What is the purpose of a financial plan? How do financial projections contribute to that? The purpose of a financial plan is to find out how much funding is needed for a venture and when it is needed by, more specifically how much is needed now. Financial projections allow the estimation of the minimum cash balance …
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Wireless electricity is an attractive entrepreneurial opportunity with great potential, connecting a high potential demand with supply. There is a clear targeted need for the customer which is to reduce complications, effort and waste with wired electricity transfer with the creation of wireless electricity. This provides immense benefit to the user with potentially convenient, passive …
The most credible signals in a business plan are those that are substantiated with evidence, for instance contact with consumers, proof of concept, a working prototype, first sales, contracts with suppliers and credible financial statements and projections. For instance, Avatech have filed three patents and even sent a working prototype for testing which most certainly …
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Entrepreneurs need a business plan as a strategic framework to help make decisions and establish a direction (Da Rin and Hellmann, 2017). The lean start-up (Blank, 2013) framework contradicts this and suggests that business plans are based on a set of untested hypotheses that need to be tested via iterative experimentation and thus, there is …
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Start-ups can hope to build the competitive advantage of having access to the customer by building customer loyalty and trust via reputation (Da Rin and Hellmann, 2017). This involves addressing the customer’s need, getting early access to the market and building a sales strategy to earn the trust and loyalty of their customers. This is …
A micro perspective is based on how the firm creates value for its customers. How is the firm able to match supply and demand on a basic level with a solution to a customer’s need and deliver it with a team. This is for instance looking at how effective the solution Avatech provide is at …
Entrepreneurs must be able to implement the solution that they propose. This requires good execution and management. Even if the initial idea is not that attractive, a good entrepreneurial team can adapt and iterate until a viable business model is found. Entrepreneurial ventures often go through a roller coaster journey and to come out on …
Entrepreneurs must make sure to verify their proposed solution with real customers through interaction via surveys and research. However, this must be taken with a pinch of salt, as firstly, verbal support may not reflect true intent and secondly, as Henry Ford famously said if people were asked what they wanted they would have asked …
Investors must evaluate business opportunities in order to assess if the business has the potential to generate enough value for them to get a return on their investment. Most importantly, projections can be made on the growth of the firm the projected exit value of the firm. This allows the investor to make sensible valuations …
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I agree that a major criticism of the ‘Matrix Canvas’ by Da Rin and Hellmann (2017) is indeed that it fails to account for the transient nature of start-ups which evolve over time and frequently change direction as indicated by Mullins and Komisar (2010). This is because an initial business plan which may appear to …
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