BUSI 603 Week 3 Group Discussion Board Forum 3 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 3: Founding Team and Product/Service Development

BUSI 603 Entrepreneurship, Group Discussion Board Forum 3 (thread and 2 replies)

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The venture, its founder, advisers and pilot churches, and the classmates' plans 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.

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Steward Ledger Services will launch with one founder and an advisory board, not a full team, and the plan should say so plainly. The founder brings eight years as a volunteer church bookkeeper and four years as a staff accountant at a regional manufacturer, which covers the core service: bookkeeping, monthly reporting and payroll. What the founder lacks is experience in nonprofit tax rules, legal structure and the pastoral side of selling to churches.

Research on founding teams explains why this gap is common. Ruef et al. (2003), using a national sample of new business founders, found that teams tend to form through homophily and existing strong ties, people choosing partners who resemble them or whom they already know well, rather than through a deliberate search for complementary skills. A team formed this way can share blind spots. Beckman et al. (2007) found that founding teams whose members came from a variety of prior employers and that covered a full set of functional roles were more likely to attract venture capital and to go public. Klotz et al. (2014), reviewing research on new venture teams, concluded that who is on the team and how its members work with one another both shape what the venture achieves.

Because the venture cannot yet afford partners, the plan fills the gaps with a three-person advisory board: a CPA who specializes in nonprofit audits, an attorney who has formed several ministries and a retired pastor who chaired his denomination's district finance committee. Each has agreed to meet quarterly and to review one area of the plan. A part-time associate will be hired in the second year, when the client count reaches 15.

The service development plan has four stages. First, by the end of month two, the founder will build a standard church chart of accounts with designated-fund tracking and a monthly close checklist. Second, in month three, the founder will set up secure document sharing and a payroll process with quarterly filings. Third, from months four through six, three pilot churches will receive the service at half price in exchange for weekly feedback. The pilot exists to learn what churches actually need, not to prove that the founder's design is right. Fourth, the service will be revised and priced from the pilot results before the public launch in month seven.

Reply to Jasmine

Jasmine, launching the coffee trailer with your brother gives you something many founders lack: a partner you trust completely and who will work early mornings without being paid at first. Davidsson and Honig (2003) found that nascent entrepreneurs' social capital, including support from family and close contacts, helped them move through the early steps of starting a business, so your partnership is a genuine asset.

The risk is in how disagreements will be handled. Ensley et al. (2002) studied new venture top management teams and found that cohesion was associated with stronger performance, while conflict had different effects depending on its type: disagreement about tasks and decisions could be productive, but relationship conflict that became personal hurt the venture. Family partners often avoid task disagreements to protect the relationship, and then those disagreements turn personal later. Your plan describes your brother as the operator and you as the business manager, but it does not say who decides when you disagree about hours, spending or hiring.

I would recommend adding a short operating agreement to your organization plan that assigns decision rights by area, sets a monthly meeting to review the numbers and includes a buyout clause in case one of you wants to leave. Agreeing on these terms now, while the relationship is easy, protects both the business and the family. It also reassures any lender or landlord who asks who is responsible for the trailer's obligations, a question that tends to come up as soon as you sign a site contract or apply for a loan. Have you and your brother talked about what would happen if one of you needed to step away in the first year?

Reply to Caleb

Caleb, your product development plan is careful about recipes and nutrition, and having a registered dietitian review every menu adds credibility. What I notice is that athletes appear in the plan only as buyers. Cooper and Kleinschmidt (1987) compared successful and failed new products and found that product superiority in customers' eyes, along with strong predevelopment work such as market assessment, separated winners from losers far more than technical quality alone. A meal that is nutritionally perfect but bland, hard to reheat in a dorm or packaged in portions that do not fit an athlete's schedule will not be reordered.

Von Hippel (1986) argued that lead users, customers who face a need well before the general market and benefit greatly from solving it, are a valuable source of product concepts because many have already improvised solutions. Among athletes, the lead users are probably the ones already meal-prepping on Sundays or paying a teammate's parent to cook. Their containers, portions and timing would tell you more about product design than a survey would.

I would recommend adding a stage before recipe development in which you interview six to eight of those athletes and, if possible, watch how they prepare and eat their meals during a training week. Their improvised solutions could shape your portion sizes, packaging and delivery schedule, and they would make natural first customers for your pilot. They are also likely to tell you honestly what they would stop buying, which a general survey seldom reveals. Do you already know any athletes who cook for themselves this way?

References

Beckman, C. M., Burton, M. D., & O'Reilly, C. (2007). Early teams: The impact of team demography on VC financing and going public. Journal of Business Venturing, 22(2), 147-173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2006.02.001

Cooper, R. G., & Kleinschmidt, E. J. (1987). New products: What separates winners from losers? Journal of Product Innovation Management, 4(3), 169-184. https://doi.org/10.1016/0737-6782(87)90002-6

Davidsson, P., & Honig, B. (2003). The role of social and human capital among nascent entrepreneurs. Journal of Business Venturing, 18(3), 301-331. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0883-9026(02)00097-6

Ensley, M. D., Pearson, A. W., & Amason, A. C. (2002). Understanding the dynamics of new venture top management teams: Cohesion, conflict, and new venture performance. Journal of Business Venturing, 17(4), 365-386. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0883-9026(00)00065-3

Klotz, A. C., Hmieleski, K. M., Bradley, B. H., & Busenitz, L. W. (2014). New venture teams: A review of the literature and roadmap for future research. Journal of Management, 40(1), 226-255. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206313493325

Ruef, M., Aldrich, H. E., & Carter, N. M. (2003). The structure of founding teams: Homophily, strong ties, and isolation among U.S. entrepreneurs. American Sociological Review, 68(2), 195-222. https://doi.org/10.2307/1519766

von Hippel, E. (1986). Lead users: A source of novel product concepts. Management Science, 32(7), 791-805. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.32.7.791