The Business Model Canvas is a tool for documenting your business and creating the value proposition for new ones. It was developed in 2005 by Alexander Osterwalder, and has been improved upon in the business arena ever since. We use the Business Model Canvas to communicate the eight distinct areas of a business, and how they all support what is considered the ninth area, the Value Proposition.
I use the Business Model Canvas (BMC) in my
Growth Accelerator coaching program to help understand the Value Proposition of a business (what the key differentiating factor is) and also to identify opportunities to scale within the current framework. Often, when business owners are looking to scale and add new income streams, they try to think "outside the box" and find completely different avenues to drive revenue. But oftentimes, they are not properly capturing revenue streams that are already in their sphere of influence.
Basically, they don't look at the value they already offer that they can capture without trying to market to entirely different customer segments or create entirely new facets of their business.
The BMC is also a helpful tool to see if the business is already spread too thin. Perhaps it is offering too many services, serving too many customer segments, or otherwise trying to cover too many bases. This means the business needs to be reigned in and we need to start trimming.
If nothing else, it helps one better understand what the business is actually doing in one concise page.