Entrepreneur, Business Plan and Data Warehouse
Created on 2018-04-07 10:32
Published on 2018-04-07 11:36
Whenever a venture is about to start, the level of information exchange, sharing, analyzing and validating happens at a very healthy level. Starting from back of envelope calculations, bench marking, market profiling, market share, customer segments, industry growth, capex and opex plans and so many things are done with a lot of passion and in engaging mode. This is the time when entrepreneur is at his/her best to balance the passion, facts, resources keeping present and future in mind.
Especially if the funding is from own sources then generally the business plan exist only as a back of envelope paper. In few cases it is documented and in further few cases it is approved by stakeholders. Moving forward the plans are rarely reviewed for ascertaining it's relevance to the changing present and varying assumptions about futuristic trends. A learning curve in first 1000 days (start up period) of a venture is very steep, causing a lot of investment of time, money and efforts. The entrepreneur manages with very limited resources and hardly has time to prepare the annual business plan. The most common tally accounting is used with little attention to create a robust data warehouse to capture the facts from multiple silos. This make it difficult to compare the assumptions that were made.
Besides others, lack of robust data warehouse is the reason for 95% failure rate in startup. For everything that goes wrong, the facts generated inside venture and the facts as learnt from new customers, vendors, employees, channel partners etc. are critical to find solutions. The technology is available and need to be adopted. When data is oil of future, then data warehouse is the engine and BI is the dashbboard of the future. Some of the reasons of neglect on the data ware house is small size, heavy dependence on small time accounting systems, too many excel file usage, fear of sharing information, fear of very high cost of data warehouse creation and maintenance, lesser commitment to harmonize silos to face customer, too little time to focus on knowledge management, hesitation of engaging experienced professionals, taking lightly about the projections submitted to Stakeholders/Banks, inability to confront the hard facts and share them with stakeholders making them part of solution.
The lack of business plan is a nightmare for solving issues of fund raising, market development, pricing, channel development, capex/ opex monitoring, incompatibility in performance and rewards. Business plan by itself is not a perfect solution but data warehouse creates a sound bridge to understand what has happened, what is happening and what can happen in near and longer time horizon. The entrepreneur and stakeholders hear and see through the business plan. To ensure sustainable support from the stakeholder, governance and transparency are essential and data warehouse helps to build it by giving support to business planning process.
Entrepreneurship, Business Plan and Data Warehouse all are inter dependent and dynamic entities (the third dimension of time along with pace of innovation continuously alter them) in the competition that can make the business model healthy and sustainable. Health of any one can affect others. No wonder why share of service industry (mainly backed by knowledge) in GDP grows high as the economy develops. No wonder why amazon can sell without owning inventory.
Amazingly huge opportunities are getting generated in India for those entrepreneurs who make this trio work in harmony.
If you are an entrepreneur and want to manage your risks, stability, growth or succession and want to know further, you are welcome to write me.
“Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.” - Jeff Bezos