At Value Capture Machine we think that this is the greatest business quote of all time:
“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Mike Tyson
There is no better modern-day version of our favourite motto, Pathei Mathos, meaning that learning comes through struggle, written by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus about the battle for Troy.
(It doesn’t hurt that one of the translations of Pathei Mathos from ancient Greek into Latin is “disco inferno”. Seriously.)
It tells us that we need to be prepared for hard times, struggle and change, and that this change will help us develop and grow just as the trials of our past have helped us grow.
And that whenever we plan for the future, we must do so knowing that we will need to be agile and ready to change, because the future will not be like today.
It is why we developed the Value Capture Machine as our business planning tool, because it is simple enough to understand, and also simple enough to adapt to changes.
We start by getting right to the heart of what we want our business to do and why we want our customer to use it: the value we create.
We then develop it by understanding how we will capture value from that, so that our business doesn’t fail, so we can do it again (the beginning of the machine) and so we can grow it to create more value, and capture more value.
And then we start to build a machine that can do this separately from us, without us, so that we can focus on controlling it, assessing it, improving it, and adapting it for changing times and conditions.
It gives us a plan, but it is a plan that accepts that we will be punched in the face. It is a plan that knows we need to protect ourselves, and move, and most importantly, get back up on our feet and see where we stand.
Because the perfect retort to Mike Tyson is this:
It does not matter how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get back up.
Vince Lombardi
The perfect Value Capture Machine is a machine that knows it might get punched, and has an ability to plan for that too.
Now you’ve got the beginning of a business plan, including risks, you need a real plan.