Business Mapping
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Case Study: |
Background |
Background
Heritage House Publishing is the organization that surrounds and supports marketing guru Alex Mandossian in his practice and teaching of business and marketing. More details at:
SergiuRecommends.com/AskAlexToday
You are listening to Alex Mandossian
Problem
Alex Mandossian perfected the art and science of teleseminars, and especially as applied to Virtual Book Tours, which he invented several years ago. His success both as a practitioner and a teacher of these marketing and promotional methods exploded his company's revenues. In five years, he turned his yearly revenue into an hourly one.
His success also created the seeds of a problem: Over the course of a few years, Heritage House Publishing (HHP) committed to projects and types of engagements that made perfect sense at the time, but later stopped making business sense. Yet, they keep piling up. As Alex put it when he approached me about this project: "I cannot handle all the business that's coming my way!"
Solution: Evaluate, Map, then Prune
As it is usually the case with highly successful entrepreneurial groups, there is too much going on for anyone to have a complete picture. So my first task was to inventory all the WHAT components of the Heritage House Publishing's work.
With a twist...
We established four criteria by which we'll evaluate each project, and which will enable us to rank them for pruning purposes: Joy (the amount of joy it brings to the organization), Revenue (the amount of revenue it generates), Ease (the amount of effort it takes to execute it) and Continuity (the degree to which this is an ongoing project).
I then mindmapped the information collected, bringing for the first time the entire picture of HHP's activities into one single visual that showed both the forest (the categories of projects, the individual projects, and the complexity of the entire operation) and the trees (the individual project scores).
The final step was taken by HHP's management: annotating "unsatisfying" nodes in the mindmap, and eventually removing them. The result was a streamlined operation that created more joy among its members, was more efficient at producing revenue, required less effort to execute each project, and had a more continous, smooth operation.
Results
Due to the confidential nature of some of the information, I got permission from Heritage House Publishing to only share a "sanitized" version of the resulting mindmap. Not only were the specifics removed (such as the names of projects, partners, etc.), but also the underlying data, captured in several comprehensive spreadsheets.
Demo
Please read these Important Notes :
To view the sample mindmaps:
- To view the mindmaps, please enter your First Name and your Primary Email Address below, then click on the View The Content Maps button.
- Each mindmap will be presented in three formats: flat, expandable and magnified.
- The whole flat mindmap is a single page PDF file, which you can download and either view it on the screen or print it on a regular sheet of paper. To reliably view it, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader version 8 or later, which you can download or upgrade, for free, from www.Adobe.com.
- If a flat mindmap is dense, that is it contains lots of information, the type size may get too small for comfortable reading on a 8.5x11" sheet, so it may require printing on a larger paper, or just viewing on the screen. The Acrobat Reader enables you to zoom in and out and slide around the page.
- The advantage of a flat mindmap is that you can see it all, by default, in one view. The disadvantage is that, if too dense, you may not be able to read the details comfortably.
- The expandable mindmap is viewable on the Web page, as a flash display. You can expand each node by clicking on the + symbols, or contract it by clicking on the - symbols.To reliable view it, you will need the Adobe Flash viewer version 9 or later.
- To test what Flash viewer you have installed, go to SergiuRecommends.com/TestingYourFlashVersion. If the page reports a version older than 9, click on the Adobe Flash Player Download link below the report to upgrade to the latest version (again, a free software).
- The magnified mindmap is shown as a graphic embedded in the web page you can access below. While each topic may appear small and hard to read, you can see the shape of the entire structure. Then, to read individual topics, simply hover your pointer over the image to magnify areas of the mindmap. You can also drag it UP to zoom in, drag it RIGHT to increase zoom window.
If you have any questions about this Case Study or about mindmapping your info products, please do not hesitate to email me at SSS@VirtualToursMarketing.com (please refer to Case Study: Projects Inventory & Pruning) or call me at +1-617-731-3132.
Enjoy!
Sergiu S. Simmel
Virtual Tours Marketing