Category: Professional Development

So you have piles of venture ideas and don’t know where to start. Or perhaps there’s just one idea that you think looks pretty good. Either way, you need to some feasibility testing.

To narrow a long list to a manageable number, try the Quick Feasibility Screen (at www.RolfeLarson.com click on Free Resources). It’s a list of ten multiple-choice questions that has been used by hundreds of organizations to winnow down a long list into the best one or two ideas. In most cases, you can do this just using what you already know or can find out quickly.

Once you have it down to one or two ideas, take a look at the Quick Feasibility Test, which takes more time. Here are our top 10 tips for efficiently gathering the information you need to answer those questions:

1. Start with your goals. What do you want to accomplish? How will you define success?

2. Write a one page “first cut” summary of your venture, describing its products or services (benefits not just features), customers, operations, marketing strategies, and likely competitors.

3. Decide whether you want to do the feasibility research yourself, bring on a team, or hire a consultant to help.

4. Go online to find similar ventures and interview them. You’ll be surprised how open they are.

5. Your online research should also guide you to some “experts” in this field: could be retired managers, consultants, state employees, even academics.

6. If this is a venture idea you already know something about, you probably already know some other folks who can offer some insights. Talk to them.

7. If there’s an industry association that covers that area, contact them.

8. “Secret shop” potential competitors to learn how they do things.

9. Identify your target customers and then find ways to interview some of them. A dozen interviews can yield great results. Evaluate their willingness to pay; what do they currently purchase that’s more or less similar?

10. Write down everything you’ve learned. You can use the Quick Feasibility Test structure above to organize your work. Crank out some projections based on your research, and run the whole thing (5 -10 pages max) past a half dozen people with business experience. Revise and do more research if needed.

Good luck!

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Copyright © 2010 Rolfe Larson Associates – Fifteenth Anniversary, 1995 – 2010

Author of Venture Forth! Endorsed by the late Paul Newman of Newman’s Own

Read my weekly blogs on Social Enterprise and Business Planning

It’s not hard thinking up venture ideas. Often they seem to come out of the woodwork. Get some folks together for an hour and you’ll come out with a couple dozen of them. Include some entrepreneurial people from outside your group and you’ll get some new ideas that you might have missed.

But also step back to take a look at what your group or organization has to offer. Start with any services or products you’re already offering, even if they don’t make any money for you. What could you do to improve financial impact through them? Perhaps increase your prices, lower your costs, or sell more to existing customers. Is there anything else you need? Next, look at what else you could provide to these customers, based on what you know about them or could find out by asking them. Do you want fries with that burger?

After that, explore where you might find additional customers for your current products. Best thing to look for: customers who are similar in some fashion to your existing customers. Seek out similar demographics or organizations in different locations. How do we get our customers to refer us to others? Finally, consider new products or services you could provide to new customers, but only do that last. This represents the most difficult, riskiest strategy. But in entrepreneurship, anything is possible. Just don’t spend too much time discussing the least likely to succeed ideas.

I often use the Venture Brainstorming Pyramid as a tool for working through these options. Start at the bottom and work your way up. In a future blog, we’ll discuss effective strategies for evaluating the ideas you come up through feasibility testing.

The recent use of social media by the Coast Guard as part of their response to the BP oil spill, and by the Rhode Island Department of Transportation with regard to flooding in that state, are both discussed in recent posts by Erik Bernstein at the Bernstein Crisis Management Blog.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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What type of highly confidential information do you store on your mobile device? Contacts who would hate to see their information shared with spammers or identity thefts? Passwords? Photos or videos you or others wouldn’t appreciate appearing on YouTube? Text messages flirting with someone who isn’t your spouse?

It’s an odd quirk of human behavior that we will put certain types of information under lock and key and password at home or office, but then make the same information easily accessible to anyone who steals (or finds) our phone or other mobile devices. I have helped more than one organization respond to crisis that originated with such thefts. And while some types of crisis aren’t preventable, these situations are, usually employing simple-to-implement measures.

Take my Blackberry Tour, for example. By using the built-in password protection system, I can prevent access to the phone and my data. If someone fails to enter the correct password a preset number of times, all my data is wiped! I can restore it 100% from my corporate Enterprise server (and even a private Blackberry user could restore from their backup), but a thief could not unless he/she could quickly guessed my password. Are there hacks around this system? Probably. But most thieves wouldn’t have that level of sophistication. I set up my Blackberry so that it defaults to “password required” mode if it has been turned off or if haven’t used it in an hour, but there are other options. Even if the device is in password-protected mode, it can receive incoming phone calls and can be used for one type of outgoing phone call – to emergency services (911 in the United States). While it sounds like a pain in the ___ to enter a password first, I became very fast at doing so with just a little practice.

There are built-in and/or inexpensively purchased protection systems of this sort for literally every type of mobile device. Is entering a password a slightly-time-delaying pain in the ass? Sure. But it doesn’t cause nearly as much pain as dealing with the aftermath of stolen confidential data.

I recommend strongly that every organization whose employees use their mobile devices for business purposes require that those devices have some means of protecting confidential information in the event of theft or loss.

Comic Postscript: I know how well my Blackberry’s protection system works because, shortly after getting this phone, I forgot the password I’d set up. I knew my data would be wiped if I kept mis-entering, so I called for tech help with one password try left to see if there was a workaround. I was told no, the system is hard-wired for the protection of the owner. So I tried one more time and *POOF*, all my data went bye-bye.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

I’ve worked with nonprofit organizations for a very long time. I’ve noticed two distinctly different approaches to leading: reactive versus proactive. You’ll very likely notice each of the two distinctly different types in the following paragraphs.

Fundraising

The reactive nonprofit is continually fundraising and then spending whatever funds are obtained — so the organization is in a continual state of fundraising. The proactive organization sets a fundraising target and raises funds until that target is hit. Then the organization directs more energies to the rest of the organization, especially to programs.

Source of Leadership

The reactive organization is led by a person, usually the Executive Director. He/she staffs the Board with members who are expected primarily to do fundraising. The proactive organization is led by a strong working relationship between the Board and Executive Director, with emphasis primarily on planning and implementing those plans.

Sustainability

The reactive organization sees sustainability as a matter of having enough funds. The proactive organization see sustainability as being realistic in everything it does — because if the organization is not realistic, then it will not have enough resources, which will lead it into an unsustainable situation.

(Astute readers might recognize the signs of a reactive organization as very similar to the signs of an organization with Founders Syndrome.)

What do you think?

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my weekly blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, Nonprofits and Strategic Planning.