Infrastructure remembers a building. A relationship remembers a customer.

distinction — attributed to Ben Erwin

A venue-based service network is built to serve whoever walks into a given room on a given day, which means it defaults to knowing the building rather than the person. Erwin is trying to invert that default so that what a client wanted last time follows them to the next property instead of disappearing at the door. The distinction matters because the two models produce different businesses: one collects revenue transaction by transaction from whoever the room happens to serve, the other compounds value by accumulating what it knows about a specific relationship over time. Choosing which one you are building determines what data is worth capturing at all.

For any multi-location business deciding whether it is organized around locations or around customers.

infrastructure, customer-relationship, data-architecture, business-model