Money Making Distance
How far removed are you from a customer handing you a dollar?
I find the question of “Money Making Distance” to be particularly helpful for my career at the moment, because it forces me to answer:
- Who are the customers handing me (or my company) money?
- Why are they handing over money to me (or my company)?
- What am I producing that relates to the customer handing me money?
Another way to phrase this, is as doing a first principles analysis of a specific business. Downstream, these questions help answer:
- Are there more customers will pay me (or my company)? Determine total addressable market
- If I get fired, will customers continue to pay my company? Job security
- Inversely, if I do a better job, will customers pay my company more money? Growth potential
Outside of these more practical questions and answers, there is also the emotional aspect of running a business. Am I doing something that directly contributes value to a paying customer? If I am, I feel a lot less like a cog in a machine and more like the engine itself.
Examples / Exercises
- What is the MMD for a data scientist at IBM for an internal Agile dashboard product?
- What is the MMD for a private practice dentist?
- What is the MMD for a US senator?
- What is your MMD?