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Part 1

Road test your new business idea

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My opportunity: why will or won’t this work?

You may have capital and a talented management team, but if you are fundamentally in a lousy business, you won’t get the kind of results you would in a good business. All businesses aren’t created equal.

Long-time venture capitalist William P. Egan II1

Passion! Conviction! Tenacity! Without these traits, few entrepreneurs could endure the challenges, the setbacks, the twists in the road that lie between their often path-breaking ideas – opportunities, as they call them – and the fulfilment of their entrepreneurial dreams. The very best entrepreneurs, however, possess something even more valuable – a willingness to wake up every morning and ask a simple question about their nascent opportunity: ‘Why will this new business work when most will fail?’ Or, to put it more realistically, ‘What’s wrong with my idea, and how can I fix it?’ They ask this simple question for a very simple reason. They understand the odds. They know most business plans never raise money. They know most new ventures fail. Most of all, they don’t want to end up starting and running what Bill Egan would call a ‘lousy business’, one that consumes years of their energy and effort, only to go nowhere in the end. Despite asking this crucial question every day, their passion remains undaunted. So committed are they to showing a reluctant world that their vision is an accurate one that they want to know before bad things can happen why they might be wrong. If they can find the fatal flaw before they write their business plan or before it engulfs their new business, they can deal with it in many ways. They can modify their idea – shaping the opportunity to better fit the hotly compet-

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The New Business Road Test...