From Business Model to Business Value Model: How to Future-Proof Your Company

The Importance of Value-Driven Business Planning in the Modern Era

Your company’s business model is at the heart of everything you do. It ties together all of the elements of your organisation, from marketing and sales to finance and operations. If your business model is flawed, your company is heading for the abyss. That’s why it’s crucial to take a comprehensive approach to business planning, one that takes into account not just monetary value, but also the social and environmental impact of your organisation.

Over the past year, we at THINK with people have had the pleasure of working with organisations that pursue broader goals than just financial gain. When talking about business models in this context, we quickly realised that future-proof business models must include a consideration of the value created for society. It took some brain gymnastics, but we developed an approach that combines a holistic perspective with the formulas of a spreadsheet.

Today, all companies are responsible for their positive and negative impact on people and the planet. This includes next to government institutions, NGOs and nonprofits. All of them are purpose-driven organisations and companies adopting a CSR strategy. Equally, startups and scaleups looking for investments from impact-focused funds will find value in such an approach.

To future-proof your company, it’s essential to identify your stakeholder ecosystem, map out all relationships between stakeholders, and ask yourself what value they deliver to one another. Our approach is unique because we don’t start with theoretical, high-level metrics. Instead, we map out the real relationships between stakeholders, considering not just abstract global impact metrics, but the actual value that is exchanged with the direct stakeholders. There are multiple connections in your ecosystem, but a selected number of them are truly core relationships. For example, you can look at the employment a company creates in a community versus the local traffic it generates, which means you both give and take back value from that community.

The difference between a traditional business model and a business value model is that in the value model, we integrate all the value that is exchanged in the company’s ecosystem. So also the things that are traditionally considered as an extra, even if they are measured with analytics that bear no relationship to the core business at first sight. This allows you, as a CEO, to build a future-proof model for your business that includes all value created, given, and received.

Incorporating non-monetary values into your business model can be difficult if you approach it as an afterthought. Therefore you need to start from scratch and build it up step by step, involving all stakeholders. This way, you can create a comprehensive business plan that accounts for social and environmental impact, in addition to financial gain.

​​Incorporating non-financial goals into your business model can seem like a daunting task, but it’s essential for your company. By taking a comprehensive approach that considers social and environmental impact, in addition to financial gain, you can create a truly future-proof business value model. We have developed a strong approach that involves mapping out the real relationships between stakeholders and involving all parties in the process. If you’re interested in learning more about how to future-proof your business, we invite you to contact us to discuss our approach further.