A business plan is a valuable document. In fact it is a sales document. It sells the reader, a banker, investor or venture capital company on your business idea.

Competition comes from your competitors business model. How they do business and their service context. To improve your competitiveness and market share change your business model. Look at how you add value to the customer experience.

Making Your Business Plan Invaluable

Show your knowledge, experience and philosophy by taking it to the next level by looking at the your company's 'Service Context' and looking for ways to improve.

Example Service Context

An intangible mortgage makes it possible to have a tangible house, but not before the formal closing ceremony. Intangibles have to be experienced directly they cannot be stockpiled or inventoried. Which is not possible until delivery and consumption because the service has to be delivered and experienced by the customer.

Building More Value

The first step is to understand the relationship between tangible and intangible aspects of your products/services. When a customer thinks about purchasing a product or service, they have certain needs and wants.

Your 'Service Context' is the immediate environment, as it relates to the service component of those products or services that you deliver.

Social Interactions

In the same way that intangibles cannot be stockpiled prior to delivery, they cannot be sold afterward. Also, intangibles are performed in addition to being produced. They are essentially social interactions conducted between the deliverer and customer.

Because the customer has a hand in the creation of the quality of the service, the deliverable has an intrinsically experiential quality to it. It looks for:

• Quality rather than quantity.


• Experience rather than things.


• Experiencing the service is part of the service itself. Whatever the deliverer produces, positive or negative, the service itself is either positive or negative.

We need to take our cue for the quality of service from an external source, the customer. More importantly what is the consumer's 'experience' of this service? We must identify the desired ends an experience creates and then use that to determine what business we are really in!

Answer These Questions to Add Value To Your Business Plan and Service Context

• How can I assist the consumer to increase the quality of their experience?


• How does __________ (my job, employees job) fulfill customers' needs?


• How well does our current service context meet customers' needs?


• What are the key elements to be provided?


• How are these key elements perceived by the customer, management and employees?


• How do competitors define the market needs? How does their service context differ?


• What is the service deliverable?


• What are the intangible characteristics of my customer? (Psychographics, values, beliefs, attitudes, lifestyle etc.)


• How can I improve my delivery system?


• What are the key psychological and service intangibles?


• What are the important intangible personality traits, knowledge and characteristics for myself, my employees and staff?


• How can I match the desired personality attributes appropriately to the service?


• How can I reduce the number of people involved in the delivery of the 'transaction' to reduce the risk of a negative experience?


• What key 'knowledge assets' do my employees, suppliers and myself require?


• How can I reduce the learning curve to reduce or eliminate the lag time between need identification and fulfilling the customer's need?

How Much Is Enough?

How can I measure the value added per employee? (subtract the value of goods & services purchased from sales= value added ratio)

The greater your ratio, the more important intangibles are to improving your service context.

Intangibles Rule

Value added will increasingly come from intangibles, or 'things' where importance does not lie in its material existence. For both product and service related businesses, knowing whether the intangibles are at the periphery or core of your business is central to developing a strategy for the new economy.

Strategy for Tangible Products & Services in Your Business Plan

Increasing the Ratio of Intangibles for Tangibles, which change the 'Service Context' and increases the value of the customer's experience!

Strategy for Intangible Products & Services

Make tangible the Intangible for invisible products or services, which change the 'Service Context' and increase the value of the customer's experience!

Impact On Your Business Plan

What resources, expenses and strategies do you need to add to your business plan to create more value and make your business more competitive?