Your business creates more value than you can see from inside it. This exercise gathers the evidence from three directions, then uses AI to show you what it adds up to, including the value you've been underselling.
One thing to hold onto throughout: the insight here comes from asking the right questions of the right people. The AI's job is only to bring the answers together. Your source material, the actual words of your clients and team, stays yours, and you can always go back to it and read it in other ways.
What does your business sell?
The questions adjust to fit. Pick the closest match; if you're not sure, "products and services" covers both.
And who's around the business?
Gather the inputs
Collect answers from your clients or customers, the people around the business, and yourself. Allow a week or two for replies. Answer your own questions first, before you read anyone else's; the exercise depends on your unprompted view being on record.
Questions for your clients (send to 4 to 8 people)
Copy this into an email or message. Include at least one past client or lapsed customer.
Questions for your team
Anonymous is better if you can manage it. In a small team, ask everyone.
Questions for you, the owner
Written before you read anyone else's answers.
Paste the replies in
Paste everything exactly as people wrote it. Don't tidy, summarise or leave out the awkward ones; the verbatim words are the raw material.
Aim for at least three replies. More is better.
If you work alone, switch the option in step 1 to one of the "just me" choices.
Generate your prompt and run it
This builds the full prompt with your evidence inside it. Copy it, paste it into your AI tool of choice, such as Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll get back your analysis: the value themes in your clients' words, the gaps between how you see the business and how they do, three candidate value statements, and three actions.
Fill in the boxes first. The exercise only works with the evidence in place.
The section to sit with is the perception gaps; that's where the exercise earns its keep. Read it with someone you trust. At the end of the analysis you'll also get a block starting ===VALUE MAP START===. Bring it back here for step 5.
Turn it into your Value Map
At the end of its analysis, the AI produced a block starting with ===VALUE MAP START===. Copy that whole block (markers included) and paste it here to create your one-page Value Map, ready to print or save as a PDF.
That doesn't look like a complete block. Check you copied everything between ===VALUE MAP START=== and ===VALUE MAP END===.
How you describe it
How they experience it
Invisible value
Blind spot
Trapped value
Charge for it
Hand it over
Stop it
A note on how to read this. This map was assembled by AI from the answers you collected, and AI can misread, overweight or occasionally get things wrong. Treat it as a guide that brings your evidence together, not a verdict. Your source material, the actual words of your clients and team, is the real asset here, and it stays yours: go back to it, check anything that surprises you, and analyse it in other ways whenever you like. The value of this exercise was never the AI. It was asking the right questions of the right people.
Know your value · Simplify & Scale · Read the business, not the to-do list
© Simplify & Scale Limited 2026 · simplifyandscale.co.uk · Free to use in your own business, not for resale or redistribution
