Finding funding for a new company or convincing corporate headquarters to support a new business line is tough these days. The discussion easily becomes something of a catch-22, where results and proof need to exist before the new venture is even started! Few find themselves in the lucky position where funding is secured at start to cover the full extent of the start-up phase.Building a new business, be it an independent company, a new business unit or merely a new business line, is perilous at best. To get going as an entrepreneur, one likely has to bet all one has on the venture. As a corporate employee, setting out to develop a new business is a potential career risk; one may find the mat is pulled away from under the feet too soon. Funding requires setting the bar way up, which may lead to too-high expectations.
The practical approach to address these issues is applying iterations similar to those used in agile programming approaches, where each cycle produces a “complete and working unit”. Although more applicable to service based businesses, the overall mindset is a useful guideline no matter what the company does. The idea is to apply two basic concepts, financial boundary conditions and time-driven execution to the effort from the start. Time-driven execution simply means using a “roll-back” methodology in project planning, starting from the desired launch date. Applying financial boundary conditions implies focusing on getting revenue from the start, even if it implies a somewhat crooked path. Of course those lucky few who get major funding from the start may choose to disregard the latter concept, but in most cases it comes handy somewhere along the development path.
We frequently hear comments like “if only I could get this much money then I could do this”. Turn this into “I have this, and with that I can do this by this time” and you have the basics of what we are describing. Put a continuous iterative evolutionary development path on top of all this, and the main principles of speed to impact are there. In essence the approach tries to codify an approach where waiting times are minimized and progress is continuous.