The 3 E issues: Islamic finance, startuppers and a common paradigm.

Lets’ look at facts & figures.

Reading the latest available reports and figures on development (and related issues) of islamic finance from the point of view of entrepreneurs and young startuppers across the world a few facts are clear.

First of all there are facts and requests coming from this specific entrepreneurial and financial environment that are surprisingly similar or even equal to the requests of new entrepreneurs not belonging to that area.

The most frequent issues that young Islamic entrepreneurs are facing seem related to the following subjects:

1. Bridging the skills gap, through specific training both inside startups and within the stakeholders providing services to entrepreneurs (such as banks, consultants, incubators etc);
2. Developing leadership programs, identifying potential leaders;
3. Creating the conditions for benchmarking inside and outside its own cultural sphere;
4. Rising the service-quality bar: 5 characteristics are the most appreciated/requested good, specialized, updated, integrated on demand services for startup and generally speaking, entrepreneurship;
5. Create start-up hubs, mentorship schemes for entrepreneurs; allocate dedicated advisors within institutes to help develop ideas, finance scholarships for entrepreneurs and nurture entrepreneurship and social enterprise as a part of CSR;

6. Make CSR not just a paper producing activity or simply a report, but a chance of creating value through enhancing the social impact of an entrepreneurial idea;
7. Dialogating with stakeholders and finding the right tools and environments to communicate clearly and effectively with them, “certifying” at the same time their real interest in investing in a firm/startup;
8. Combining finance and entrepreneurship, finding always the ideal financial product/service product/service for the present state of development of a firm;
9. Dialogating with academic world and connecting with research programs.

The truth is that we can say almost the same thing for the rest of the world. The same problems affect startuppers  with every kind of background and are generally speaking related to the following categories that you can be summed up as the “3 E”:

ENVIRONMENT: finding a smart, virtual and physical environment, where a business can grow and the develop/generate values accordingly to its entrepreneurial culture

ENTRENEURSHIP: transforming an idea in an autonomous, balanced and self-organizing entity able to identify and interact with the external environment

EQUITY: acquiring the best financial culture able to make the most efficient use of resources in order to timely accelerate, boost and stabilise startup growth.

So, it really looks like that every startup is carrying some specific financing, cultural, and social issues because, in the end, every new entrepreneurs is introducing somehow newly formed DNA into the system. This DNA makes the startupper look for a specific and sometimes unique combination of the 3 E.

Exactly like it happens for many ethnic, migrant or community startups.

So, for those who are daily trying to provide startuppers with right services, will be very important to consider that probably every newly established company is to a certain degree a kind of “stranger” into the business environment, an unknown variable sometimes not easy to read.

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New!!! ISO 19011:2018….finally auditing becomes really viable for startups!!!!

As you know, we are convinced that ISO standard represents an opportunity and a real added value when starting with a brand new firm.

And moreover, is not necessary to wait for approaching ISO standards that one or more of this  (traumatic) events happens:

• Some regulator, an important industry partner or an international tender suddenly requires a certification (then the only thing entrepreneur wrongly perceives is that ISO is just a paper work, or even a …”chip” necessary to play at the casino and nothing more);
• A major problem/incident takes place (ISO 9001 as a sort of “punishment” for the company’s staff or as a sort of  “process cleaning” product)

The recently issued standard ISO 19011:2018 “Guidelines for auditing management systems” represents instead an opportunity for startups in order to:

• Finally approach and apply the auditing concepts into their processes, for focusing on risk and constantly improving them:
  
• Reduce auditing costs (either internal and second/third party)

The standard provides a comprehensive guidance on how to conduct a management system audit and is applicable to a really wide range of users, including, among others, organizations that need to conduct internal and/or external management system (MS) audits and manage audit programmes (cfr also our article https://massimilianobellavista.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/is-9001-2015-viable-for-startups/

And therefore id useful also for startups who are willing to:

• Transform the costs of receiving an external audit into an opportunity of growth and achieving the appreciation of their stakeholders and partners

• Fix errors in an earlier phase
• Prove their capacity of documenting and controlling their processes
• Show that they can adapt with large company culture (auditing is a most of the times a mandatory process to have the access to the support of financial and funding parters, large groups/clusters, incubators, international business partners)

The ISO 19011:2018 standard has undergone a certain number of changes. Why is so? Because the new standard finally considers auditing process as a continuous, risk focused and  IT- supported process.

The most relevant new points for startups are at least as follows:

-the audit process is not anymore just a conformity audit; this is important because it means that auditor shouldn’t look anymore for mere compliance with the standard ( very often a self -referential and not value adding process from firm’s point of view ) but mainly for effectiveness and performance

–remote auditing. Audits can now be fully and easily (and with much less costs  involved) performed on-site, remotely or as a combination. (“On-site audit activities are performed at the location of the auditee. Remote audit activities are performed at any place other than the location of the auditee, regardless of the distance. Interactive audit activities involve interaction between the auditee’s personnel and the audit team. Non-interactive audit activities involve no human interaction with individuals representing the auditee but do involve interaction with equipment, facilities and documentation.”)

–virtual audits. “Virtual audits are conducted when an organization performs work or provides a service using an on-line environment allowing persons irrespective of physical locations to execute processes (e.g. company intranet, a “computing cloud” ;“A virtual audit follows the standard audit process while using technology to verify objective evidence”, this represents an opportunity for aligning auditing processes, sometimes perceived as “old-fashioned” by young startuppers as an up-to-date management and control process.

Take a look to the standard structure: it may represent a chance for growth

For efficient planning startups need to bridge the forecasting gap

 

Business world is experiencing an evident schizophrenia which is causing considerable damage. In Italy (as well as to a greater or lesser extent, in many other countries) about 98 percent of the total amount of active firms have less than 20 employees. A cluster  made up of over 5 million small and micro  business that produce 40% of the annual national value added.

For those who are willing to manage a firm in the right way, first of all is necessary to plan, because nowadays the entrepreneurial intuition without planning and organization skills does not lead anywhere.

Planning of course means a lot of different things:

• Strategic planning, played around the entrepreneurial vision, with a time horizon ranging between three and five years;
• Marketing and commercial planning, for conquering new markets for their services and products, with times horizons sometimes short, seasonal or anyway generally between one and three years;
• Financial and fiscal planning, necessary to ensure the company a sufficient and above all constant cash flow injection;
• Risk and IT planning more and more necessary to keep up with a fast moving market and with the huge technological progress;
• Planning of training, increasingly decisive for long-term success on the markets, but which often requires some time to appreciate its impact in terms of value production;
• The planning par excellence, that is the one concerning research and development, which according to the various product fields, can absorb resources for many years to come;

Challenged with this growing demand for planning skills (and related investments), the reality that entrepreneurs are facing is constantly changing, almost ungraspable.

It is not just the markets that oscillate dangerously between unbridled globalization and a neo-protectionistism that is often illogical and counterproductive, it is the whole society at the global level. As a victim of something very similar to a sort of sociological and political “greenhouse effect”, the social and cultural climate seems to “overheat” everywhere, with phenomena of political instability and local virulence that are equally unpredictable and difficult to read as weather events.

So companies are faced with a clear schizophrenia, if on the one hand the market demands more planning skills (and therefore ultimately an increased forecasting capacity able to lead the investments that these plans always accompany) and on the other hand it always provides less certainty on how and in what direction the needs and aspirations of consumers will move ahead, as well as the socio-economic government policies, the possibilities of supplying resources and raw materials, etc, etc

In this context data are definitely not missing, rather we are submerged of numbers, often lacking the ability to classify, order, analyze this avalanche of data, in an aseptic way, free from prejudices or from ideological strabism deriving from the use and the abuse of theories and economic and entrepreneurial ideas.

There is therefore a need to moderate this evident asymmetry, to bridge this “forecasting gap”, endowing companies with reports that aim to reduce this huge uncertainty back into clear trends and scenarios with which the company can become step by step familiar (if at the same time we can also provide them with the appropriate interpretative keys), reducing at the same time the risk and instead increasing their possibility of success on the markets.

Therefore entrepreneurs and most of all startuppers should select structures, advisors and incubators able to provide these forecasting services too because not only  large companies should benefit from it.

Scenario planning helps reducing risks in many ways:

• It compensates common and frequent errors in decision making
• It’ very different from any other plan (f.i. contingency, risk, etc) because it connects all different uncertainties a form daily has to face

The scenarios and trends on the evolution of the international landscape and market that SME’s and startups need to have at their full disposal, in facts help to create that substrate on which the above described planning needs can consistently grow, finding confirmation and inspiration and, above all, the most necessary thing: a concrete reduction of the entrepreneurial risks.

The Naked Pitcher Book available starting September 1st

The Naked Pitcher represents the essence of an approach that proved to be effective with many different startups in the Euro-Mediterranean region.
In my experience with many young entrepreneurs from all over the world, I realized that very often what they really need beforehand are very basical informations on how to manage a consistent, quick and affective approach about strategy, postponing to a different and future stage further and more complete insights.

Just as very often we talk about MVP and any other mean useful to reduce time to market, so there must to be a way to reduce learning time when approaching strategy and the essental concepts of business modeling.

Time is scarce and all they want to know is:

– how to present their idea;
– how to depict an affective business plan;
– why the two above-mentioned points are so important;
– how to pitch communicating their business idea at its best.

 

In the Naked Pitcher Book we try to provide a credible answer to these questions.

Value left ih the shade

Sometimes ideas and projects into a startup are so good that we forget about the rest.

What is left in the shade?

1. Skills and organizational roles: watch out for over specialization into your firm. At least once in a while try to measure/assess the distance between who you were (as a founder) and who you are (as a manager in charge of something into a startup): anything you aren’t completely satisfied about? Is the upskilling process working well enough?
2. 2. Ideas: not just because one idea was successful you have to kill the others. Always good to have what is actually very often missing: an archive of previously developed ideas (even the unsuccessful ones)
3. Corporate image: being a brilliant startupper and a kind of ingenious craftsman may be good at the very beginning but then you need a project for building up and consolidating of your brand image as well as for gathering feedback and refine your brand identity.
4. Investments: the progression of your idea on the market will sooner or later reach a plateau. What’s next for keeping firm alive? Investments in training, company culture, internal communication and management feedback tools (no feedback is even worse of negative feedback), research & development are needed and space should be left for it
5. Roots: roots are part of your company. No matter how short it can be, but your company story is very important as well as is fully understanding the…roots of your success! How determinant the context was (and is) in your success? Most of the times, fighting for success, this aspect is underestimated and that may lead to wrong evaluation of the next development steps of your startup. Never let that pursuit of success get in the way of your company identity.

Vision is about Red and Blue

A good vision is blue and red

Nothing is probably more difficult to address than writing a good vision.

There are endless ways to accomplish the task: when it comes to explain what an effective and inspiring vision can be and represent, everybody has is his own theory.

In the end, there are some points in common between the various approaches:

-it has to be short (between 1 and 20/30 words, somebody says no more than 7)

-it has to be original

-it has to be clear

-it can be the basis for communicating company’s goals internally and externally

If you look at the vision statements standing on line and you analyse the most commonly used words in those texts you can reach some certain conclusion:

A) Mission is about words, that define either one of more of the following 4 areas:

1. a scenario,
2. a target
3. a competitive advantage
4. a stakeholder

In facts the most widespread words are related to concepts like: service, customers, quality, growth, environment, leadership, champion, value, being the best, profit, future, employees.

 

B) Mission is about verbs, that define either a process or an action related to some or all of the following 9 categories:

1. time (accelerate, advance, end, start)
2. growth (boost, enhance, broaden, enlarge, develop, exceed, grow, increase, extend, expand, enrich)
3. challenge and fight (defend, preserve, defy, dominate, eliminate, engage, maintain, save)
4. change (change, make, shape, revolutionize, review, disrupt, transform)
5. progress (advance, improve, elevate, transcend, prevent, resolve)
6. creation (build, activate, craft, feature, generate, invent, establish, construct)
7. communication (formulate, highlight, illustrate, inform, instruct, persuade, promote, reveal, inspire, coach, claim, facilitate, imagine)
8. operations (collect, delivery, produce, make, distribute, enable, equip, execute, validate, work, produce, organize, test, measure, offer, launch)
9. human resources/human factor (honor, encourage, empower, educate, celebrate, care, sustain, motivate, entertain)

Vision can therefore shift from a “soft” one like a combinatio of scenario words together with creation or communication categories to a “hard” one, where target words together with challenge and fight or time verbs.

So in the end a good mission is about a balanced combination of RED and BLUE.

Try to combine these categories to find your own.

There are probably many other words that can be used next to those we tried to list, those are just the most common ones. But they can provide some useful hint (one of them could be also to avoid all of them in order to produce something really original!!!)

When startup…started up!

 

1200: the word appears with the meaning of “to rise up”

1550: first evidence of the word “upstart” meaning “beginning, start”

1590:  it means (something that) “come suddenly into being”

1845: the word appears for the first time with the meaning of “action of starting up“, as the act or an instance of setting in operation or motion, and as a fledgling business enterprise.

1976: the word appears on Forbes 15 Aug. 6/2   “the … unfashionable business of investing in startups in the electronic data processing field.”

1977: on Business Week (Industr. edn) 5 Sept. “An incubator for startup companies, especially in the fast-growth, high-technology fields”

1990/2000: the word becomes highly popular thanks to the “dot.com” economy

2002: Google N-Grams, a service that measures the frequency of a word’s use within Google’s collection of scanned books shows that the usage of “startup”  peaked around 2002, shortly after the burst of the “dot-com bubble”

Is 9001 2015 viable for startups?

 

Not many young entrepreneurs are familiar with ISO 9001 standard.

All they think they know is sometimes is that:

-it may be useful on a later stage…but definitely not now!

-it’s most of the times an expensive obligation, a condition to have access to certain markets or for approaching some industrial partner that compulsory require the application of this standard in order to do business with them

-it’s somehow perceived as against the spirit of a startup… a pioneer doesn’t shave to spend times drawing maps, his task I conquering unexplored territories. Startups process are liquid and constantly changing, it’s against this flexibility-mantra to tighten-up processes like ISO 9001 seems to suggest

– …ISO 9001 what?

Well, an expert will probably tell you (There are endless articles like that on the net) that ISO 9001 certification is really essential because:

• Brings into your organization a continuous improvement culture
• Helps you to formalize and document your processes; the idea behind is: if you can do that, then you can easily explain them to third parties/stakeholders and if a process is formalized, is also under control
• Teaches you how to approach the concepts of risk and opportunity management
  
• Makes you sensitive to customer needs and issues because with ISO 9001 you have to pay attention to customer satisfaction and customer experience, having therefore the chance to boost your sales
• Shows you the importance to setting goals and objectives for all your processes…in the end performance is everything

NO. Is too simple and unrealistic. That’s just part of the truth…when it comes about ISO 9001 certification you have to think carefully about the following aspects:

SUPPOSED ISO 9001 ADVANTAGE	ISO 9001 PROS	ISO 9001 CONS	SUGGESTION FOR IMPLEMENTATION
PREVENTING COMPANY’S FAILURE	?	Startup fail for many reasons, but they are definitely Not failing because they don’t have ISO 9001 certification!	First contents, then the framework….if processes are working you are always in time to formalize them into procedures. Start with knowing the standard, and then with applying internally its principles. Your firm will benefit from it.  Undergoing a certification process request defining a clear certification-purpose and having in place a consistent organization… both thing request a mature and well aware organization, with a strong identity and company culture.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT	It’s ISO 9001 DNA, through the plan-do-check-act approach, that is naturally improvement .oriented	Improvements can be defined and realized with many alternative methods	Get familiar as soon as you can pdca continuous improvement cycle: in the end is a very good management method in every stage of your startup development. Is the best way to get in contact with ISO 9001 world  (and also with other standards of the ISO family such as ISO 20000, 14001, 27001 etc)
PROCESSES DESIGN AND FORMALIZATION	It’s true, this represent a weakness for many startups…they just don’t document and write down enough their processes; but establishing uniform and well defined process is essential for: – transform a craftsman, like sometimes a startupper really is (producing products with sometimes unacceptable erratic quality) into a business man (able to guarantee always the same quality standard) -make yourself understood and appreciated to potential partners and investors	Process design and formalization is costly, takes a lot of time and needs to be kept properly updated and therefore well understood by everyone into your organization. Briefly, it needs also a lot of (expensive and time demanding) training	Do it in steps: -set this point as, f.i., a specific Business plan’s goal -start with core processes, the “heavy ones” that really make your organization looking unique and special… that’s a good point for developing a good business plan too! -get gradually to reach a full documentation of primary and secondary processes in a two years approach
RISKS AND OPPORTUNITY	Getting familiar with the concept of risk since the early development stages is very important. Not being enough  risk-aware is a very significant reason of failure for many startups.	ISO 9001 tell to perform a risk analysis, but it doesn’t tell you how to do it, which kind of techniques are appropriate for a startup. Performing a risk analysis and using it as a management tool on a regular basis request time and a mature and consistent management culture.	A startup is by definition a risk taking organization. Use first the ISO 9001 risk approach in developing some parts of your business plan (f.i 5 forces model) and get familiar with it. Then fully develop it with the help of some skilled advisor who can provide the most appropriate frameworks and tool to perform the risk analysis
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH CUSTOMER	ISO 9001 is, since the very beginning of its history, customer oriented. Being aware of the importance of developing skills, processes and tools to hear the “customer voice” is certainly extremely important	Sometimes customer voice can be hard or too expensive to be detected by a startup alone; sometimes can be even misleading, especially when it’s about bringing to market some potentially disruptive and unexperienced change	There are many methods and chances (direct, f.i. asking questions directly to your customers, and indirect, like f.i. analysing claims and behaviours) to detect customer satisfaction and the effectives of the provided customer experience. –          Start with simple and not too much structured methods, gathering timely the first basic feedbacks. –          Learn how to use it in improving your organization –          Refine your research and analysis from time to time investigating some specific elements (f.i. connected with some commercial initiative such as the launch of a new product
SETTING GOALS AND OBJECTIVES	ISO 9001 provides a really important  and widely used framework for setting, reviewing, and taking action against objectives etc etc	It can be difficult, especially in an early stage, to follow efficiently the many changes and the variations a startup  may have to undergo; moreover, goals and objectives may be enforced by partners, investors, customers etc	Use first the ISO 9001 just as a framework able to inspire and make your work consistent. Then refine your work from time to time, following the progressive formulation of your firm’s identity

 

It can be concluded that:

• the implementation of ISO 9001 standard into your organization is important but probably not in an early stage of development: at this stage training (also about ISO standards) is instead essential to get familiar with this specific world;
• at an intermediate stage, you can use ISO 9001 framework for internal application to build your quality system and trying to organize people, resources and process inside your business;
• –you can then think about ISO 9001 third party certification when your firm is sufficiently mature to implement and most of all improve and maintain such a quality system growing consistently and coherently with your business development; you can also think, in order to make costs sustainable, to obtain ISO 9001 certification as part of a cluster, a joint venture or a network of firms.

 

 

 

 

 

Making a beeline for market

 

What is eternal is circular, and what is circular is eternal said Aristotle

Not your business, probably.

Common knowledge it that a person who gets lost in unfamiliar terrain often end up walking in circles. It looks to the most of the people like an axiom.

                                                  

It may be true but in facts is just part of the truth. We imagine ourselves in the middle of an unfamiliar terrain, like a forest or maybe somewhere in the ocean during a storm: but let’s add an external directional reference to this scenario, such as the sun or the stars, and everything changes. Science proves that our previous assumption is completely wrong…humans are perfectly able to walk on a straight course even in an unfamiliar terrain if you only give them the chance for a reliable reference point able to eliminate the accumulating noise in their sensorimotor system.

If this reference point exists, then we can “make a beeline”, common expression to say that we are able to head directly and quickly toward something or some place.

For a startup is more or less the same thing, if we are able to look for those reference points in the landscape we’ll conquer 3 important targets:

• Avoid losing unnecessary resources in order to accomplish our business targets
• Understanding that those points may vary according to circumstances and therefore a continuous assessment process is requested to understand which reference point may be viable, consistent, feasible…
• Changing/choosing some reference point (either a partner, a product, a service, a leader, a vision etc) doesn’t mean at all to lose your identity: that should help you to classify their relative importance. In the middle of a journey, the top of a mountain can represent a momentary reference point that can lead you out of a valley, where instead the sun represents the key to reach your final destinations. Then probably the first is a mission, the second is about setting values and/or a vision

Is your startup running the risk of walking in circles or instead is able to make a beeline for market?

Here the most typical signs:

CIRCULAR	STRAIGHT
No leadership	Clear leadership (whatever leadership model..)
Follow the leader	Being inspired by the leader’s vision
We are right	We want to prove that we are right
Going ahead	Planning
Past	Future
Time is endless	Time is a precious and scarce resource
Gathering data	Gathering knowledge
Analysing data	Forecasting, making scenarios
Comfort zone	Accepting risk
Having an idea	Having a vision
Working  together	Collaborating and sharing
Believing in a white knight	We have to do it ourselves.
Rigid tasks	Flexibility
Changing is a drama	Change is a normal process
Reactive	Proactive
All or nothing	Rome wasn’t built in a day…success may be reached adopting a stepwise approach
Our firm is forever	We don’t know…we will be there till we’ll be useful to someone
Being always sure	Managing uncertainty
Driving onto train tracks	Cut out your way
Destination is everything	Present position is important
Creating borders	Exploring
Interested only in the firm	Interested in the competitive landscape
Exclusive company culture	Inclusive company culture
Talking  and announcing	Communicating
Improvement	Improvement and/or disruption
Focused on effectiveness	Focused on efficiency

 

So in the end we can argue that strategy can be defined as the set of activities and resources that can make an organization shift from walking in an unproductive circle to moving on a straight and efficient path

 

Feasibility study: how and why

by Ouijdane El Arabi (A graduate of the national school of management and trade Oujda Morocco, a current student in EMUNI University Slovenia in Euro-mediterranean entrepreneurship diploma (EMED). Worked previously in several non profit organizations but also interned in many businesses.)

What is a Feasibility Study?

 

The feasibility study is a concept that gets mixed quite often with the concept of business plan. The feasibility study however it is not a business plan, regardless of the fact that much of the informations are in the business plan do exist in the feasibility study. The feasibility study tends to answer a single major question: Is it a viable idea to proceed with?

In other words, the feasibility study is intended to answer if the business idea makes sense and profitable (narrow the alternatives and provide the focus to highlight the opportunities that might be hiding or not showing to the entrepreneur), Cash flow, profit with  reasonable risk, long term viability and long term business goals.

On the other hand, the business plan is a detail plan of how to achieve success, goals, targets,….

The feasibility study’s process goes through determining 3 major analysis:

• Market analysis : Composed by :
  • Demand: on this level we need to answer the following questions: Does the demand exists? If Yes, how much is its level? How much of the product the customer will purchase and how often?
  • Target market: at this level we need to have an accurate targeting of customers in addition to defining elements related to them (where do they live, their revenues…)
  • Competition: how many competitors do we have? What they do well? and what are their weaknesses? And how our business and product(s) will be different than them     ?
  • Market channels and outlets: What channels are we going to use? Ex: Retail, grocer market direct sales (knock on the customer’s door for example) … Do they require specific distribution?
• Production analysis : We need to determine:
  • Facilities and equipment: What are the required equipments? Where to retain them? Can we repair them? if not how close is a reliable technician?
  • Labor and management: by identifying the number of employees, knowledge and skills they need to have, and our ability to train them. On the other hand, determine the skills needed in our side to manage and weaknesses that can happen to us as well.
  • Inputs all material: From where to have them? Is our schedule aligning with the schedule of obtaining the inputs?
• Financial analysis : It has 4 main levels to precisely plan as well, we can present:
  • Start–up costs: costs required for land, facilities, machines, licenses and all elements to start the venture. We need to determine also how our venture will be financed.
  • Operating costs: Gathers the fixed and variable costs to run and produce and how they change over time,
  • Financing: how to finance the venture: it is about knowing the requirements to fiancé the venture.
  • Revenue and profitability: It is essentially the price, profit and results.

Key advices for creating a good feasibility study:

Elaborating a feasibility study is not always a piece of cake, however every entrepreneur is capable of doing it by using one or many of these tools:

• For the Market analysis:
  • Data collection: First and secondary data using observation, surveys, focus groups, interviews.
  • PESTLE, SWOT, Porter’s five forces, Blue Ocean Strategy Analysis ( you can find more about in this site )…
• For the production and financial analysis:
  • Distinguish between the operating and investment activities (define long term and short term assets)
  • Define the risks and uncertainties to try to manage them ahead.
  • Best case, worst case and “most likely” scenarios.
  • Proceed with the cost/benefit analysis (define the break even point in units and in timing)
• General directives:
  • Call for the help and assistance of the specialists in each field but also business angels that can offer moral support as well as the financial one.
  • Engage the whole team in elaborating the feasibility study.
  • Being open to changing some aspects of the business to have the best results on the longer term.
  • Be flexible.
  • Don’t be afraid to let go an idea if it is not fruitful for you as an entrepreneur!