Summary of long answer ( met one stakeholder over coffee ):
Level 1.
Before money is spent - approach from the point of view of the [ Investor stakeholder ]. Investing in a self-run business is not like investing in the stock market. How much time are you willing to spend on this until an exit? How much more risky is this than the stock market's annualised 8% nominal gain? Do you think you can beat inflation? If no ... and the purpose of the investment is for the pleasure of ownership, are you very sure about paying the price for this pleasure? There may be other benefits as well, such as paying to test things as a sort of tuition.
For hardware subsales, pay no more than 30% of new price, and have 20% of new price on standby for repairs in Y1.
Unit economics : use one business day as the unit ... not one plate of whatever. All direct and indirect costs for each day should be known. That's your daily sales hurdle. If you're selling low priced stuff, how many units do you have to sell to clear the hurdle? (skip to level 3 below)
The tenancy can have a clause giving the tenant the right to transfer the tenancy - this is a saleable asset. Most tenancies do not have this, but you can try to get it. It's worth thousands of RM.
Level 2.
If you have already spent money to buy an asset, you are stuck - and now must operate it. [ Staff stakeholder. ] It takes longer to build an employer value proposition, than to build a customer value proposition. You may have stable customer flow in six months, but no staff is going to commit bulletproof loyalty to a 6-month-old business over a 2-3 year span. If staff walk, your customers walk. So you can't even walk away from a 6-month-old business that has stable customer flow ... until you hire someone to babysit the work for perpetuity. This is called the whip, or CEO, or chief or staff role. It is better to have this person identified BEFORE you evaluate [ Level 1], otherwise you will be rushing to find this person while you are actively trying to clear the daily hurdle.
If you have already spent money to buy an asset, you are stuck - and now must operate it. [ Staff stakeholder. ] It takes longer to build an employer value proposition, than to build a customer value proposition. You may have stable customer flow in six months, but no staff is going to commit bulletproof loyalty to a 6-month-old business over a 2-3 year span. If staff walk, your customers walk. So you can't even walk away from a 6-month-old business that has stable customer flow ... until you hire someone to babysit the work for perpetuity. This is called the whip, or CEO, or chief or staff role. It is better to have this person identified BEFORE you evaluate [ Level 1], otherwise you will be rushing to find this person while you are actively trying to clear the daily hurdle.
Level 3.
[ Customer stakeholder. ] This is what most people have in mind when they want to open a business, because they come from this point of view. However this is the easiest level of problems to fix. You should ignore it until [ Level 2 ] is settled.
[ Customer stakeholder. ] This is what most people have in mind when they want to open a business, because they come from this point of view. However this is the easiest level of problems to fix. You should ignore it until [ Level 2 ] is settled.
I'll limit the summary to this. Of course each area above can be expanded in writing.
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