Having found the inspiration to start your own business, the next step in the practical entrepreneurship process is usually to develop a viable new business idea around that inspiration. This is not always easy to do.
Coming up with fancy business ideas for the creative among us (and pretty much everyone considers themselves creative) is quite easy. Coming up with real viable new business ideas is the harder thing to do. Indeed, talk to any serial entrepreneur, and they all seem to tell you that lack of viable business ideas is the greatest obstacle on the road to starting business, and not lack of financing as many of us wrongly assume. There you are brainstorming on starting business, and every business idea either turns out be one that needs too much (in terms of resources) to roll out, or one that is already too flooded (read where there is already too much competition).
So how do you know whether the business idea you have in mind – as you contemplate starting business – is really viable?
Well, the way to know whether a new business idea is viable or not is to subject it objective analysis. You can, for instance, develop a realistic proforma budget to roll it out – and see whether the resources needed to do so are resources you can marshal. In the same vein, you might consider to develop a realistic sales forecast around it (based on your worst case scenario analysis) and see whether with that level of sales and revenue you can really have a viable new business.
