How to Build a Simple Business Model That Grows Profit

You want to know the truth about business? Business is hard, and it’s harder when you’re stupid. So in this episode, you’re going to discover the business model that’s at the core of every successful business on the planet. Once you know what this model is, you’re going to be able to be smart evaluating your business. You’re going to be able to make intelligent adjustments to your business model, and you’re going to see amazing things happen. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast, everyone. My name is Eric Dingler and I am a full time digital nomad. Living the dream, getting to travel around the world with my wife and our four teenagers. We are wrapping up our time in Santiago, Chile. This will be our 14th country that we have lived in, and it has been an amazing trek for the last couple of years through Central and South America. But we’re getting ready to head over to the United Kingdom.

The reason this is possible for us is because we have a location independent business, and at the core of our business are really two primary frameworks. Two primary frameworks. And I want to talk about the business model framework now.

The business model framework, I call it OP3. Now what OP3 does is it gives you three central things. Three core things.

One, it helps you to have clarity of message, and confused buyers never buy. You have to have clarity in your marketing messages. And so OP3 helps you find crystal clear clarity in your messaging.

Two, it helps you create a powerful, powerful offer to help people be very highly incentivized to buy your product or service.

Three, it helps you simplify the process. It helps you simplify your processes of attracting clients, converting clients, maintaining clients. And there’s just a lot of benefits that come from OP3.

Now, when you execute on this correctly, you’re going to have a profitable business, a business with increasing revenue and increasing profits.

Now, you might be thinking, really? I mean, really, this is a really bold claim and I want to hear you back it up. Well, I’m not the only one that talks about this. In fact, if you’ve seen any infomercial on TV, you’ve seen the infomercial start out. Are you tired of your neck hurting when you wake up in the morning because your pillow is worn out? Well, we’ve got our patented X, Y, Z pillow. Order now, get it tomorrow, and your three free pillows will arrive.

So this is a very typical formula for a business, a business model that is an infomercial, that is selling something, a product. And what they’ve done is they’ve incorporated OP3. The first P stands for a person with a problem. Are you tired of? Has this happened to you? Are you this person with this problem? Because the business owner, the founder, they made a decision at some point about what problem they wanted to solve for people. Then they came with a product that solved that problem. And so they’ll say, get our patented blah, blah, blah. All right. So they’ve got one problem, one product that solves that problem, and then they’ve come up with a pathway for you to buy that product.

Now, this isn’t true just for infomercials. This is true for every business out there. Businesses just get created to solve problems. And for us, not just solve problems, we normally solve problems for a specific type of person. That’s why they call this the persona. Now, Alex Hormozi, he calls this the avatar. Donald Miller talks about this as the hero of their own story. So everybody talks about these three things. Every business guru out there talks about these things, and they kind of put their own spin on it.

I use OP3 because I like having the acronym. What happened is I came up with OP3 because it was an easy way for me to share it with my team. And I love coming up with frameworks as a way to share them with my team, and then once it’s working with my team, I love to share them with others.

So OP3 stands for Persona, Product, Pathway. One persona with a problem. One product that solves that problem. One pathway to buy that product.

Now, here’s an example of why not working on these in order can kind of get you in trouble. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have. All of you listening know that there are a variety of types of businesses represented by those that listen to Digital Nomad Entrepreneur. But I’m going to use a web designer as an example.

I was talking to a web designer not too long ago and they asked me, they’re like, Eric, should I offer templated websites or custom websites? And the reason that they couldn’t answer this question is because they had never spent the time to decide about the problem they were going to solve. And that’s what I told them. I said, well, it depends. What’s the problem you’re solving? Are you trying to solve a problem for people that can’t afford custom websites? Are you trying to make websites designed by a professional accessible to the masses? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Because if you’re trying to make websites affordable, then you have to offer a templated website. If you want to solve the problem where you’re tired of people getting crappy websites and you want to provide really high end quality websites, well, then you’re going to sell custom websites. You’ve got to know the problem you’re solving.

And then once you know the problem you’re solving, and what’s the type of person you want to sell this to. Like my company, In Transit, we don’t sell to businesses and CEOs of businesses that are doing 15, 25, 30, 50 million dollars a year. That’s just not who we want to talk to. It’s not who we feel comfortable engaging with. We love serving and helping those small business owners that are in the one and a half, two million dollar range. So a lot of our clients do less than that. But we really target the people in that one and a half to three million dollar range.

And we love working with people that are skeptical about marketing, because we know that we’re going to prove to them that digital marketing works. And once we do that, they’ve been burnt in the past. I tried that in the past, it didn’t work for me. I hired this other person, it didn’t go well for me. These are my favorite types of clients, because the moment I’m able to deliver on our promise to them and they see that it works in their business, their lifetime value to us significantly increases. And I know that they are going to start having better nights of sleep because their businesses will be growing.

So that’s me. That’s the problem I want to solve. I am trying to solve business growth problems, and the product we use for this is marketing. We use marketing to solve it. I could do coaching, I could do consulting. But through my digital marketing agency, we sell marketing.

Now, through my Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast here, well, I won’t sell marketing. I want to help businesses grow. I love helping businesses grow, and I do it with coaching and consulting here. But I’m doing it for a different audience. I want to help people that want to have a location independent business, because they see me doing it and they want to know how we’re doing it, and they are aspiring to it. And so that’s why I do this podcast, to help people that want to have a location independent business. But my digital marketing agency, we want to work with brick and mortar businesses in the United States. And so for them, we do marketing services.

This becomes really simple when I sit down and go, what’s a problem out in the world I want to solve? How do I want to solve it with one product? What’s the one product, the one thing we’re going to do to solve that? Then we move on to the third one.

Now, before I do, I talked just a few minutes about the third one. I want to invite you right now to get a good picture of where your business stands. And so I’ve created an assessment. It takes about four minutes. And the assessment scores your business on OP3, persona with a problem, product to solve the problem, your pathway to buy the product, as well as the Core Five.

The Core Five are business systems. The five business systems you have to have. Your five business systems are what make your OP3, your business model, work. And those five core systems are leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project management.

So this online assessment is going to give you a snapshot of what part, about which of OP3 and Core Five you’ve got strong and healthy and which one needs a little bit of work. And so you can get the results by going to DNEPodcast.com/scorecard. So again, DNE, Digital Nomad Entrepreneur, DNEPodcast.com/scorecard.

All right. So back to OP3. What I was talking about was the pathway. So recap, we’ve got one persona with a problem. One product to solve the problem. One pathway to buy the product. Now this pathway, this is your sales funnel. That’s your sales funnel. And in here, don’t be surprised, don’t drive off the road or walk off the sidewalk or fall off the treadmill, whatever activity you’re doing as you’re listening to this, don’t be shocked, but inside here, I’ve got another framework. I know it. I can’t help myself. I love frameworks.

So in the pathway we use the Marketing Momentum framework. And the Marketing Momentum framework is very simple.

First, people have to become aware that they have the problem that you solve. Now, people can discover this problem on their own, or you can create the awareness.

Then step two, they have to consider who they’re going to buy it from. Who’s going to solve this problem for me?

Then the third step, which is the actual purchase experience, the customer experience with your brand.

And then the fourth and final stage, do they become raving fans, roaring critics, or do they sit there as the silently satisfied?

And so these four steps, awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy, the Marketing Momentum framework. And so we have to have a top of funnel activity creating awareness. We have to have a next step that nurtures the relationship to help them as they’re considering, should I buy from them? Then we move them to the actual purchase, delivering the promise, collecting the money, all of those things. And then we move them from silently satisfied to being raving fans, bringing us referrals, giving reviews. This is the Marketing Momentum framework, and it’s what makes the pathway to your product work.

I love stacking frameworks. It’s really one of my favorite things.

So if you take a moment, think about your business, and you were clear on the problem you’re solving and the person you’re solving it for. What does that look like? Well, you’re going to know what they feel. You’re going to have imagined their perfect day. You’re going to have imagined their typical day. And you’re going to build a bridge from their typical day to their ideal day. And as you’re doing all of this, you’re going to start to come up with messaging. You’re going to start coming up with language. You’re going to start coming up with marketing assets, and it’s going to be marketing messaging gold.

Then you’re going to say, okay, what is the product that really solves this problem, and how do we make it unbelievably attractive to them? What’s the product that would make it, we may make it super simple, because simple products are profitable products. What is my simple product that I’m going to be able to go to all of these people that have this problem and say, hey, Mr. or Mrs. Person with a problem, look over here at the land of milk and honey. Here’s the solution to your problem. And it’s not a solution to all their problems. It’s the solution to that problem. They’re going to go, oh, my gosh, I want that. I need that solved in my life.

And then once you figure out, okay, now I’ve got my product. I know what I’m going to say to people. I’m going to go out. I’m going to create awareness. And then I’m going to have resources to help people, consideration, choose me over my competitors. I’m going to be the obvious and easy choice. Then I’m going to have this customer experience that wows them. And then finally, I’m going to turn them into a raving fan.

Imagine if you had that for your business. Do you see here how this is a profitable business model? Once you check all of these things off, you’ve got what you need. Now, does it make it easier? A little bit. But business is still hard. It’s just harder when you’re stupid. So doing this works, makes you smart. It makes you a smart business owner. And it gives you a smart business model.

Now, as I do every week, I want to wrap up this episode with this week’s Leadership Tip of the Week. But before I do that, I want to invite you, if you’re interested in the travel side of our life as well, in the behind the scenes, what we do as a family, what we’re up to. If you have questions even about homeschooling or health care, all that kind of stuff, I want to invite you to follow us on Instagram. We are Family of Dishes. Family of Dishes on Instagram. And that is where my wife and even my kids sometimes post, and you’ll see all the behind the scenes stuff of the travel side of our life as we move from one country to the next and explore new things and have these amazing experiences around the world. So if that’s of interest to you, then I encourage you to follow us on our Instagram.

This week’s Leadership Tip of the Week is this. You have to remember that all organizations, all businesses, all organizations drift to complexity over time. And as a business owner, you have to fight the drift. You’re going to feel a pull to make your business more complex, when in fact you always want to be fighting for simplicity. Every organization does this. It’s just natural. It’s the natural tendency of a business to do this. But we have to fight the drift. We have to fight to keep things simple, because simple scales. Simple scales. This is where profit is found. Complexity slows you down. Complexity slows you down.

So this week’s Leadership Tip of the Week. Fight the drift. Constantly be reevaluating your business and looking to see where complexity has started to creep in. How can you fight to keep things simple in your business?

Well, my friend, I hope this was helpful and inspiring to you. And if you’re still at this point, I want to share with you a Black Friday special. I am putting this out in November of 2024. So if it’s after November 2024, this deal is gone. And so I’m sorry, this is an offer right now that I’ve got going on.

If you are sitting there going, I need to have OP3, I need to work through setting up my business model, and OP3 sounds like it’s the right thing for me, then I want you to know I’m offering, it’s ridiculous. It’s just absolutely insane. But I have a 90 day accelerator that I take people through to help them build their business model. And right now for Black Friday, I’m offering access to it. It’s like coaching with me for 90 days. I’m offering access at 90% off the regular price. 90% off.

And I’ve got a guarantee. The guarantee is this. At the end of 90 days of the accelerator, if you don’t have a profitable business model, I’ll keep working with you one on one until you do. And the guarantee extends beyond that. After we’re done the 90 days building your profitable business model, 90 days after that, if you haven’t made back your investment into the coaching program, into the accelerator, again, I’ll keep working with you one on one until you make it back three times. So it is a no risk guarantee.

This is, I’m never going to offer it at this lower price again. One of my best friends, who’s another business guy, we’re constantly messaging each other throughout the day. I told him I was going to do this and he goes, I would go lower than 75. And I didn’t listen to him this time. I said, nope, I’m going all the way to 90% off.

So if you would like to work with me, and potentially in a small group of some other people, and in 90 days get your business model nailed. Know your marketing message. Have your, doing the cost analysis on your product or your service and really understanding, you’ll know at the end, are you charging enough? Knowing your profit margins and all of that kind of stuff on your product. And really fine tuning your product, and then having a pathway, having a sales funnel that attracts new leads, that converts them to customers, and turns those customers into a referral engine of themselves. This is what you want for your business.

Then you need to reach out to me. [email protected] and let me know. We can talk about it. I can answer all your questions, give you all the specifics. Contact me and ask me questions. It’s not an obligation to anything. But if it’s something you’re interested in, email me, because I’m limiting this. It’s a limited time.

Now, if you’re listening to this after November and you’re like, hey, I’m still interested in that, reach out to me. I plan to do this accelerator a couple of times a year. And so reach out and let me know, when’s the next OP3 accelerator? I’m interested in it. And we’ll work through that together.

All right. Well, my friend, thanks for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it. Make sure you leave a review, subscribe and follow. And if you’re a listener on Spotify, leave a comment on this episode. I really look forward to reading all of those. Until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.

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