The Lean Business Scorecard
By: Robin Wong
Tags: Design, Responsibility, Lean Startup, Canvas, Business

The Lean Business Scorecard

The fastest-growing businesses in the world experiment on an industrial scale to demonstrate how Desirable, Viable, Feasible and in some cases, how Responsible they are. Give your business a headstart with The Lean Business Scorecard, a one-page canvas that helps you focus your time, money and energy on the right questions to answer at the right time. Robin Wong Jul 1·11 min read

The Lean Business Scorecard v3.3 — Creative Commons Attribution- Robin Wong (download your copy)

We’re at the turning point of a new age.

Whilst our fundamental needs haven’t changed during the pandemic, our priorities and expectations most certainly have.

As the first wave of lockdowns were announced across the world, many of us shifted overnight from the world of commuting and face-to-face meetings to digitally-enabled, remote ways of living and working.

Millions upon millions of retail and hospitality businesses were forced to close as their customer footfall and sales fell to zero.

The shops that survived have been left with increasingly bare shelves due to the disruptions to our global supply chain. First, it was items like hand sanitiser and toilet roll, then it was staple food items like tinned food, flour and pasta.

Meanwhile, tech companies like Apple, Google and Amazon with their global network of cloud data centres and highly automated and resilient supply chains have not only survived but have positively thrived.

Their digital channels, products and services, largely impervious to recent world events, have increasingly become the way many of us meet our consumer demands.

Their share prices have risen to all-time highs, giving them an even greater ability to capture more of the markets that have been disrupted by COVID.

For Business leaders trying to navigate this new age, it can appear daunting.

How can anyone compete with these billion- and trillion-dollar companies?

The good news is that it is not only possible to compete, but if you’re someone looking to grow or invest in a business in this new age, there are not only numerous opportunities to exploit at any moment in time (if you know where and how to look), but you can still gain a competitive advantage without having thousands of Google or Amazon engineers to help you.

That advantage is gained through focused and lean experimentation.

The Lean Business Scorecard helps you focus on the right problems at the right time by assessing how desirable, viable, feasible and responsible your Business is.

Depending on the scores you achieve using the Scorecard, you can then use a series of simple Experiment “Flows” to rapidly identify better insights and opportunities, develop solutions your customers love to use and grow your business in ways that are good for people, profit and the planet.

[note: a post about Experiment Flows is coming soon, watch this space]

Who is this for?

The Lean Business Scorecard is designed for 2 types of people -

Creators of Business ideas like Corporate Innovators and Entrepreneurs

like Corporate Innovators and Entrepreneurs Investors in Business ideas like Business Leaders and Startup Investors

Creators of Business Ideas

If you are an Innovator, Entrepreneur or looking to set up a Side Hustle, having an effective strategy for knowing where to focus will help you avoid distractions on your journey to conquering new markets.

Managing your time effectively will either be one of the biggest challenges you face or one of the most competitive advantages you have at your disposal.

Focusing your time and energy — Photo by Surface on Unsplash

The scores you get from using the Lean Business Scorecard will help bring to the surface any assumptions you still have, check your unconscious biases and quickly evaluate how much evidence each part of your business idea has.

Armed with this knowledge you will know where to focus your time and efforts next for business success.

Investors in Business Ideas

If you’re a Business Leader or Investor, having an effective strategy to review and prioritise multiple business ideas will increase your chances of capitalising on the right opportunities and help you to drive sustainable growth across the greatest number of them.

Making Investment Decisions — Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

In your case, the Scorecard’s scoring system is an invaluable way to help you compare and contrast several ideas, work out which ones to focus your investments on and provide the right level of support as those opportunities are realised.

One of the benefits of using the scorecard approach is that it’s easy to use even if you have little prior knowledge of the problem, solution or market a business intends to operate in.

The Lean Business Scorecard gives you a simple way to evaluate any business idea based on evidence rather than how well someone presented a set of slides or how theoretically sound a business case looks

How does the Scorecard work?

The Scorecard provides a simple framework to reliably assess 4 business-critical questions and examines how much evidence or assumptions you have to back up your answers.