I love to look at business models and see how companies and people get paid for things. One recurring theme that I see in successful companies is the simplicity of their path to revenue. Let’s take a look at 3 examples.

1. Attorney:  Charges time for money, but 1 hr = $xxx
2. Restaurant: Charges for the service of preparing food, 1 Pizza = $xx
3. Online News Site: Create content, drive traffic, find advertisers, drive conversions = XX% of revenue generated

The moral of the story is not to only focus on the first 2 at all, but to understand. For revenue optimization from a model like the online news site, more visits and customers are needed. It isn’t impossible, if your model accounts for it. The other side of the argument is that finding people who will pay hundreds of dollars per hour is a lot harder than having someone view your website for free.

Draw the steps a customer has to go through to pay you, generally…The more complex the path is to revenue, the harder it is to make revenue.