Ultimately to be a successful business with ongoing revenues, you need to build a platform. Wal-Mart, love ’em or hate ’em, has a platform for distributing products to consumers. It could be argued no business has ever done that better than them. Twitter has a platform that facilitates human communication and provides revenue opportunities in the form of advertising. What’s your platform?
Defining your platform
Odds are if you have been in business for any length of time, you already have a platform and just may not realize it. For example, this blog is a platform that generates a modest amount of affiliate marketing revenue each year. Look for something your business does on an ongoing basis that generates revenue. That’s your platform. Even consulting firms have a platform as long as they have figured out the trick of finding new clients and retaining existing ones.
You may have built your platform intentionally, or like this blog, figured out later it could generate revenue. Twitter started as a way for the founder to communicate with his family and close friends. It was only later they figured out it was a damn fine platform for generating venture capital dollars and then advertising revenues. On the other hand, the McDonald’s platform was built from day one to make money selling folks affordable delicious food. (Well, it’s delicious when I’ve had a tad too much to drink the night before.)
Repurposing your platform
Since we’re talking about McDonald’s, you’ve probably noticed over the last several years they’ve really been pushing their coffee products. Why do you think that is? Well, I’d speculate Starbucks was kicking their ass in the early morning breakfast business. For many folks, the first consideration in the morning is a cup of coffee and the food is secondary. McDonald’s was known for food, not beverages. Now they’ve always sold coffee, but they just were not known in the marketplace as a coffee leader.
Through great marketing and the addition of a few coffee drinks distributed through their existing platform, they have changed that. They have also started using their platform to distribute several “healthy” meal options through their platform. The key point here is that McDonald’s management stopped thinking of themselves as a burger and fries distributor and started thinking of themselves as a food and beverages for the masses distributor.
It’s all about revenue
Whatever you originally built your platform for will only generate so much revenue. At some point, you need to figure out how else you can use your existing platform. It’s either that or start over with a second platform; but that is damn expensive and time consuming. Why not figure out what else your current creation can do to add to your business’s bottom line?
For example, at ColorMetrix we’ve built some pretty cool cloud-based tools for color verification and process control. That’s a relatively small niche market. Our platform, however, is really an ecosystem for the collection, analysis and distribution of scientific data. Just because today we plug into spectrophotometers does not mean that tomorrow we could not plug into other scientific and testing equipment. Or maybe we will start thinking even more like McDonald’s and just figure out a way to collect other information that’s valuable to our existing client base and sell more to existing customers while finding new ones.
New is not always the answer
If you take anything away from this post, it’s that starting over is not always the right answer. It’s expensive and time consuming. Sure, building something new can be “fun,” but so can figuring out ways to repurpose something old. This blog has been around since 2005 and I’ve started thinking about some new ways to utilize this platform in 2013. For me, 2013 will be the year of refining and improving what we already have; not running off half-cocked to build six new things.
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