There are 3 places where you and your team are likely to be found during your working week.
- The Office
- The Workshop
- The Marketplace
The Office is where you run operations and administration. This could be a physical building where a team assembles Monday to Friday each week. It could be just you beavering away on your laptop in the spare room, or it might be a collection of cloud-based apps that your global staff and contractors log into on various time zones.
The Workshop is where you create your offering. You might be producing videos for YouTube, hand-making high-end physical products, or coding new technology. You might own a factory or be creating content on your iPhone. For much of my professional life, my workshop has been the recording studio.
The Marketplace is where your customers experience what you have to offer. This could be through a retail outlet where you need to ensure strong product placement or it might be a subscription people sign up for via your own app as you seek to gain more 5-star reviews than your competitors on the AppStore.
Your Office, Workshop and Marketplace could be one physical building. It might also be a complex web of virtual spaces and technologies scattered around the web. However, regardless of the specifics, there is one thing that is certain…
There will be RESOURCES that you require in all of the 3 areas and it’s highly likely that there will be associated costs that you need to be aware of.
I would also like to encourage you to list resources including contracts, intellectual property and insurance certificates. Even if some of these resources appear not to require ongoing expenditure, they are vital to the success and stability of your business and should be placed alongside other physical and digital resources. Being reminded of the fact you have standard contracts already drawn up, for example, it might help you consider whether they need to be updated and whether a couple of hours of your solicitors time might save you from losing a dispute some time in the future.
