Tag: pivot

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7 things you must know before you start your new business venture

A hamburger with a rim of lettuce sitting on a...
A hamburger with a rim of lettuce sitting on a black plate against a black background with a black and red napkin on a black and white-dotted tablecloth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A person I met recently talks about starting a hamburger restaurant business. At every opportunity he wants to talk about his hamburger restaurant business idea. But unfortunately he doesn’t get around to taking even one step towards realising his dream idea. Talk won’t get you anywhere. You’ve got to have a vision and a plan.

Here are seven things that you must absolutely know before you start any new business venture whether it is based on a product or service: Continue reading “7 things you must know before you start your new business venture”

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How does a start-up owner deal with failure?

IMG_2664Start-up businesses differ from existing, established small businesses in that they are still in search of a sustainable business model. This means that a start-up owner has to deal with inevitable failure because not every business model they try out is going to succeed overnight.

One commentator recently said that experts say if a start-up is going to fail, there are two options – it needs to fail fast or learn faster. This may sound cruel or harsh but really all it is saying is that a business needs to learn faster by pivoting, a concept from the lean start-up movement. The business really needs to redesign or change its product or service and go into a different direction where there are better opportunities. Continue reading “How does a start-up owner deal with failure?”

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Does your start-up have scope to expand?

Photo credit: Wikimedia commons
Photo credit: Wikimedia commons

It’s one thing starting a new business but quite another to scale it up to a level so that it can grow and become financially viable. Starting up a small business is hard enough but when it comes time to grow or expand will your business model be robust enough?

To increase the size of a start-up business and turn it into a full-scale operation means that you possibly need more space, more people and more capital. But even if you have these resources, you might expand your business into a monster that robs you of your time and resources but doesn’t give you the returns you were looking for.

Here’s an example. A small business in India was serving over 7,000 sandwiches orders a day but couldn’t scale up. It was difficult for the business to encourage customers to have sandwiches for lunch. The founders realised that to become a sizeable business they would need 200 outlets with at least 15 employees in each outlet. But that would mean that they would suddenly have 3,000 staff on their payroll. Continue reading “Does your start-up have scope to expand?”