The Bold Manifesto for the Business Model of the Future.
By: Frank Wazeter
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Website Traffic, Web Design, Small Business Marketing, Digital Marketing

Living up to bold statements you make is entirely different than making the statement in the first place. Thought leaders, designers and marketers are often guilty of declaring a best practice or making a bold statement as to what everyone should do.

A lot of the time, we implement those ideas in client-related work. The problem that most of us suffer from is that we rarely practice what we preach for ourselves. Classic examples of the cobbler’s kid not having any shoes. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m certainly guilty of it.

In April, I published an article in Entrepreneur that made some pretty bold claims about what the business model of the future looks like. I believe strongly that fundamentally, the market leaders of the future are all going to be thought leaders, influencers and content creators first.

Said another way, that social capital and content is the product. While the actual product or service is simply a way to monetize. For example, as web designers and digital marketers, our product and website all focused around the service and why you should buy and the blog and content was all secondary.

The classic approach is to build a following and publish content with the ultimate intent to sell the service. By default that means information either gets locked up in an info product or placed behind a “consultation” and followers are a number towards meeting sales objectives.

The classic model isn’t effective anymore. Content created with the intent to sell is filled with useless hooks and ‘call to actions’ to push people into the sales funnel. It’s utterly dependent on one thing: push more numbers.

Traditional advice leads to a majority of businesses and professionals marketing their business like they’re that desperate person in the street chasing you down to hand you a flier. The only thing that makes you wanna do is run away from that person as fast as you can. So why do we magically think that same approach is going to work online? Because customer acquisition is just a numbers game?

Related: Should You Be Personal In Marketing?

We’re going to change that approach and live up to the digital-first business model of the future and I’m going to risk my company’s future to live up to what I believe.

Looking at my own efforts online and evaluating my own website, I haven’t even been living up to my own bold beliefs. That changes now and it’s been something I’ve been preparing the entire summer for.

Sure, my publications, social media reaches and organic traffic has been enough to keep the business steadily growing — but it isn’t the bold impact I want to have. The company somehow became “another one of those” with an owner with “such and such look at me I have impressive credentials.”

Below are the radical changes that’re taking place.

Our website will read like a magazine with content and story the first and foremost focus.

The only focus that matters is breaking down processes and steps in a way that any business owner can do what we do professionally. You’ll still be able to contact us directly or look at our core service pages, even hire us, but to find those pages you’ll have to go through a side menu. You’ll have to dig to get to the “business” side of things — which goes against every best practice you’ve ever read about “converting sales” on your website.

In other words, we’re dramatically shifting the focus of the website from being ‘service’ oriented to being more like a magazine, a trusted and reliable source of quality and tangible information (without ads or anything). Instead of being about me and my team and how great we are, it’s going to be all about how you can actually make the internet work to the level you want.

I believe that the people who really want to do business with you will reach out and that the money will take care of itself. I don’t need to cram it down your throat.

We’re going to eliminate SEO and digital marketing services altogether. Instead you’re going to be empowered directly.

SEO, advertising and marketing based services are tough. The majority of the time they’re hollow and business owners ‘hope’ that it’ll be the silver bullet that makes things work for them. To scale those services effectively, an agency has only two choices: charge high fees commensurate with the time investment required (like we did, typically starting at $16,000+) or plug your business into a templated pattern of ‘what usually works.’

In the first case I can show you my case studies and proof all day long about how we took a company that was stuck at $300k for 7 years to $1.4 million in 8 months, and how charging $30,000 to do it was the best deal on the planet. But if you don’t have the budget for that and, more likely, are extremely skeptical whether or not it can even work, it doesn’t matter. Traditional sales advice would be to say “you’re simply not my customer or a good fit,” that’s a lazy excuse that makes it all about me and not about actually helping you build your business.

In the second case the business model is basically: throw the spaghetti against the wall, do the basics, if it works we keep a client, if it doesn’t we lose one and just get another. I hate that because it makes business owners believe that the internet simply doesn’t “work” for them like it does for others. In this model, I’m basically saying that you’re just a number on my spreadsheet with an average cost to acquire and average lifespan.

Instead we’re going to publish every last thing we do to scale a company online, make it completely free and written in both technical formulas, easy to follow recipes and stories so that it’s easy to digest. No course to buy, no paywalls, no requiring a consultation to get the meat and potatos.

My goal is to be so over-the-top transparent, informative and entertaining with what actually works to scale a digital strategy that you’re able to actually FEEL the internet working for you and grow to love it’s power and other agencies blatantly take our stuff and use it to make massive profits of their own actually offering the service. My intent is for it to be so ahead of the curve, through using our own trials, tribulations and experiences, that it’s the stuff that you’ll see advertised by some info-product on Facebook for $3,000 in 3 years.

We’ll be experimenting with alternative monetizations that make sense and leverage our strength in web development.

Ultimately, a business has to make money. But the way we do it can be radically different. For instance, we won’t ever fully eliminate our web design service because we love to do it. What we will do is open it up to people through publishing powerful WordPress themes and the like that anyone can download for free and put “Frank’s design brain” in their own DIY efforts if they choose.

We’re focusing on making Tech-as-a-Service more open and easy to use for businesses. As a business you must pay for hosting, your domain name, email, invoicing, etc. We’re building a platform (currently in beta, and would love more beta testers!) that leverages our considerable tech background in server and IT management in a way that you can have the world’s best technology for a fraction of a cost. For example, our average WordPress website on our server loads in less than 600 milliseconds (.6 seconds!) because of how we configure the tech.

By offering this in a hands on way, for services you must pay for anyway but also opening it up at an affordable and scalable rate (we’re currently hovering around $25-$35 a month) and taking away all the technical headache, you’re able to get to the meat and potatos of loving the tech in your business and we get to “invest in you” as a business and keep cash flow going.

One exciting idea we’re toying with is a ‘cryptocurrency’ built in where recurring revenue you pay actually gets you the service AND a monetized token for the dollars invested. You could simply then use your in-house crypto to purchase design and dev services from us or sell them to someone else. It’s still an extremely raw idea, but I love the concept it represents.

Digital Strategy consulting services will still be available for one-on-one personalized attention, but the prevailing thought here is to do it this way: offer it completely for free, with the caveat that we can either do the meeting live or record the meeting and publish it to help other people through tangible stories and examples. This would provide links back to the person we consulted for (to help their web presence) and give back to all business owners.

You’d still have the option to pay for it, and I’m imagining two scenarios: 1) a good old fashioned ‘tip’ jar and 2) pay for privacy. There are scenarios where companies need or want privacy (or simply don’t want to be in a public spotlight). For these scenarios, that’s were more traditional style fees would come into place — so the only difference between “free” and “paid” is simply whether or not you want to contribute to the content machine or not.

Finally, we’ll publish books and materials that cover much of what we’re talking about. I imagine fun collector’s edition styles that would look great on a desk or coffee table and standard $20 books. The key difference here is that all of the information would already be available for free on the ‘magazine-style’ website.

I have a prevailing belief that really, our customers become friends and partners, and the products and services we offer are simply socially acceptable ways for us to not feel awkward about them supporting our ability to live in the world. This idea is one way we’re building off that belief.

There’s no crystal ball here, I don’t know to what degree this is going to work, only that I know for certain that it’s going to work and will surprise us in ways we can’t even fathom right now.

Whether or not this model is scalable in a huge market, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t factually know whether or not it’s going to be the model gamechanger for how we all do business on the internet. I’m certain that what I’ve laid out today will change and evolve over time as we dig further in the trenches. Some ideas will work great, others will need modification.

Over the next coming week’s I’ll be recording our entire overhaul of our website and forming groups on LinkedIn and other social media platforms to gather a community for you to benefit from and put all this into action. If this excites you or inspires you, send me a DM, else keep an eye out on my feed as I post updates and articles so you know where to go to get access.

Otherwise, this only works with in-the-trenches experimentation and live feedback — send me your thoughts so we can refine the model for any business to use and hammer out the kinks.

One thing is for certain: things will never be the same again. Everyone needs to choose what they believe is best for them. As for me, I choose to pioneer boldly and relentlessly into the unknown.