Entrepreneurship. Rhonda Abrams

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      Donations/grants: Receiving funds from others without their receiving goods or services in return, done because they support your cause or efforts; this is primarily a business model for not-for-profit, charitable businesses, but for-profit social ventures might also receive these.

Feasibility Analysis

      At this early stage, when you are just fleshing out your business concept and business model, you will certainly not have all the information you need to know whether your business can succeed, whether you can execute on your idea, or how much money you can reasonably expect to make. You will not, for instance, have done a financial analysis at this point, so you won’t know what your costs and profits will likely be. To do that, you’ll develop a complete business plan—a critical step in your entrepreneurial process.

      Nevertheless, a feasibility analysis provides a chance to begin to flesh out your initial business idea, see which components are already in place to make it possible, see which are not, and do a quick assessment of whether you can pull this off. Before you develop the in-depth, specific components of your business plan, take time to see if it seems feasible—and identify the roadblocks you’ll likely face.

      Doing a feasibility analysis gives you the opportunity to open your eyes, ask yourself some tough questions, then determine whether your idea, as originally conceived, needs to be modified, refocused, or changed dramatically. (Or perhaps even scrapped altogether. It’s better to drop an unworkable idea early on and move on to a different, potentially more successful idea.)

      How involved your feasibility analysis is will depend a bit on how unusual your idea is or how hard your market is to reach. The more novel your concept, or the more unproven your marketing and sales channel, the more investigation you’ll need to do to figure out whether the necessary building blocks are available to you or whether you’ll have to create those too.

      Let’s say you’ve got an idea for an entirely new product—tasty meals that come in self-heating packages, no microwave required. You originally plan first to sell them in airports so passengers can carry hot meals on board to eat while they fly. You can look at many things fairly quickly to test the feasibility of this idea. Does such packaging already exist and is it proven? Would airlines allow such packages on planes? How expensive is it for you to get space in airports to sell these? That’s on top of the bigger question: Would flyers even want this? Doing a quick feasibility analysis, you might realize that, even if the concept of self-heating meals is workable, you’d be better off introducing them to college students, both because of the complications of dealing with airports and airlines, and because a younger target market might be more open to novel products.

       A feasibility analysis vs. a business plan

       How does a feasibility analysis differ from creating a full-fledged business plan? Think of developing and planning your business as entailing a few components:

       1. VISION. Identifying and articulating your business idea and concept.

       2. FEASIBILITY ANALYSIS. Challenging your concept, identifying which components are in place to make it realistic to easily execute, recognizing the biggest obstacles you’ll likely face.

       3. BUSINESS PLAN. Clarifying your business strategy in detail, describing how you’re going to execute on your vision, developing the major components of your business, projecting detailed financial forecasts.

       4. MARKETING/OPERATIONS/TECHNOLOGY PLANS. Describing in detail and developing budgets for the internal aspects of how you’ll run your business day-to-day.

      But if you pursue something more proven—let’s say you’re opening an Italian restaurant on a street that’s already a major destination for diners—your feasibility analysis will be much less involved. Is there space available in that neighborhood? Are the rents too high to operate profitably? Do you personally have the restaurant experience necessary to make this a success? Can you find a great Italian cook?

      ENTREPRENEUR’S WORKSHEET

       Your Business Model

       Check out which components you’ll use below in your business model, elaborating on each choice in the space provided. Then draft a short paragraph of your business model in the summary section.

      With every feasibility analysis, start by evaluating yourself. Are you really suited to run a business? Do you yourself have the knowledge and skills to pull this off? Can you assemble a winning team?

      A feasibility analysis only begins your business plan—and your questioning and exploring. You should continually challenge your assumptions. The entrepreneurs most willing to ask themselves the tough questions are most likely to succeed.

      The Feasibility Analysis worksheet on pages 48–49 helps you evaluate your basic business concept. You’ll need to do some basic business research to fill it out. See Chapter 3 for more on research.

       See pages 48–49

Creating a Product Prototype

      If you СКАЧАТЬ