Fluent Brain

Marco Gutierrez is a former chemist living in Mexico.

With a Masters degree in Business Innovation as a background, he started a language school but has been out of it for 3 years. He is now relaunching it.

He realized that there is now a lot more competition in this field than before. Consequently, he developed the idea of offering added value to employees by developing their personal skills while teaching them a new language.

Marco read the Business Model Generation book and did some of the exercises already before our work together.

When I made the offer of a Free Current Business Model session, he showed his interest. We got on a Skype call, then started the process.

If you read the previous blog posts, then you will be familiar with the following steps. However, each process and the lessons learned are all somewhat different. (more…)

I’ve known Louis Cléroux from Lead Web for many years.

We reconnected recently, and he took me up on the Free Business Model Canvas offer.

Lead-Web is an internet marketing and web development business located in Montreal. They offer lead generation, social media and other internet business solutions.

Louis is the President of Lead Web, and he won several awards in 2011:

• Best Startup Innovation in Canada (Spin Master Fund / CYBF)
• Best Startup Business Plan (Yes Montreal)
• Best Montreal Startup (Montreal Mayor Foundation)
• Best Montreal Startup (Quebec Entrepreneurship Contest)
• Best Local Startup (SDEVM)

Teresa Ciscar is a business consultant for entrepreneurs.

She connects clients with resources related to marketing and communications. She lives in Spain and speaks Spanish, English and German. Her background is industrial engineering, in the field of renewable energy.

We went through a two-iteration process to clarify her business model.

After an initial call, I asked her to do a first pass on the Business Model Canvas. She sent me a photo of what she came up with: (more…)

If you haven’t heard, we are currently offering you a completely FREE “Business Model Canvas” session ($195 value) that helps you clarify how your business makes or will make money.

The offer ends on May 3rd at midnight Eastern time, so apply now if you’re interested!

Simply post a comment below to apply, or get more information first.

One of the teams that already took advantage of this offer  allowed me to share with you the work that we have done together so far.

Alexander Shai Lipkovich and Alyse (Laura) Wonder both live in Montreal and are considering starting a socially responsible dog walker business.

They are in the concept phase, and needed to figure out if this was a viable business to avoid wasting time and money.

Here is the process that we went through so far:

1. Preparation call: Shai and I had a 30-min call to gather information about his projects, and which one to use the Business Model Canvas on.
2. Initial draft: Shai and Alyse did a first pass on the canvas by themselves.
3. Iteration 1 – my feedback: I reviewed their draft and challenged some assumptions and added questions to the canvas.
4. Iteration 2 – more offline discussion: They addressed some of the questions I had by adding their answers to the canvas.
5. Iteration 3 – online call: During the 90-min visual call, we discussed the Customer Segments, Value Proposition and Revenue Streams.
6. Iteration 4 – face-to-face meeting: We locked in the Customer Segments, Value Proposition and Revenue Streams, and worked on some of the other components. We reached a point where they need to validate assumptions and mitigate the biggest risks, before we can keep on building their business model.

(more…)

In this infographic, I share with you what I learned from experience about how to best capture notes during 1-on-1 online calls. Click on the image below to view the full-size free infographic.

Most mind mappers simply export their huge one-page mind map to PDF or to an image.

The map contains way too much information. It is hard for other people to understand it, and know where to look. There are just too many branches.

Also, most maps that I come across do not look professional and attractive, such as the example below:

Would you like to be able to create beautiful professional handouts easily from your mind maps? Below is an example of what you can produce, in three easy steps.

Keep reading to learn how! (more…)

Are you a visual thinker?

As a visual thinker, we tend to have a specialty, to revolve around one or a few particular visual techniques and categories of visual thinking.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of those:

• Doodling
• Mind mapping
• Graphic facilitation
• Graphic recording (more…)

Before you can pencil in a meeting, you need to get the availability of your colleagues.

Typically, when a meeting needs to be organized, people will simply send an email and mention a few days when they are available.

Then, this is followed by back-and-forth email communication.

Often, these emails are spread out over a few days. As a consequence, by the time that you get all the answers, it might be too late.

If the members of the team are spread out in different time zones, it is even worse. Responsiveness goes down, and the time it takes to schedule a meeting goes up.

Doodle cuts down on the email exchange by providing a simple way for each attendee to check when they are available. (more…)

Are you collaborating with a distributed team, online?

I recently had to make recommendations of free online collaboration software for an international consulting firm. The tools were to be used within a small team of 8 people. My first question for them was, what do you need to be able to do?

Based on their needs, I broke it down in three categories:

1. Team task management
2. File sharing
3. Knowledge management

(more…)

Are you a business consultant? Do you work online with your clients abroad?

I will talk about online meeting software in another post. But for now, I want to share with you the Dos and Don’ts of online meetings – in regards to the audio-visual component.

1. Wear a headset

Using a headset for your online meeting is best.

It ensures that you don’t generate any echo. Feedback (echo) is produced when the sound from your speakers feeds into your microphone. It is, to say the least, very annoying during online calls.

With a headset, the quality of your voice will also be higher. Others on the call will hear you well.

If you run a lot of meetings over the Internet with international clients, then investing in a good headset is a must.

Here is the one that I am currently using: (more…)