Successful Business Models: Surefire Ways to Build a Profitable Business

by Don Debelak

Despite an abundance of lip service to the 'can't lose' business model little thought is given to attracting customers, achieving long term goals, or even to the basics of well known business... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1891984454
• ISBN13: 9781891984457
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.0" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Practical road map for starting a consulting practice

I enjoyed reading this book. It provided a very practical approach to starting a consulting practice. I also enjoyed the insights from interviews with real life consultants and the very and the very up front realities of starting a consulting firm. I have recommended this book to a number of my colleagues interested in starting consulting firms.Good job, Marc!

Excellent book by experienced consultant in this field

Don Debelak is one of my favorite authors. This book presents an easy way to evaluate business start ups. But unlike "Will It Fly" by McKnight, which I recently reviewed, this book provides a set of criteria that can be applied to nearly all businesses. The "Will It Fly" book was oriented primarily to venture capital funded start ups. So, if you are thinking of starting a home-based business all the way on up to a small steel mill, Don's criteria will give you a great first blush look at its feasibility.Like McKnight's book the criteria are just a starting point, because Debelak tells you how to find compensating factors against any weakness in your business model.Although McKnight goes into more depth (44 criteria), I will probably use Debelak's (18 criteria) as a first blush approach as they are easy to apply and remember, they apply for all types of businesses, and they leave out the messy details of how the company will be staffed -- which can be evaluated after these.The author calls his model "GEL". "G" is for Great Customers, "E" is for Easy Sales, "L" is for Long Life.Great Customers - Debelak breaks this up into 2 sub areas: Customer Characteristics and Customer Value to the Company. Customer Characteristics has 3 factors: the number of possible customers (High is better); ease of finding the customers (Easy is better); Spending Patterns of the Customer (Prolific is better). Likewise, customer Value to the Company is broken into 3 factors.Easy Sales is broken into 2 parts, and in total they total 6 factors). Long Life (profitability and investments) is likewise broken into 2 parts having a total of 6 factors.You rate each factor into: Excellent, Average, Poor. Then you want to have a certain number of Excellents... and no more than a certain ratio of Poor's for every so many Excellents.He provides a nice form for you to use to fill all this in. He also provides many examples of how to rate different business types.What I found most interesting was his discussion of why we should use his (or McKnight's) business model. He says that you should go through these criteria before you do your business plan. You need to re-calibrate your business each year -- because the degree of change is so great. When you jump into a business plan, you often forget to look at the forest for the trees. Debelak points out that many dot.com's become dot.bombs because they focused on their plan (and selling it to VC's) and not on whether their business made basic sense.Debelak's criteria make you stay focused on whether your business makes sense.Once you go through Debelak's business model then he describes how you should then proceed doing your business plan. I like this approach very much. It allows you to re-configure your "business offer" (so to speak) before locking it in with a business plan. If your ease of finding new customers is Poor, then you can brainstorm ways to change that. After that, then you can proceed on your business plan w