Eight Questions to Answer Before Starting Your Company

[Pinskylaw.ca]

1. What is the deadly sin your company caters to?
Make sure that your company serves needs that your customers naturally experience again and again over a short period of time.

2. What geographic location has real money your company can target?
Identify geographic regions where potential but real revenues lay.

3. What are your single paying customer economics?
How much does it cost your company to bring a paying customer in and how much more money your company makes from the paying customer than it costs to get and serve that customer.

4. What are your company's explanatory events?
Identifying relevant business events and correlating them with business decisions helps to understand what trends really change the parameters of your company. You may or may not get lucky when you cannot identify those explanatory events.

5. What factors will limit your company's growth?
Know what the growth rate limiting factors for your company are.

6. What are your company's accelerating factors?
It is easy to expand by 200% in your second year when customers start to learn about your company. However, what separates potential business juggernauts from other businesses is their propensity to grow at that rate in years three, four, and five.

7. What is your company's secret proprietary competence?
You must have at least two - management's experience and protected proprietary intellectual property.

8. How do you win over your competition?
Come up with something big or you will be sorry.