Abell Framework
The Abell Framework defines a business along three questions at once - who you serve, what need you meet, and how you meet it - so you can see whether you're actually one business or quietly running several.
Three questions asked at once, laid out as cards you weigh together rather than one at a time.
Reach for this when…
- You're deciding whether to expand into a new customer segment or a new service, and it feels like the same question.
- Growth has come from saying yes to everything, and 'what business are we in' no longer has an easy answer.
- You're writing a business plan and keep circling the same definition problem.
How to run it
- List your customer groups: who exactly you serve.
- List their needs: what problem you actually solve for them.
- List your technologies: how you currently solve it.
- Map where groups, needs and technologies genuinely overlap.
- Decide which combinations are your real business, and which are drift.
A worked example
Situation. Sarah Mitchell runs Mitchell Physiotherapy, a physiotherapy clinic in Adelaide, Australia, that had drifted into treating everyone from elite athletes to elderly rehab patients with the same six therapists.
Applied. Mapping customer groups, needs and technologies against each other, she found athletes and elderly patients needed genuinely different clinical approaches - the clinic couldn't excel at both with one undifferentiated team.
Result. She split the clinic into two clearly defined tracks with dedicated staff for each, and referrals rose because both groups could see the clinic was built specifically for them.
The catch
The framework is deceptively simple to draw and genuinely hard to fill in honestly - most businesses discover they're serving more group/need/technology combinations than they can resource well. It also says nothing about which combination is profitable, only which ones exist.
If you can't name the technology - the how - as precisely as the customer and the need, you don't understand your own business yet.
Origin: Derek F. Abell