How to Create Your Own Blue Ocean

In my Webinar – “Thinking strategically – 2014”, I mentioned a very powerful tool that could help you in building strategy for your business, which is called Blue Ocean Canvas.

Many of you requested to know more about this tool. If you want to know more go and read the book! It would be probably the most productive hours you will spend, this year, working ON your business.

Having said that, I want to add more by explaining how using this tool would be more than just creating your strategy, but also clarifying and helping you create the most important ingredient in your business, which is adding value to the marketplace.

Doing the “Blue Ocean Canvas” creates totally clarity what is out there in the market. If you wish your business to be successful, you know, by now, that you need to stand out!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face – you were NOT born to fit in you were born to STAND UP! This is true in life AND in business… it is CRUCIAL.

In order to be different you first need to know what is the standard in your industry. This is where Blue Ocean Canvas comes in and helps you.

What is “Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas”?

The canvas consists of the horizontal axis, capturing the range of factors that the industry competes on, and the vertical axis, which illustrates the level of presence of each factor across all competitors.

Have a look at the image on the right – this is how it looks like when analyzing YouTube and ordinary web hosting services.

As you can see, the canvas maps out different factors and how they’re present in the ordinary web hosting provider (red) and how is YouTube different (blue). The line connecting the dots is called the value curve.

How to create a “Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas”?

First, you have to identify the factors that the industry competes on to put them on the horizontal axis. Some of the obvious ones will be: price, specialization, payment terms, etc.

In Balanced Business Women I would put: Live events, online tools, videos, community etc…

Then you look at how other players in the market engage with these factors, from high to low.

For example, if you are a coach you might notice that the majority in your slice of the industry offers long payment terms, or that they’re not really specializing, they treat and work with EVERYONE .

Use one color to mark all the appropriate dots and then connect them with one line (value curve).

Finally, look at your business and how it relates to the value curve of other players. You may find that it runs very closely to everybody else in the market, or that some points in the way you run your business are different (for example, your payment terms are significantly shorter or you focus only on a specific audience or issue).

Mark your dots with another color and connect them to form the value curve.

How to use the Canvas?

The canvas tool can be used in two ways. If you do this exercise as I described above, you’re looking at the “as is” perspective, so you have a clear answer of how you’re positioned in relation to other players.

In my opinion, doing it that way should be your first step. Your next step should be to work on it and create how “it could be” perspective.

In order to do that you look at what you could change in the way you run your business to set yourself apart from the rest of the market.

When you think that way you follow 4 steps that are called ERRC. You are going to ask yourself 4 questions:

What can I ELIMINATE from what is already out there?
What can I REDUCE in my existing canvas?
What can I RAISE (improve) in my existing
What can I CREATE in my canvas, which does not exist in the market?

To help you work this out here is an amazing online tool to help you play around with your own strategy canvas.

Try it out for yourself!

Now I’m curious…

What would you Eliminate, Reduce, Raise or Create to make your business stand out?

Share it with us in the comment box below - What makes YOUR business different?

As a thank-you gift I will send you a video from my seminar of Women Do Business Differently

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Have a magical week! Vered