Agile Entrepreneurship: How to Start your Business Project

By Rafael Morales

When launching a business project, it is difficult to decide how to start: looking for fundings, designing the product, outlining the marketing plan? An entrepreneur has a limited set of resources and projects must be well selected to ensure maximum profitability and probability of success.

The solution comes from a tool called "The Business Case", a brief document that outlines, in a little more than one or two pages, the rationale for investing in a particular idea. In the hands of a CEO, it is a powerful tool for making decisions, and in the hands of an entrepreneur, a help to keep the project on track during its development and resolve any doubts that may arise.

In this workbook you will learn:
* How to define the premise that justifies the investment in time, money and effort.
* How to structure your business project in phases to reduce risk.
* How to make sure you don't forget an important aspect of your market analysis.
* How to look for intangible benefits that can reinforce the investment decision.
* How to evaluate your past experience to find helpful resources.

Rafael Morales has been a trainer in corporate governance and professional applications of information technologies since the mid-1990s. He has taught hundreds of courses and seminars on business start-ups and project management, as well as publishing numerous books that stand out for their straightforward and easy to understand style and the practical examples included.

If you want to launch your entrepreneurial project, start by applying the techniques you will find in this manual and you will be up and running in less than a week.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Professional Workbooks
• Release date: Apr 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386879169

Rafael Morales

Rafael Morales nació en Cienfuegos, una ciudad de la costa sur de Cuba. Tiene una licenciatura en biología, y trabajó en la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba hasta 1998, cuando emigró a los Estados Unidos. Trabajó como profesor de biología durante dos años y luego comenzó su propio negocio. Ha estudiado literatura espiritual oriental desde 2006, lo cual ha influenciado fuertemente en su escritura.

Book preview

Agile entrepreneurship: How to start your business project

Professional Workbooks, Vol. 1

Learn how to define your ideas to successfully launch your entrepreneurial project

by Rafael Morales

Introduction

Being an entrepreneur has more to do with putting an idea into practice than with managing a business. Entrepreneurs do not usually have studies in business management or training in accounting. In fact, many are lousy businessmen, since the daily tasks of bureaucracy and paperwork bore them completely, which is often one of the most important reasons for them not being able to carry their project through to the end. The problem is not that the public does not appreciate the benefit of their idea or that the market is not mature enough to accept it, but that the qualities and skills needed to be a manager are not the same as those needed to be an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur has a vision. The manager puts it into practice.

The entrepreneur-manager is a curious combination in which both profiles are combined so that one person carries out the business project from its conception to its consolidation. It is not an easy job and there will be times when you will have to learn to master your restlessness, your desire to immediately take the next step and put some order in your head, because when you act impulsively, it is normal to put the whole project at risk. That impulsivity starts from the first day you have that brilliant idea that crosses your head and you start to notice the exciteness of wanting to put it into practice at all costs, immediately, because you are convinced that it is something so great, that it is impossible not to succeed. But that passion does not serve, by itself, to reach your goal.

Passion is what will make you recover after each setback and keep your spirits up despite the difficulties you will encounter at each step, but it will not solve the problems of viability, financing or execution of your entrepreneurial project. The good news is that management and organizational techniques can be learned and the first step you must learn is to put your ideas in order and see if, indeed, the idea you have had is as good as it seems.

There is an aphorism, attributed in different forms to several people, which says "no one can stop a person who knows where he is going. And that is the first thing you must do in the entrepreneurial project: to put the ideas in order, with a plan that allows you to know how to do things, in what sequence, with what object and strengthening each step to achieve success. In short, to know where you're going. But when I say a plan" I don't mean those endless documents and spreadsheets with sales projections based on illusions and fantasies that you'll find in other entrepreneurial books, but a real work plan, a succession of small objectives that confirm or discard those aspects of your project that can turn the idea into a profitable business.

In this workbook, the first in the collection dedicated to entrepreneurship, we are going to see two things: how to structure this work plan and how to take the first step, which consists of elaborating the business case.

Companies, especially the larger ones, face the problem of making decisions every day. And one of the most common is to decide which projects they start and which they discard, because no matter how big they are they always have some restriction and cannot execute everything project they have. Think, for example, of a chain of restaurants. They usually are introducing new recipes every few months, so that their clients have the opportunity to try new plates. There is a very delicate balance in these decisions, because if you introduce too many novelties at once, the customer may feel confused and not recognize the site they like to go to. And if you don't renew them at all, there will come a time when you will lose your customer base, attracted by the offers of the competition.

As if that weren't enough, the introduction of each new dish involves a series of changes, such as negotiating ingredients with suppliers, changing all promotional material or training kitchen and room staff to learn how to prepare, offer and serve them. So among all the ideas for new dishes you can come up with, you have to choose carefully the two or three you're going to choose, because they're a risky bet.

The business case is a document that is drawn up before any project is started. It should not be too long and its main objective is to gather the arguments for and against selecting any project among many others, so that the people in charge of the company make the best possible decision. In the example I just gave