When business model is mentioned in business field, usually it means the main method which is used by a company to make profit.
For example, facebook is a social website and its profit comes from advertisements. Amazon is an electronic commerce and cloud computering company.
Therefore, when I say “finding your own business model”, maybe someone would ask, I don’t want to do business, is it essential for me to find the business model?
The answer is yes. For a person, the business model is the method that you use to sell your time for earning a living, which is essential for everyone.
Moreover, your business model will decide your income and your career development.
There are three kinds of business models. The first one is to package your time and sell it once to a company or an organisation, which is done by most people, we call it finding a job, such as teachers, researchers, lawyers and doctors.
The advantage of this model is to be stable. If you are qualified to obtain a position, there is a high possibility that you can keep doing this job.
However, the drawback of this business model is that you can only sell your time for once and there is a limitation of your time.
In another word, if you do one job, you can’t do another job at the same time.
In addition, there are only 24 hours a day for each person. Therefore, if you want to get higher salary, the only method is to increase the price of unit hour of your time.
For example, people get higher degree in university, people take training for their skills. All of them want to make their unit hour more valuable.
Besides of this business model, have you ever thought of other models? Another business model is selling your unit hour of time for many times.
For example, a writer can sell his book for many years, so the time for writing book has been sold for many times. A programmer designs a software, which is used by many companies. All the creators who can create fine works meeting the needs of a group of people can sell their time with creation for many times.
Furthermore, this kind of income can be called as “income after sleep”, which means after the works have been created for selling, even though you sleep, they can make profit for you.
For this kind of business model, we need to have a speciality in a domain, finding the potential customers, mining their needs and selling your products.
Usually, the whole process is completed by the cooperation of a team.
After you have been an expert in a field and accumulate enough resources, you could use the third business model, which is buying others’ time with lower price and selling it for a higher price.
For example, when you register an MBA course, you spend money to buy the time of teachers to learn the knowledges, and the opportunities of the cooperation with excellent classmates from diverse backgrounds.
Then you can use these opportunities to do projects together, linking with more resources and creating more values.
Another example is that your boss, who buys your time for creating more values. This business model is of higher risk but there is much less limitation for income and time restriction.
Starting un undertaking is this kind of business model.
So how to find your own personal business model? Firstly, we need to better know ourselves. What are your own personal characters? Do you prefer to a stable job or you would like to start your own business?
After knowing this, we need to find and develop our superiority. Nowadays, most works are completed by cooperation. Only if we have strong superiority, we could provide enough values to our team.
Finally, in my opinion, no matter what kind of business we choose, time is a valuable resource without regeneration.
So, spend your time to do valuable things and keep yourself growing up. This is also a good method to keep you from doing things which can just sell your unit time for once.
Do not waste 1 hour to stay in a queue for just saving 10 dollars, using this one hour to write a paper or practice speech, which may bring you much more valuable opportunities in future.
And sometimes, we need to try many times to finally find our own suitable business model and need to spend great efforts to make it stronger and stronger.
However, no matter how we work hard for it, after you find your own business model and keeping to make a progress for it, you will benefit from it all of your life.