Contours of a Business Model

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A business model attempts to answer four questions:

• Who are your customers?

• What can you give them?

• How can you do that?

• How much will it cost?

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Customers

Understanding who your customer are is pivotal in two ways —knowing him from the outside and knowing him from the inside:

(1) Knowing your customer from the outside

• Who will be benefiting from your services, or put differently, 

• who is seeking your product or will become a taker of it once its availability is known to that person or firm?

Identifying customers may be a concentric process, starting with large segments — say, the financial industry—and then working toward the inner, more detailed segments, say, a bank or a hedge fund down to a M&A-niche player, or a prominent individual.

It may also be both 

• a sieving process leaving candidates by the wayside and 

• an accruing process, getting to know more about an industry, an industry segment, a company, and the inner workings and needs of a client:

(2) Knowing your customer from the inside 

Read about and do personal research on your clients, call them up and visit them, and when you have secured business with them use your contacts to learn more about the way the client functions and develops and what about your (potential) services are helpful and desirable from their point of view.

All along you should strive to work out a value proposition with respect to each of your clients, i. e. find answers to these questions:

• How do your services solve customers' problems?

• Why are your services better than those of other providers? 

Channels to Reach the Client

Writes Simon Akhrameev,

You already know your customers, how to cooperate with them and what you can offer. Now the question is how you can reach your customers. There are many ways to reach customers using conventional (direct marketing: emails, calls, offline ads, etc.) or modern marketing methods (online marketing: website + SEO, online advertising, SMM, etc.). 

The Service Delivery Process

Ensure you understand in detail the operational implementation of your business — the present outline addresses translation, texting and ghostwriting services, hence the specific references: ordering and registration, signing agreements, pre-translation and translation activities, project delivery and payment arrangements. Try to be as specific as possible and write each activity pertaining to your business.

Implementational Resources 

These will include not only physical assets like PC, printer, scanner, etc. but intellectual resources as well: software, legal registration, website, membership in organizations, etc.

Value-adding Partners

Search for value-adding partners that will either complement your services or serve as multipliers to get your more and better business, like concluding a contract with a web development company to enhance the range of their services and help their clients with website translation.

Cost, Revenues, and Profit

Determine how much you need to pay for key resources and how much you will have to spend for the main activities.

Then you need to determine your pricing model. Translators and agencies use different pricing models with most common being per word, per page and per hour models. Choose what suits your needs better. You may use this translator rates calculator by Proz.

Then set up realistic annual revenue rate. Calculate how much you need to cover your living expenses and find out how much will remain as net profit. Conduct a market research to find out the prices of your competitor to avoid charging too much or too low for your services.

Now you have a customized business model ready for your freelance translation business. But remember, your business model is not a rigid framework, it is a dynamically forming and developing concept that can and should be adjusted depending on current conditions. Keep on experimenting: try to cover new markets, offer better services, use new technologies, and reach new heights!