The core of the value onion is the actual product or service itself, and the value is in the layers, increasing the further out you go.
3. The value onion must precede the response onion. However, the problem is that we are always putting response before the value onion. When you go to buy that laptop, and they simply show you all the different models available, that is responding without having understood that you make movies and want a bigger screen, higher capacity, faster processing etc.
4. Layer by layer, invest in developing responses to value and naturally you will invest more in serving the outer layers compared to the inner layers, let’s face it, resources are limited, and this is what we mean by doing the “right things”.
5. The emotional factor for the customer increases as you go further and further out in the onion. People buy on emotions. They’ll justify it on the core (we’ll discuss this more .under pricing).

This level of obsession for discovering value and dedication to building responses is valuepreneurship and the essence of being not only differentiated but distinguished.