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84. Bob Luddy: Five Active Processes of Austrian Economics That Helped Me Build One of America’s Most Successful Entrepreneurial Businesses

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Bob Luddy is founder and CEO of CaptiveAire (CaptiveAire.com), the US market leader in commercial kitchen ventilation systems. It’s a $500MM+ business with 1,000+ employees and a 40+-year success record. Bob explains to Economics tor Entrepreneurs how these principles of Austrian economics, applied as active processes, played a part.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Say’s Law

Say’s Law is a fundamental proposition in support of a production-driven market system as opposed to a consumption-driven view. It’s quite difficult to interpret and pithy summaries like “production creates its own demand” and “production precedes demand” don’t help entrepreneurs very much.

Bob Luddy doesn’t interpret, he applies. His application formula is this: new supply that is brought to market can solve problems that have not so far been solved. In that case, demand will result.

He gave this example: in the 1980s, many of the harmful effluents from cooking in a restaurant were escaping into the kitchen and sometimes even into the dining room. Those effluents could contain carcinogens, and at the very least, they’re very unpleasant. That was a problem – but it was the status quo.

So Bob thought, in Say’s Law mode: if CaptiveAire could solve that problem, and bring the solution to market at an acceptable price, demand (i.e., lots of customers) would follow. That turned out to be exactly right.

Implied in this formula, of course, is attention to market signals regarding unsolved problems, a problem-solution design process, and a communications and customer interaction capability to inform the market of the new solution. Say’s Law applies, but not in isolation from other entrepreneurial actions. Those actions, Bob tells us, include accuracy and completeness in solving the problem, since many competitors may be trying to address it at the same time. Small details can make a big difference in applying Say’s Law.

Subjective Value

Many podcast listeners have asked whether the concept of subjective value — which holds that it is the subjective and emotional evaluation by customers of an entrepreneurial offering that determines its market acceptance – applies equally in B2B markets as in B2C markets. Isn’t subjective value more relevant to consumers’ choices of fashion and food than it is to business customers’ choice of service es from vendors and suppliers?

Bob’s response: The subjectivity of value is very, very clear, and it’s reinforced in the market every single day.

He used the example of bringing an integrated ventilation system to a restaurant. CaptiveAire might be successful in explaining all of the problems it’s going to solve, its sustainability, and all relevant features and functions. Completion of a sale still comes down to the user subjectively assessing the exchange value, by asking “Am I willing to pay X amount of money to solve these problems?” The customer very well could say, “No, I’d rather live with some of the problems and depart with that much money.”

Bob emphasized the importance of communications in addressing the challenges raised in calibrating subjective value appraisal. A strategy of “solving all the problems” requires clear communications to the customer of how CaptiveAire solves the problems, so that the user can make a fully-informed decision. “If we don’t communicate well, the value of the product in the user’s mind may be lower. So part of the issue of getting a higher subjectivity of value is to have a full understanding of what the product does.” Clear communication is a component of value.

Comparative Advantage

There’s a big difference between competitive advantage and comparative advantage. Bob explains it this way: competitive advantage lies in striving to provide the same service and same solution in a better way than a competitor. Such an advantage may be achievable from time to time, but it is temporary and quite easily taken away by a hard working competitor. The market signals are clear and unobscured, telling the competitor where they must improve and the incentives to do so are compelling. No competitive advantage is sustainable over the long term.

Comparative advantage is different. It’s an unmatched capability, often built over time by accumulating unique knowledge and experience and applying them in a unique capital structure. Such an advantage is longer term, maybe not absolutely invincible, but very hard to overcome.

Bob cited an example outside of his field: winemaking in Napa Valley, California. “If you decided you wanted to make wine and compete with Napa Valley, it’s going to be a hard way to go.”

In the case of CapitveAire, “over time, we’ve been able to develop those design technologies, techniques, automated equipment and software, and when you marry all those things together and you integrate them, we gain a major comparative advantage. It’s very hard to overcome because it’s not one thing. It’s many things, and they’re all well thought out and have been developed over a number of years.”

Bob refers to on important element of CaptiveAire’s comparative advantage as “technique”. An example is “bending metal in real time and dynamically stacking it right up on the assembly line”, resulting in elimination of inventory, and very rapid turnaround time. It’s CaptiveAire’s unique methodology, developed over many years. Competitors can attempt to emulate but they fail. It’s a comparative advantage.

Opportunity Cost

The cost of any choice or decision includes its opportunity cost: what option must be declined or given up in order to make the choice you prefer.

Bob explains: Understanding opportunity costs means turning down opportunities that would divert resources, and, instead, focus on getting the best utilization out of your human resources possible, and making the most sustainable solutions, which are going to save time and money over a period of time. We make 10 major categories of products. No more. To keep those products at the right price, at a high level of performance and sustainability requires all of our time. So if we divert any of that time, opportunity costs might result in us failing at our most primary mission.

He gave the example of a line of business that required extensive customization. The benefit of customization is that each customer feels that they enjoy unique value. The opportunity cost is that it’s impossible to be all things to all people — it absorbs too much time and too many resources. CaptiveAire addressed the opportunity cost problem by replacing customization with software-enabled adjustability of certain key inputs like voltage and phase. They found that this solution could effectively address 95% of customer-requested flexibility. While competitors asked, “Just tell us what you want, we’ll figure it out” and spent resources on responding, CaptiveAire was able to stay focused on its core mission and core products and services.

Every opportunity that comes a firm’s way must be examined through the lens of opportunity cost. Austrians see opportunity cost as an active process — the same way they see value and resource allocation and pricing and many other elements of business.

Pricing

Pricing is a discovery process. At the same time, it’s an element of business strategy. Bob made a strategic decision at the outset to price “lower than the market,” while aiming for highest quality. The market informs CaptiveAire of what the pricing norm is, and therefore what “lower than the market” is. The discovery part is: how low to go to maximize unit sales and revenues. The second part of Austrian pricing theory is that producers choose their own costs. Bob chose to seek ways to keep costs low enough to sustain his pricing and quality strategy, which led him to the efficiencies, automation, speed, inventory-reduction, high technology, and opportunity-cost sensitivity that characterize CaptiveAire.

Price, cost, and profit are integrated in a strategic formula that’s tested every day by the customer’s willingness to pay the price of high quality.

Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode

Five Active And Integrated Processes Of Austrian Economics (PDF): Download PDF

Bob Luddy’s Effectuation Process (PDF): View Image

Entrepreneurial Life: The Path From Startup to Market Leader by Bob Luddy: View on Amazon

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

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Your Value Proposition Language Is Your Customer Commitment And Your Company Culture.

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Peter Drucker is famous for, among many other pieces of business wisdom, his statement that “there is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer”.

That’s a statement with a lot of punch and a lot of clarity. It dismisses all the contemporary alternatives in the debate about the purpose of business firms, such as maximizing shareholder value or sustainability and environmental protection or stakeholder theory.

How do firms create customers? Peter Drucker was equally clear on this question:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

It’s certainly sound advice to place marketing and innovation at the front and center of business operations. Since 1954, when Drucker’s book, The Practice Of Management,  was published, there have been great advances in defining how marketing is conducted and how innovation can be successfully introduced to the market.

The most recent advances have come from the field of economics, a discipline that is dissolving the walls that previously existed between it and psychology and cognitive science, and discovering a new understanding of how and why customers make their economic decisions to buy or abstain from buying, to increase or decrease their usage levels, and to maintain or abandon loyalty to a service provider or a brand.

The new discoveries concentrate in the phenomenon of value. Business language has embraced value in the past, and shifted its focus from value creation (the idea that value is produced within the firm) to value co-creation (the idea that value is produced jointly in an act of exchange between a service provider and a customer). Now, economics – and specifically that brand of economics known as Austrian economics – has identified that all value is created by the customer. It is the customers’ investment of time and effort and emotional commitment and intent to better their circumstances that creates value. Value emerges in the customer domain.

Behind this discovery is a new definitional understanding of value. It is a feeling in the customer’s mind, an experience that’s unique to each customer. Only the customer can have the experience. New research is revealing more about the experience – for example, that it is a learning experience. It takes place over time, beginning with an anticipation or estimate of future value (“what’s in it for me?”), an appraisal of relative value (“is it worth it?”), an exchange experience (the act of buying), a usage experience (the act of using the good or service) and finally an assessment of whether the experience met the expectations of the initial anticipation. The customer is busy and highly engaged in the physical, cognitive and emotional processes of value.

Where does all this leave the firm, and their marketing and innovation activities? The new discovery is that the successful firm is a facilitator – rather than a deliverer or creator – of value. There are degrees of facilitation ranging from passive (e.g. making a purchase opportunity available on an e-commerce site) to active (e.g., providing help-desk or personal service in real time when the customer is experiencing product usage), and many in between.

The pivot in the shift from value creation to value facilitation is the new role of the value proposition. Firms can create new information of which the customer is unaware, such as the development of a new service or the addition of new features to an existing service. Customers want to appraise the potential value represented by new information. They will make the decision, and they give some weight to information from the service provider.

The first element of information in a sound value proposition is empathy. The value process begins with the customer’s pursuit of betterment. They give a signal to entrepreneurial innovators that betterment is possible: the signal is dissatisfaction. Customers can create value but they can’t design their own products and services. Their genius is to always want something better. The responsive entrepreneur diagnoses their inarticulate dissatisfaction using a highly tuned sense of empathy. The value proposition communicates to the customer that the entrepreneur expended significant effort at empathic diagnosis.

The next element of the value proposition is a promise. While unable to create value, firms and brands can promise that they have worked hard to find a way for their customers to  experience value. The value proposition must demonstrate to customers that

  • You recognize them as individuals. Show evidence.
  • You understand their current dissatisfaction – reveal your empathic diagnosis.
  • You offer a credible promise of relief.
  • You reinforce your offer with reasons-to-believe. Before the customer engages emotionally, they want to engage rationally.
  • You have a clear statement of benefits that you can demonstrate are greater than the customer’s cost. The customer’s cost includes not just willingness to pay, but also opportunity costs such as inertia, alternatives and value uncertainty. Help them with their economic calculation.

The value proposition sets the customer’s value learning process in motion: anticipating, weighing, exchanging, experiencing, assessing. The value proposition is your commitment to the customer that the process will be worthwhile, satisfying, enjoyable, and, ideally, beyond their expectations.

And this valuable exercise in making a promise does much more. Through its language, it becomes the culture of your company. Starting from Peter Drucker’s definition of business purpose, every employee, supplier, agent and partner should know their role in creating and retaining a customer.

In the language you use to recognize your customer and their dreams and hopes, their individual context and their preferences and desires, you’ll communicate to your organization how to love the customer and develop relationships. In the language you use to describe the customer’s current dissatisfaction, you’ll nurture an empathic organization. In the language you use to make a promise, you will embed commitment to keep it. In the language of credible and rational support for the promise, you’ll cement internal belief in the promise-keeping mission. And in the language of benefits to the customer, you’ll set the standards of customer-facing behavior and customer relationship management for everyone in your firm.

Yes, a value proposition is just language. In business strategy, language is all we have to tell each other how we will collaborate around a purpose, to share the tools and tactics we’ll all use, and to communicate the successes and learning opportunities that come from implementation and promise-keeping. And, most importantly, to invite the customer to allow us into their value learning process.

Value Proposition Deisgn and Template 5-minute audio for hh.com

82. David K. Hurst: Business School Fallacies and Acting Your Way to Better Thinking

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At E4E, we believe that Austrian economics can guide business execs and entrepreneurs to better thinking about how to manage businesses that thrive. Business educator David K. Hurst blames neo-classical, Chicago School economics for the bad thinking that pervades business today.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Here’s how he phrased it in our @e4epod Episode #82:

I emerged from Chicago believing, or at least accepting, the basic assumptions which lay behind business education at that time, which was heavily influenced by what I came to understand was neoclassical economics. That is, it believed in greed as the primary motivation. It was all about individual self-interest and utility maximization, I think, was the word. It was heavily rationalistic in that it believes that we ought to behave like little mini scientists with everything based on evidence and data and then lastly, the focus was very much on equilibrium, that markets were self-equilibrating and that the natural condition in organizations was stable. Stability was the norm and change was something that you had to manage and that if things went awry, it was mainly because you weren’t following standard procedures. Management was essentially about allocating resources… It was nothing about innovation… and making sure things ran in a steady, linear, rational fashion.

When I got into the real world, I found that these principles were, well, wrong.

The right principles are those that Jesus Huerta de Soto includes in his Austrian theory of dynamic efficiency. David Hurst sums them up this way:

Of course the linear, stable, rational model is the way academics think businesses ought to run, if only they would listen to them, and the fact you can’t run them that way because the world is nonlinear. It’s dynamic.

Organizational Dynamism

To illustrate dynamism at work, David described a frantic time of disarray in a newly acquired company when a major project management problem arose, and sclerosis caused by hierarchy and central planning, multiple process manuals, traditional career paths and rigid job descriptions impeded a response.

Spontaneously, individuals on the front line formed small teams (they’d be called Agile today) to hunt down innovative and collaborative solutions to this and other challenges that arose. They were non-hierarchical, with no process manual, no reporting structure and no fixed operating plan.

Similar small, collaborative, horizontal teams multiplied to solve problems of business recapitalization, debt and cash flow management, innovation, pricing and many more. The business, after divesting unproductive divisions and products, became profitable, grew and thrived. There was improvement and it was, as David put it, non-linear.

New Organizational Theory: Boxes and Bubbles

David reflected on this experience and developed a theory to explain it. He observed that, in the dynamic crisis time, traditional hierarchy and procedure had faded into the background, and the spontaneous order of agile teams had taken the foreground. Both continued to exist.

I called them boxes and bubbles, boxes being the formal box structure which productive, large-scale organizations end up using, and bubbles were these soft, informal teams that we formed at a moment’s notice. They formed easy coalitions with each other and when they did the job, they burst. They disappeared and went back into the mixture out of which new bubbles could come.

The Theory Of Complex Systems

Applying complexity theory, David developed what he calls an organic approach to business management, modeled after natural ecosystems, such as a forest. Forests start off as weeds — small and fast — and end up as big and slow trees. Yet forests are dynamic: they renew themselves through fire, burning the obsolete, decadent growth to create the space into which new growth can come. At that stage, the forest starts to build a new community of fresh growth. It continues in an infinite loop, existing for indefinite periods of time.

David Hurst's Business Ecocycle Model

Austrian theory, of course, embraces the idea of complex systems. We know that any economic endeavor, any market, and any firm operates within a complex system of millions and billions of provider-customer exchanges, governed by the idiosyncratic subjective value scales of consumers and the entrepreneurs who strive to empathize with them and serve them. We know that these complex systems can’t be managed in any traditional, hierarchical, procedures-manual sense, and they can’t be predicted. We understand business cycles and adaptive behavior.

How Did Business Schools Come to Teach The Wrong Model?

How did the business schools get to teach their totally inadequate model?

They adopted this model in the late 1950s. Their goal was to come up with systems to produce economies of scale, how to produce more of the same. Like the steel business – very inefficient, highly polluting but facing tremendous demand for steel for rebuilding the world in the 1950s and there was no reason to change.

The theory that emerged was how to perpetuate this success. But nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed. Firms must innovate to maintain dynamic competitiveness. The organizational structure required to run something with economies of scale, a very mechanical, machine-like, productive hierarchy, is very poor at innovation because those are exactly the dynamics that you’ve got rid of in the pursuit of efficiency, in the pursuit of low prices.

The theory that businesspeople used to support them in this productive model was of course neoclassical economics. It appealed to them to explain why it was all about rationality and it was all about stability, keeping things the same.

The Uses of Knowledge

David tells us that Hayek became his guide.

It seemed to me that The Fatal Conceit applied to the corporate world, the mini socialist structures. I mean, when I graduated from business school, the Fortune 500 were the sort of last refuges of Stalinist bureaucracy. They were central planners, so Hayek’s critique applied to them. That’s the way they work. People at the top were dictators, that’s the word for it.

Businesses fall into what David refers to as a “power trap”, bureaucratic and rigid.

The boss would come and say, “Well, I want to do this deal so find me some assumptions that make it work.” Instead of getting evidence-driven strategy, you got strategy-driven evidence. It was totally inverted. The process was actually a process of power, and the structures are structures of power. It ends up with elites”.

The Organic Approach to Management

David described working with an entrepreneur in South Africa.

He was Austrian, but not an economist. He was a tool and die maker in Austria and he had come out to South Africa and he had set up a tool and die business to make fuel tanks for the automotive industry in South Africa. This guy was a wizard on the technology of stamping. It was just know-how, practical knowledge.

He wasn’t dealing in abstractions at all. It was all about practice and things emerged on the shop floor, “Oops. Okay, so that’s interesting.” He was continually experimenting, tinkering, and he was hugely successful because he had this extremely efficient, effective process. And he was not intellectual in the remotest. If you tried to ask him, “What principles are you operating by?” he wouldn’t be able to tell you and that was okay. It’s the power of practice and that the actions come first, and the words come later.

There is a space in my diagram, on the left-hand side, it’s all about acting your way into better ways of thinking and on the right-hand side, it’s about thinking your ways into better way of acting. The two are melded together. It’s a dance, if you will, between the two sides.

The way you come out of business school is thinking about the job of management like an engineer. You had this machine which required to be maintained, lubricated, fixed, parts replaced sometimes, but it was essentially a machine, a smooth running machine, and you think like an engineer.

I see the manager as a gardener. A gardener has engineering aspects, but they also have wilder aspects to them. The gardener creates the conditions in which, in the case of enterprises, people can grow. They grow people. That’s what it’s all about. I see this gardener as the one being able to conduct this dance. You need to dig up soil and replace it. You may need to tear down existing plants and put them on a bonfire and burn them, break out the chainsaw and saw. At other times, you need to supply structure, a lattice on which they can be trained and pruned and all that kind of stuff. The gardener seemed, to me, to capture this duality to the manager’s task.

Measuring Unmeasurables

Peter Drucker said that there a lot of unmeasurable things which are absolutely valid and are absolutely critical. Like Mises, he understood that measurement is always about the past. It’s always about what happened. He says,

The things that really matter are the unmeasurables that refer to the future.” The example he gives is the ability of the enterprise to attract young, high motivated people. He said, “If you can’t attract these people, eventually it’ll show up in the numbers, but it’s not something you’ll see in the numbers right now because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s straws in the wind.

How do you measure unmeasurables? Through Hayekian knowledge theory: getting everybody in the organization talking to each other about what’s happening, about what they’re seeing every day, because that’s where it’s happening, on the ground. This is all a part of acting our way into better ways of thinking, getting ideas, seeing the opportunities emerge out of what we’re doing, out of the action.

Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode

Austrian School vs. Neoclassical School: Download PDF

David Hurst’s ecosystem model (JPG): View Image

David’s book, The New Ecology Of Leadership: View on Amazon

David’s original HBR article on “Boxes and Bubbles”: Download The Paper

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

Enjoying The Podcast? Review, Subscribe & Listen On Your Favorite Platform:

Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify

Why All CEO’s Can Benefit From A Familiarity With The Austrian Business Model.

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For our Economics For Business initiative, we have adopted the motto: Think Better, Think Austrian.

Everyone in business can benefit from studying and understanding the fundamentals of economics. By this, we do not mean the economics of GDP and employment levels and the money supply, and not the economics of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. We mean the economics of human action – how and why individuals behave the way they do in markets, in buying and selling, and in everyday life. Businesses are successful when they fit into and contribute to the everyday lives of customers, and economics provides understanding of how to do so.

The brand of economics that helps you to think better is called Austrian economics, because it originated at the University of Vienna. You may have heard of the Chicago School of Economics, made famous by Milton Friedman and others. Many so called “schools of thought” are named for their geographical origins.

Austrian economics is a tool for business because its thinkers have developed a particularly rigorous body of economic theory, and its practitioners have translated the theory into a complete toolset for application in business. Mainstream economics is not particularly useful for business, for many reasons. Insofar as it deals in fictitious aggregates such as GDP or “the automobile industry”, it can’t help firms who are making decisions about real resources to serve their customers and enable their employees. Insofar as it mathematicizes economic processes for analytical ease, it can’t help firms who deal in trust, loyalty, service, and human values, rather than equations. Mainstream economics can’t be used to strengthen your business model.

Austrian economics, on the other hand, can provide exactly that level of practical utility. In fact, Austrian economists have developed an Austrian Business Model to demonstrate the applicability of this brand of economics in business. The ABM is a framework from which any company can develop or refine its own unique business model suitable for our fast-accelerating digital age. If you are a CEO contemplating the sustainability of your firm’s business model, the ABM will provide you with some new ways of thinking.

A new way to think about value.

Value is one of those terms that is used loosely in business, which leads to flawed understanding. Business schools and business writers refer to “value creation”. Often, they mean market value, the dollar difference between the stock market value of the number of shares outstanding at one point in time and some earlier point in time. Sometimes they equate revenue or profit generated with value. In these cases, value is objective and can be calculated and allocated a dollar denomination.

Austrian economics defines value as subjective. It is a feeling in the customer’s mind, a complex outcome of cognitive, emotional and biological processes, both conscious and unconscious. Value emerges for customers as they live their life and try to assemble an ecosystem of services to help them make it better. This value is context-dependent, idiosyncratic and changeable. This value is created entirely in the customer’s own domain. Firms can’t create value.

This is a very different premise than we are traditionally taught at business school or even in the everyday language of business discussion. For example, a popular book on business models makes this statement: there is something about some firms that makes them more profitable than their rivals. In the framework of the ABM, we would say: there is something about some customers’ desired experiences that makes facilitating them more profitable than other customers’ desired experiences.

This value perspective can stimulate some new behaviors in firms.

  • Obsessive and total focus on the customer — identifying them, understanding them, letting them lead the process of value creation.
  • Selection of a precisely defined group or cohort of customers as your audience, with continuous development of ever deeper and more detailed understanding of their subjective preferences.
  • Development of a value proposition — a hypothesis about how you will help the customer to an experience that they will value. It’s simply that — a hypothesis that you will test as much as possible for verification, but which is never proven until the cycle of market exchange, experience and evaluation is completed.

This business model starts with developing deep understanding.

A new business relationship with value.

Value is what customers seek. Their life is a search for value and an assessment of whether value was realized in their everyday experiences. If your business can not create value, what can it do? The answer is : facilitate value – make it more possible for customers to enjoy their experience.

A design approach can be used – experience design. Experience design consists of imagining every element of the customer’s experience, based on their value learning cycle. What is it about your value proposition that will make them anticipate a valuable experience? What will make them feel that this experience is preferable to any alternative they have, direct or indirect? What will cause them to exchange value — give their dollars for your offering — and what is the price they will be willing to pay? What ensures that they will assess the experience positively after the event?

The key to design is (1) to imagine every possible element of the subjective experience, empathically embracing the customer’s individual context; (2) to understand that every little detail counts and that small differences in delivery can make a huge difference to the perceived experience. In fact, since customer service is so highly developed in modern economies, it is the small details that generate differentiation and uniqueness for your brand.

Since the business is never in control of value, it is important to make measurement part of experience design. Once in the marketplace, your value proposition goes “wild”. You no longer control it. The customer is creating the value and you are not. The best you can do is to be available if they want to invite you into their process, and to be observant of their behavior. Measurement is observation. Don’t presuppose, but do collect data, preferably qualitative data at the individual customer level. This is your raw input for continuous improvement.

Phase 2 is a customer-led design and assembly phase for the entrepreneur.

An experimental approach to value exchange.

Austrian economics sheds bright light on exchange – the transaction between seller and buyer. Exchange is governed by uncertainty – a business can’t know or predict with accuracy what the customer is going to do in the future, or how they will view the terms of exchange. Will the customer perceive sufficient value to even enter into exchange? It’s the ultimate market test. The customer is weighing the benefits they subjectively perceive against the costs, which include money but also any other difficulties or barriers they perceive to making the exchange. Is participating in your offering totally convenient (which is the general standard today) or is there anything in the experience that makes it less convenient and less compelling?

The best way to solve this challenge is to experiment with as many offer bundles as you can in order to observe market results. Does your service sell better online or direct-to-customer? Do customers prefer to subscribe or to buy by the unit? If they try, do they convert? Test as many bundles as you can.

Once you have established the right bundle and willingness to pay, calculate your cash flow and choose your costs in order to generate the margins and profits you require. This is the opposite of the margin math taught in business school, where firms calculate their costs and then add a margin. Austrians discover the price the customer is willing to pay, and then choose the costs compatible with that willingness to pay. The customer determines the price of the exchange, not the business.

Phase 3 is an experimenting and testing phase for the entrepreneur.

Value Agility

You’ve achieved some marketplace results. You’ve established that the customer perceives value in your offering and they’re willing to pay a price that generates positive cash flow and profit.

That same marketplace is incessantly changing. Your approach to the 4th stage of the Austrian business model is dynamic. You make sure that you have all the feedback loops required to receive marketplace data about the acceptance of your offering, and any changes in customer preferences and competitive behaviors. You manage 360 degree monitoring of the customer experience and you anticipate and expect that your experience design, however excellent, will erode over time. The customer will demand something even better, and competitors will aim to match or improve on your delivery. It’s important to keep your model of customer value preferences fresh, and to be planning and preparing new and improved value facilitations. You find ways to maintain flexibility in your capital structure to facilitate the required agility.

Agile businesses continually test and evaluate innovations, and introduce them to the marketplace. Value improvement and value innovation are your goals. The process never stops. The journey never comes to an end.

Your business model must yield sufficient cash flow for substantial amounts of new capital investment each year. Your organizational design must facilitate the addition of new capabilities and the discontinuation or de-emphasis of existing capabilities that no longer are perceived as unique or compelling by the changing customer. Agile businesses monitor their dynamic capability — how much is being added, how much is being changed or updated. Are you keeping up with the customer, the ecosystem in which you engage, and your competitors?

Phase 4 is a phase of continuous dynamic change for the entrepreneur.

You can learn more about the Austrian Business Model here.

 

What Is A Business Model? It’s Not What You’ve Been Told.

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What is a business model? It’s a question asked frequently on Google Search, so there must be doubt in businesspeople’s minds.

The reason for the uncertainty is clear. The term business model sounds like a thing – a completed canvas, a written document, a spreadsheet with macros. But it’s not a thing, it’s a lived experience, for both business executives and their customers.

The Austrian Business Model

In a recent edition of the Economics For Entrepreneurs podcast with Dr. Per Bylund of Oklahoma State University, we described a very different kind of business model framework we called the Austrian Business Model, based on principles of Austrian economics. It’s a recipe for business success. We chose the term “recipe” purposefully, to communicate these features:

  • A recipe is a non-linear process: there are inputs and outputs, there are many different sub-processes progressing at different rates designed to integrate at critical points, and subject to adjustment by the operator as new information is revealed (“the oven’s on fire!”; or, “this tastes like it needs more salt”).
  • A recipe is dynamic. All parts of it are in motion all the time – assembling, combining, mixing, cooking.
  • A recipe is adaptive. If the chef does not have all the ingredients at hand, he or she may substitute or leave out some elements. If a guest does not like some ingredient, the chef might work around it. New methods of cooking may lead to a better outcome with the same ingredients. There is learning from experience about what techniques work best.

Like a recipe, a business model is also a non-linear process, dynamic, always in motion, adaptive and improved with experience and learning. And, like a recipe, it unites multiple lived experiences. There is the chef’s lived experience, operating the recipe this time, as well as applying accumulated experience from previous times, and perhaps the inherited experience of family members from past time. And there is the lived experience of the recipient who tastes the output, in the context of a dinner party or a family meal. An experience is always shared.

In fact, the focus on experience is critical in a business model. Its end result is a value experience – value perceived by a customer, sufficient to justify the price they’re willing to pay for anticipated value, sufficient to deliver value in the use experience, and sufficient to support an assessment of value after the fact, looking back on whether the experience met expectations.

The experience-centric business model

An experience-centric business model traverses four phases of value learning for the entrepreneur.

Understanding Value

The foundation of a business model is an understanding of value for a specific set of customers. There are conventional business models that talk of “creating value” – whether that is the economic value of returns on capital that are higher than the cost of that capital, or shareholder value in the form of higher stock prices, or even brand value and product/service value. But all of these routes to “value creation” are misdirections. Firms can’t create value. It is customers who create value through their experiences. Value is something customers experience after they have made the economic calculation to buy a product or service, used it, and then stepped back after usage and assessed the experience compare to their going-in expectation. Value is formed in the customer’s domain, and not by the producer.

That’s why economists refer to value as subjective. It’s a perception that varies with each individual customer, with changes in context, and with changes in time and circumstances. The task of the business model developer is to understand the subjective value preferences of a specific set of customers in a specific context at a specific time.

Value Facilitation

Producers can suggest to customers that they can help them bring about the value experience they seek. The word “help” is important. Operating a business model is not an exercise in “making things happen”, it’s the art of helping them to happen.

In the business literature, there is talk of the design process – designing experiences for customers based on listening to their feedback. That is all very  well-intentioned, but it doesn’t quite capture the art of value facilitation. Customers form value through cognitive, mental and emotional processes, consciously or unconsciously, interpreting interactions and information and constructing an interpreted and experienced reality within which their feelings of value are embedded. Value is formed in people’s life experiences and it’s not the role of the producer to act as designer.

Producers and marketers must ask, how does the customer live their life? What is the life context? What are the challenges the customer faces? These and many more questions prepare the producer to humbly request to fit in and contribute to the customer’s life. If invited in, there is the possibility of value facilitation.

Value Exchange

Your customer is going to undertake a complex subjective balancing of the value they perceive based on your proposition and their own willingness to pay, in the context of all their alternative choices and any historical experiences they have had, either with your proposition or others. You can try to understand their process, but you can’t direct it. For example, you can’t set pricing. The customer determines the price they are willing to pay, and the producer’s job is to discover that price, through testing. Therefore your revenue model must balance the price the customer decides upon, with the costs you choose to include in assembling your offering. Costs are never forced upon businesses – they are always chosen. In the Austrian business model, entrepreneurs buy as many inputs as possible on the market, where costs are known and are rendered efficient through competition, as opposed to keeping costs internal, where they can’t be known exactly and may be unstable or hard to control. Your margins are emergent from this equation of customer-chosen pricing minus entrepreneurially-chosen costs. Don’t try to set margins in advance.

The best metric to monitor is not margin or profit, but cash flow. Keep it positive, monitor it weekly, and adjust to its signals.

Value Agility

Once invited into the customer’s experience, the producer has an opening to act as the value facilitator-on-the-spot for the customer. As the customer lives the experience – operates the recipe – there will be questions, unexpected occurrences, errors to fix, context changes, and many more unanticipated twists and turns.

The entrepreneur’s business model secret at this stage is agility. Business models that talk about strategic pillars and similar unchanging elements risk failure in the light of customer volatility and change.

A key to success lies in good feedback loops. Your business model must prepare your firm to be dynamic in response to customer preference changes and all the new information coming to you from the market every second, minute and hour. If you don’t maintain dynamism, your business model will weaken and your grip on competitive advantage will loosen. Your value proposition must strengthen and improve continuously. Your model of customer preferences must be kept fresh. Your value facilitation must demonstrate continuous improvement at a faster rate than the customer’s value experience erodes.

Empathy, humility, adaptability, and agility. These are the components of the contemporary business model. There’s a framework you can use to shape these components for your own unique application of the model, in The Austrian Business Model video.

78. Per Bylund Introduces the Austrian Business Model

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Every business needs a business model, a recipe for generating profitable and sustainable revenues that result from bringing the customer an experience on which they place a high value.

How do entrepreneurs design successful and profitable business models? They combine theory and experience — theory provides the foundational starting point, and experience refines the model based on action-based learning and real-life feedback.

The best theory — the meta-theory — for business models comes from Austrian economics. This is a proposition we intend to demonstrate rigorously and completely in our Economics For Business platform. Dr. Per Bylund joined us on the Economics For Entrepreneurs podcast to provide an exposition and explanation of the core structure of the Austrian Business Model (ABM).

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

The model can be expressed as 4 core components for the entrepreneur:

  • Understanding and defining subjective value.
  • Facilitating value for specific customers.
  • Exchanging value with customers in the market.
  • Value dynamics — agility in continuously refining the value proposition.

1. Understanding Value

The foundation of the Austrian Business Model is a deep understanding of subjective value. This understanding changes everything: its implications ripple through the entire model from the beginning and throughout all phases.

Value is created only in consumption. The customer (in both B2C and B2B models) creates value. Value is in the customer’s domain. It’s an experience that customers evaluate after the fact against their expectations. The entrepreneur isn’t even present when value is created.

This is a very different premise than we are traditionally taught at business school or even in the everyday language of business discussion. For example, a popular book on business modelsi makes this statement: there is something about some firms that makes them more profitable than their rivals. In the framework of the ABM, we would say: there is something about some customers’ desired experiences that makes facilitating them more profitable than other customers’ desired experiences.

It’s hard to get one’s head around just how different this approach is. It requires some new behaviors:

  • Obsessive and total focus on the customer — identifying them, understanding them, letting them lead the process of value creation.
  • Selection of a precisely defined group or cohort of customers as your audience, with continuous development of ever deeper and more detailed understanding of their subjective preferences.
  • Development of a value proposition — a hypothesis about how you will help the customer to an experience that they will value. It’s simply that — a hypothesis that you will test as much as possible for verification, but which is never proven until the cycle of market exchange, experience and evaluation is completed.

Phase 1 is an understanding phase for the entrepreneur.

2. Facilitating Value for Specific Customers

Starting from the hypothetical value proposition, the entrepreneur advances to the phase of designing a value experience for the chosen target audience of customers, based on as deep an understanding of their subjective values as it is has been possible to develop so far. The entrepreneur is continually adding to that understanding — creating new knowledge as much and as frequently as they can.

Design consists of imagining every element of the customer’s experience, based on their value learning cycle. What is it about your value proposition that will make them anticipate a valuable experience? What will make them feel that this experience is preferable to any alternative they have, direct or indirect. What will cause them to exchange value — give their dollars for your offering — and what is the price they will be willing to pay? What ensures that they will assess the experience positively after the event?

The key to design is (1) to imagine every possible element of the subjective experience, empathically embracing the customer’s individual context; (2) to understand that every little detail counts and that small differences in delivery can make a huge difference to the perceived experience. In fact, since customer service is so highly developed in modern economies, it is the small details that generate differentiation and uniqueness for your brand.

Then the entrepreneur turns to value assembly, assembling the resources to deliver the desired features and attributes of the experience to market. What is the right organization for market delivery? Since it is impossible to know exactly the costs and quality you will be able to achieve in your firm, Austrian theory advises entrepreneurs to obtain as much of the required capability on the market at market prices — via outsourcing, partnerships, alliances, and external supply chains — and to limit internal capabilities only to those that cannot be obtained on the market, those that are genuinely unique and advantaged for you.

Use a value alignment approach to check for each element that your value delivery is aligned with the customer value preference — that you know what they want and you can deliver it in the way that they want it.

And include communications design and delivery as part of your experience design. It’s not an add-on or a supplement or a marketing budget item to dial up or dial down depending on cash availability. It’s part of the customer experience that you are designing and delivering.

Finally, make measurement part of the experience design. Once in the marketplace, your value proposition goes “wild”. You no longer control it. The customer is creating the value and you are not. The best you can do is to be available if they want to invite you into their process, and to be observant of their behavior. Measurement is observation. Don’t presuppose, but do collect data, preferably qualitative data at the individual customer level. This is your raw input for continuous improvement.

Phase 2 is a customer-led design and assembly phase for the entrepreneur.

3. Exchanging Value

Does the customer perceive sufficient value to enter into exchange? It’s the ultimate market test. The customer is weighing the benefits they subjectively perceive against the costs, which include money but also any other difficulties or barriers they perceive to making the exchange. Is participating in your offering totally convenient (which is the general standard today) or is there anything in the experience that makes it less convenient and less compelling?

The best way to solve this challenge is to experiment with as many offer bundles as you can in order to observe market results. Does your service sell better online or direct-to-customer? Do customers prefer to subscribe to buy by the unit? If they try, do they convert? Test as many bundles as you can.

Once you have established the right bundle and willingness to pay, calculate your cash flow and choose your costs in order to generate the margins and profits you require. This is the opposite of the margin math taught in business school, where firms calculate their costs and then add a margin. Austrians discover the price the customer is willing to pay, and then chooses the costs compatible with that willingness to pay. The customer determines the price of the exchange, not the entrepreneur.

Cash flow is your most important financial metric. Make sure you monitor it closely and make sure your accounting methods are the right ones to serve your individual ends. Accounting is a tool like any other — use it subjectively to help you meet your goals.

Phase 3 is an experimenting and testing phase for the entrepreneur.

4. Value Agility

You’ve achieved some marketplace results. You’ve established that the customer perceives value in your offering and they’re willing to pay a price that generates positive cash flow and profit.

That same marketplace is incessantly changing. Your approach to the 4th stage of the Austrian business model is dynamic. You make sure that you have all the feedback loops required to receive marketplace data about the acceptance of your offering, and any changes in customer preferences and competitive behaviors. You manage 360 degree monitoring of the customer experience and you anticipate and expect that your experience design, however excellent, will erode over time. The customer will demand something even better, and competitors will aim to match or improve on your delivery. It’s important to keep your model of customer value preferences fresh, and to be planning and preparing new and improved value facilitations. Agile entrepreneurs continually test and evaluate innovations, and introduce them to the marketplace. Value improvement and value innovation are your goals. The process never stops. The journey never comes to an end.

Your business model must yield sufficient cash flow for substantial amounts of new capital investment each year. Your organizational design must facilitate the addition of new capabilities and the discontinuation or de-emphasis of existing capabilities that no longer are perceived as unique or compelling by the changing customer. Agile entrepreneurs monitor their dynamic capability — how much is being added, how much is being changed or updated. Are you keeping up with the customer, the ecosystem in which you engage, and your competitors?

Phase 4 is a phase of continuous dynamic change for the entrepreneur.

Over the next few months, we’ll be building out the tools and knowledge entrepreneurs need for every one of the four phases of the model and the steps within. Keep up with us at E4EPod.com/signup.

Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode

Dr. Bylund’s Mises University Lecture, “Austrian Economics in Business”: Mises.org/E4E_78_Lecture1

Dr. Bylund’s Mises University Lecture, “How Entrepreneurs Built the World”: Mises.org/E4E_78_Lecture2

“Means-Ends Chain Tool” (PDF): Mises.org/E4E_01_PDF

“Tools for the Value Learning Process” (PDF): Mises.org/E4E_62_PDF

“Identifying Dissatisfaction Interview Guide” (PDF): Mises.org/E4E_Interview

“Insights Generation Tool” (PDF): Mises.org/E4E_67_PDF_A

“ACT! Austrian Capital Theory at Work” (PDF): Mises.org/E4E_19_PDF

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): Mises.org/E4E_ABM

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