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When it comes to presenting your business plan to potential investors, partners, or lenders, you probably think that an extended document packed with numbers and details is the only way to go.

After all, you need to prove that your business has a solid foundation before asking someone else for their money, right?

The thing is that while detailed documents are important in establishing the viability of your company, they might not be the best way to achieve your objectives when pitching your business idea. The one-page business plan is a compact alternative that presents the most essential information about your startup in a condensed, accessible document. It’s also much more likely to catch the attention of potential backers than a dense word document.

What is a Business Model Canvas?

There are several different models you can use to explain how your company makes money and how it grows.

The business model canvas is a brief but surprisingly powerful tool to help you communicate your ideas to potential investors, partners, or lenders. The business model canvas is a visual representation of how your company makes money. You start with a focus on the core product or service that you offer, and then expand outward to address each of the other revenue streams your business might generate.

The two key metrics you’ll want to include are the percentage of revenue taken in by each revenue stream, and the overall financial return on investment. You can also include a demographic breakdown of your customers or a financial projection to show the growth of your business.

Why should you use the Business Model Canvas?

Because it helps you clarify your business idea, the business model canvas is a crucial first step in crowdfunding or raising capital through any other type of investment. It also makes it much easier to explain your business to partners and investors. In addition to being useful in your fundraising efforts, the business model canvas is a useful tool to help you identify and correct any potential issues in your business model. By identifying the weaknesses in your business model, you can work to build a model that’s more likely to succeed.

Create a great unique selling proposition

The unique selling proposition (USP) of your product or service is the one thing that makes your company stand out from the rest. Pitches that focus solely on the competitive advantages of your competitors and how your product or service is better than theirs are likely to fall flat. Take some time to brainstorm what makes your offering unique. What makes it better than all the other options out there? What makes it worth paying a premium for? What’s so special about it that customers would pay you money to use it? Once you know what sets your business apart, you can use this as a foundation for your USP. Be sure to keep it simple and straightforward.

Define your product or service

This is where you need to decide what your product or service actually is. Keep in mind that the product you sell doesn’t always need to be tangible. For example, a service such as consulting might be sold on the promise of helping your customers solve their problems and achieve their goals. Your product or service might also be a combination of products. In other cases, it might be a bundle of services that work together to provide a benefit to customers.

Identify your target audience

Start by identifying your target audience. Who are you trying to attract as customers? What kind of people do you hope to attract as customers who would be willing to pay you money? What are their problems that your business can solve? Your target audience will help you shape your product or service, as well as the marketing channels you’ll use to sell it. You can also use their characteristics as a benchmark to set marketing goals for your business.

Focus on your key metrics

Next, focus on the key metrics you’ll use to measure the success of your business. These metrics should be the focus of your marketing efforts, as well as the metrics used to evaluate your managers and employees. Your key metrics should reflect the success of your core business. For example, you might want to track the number of paid subscriptions to your product or service. Or, you might focus on the number of customers who achieve their goals using the product.

Summing up

One of the most important aspects of business planning is communication. the business model canvas can be used as a practical tool to identify and correct potential issues in your business model.

The Business Model Canvas is a framework that any company, small or large, can use to create a strategy for success in their respective industry. By outlining and considering every detail of your company’s business model, you create a map for growth and success.

You can’t get ahead if you don’t know where you’re headed.

Thanks for reading!

5 Tips to Help You Create a Successful Business Model Canvas was originally published in The Startup Recipe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this article, I’ll talk about the following:

• How to transition from an office-only job to a remote-friendly one
• How your company can shift to a “Remote-friendly mindset”
• Pros and Cons of working remotely

3..2..1….Let’s start!

How much time do you spend in the traffic? How long does it take you to get to work every single day of the week?What if you could manage your time in a smarter way?

When I was still working as a full-time employee in Italy (8 years ago or so), I remember that I used to wake up every day around 7 am, had a quick breakfast and headed straight to my car, turn on the engine and start heading to the motorway in order to get to the workplace.

The distance wasn’t even that long, around 20 kilometers (12 miles), which shouldn’t have taken more than 20 minutes driving.

Yeah. Except it took much more than that. 1.30 hrs, every day. 3 hours, if we consider the journey back home.

Why? Well, traffic! What else?

No matter how much I liked my job (not too much, after 3.5 years doing the same thing because the company was “afraid to innovate” and my bosses didn’t want to reallocate me, given I was “very good at my job”), and how cool my colleagues were, but I was already stressed by the time I reached the workplace, and even more when I had to spend the same time driving back home.

20 kilometers, 1.5 hours each way.

Let’s do some math.

If we consider 365 calendar days, and around 250 working days in a given year (even tho I am not living in Italy since more than 6 years this should be accurate enough), we can calculate the total time I have spent on the road (in 3.5 years out of 12) as follows:

250 days x 3.5 years x 3 hrs= 2625 hrs= 109 days driving to and back from work.

109 Days, totally wasted in the traffic. Yikes.

I love driving, but I hate being stuck in traffic, especially when I know that I am travelling all the way to an office where I will spend the majority of my day looking at a monitor, and that I would be able to do that same job from anywhere in the world. Including my bed.

Keep in mind that everything I said so far is only in relation of the longest commute I have made while I was an employee, but I have been commuting for around 12 years in total, so I have probably wasted much more than 109 days, given the calculation above covers 3.5 years out of 12.

I know, I know. There’s also the human interaction aspect (I have to say my colleagues were incredible) and all of that, and I agree with you. Just hear (read) me out, you’ll see what I mean.

Oh, and the office location was in a dodgy area.

I remember the not-so-gentle breeze that hit me in the face on the way home, after somebody smashed my car passenger window during an icy winter. Awesome. Not. Imagine my joy.

On a side note, there were times when I had to call in the office and mention I was arriving late because of a car accident, or just traffic slower than usual.

My managers weren’t pleased and, on some occasions, they thought I was lying or something, but they came to their senses when I started to send them an MMS (it was 2008) of the situation in front of me (yeah I took pictures of the traffic).

One evening, I was driving back home, and I ended up stuck for hours because a Truck fell from a bridge and ended up on the highway. I was able to get home around 10.30 pm.

Ok, you get the point.

I couldn’t stand to waste hours of my life in the traffic, the office wasn’t easy to reach with public transport, and the work environment didn’t give me any stimuli.

The critical point in all of the above, is that the waste of time was utterly unnecessary. Especially when the weather was terrible, there were incidents on the road or I wasn’t feeling really well.

Don’t take me wrong. That effort had a massive impact on who I am today. If I didn’t go every day to the office, maybe I wouldn’t have moved to Dublin in 2012, and I would have missed significant opportunities that allowed me to become a 100% location independent entrepreneur.

The Silver Lining is that I have learned plenty of amazing songs in those 109 days spent in the traffic. (The internet connectivity on the motorway wasn’t great, and in 2008 I couldn’t listen to TED Talks on my phone).

Why have I just told you this story? What was my solution to the above issue?

Today I am no longer spending hours on the road, despite the fact of being an entrepreneur (I have been a full time employee for 15 years, 5 of which spent by freelancing, then building what today is my core business).

Let me rephrase.

I am now in charge of my own time, and it’s up to me to decide if I want to spend time on the road to get to work or not. I have the freedom to organize my day-to-day and work-life balance in whichever way I see fit.

I am a Remote Worker. A Location Independent Entrepreneur. A Digital Nomad.

And this the type of freedom that I want for my team and my family.

And why not, for you as well, assuming that’s what you want.

Let’s jump right into it then.

How to transition from an office-only job to a remote-friendly one

Assuming that you have already assessed that your job is not location dependent (e.g. if you work in construction, it’s possible that this article is not for you. At least not yet), you should be already aware of the fact that you don’t need to go to the office in order to perform your daily tasks.

If you are working in a distributed team (for example a large enterprise with staff located in Ireland, Italy, Spain, China, Germany, India) you might be already leveraging tools and practices typical of remote working, without even knowing.

Interacting using tools like VoIP, Slack, Phone Calls, Emails, and others, with team members located in different parts of the world, or just on a different floor of the same building, makes the shift to a remote job much more manageable.

Why?

Because that’s exactly what you are doing (working remotely)!

You are interacting with your clients and team, even tho they are not physically in your same location. That’s what remote working is all about.

Ask your manager to let you work remotely 1 day per week, and make sure to highlight the fact that you will ensure to deliver above and beyond expectations.

Make sure to explain thoroughly what would be the benefits on your mental health and productivity, and how this would bring an improvement to the project you are working on, even if is just a couple of additional hours where you will be focusing on working on what matters, rather than being stuck in the traffic. Well, your company will also save on electricity costs for the time being.

You must bring convincing arguments to change the status-quo.

If all goes well, make sure to focus as much as you can in providing additional value, in exchange for that returned freedom. The next step would be to ask to do it two days a week, and so on.

When I moved to Ireland, after 8 years working as an employee in Italy, I worked for a multinational company that allowed me to work two days a week from home. That was amazing.

When I had a bad cold or a headache, I wasn’t just calling out sick, but I was working from home instead (assuming I wasn’t feeling terrible), saving my company money and reducing my sick days.

You think what I have just said won’t be sufficient to convince your boss? No worries. I’ll go through the benefits for your company (no matter if you are an employee or a founder) in the next chapter.

Productive employees are happy employees.

Just keep that in mind. Ok?

How your company can shift to a “Remote-friendly mindset.”

In the past 15 years, I have come across tons of companies that came up with a vast number of “excuses” on why remote working didn’t fit them, or how their staff would have become “less productive”, just because they couldn’t spy on them every day.

That’s not entirely true. Well, let’s say it’s false.

While there are valid reasons for which a company might or might not decide to have a 100% remote staff, all the traditional excuses do not stand a chance.

I have noticed that when you give people freedom, they do everything in their power to maintain that freedom.

Start by giving this “privilege”, which should be a common practice instead, to the member of your team you trust the most. The one most organized and that you think might be able to organize his own time without supervision. Hint: Each member of your team, with an exception for new team members, should have an adequate level of self-organization. If not, you have a more significant problem than introducing a work from home policy.

In case you have multiple Senior team members with similar skills (and you should, have you ever heard of a thing called “Single point of failure”?), you might introduce a Work From Home rotation, by asking your team to organize (you are just gonna be the final approver) their schedule, so that when your Senior Dev 1 works remotely, Senior Dev 2 will be in the office. The day after (or whenever they have decided), they will switch.

This way, if somebody approaches your team area, there will always be someone with a specific subject matter expertise.

It’s useful in the initial phase of your company “remote” journey, when you still have colleagues looking to chat with the “guy” or the “lady” at the desk, no matter if that means interrupting their work (pun intended).

TL;DR: Introduce the option of working remotely 1/2 days a week, and let your team organize their agenda.

Pros and Cons of working remotely

This chapter should be an article on its own, and probably will be, but let me try to list the Pros and Cons.

The Pros

1. Flexibility and Work-Life Balance

You get to work from anywhere in the world, with your own schedule. As long as you deliver up to and beyond expectations, you’ll be able to work accordingly to your own schedule (it doesn’t matter if you are a freelancer or a location independent entrepreneur, or you work for a company allowing you to do so).

On top of that, you’ll have more time to stay with your family, friends or yourself.

And travel. A lot.

This is to me, one of the most amazing things in the world and one of the reasons why Webyourmind, my business, focuses on remote work and working with outstanding professionals from any place in the world.

2. Both you and your company will save money and time

While you will save quite some money on transportation (and food), especially if you have been commuting your whole life, your company will also save money, because there will be a reduction on office expenses.

Even better, If your company is entirely remote, there’s no need for an office right?

I have already mentioned that both you and your company (whether you are an employee or a founder) will save also on time because a remote worker is productive straight after breakfast, right?

3. Remote workers leverage time management and organizational skills

Professionals working remotely are generally more inclined to improve the way they manage their daily agenda. Given they won’t be in the office environment and that they are able to organize their work, they will most likely learn many time management techniques to stay committed and productive.

4. The World is your (recruitment) oyster

If you run a remote-friendly business, this means that your HR and recruiters will be able to potentially recruit candidates from pretty much anywhere.

You could argue that this is what a relocation package is for, but that comes with a high-cost right? Both for your business and for the new employee that might not be necessarily happy to relocate.

Remote-Friendly companies can hire talented staff from anywhere in the world. At no cost.

I can keep going with the pros, but as I said I will write more about the topic in the future.

Let’s take a look at a few cons, which in the majority of situations can be addressed by making smart choices.

The Cons

1. Loneliness

I am mentioning this aspect, just because many posts I read where outlining that.

I personally disagree. The reason why I work remotely is exactly the opposite. I wanted to travel, meet amazing professional and create wonderful products and services with them. Every time I feel lonely or bored in my home office, I just go to a coworking space and spend some time there.

Additionally, working remotely doesn’t mean to isolate yourself from your company.

If you work for a hybrid (remote-friendly but not fully remote) business, you might try to balance your work from home time with days in the office.

If you run said business, the most important thing is making sure that people in the office won’t ignore their colleagues working remotely. It’s true that working together and seeing each other every day makes easier instating a friendly relationship with colleagues, but inclusion is crucial to creating a successful hybrid team.

If you work or run a 100% remote company, a great idea would be to organize an annual gathering in a nice location (not necessarily expensive) with all the team members, to leverage team building, give a face to your colleagues/employees and have fun together. Even better, do it 3 or 4 times a year.

And when you are not facing each other, try to leverage tools like Zoom, Slack, etc. in a way that creates a sense of community and doesn’t make anyone feel excluded. It’s hard but doable.

2. A good internet connection is mandatory

This one’s easy.

Whether you work from home, from a beach in Thailand, or from your favorite Starbucks, you MUST have a good internet connection.

If you don’t, you won’t be able to communicate with your colleagues and manager.

Make sure to invest in the best possible connection you can get. If you are an employer, a significant benefit would be to cover internet expenses your employees/contractors occur in.

3. Distractions

From great power…you know the rest.

If you have the flexibility to work from anywhere you want, whenever you want, you have probably already noticed that distractions are just behind the corner.

Make sure to block out external noise during your working hours, no matter if it’s your favorite console, your roommate listening to high volume music, or your husband asking you to help him out with something.

Hint: buy a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

If you want to work remotely, you need to excel in organizational and time-management skills.

If you are an employer, make your employees and contractors aware of best practices related to remote working. Write an onboarding document and illustrate to them how to stay productive.

Conclusions

I hope this post will give you at least the curiosity to dig more into the remote work world.

Nowadays we have the means to work from anywhere in the world while building teams that are cohesive, efficient, and excellence-driven.

People from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences, working together to bring amazing things to life. All thanks to remote working.

Are you sure you want to be stuck in traffic while something incredible happens?

In one of the upcoming articles, I will tell you which strategy and tools work for my company and me when it comes to interacting with distributed / remote teams (especially with my teams).

If you want to get in touch with me, feel free to check out my Linkedin Profile, or contact me on twitter: @webyourmind

I would genuinely love to read your comments below and hear about your experience with remote working.

If you liked this recipe, leave me a clap or two.

Everything You Wanted to Learn about Remote Working and Were Afraid to Ask (And How To Make It… was originally published in The Startup Recipe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This my first post on Medium. I have been blogging in the past about a plethora of things (including my romantic encounters, ages ago, I was 19 or something back then), and I had a few business blogs, but never on Medium.

Despite reading it assiduously since the very beginning, I am a (very) late adopter when it comes to publish content on this platform .

Well, here’s me writing content.

Before introducing myself, I’ll start by introducing the idea behind “The Startup Recipe”.

“The Startup Recipe”, the magic mixture of powerful ingredients to create a successful startup, the one formula that will guarantee your product (or service)’s success is NOT what this series will be about.

Why?

Well, if you got to this point without flagging me as a “stupid”, you probably might have thought that “there is no such thing as a Startup Recipe”.

My friend (too soon?), I share your concerns. High Five! (maybe just leave me a clap or 20 at the bottom of this article, ^_^).

The reason why I came up with this title, is that I don’t personally think that there is a set of strategies that can work for every business, but at the same time, I think that entrepreneurship and in general building a successful business is a little bit like cooking.

And nope, my core business has nothing to do with the restaurant industry (even tho I am in love with cooking).

You start out following a recipe from famous books (or successful entrepreneurs), then you realize that you and your guests (clients?) prefer certain types of ingredients rather than others and instead of using butter, as the book would suggest, you try to substitute it with olive oil, and it tastes much better to your and your guests palate.

The more you continue experimenting with different ingredients and recipes, the more you realize that you are constantly improving, and you do that thanks to the feedback you receive when your guests try out your dishes, or the proud comments from your mother and friends that, like you, are passionate about cooking (business).

One day, a friend of yours, that works for “BreadCrunch”, writes about your fabulous Risotto and cites you as the “subject matter expert” for anything in relation to “Risotto al Barolo”.

An important Editor reads the article on “BreadCrunch” and asks you to write a new book of recipes, paying you 9.99$ in Royalties for every copy sold. They sell 100.000 copies in the first year.

You suddenly start to receive hundreds of mail from both people that would like to taste your now world famous “Risotto al Barolo”, as well as chefs that would like you to mentor them, and also a few very angry characters that are jealous of your success.

The story continues, and your now sustainable business keeps growing and guarantees you financial success.

If you had made the wrong decisions (even tho you made some mistakes initially, and you didn’t avoid to mention in your book the countless number of times in which you put too much salt in the risotto, or burned the whole thing because you were distracted, etc) the story would have taken a different direction.

If you ignored your guests’ feedback or avoided continuous learning and experimentation, the “BreadCrunch” article would have not existed or would have been about the horrible way you treat your guests and friends by telling them that they have no idea of what a good meal is, despite the bad taste of your “not-so-good-risotto”.

It’s easier to ignore your mistakes than collecting constructive feedback and work hard to avoid such mistakes in the future.

Ok, you get the idea.

As you probably already know, there are many strategies available in different forms when it comes to business, and there’s not a specific recipe for success.
I have read (and keep reading) tons of books, interviews, articles, and content about how to launch a successful startup/business, how to create a “Purple Cow”, create traction, scale-up, and so on and so forth.

Moreover, I watch countless videos from experts and I have been doing all of those things for many years.

All of those resources are great, and I treasure every single advice from people that have been building successful businesses, no matter how small those are.

I am literally obsessed with reading. My 2018 development plan demands me to read at least 100 book pages per week.

All great recipes. All great chefs. All great entrepreneurs/companies.

But, the thing that the majority of those contents have in common, is that those have been written by widely recognized entrepreneurs, marketers, influencers and successful people in general.

Don’t get me wrong, these people always make sure to mention how they started, the struggles they went through, etc.

But there’s sometimes a lack of contextual information.

I often end up wondering about things like “Ok, I must focus on selling my services to the right audience, and create amazing lead magnets to acquire high paying customers. All in 10 days. What’s a lead magnet again? How can I do it if I cannot afford yet a marketing or sales team? Can you give me an example that does not involve Coca Cola or Walmart or 100.000$ budget?”.

Long story short, I think that sometimes is better to focus on how to build success, rather than look at already successful ventures (which is still very useful).

What I am planning to do with this series is to write about startups, tech, and business in general, from the “inside”.

I want to discuss and share those ingredients with other chefs that are trying to build their own successful dishes.

I will definitely talk about ingredients I already know to have a great chance to produce amazing results, given I have been working in the tech industry for a while (15+ years?).

I want to share the struggle while I am currently facing it, and share the different approaches I am taking to address the issues I am facing.

If I test a new ingredient today, I will post about the effect the ingredient had on my recipe straight after trying it (well, when the dish is cooked and ready to be served aka when the ingredient takes effect).

I want to provide a full set of resources, information, comments, strategies on how to face the day-to-day issues a startup faces.

Specifically, I want to talk to online businesses similar to mine.

Abandoning the “cooking” metaphor, the Goal of the “Startup Recipe” is to create a set of valuable resources for those who are actually “starting up” as well as people running their businesses from years, and make sure to provide relevant information as a result of actual direct experience.

I would love to look back at this series in a few years time and be able to tell that it was a series of horrible ingredients that lead to a catastrophe, or a set of great guidelines to follow for my next venture. At least it will be of some use, one way or the other.

Again, I have no idea if my ventures will turn into highly profitable businesses or will end in the “Startup Graveyard” catalog.

Many times in my business I had to face (and I still have) questions on topics I knew nothing about before.

For example:
“Who should I hire first”?
“How do I become more productive”?
“How do I make sure to write engaging content for The Startup Recipe?” No idea, really.
“How should I price my SaaS products”?
“Am I wasting time on the wrong things”?
“How do I create a Business Plan? Do I even need a business plan?”
“Is my cashflow consistent? Why did I have 30.000$ in the company bank account and now I only have $100?”
“Did I forget to buy garlic”? → whoops this shouldn’t have been here ^_^.

And again:

“Should I bootstrap my company or get funding”?
“Should I build this project with React or Angular”? pun intended.
“How do I build different sources of income”?
“How do I make sure that my content goes viral”?
“Should I buy Bitcoins? Learn Blockchain? Invest in Stock Market? Buy treasury bonds? What the hell are treasury bonds by the way?”

This covers around 0.01% of the questions that I am facing every day, and I am sure you are too. Let’s try to address this and many, many other questions together.

Oh, I have completely forgotten to introduce myself.

I am Alessandro (Alex) Russo, a Tech Entrepreneur with around 15 years experience in Software Engineering. I have had the amazing chance to work with Fortune 100 companies as well as very small startups. I have done work for Fashion, Media, TLC, Insurance, Cloud Computing and Financial companies.

I am the founder of WebYourMind Limited, a Small Software Consultancy company based In Ireland and with customers all over the world. Trying to make my business sustainable (even tho revenue in 2016/17 has been quite satisfying), more on the story of WYM in future articles.

I am about to launch saascriptions.io, a product to control SaaS spending.
I have published a few online courses, and I provide onsite training as well.
I am in love with traveling, and I am a location independent entrepreneur (I was born and raised in Italy, lived 5 years in Dublin, and moved to Sesimbra, Portugal in 2018).

I’ll tell you more about me in future posts.

If you got to this point, you are my hero. If you liked the post, please leave 1, 2, 200, 0 or 42 claps below, so that more people will read this post.

I would love to connect with you. You might follow “The Startup Recipe” on Facebook (here’s the link) and see what I will do there as well.

I have a few other social media accounts (for WebYourMind, remember?) but it would be overwhelming and very salesy to share them all in one post ^_^.

I hope you will enjoy the upcoming content and that we’ll be able to shape our perfect recipe.

The Startup Recipe — An inspired introduction was originally published in The Startup Recipe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.