BUSI 603 Week 4 Group Discussion Board Forum 4 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 4: Operations Plan and Organization Plan

BUSI 603 Entrepreneurship, Group Discussion Board Forum 4 (thread and 2 replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The venture, its founder, capacity figures 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.

Thread

Steward Ledger Services' operations follow a monthly cycle that begins when a church signs on. Onboarding takes about six hours: the founder collects the prior year's records, converts the church's accounts to a standard chart of accounts with designated-fund tracking, sets up bank feeds in a cloud accounting system and enrolls staff in a payroll service that files federal and state returns. Each month the church uploads deposit records and receipts to a secure folder, the founder reconciles the accounts by the tenth and delivers a one-page report to the treasurer and finance committee by the fifteenth. Payroll runs on the church's schedule, and giving statements are produced each January.

A small church with one or two paid staff requires about six to eight hours a month, so a full-time bookkeeper can serve about 20 clients with time left for onboarding and year-end work. That figure sets the trigger in the plan for hiring a part-time associate at 15 clients. Because the service handles donor names, giving amounts and payroll data, security is part of operations. The economic model of Gordon and Loeb (2002) implies that, for a wide class of breach risks, the money worth spending to protect a body of data stays below roughly one third of what a breach would be expected to cost. Applied here, the founder estimates the expected annual loss from a breach of client data and caps security spending at roughly a third of that figure, buying multifactor authentication, encrypted storage and cyber liability coverage rather than enterprise systems built for much larger firms.

For the organization plan, the founder will form a limited liability company with one owner. Harhoff et al. (1998), studying German firms, found that limited liability firms grew faster than firms whose owners bore full personal liability but also had higher rates of insolvency, which suggests that limited liability encourages owners to take more risk. For a service firm with modest capital needs, the main reason for the LLC is to separate the founder's personal assets from claims arising from the business, and professional liability insurance covers errors in the work itself. Sine et al. (2006) found that new ventures with more formal structure, defined roles and specialization, performed better than less structured ones, even in fast-changing sectors. Even a one-person firm benefits from writing down who does what, because the second person will arrive sooner than expected. The plan therefore includes written role descriptions for the founder and the future associate, an engagement letter for every client and a procedures manual begun during the pilot.

Reply to Jasmine

Jasmine, your operations plan covers the essentials well: the commissary kitchen agreement, the health department permit and a daily route timed to crews' breaks. What I would add is a plan for the first six months, when the business is most fragile. Freeman et al. (1983) documented the liability of newness, the tendency of young organizations to fail at higher rates than older ones, and attributed it to the time new firms need to build routines, learn their roles and earn the trust of customers and suppliers. A trailer that misses its 5:30 a.m. arrival twice during its first month on a site may lose a site contract before the business has any reputation to fall back on.

Brüderl et al. (1992), following newly founded businesses in Germany, found that survival chances were better for founders with more relevant experience and for businesses that started with more capital and a larger scale, partly because those resources allowed them to absorb early mistakes. You have the experience, but your budget leaves little cushion. I would recommend two operational safeguards. First, write a checklist for the morning routine, from loading supplies to the generator check, so either you or your brother can run the trailer the same way. Second, build a reserve equal to two months of operating costs into your startup budget, so that a breakdown or a slow start does not force you to close. Who would cover the route if your brother were sick on a Monday, and would the site supervisor even know whom to call?

Reply to Caleb

Caleb, your organization plan lays out a partnership with your roommate in which you handle sales and he handles the kitchen, and you plan to hire student workers for deliveries. The plan is clear about tasks but silent about how you will treat employees: pay, how people are chosen and what keeps them. Baron and Hannan (2002), studying high-technology start-ups in Silicon Valley, found that founders' early models of employment, which they called blueprints, shaped how the companies developed, and that firms that changed their blueprint later experienced disruption, including higher turnover. Hannan et al. (2006) later found that such changes to a young firm's organizational identity were associated with a higher hazard of failure.

Your venture is far from a technology firm, but the lesson carries over, because a food business depends just as heavily on the reliability of the people who prepare and deliver its product. If you begin by hiring friends for deliveries informally, paying cash and expecting loyalty, you will find it hard to switch later to formal schedules, performance standards and payroll. I would recommend deciding now what kind of employer you want to be, writing a short handbook for delivery workers and setting up payroll properly before the first hire. You might also decide whether the meal company will rely on a few committed part-time staff or on a larger rotating pool, since that choice affects training, food safety and reliability. Have you and your roommate discussed what kind of workplace you want to build, and would the two of you answer that question the same way?

References

Baron, J. N., & Hannan, M. T. (2002). Organizational blueprints for success in high-tech start-ups: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies. California Management Review, 44(3), 8-36. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166130

Brüderl, J., Preisendörfer, P., & Ziegler, R. (1992). Survival chances of newly founded business organizations. American Sociological Review, 57(2), 227-242. https://doi.org/10.2307/2096207

Freeman, J., Carroll, G. R., & Hannan, M. T. (1983). The liability of newness: Age dependence in organizational death rates. American Sociological Review, 48(5), 692-710. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094928

Gordon, L. A., & Loeb, M. P. (2002). The economics of information security investment. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 5(4), 438-457. https://doi.org/10.1145/581271.581274

Hannan, M. T., Baron, J. N., Hsu, G., & Koçak, Ö. (2006). Organizational identities and the hazard of change. Industrial and Corporate Change, 15(5), 755-784. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dtl020

Harhoff, D., Stahl, K., & Woywode, M. (1998). Legal form, growth and exit of West German firms: Empirical results for manufacturing, construction, trade and service industries. The Journal of Industrial Economics, 46(4), 453-488. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6451.00083

Sine, W. D., Mitsuhashi, H., & Kirsch, D. A. (2006). Revisiting Burns and Stalker: Formal structure and new venture performance in emerging economic sectors. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 121-132. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2006.20785590