InnovaBuzz Episode #23 – John Warrillow of The Value Builder System

In this episode number 23 of the InnovaBuzz podcast, John Warrillow, the creator and president of The Value Builder System, author of Built to Sell and The Automatic Customer, talks to us about recurring revenue or subscription business models and how they can give certainty in both cash flow, inventory and staff management to any business.  Listen to the podcast to get the details.
Listen to the Podcast
Today we are giving away a copy of John’s book, The Automatic Customer where he talks about 9 business models that are good recurring revenue models, where those business models are well-suited and and what you need to have in place for them to succeed.
Leave your comments underneath the Podcast post and tell us what your biggest challenges are in adopting a subscription model in your own business.
Show Highlights
Some of the highlights of this episode include:

* The biggest benefit of running a subscription based business model is that it increases the value of your business.
* Another huge benefit of a subscription or recurring revenue model is that you have a steady cash flow, can plan for stock inventory and staffing levels.
* The most important thing to pay attention to in a subscription business model, is to minimize cancellations.
* Critical to minimizing cancellations is to teach people to get the best value out of the products or service you are offering – the onboarding process is vital to get right, and that onboarding window is in the first 60-90 days of the subscription. That’s the window where you can actually get the customers to change their behavior to adopt whatever it is you sell
* To scale a business, it’s people need process, they need systems. It is important to find the right balance between documenting enough and not over complicating the business.

 finding the balance between having enough and too many people is really difficult if you sell on a transactional model but if you sell in subscription, you know how many customers you have in 3 or 6 months from now, so you can staff accordingly.
John Warrilow 
The Buzz – Our Innovation Round
Here are John’s answers to the questions of our Innovation round. Watch the interview to get the full scoop.

* #1 thing to be more innovative – Sell less to more people. Selling fewer things allows you to focus on getting it right with just a couple of things.
* Best thing for new ideas – Keep asking “What would make this better?”.
* Favourite tool for innovation – Evernote.
* Keep project / client on track – Creating a subscription model where a customer agrees upfront to a set of services in advance with a very clear set of deliverables in return for an amount of money. When you publish that and you commit to that, then you’ll stay on track, they’ll stay on track.
* Differentiate – You need to focus on something that both makes you different as well as something that customers care about.

To Be More Innovative and Productive
Create some recurring revenue.
Reach Out
You can reach out and thank John via The Value Builder System website,  Built to Sell website ,  John Warrilow’s articles or his Twitter account.
Suggested Guest
John suggested I interview Bo Burlingham who is the author of Finish Big – a book about how to exit a company on top.
So, Bo keep an eye on your Inbox for an invitation from me, for the InnovaBuzz Podcast!
Competition Hint
Hint: To enter the competition, leave your comments under this blog post.