The Value Proposition Wheel

Good ideas are never born just once.

I wish I was the first one who had come up with the concept of a value proposition wheel. But it turns out I wasn’t. In his book Lost and Founder, Rand Fishkin offered the idea of a flywheel of business value:

I like to describe the complexities of the marketing process as a flywheel. […] Like a flywheel, it took an immense amount of energy to get started, and only after it was rotating smoothly, growing its inertia, did it function in this friction-light fashion. — Rand Fishkin,  Lost and Founder

I haven’t done the research but I’m sure that others have used the flywheel metaphor before.

In the beginning, starting a new business, offering value, and spinning the wheel takes a tremendous amount of effort. But the more your customers recognize the value you offer them and start pulling on the flywheel, the easier and faster the entire business will start spinning.

This is the value proposition wheel we created for Agility Scales:

My team identified four areas of value that we want to offer to coaches and consultants around the world:

• Find Ideas: There is value in exploring multiple actionable ideas from many sources and getting inspiration you can apply at work;
• Take Steps: There is value when you go beyond learning and take action to solve problems and achieve outcomes;
• Track Value: There is value in measuring/tracking your work in terms of its impact instead of simply time or effort;
• Share Learnings: There is value in collecting new actionable ideas and/or iterations and making them available to the community.

Maybe you can try and draw a similar picture for the value proposition of the business you are running. What are the areas of value that you aim to offer? Can you draw them as a virtuous circle? Can your clients pull value at different points on the flywheel? Will this make the wheel spin faster and faster?

Do you believe in our value proposition wheel? Do you want to be a co-owner?