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.
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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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