Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:

A business model can show us what someone did, but it cannot capture every condition that made what they did work. Before concluding that a model doesn’t work, it may be worth examining whether the problem is the model itself or something less visible that is affecting the results.

---

We encounter successful business models daily

Someone builds a thriving consultancy around retainers. Someone else creates a subscription business. Another turns expertise into courses, licenses a methodology, develops a productized service or builds an entire business around a personal brand. We study what they did, read the book, listen to the podcast, attend the workshop and examine the framework.

Then comes the seemingly reasonable question: If this business model works, why isn’t it working for me?

There is nothing wrong with learning from models.

We need them because they help us simplify complexity and understand how things work. The difficulty begins when we assume that because a model explains something useful, it contains everything we need to reproduce the result.

Shane Parrish for example, has written extensively about mental models as tools for thinking.

First principles thinking helps us separate what we know from what we have assumed. Inversion allows us to approach a problem from the opposite direction. Second-order thinking asks us to consider what happens after the immediate consequence. These models are valuable because they do not necessarily tell us what to do. They help us think more clearly about what we are contemplating at any given moment.

There are those models that help us understand structure.

A business model describes how a business creates, delivers and captures value. A revenue model explains how money enters the business. A sales model provides a structure for acquiring customers. An operating model helps us understand how the different parts of an organisation work together. These models can give us a useful representation of something that is much more complicated in reality.

The map however, is not the territory

A map is useful precisely because it simplifies reality. It gives us enough information to navigate without reproducing every tree, building, pothole, slope and drain along the way. But that usefulness comes with a limitation. The representation is not reality.

The same is true of a business model. We can see the pricing structure, the offer, the sales process, the marketing strategy, the customer journey and the revenue streams. We can draw the model on a page and understand how its pieces are supposed to work together; but those visible elements may not contain everything that made the business successful.

Years ago, I read Thick Face, Black Heart by Chin-Ning Chu, and there is a section called “The Inward State” that explains best why something may not work for you.

Chu writes about the many books that promise to teach people how to become better executives, salespeople or more effective individuals. Their authors usually prescribe a course of action that worked for them and perhaps for some of the people they taught. But following the same instructions does not necessarily produce the same result.

She illustrates the point with two people who read the same book on lion taming. They enter the lion’s cage dressed identically. They use identical gestures and the same words to command the lion. Yet the results are dramatically different. One gets the lion to jump through the hoop. The other, in Chu’s rather memorable description, ends up as a “gruesome mess” on the floor of the cage.

Her point is that reproducing visible behaviour does not necessarily reproduce the result. Chu argues that there is an inward state that must also be present for those words and actions to have their intended effect. The people teaching the method may have developed that state intuitively or unconsciously and therefore may not even recognize how much of their effectiveness depended on it.

In business, we tend to study successful people from the outside.

We can see what they charge, but not necessarily what they believe about charging it. We can watch them enter a room and confidently introduce themselves to strangers, but we cannot see what is happening internally as they do it. We can hear them ask for the business, but we cannot see the experiences that shaped their relationship with rejection. We can copy their sales script but not necessarily copy the accompanying conviction needed to put it into action.

We can also reproduce someone’s calendar, sales funnel, pricing structure, networking strategy or business model while missing the internal conditions that allow that person to operate it effectively. Their judgement, confidence, tolerance for uncertainty, willingness to be visible, relationship with money or ability to continue after rejection may never appear on the diagram; yet they may be doing much of the work that makes the model successful.

Often what we’re looking for may not be what we need

We might consider that, “The business model isn’t working,” and immediately start shopping for another one. Perhaps we move from projects to retainers, consulting to coaching, individual clients to corporate clients, services to courses or one target market to another.

Sometimes, yes, the business model might genuinely need changing. But sometimes the model is sound, and what needs examining is whether our thinking, emotions and behaviour are allowing us to do what the model requires.

A Universal Model That Applies Across the Board

There are some models whose usefulness is not dependent on having the same business, personality, market or circumstances as the person who developed them. They describe relationships that are present regardless of the particular business model we choose.

One that I have found particularly useful is Weldon Long’s Tear Through Fear model from The Power of Consistency. The model connects thoughts, emotions, actions and results. What we think influences what we feel. What we feel affects the actions we take, avoid, postpone or abandon. Those actions, in turn, influence the results we produce.

That makes the model broadly applicable because every business model ultimately has to be operated by a person. Whatever structure we choose, whether it is consulting, subscriptions, retainers, productized services, licensing or something else, there are still actions that have to be taken for that model to work. And behind those actions are thoughts and emotions that can either support or interfere with what the model requires.

Imagine two consultants using essentially the same business model

Both need to contact prospective clients consistently. One thinks, I have something valuable that could help this person understand their problem differently. The other thinks, I don’t want them to think I’m bothering them.

Those thoughts create different emotional responses, and those emotions affect behaviour. One reaches out consistently, follows up, asks questions, discusses value and asks for the business. The other rewrites the email six times, sends fewer messages, hesitates to follow up and perhaps even reduces the price before anyone has objected to it.

Six months later, one business model appears to work and the other appears not to.

But was the model really what we tested?

The structure may have been the same, but the actions required to make that structure work were different because the thoughts and emotions driving those actions were different.

Adaptation of models requires discernment

Some models help us think. Some help us understand how something is structured. Some describe relationships that apply much more broadly and some show us what worked for someone else under a particular combination of capabilities, resources, market conditions, relationships, experience and timing.

The mistake is assuming that because a model works, it will work in the same way for everyone.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Think about a model or approach that doesn’t seem to be working for you. Before deciding that the model is the problem, what might you not be seeing about the thoughts, emotions or other hidden factors affecting how you are putting it into practice?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson — The Pre-Fixer. I help leaders see the real problem before they act, in my writing and in my work. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.

What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?