Four strategic frameworks every founder should work through themselves
Before you pay a consultant for strategy, take a piece of paper and do the work yourself. First, you’ll save money. Second — and more importantly — you’ll walk into the conversation with hypotheses ready instead of a blank slate.
Why work through these frameworks yourself?
Among founders of small and medium B2B companies, there’s a common belief that business strategy is something you order from a consultant together with a thick presentation. Our practice at the nech shows the opposite: the best strategic conversations start only when the business owner has already worked through four basic models — and arrives with hypotheses rather than open questions.
These models aren’t secret knowledge. Porter’s Five Forces is nearly fifty years old. Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas are free and available in hundreds of materials. Jobs to be Done — the youngest of the four — can be mastered in a single weekend. Together they give you something no external presentation ever will: an internal understanding of how your business actually works.
A consultant doesn’t ask questions so they remain unanswered. A consultant asks them in order to search the solution space with you — and for that space to be well-defined, someone has to do the homework first. In practice, either the owner does it, or the consultant does. If the consultant does, you pay for it twice: once for filling out the models, and again for the strategic session that could have happened immediately.
Below we present four frameworks in the order in which they’re easiest to learn. At the end you’ll find a suggestion of the order in which to apply them in practice — that’s not the same order.
Note: all company examples used in this article (installation company, marketing agency, accounting firm, courier company) are entirely hypothetical. They don’t refer to specific entities, clients, or market situations — they serve solely to illustrate how the models work.
What is Porter’s Five Forces analysis and how do you do it?
Porter’s Five Forces is a model developed by Michael Porter at Harvard Business School in 1979. Despite its age, it remains the simplest tool for assessing whether the industry your company operates in is structurally attractive — whether generating profit is easier or harder than elsewhere.
The model looks at five sources of competitive pressure: rivalry within the industry, threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of customers, and threat of substitutes. The stronger these forces are, the harder it is to make money in that industry. The weaker — the easier.
Hypothetical example: a solar installation company in Warsaw
Imagine a company installing photovoltaic systems for businesses in the Mazovia region. Rivalry within the industry is very high — in Warsaw alone, several dozen similar companies operate. The entry barrier is low, so new players appear regularly. Module suppliers have moderate power, because the panel market is global and competitive. B2B clients compare offers based on price and payback period, giving them strong bargaining power. Substitutes — heat pumps, cogeneration, PPA contracts — exist and are increasingly visible.
The analysis produces a clear picture: the industry is structurally difficult. The strategic conclusion: you won’t win on price. You need to find a segment where you deliver more than just installation — financing, service, performance guarantee, integration with energy management systems.
Questions for each of the five forces
- How many real competitors are there in your segment and how do they differentiate?
- What would a new entrant need to do to enter your niche within 12 months?
- Do you have alternative suppliers for key components or services?
- How many clients account for more than 20% of your revenue?
- What do customers do today if they don’t buy from anyone in your industry?
Common pitfall
The most frequent mistake is counting only direct competitors. A substitute is often the biggest threat — and it’s invisible until it starts taking market share. The customer doesn’t choose between two solar providers; they choose between solar and doing nothing, between solar and a heat pump, between investing now and investing in two years.
What is Business Model Canvas and how do you fill it in?
Business Model Canvas, developed by Alexander Osterwalder in 2010, reduces an entire business to nine blocks on a single A4 page. Customer segments, value proposition, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partnerships, and cost structure. It sounds banal — and that’s its strength.
The value of this tool isn’t the diagram itself. The value is the speed of hypothesis change. You can fill out the entire Canvas in 30 minutes, look at it with distance, find three weak points, and rewrite it. In a single afternoon, five different versions of the business model emerge. This is the kind of work that can’t be outsourced — it requires someone who actually knows the company’s day-to-day reality.
Hypothetical example: a B2B marketing agency
Assume a marketing agency serving manufacturing SMEs. The first version of the Canvas looks like this: customer segment is manufacturers of 50–250 employees, value proposition is “comprehensive marketing”, channels are LinkedIn and referrals, key resources are the team, revenue streams are monthly retainer.
After two hours of critical scrutiny, it turns out “comprehensive marketing” is too broad a concept. Competitors offer the same. After revision, the value proposition reads: “generating qualified B2B leads in the manufacturing sector through technical content in Polish and German”. Then channels change (industry trade fairs and webinars are added), revenue streams change (hybrid model: retainer plus commission on leads), partnerships change (a trusted network of technical copywriters). After the fourth iteration, the firm has a model that can’t be copied in three months.
Common pitfall
Confusing customer segments with personas. A segment is a group that shares the same problem and the same willingness to pay. “Small businesses in Poland” isn’t a segment — it’s a population. “Manufacturers with 50–250 employees, exporting to Germany, with margins below 10%” is a segment. This difference is worth nailing at the very start, because all other Canvas blocks depend on a precise segment definition.
What is Value Proposition Canvas and what distinguishes it from Business Model Canvas?
Value Proposition Canvas is a zoom-in on one of the nine BMC blocks — the value proposition — combined with a customer profile. On the left side of the model: products and services you offer, pain relievers, gain creators. On the right side: customer jobs, pains, and desired gains. Matching the two sides is called product-market fit, and a lack of fit is the most common cause of stagnation in B2B.
Most companies fill out the product side based on what they already offer. The customer side — based on what they imagine the customer feels. That’s exactly the order to avoid. The value of Value Proposition Canvas only appears when the customer side is filled out from literal transcripts of conversations with real customers, and the product side is adjusted afterwards.
Hypothetical example: an accounting firm for small businesses
An accounting firm in Warsaw had positioned itself for years as “accurate and on time”. After filling out the Value Proposition Canvas based on fifteen customer conversations, something different emerged. Real customer jobs sounded like: “make fast financial decisions”, “sleep peacefully through a tax inspection”, “not be surprised by the size of the CIT advance”. Real pains: data is missing at the right moment of the month, documents are in three places, reports come as PDFs instead of spreadsheets.
After adjusting the product side, the offering changed from “bookkeeping” to “a financial dashboard updated by the third day of the month, a monthly 30-minute call with the accountant, alerts before tax deadlines”. The price went up by 40%, and client churn dropped to negligible.
What is Jobs to be Done (JTBD) and why does it matter for B2B?
Jobs to be Done is an approach developed by Clayton Christensen at Harvard and Tony Ulwick. The central thesis: customers don’t buy products — they “hire” them to do a specific job in a specific situation. Christensen’s classic question wasn’t “Who buys milkshakes?” but “In what situation does someone reach for a milkshake, and what are they trying to accomplish?”
In B2B, this perspective shift has even greater value than in B2C. Corporate buying decisions are less impulsive, more often involve multiple stakeholders, and the moment of triggering the search — the so-called job trigger — is usually more pronounced than in consumer decisions. A B2B customer isn’t looking for “a CRM system”; they’re looking for a solution to the problem “I’m losing leads because salespeople don’t remember who they called last week”. Those are two different things, even though they end with the same purchase.
Hypothetical example: a B2B courier company
A mid-sized courier company serving e-commerce in Poland tried to sell itself as “a cheaper alternative to global carriers”. After conducting twenty JTBD interviews, it turned out the job clients were “hiring” them for sounded different: “deliver this package on time so I can promise the customer a specific day on the product card in the shop”. Price was the second criterion. The first was predictability.
After rewriting communication around this specific job — with emphasis on SLA, automated notifications, and integration with e-commerce platforms — conversion on sales inquiries more than doubled within a quarter.
How to conduct a JTBD interview
- Ask about a specific, recent purchase situation — not general preferences.
- Rewind in time to the moment the customer started searching for a solution.
- Ask what they tried earlier and why it wasn’t enough.
- Ask about emotions and anxieties, not just functionality.
- Listen for long silences — the real answer usually appears there.
Common pitfall
Phrasing the job so broadly it fits everything. “The customer wants to be productive” isn’t a job — it’s a platitude. A good job has context, obstacles, and measurable success criteria. “The customer wants to close the quarterly financial review within two business days without weekend work” — that’s a job you can build an offering around.
In what order should you apply these frameworks?
The order in which we presented the models is the order of learning. The order of application is different — and more important. In our practice at the nech, we always start with the customer and work toward the market.
Step one: Jobs to be Done. Interviews with ten to twenty customers show what jobs your product is actually being hired for. Without this layer, the rest is speculation.
Step two: Value Proposition Canvas. With JTBD interview results, you adjust what you offer to what customers are trying to achieve. This is usually where the first sharp changes in the offering appear.
Step three: Business Model Canvas. With a matched value proposition, you arrange the entire model — segments, channels, revenue streams, costs. You iterate until all nine blocks are coherent.
Step four: Porter’s Five Forces. The last step is checking whether the industry in which you’ve built this model can generate profit at all. If all five forces work against you, the model needs to shift — sometimes the segment, sometimes the entire market.
This sequence can be completed independently in three to four weeks. After it’s done, you have something well-suited for further work with a consultant: a set of documented hypotheses whose weak points need to be refined, not invented from scratch.
When is it worth hiring a strategic consultant?
Frameworks are free, but they have one limited resource: impartiality. Working on your own company, each of us sees what we already know. An internal team has the same problem — they look from the same perspective as the owner, because they live in the same context.
A good strategic consultant gives three things that independent work with models can’t: external questions no one inside the company will ask; experience from other industries that lets you spot patterns invisible from within; and methodological discipline that turns a set of hypotheses into a concrete execution plan.
At the nech, the best projects start when a client arrives with completed models and a specific question: “I know our value proposition is misaligned with this segment — is that the correct diagnosis, or did I get the segment wrong?”. This kind of question allows the conversation to start at the strategic layer, not at basic ordering.
If you’re working on business strategy, B2B sales development, or entering the Polish market, these four frameworks are a good starting point. With them, the conversation looks different — and costs less.
Frequently asked questions
Do these frameworks work for small businesses in Poland?
Yes. Porter’s Five Forces, Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Jobs to be Done don’t require large teams or significant resources. A small B2B business in Warsaw or anywhere else in Poland will benefit from them at least as much as a mature organisation — often more, because strategic decisions are made faster and have a direct impact on sales.
How long does it take to work through all four frameworks?
A first, rough version of each model can be created in one to two hours of work. A well-developed complete set — with customer interviews for JTBD and data verification for Porter — typically takes two to three full days spread over two to three weeks. That’s still significantly less than starting from a blank slate with a consultant.
How is Business Model Canvas different from a business plan?
Business Model Canvas is a one-page picture of how a company creates, delivers, and monetises value — a tool for quickly changing hypotheses. A business plan is a comprehensive financial and operational document, typically required by banks, investors, or grant institutions. In practice, the Canvas comes first and becomes the skeleton for the later business plan.
Does Jobs to be Done replace marketing personas?
JTBD doesn’t so much replace personas as change the question. A persona describes who the customer is — age, role, industry. JTBD describes what the customer is trying to achieve and under what circumstances. For product and sales decisions in B2B, JTBD usually gives sharper signals than classical personas because it focuses on the situation in which the customer is searching for a solution at all.
When is it worth hiring a strategic consultant after working through the frameworks?
When you already have draft answers but don’t know whether they’re accurate, or when you don’t know how to translate them into concrete sales and operational actions. A good consultant doesn’t invent strategy from scratch — they help validate hypotheses, find weak points, and build an execution plan. Clients who come with completed framework versions save weeks of work and significantly more money.
Next step
You’ve worked through the frameworks. Time to validate the hypotheses.
Book a free 30-minute call. We’ll find where your strategy has the weakest points — and what to validate first.
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