BUSI 603 Week 1 Group Discussion Board Forum 1 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 1: The Business Concept and Opportunity

BUSI 603 Entrepreneurship, Group Discussion Board Forum 1 (thread and 2 replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The venture, its founder and the classmates' concepts are composites written for this sample, and the assigned topic stands in for the course's own; the research cited is real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 603.

Thread

Steward Ledger Services will provide outsourced bookkeeping, payroll processing and annual giving statements to churches and ministries with fewer than 250 regular attendees in central Virginia, for a flat monthly fee. The founder has kept the books for a 180-member congregation for eight years while working as a staff accountant, and the concept grew from seeing how many neighboring churches handle their finances with a volunteer treasurer, a spreadsheet and little separation of duties.

For Shane and Venkataraman (2000), an opportunity exists wherever a new product, service or way of organizing could earn more than it costs to provide, and they argue that opportunities exist because information is unevenly distributed: some people notice what others do not. Baron (2006) adds that opportunity recognition is largely a matter of pattern recognition, of connecting seemingly unrelated events into a recognizable pattern of unmet need. The pattern in this case is a set of repeated problems: volunteer treasurers who resign and leave records no one else understands, payroll tax filings for one or two staff members that small churches find confusing, and giving statements that must be accurate for donors' tax deductions.

The research supports the concern behind the concept. Duncan et al. (1999) surveyed churches about their internal controls and found that smaller churches had weaker control systems, with less segregation of duties over cash receipts and disbursements. A church whose offering is counted, deposited and recorded by the same person is exposed to both error and theft, and the damage from a single case can last for years. An outsourced bookkeeper cannot solve every control problem, but it can separate recording from receiving and provide monthly reports that a finance committee can review.

The opportunity is not bookkeeping itself, which many firms offer, but bookkeeping designed for how small churches actually work. That means fund accounting for designated gifts, giving statements in the format donors need, clergy housing allowance documentation and pricing a congregation of 120 can afford. Allen (2016) treats feasibility as something to test with customers before money is committed, so the next steps are to interview 15 church treasurers and pastors, confirm which of these problems they would pay to solve and test whether $350 to $500 a month is within their budgets. In Proverbs 27:23 a shepherd is urged to stay well informed about the state of his animals; giving a church a clear monthly picture of its finances serves the same kind of stewardship.

Reply to Jasmine

Jasmine, your coffee trailer for large construction sites has a clear customer and a real problem: crews start before most coffee shops open and cannot leave the site for a break. I also like that you plan to contract with general contractors rather than rely on walk-up sales, which gives you predictable volume. My concern is that the concept depends on one market. Gruber et al. (2008) studied technology ventures and found that founders who identified several market opportunities before entering, and chose among them, performed better than those who pursued the first opportunity they saw. Construction work is seasonal and moves from site to site, so a trailer that depends on it may sit idle in winter or between projects. Before committing, it would be worth sketching two adjacent markets, such as hospital night shifts or distribution centers with early shifts, so you can move the trailer when construction slows.

Your background could be your biggest asset here. Dencker et al. (2009) found that founders' prior knowledge of the business they were entering improved the survival of new firms, partly because they learned faster after launch. You mentioned working on a framing crew for three summers, which gives you an insider's sense of when crews break and what they will buy. I would put that experience prominently in the founding team section of your plan, with specifics such as crew sizes and start times, because investors and lenders weigh exactly this kind of knowledge. Have you talked with a general contractor yet about whether they would pay for coffee service as an employee benefit, or would workers pay individually?

Reply to Caleb

Caleb, your meal subscription for college athletes addresses something real: athletes need far more calories and protein than dining halls conveniently provide, and many lack time to cook. The concept is promising, but I think the business model needs more attention than the product. Zott and Amit (2007) examined how the design of a new firm's business model, the way it structures transactions with customers and partners, relates to performance, and they found that models designed for efficiency, lowering transaction costs for everyone involved, were associated with higher performance. For your service, the efficient model might be selling through athletic departments or team nutritionists rather than to individual athletes, so one contract delivers dozens of subscribers and the department handles approval.

The second issue is how much to build before you know which model works. Kerr et al. (2014) frame new venture creation as a series of experiments and argue that the ability to run cheap, fast experiments shapes which ventures get started and which succeed. A commercial kitchen and a delivery route are expensive experiments. A cheaper one would be to partner with an existing caterer for one team for six weeks, measure how many athletes keep ordering, and ask the strength coach what would make the department pay. If the test shows strong reorder rates, your plan will rest on evidence rather than on a survey of interest. If it does not, you will have learned that cheaply, before signing a kitchen lease, and the pilot data on portion sizes and delivery times will improve the operations plan either way. Which team or coach do you think would agree to a pilot?

References

Allen, K. R. (2016). Launching new ventures: An entrepreneurial approach (7th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Baron, R. A. (2006). Opportunity recognition as pattern recognition: How entrepreneurs "connect the dots" to identify new business opportunities. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(1), 104-119. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2006.19873412

Dencker, J. C., Gruber, M., & Shah, S. K. (2009). Pre-entry knowledge, learning, and the survival of new firms. Organization Science, 20(3), 516-537. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1080.0387

Duncan, J. B., Flesher, D. L., & Stocks, M. H. (1999). Internal control systems in US churches: An examination of the effects of church size and denomination on systems of internal control. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 12(2), 142-164. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513579910270084

Gruber, M., MacMillan, I. C., & Thompson, J. D. (2008). Look before you leap: Market opportunity identification in emerging technology firms. Management Science, 54(9), 1652-1665. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1080.0877

Kerr, W. R., Nanda, R., & Rhodes-Kropf, M. (2014). Entrepreneurship as experimentation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(3), 25-48. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.28.3.25

Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. (2000). The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 217-226. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.2791611

Zott, C., & Amit, R. (2007). Business model design and the performance of entrepreneurial firms. Organization Science, 18(2), 181-199. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1060.0232