Map Your Business On One Page
Put your whole service business on one page, find the customers who actually pay you, put a dollar figure on each type, and pick the one thing to fix first, inside 7 days.
Nine blocks. One page. One decision you can defend with arithmetic. Then 30 minutes every quarter.
The Full Guide
10 short chapters, 4 steps, one worked example carried all the way through, and a second one where the owner skips the test and it goes wrong. You finish with a decision, not just a filled-in grid.
- The printable map: a real one-page landscape canvas (letter or 11x17) with three decision rows underneath, plus a one-page decision sheet
- Customer scorecard: rank every kind of customer on pay, hassle and effort, then mark each GROW, KEEP or SUNSET? as a first pass (Chapter 1, free)
- The 9-Block Map in plain words, with the fill order and the reason for it, plus a 15-minute rival line-up for the value block: you against the 2 alternatives your customer really uses
- Money model row: what each customer type buys first, next and again, plus the 30-day cash check (win and serve)
- LTGP : CAC per customer type: lifetime gross profit against the cost to win one customer, every row worked step by step
- Profit per scarce hour, per customer type: contribution for 12 months divided by the hours of the thing you run out of first. The number that decides what to grow
- The 3-line sunset test: contribution, capacity, refill. Run it before you stop serving anyone, with the refill and price-rise break-even sums
- Pick one constraint: getting customers, selling, delivering or running the place, then GROW, KEEP, REPRICE or SUNSET for every type
- 7 numbers to track against your own baseline, guess first, then count. No borrowed green and red ranges: you count your own and beat them
- 5 AI companion prompts for ChatGPT or Claude that sort your data without inventing your margins
- Free digital versions: links to the free Business Model Canvas templates in Strategyzer, FigJam and Miro
- A 7-day plan, a 30-day look-back that checks whether freed hours were refilled, and a 30-minute quarterly review
- 17 fill-in worksheets (PDF and text) and a quarterly tracker, one row per customer type
WHERE IT COMES FROMCredit first
The nine blocks are the Business Model Canvas, created by Alexander Osterwalder with Strategyzer and published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 3.0). This guide is how we use the canvas in a local service business. Our printable map is adapted from their grid and shared under the same licence.
What we add is the part most owners need after the boxes are full: rank your customers, put a dollar figure on each kind, and pick the one constraint to fix first. And a test before you drop anyone, because a customer type that "loses money" on the accountant's report is often paying part of your rent.
THE METHODRank. Map. Price. Pick.
- Rank. Score every kind of customer you serve. Find the ones who pay the most, complain the least and cost the least to serve. 20 minutes.
- Map. Fill the nine blocks on one page, in the order that makes each block depend on the one before. 90 minutes.
- Price. Put a lifetime gross profit and a cost to win on each customer type, then work out what each type earns per hour of your scarcest resource.
- Pick. Choose one constraint for the next 90 days, run the sunset test before you drop any type, and write 3 actions.
Chapter 1 is free and complete on its own: a 20-minute customer scorecard that tells you who your business is really for. Score = Pay + (6 − Hassle) + (6 − Effort).
Every number in the guide is a round, labelled hypothetical or carries its source. The worked example is an invented heating and air company, followed from the first score to the final decision, including how that decision could go wrong.
Read chapter 1 free.
Start with the first chapter. The full book is $27.
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