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Report Catalogue Data

  Report Class   General Public Report
  Analysis Type   Businesses Planning
  Issue Category   Businesses Start-Up Planning
  Publish Date   02_05_2009
  Last Update   03_17_2009
  Reference Code   GPR-TE.ME-20080715
Business Start-up Planning
Business Starting Phase

More Update Post: 03_12_2009; 03_14_2009
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Abstract/Summary:
This report critically analyzes the first phase, The Starting Phase, of Business Start-up Stage. The Starting Phase of the Business Start-up Stage is concerned with creating the capability of being in possession of the products to sell, creating of the business, and the establishing of the procedures or business practices/models on which to rest the operations of the business; and the would-be business owner is exposed to an analysis of the issue involved in guiding the development of a business.
 

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Remarks: Bibliographical references are not provided inline, but are provided only with properly book-form organized bound-copy of this report available for purchase. 

Introduction
Three phases characterize the Start-up Stage of every business endeavor: The Starting Phase, The Execution Phase and The Penetration Phase; each with its peculiarities and pitfalls that must be adeptly circumvented or managed by the business owner to be successful. For starter, it should be borne in mind that business is simply the profitably marketing of a product; hence, this phase of the Start-up Stage is concerned with creating the capability of being in possession of the products to sell, creating of the business, and the establishing of the procedures or business practices/models on which to rest the operations of the business. Although this phase seems to entail the making of several decisions, the phase is, by and large, not difficult, but as with every building process, a good foundation has to be laid, before moving forward.

Planning Capability for Market Participation
The considerations about creating the capability for market participation, are extensively explained, albeit more abstractly, under The Entrepreneur, in essence, as the issues of discourse of vision analysis, vision dimensions clusters analysis. In any case, as is noted above the first task is the creating of the capability for market participation; and that is tantamount to creating the means of being in possession of the product, the marketing of which is the business. Until this is fully defined nothing else needs to be undertaken. This task, of course, is accomplished by different methods for different markets and different intended market participations. The process of creating the capability can be very complex atimes.

The process by which the capability for market participation is acquired is dependent on the strategic framework within which the business is planned to be conducted. The strategic framework is invariably always defined by the corporate growth strategy and its translation into venture growth strategic plan adopted or formulated for the purposes of competing in the market. In general though, the corporate growth strategy is defined by the stage of evolution of the product on the product lifecycle curve.  As is well-documented the product sales evolves over its life-cycle  into a curve that is  generally of a sigmoidal structure and that a product attains the status of a commodity when the sales evolution curve has fully attained the structure. Products for market participation that  are in the commodity stage of the product life cycle curve, generally have no associated development financial risk and so do not qualify as venture very often, and particularly so when in addition the market participation being sought does not entail operation along any one of the remaining two dimensions of innovations: Manufacturing Technology and Marketing Dimension, hence the corporate growth strategy and consequently, the strategic framework rarely involve technology as a driving force, but rather involves Sales and Selling Demographics as the driving force.  The presentation given are for such business entity development tasks for which the venture risks have been virtually alleviated.

However, it is not always simply sufficient to be able to come into possession of the products so that a sale can be made. The product must be positioned for competitive advantage, because without competitive advantage the business is doomed to fail, from the get-go. Successful business start-up, which is the same as successful competition in the market require out-competing the competition to gain entry into the market - the object of The Execution Phase - and being that successful derives from offering a competitive product to the buyers of the markets. The product that is actually sold within a market therefore should be viewed as consisting of the actual product or service together with the associated customer relationship services offered.

An effective way of defining this approach is to adopt the age-old concept of Product-offered. As per this conceptual approach of defining products for market participation, the market participation product is the core product together with the augmented product. Pictorially, this may be view as a set of concentric circles with the inner circle being the core product and the outer annulus being the augmented product; and these two products constitute the product offered for market participation.

This perspective on product definition for market participation is important because of the inherent advantage offered towards the forestalling of product or product-technology obsolescence. Indisputably, the technology of the core product will change with time, yet, competitively the impact of innovations on the same product could be minimized through a creative management of the augmented product component of the product-offered. In this sense then the forestalling of product obsolescence obtains from managing a repositioning of the product on the product-life cycle curve. The challenge in remaining competitive while this change is occurring or has occurred is the continual repositioning of the product towards the growth phase of the product-curve, which happens to be easier accomplished through the continual corresponding redesigning of the product-offered.

 However, before designing the product-offered, the would-be business owner needs to and should craft a competitive corporate strategy, consistent with the mind-set espoused under venture growth strategic plan, by which to compete in the market. This knowledge must then be used to out-compete the competition through its use in the initial design product-offered, as well as in the continual update and optimization of the product-offered design.

In view of this opportunity to remaining competitive for as long as possible, the would-be business owner is always at an advantage in adopting the product-offered definition for the purposes of planning capability for market participation.

Planning the Business Entity
First the concern is to define the name of the business, and the suggestion is to include in the name  a word that reflects the nature of the business. A good name is always helpful  as every advise suggests and effective for company-image marketing as part of product marketing; however your name is as good as it gets, so use your name as "Joe" and append the business descript word. 

Regarding creating the entity there are four primary entity types to consider; of course not all types are available in every state and every country. Each would-be business owner must always use the best of the type available, but then the best depends on the situation of the would-be business owners. In any case the types of businesses to consider are the following: Corporation, Limited Liability Company, Partnership, Business Trust. The main features of each of these have been presented in the report addressing the organizing of legal-entities of ventures. Of particular interest here are the Limited Liability Company and the Business Trust.


The Limited Liability Company by default is a Partnership and is simply formed as a result of agreement entered into by its associates who are called Members.  This feature allows members to automatically write-off their losses annually which is a good feature for technology companies that may not generate profit for years while the members continue to invest in the company. Often the members are also the employees.

Business Trust is particularly interesting because of the flexibility it offers to just about every type of business operation. In that regards,  there are no equity-stakeholders in the entity, only beneficiaries of the entity as is with a Trust entity. Equally of significance, this form of business entity unlike others does not require the setting of equity-shares prices. Besides, the investments do not have to be in cash, the investment can be defined to be made of a specific good of some monetary value. For example, a group of corn farmers looking to start an ethanol production company may decide to form an entity of this type to hold and store their excess corn not sold as food and have the ethanol company process the unsold into ethanol and thereby preserve the monetary value of the corn. In this particular situation, the  investment is made according to the harvest of each farmer and the monetary value of the corn such farmer contributes to the business entity.

All considered, the choice of an entity therefore is entirely at the discretion of the would-be business owner, although whenever possible the use of the Business Trust is suggested. Unfortunately, the Business Trust is not available in every state in the USA and this may also be the case in other countries as well.

Irrespective of the choice the would-be business owner makes for the purpose of operating the business, the approach to asset [protection] management is an essential feature and should be factored into the acts of actually implementing the business. Legally organizing any of these entities, however, is readily accomplished by contacting the appropriate offices for business entities organization, and the would-be business owner is advised to seek out such offices.

Often, businesses that are organized, are run immediately by the would-be business owners, however, this should be discouraged. The formation or incorporation of a business entity does not immediately qualify it as ready for an operating business-entity. A legally organized business becomes ready for operation only after the necessary organizing formalisms have been executed. The would-be business owner is advised that until the formalisms have been executed and particularly the First General Meeting is held the company has not formally legally been formed to start operations. In the worst case scenario, the new business owner should set a date and on that date admit to having had a meeting, go through the formalities and then sign the Bylaws for corporations and Trust, or Members Agreement for Limited Liability Company, and specially for Trusts [including Business Trusts] the Beneficiary List and Distribution Plans.

The would-be business owner, however, is strongly advised to place oneself as the Chairman of the Business Governance Board, whatever the form this body takes. This is crucial to enable the owner and risk-taker be responsible for managing the business funds. Otherwise, the owner faces the possibility of the funds being absconded with.

Planning The Business Model
Developing the Business Model to use for operating the business is perhaps one of the tasking aspects of the starting phase. The difficulty stems from the lack of realization on the part of the would-be business owner about the relationship between the corporate growth strategic goal and the organization structure and consequentially the information flow. The would-be business must develop from the competitive corporate strategy adopted for market participation the corresponding tactics, and from the tactics develop the information flow or overall Business Process Model as well as the detailed Business Processes. The development of the processes however must derived from a detailed understanding of the intended positioning of the business.

The Business Policies are then to be developed from these processes and documented.[ In some sense then this step must be  undertaken prior to the legal organization of the entity as noted above in the last paragraph under Planning the Business Entity, as the policies must be written into the business entity Governance Guide and Policies that must be adopted in the First General Associates Meeting.] The Policies should then guide the development of the Company and Employee Rules and Regulations to be used for the day-to-day management of the business operations.

Having developed the Business Processes, the would-be business owner should then develop the employee roster required for operating the business by assigning employee to each task of the business processes. Though the employees as determined are not expected to be employed at the start of the business, as this roster far exceeds the employee-count for the supporting business critical mass operation, this roster gives the owner a recognition of the potential funding needs and prospective operating expenses of the business.

Planning Operating the Business
The operating a new business entity as defined for routine operations from the inception through the successful conclusion of the Execution Phase addresses two sets of issues. The most important of the two issues is the matter of the startup financing, which the business owner should attend to in consistence with the usual approaches of Initial Capitalization of business entities. The second issue of planning for the operating of a venture is to ensure that all venture startup operations planning tasks applicable to the business-entity have been accomplished.

Preparing the Business Plan
The analyses as summarized in the Business Model which a would-be business owner makes, often will not stay in the individual's mind and thoughts, and often the approach will change dynamically unless the owner faithfully follows the Business Model. In order to prevent both deviations from the Business Model, the analyses should be documented, and such documentation is generally known as the Business Plan. So the would-be business owner must prepare a Business Plan to make tangible, sort of, the contents of the business development planning.

The developing a Business Plan however, also has the benefit of having the owner review the Business Model analyses for internal consistency. As noted, the Complete Business Plan is composed of three types of Business Plans: The Growth Tactics Business Plan and The Growth Tactics Implementation Plan; and the Financial Business Plan and the would-be business owner should actually prepare the latter two plans, because the dynamic aspects of the development of the business are only documented in these plans, and therefore these plan more truly addresses the issues involved in the evolution of the business. Upon the completion of the preparation of these business plans, the would-be business owner can now truly initiate the Business Startup Execution Phase of the business-entity.

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