Starting a new venture is filled with risks and uncertainties. A venture is a business enterprise established despite the uncertainty, and risk of failure or loss, for the purpose of profit generation. Our previous article, “In the Market for New Venture Opportunities?” discussed various ways of identifying new venture opportunities. Having gone through that, you should be bursting with various ideas and may already have one you’re leaning towards. In this article, we will be talking about how to plan for a new venture.

Venture planning is not about writing a business plan. It does not require the intricate details of funding source analysis, professional opinions, entity formation or detailed market analysis. Venture Planning is the process of identifying opportunities, evaluating said opportunities, deciding on the opportunities and starting the venture. It is an assessment of the feasibility of a venture and stance of the founder. The process begs the questions;

i. Should I Be Doing This?

A very important question as you do not want to get into anything you can’t see through. You want to venture into something that aligns with your pre-existing values and vision. It’s important to weigh the pros and cons and decide if the venture would be worth your while.

ii. Why?

This looks at the specific objectives the venture aims to achieve. This could be a solution to a societal need, customers’ pain points or even your pain point; creating a product out of a repetitive process to shorten run time and bulk. Find out the driving force behind this new venture.

iii. How ?

This covers how customers will access your products or services as well how you intend on offering the solutions and the resources required to kick off.

iv. For whom?

This refers to the users of your product or service.

The Importance of Venture Planning

It is easy to ramble on about the economic benefits of starting a venture such as creation of wealth, provision of employment opportunities and bolstering the economy. Nonetheless, there are also a few other reasons that are way up there with the others:

1. Planning for a venture helps identify the needs of people, finding out what their pain points are and providing a solution.

2. It provides an answer to non consumption

3. It gives rise to innovative solutions as it identifies inefficient processes either within the society or an organization;

4. which in turn creates efficiency in society and organizations.

5. It keeps organizations ahead of their competitors and abreast of the dynamics of their industry.

As an organization, it is important that you kill yourself else a competitor will.

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