Improve Your Business Processes with Customer Conversion Funnel in IT Architecture Documentation

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all right we are live if you're dropping into this video first of all i'll say thanks so much for coming by and uh my name is logan skees today i'm going to be documenting some of my methodology on designing the business architecture for a new project so colleagues and i have been putting together a visual model of a business map we call it the venture map for some time we've had the great fortune of being able to test this on our own businesses but also businesses for our strategic consulting clients my objective is to go for 90 days and basically document a run-through of the entire map or at least a pretty substantial portion of it now we started in my last videos looking at vision and team culture as we believe that's really where it all begins we want to anchor the map into a strong and compelling reason a just cause in other words as simon sinek would say so we've found our why that that's our nucleus and for us the purpose why we're doing it is we know that entrepreneurs are in need of a better way to clearly align and strategize with their team in order to mitigate risks and streamline operations we developed a venture map framework to help business leaders create a multi-dimensional model of their business that will serve as a map to visualize and optimize all systems and processes a tool for onboarding team members and a repository for their intellectual property so if you want to know more about how we structured our guiding principles what comes after that our leaderboard team tapestry and even some of our core narrative for example how we structure the deliverable of our origin story and how we translate these things into blog posts and copy through jarvis the copywriting ai to streamline that you're welcome to check the videos i've posted before if at any point in time you see a deliverable an asset here that is something you could use you could put the use something that you need just let me know you could leave a comment below check the link in the description it's an easy way to get a hold of me and in fact you can not only get one of these deliverables i'll give you the base architecture for the entire map as a template happy to do that for free in fact we want to find like-minded entrepreneurs in the world who demand more from technology in terms of how we align with our teams reinforce our cultures streamline our processes and validate our business models while maximizing capital efficiency and keeping a tight finger on the pulse of the needs in our marketplace moving forward today i want to address some elements of project plan now i've been involved with several startups in my entrepreneurial journey and i've had the insight into what happens when no one on the team has any formal training in project planning and how devastatingly consequential that can be it can be a real backbreaker so i've also on the other side of that been involved with teams and startup projects where there's a very strong basis of understanding and best practices for project planning in fact we've even worked with project planners before pmps or project management professionals these are folks who are certified am i or licensed if you know let me drop a note in the in the box but it's their certified field uh project management professionals are highly respected from my point of view these folks are quite skilled so i've got just a quick sort of cheat sheet dialed in here on some of the core elements that they'll discuss in project planning so this is not meant to be an exhaustive list and by no means am i claiming to be any sort of expert in the field in fact i'm uh just sharing some of my learnings in the hopes that it'll help me better understand how to document what we're doing here and be willing to share it with others but also if i can help consolidate your learning curve and show you a little bit of what we've found to be effective then you know i'm all about that the rising tide floats all boats as they say so truly if you're starting internally a scope statement or a stakeholder interview is typically a great place to start if you're working with an outside party a letter of intent can also be a really great way to start but truth be told if we're cutting down to the bone and we just got to get aligned on what it has to be done we're agreeing that something's going to be done and to really get alignment just i kind of view it in uh in big chunks which is first is the what and these are the deliverables um they don't have to be formatted like this but it could be it really could be so a work breakdown structure is kind of like this tree and uh it lists out deliverables so i'll tell you what i'm gonna do i'm gonna actually just grab this and take it over so i'm coming out of my talos os one board here this is kind of our mega board we've got quite a substantial volume of assets populated in the map here and on this series i'm going to be flushing out brand os one and this is just a white big white board basically you know this is pretty much what it is with a ton of shapes on top and we view this as a construction paper project macaroni macaroni noodle project even and it's a low fidelity prototype for us to validate our logic and our approach on the venture map essentially so when i'm looking at this right we effectively define some very high elements high level elements of our culture and we really want to move forward into the market analysis business modeling type of stuff but we want to do it with a shared understanding on the plan as well as the cultural elements of why we're doing it so we've kind of answered that question so now we're getting into the what um and that's the deliverables if you remember over here we were kind of going out in concentric circles the nucleus is our core or why the team is around that kind of the guardians of the purpose the method we agree to common behaviors aspirational behaviors and environmental priorities as a group how we will treat one another for example and uh the kind of space so to speak that we'll define and then the last outer ring is just very high level kind of the membrane of the cell and it's what it is and we have a few words that define that but let's just take it to the next step because where we really want to pick up from everything in this is kind of left to right it's a linear pattern so it's feeding through time and we want to start doing a deeper dive into the what will be done and this is where the work breakdown structure really can come in handy for our own uh work as entrepreneurs if you're if you're a solopreneur it's still valuable to have these sorts of things because like i believe it is churchill he says plans are useless but planning is invaluable and by just going through the total volume of i mean what it will realistically take to get an operation off the ground or map a pre-existing operation if you're a business uh of one or business of a hundred whether you've been operating for years or you're literally just starting out and filing your llc and getting a domain name it doesn't really matter there's pretty big components that are going to have to be mapped out at some point not to say that they're all equal in terms of priority a lot of folks will put their emphasis on market facing assets first and they don't really want to hear much of culture they don't really want to hear much in terms of market analysis or strategy or validation sequence where they're extracting hypotheses from their business model and going to market a very rigorous and evidence-based way and even in terms of continuity on the marketing side they don't a lot of times people are just really chomping at the bit to get sort of into the market traction domain and understand how they can get traffic to their funnel or if they're even less sophisticated they're saying i need sales right that's what it boils down to i need i need we need cash flow we need to increase revenue um from there they can look at their channels where those sort of prospective customers are coming from how they nurture those leads and and fuel it in but ultimately what i believe most in my experience a lot of times most cases happens is you sort of continue swimming upstream because you can't really have sales unless there's some sort of mechanism that feeds prospective customers to a conversion engine typically a best practice to accomplish that certainly within uh businesses with a strong online presence is that of a sales funnel and nurture sequences and then typically you know you if you did all of that you would typically find that you're going to need to drive traffic to that funnel by some means and if you're going to be driving traffic for any amount of time ultimately you're going to need to start thinking about marketing and if you're going to do marketing for a period of time you're going to need probably want to start thinking about an overarching strategy for the brand um and then typically the things that will define all of that i mean if you start a market analysis and swat assessment in your business model canvas it's going to be pretty inhumane and devoid of the dream so having a really strong root and that purpose is meaningful our purpose is we were frustrated and overwhelmed with the silos the digital silos between the cloud storage services our dropbox or google drive our desktop having just documents and spreadsheets and files and photoshop documents and website pages and just emails and all these siloed platforms with with file types what we wanted was a single unified place where we can view everything and we've been having a lot of fun working on that together as a small group for a little bit of time here and now i have the benefit of sharing this with viewers and also being able to share the venture map template itself i'm even willing to jump onto zoom with you get a venture map template plugged in to your own miro board which is the platform we're using to host this and uh help you get a general understanding of what to do next and uh in fact you could simply just plan to follow along with me throughout the series and as i show you the deliverables we have and sort of lay it all out step by step we'll view this as a it's a community-based project so work breakdown structure is a great way to go about uh defining the what these are the core deliverables right we kind of have it broken down as it scales throughout and these are typically some of the big ones that you're going to need to find at the bare minimum from our point of view this is of course speaking to the customer journey so there's our work breakdown structure we're just going to look at a couple other elements here all right so at a bare minimum if we've defined our what we didn't want to define our when um we can definitely get more clarity on what for example it's a pretty low fidelity in terms and easy just to say okay well we're going to have a origin story or we're going to have a lean canvas developed but if you don't have any visual reference for what that looks like sometimes it's it's best to have an appendix in this case especially if you're working with strategic consulting clients we've found out that it's very meaningful to have a visual reference that sort of breaks things down you can break down the time here sort of do some defining terms and and then show what each deliverable looks like and we think that this is probably a healthy thing to do so you have your your deliverable breakdown tree but then bringing in an appendix that's sort of even if it's if it's rough you know if you're saying we're gonna make a website wireframe bringing in an example website wireframe just to show them even something if you haven't built before if you're doing a cell then build type of strategy you could just provide references right at the bare minimum we think that's uh probably a smart and healthy thing to do to keep alignment and uh sustain rapport let's see uh so it an appendix is a great thing to have there we're very uh strong believers of the importance of reference material throughout the journey all right so with that being said let's tell you what i might as well might as well bring it over let's see what happens here maybe we'll just do the general template do some real-time workflow here at the end of the day you're going to want to be able to sit down with stakeholders you're going to want to be able to sit down with teammates and even with customers and break down visually what it is you're going to be providing right the what so it's kind of a second layer deep of to the what maybe it's probably right to put that over here so over time we can come back through and expand this it will undoubtedly be a large document probably something in the ballpark of 18 to 30 pages something like that but yeah having a visual appendix we could sort of come through and say yeah deliverable 1.1 is a project charter but delivering something like this beyond that so if there's questions and you say well what is a project charter have a definition there and break it down even simpler what's the core benefit and then a visual indication of what that looks like we'll just go ahead and keep on pushing forward here after we've defined the what and uh we've done that at a sufficient level the next thing is the win it's like we know what we're going to be building out and now the question is when are we going to be building it out um so that's important right we can sort of illustrate this and this is going to be more or less the schedule that we'll follow in this course in the series that i'm recording here on youtube and sharing on other channels um building out a brand architecture basically that's the win that we're going to use to map out the entirety of this sort of first business and at the end it's going to be accumulated in a mini course and delivered for free as well as the templates are the the base template of the venture map etc uh let's see so you can post in a gantt chart that's a great tool now there's different ways to view the gantt chart we love dark mode and that's why we've got everything pretty subdued here in terms of the color palette that works for us internally if something works for you you know i've had clients who love all sorts of colors and you can definitely take it that direction another element to consider is you don't always have to view it in a traditional format sometimes it's helpful to use emojis and stickers and different types of structure for sure beyond that beyond the what and the win you know it depends on the size of the team if it's a third party project of course you're going to want to look at contracting assets like a statement of work a master service agreement super helpful you can do team accountability agendas project change requests again if you're working with a client but in project status reports this is healthy especially as we start taking things into the market but for the time being i'd say or communication plan i'd say we're going to just cap it with what's absolutely necessary you know the biggest bang for the smallest amount of effort that's really defined in the what and the when um and i have just that additional insight here into what appendix could look like we could also do a an alternative structure of a journey map or something that says we're going to do these phases and it could have more of a unconventional structure than a gantt chart but for today that'll be sort of the game plan we're kind of in this first week here it's ambitious that in the current structure we're most likely going to reevaluate this and see if we can't break it down in a little bit pronounced way or prolonged way i should say but if we have these sorts of project plans just as a as a core foundation so not only as as an entrepreneur as a leader we can come through and say well this is what we're going to be doing and this is when how basically the how right this is the the threshold of performance the fidelity standard that's very helpful but at the bare minimum this is what we're going to do and this is when we're going to do it that's pretty helpful definitely helpful from there we're going to look at our market analysis i've got my box down here and the the natural progression from all of this now is to kind of say well let's let's get to work you know let's let's do this thing and market analysis is uh is a super interesting field i'm by no means an mba or formally trained in any of this in fact if anybody out there is i would love to learn from you if you got additional insights we've had the privilege of learning a thing or two over time in our studies and in our practice and i'm definitely planning on learning a little more live during this sort of documented series in this practice with with the youtube streaming and my pre-recorded videos one of the things we like to begin with and i'll do live here as i close this up and step it up for set it up for next time is what strategizer calls the environment map we're huge fans of what they've done with this sort of concept and it makes a lot of sense from our point of view i've got all of their assets here represented total respect and props to their content they have full ownership of it and these things are online for free you can download from their website i definitely recommend checking out the strategizer books and youtube channel definitely been a beneficiary of learning from them so the way that they break this down is is pretty straightforward they have their business model canvas here in the center and uh we did struggle for some time to reconcile if why what should go first and what we eventually came down to is after studying steve blank's approach which he always talks and for customer discovery he talks about doing a market size a step first and you could also look at doing something like a dream 100 this is a more kind of modern uh russell brunson click funnels kind of a guerrilla warfare thing and we really love that approach as well but we we believe that it's a healthy thing to do to just at least consider these elements before getting in to uh into the weeds so i'll just break this down a little further so i think this comes naturally before market size if you are out there watching this and think that something else should come before that by all means let me know um so four forces effectively four elements four sides to this and at the front end we're looking at our market forces at the top end we're looking at key trends on the back side we'll look at industry forces and below macroeconomic forces each of these has just a question and if you're on a team and you go through here for 20 minutes 45 minutes an hour an afternoon and even at the bare minimum just answer some of these questions and if you don't know them you can google them at the bare minimum it's helpful in terms of preparedness not because you're going to have something on a arbitrary digital whiteboard somewhere but because it'll help prepare the team and really ensure they understand some of these core concepts for best practice and it's biting off a lot that not all of it will be relevant to all business cases but nonetheless it's a healthy practice from there we'll of course go into our market sizing and this will be the last deliverable i pull over and maybe i'll pick it up here next time on the live stream but once we have gone through a workshop inside of the environment map we could simply just have notes here in each of these spaces we could draft up entire dossiers or or reports for each of these four sectors it or we could simply just review it and have some open-ended discussion whatever threshold of alignment and comprehension is right for your business that's kind of what we do we can always come back to it later from there we want to of course identify our addressable market and that's a healthy practice but i'll leave the live stream off here and say thanks so much for watching this journey this youtube stream is a documentation of my uh practice and methodology it's something my colleague jack hickler and i have put together over the last couple of years and it's evolved quite a quite a bit and we're excited to share it with the world we're excited to continue validating this uh unique approach in the market with other businesses right now we have the privilege of working with the number of clients here in south florida but we are looking to expand our client base and are currently looking for three business owners who are interested in leveraging the power of business architecture and visualizing their business processes iterating upon their primary business collateral and deconflicting disambiguating any of the complexities within their marketing channels with and the traceability of leads throughout their funnel and maximizing the efficiency of their conversion engine or their sales processes as well as understanding what sort of elements to their operations we could provide further support and from a team training perspective from an automations perspective from reinforcing the culture of both the team as well as the customer ensuring that there's a consistent surprise and delight to retain those users and push them through cross-channel sale opportunities as well as referrals and advocacy programming so having all that mapped out in a way that kind of comes full circle and ties the advocacy um and referral elements all the way into that place where we started from with the culture is really what we're all about we love to do this kind of work um i'm going to be building out this sort of base template here and sharing it with with the world if you have thoughts a perspective or an interest and this sort of approach just go ahead and drop a comment below like the video subscribe if you want to continue watching uh but even better than that you can just click the link here in the description check out the the next steps let me know where to send your very own venture map template and if you want you can even follow on from that schedule time to connect with me one-on-one on a zoom call happy to help set up your your template and from there if you want to explore further alignment or engagement opportunities happy to do so but that's all i got for today folks we did it uh some covered some ground here we got a chance to look at three elements from project planning and how we approach that with a work breakdown structure and a gantt chart going one step deeper is a visual appendix to define the threshold of quality for deliverables and we're just going to kind of continue pushing down the top and look at our market analysis and beginning that with strategizers beautiful environment canvas here and then pushing forward into what steve blank says to do first in the customer discovery journey which is defining that market size i'm going to pick up here next time and we'll look at some real uh data and uh we'll maybe even break down some behind the scenes of how we get that and what our approach is uh what the gurus in the world suggest you do when conducting a market this size when you're conducting market sizing but uh for today's video that's all i got look forward to connecting with you all soon as we continue bringing life to this venture map and detailing the process documenting the process for the world to see all right until then