The entrepreneurial ecosystem is quite abuzz with activities. When one talks about business, one talks about achieving an objective and for which, one of the necessary conditions is that the business must make money now as well as in the future.
The amount of money that is available today in the system is such that for a vast majority of entrepreneurs and managers, making money means ‘making money from money’. No doubt then, the moment one conceives an idea of the business; the immediate tendency is to run up to the investors to seek funds. However, as we know, business is a system comprising of a number of building blocks and Finance is just one of these building blocks. And since all building blocks must ‘together’ work seamlessly to run the business; not in many cases, funding is necessarily the dominant requirement to create or run a business effectively. It is an important recognition that before an entrepreneur seeks funding, one must explore possibility of improving the business by leveraging activities in other building blocks of the business model. For most of the businesses, seeking funds must be preceded by exploiting other opportunities and road testing of the business model.
This caselet, is a part of Respecting the Business series of CVMark. It provides an approach to identify the next step an entrepreneur needs to take to improve performance of the organization quickly and significantly, without exhausting key resources and without taking real risk. It exhorts the entrepreneurs to be well prepared before seeking funds, so that expectations are realistic for both investor and the entrepreneur.
Check the full script here: StartUps Rushing for Investment –Do You Really Need Funds NOW
You can also read/ download the caselet at scribd and docstoc.