It’s been a really busy few months, and what we’ve loved is that much of the work has been really creative.

Our bread and butter is helping businesses dig into how they do what they do, and looking for how we, they and their staff can make incremental improvements. Very satisfying.

The work we really love though, is to look at the situation and help an organisation come up with fabulous new stuff – great, unexpected, (positively) disruptive ways of doing things.

We came up with a really intriguing business model for Qton Solutions (a favourite client of ours because of the idea-storms we generate together!) to consider.

They produce software solutions for customers that really liberate value through streamlining operations (fitting nicely with the analysis and design that Critical Action does). However, customers are often concerned that value-based solutions are only valuable to them if they deliver…

A classic example of this is where we show that one can save a business 15 minutes per day per person – across a workforce of 100 people, so let’s say 25 person hours per day, around 6,250 person hours every year – at £60/hr that’s £375,000 p.a.!

Now, that sounds impressive, but we usually also point out that you can only get £375k of benefit if people use that 15 minutes every day to do something productive instead of talk some more about X-Factor or football…

With this thought in mind, we posed ourselves a challenge:

“could we build a pricing model that said – the more you actually use this system, the cheaper it gets, from what it’s worth to what you want to pay?”

We didn’t mean break points for volume usage, we meant the actual money you pay each month to use the system comes down if people genuinely use it…

That’s quite radical – and it usually stops the conversation dead for a few minutes, before the talking really starts again!

If you’re interested in commenting or knowing more about how we’re thinking of making this work – why not get in touch?