An entrepreneurial journey simplified

I had promised in one of my previous blogs that I would share with you a glimpse of the entrepreneurial journey from 10,000 feet. This will help the first time entrepreneurs and those are in the middle of such a journey get a high level perspective of where they are and what the next steps should be.

For purposes of this discussion I will describe the journey based on one product or service. Many companies have several products and several services. Such companies' journeys are an aggregation of such individual journeys.

An entrepreneurial journey is a study in risk management. Managing risks in an appropriate way yields the most optimal results. While the passion and the vision of the entrepreneur provides the thrust to move forward, reaction to risk provides the drag. A well engineered combination of the thrust and drag provides allows the product to take off.
An entrepreneur is faced with four primary risks - technology, market, execution and finance. In addition to the traditional definition of technology, it also consists of process, knowhow or competence (e.g. tight cashflow management). Market is the acceptance of a wide variety of customers/partners. Execution is the ability to team to consistently deliver desired results even as the product traction grows. And finally the ability of the management of the company to fund the growth through internal means or external means.

It is important for the entrepreneur to understand that as each one of these risks is mitigated, the product has moved to a different level. With this simplified view of the journey, an entrepreneur can plan his technology development activities, fund raising, expansion activities and other activities in a phased manner. It helps entrepreneur develop a well defined set of milestones to achieve. The entrepreneur has an opportunity to celebrate when an milestone is reached, rather than be in a constant anxiety of how far he is from the ultimate goal. At the same time, the entrepreneur has the ability through this approach to set and meet expectations of investors and other stakeholders.

I have included a visual representation of the journey at ... I have also mapped onto this graph the kind of investors that one should approach so the expectations and appetite for risk is calibrated appropriately. Several people have liked this visual as it captures the essence of this blog in one place. I would love to get your thoughts and comments on this matter. This diagram gives more details:
http://prod.mentorsquare.com/frameset.php?url=http://www.mentorsquare.com/articles/MentorSquare-Maturation-of-an-Enterprise.pdf

And in ways such as this, the Mentors at MentorSquare hope to provide Members of MentorSquare a perspective that is developed and matured over several years. The members then can plan their journeys much better, understand how to manage risks and be in the driver seat rather than letting other people and circumstance push their buttons!