Accelerate & Transform
A new model to try, not to bet on
How do we test it with real clients before the company commits to it?
How do we test it with real clients before the company commits to it?
There is an idea on the table that would change how the company earns its money. A subscription where there was a sale. A service built on the product. A low-carbon line for the clients who keep asking. A joint offer with a supplier. It has a sponsor, a deck and a budget request. The budget request is the problem: it asks the board to commit the company to a model that has not been tried on a single client.
The alternative on offer is usually a study. Three months, a market report, a survey of stated intentions. It tells the leadership team what people say they would do. It does not tell anyone what a client does when the invoice arrives, what the employees who have to run the new model think of it or what the community around the plant says when the terms are explained to them. Those are the three places where new models fail. They fail there early and cheaply if someone asks.
Whether the idea deserves the company's capital, on evidence rather than on conviction.
Which means deciding first what would count as evidence. What is the commercial hypothesis, exactly: which client, which problem, which price, which cost to serve. And what result would kill it. A hypothesis that cannot be killed is not a hypothesis. Agreeing the failure criteria before the test is the hardest decision; the go or no-go at the end is read off the facts, which leaves the sponsors little to negotiate.
The work is Business Model Prototyping, built to reach the truth before the capital does.
We start by naming the bet. With the founders, the innovation lead or the business owner we write the hypothesis in one page: the client problem, the proposed solution, the model logic and the definition of validated and of failed. For a CMO we frame it against actual customer behaviour; the pitch is not evidence. For a Chief Innovation Officer we translate the innovation brief into something that can be measured, with a timeline and a resource cap.
Then we build and we test. A small dedicated team, a minimum version of the offer that a real client can buy or refuse, iteration cycles counted in days. The test is run with the full set of people who will make or break the model: clients who are asked to pay, employees who are asked to operate it, the community or the partner whose terms it depends on. What does not work is killed within days and what works is pushed. Client-side involvement is focused and time-boxed, because a prototype that needs a committee is already a programme.
What leaves the room is the validation brief: what the prototype proved, what it disproved, the client evidence, the refined model and the go or no-go recommendation, written to survive the questions of the board member who did not believe in it at the start. For a fund it says whether the asset has a growth vector the prototype has demonstrated, before the next raise. For a scale-up it is run at founder pace, without approval cycles.
In the case below we take a retailer's own brand and treat its responsible upgrade as a model to be tested with shoppers instead of announced to them: which claim they pay for, at which price gap, in which category. The prototype gets that answer before a launch would have to pay for it.
Private label accounts for over 40% of European grocery sales. Own-brand sustainable products grow four times faster than conventional equivalents. Consumers pay a 9.7% premium for private label products with credible sustainability credentials.
ReadFabrice Macarty, Founder, CEO. He works with leadership teams on business model innovation and on the value architecture behind it. On this situation he holds the hypothesis: what the company is really betting on, how the model earns and what evidence would change the bet.
Lucile Olivas, CRO & Co-Founder. Nearly twenty years in operations, from purchasing to aftersales, then strategic support to an EV-retrofit start-up. She holds the build: whether the offer can be produced, served and priced in the real chain, at the cost the hypothesis assumes.
Performance is what the business delivers: speed, scale and the profit that funds what comes next. A prototype is the cheapest way to find out whether the next thing will deliver any of it.
Read the card in Our Approach: PerformanceThe idea with a sponsor and a budget request, the study that would tell you what people say, the client you could ask instead. Tell us where it binds and we will tell you where to start.