Market Analysis and the Business Plan: Venture Capitalists' Perceptions
通过访谈16位芝加哥风险投资家，探讨了创业者在启动前是否重视市场分析、市场分析的实际价值以及商业计划中需求预测的准确性。
Developing a business plan is widely recognized as an important part of starting and managing business. Although sometimes considered a selling tool by entrepreneurs for obtaining financing, the business plan should serve as the road map for the enterprise. For most people, the exercise of developing a comprehensive written business plan can help to identify voids, issues, and uncertainties that would not otherwise be seen. Significant research has been conducted in recent years on various aspects of entrepreneurship, including the development and importance of business plans. This attention to new firms and smaller enterprises is long overdue; yet the broader business discipline of which it is a part is still seeking to identify its true boundaries and its central tenets. A scholar recently remarked that the discipline of biology would be sorely lacking without ongoing research into developmental biology. Surely the same is true for business. In order to develop useful theories and empirically based explanations of phenomena pertaining to larger corporations, one must first understand how they evolved from small enterprises. The results of a study of pre-venture business planning are reported in this article. STUDY OBJECTIVES Relatively little has been written about the market analysis portion of the business plan. The present article, therefore, presents the early stage findings from an ongoing exploratory study of entrepreneurship, the business plan, and market analysis. A comprehensive review of the marketing literature pertaining to new venture planning served to identify the following gaps: * The propensity of entrepreneurs to seek out and use market analysis information in the venture planning process is not known (see Hypothesis 1 below). * The actual value of in-depth market analysis (as perceived by users) is not known (see Hypothesis 2a below). * The predictive validity of demand forecasts contained within business plans is not known (see Hypothesis 2b below). If the predictive validity of pre-venture business plan demand forecasts were high, and if entrepreneurs aggressively sought to develop such forecasts prior to start-up, then new venture uncertainties and failure rates should be reduced accordingly. Understanding and anticipating the types of marketing strategies the business needs should also increase the odds of success. To increase general knowledge about and understanding of these subjects, the following hypotheses were investigated: * H1: Entrepreneurs tend to de-emphasize obtaining in-depth market information prior to start-up. * H2a: The actual value of in-depth market analysis is high. * H2b: The predictive validity of demand forecasts contained within business plans is low. METHOD Due to time and cost constraints and the possibility of biased responses from entrepreneurs, it was decided to interview professionals who had experience in assisting entrepreneurs and evaluating business plans. Consultants, attorneys, accountants, and others will be surveyed in future phases; this exploratory phase of the study included interviews with venture capitalists in Chicago. Collectively, the people interviewed have encountered thousands of entrepreneurs and analyzed many market analyses contained within business plans over the years. Venture capital firms were identified using the membership directories of two leading venture capital associations. The presidents of these firms were contacted, first by letter, then by telephone. The study objectives were described and interviews scheduled. Only one of the firms contacted was not included (due to lack of experience with start-up financing). Cooperation was obtained from sixteen venture capitalists. A questionnaire was designed to assess their perceptions and, based on the first three interviews, refinements were made, including splitting the instrument into a primary schedule for the personal interviews and a self-administered questionnaire that was returned by respondents after the interview. …