By Mary,
The first formal planning step when starting up a business, is to do an opportunity analysis by performing the following steps:
- Assessment of the opportunity
- Assessment of the entrepreneur (you)
- Specification of activities and resources needed to translate your idea into a viable business
- Source (or sources) of capital.
The opportunity analyses focuses on the opportunity itself, not the entire business venture. This analysis provides the basics for an entrepreneur to make a decision on whether or not to open a business. It is then when the business plan comes in place.
The reason I decided to talk about this on the Board, is because I didn’t know this. And I think from any entrepreneur’s standpoint, this information in chapter 6 is a big asset to my professional business development. As I intend to try for the second time to open up a business; I do feel information like this is what i missed on my first attempt. As for all of us, this raises our professional capital for anyone thinking about starting up a business or help run a business.
DOCUMENT: I know the book has a lot of theory, so i found a hands-on excel sheet to practice Opportunity Analysis further.
Side note: Risk vs. Benefit Analysis, and Competitive analysis should also be the steps along with the Opportunity Analysis (my own research).
Free Download: OpportunityAnalysis_and_Risk_vs_Benefits_Template
