essay on business start up

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Business Start Up, Essay Example

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Words: 415

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Starting a business is a hard, long, and confusing endeavor filled with much information, a lot of paperwork, but much instruction on how to steer your startup. When starting a business the basics of creating the name, deciding the market, and writing up the business plan is necessary in the initial steps to becoming a business owner. However, they are several important factors, financial, social, and more importantly legal factors that must require the assistance of a professional when starting your own business.

The job of a paralegal is to work as a legal correspondent in guiding individuals through legal matter, such as, starting a business. There are several aspects of starting a business the potential owner must keep in mind. The first step is deciding, what the business is. Once decided, the paralegal should reveal the importance of intellectual property, along with the need, if any, trademarking, and patenting the business. Whether it be online or in a physical location, the decision matters in terms of the different laws and regulations that are assigned. If starting a business in a physical place, environment laws, zoning regulations, insurance, taxes, work place safety laws, permits, and licenses are required to know, and this information is essential for the potential business owner. (SBA, n.d) When starting a business online the knowledge of sales tax, international sales tax, regulations, consumer protection, and customs are essential in success of the company.

One of the most important information that the paralegal needs to inform the potential owner, is contracts, there are an important day to day aspect that business owners must use to further their business. Contracts are initial in confidentiality agreements, purchase of goods or services, financial obligations, joint ventures, with employees, intellectual property, and other aspects. The paralegal must inform on the basis of reading the fine print, knowing the laws before signing, and knowing the consequences of the contract.

Overall, starting a business is long road, with a big payoff if successful. However, when starting out, there is a lot of information that needs to be obtained in order to be a success. The need for financial, social, and legal advice will aid in navigating through the startup phase. The paralegal’s job is to inform the potential owner in the confusing legal requirements and information that will help in progressing the business into whatever area or focus that the business owner entails.

“Learn About Business Laws & Regulations.” SBA. N.d http://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/starting-managing-business/starting-business/understand-business-law-r

“Small Business Legal Issues: Contracts.” Virtual Advisor . 2009. http://www.va interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/legal/ibt/legal_is.html

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How to Start a Business Essay: Full Explanation with an Example

Starting a business is like setting off on a wild adventure. It's thrilling, full of ups and downs, and it's up to you where you want to go. But let's face it: it's also confusing! With so much to think about, it's easy to feel lost. That's where this essay comes in. We're here to break it all down for you, giving you the lowdown on turning your business dreams into a solid action plan. So, grab a cup of coffee and get ready to dive in!

What Is a Business Essay?

An essay on business is a written composition that explores various aspects of the business world, ranging from theoretical concepts to practical applications. Typically, it analyzes specific topics within the realm of business, such as management practices, marketing strategies, financial analysis, or entrepreneurship. Business essays often provide insights, arguments, and recommendations supported by research, data, and real-world examples. They aim to inform, persuade, or educate readers about key issues, trends, or challenges in the business environment, fostering a deeper understanding of the subject matter and stimulating critical thinking. Our business essay writing service supports such types of assignments, so if you need help – feel free to request a quote.

What Is a Startup Business Concept?

A startup business concept is essentially the seed from which an entire venture grows. The initial spark of inspiration sets the foundation for everything that follows. This concept typically arises from identifying a gap or inefficiency in the market or recognizing an unmet need or problem potential customers face. Entrepreneurs then conceptualize innovative solutions to address these challenges, whether a new product, service, or approach.

The concept defines the startup's unique value proposition, outlining what makes it stand out in a crowded marketplace. For example, a startup concept might involve developing a mobile app to streamline a tedious process, creating a sustainable alternative to an existing product, or offering a niche service tailored to a specific audience.

Once a startup concept is formulated, it undergoes refinement and validation through market research, feasibility studies, and prototyping. This stage involves gathering feedback from potential customers, testing assumptions, and assessing the concept's viability in the real world. Entrepreneurs analyze market trends, competitive landscape, and consumer preferences to fine-tune their concept and ensure it aligns with market demand.

Additionally, they evaluate the concept's scalability and potential for growth, considering factors such as market size, revenue potential, and scalability. Through this iterative process, the startup concept evolves into a robust business model that serves as the blueprint for the startup's operations, guiding decisions related to product development, marketing strategy, and resource allocation.

How to Start a Business Essay?

Starting a business involves several key steps. Firstly, it's essential to identify a viable business idea that aligns with your passion, expertise, and market demand. Research your target market, competitors, and industry trends to refine your concept. Once you have a solid idea, develop a comprehensive business plan outlining your goals, strategies, and financial projections. This plan will serve as a roadmap for your venture and help secure funding or investment.

Next, you'll need to choose a legal structure for your business, such as a sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or LLC. Register your business name and obtain any necessary licenses or permits. Set up your business finances, including opening a business bank account and obtaining any required insurance. Finally, develop a marketing strategy to promote your products or services and attract customers. Building a strong online presence, networking with other businesses, and utilizing social media can all be effective marketing tactics. With careful planning and execution, you'll be well on your way to launching a successful business. Now, let’s review a basic business essay outline:

Introduction

• Grab the reader's attention with an interesting fact, quote, or anecdote related to the topic.
• Provide context and background information on the topic.
• State the main argument or purpose of the essay.

Body Paragraphs

• Paragraph 1: Describe the current business landscape, including trends, challenges, and opportunities.
• Paragraph 2: Discuss the significance of developing a comprehensive business plan for startups and established businesses.
• Paragraph 3: Outline the essential components of a business plan, such as market analysis, competitive analysis, marketing strategy, operations plan, and financial projections.
• Paragraph 4: Explore different sources of funding available to entrepreneurs, including bootstrapping, loans, venture capital, and crowdfunding.
• Paragraph 5: Discuss effective marketing strategies for promoting products or services, building brand awareness, and attracting customers.
• Paragraph 6: Highlight the significance of delivering exceptional customer service and building strong relationships with customers.
• Paragraph 7: Emphasize the importance of adaptability and innovation in responding to market changes and staying competitive.
• Summarize the main argument or purpose of the essay.
• Review the main points discussed in the body paragraphs.
• Leave the reader with a thought-provoking idea, question, or call to action related to the topic.

Business Paper Format

The business essay format typically follows a structured outline, including the following sections:

• This page includes the paper's title, your name, the name of your institution (if applicable), and the date.
• A brief summary of the paper's main points, usually around 150-250 words, providing an overview of the topic, purpose, methodology (if applicable), and key findings or conclusions.
• This section introduces the paper's topic, provides background information, and states the purpose or objective of the study.

Literature Review

• A review of relevant literature and research on the topic, highlighting existing theories, studies, and findings related to your research question or problem statement.

Methodology

• If applicable, this section outlines the research methods and techniques used to collect and analyze data, including any tools, procedures, or sampling techniques.
• Presentation of the findings or results of your study, often including tables, charts, or graphs to illustrate data and statistics.
• Interpretation and analysis of the results, discussing their significance, implications, limitations, and relevance to the research question or problem statement.
• A summary of the paper's main findings and key points, restating the purpose and significance of the study, and offering recommendations for future research or practical applications.
• A list of sources cited in the paper, formatted according to a specific citation style (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago).
• Optional supplementary materials include additional data tables, survey instruments, or detailed methodology descriptions.

How to Write an Introduction for a Business Essay?

Writing an introduction for a business essay requires capturing the reader's interest while setting the stage for the topic you'll be discussing. Here's a guide to crafting an effective introduction:

Start with a Hook

• Begin with an attention-grabbing opening sentence to pique the reader's curiosity.
• This could be a surprising fact, a compelling statistic, a thought-provoking question, or a relevant quote from a business leader or expert.

Provide Context

• After the hook, provide a brief overview of the topic you'll address in the essay.
• Give the reader some background information to understand the significance and relevance of the subject matter.
• Explain why the topic is important and matters in the business world.

State Your Thesis

• End the introduction with a clear and concise thesis statement that outlines your essay's main argument or purpose.
• This statement should provide a roadmap for what the reader can expect to learn or discover in the essay.
• Make sure your thesis is specific, debatable, and supported by evidence you'll present in the body paragraphs.

Transition to the Body

• Use the end of the introduction to transition smoothly into the essay's main body.
• Briefly preview the key points or arguments you'll discuss in the subsequent paragraphs to give the reader an idea of what's to come.

How to Write a Business Essay?

Let's kick things off with a solid step-by-step guide that sets the stage. We're about to dish out some awesome business essay writing tips to make your essay shine like a beacon in a sea of words. So, buckle up, grab your pen (or keyboard), and let's get started on crafting an introduction that'll hook your reader from the get-go!

Understand the Business Assignment

Take the time to carefully read and understand the assignment prompt or guidelines provided by your instructor. Pay attention to any specific requirements, such as the length of the essay, formatting style, or particular topics to address. If you have any questions or uncertainties about starting a business essay, don't hesitate to seek clarification from your instructor to ensure you're on the right track before you begin researching and writing.

Research and Gather Information

Start your research by consulting various credible sources relevant to your topic. Utilize academic journals, books, reputable websites, and industry reports to gather information and evidence to support your arguments. Take detailed notes while conducting your research, recording key ideas, quotes, statistics, and their corresponding sources. Keep track of your sources to facilitate proper citation later on. Consider how you will engage readers in the business essay introduction – an anecdote, interesting quote, or relevant statistics.

Outline Your Essay

Create an outline for your how to start a business essay to organize your thoughts and structure your essay. Begin by outlining the main sections of your essay, such as the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Within each section, outline the main points you want to cover and the supporting evidence you'll use to support your arguments. Consider the logical flow of information and how each section relates to the overall thesis of your essay. Your outline serves as a roadmap for writing your essay and helps maintain coherence and clarity.

Write the Essay

With your outline in hand, start drafting your essay. Begin with a strong introduction that provides context for your topic, grabs the reader's attention, and clearly states your thesis or main argument. In the body paragraphs, develop each main point outlined in your outline, providing evidence, examples, and analysis to support your arguments. Ensure you cite your sources accurately and consistently throughout the essay according to the chosen citation style. Conclude your essay by summarizing the main points discussed in the body paragraphs and reinforcing the significance of your thesis. Leave the reader with a memorable closing thought or call to action related to the topic.

Revise and Edit

After writing a business essay, take the time to revise and edit it thoroughly. Review your essay for clarity, coherence, and logical flow of ideas. Check for grammar, punctuation, spelling errors, and any inconsistencies or gaps in your argumentation. Consider your essay's overall structure and organization, making adjustments as needed to improve readability and coherence. Seek feedback from peers, tutors, or instructors to gain fresh perspectives and identify areas for improvement. Make revisions based on the feedback received, and refine your essay until you are satisfied with the final draft. Finally, proofread your essay one last time to ensure it meets all the requirements and is ready to be submitted.

Startup Business Ideas

• A meal prep delivery service.
• An online marketplace for handmade goods.
• Mobile car wash and detailing.
• Virtual tutoring platform.
• Dog walking app.
• Farm-to-table food delivery.
• Outdoor gear rental.
• Virtual event planning.
• Home repair matchmaking.
• Maternity wear rental.
• On-site beauty services.
• Freelance photography booking.
• DIY crafting workshops.
• Mobile bike repair.
• Sustainable flower delivery.
• Virtual fitness training.
• Plant-based meal kits.
• Urban parking rental.
• Houseplant subscription.
• Fresh produce delivery.
• Mobile car maintenance.
• Gift concierge service.
• Virtual cooking classes.
• Errand running assistance.

Business Essay Topics

• Social media marketing's impact on small businesses.
• Improving employee engagement strategies.
• E-commerce: Challenges and opportunities.
• Customer relationship management success.
• Sustainable business practices and benefits.
• The gig economy: Pros versus cons.
• Workplace diversity and inclusion.
• Technology's influence on operations.
• Managing remote teams effectively.
• Corporate social responsibility in ethics.
• Entrepreneurship: Challenges and successes.
• Globalization's impact on SMEs.
• Leadership in organizational change.
• Workplace wellness programs.
• Business ethics in the digital age.
• The power of branding: Identity creation.
• Crisis management strategies for resilience.
• Efficient and sustainable supply chain management.
• Future of work: Trends and implications.
• Business innovation: Creativity and adaptation.
• Financial management for small businesses.
• Data privacy and security.
• Effective time management strategies.
• Emotional intelligence in leadership.
• Company culture: Retention and satisfaction.

Do’s and Don’ts of Business Essay Writing

There are certain rules for writing a business essay that you must follow and particular don’t-do-this issues that you should avoid.

• Clearly understand the essay prompt and adhere to any guidelines provided.
• Conduct thorough research using credible sources to support your arguments.
• Create a well-organized outline to structure your essay effectively.
• Craft a strong introduction that grabs the reader's attention and states your thesis clearly.
• Provide evidence and examples to support your arguments, using proper citations.
• Maintain a formal and professional tone throughout the essay.
• Use clear and concise language, avoiding jargon or overly complex terminology.
• Proofread your essay carefully to eliminate errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
• Conclude your essay by summarizing key points and restating your thesis.

Don'ts:

• Don't plagiarize or use someone else's work without proper attribution.
• Avoid going off-topic or including irrelevant information in your essay.
• Don't rely solely on personal opinion; support your arguments with evidence and analysis.
• Avoid using informal language or slang in your writing.
• Don't rush through the writing process; take the time to revise and edit your essay thoroughly.
• Avoid making unsupported claims or assertions without evidence to back them up.
• Don't forget to cite your sources properly according to the chosen citation style.
• Avoid overloading your essay with too much information; focus on quality over quantity.
• Don't neglect the importance of formatting and presentation; ensure your essay is well-structured and visually appealing.

Business Essay Example

Here’s an example of a business essay that will be an excellent source of inspiration and formatting hints. If you want a new paper of similar quality, feel free to leave a quote.

Business essays serve as invaluable learning tools for students, providing them with a platform to apply theoretical concepts to real-world scenarios and develop essential skills for success in the business world. Students hone their critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication abilities by learning how to set up an essay , research topics, analyze facts, and write eloquently about various business topics. Business essays also encourage students to stay updated on current trends and developments in the business landscape, fostering a deeper understanding of industry dynamics and challenges. Moreover, writing business essays cultivates students' ability to formulate well-reasoned arguments, articulate their ideas effectively, and present information in a structured and persuasive manner, all of which are crucial competencies in professional settings.

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The Business Start-up Development Essay

Introduction, marketing mix, feasibility study, competitive environment, financial reports and commentary, business aims and strategy, reference list.

This report delivers a proposed business strategy in establishing an enterprise to provide consumers with a product aimed at transforming their lives. The report focuses on the different competencies that will enable a business to compete favorably and create a successful model across market segments. An analysis of the business through Porters’ Five Forces is provided, along with a consideration of the capacity of the business to achieve tremendous gains irrespective of existing trade difficulties. The report includes an introduction, a marketing mix analysis, a feasibility review, a competitive environment analysis, financial statements, and a commentary, business aims and strategy, and, finally, a conclusion.

The development of a business start-up is a complex set of actions that have an overall purpose of establishing a new, compelling business idea and the means of the efficient implementation of this idea (DaSilva & Trkman 2014). Primarily, it is essential to carry out market research in order to identify existing market gaps and segments of consumers that could be targeted. Additionally, an initial feasibility study is necessary because it is of high importance to develop a profound understanding of targeted consumers’ preferences (Cortimiglia, Ghezzi & Frank 2016).

Accordingly, market research was carried out, and, for the purposes of this assignment, it was focused on the market gap in alternative weight loss tools that would be appealing for middle-class and upper-class customers in urban areas who want to maintain both healthy and trendy lifestyles. Therefore, the initial business idea for the start-up is the following: a company that will produce and sell high-end sports bicycles with fitness-tracking features should be established. It is possible to mention that this business idea is in compliance with two primary kinds of demand of the targeted group: to have an effective weight loss device and to own high-end, fashionable production.

The application of the marketing mix, which constitutes such aspects as product, pricing, promotion, and placement, to the proposed business idea is of high significance because it provides a business with an opportunity for efficient and sustainable growth (DaSilva & Trkman 2014). The initial idea of producing high-end sports bicycles is evidently appealing to individuals who want to be in control of their weight, but rarely find time to exercise. As the problems of obesity and lack of exercise are considerably common in contemporary society, the link between the target market and the proposed business idea is apparent, because the identified issues are more common among inhabitants of urban areas.

Accordingly, four integral elements of the marketing mix should be discussed in order to determine their appropriateness for the proposed business idea. The product itself is highly applicable to the selected segment due to two reasons: (1) bicycles are an efficient means of losing weight; (2) high-end production and fitness-tracking features are appealing for middle-class and upper-class consumers. Therefore, this product will be in demand within the targeted population. The second aspect is pricing strategy. In this particular case, relatively high pricing will be justified by the financial abilities of the targeted group since middle-class and upper-class consumers in urban areas have a higher level of income compared to the ones from rural or suburban areas. If the pricing is supported by an aggressive marketing campaign that appeals to the sense of a healthy and trendy lifestyle, the product can efficiently enter the market and be competitive.

Placement of the product is the third essential aspect of the marketing mix. It is possible to suggest that the company should establish its stores in middle-class, upper-middle-class, and upper-class neighborhoods, as it is the most efficient way of reaching the targeted population. Trendy shopping centers should also be considered suitable placement opportunities. Additionally, it is critical to mention that the placement of the product is closely connected with the promotion, the fourth aspect of the marketing mix. Targeted consumers should be able to reach the product easily while marketing and advertising efforts should reinforce their interest in the product.

In order to implement the proposed business idea, the company should utilize a sufficient amount of resources that are needed for the production of high-end sports bicycles. Also, as the product should have fitness-tracking features, it is essential that the production team is equipped with skilled workers, who are experienced in high-end technologies. A considerably large part of the company’s initial capital should be used to purchase manufacturing equipment that is in compliance with high industry standards of producing sports bicycles as well as fitness-tracking devices because the quality of the final product directly depends on it.

One of the primary objectives of the feasibility study is to provide evidence that the product could be easily and effectively produced. It is essential to notice that manufacturing technologies for both sports bicycles and fitness-tracking devices are already available. Therefore, the most important aspect of the successful production process is to hire highly skilled labor from different industries and make them cooperate in the process of working on the product. Additionally, as was already mentioned, high-end manufacturing equipment is also an important aspect of successful production.

It could be hardly doubted that entering the market with the initial product idea, despite the fact that it has considerable advantages, will be difficult due to high competition (Gans & Ryall 2017). Thus, this section will dwell upon the investigation of theoretical frameworks that could support the company’s growth. First of all, Porter’s Five Forces model will be useful in identifying a strategy that ensures success in the market. The competitive rivalry will be tackled through positioning the business based on Porter’s Five Forces, specifically through understanding supplier power, buyers’ power, the threat of substitutes, like indoor gyms, and the threat of entry due to the lucrative nature of the business. The notion that the bicycles will be targeting customers with significant complications, linked to necessary weight loss and restricted time, prompts the need for the incorporation of advanced technology in making the products to ensure they hit the market hard (Porter & Heppelmann 2014).

Secondly, it is possible to use a PEST Analysis framework, as it is useful in identifying essential economic and technological elements. It will be important to utilize all the available financial resources in developing high-quality, unique bicycles. As mentioned previously in the Marketing Mix section, the bicycle market is highly competitive, and thus a unique product is needed. Moreover, the initial market research should further provide information regarding the technology used by competitors in making their bicycles. The company should then be able to make any upgrades on what is already available within the current market in a bid to attract customers.

The business should have a projected financial statement in place that will serve as a point of reference for decision-making. The research methodology is both primary and secondary and entails interviewing potential consumers and reviewing journals on market dynamics. Also, it is essential to mention that the methodology of the work is largely based on frameworks provided by Cortimiglia, Ghezzi, and Frank (2016) and Dobbs (2014). Below is the projected profit and loss statement. The estimations that are provided are based on evidence from the scholarly literature on the topic (Dobbs 2014; Massa, Tucci & Afuah 2017). The major components of the statement include operating expenses, gross profit, and net earnings. The operating expenses include wages and salaries, rental fees, and advertising costs.

Projected Profit and Loss Statement for the year (in Millions):

The following assumptions were made in the process of preparing the data. The advertising cost would be high as the initial stage of the business involves more promotional activities aimed at popularising its existence amongst customers. Another assumption was that the selling and distribution fee would also be high due to the initial activities aimed at ensuring the products are supplied widely to increase their availability in the market. Lastly, the revenue figures are relatively higher as it is presumed that there would be large profits as a result of numerous sales to the identified target group. These assumptions were justified by previous market research.

It is estimated that the company should have an initial capital of about $15,000 (million) in order to successfully start the manufacturing process and enter the market. Primarily, a significant part of the capital will be used to hire high-skilled personnel and buy manufacturing equipment. The rest of the capital should be used for the establishment of an efficient supply chain and carrying out promotional, marketing, and advertising activities.

The top priorities using SMART goals are to set growth targets that will be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. The essence of SMART goals is to provide a roadmap for asserting guidance on areas of strength to take on market opportunities and weaknesses to recommend corrective models (Massa, Tucci & Afuah 2017). The goals of the business are as follows:

• Be a leader in the bicycle industry.
• Increase market share by 15% over the next two years.
• Reduce operating costs by 20% over the next three years by improving the efficacy of the production process.
• Increase the volume of sales by 15% within one year.

The stated goals are of great importance to the business. In order to achieve them, the finance department should carry out an in-depth analysis in order to identify low-cost suppliers to reduce operating costs. Also, the marketing department would be involved in creating and implementing a plan that will facilitate an increase in sales. The department will have a benchmark on the projected sales revenue with deadlines on when they should be achieved. Moreover, the organization will equally consider consumer feedback to ascertain the success of the entity. Through these strategies, the business will be in a position to increase its market share and eventually become a leader in the bicycle industry.

In conclusion, the company will have a market development strategy that will allow it to concentrate on creating more market segments for the bicycle and, as a result, increase its volumes of sales, and see tremendous growth. Most importantly, by focusing on manufacturing high-quality and unique products, the company will be able to remain competitive in the face of stiff competition. Above all, integrating new technologies will facilitate the production of unique bike models. Indisputably, these factors will ultimately lead to business success.

Cortimiglia, M, Ghezzi, A & Frank, A 2016, ‘Business model innovation and strategy making nexus: evidence from a cross-industry mixed-methods study’, R&D Management , vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 414-432.

DaSilva, C & Trkman, P 2014, ‘Business model: what it is and what it is not’, Long Range Planning , vol. 47, no. 6, pp. 379-389.

Dobbs, M 2014, ‘Guidelines for applying Porter’s five forces framework: a set of industry analysis templates’, Competitiveness Review , vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 32-45.

Gans, J & Ryall, M 2017, ‘Value capture theory: a strategic management review’, Strategic Management Journal , vol. 38, no.1, pp. 17-41.

Massa, L, Tucci, C & Afuah, A 2017, ‘Critical assessment of business model research’, Academy of Management Annals , vol. 11, no.1, pp. 73-104.

Porter, M & Heppelmann, J 2014, ‘How smart, connected products are transforming competition’, Harvard Business Review , vol. 92, no.11, pp. 64-88.

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IvyPanda. (2021, June 16). The Business Start-up Development. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-business-start-up-development/

"The Business Start-up Development." IvyPanda , 16 June 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/the-business-start-up-development/.

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IvyPanda . "The Business Start-up Development." June 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-business-start-up-development/.

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Essay on starting a small business.

Starting a small business is the best way to gain freedom. Although this statement is disputable, it has sense.

Why do people decide to become entrepreneurs? They are longing for independence. Small business helps one manage his time in the way he wants. He can produce the goods and services he likes. Finally, he is able to try to be responsible and creative.

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Small business is very important for the economy of every state. Small entrepreneurs contribute into the state budget a lot. It is possible to say that the complex of small and middle firms provides the country with the same profit as big business does. In simple words, a prosperous state cannot survive without small business. It is impossible to defeat poverty without small business. Thus, if you have any genuine and uncommon ideas concerning the production of useful goods and services, establish your own small firm.

Table of Contents

Starting up is not easy

Starting a small business is not an easy thing. Whether you’re doing something as simple as business paper writing as a business or as grand as running a construction company building skyscrapers, you should be psychologically and financially prepared to numerous challenges. Moreover, it is vital to know something about business, management and marketing.

To begin with, you should educate yourself about the business and market. Learn from reputable education websites. You can take Research Prospect as an excellent example of educational websites as its visual appearance is fantastic. It has simplicity, informational content, responsiveness, and a proper Content Management System. You can read an excellent article written by Research prospect professional editors on how to write an essay here:  https://www.researchprospect.com/how-to-write-an-essay/

You should also study the market in order to learn about the goods and services that are required by consumers. This factor is the crucial one. When you discover that people demand an item but no one has produced it yet, you have the best chances to conquer the chosen sector of the market. Secondly, you ought to think about the price and quality of your product.

There are two options. The foremost one is the production of high-quality and expensive goods that will serve long. The second option is related to consumerism. You produce poor-quality cheap goods and attract clients with the help of the lowest prices.

Sad to say but it is difficult to choose the best option. Many people are ready to pay a lot to possess a quality item. Others avoid paying a lot and prefer cheap products. If you need title cash now to start your business, consider applying for a title loan.

Create a business plan

Then, you should create your own business plan that will contain the entire information about the functioning of your firm. Think about the target groups of customers, production, logistics, storage and retail.

Apparently, you should produce and store your goods somewhere. Then, you will meet with such issues as revenue and expense. You will need to hire a few employees to run your business rewardingly. Without doubt, you will have to be selective, demanding and attentive in order to recruit the right people into your firm. Finally, you will meet the problem of rent, taxation, etc. A firm resembles a household. You should pay attention to the slightest problem, question and misunderstanding if you want to increase your income and develop your small firm into something bigger.

The ups and downs

As might be expected, starting a small business has many advantages and disadvantages. The most solid strong side is independence. You do not have to work for someone else. You work for your own profit. You possess the freedom of choice and actions. If you are not respected and appreciated at work, you can embody your original and amusing ideas in your own business.

Ambitious people always try to start a small business if they receive such an opportunity. You do not need to listen to the instructions and threats of your boss when you are late. At long last, you will earn more money. You are the boss and the entire profit is yours.

Nevertheless, there are many factors that cause problems to a novice entrepreneur. You should remember that independence is also responsibility. You are responsible for your firm, its prosperity and the wellbeing of your employees. Furthermore, you are responsible for the health and life of your customers who consume your products.

You are expected to know how to develop and improve your small company beneficially. You should know how to behave in case of crisis and unpredictable situations. You should be ready to wake up at night and spend the whole day at your firm in order to settle down all urgent problems and conflicts between employees. You should be a teacher, psychologist and negotiator who is able to resolve conflicts and motivate his staff practically.

You have a great opportunity to share your experience in creating and managing your business, shoot and edit a video using ad maker  in which you can talk about the difficulties and successes that you have experienced. Perhaps this will be useful for people who also want to open their own business.

Starting a small business is a challenging but beneficial idea. You are able to establish you own store, café, restaurant or bakery and embody your offbeat and splendid ideas there. On the other hand, you should be ready to resist numerous challenges and work hard for the protection and development of your business.

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Startup (Start your own Business) Essay for Children and Students

December 10, 2017 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

A start up is an entrepreneurial venture firm that is recently raised for quickly developing businesses. It is a business plan that needs to meet the commercial attraction by building a feasible plan for action that includes invention, innovation and risk.

Start-up is generally a private venture, organization or association that creates and improves an adaptable and flexible plan for business.

New business authors and researchers extended their thoughts, invention or idea into business plan and are quite successful. The business is generally divided on the three basis kike manufacturing, trading and service provider.

The start-up is generally a sole business proprietor and solely earns profit or loss in the business or a partnership joint venture where they invest a particular amount of fund and shares profit or loss of the business in profit sharing ratio according to their liability capacity.

The growth areas for setting start-ups are identified as the business environment; trading business like wholesale, retail, mall, exporters, importers, stock trading, real estate; industrial area could be large, medium, small or tiny sector; housing; health care; services like information services, public services, financial services, repairs, beauty parlours; training and business development; manufacturing; food; rural development like artists, handlooms, sericulture, khadi, handicraft or rural services and agriculture sector like he can work in plantation, horticulture, dairy, forestry, animal husbandry, poultry or seeds.

The Process of Starting a Start up by an Entrepreneur

• Find an opportunity
• Develop a business concept
• Figure out what success means and how to measure it
• Acquire the right resources
• Attain goals
• Launch and grow

Table of Contents

Main Challenges faced by any Start-ups

Any start-up faces these major challenges in running the start-up like money, competition, demonstrating effectiveness, technology, trust, human resources and public relations.

WHO IS AN ENTREPRENEUR?

An entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make various changes. He is a business professional whose main goal is to create a standard business model that can be used by several companies across the board.

They tend to concentrate on bringing new ideas to life within the business market.   Entrepreneur shares a pursuit of revenue generation with commercial firms but they also seek to achieve social goals such as positive human/social impact, and positive environmental impact.

Characteristics of a good Entrepreneur

• Not bound by sector norms or traditions.
• Not confined by barriers in the way of their goals.
• Develop new models and pioneer new approaches to enable them to overcome obstacles.
• Take innovative approaches to solve social issues and should keep business secrecy.
• Administrative ability and organization skills.
• Intelligence, creativity and should have clear objective.
• Emotional stable, have public relation, effective communication and technical knowledge.
• Innovative, have skills to manage everything, have a vision.

Who can be the Entrepreneur?

Anyone can be an entrepreneur whether men or women, anyone who has quality of managing things, risk bearing ability, urge to do something, have skills, thinks about growth, is innovative and positive thinker can be an enterprise. The entrepreneur should have some other qualities like:

Qualities of a good Entrepreneur

• He should be adaptive or go with the trend (mostly in case of technology).
• Have risk bearing ability.
• Should be innovative and progressive and should always think of diversification.
• Think of growth.
• Analyse the pros and cons for decision making.
• Do good planning before and after starting a venture.
• Not be afraid of failures and confident to face challenges.
• Improve his quality and should have ability to manage 5M factors, that is, men, machine, material, method and money.
• Should strive to meet the changing needs and requirements of the customers.

Types of Entrepreneur

There are majorly three types of entrepreneur which are as follows:

• Super Growth Entrepreneurs: these entrepreneurs start their business by their natural talents. They are bold, confident and are highly motivated to undertake the activities of an entrepreneurship.
• Classical Entrepreneurs: these are concerned with the customers and marketing needs through the development of self-support venture. These are survival firms without any growth rate.
• Mompreneurs: homemaker entrepreneurs are commonly known as mompreneurs. These entrepreneurs generally start working from their homes during the flexible hours of working like Lijjat Papad making.

Financial Institutions for Start-ups

To encourage the entrepreneurs, IDBI (Industrial Development Bank of India) has provided a scheme to finance the entrepreneurs at very low rate of 15% and to refinance the old small and old businesses at the concessional rate of 12.5% for male entrepreneurs and at 9% for the women entrepreneurs.

The CBI (Central Bank of India) is given contract to pass the loan of 10 Lakh rupees to the women entrepreneurs for starting a business venture but the loan is given on one condition that the idea of business should be innovative.

EDP (Entrepreneurial Development Programme)

This programme generally considered as the human resource development tool that provides the entrepreneurs the technical and managing skills.

The programme aims to remove unemployment, enhance development, promoting industrial growth. This programme is generally framed for the first generation entrepreneurs to be successful and covers majorly three variables:

• Target groups

It provides proper training to the entrepreneurs to enlarge their business and also ensures assurance of licence, requirement of finance for the business venture, providing raw material, etc.

The entrepreneurship development movement in India had received a very magnificent attention and the small manufacturing enterprises have made a demetrious growth in the three decades and had occupied a very important position in the industrial economy of India.

According to economist, entrepreneur is the one who brings resources, labour, material and other valuable resources all together to gain profit is the entrepreneur and also introduce something new changes or innovative.

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Essay on Starting a New Business | Business Management

After reading this essay you will learn about:- 1. Introduction: Starting a New Business 2. Why do People Enter Into Business ? 3. Ways of Entering into Business 4. Promotion 5. Problems.

Essay on Starting a New Business

Essay Contents:

• Essay on the Problems in Starting and Operating a Business Unit

Essay # 1. Introduction: Starting a New Business:

Starting a business involves the use of resources to achieve a given objective. Every human being engaged in some form of business activity of producing, distributing and exchanging goods and services. This project report is devoted to the discussion of the objective of and problems relating to starting and operating a business by a person or group of persons as a proprietor or co-owners, partners or shareholders in expectation of profit subject to readiness to bear the risks involved.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Business enterprise is concerned with the skilful and careful application of the human, material and monetary resources towards the accomplishment of one’s aspirations and ambitions. Establishing an enterprise is an exercise in resource mobilising and in risk taking with a view to earn income or profit out of the chosen operations.

Essay # 2. Why do People Enter Into Business?

People enter into business with the purpose of getting profits as return on the capital invested by them. But there are other motives too.

(i) Livelihood:

Small businessmen start some petty shops with their limited capital and ability to earn their livelihood.

(ii) Profit:

Profit, the surplus margin between income and costs, is the substantive stimulating factor underlying starting of a business enterprise. The real enterprising businessman seeks not merely to earn a living or interest on his capital but also to acquire additional return or reward for risk -bearing and for the managerial and organisational ability.

Those who intend to establish their enterprise are primarily lured by prospects of profit but at the same time they have to be ready to face risks, i.e., possible loss in business and, sometimes, of the capital itself.

(iii) Social Recognition:

In the modern society, businessmen are regarded as resourceful and they are honoured by the society. Wealthy and capable businessmen figure prominently in the public estimation. It is, therefore, natural for a person to start a business enterprise that would give him social prestige.

(iv) Public Service:

The desire to promote the welfare of the community may motivate some people to enter into business. As Spriegel said “business provides an excellent opportunity for social and economic service of the highest order.” Attitude of service and social approval may generate greater psychic rewards than monetary gains. Such incentives may result in the manufacture of standard quality of goods leading to higher profits.

(v) Personal Satisfaction:

To some people business is a means of living and to many others it is a way of life-the practical embodiment of their mode of thinking. They enter into business in order to channelise their creative urge. Many people like to be independent and strive to develop their dynamic talents without servings under any masters.

(vi) Power:

Power too is a strong motivation force in entering a business. Business enables the entrepreneur and managers to possess powers over productive resources, employed workers and earned profits. The prospect of becoming a boss lures many people into business.

(vii) Protection of the Family Estate:

Many times individuals inherit a business and they would like to run it in order to protect their family property and tradition and prestige.

Essay # 3. Ways of Entering into Business:

People desirous of entering a business may acquire ownership of a business unit in the following ways:

(i) By Buying Shares:

They may buy shares of joint-stock companies engaged in or proposed to be engaged in the manufacturing, marketing or any other type of business operations.

(ii) By Starting own Firm:

Some people may start their own firm or acquire an existing firm operating in a particular line of business with their own funds supplemented by borrowed funds. They are owner-cum-managers .

(iii) By Gift or Inheritance:

There are many who assume ownership of business by gift or inheritance.

(iv) By Promotion:

Nowadays, mostly, large-scale enterprises are started by the technical cum financial process of investigation. Every new business is the result of an idea conceived by persons with flair for business. Those who originate the idea of starting a company, follow it up by testing the worth of the idea and finally bring up a company, in its legal structure after completing the formalities and backing it with their efforts to mobilise money, men and materials are called promoters.

Promoters may or may not be interested in seeking powers of management. Their main function is to conceive the idea of worth, while business and “sell the idea” in concrete from to the organisation he builds up.

Essay # 4. Promotion of Business Enterprise:

Promotion signifies the aggregate of activities designed to bring into being an enterprise to operate a business. It pre supposes the technical processing of a commercial proposition with reference to its potential profitability. The meaning of promotion and the steps to be taken in promoting a business are discussed in brief hour.

Meaning of Promotion:

Promotion of a company refers to the sum total of the activities of all those who participate in the building of the enterprise upto the organisation of the company and completion of the plan to exploit the idea. It begins with the serious consideration given to the ideas on which the business is to be based. Gerestenberg has defined promotion as “the discovery of business opportunities and the subsequent organisation of funds, property and management ability into a business concern for the purpose of making profit therefrom”.

Person or persons who undertake all these activities are known as promoters.

Stages in Promotion of a Company:

Promotion involves following steps:

1. Discovery of Business Opportunities

2. Assembling

3. Preparation of a Financial Plan or Financing the Proposition.

1. Discovery of Business Opportunities :

When a person or persons get an idea that there is the possibility of starting a new business to take advantage of the untapped natural resources or new invention, discovery of some business opportunities begins.

Such an idea may also be to start a business unit to supply the product at a lower price by breaking the monopoly of existing concern in a particular line of business or to expand an existing concern by converting partnership into private limited company or into public limited company or by combining some going concerns. But the promoter cannot go ahead immediately after such an idea strikes him.

Discovery of an idea will mean following steps:

(i) Conception of an idea:

When a person or persons, called promoters, understand that there is a possibility of starting some business concern, the idea is said to have been conceived.

(ii) Investigation:

Before money is invested to exploit the idea conceived thorough and detailed investigation of commercial feasibility of idea with reference to sources of supply, extend of demand, present and potential competition, the amount of capital necessary etc. is absolutely essential.

The idea must be put to “the rigid test of cold fact of costs and inflexible law of experts like engineers, values, accountants, statisticians, marketing experts etc., who prepare a report on the position of the market, present and potential competition, amount required for the fixed assets like land, buildings, machinery, furniture etc.”

The report would also include the survey of supply positions of raw material, labour, transport facilities and other relevant items of expenditure. Such an investigation gives the critical appraisal of the idea conceived and reveals whether the idea is commercially feasible or not.

(iii) Verification:

The report submitted by the investigators must not be accepted without getting it verified by separate team of impartial, disinterested experts. Mistakes are likely to creep into the investigators’ report.

This may be due to the wrong selection of the investigators or because of prejudiced interest or optimistic view of the investigators. Mistakes may also occur because of collection of figures from the non-reliable sources or due to the wrong interpretations of the data collected by the investigators.

Therefore, dispassionate and impartial opinion of the experts of the investigators must be taken to correct any shortcomings in the methods and contents of investigation.

2 . Assembling :

After verification of the investigators report if the result of verification is favourable, promoters go ahead with the promotion of the projected company. The next step which promoters have to take is to give their idea a pattern which may look like a going concern.

This involves bringing together or assembling of original idea, property and managerial ability. At this stage wide range of activities such as selection of a site and taking an option for the lease or purchase of land, arrangement for the construction of buildings, purchase of equipment, securing of patent rights and entering into contracts with persons for technical, managerial, office and factory jobs are all to be undertaken by the promoters.

3 . Preparation of a Financial Plan or Financing the Proposition :

After assembling or mobilising all the factors required for giving the idea the form of a business concern, promoters have to proceed with the preparation of a financial plan for the proposed concern. While preparing the financial plan promoters have to keep in mind that adequate funds have to be provided for launching the enterprise as going concern with title to the necessary property.

Also, sufficient amount of cash in hand and adequate margin for contingencies must be considered.

For this promoters give a thought to the choice of different kinds of securities such as share and debentures as source of raising the required finance. They may enter into contact with the underwriting houses for the subscription of these securities. They may also come to an agreement with the banks for raising loans for the working capital requirements.

Types of Promoters:

Idea of starting new business undertakings originate from a person or a group of persons whom we call promoters.

There are following types of promoters:

1. Entrepreneurs:

Dynamic persons who are gifted with the business acumen conceive the idea of starting business and continue to carry on the affairs of the business enterprise so promoted are known as entrepreneurs.

A large number of small-scale enterprises are brought into being and managed by the promoters themselves. They discover the idea, find out its worth in commercial perspective, organise the activities connected with the idea, assume risks and strive to earn profits by their own efforts.

2. Professional Promoters:

Large-scale enterprises are the creation of thought­ful actions of independent businessmen. They are the gifted personalities compe­tent to visualise varied opportunities of making profits through business activities.

They conceive the idea, investigate the possible costs, revenue and estimate the potential profit margin and assemble the factors of production needed to put the idea into operation. They bring into existence new enterprises, expand old enter­prises or bring about integration and consolidation of existing undertakings.

These promoters are concerned with giving concrete form to the business opportunity. Once the idea is given practical shape, they sell the proposition to the company formed to exploit the idea. They are not usually interested in assuming managerial powers in the enterprises which they seek to promote.

They are only in the lookout for new opportunities which they nourish into business propositions to be entrusted to firms or companies in return for definite remunerations known as promotional remuneration.

3. Technical or Engineering Firms:

Engineers and technological experts sometimes pick up lucrative idea of business promotion. Patents are evolved for manufacturing equipment or product to be used in the related business.

4. Financial Institutions:

Investment banks or industrial banks very often initiate new enterprises or put in proposals for mergers in the process of investigating the financial viability of different enterprises by whom they are approached for financial assistance. Gerestenberg points out that investment banker becomes active in the field of promotion when the securities market is able to absorb new issues of equity security.

5. Government:

The modern states (governments) in a number of countries have taken abiding interest in pioneering basic, strategic and defence industries with a view to speed up the process of development, expand employment opportunities, ensure economic and social justice etc.

In India, as per Industrial policy Resolution the Government has emerged as the leading promoter of prestigious enterprises ranging from steel, coal, shipping, fertilisers, electronics and aircraft to banking, insurance, tourism, hotels, etc.

6. Specialised Institutions:

The Government has set up special institutions to undertake investigation of probable or potential business opportunities that would benefit the community and fill up the gaps in the industrial structure of the country concerned. Industrial Estates and National Industrial Development Corporation of India are the examples of such institutions.

These institutions survey the field, judge the prospects of new business opportunities and conduct investigations. Subsequently the probed and approved propositions may be handed over to the companies in the private sector for follow-up and actual execution.

Essay # 5. Problems in Starting and Operating a Business Unit:

It has been noted in the preceding pages that conception of an idea is not enough to launch a business enterprise. Before the enterprise is brought into existence promoters have to assess the commercial feasibility of the idea conceived by them.

For this purpose an economic survey has to be undertaken in a given region, city or location. This survey indicates the clear and comprehensive picture of the business planned and measures the extent of profit-earning capacity of the proposed undertaking.

The aim of the survey is to judge how far the operations of the proposed business would result in profit. Profits depend on the sales potential which in turn depends on the design and utility of the product and the probable demand for it in the competitive market. The surveys would also give an idea about the volume of business that can be expected in the given set of conditions.

The problems that need to be tackled in starting a business are as under:

(i) Choosing the product;

(ii) Marketing the product;

(iii) Deciding about the size of the firm;

(iv) Purchasing the materials;

(v) Employing the needed personnel; and

(vi) Raising adequate funds to start the enterprise.

These problems are studied under the following heads:

(i) Product Analysis:

The type of the product or service intended to be produced or rendered influences all other aspects of business. Quick and wide sale ability is the main criterion of production planning. Product analysis primarily means deciding about the kinds of products to be produced and the different sizes and models in the line. The design of each type of product must be planned after careful study of technical and marketing factors.

Consultation with engineering and marketing experts are necessary to evolve suitable designs of the products that would be consistent with the trends in the market. The size, style, colour, shape, workmanship and the finish of the product have to be determined according to the criteria of technical observation and testing.

All the aspects of a product have direct bearing on the consumers’ likes and tastes and the moods of the market. Consumers’ preferences are to be examined to shape the product or the service so that immediate demand would manifest as soon as the goods are released into the market.

In the words of Shubin: “Each item is to be designed for maximum sale ability in a chosen price-field; the product analysis must be made the viewpoint of the prospective consumers.”

Consumers’ interest are focused on the products or services depending on their durability, utility, size, weight, appearance, style, convenience, competitive price, general performance, etc.

The product analysis should closely study the consumers’ psychology and compile data useful for accurate designing and developing the product.

Product analysis includes the survey of the following:

(i) Raw materials required;

(ii) Trained personnel needed;

(iii) Equipment essential;

(iv) Other products in the competing line; and

(v) Quality and performance of the product expected to meet the needs for which product is designed.

The product and its elements are to be designed to tally with the motivations of the prospective customers. Business promotion will be futile if products fail to fit into the need -pattern of consumers.

Hence the fundamental problem in starting a business is to take a crucial decision about the designs of the product vis-a-vis the temper of and the prevailing fashion in the market as well as the desires tastes and needs of the consumers.

(ii) Market Analysis:

The ultimate goal of every enterprise is to sell the products in the market. Therefore, promoters have to explore the diversity and depth of the market for the products or services proposed to be produced.

The assessment of market potential for the product is a key for ascertaining the probable profitability of the enterprise under formation. Over-enthusiasm for a new product without judging the commercial value may land a new or existing enterprise in a crisis.

Costly plant, expensive equipment and highly paid personnel would be of no avail if the production capacity generated is in excess of the current and potential demand. Enterprises started with high ambition may come to grief if the actual sales are lagging behind the rate in output growth.

In the words of Wheeler “The businessman who neglects to estimate his probable volume of sales is courting financial disaster.”

It is obviously essential for businessman to make a thorough and careful check-up of the market demand before investing his capital in new ventures. Estimating the demand in the market involves the exploratory study of the area to be served and the potential number of buyers within the area. Income and buying habits of customers are analysed with reference to the products in view.

The ‘regularity’ or ‘seasonality’ of sales is ascertained as a guide to production, purchasing and manpower requirements. Market analysis implies calculation of possible sales of products if the industry is established.

It comprises the study of:

(i) Who will buy?

(ii) Where these buyers are?

(iii) What will they buy?

(iv) How much they will buy?

(v) When would they buy?

Forecasting of sales over the given period is the aim of market analysis. Market analysis has to study the current demand and potential demand.

Demand depends on the kinds of products -whether these are necessaries, luxuries, etc. If the products are necessaries demand would be steady, in case the products are luxuries demand would be more elastic and would vary according to price changes. If the products are durable goods and have continuous use over a period of time, the demand may fluctuate frequently over the various phases of the trade cycle.

The number of consumers, their standard of living, buying habits, their status, age, their purchasing power, the overall trends in the market and the characteristics of the market are studied to find out the potential demand. The prevailing competition in the product line has also to be assessed before attempts are made to penetrate the market.

A study of the suitable marketing channels is also essential to plan the sales promotion efforts. The promoters have to choose direct channels of selling to the consumers bypassing the middlemen or indirect channels of distributing the products via wholesalers and retailers to consumers.

Need of advertising, approach in customer relations, product guarantees, etc. have to be anticipated. In forecasting marketing potentials the promoters have to take note of secular factors like population growth, changes in technology, variations in tastes and fashions and cyclical factors reflected in the boom, recession, depression and recovery. Pessimistic or optimistic attitudes of consumers would reveal the cyclical influence on demand.

(iii) Objectives and Policies:

After the completion of product and market analysis promoters have to lay down the fundamental objectives and scope of the proposed business operations. An overall plan and policy framework have to be devised on the basis of conclusions drawn consequent to market surveys and forecasts.

The plans and policies are formulated in order to guide the developmental course of the proposed firm in respect of manufacturing and marketing operations, future expansion, adaptability and stability. Finally, the promoters have to evolve a good design of the product keeping in view the trends and moods of the market and suited to technological requirements of the time.

Consumer utility, market stability, flexibility for growth, economical functioning, reasonable price-range etc. would weigh with the promoters in the choice of the shape, size, style, colour and character of the product.

(iv) Size of the Firm:

Determining the size of the firm is an important decision to be taken by the promoters. The size of the undertaking has to be decided on the basis on the market feasibility, technological possibility and availability of finance.

Realization of internal and external economies also influences the scale of production and the size of the firm’s operations. At the inception of the undertaking its size should be fixed solely on the basis of the correct estimates of sales over a given period. If the size is unduly large, the resources invested would be wasteful and the entire operations would not bring in expected profits.

If the size is very small, the firm may not be able to function efficiently and realise the economies of bulk operations. Therefore, that size which would ensure the fulfilment of realistic sales targets for a reasonable period of time will have to be determined. Fuller and optimum use of resources and the expected sales are the main criteria for deciding the size of any proposed undertaking.

In the words of Shubin, “the initial size of the establishment must be based on judicious sales estimates with accurate sales-estimates the firm can avoid investing in an establishment that is too large and expensive to be profitable at the outset but can select a size sufficiently large to take care of the initial sales and their expected increase during the years immediately ahead.”

(v) Location:

Promoters have to take with utmost care the decision regarding the selection of the region and the site where the proposed enterprise is to be established. Location of the enterprise should be guided by the comparative cost conditions as between different areas with reference to the manufacturing and marketing of the products.

Access to raw materials, nearness to markets, adequacy of cheap means of transport, availability of required labour, existence of other infrastructure facilities are the main factors to be reckoned in the choice of the site for locating the enterprise.

(vi) Layout of the Plant:

After the size is selected, the promoters or the entrepreneurs will have to devise a systematic arrangement of the plant, equipment and other physical facilities in order to secure economical, productive operations.

The building of the factory should be sufficient in size and designed to suit the techniques underlying the manufacturing operations.

The plant, machinery, tools, equipment etc. are to be placed in a scientific sequence so as to bring about smooth, uninterrupted flow of output from one stage to another stage of operations.

(vii) Financial Arrangements:

Assessment of financial needs and arrangements for raising the required finance are the most crucial tasks of the promoters. They have to calculate in detail the fixed costs and recurring expenses of the enterprise. In the absence of proper financial data, the enterprise may be bogged down due to paucity of funds at different stages. It is therefore necessary for the promoters “to set forth their proposed capital structure”.

After the nature of business operations is decided, policies are formulated and layout and equipment plans are finalised, it is possible to compute the costs of land, plant, machinery, building, equipment, inventories and other operational expenses for fulfilling the objectives.

The procedure for financing a new enterprise is summarised as under:

(i) Determination of the immediate and future financial needs.

(ii) Classification of the securities to be issued.

(iii) To acquire the funds through sale of securities.

Financial requirements are estimated by ascertaining the amount essential for fixed capital, working capital and costs of organising and promoting the enterprise. Immediate requirements plus estimates of financial needs for probable expansion in future would constitute the bulk of finance to be raised for starting the enterprise with a promise of stability and prosperity.

Fixed capital requirements refer to costs of land, building, plant, tools, equipment and other basic assets needed for starting an enterprise.

Working capital signifies the funds required to cover the expenses for day-to­day operations of the enterprise, such as costs of inventory- raw materials, semi- processed and finished goods-wages and salary of the personnel, overhead costs of maintenance, fuel and power, services, taxes, insurance, etc. and costs of promotion of sales such as advertising, salesmanship, credit facilities, guarantees, after sale service, etc.

Financial arrangements should also include the estimate of preliminary expenses and losses, if any, to be incurred prior to incorporation. After calculating the aggregate requirements of funds, the entrepreneurs should decide how to raise these funds. They can issue securities of different types- equity and preference shares, debentures.

Promoters of large enterprises sell the securities through investment bankers or directly to investors or through underwriters. After the total investments have been calculated and the sales forecasts made, it is possible to compute the expected rate of profit.

(viii) Organisational Structure:

The next step for the promoters, after ascertaining the commercial feasibility of the business opportunities visualised and having made necessary arrangements for the funds needed, is to build up a competent and coordinated internal structure of organisation.

Organisation of the activities into different departments, staffing them, training the staff, controlling their work, evaluating their performance, motivating the personnel are the vital problems to be solved by the initiator of a business enterprise.

(ix) Launching the Enterprise:

After all the surveys and estimates are conducted and their findings indicate the feasibility of starting the enterprise, the entrepreneurs shall have to take practical steps to put the enterprise into actual operations.

Acquisition of land and building, selection of personnel, installation of plant and machinery, arrangement of tools and equipment, purchases and build-up of raw material inventories, announcing the introduction of new products, advertising their utility through different media, all these constitute the concrete steps in launching the enterprise.

Orders for starting the production processes through standard instructions, models, route sheets, and procedures herald the beginning of the new enterprise.

Related Articles:

• Promotion of a Company: 4 Stages | Business Management
• 9 Problems Faced During the Establishment of a New Enterprise | Business Management
• Essay on Joint Venture | Business Management
• Essay on Entrepreneur: Top 8 Essays | Business Management

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What’s Behind the Success of Some Tech Start-Ups?

Their corporate culture often focuses on unconventional solutions to hard business problems.

• Apple Podcasts

The secret to success for many Silicon Valley tech companies isn’t necessarily that they’re ultra-nimble start-ups, or that they’re led by tech-savvy geniuses. Andy McAfee says their success often has more to do with a specific type of corporate culture that focuses on finding unconventional solutions to hard business problems.

McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and he’s the author of The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results .

In this episode, he explains why business leaders need to think more like geeks and explains why it’s important to center your culture on company norms, rather than organizational structure. He also offers tips for finding that delicate balance between human judgement and data-driven insights.

Key episode topics include: strategy, technology, start-ups, innovation, competitive strategy, Silicon Valley.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

• Watch the original HBR New World of Work episode: How the Geeks Rewrote the Rules of Management (2023)
• Find more episodes of the New World of Work series on YouTube
• Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org .

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy , case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business.

You might think that t he secret to success for many Silicon Valley tech companies is that they’re ultra-nimble start-ups, or they’re led by tech-savvy geniuses.

But Andy McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management,  corporate culture. One that is all about finding unconventional solutions to hard business problems.

McAfee outlines the pros and cons of that approach to management in his book, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results .

In this episode, you’ll learn why it’s important to center your company culture on norms rather than organizational structure.

McAfee also explains how to build an organization that can get things right even when the person at the top is wrong. And he has tips for finding that delicate balance between human judgement and data-driven insights.

This episode originally aired as part of HBR’s New World of Work video series in September 2023. Here it is.

ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome to Harvard Business Review’s The New World of Work. I’m Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief of HBR. Each week on the show, I interview a CEO, a thought leader, or somebody to inspire us, to educate us on the changing dynamics of the workplace.

Our viewers come from all over the world. And they work at everything from Fortune 500 corporations to fledgling startups, from family businesses to nonprofits. The aim of this show is to give insights for everyone as they navigate this transitional moment in how we organize ourselves in the business world.

So, on tonight’s episode, we have another great guest, Andrew McAfee, a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on how information technology changes how companies perform, how they organize themselves, and how they compete.

He’s a frequent contributor to HBR and is the author of the forthcoming book, The Geek Way, the Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results. The book is out in mid November. But you can pre-order it now wherever you pre-order your books.  So, Andy, welcome.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Adi, it’s great to be here. Thank you.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s exciting about the book. So, I’ve read the book. It is a great read. It lavishes fulsome praise on geeks and business, not just for their technological innovation, but also for developing an approach to business itself that you’ve come to respect.

So there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s start with definitions. So how do you define a geek?

ANDREW MCAFEE: Yeah, so I’m walking away from the computer-based definition of a geek, which was kind of where it started. And my definition is two-part. For me, a geek is somebody who gets obsessed with a hard problem and is willing to embrace unconventional solutions.

And for me, the patron saint of geeks is probably Maria Montessori, who about 100 years ago, got obsessed with the problem of, how do you educate young children best and came up with the Montessori educational method, which is this radical departure from industrial-scale model of schools that was dominant then and, sadly, still dominant now. So, think about Maria Montessori when you think about a geek.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, there’s a definition. Then, how do you define the Geek Way that you’re talking about in the book? What is the Geek Way?

ANDREW MCAFEE: So, the particular geeks that I got excited about that led me to write the book were not educational geeks like Maria Montessori. They were business geeks. They were a group of people, concentrated but not exclusive to the West Coast of the US, who got obsessed with this problem of, how do we run a company in an age of really fast technological change and lots of uncertainty?

And in particular, how do we avoid some of the classic dysfunctions of the internet era? And the Geek Way is what they’ve come up with. It’s the business model or the culture or the set of norms that they’ve settled on to try to accomplish that really hard goal.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, if you’re watching this if you have questions yourself for Andy McAfee, put them in the chat. We’ll get to as many audience questions later as possible.

So really, the way you’re defining geeks, the way you’re defining Geek Way, I mean, it seems to be– I’m trying to think of other terms that we might have used, other coinages. Lifelong learner, but that’s not quite it. It’s people who nerd out on, in this case, management, right?

ANDREW MCAFEE: Obsessive maverick is my preferred phrase for a geek. And the obsessive mavericks that I got really interested in were the ones who dove. In again on this problem of how do we run a company, and keep doing well in our markets, and avoid the dysfunctions that seem to plague so many successful companies as they get older and bigger?

How do we avoid those dysfunctions? How do we do something that’s higher performing, more sustainable, and a better place to work?

ADI IGNATIUS: So, as I read the book, some of those attributes you talked about, they had to do

with speed. They had to do with experimentation. Is this just another term for being digital or for applying design thinking in the business? Is that– are we talking the same thing here?

ANDREW MCAFEE: No, I don’t think. You remember Quibi, right? The Jeffrey-Katzenberg-led video startup– it was going to do short form videos and was going to change the way we consume entertainment. It was going to be entirely digital. It was a completely digital enterprise. It was a miserable failure. They raised $1.75 billion.

They shut down within 200 days of their launch. It was just a catastrophe. It was a completely digital enterprise. Netflix is a geek company. They follow all four of my great geek norms of science, ownership, speed, and openness. And I think the results speak for themselves.

So geek for me is entirely separate from digital. You can be a non-m digital geek. And you can certainly be very digital and not geeky at all.

ADI IGNATIUS: When I meant digital, I meant more of a mindset than a product. So it sounds like– so the Quibi thing is an interesting example. I guess what was missing in terms of from your framework was the openness, right? I mean that you had a powerful guy who had been successful, Katzenstein, who wasn’t listening to–

ANDREW MCAFEE: Evidence, to his peers, to his colleagues, to his advisors– he didn’t appear to be a great listener, which is this kind of archetypal, stereotypical trap that a lot of industrial-era companies fall into. And tech leaders also fall into this trap quite often. You become enamored of your own success and you really stop listening.

It’s incredibly common. And one of the things that I really think is powerful and respect about people like Reed Hastings at Netflix is he was able to build a business that got important decisions right when he, himself was wrong about them. And in the book, I talk about a couple of them. He was dead flat wrong about the utility of downloading to the Netflix app.

He thought it wouldn’t be very useful at all. It’s incredibly useful. He was wrong about the importance of kids programming for Netflix. And he admits this in the book No Rules Rules that he wrote with Erin Meyer. But he successfully worked hard on building a company that would correct him, the boss, the high-status, prestigious person at the top of the organization.

It’s part of this great geek norm of openness that I talk about, how do you build a company that will get it right when the person at the top of the org chart is wrong? Man, that’s a hard problem.

ADI IGNATIUS: It’s a hard problem. And I’m sure some people are going to read your book and think, hang on, a lot of these companies we’re talking about are– not exclusively– but are Silicon Valley startups or somewhere in that realm. The popular perception, I would say, is these are not cultures that you necessarily want to emulate, that they’re often male-dominated bro cultures that you may have the boss– frequently, in these cases, is a kind of overly-demanding bully individual.

So how do you how do you square all this?

ANDREW MCAFEE: And there clearly is some of that going on in the Valley, right? There are toxic cultures. You mentioned the bro culture. I would say that Theranos is one of the most toxic cultures I’ve ever heard about, was headquartered in Silicon Valley. So, I don’t think those are geek companies at all.

They might be in the right geographic location. But they’re not following the Geek Way, which is, again, about these norms and about creating a culture that is fast-moving, free-flowing, argumentative, autonomous, evidence-driven and pretty egalitarian. That’s the goal of the Geek Way.

Now, you point out some of these companies that I do think follow the Geek Way are still too pale, stale, and male. And I think that’s absolutely true. The evidence is pretty clear on this. I hope that gets better over time. But you said something that I disagree with is that a lot of these cultures, that they’re not good places to work.

That’s true in some cases. You remember when LinkedIn did its top attractors survey, I believe, in 2016. They said, look, we’re just going to look at objective criteria. We’re going to look at which company pages get viewed the most often by LinkedIn members, which companies get the most interest from LinkedIn members, the most applications, and where do people stick around when they take their first job?

The top 11 attractors in the LinkedIn list were all companies headquartered on the West Coast

in the industry that we loosely call tech. The geek culture is an extremely attractive culture to work in.

ADI IGNATIUS: So again, if you have questions– if viewers have questions for Andy, please put them into the chat. I’ll get to them later. So, one thing I’ve always wondered is some of these, let’s say, founders, entrepreneurs who got into whatever they got into because they wanted to make the world a better place.

And Sergey and Larry in their garage trying to systematize our access to all the world’s information, these sort of great ideals– when they are actually running companies, they not only are trying to run a company great. They become killers, wanting to wipe out the competition, to foster monopolistic practices, to just grab up as much market share as possible.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Is any of this new? No, I’m serious. Were the businesses of previous eras cuddly? Did they want their competitors to succeed? Were they trying to rise all boats? I don’t need to tell you that capitalism is an inherently competitive process. These companies are very, very good performers.

If you want to use the adjective “killer” for them, yeah, I think that’s by design. You’re not in business not to succeed. You want to grow your market share. You want to grow your profits. You want you want to grow. That is often at the expense of somebody else.

I think it’s for the courts to decide whether they meet the definition of monopolist. It’s a word we toss around a lot. I think the courts so far have tossed out a lot of the recent lawsuits against some of these giant tech companies. I don’t think they meet the definition of “monopolist.”

I think, in general, for a lot of these companies, the competition is one click away. And is Tesla a monopolist in the auto industry? You simply can’t make that case. SpaceX has become pretty close to a monopolist in the rockets and satellites industry.

But they didn’t start that way. And they’ve become so large and influential because they do the job better.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right. So, let’s talk about companies that are doing it right. As you say, this is not this is not universally. For digital companies, some follow the Geek Way, as you’ve laid it out. Some don’t. You mentioned a couple. Or maybe a different question is, how many companies– large, small, digital, otherwise– live into these principles, do you think?

ANDREW MCAFEE: I think that’s a really interesting question. And I don’t have a great way to answer it yet because the only way that I can think to answer it is to administer a survey to everybody and get them to fill it out. But that’s just not going to work. They’re not going to fill out that survey.

ADI IGNATIUS: Well, roughly.

ANDREW MCAFEE: But you can look at what we know about the cultures at these companies. You can also look at the fantastic culture 500 research that Don and Charlie Sull did published in a competitor magazine of yours, Sloan Management Review, where they grabbed all of the LinkedIn reviews and they put them through a machine learning analysis to see what companies’ own employees said about them.

And the three areas that I was most interested in were execution, agility, and innovation. And wow, the scores for companies clustered on the West Coast, clustered in Silicon Valley, clustered in industries that we call “high tech,” those scores are off the charts. There’s not any real competition for them.

So there’s something brewing on the West Coast in industries that we label “high tech” for reasons that I don’t very much. There’s something brewing that’s new, that is different than what’s going on elsewhere in the economy, and that’s pretty demonstrably powerful. The label that I hang on that is the Geek Way.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, was Steve Jobs a geek? And did his Apple follow the Geek Way? Or was that a different model?

ANDREW MCAFEE: And Jobs has some really classic non-geek characteristics. He believed that he knew best right. He had a very, very large ego. He also screamed at his subordinates all the time, which I think is absolutely not what an open leader does. However, I interviewed Eric Schmidt for the book.

And I brought this up to him. And he said, look, I was on Apple’s board for a while, I knew Steve pretty well. He said Steve was a tough person in all those ways. But he learned that if you want to stay on top, you have to listen to the people around you. You have to stop thinking that you have all the answers.

We see a really clear example of that with the App Store. And Adi, like you probably remember, Jobs did not want to open up his beautiful, perfect, walled garden iPhone to outside developers. He had to be talked into it. He eventually realized that he was wrong about that. So, there is a little bit of that openness going on.

One thing that Apple is pretty fanatic about, as I understand it, is they make decisions based on evidence. And whether or not that’s a A/B testing infrastructure is one thing. Apple loves to demo features and gets everybody in the room to look at this and say, for example, is it better to have blurry portrait photos where you can adjust the blur before you take the picture?

The instant they did a demo, they had the answer to that question. They did not sit around and argue from their different points of view. They said, OK, let’s run an experiment. Let’s do a demo here. That’s an extremely geeky approach.

ADI IGNATIUS: I mean, one of the interesting things about Jobs, and certainly something he would say about– he would have said about himself, he did say about himself– was that he didn’t and that one shouldn’t slavishly follow the focus groups, that people don’t know what they want.

So in a sense, yeah, the data, but not necessarily and a combination of, let’s get input. But there is a lot of personal touch, personal feel. It’s like it’s sort of like Moneyball versus the old school. And maybe the answer is a combination of skills.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Absolutely. And Ted Sarandos, who’s the co-CEO of Netflix says, our decision making is pretty algorithmic. It’s 70%/30% algorithmic versus human judgment. But he said, if anything the human judgment is on top, if that makes any sense.

And I think that makes a ton of sense because this norm of science that I talk about in the book, and that the geeks are pretty passionate about, it’s not just dry analysis and do whatever the data says. That’s an inaccurate caricature. Science is about settling arguments with evidence. It’s a ground rune for how you’re going to come to a decision.

You’re going to do a test. You’re going to do an experiment. You’re going to sit around in a group and argue about it. And if you can’t agree, what evidence is going to settle this issue? Science is this inherently deeply social, deeply argumentative process with a ground rule.

Evidence is the queen here. And that’s what we’re going to follow. And a lot of the geek companies that I respect do that as naturally as breathing.

ADI IGNATIUS: So one of the examples in your book of geek culture triumphing is Microsoft,

and specifically when Satya Nadella came in to and kind of rekindle that early success and more. Talk a little bit about what he got right, particularly in the framework that–

ANDREW MCAFEE: Adi, can you think of a more impressive corporate turnaround story in living memory?

ADI IGNATIUS: No. Microsoft went from the tech company we liked least to maybe the one we like best.

ANDREW MCAFEE: And if you were an investor, you really didn’t like it for about a decade. The stock price was flat as a corpse’s EKG. And then, Nadella took over. And it’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world. It’s an astonishing comeback story. So, I got to interview Nadella for the book.

And he made brilliant strategic moves, a bunch of them– Microsoft embracing open source, wow. But I was interested in the cultural changes that he made. And he did a couple of things that I think are straight out of the geek playbook. Some of them are obvious. He embraced agile development methods as widely and quickly as possible inside Microsoft.

He did a couple things to reduce the sclerotic bureaucracy that was in place at Microsoft, which was just hamstringing their ability to do anything important out there in the world. One of the brilliant things he did was say, look, you cannot own a digital resource inside Microsoft. You cannot own the data. You cannot own the code.

And what he meant by that was, you can’t be the gatekeeper. You can’t say yes or no to other groups who might want to use it. So, with that one simple move, he said to the company, look, if the group wants to go grab all of the GitHub code to train up a model to help to provide assistance to programmers, you don’t have to ask permission.

Just go do that, subject to all the right constraints and safeties on it. Man, that is an astonishingly good bureaucracy-reduction mechanism. I think maybe the deepest thing that Nadella did, though, was he pulled off this amazing feat of helping Microsoft become a less defensive organization.

And what I mean by that was he says in the book and he said in his interview with me, we had a culture where it was not OK to be wrong to show any weakness, to not hit your numbers, to not be the smartest person in the room. He said, we just had that culture. And it had to change.

And so he did a number of really brilliant things to move from a culture of defensiveness to a culture of openness. And when I used to hear this word vulnerability in connection with leadership or business, I thought it was just the most kind of buzz phrase, hand-wavy nonsense business.

The company is not a therapy group. It’s not there so you can sit around feeling vulnerable all the time. I was just wrong. Now, the company is not your therapy group. However, a company is a place– a successful company needs to be a place where it’s OK to be wrong, to fail, to not have the answer, to show that you’re uncertain.

And Nadella helped get Microsoft down that path. And it was an absolutely fundamental thing to do. I also interviewed Yamini Rangan, who’s the CEO of HubSpot here in Cambridge, who took over a culture that had an amazing culture and has strengthened it through a really difficult time, through the pandemic.

And she said one of the things that she learned and that she was good at was saying in this unbelievably uncertain time of the pandemic, where tech companies were growing like crazy, and then they were shrinking, and it was all weird, she said to a lot of her constituencies, look, I don’t know.

I don’t know what the future holds here. I’m going to be honest with you. She also shared her board performance review with her direct reports– not just the good parts, but the stuff that she needs to work on too. These are all just great moves to start to show the rest of the organization, it is OK not to be perfect, not to put on the brave front, not to be winning all of the time.

Adi, Jack Welch’s autobiography was called Winning. And it was just kind of epitomized this industrial-era view of what you have to do all day, every day. I love the geek view, which is, hey, man, we’re going to launch some rockets. And they are going to blow up.

Now, we’re not going to kill anybody. But we’re absolutely going to launch some rockets that are going to blow up on the launch pad. Bezos said a few years back in a shareholders letter, we are incubating multibillion dollar failures inside Amazon right now.

That’s appropriate for a company of our scale. And you look at Alexa, and I think maybe he was right about that. But the point is, this obsession with winning, and being on top, and being right, and being dominant– that has to go away

ADI IGNATIUS: Those are great examples. I do want to get to audience questions. And there’s actually a couple. One came from Shabana in Pakistan, the other from [INAUDIBLE] in India. Similar questions, and it’s really getting at what kinds of organizational design, organizational structures do you need to foster this geek culture?

ANDREW MCAFEE: I don’t think org structure is the key because the companies that I surveyed have very, very different org charts. They also have very different formal practices. Netflix is fairly famous for having the no-vacation-days policy. Amazon has extremely strict vacation policies for different levels of employee.

So, I think it’s not a matter of the org chart or the org structure that you have. It’s not so much a matter of how formal a lot of your policies are. It’s a matter of your norms. And I love that book. And Adi, like you know, I use it– I love that word. And I use it in the book all the time.

A norm is a behavior that the people around you expect. Maybe it’s written down in the employees’ manual. Very often, it’s not. It’s community policing. It’s what the people around you expect. And if you go out of line and you violate a norm in a community, you will know that fairly quickly.

And you will either come back into line. Or you’re just not going to stick around very long. So, for me, if you can work on these norms of science, argue about evidence, of ownership, push authority and decision making down to an uncomfortable degree. Speed, iterate, don’t plan, don’t analyze, build stuff, get feedback, learn from reality.

And then, openness, don’t be defensive. Be willing to pivot. Be willing to admit that you’re wrong. They show a little vulnerability. Those are the norms that are critical for the Geek Way.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, I think our audience is impressed with you and with your argument. Maybe it’s the glasses. But we have a question.

ANDREW MCAFEE: It’s probably the glasses.

ADI IGNATIUS: It’s probably the glasses. It’s always the glasses. Bob, if you had an English accent, it would blow it away.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Damn. I need a posh British accent, don’t I?

ADI IGNATIUS: So, Bob Jernaki is asking, is the stack of books on your right your reading list for the week?

ANDREW MCAFEE: So, these are from all over the place. But there was a stack of books that I kept referring to when I was writing The Geek Way. And they were not business books. I’m sorry to admit this as a business book writer. They were books from this relatively new field called “cultural evolution,” which gets at this fundamental question, why are we the only species on the planet that builds spaceships?

Nothing else is even close. We’re really the only ones out there. The octopuses are not going to do it. The ants, the bees, the chimpanzees are not going to do it. Why are we humans, the only spaceship-building species on the planet? And this field of cultural evolution, to me, has come up with the best answer to that question.

Which is, we are the only species that cooperates intensely with large numbers of people that we’re not related to. And we are the species that learns the quickest, that improves its tool kit, its technologies, its cultures most rapidly over time. Now, you can take that. And man, you can put that to work in a company.

A company is a large group of mostly unrelated people. And the goal of a company is to improve its culture, its artifacts, its technologies, its practices over time. So the goal of a company is to practice very rapid cultural evolution. Now that we a bit about how cultural evolution happens, we can put those insights to work.

And I think there’s this massive unexplored opportunity to take the insights from this field and put them to work inside the company. I think it’s so massive because I haven’t heard anybody talk using cultural evolution’s terms inside even very geeky companies. This is very, very new stuff. And I think The Geek Way, I think my book is the first applied business book of cultural evolution.

ADI IGNATIUS: I think I just figured something out. You’re a total geek.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Adi, we’ve been working together for years. It took you this long to realize this? But the thing that I got obsessed with was in my career, I’ve spent a lot of time in the– I hate these labels– the old economy and the new economy, lots of industrial-era incumbents and then a lot of companies clustered in the tech space, clustered on the West Coast.

And for my whole career, I have just been trying to pattern match and figure out what the real what the deep differences are between the two. Is it the foosball tables? Is it the hoodies? Is it bring your dog to work? No, obviously not. Where the action is in the economy, where the excitement is in the economy, what are they doing differently?

And The Geek Way contains my answers to that kind of career-long, geeky, head-scratching question.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, let’s get practical now for our viewers and HBR, I hope, stands for practical, useful, suggestions and inspiration. So, for our viewers who aren’t in classically geeky, say, startup culture or something, how can they apply the approaches that you’re championing at their own companies?

ANDREW MCAFEE: Here are a few things you can start doing tomorrow that are extremely geeky practices. And I think they will get some traction. When you’re in charge of your group or you’re a team member or you’re leading a team, if you say things like, that’s a good point.

I hadn’t thought of that, let’s go that way or I was wrong about, that that’s really good to know. You have just demonstrated openness and vulnerability instead of classic defensiveness. Now, that’s hard to do. We human beings are inherently defensive people.

We don’t like being shown to be wrong in public. It’s deeply uncomfortable. But if you model that behavior, it will start to spread. And I’ve seen geek leaders do that over and over. You can start to push decisions and responsibility down to a place that makes you uncomfortable and to get out of the, let me just run that by me first or, make sure I’m included on that– to try to get rid of the hard and soft bureaucracy that gets in the way.

I was talking to Sebastian Thrun, who’s an alpha geek and all kinds of things. And he said, one of the things I try to get my teams to do is to stop so much communicating. And he had this great image. He said, a team works on something. And then, they kind of run it up the flagpole.

And he said, the really natural tendency is for the people at every layer of the org chart to add something to that because they want to be part of the solution. They want to be part of this winning idea. And he said, by the time that idea gets back down to the originating team, it’s kind of unrecognizable.

Get out of that business. Again, this is uncomfortable stuff to do. But it’s a big step toward the Geek Way. And then, finally, you can start to say, well how are we going to make this decision? Can we agree on what evidence we’re going to look at to make this decision?

As opposed to saying, well, I’m the boss, I got it, or I got it right last time, so you should listen to me this time. All these other ways, we have to make decisions– credentials, hierarchy, charisma, excellent PowerPoint, all these things. Get out of that business and start asking for the consensus on how are we going to settle this argument, what evidence are we going to look at?

These are all super geeky practices you can start doing tomorrow.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, that’s great. I should have mentioned before, when you were in praise of Satya Nadella so he was our guest on this show. And if you want to see a really good interview that I did with Satya Nadella, go to YouTube, The New World of Work, HBR interview with Satya Nadella.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Just go listen to Nadella whenever you can. He’s got this wonderful, cheerful demeanor. He’s always got a smile on his face. And the amount of knowledge that he laid on me in one interview was fantastic. You see from the book, Adi, I had this amazing experience of getting to interview a lot of my favorite alpha geeks.  And I learned a ton from them. It’s the kind of thing that makes this geek very happy. So, they’re in the book. And I thank them.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, here’s another audience question. This is Laurie from North Carolina. And this is another very practical kind of question. How can organizations get leaders to unlearn the idea– who think that failure is bad? How do you–

ANDREW MCAFEE: I see we’re just about out of time.

ADI IGNATIUS: Nice try.

ANDREW MCAFEE: This is a super hard question. This is a super hard question. And I fall back on something that I learned from Clay Christensen– Adi, you know, the late, great scholar of management and organizations. One of the things Clay taught me is that managers are voracious consumers of theory.

And he said, don’t be afraid to tell them why this needs to change, what the principle, what the framework is. And he said, if you want to get people to change, there’s a kind of a tripod. There are three things you have to do over and over again until you’re absolutely exhausted.

He said, first of all, tell them a vivid story. We humans respond to narratives. Second of all, give them some evidence. Give them some numbers to show that it works. And then, third, give them a theory explain. Why it works. And you’ve just got to go through all three of those legs.

Why can’t we make decisions this way? I’m a pretty smart person. I reached this place on the org chart because of my excellent judgment. What do you mean, we should be relying a lot less on my judgment? Again, three-part answer to that question, keep iterating on it. It is not an easy process.

I think a lot of companies who get interested in what Silicon Valley does differently or might want to embrace the Geek Way are going to find it hard going because a lot of it is unnatural and uncomfortable. Challenging your boss in a meeting in most circumstances is uncomfortable until it becomes a norm, until it becomes what people around you expect.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, Andy. We’ve run a little bit long, so we’re going to cut you off here. I could talk all day with you about all these topics. And our audience is clearly into it and engaged. So, thank you very much for being on the show.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Adi, always a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

HANNAH BATES: That was Andy McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in conversation with HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius. He’s the author of the book, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results .

We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.

When you’re ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world’s top business and management experts, you’ll find it all at HBR.org.

This episode was produced by Julia Butler, Scott LaPierre, Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Video by Elie Honein. Design by Mikahla Dawson, Karen Player, and Kristen Petrillo. Ian Fox is our editor. Special thanks to Kelsey Hanson, Alex Kephart, Amy Poftak, Caitlin Amorin, Maureen Hoch, Nicole Smith, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.

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A Big Plot Twist at OpenAI

Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder at the artificial intelligence start-up and one of the world’s leading researchers, is out, and Sam Altman’s control looks firmer than ever.

By Andrew Ross Sorkin ,  Ravi Mattu ,  Bernhard Warner ,  Sarah Kessler ,  Michael J. de la Merced ,  Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni

Behind a big shake-up

A day after OpenAI announced major updates to its ChatGPT chatbot , the company said its chief scientist and co-founder was leaving.

There were signs that Ilya Sutskever would quit , six months after he helped lead the rebellion that briefly ousted Sam Altman as OpenAI’s C.E.O. (He hasn’t been spotted in the office since that episode.) But it also raises questions about the future of a leading developer of generative A.I.

“OpenAI would not exist without him and certainly was shaped by him,” Altman told The Times about Sutskever. It’s hard to understate Sutskever’s importance to OpenAI: He helped found it in 2015 along with Altman and others including Elon Musk, and his stature as a leading researcher in neural networks gave the fledgling company instant credibility.

But Sutskever’s presence at OpenAI may have become untenable. In November, when he was a board member, Sutskever teamed up with other directors to fire Altman, accusing him of not being “consistently candid in his communications.” After a slew of OpenAI employees resigned in protest, he had a change of heart, effectively stepping down from the board and supporting Altman’s return.

After Altman’s reinstatement, Sutskever has stayed quiet publicly — though he did spearhead the creation of a so-called Super Alignment team to help ensure that OpenAI’s products didn’t harm humanity. (Jan Leike, who ran that team with Sutskever, also resigned on Tuesday and will be replaced by another company co-founder, John Schulman.) Meanwhile, OpenAI had already effectively elevated Jakub Pachocki as chief scientist.

Sutskever’s exit is another sign that Altman is in the driver’s seat. While OpenAI is expanding its board after last year’s turmoil, Altman remains the company’s most prominent figure. (Pachocki and Schulman are regarded as his allies.)

While Sutskever has worried about A.I.’s apocalyptic potential, his statement on Tuesday said he was confident that the company would build artificial general intelligence — A.I. as sophisticated as the human brain — “that is both safe and beneficial.” That’s in some ways a validation of Altman’s approach of speedy innovations and commercialization.

Where will Sutskever go? “I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time,” Sutskever said in his statement, without providing details.

One possibility some have raised is joining Musk, who’s credited with recruiting Sutskever to OpenAI . Musk has defended Sutskever’s initial effort to oust Altman, and in December he offered his former colleague a job at his xAI start-up .

That said, Sutskever co-signed an OpenAI blog post that rebutted Musk’s breach-of-contract lawsuit against the company, suggesting a break between the two.

In other A.I. news: A bipartisan group of senators has called for the U.S. to spend $32 billion to bolster American leadership in the tech but held back on revealing plans on how to regulate it.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

The S&P 500 approaches a record as investors await key inflation data. The Consumer Price Index report comes out at 8:30 a.m. Eastern (as does retail sales data), with economists forecasting that inflation moderated slightly last month . A hotter-than-expected report could set up a volatile trading day given warnings by Jay Powell, the Fed chair, that stubborn inflation may force the central bank to keep interest rates higher for longer .

Boeing violated a settlement over the 737 Max, the Justice Department says. The agency accused the plane maker of failing to “design, implement and enforce” a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of U.S. fraud laws in its operations, a key condition of a 2021 settlement deal struck after two deadly 737 Max plane crashes. Boeing said it believed that it was in compliance with the agreement.

Vanguard names a former BlackRock executive as its new C.E.O . Salim Ramji, who ran BlackRock’s exchange-traded funds business, will succeed Tim Buckley , who is set to retire from the $9.3 trillion fund manager. Ramji was once considered a potential successor to BlackRock’s chief executive, Larry Fink.

As A.I. search ramps up, publishers worry

Search is a cash cow for Google’s parent, Alphabet, helping propel the company into a $2 trillion giant. This dominance is at the heart of one of the biggest antitrust cases in a generation , and the company’s lock on the market has long bedeviled web publishers’ ad-focused business model.

Artificial intelligence is now being added to the mix.

Google this week will make a significant upgrade to its $175 billion search business. It’s introducing a product called AI Overviews that uses generative A.I. to supercharge its search results. The move comes as the Big Tech arms race to commercialize the technology — especially through search — goes into overdrive.

Publishers are worried about the fallout. AI Overviews will give more prominence to A.I.-generated results, essentially pushing website links farther down the page, and potentially depriving those non-Google sites of traffic. “Some people are going to just get bludgeoned,” Ross Hudgens, the C.E.O. of Siege Media, a search engine optimization consulting company, told The Washington Post .

One much-cited statistic: Tweaks like this could cut search engine traffic by 25 percent by 2026.

Google has downplayed the concerns. Liz Reid, its vice president of search, wrote in a blog post that so far it had found that “the links included in A.I. Overviews get more clicks.” The company did not say, however, whether the change would translate to more traffic for publishers, The Times’s Kevin Roose notes .

Does search needs news? A recent study by researchers at the University of Houston and Columbia University estimated that Google and Meta owed U.S. publishers up to $13.9 billion a year for the value that they bring to search results.

Google has pushed back against the study , arguing that less than 2 percent of all searches are news-related and that the company already sends billions of visitors to publishers’ sites.

A.I. has divided a media industry that’s making huge job cuts and retrenching. Executives and journalists are fearful that the technology could lead to the mass theft of their work. Some publishers have struck licensing agreements with Big Tech, as The Associated Press did with OpenAI.

By contrast, The New York Times and a number of other newspapers, including The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune, have sued OpenAI and Microsoft , accusing them of copyright infringement.

The F.D.I.C. chair faces a fight on the Hill

The embattled chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation can expect a tough ride on Capitol Hill on Wednesday in his first public testimony since a scathing report revealed that sexual harassment and discrimination ran rampant at the agency.

Martin Gruenberg , has rejected calls to quit, but the pressure isn’t letting up on a regulator that’s also facing off with big banks over a proposed new capital requirement rule.

Gruenberg has apologized, but doesn’t seem ready to fall on his sword. Cleary Gottlieb, a law firm, last week lifted the lid on a toxic culture at the agency. The firm was hired after a Wall Street Journal investigation that detailed reports of senior bank examiners and other officials sending junior female employees nude pictures of themselves and taking them to brothels on work trips. Gruenberg plans to say that he took “full responsibility” and was “committed to addressing these issues,” according to prepared remarks.

Top Republicans want him out. Gruenberg, a Democrat, has led the agency for 10 of the past 13 years, and President Biden reappointed him for a second term in 2022. Representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican and the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, wants him to go .

But Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the committee, and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee before which Gruenberg will testify on Thursday, back him.

New banking rules may be one reason for the split. The so-called Basel III endgame rules would force lenders with more than $100 billion in assets to set aside more capital to deal with any shocks, like the regional banking crisis last year. Banks say it would limit competition and crimp their ability to lend; Republicans also oppose the rule.

Removing Gruenberg would mean that Travis Hill, a Republican and the F.D.I.C.’s vice chair, would step up, and Democrats would lose their majority.

Gruenberg can likely thank politics for him keeping his job — for now. “I think it would be very difficult for the C.E.O. of a public company to survive this scandal, particularly because it appears to be pretty widespread and longstanding,” Jonathan Macey, a professor of corporate law at Yale, told The Times.

A legal fight to take on hate

The fights that have erupted over the war in Gaza have forced some in corporate America to reassess their own relationships with universities and their role in a national conversation. Some have withheld donations from Ivy League schools and others have attacked the curriculum .

The law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is taking a different approach by creating a center to tackle discrimination through litigation.

The Center to Combat Hate came together in the past six months. It was officially introduced last night at an event at Paul Weiss’s office in Midtown. The center will partner with civil right organizations and educational institutions to pursue impact litigation, lawsuits that aim to influence social policy, with a focus on civil rights.

The center will be led by two partners. Daniel Kramer became involved in civil rights litigation after his brother-in-law was killed in an attack at the Tree of Life synagogue. He was part of the team hired by the District of Columbia attorney general to file a civil lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Karen Dunn, a chair of the firm’s litigation department, led the team of lawyers that won $25 million in a civil lawsuit filed against the promoters of the Charlottesville, Va., white power rally . Dunn is also well-known in Democratic politics for being part of debate preparation teams for President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Many firms are looking to stay out of political fights. But Kramer was confident that Paul Weiss’s clients wouldn’t be put off. “We don’t have any clients that are pro-hate,” Kramer told DealBook, when asked whether he was worried the center would be divisive.

In other news: Harvard reached a deal with student protesters to clear their encampment.

THE SPEED READ

The real estate mogul Frank McCourt, who has called for a more decentralized and privacy-focused internet, said he planned to bid for TikTok’s U.S. business . (Semafor)

The restaurant chain Red Lobster is said to be preparing to file for bankruptcy protection as soon as next week to cut its debt load. (WSJ)

TikTok creators sued the U.S. government over a newly enacted law that would force the video app’s divestment by its Chinese parent. The group’s legal fees are being paid by the company. (NYT)

Jacob Helberg, an adviser to tech C.E.O.s and the husband of the prominent investor Keith Rabois, has donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s re-election efforts. (WaPo)

Best of the rest

“Walmart’s Reign as America’s Biggest Retailer Is Under Threat” (WSJ)

To celebrate Mark Zuckerberg’s birthday, the Meta C.E.O.’s wife recreated key locations like his college dorm room — with a guest appearance by the fellow Harvard dropout Bill Gates. (@Zuck)

We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected] .

An earlier version of this article misstated the nature of the Justice Department's complaint against Boeing. It is for failures related to a compliance and ethics program, not only an ethics program.

How we handle corrections

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder and editor at large of DealBook. He is a co-anchor of CNBC’s "Squawk Box" and the author of “Too Big to Fail.” He is also a co-creator of the Showtime drama series "Billions." More about Andrew Ross Sorkin

Ravi Mattu is the managing editor of DealBook, based in London. He joined The New York Times in 2022 from the Financial Times, where he held a number of senior roles in Hong Kong and London. More about Ravi Mattu

Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets. More about Bernhard Warner

Sarah Kessler is an editor for the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business and how workplaces are changing. More about Sarah Kessler

Michael de la Merced joined The Times as a reporter in 2006, covering Wall Street and finance. Among his main coverage areas are mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies and the private equity industry. More about Michael J. de la Merced

Lauren Hirsch joined The Times from CNBC in 2020, covering deals and the biggest stories on Wall Street. More about Lauren Hirsch

Ephrat Livni reports from Washington on the intersection of business and policy for DealBook. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Quartz, covering law and politics, and has practiced law in the public and private sectors.   More about Ephrat Livni

How To Do Business on Easy Mode in 2024 The Sweaty Startup

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These are the 3 things that you need to do business on easy mode in 2024. An audience, capital, and talent. If you have these 3 things, you can basically build anything you want faster and easier than ever before.   Thanks for listening!   Like this episode? I think you’ll love my newsletter. I write a long form essay on how to build wealth and succeed to 250K+ readers each week. Subscribe here: www.nickhuber.com/newsletter   Want to see all of my companies? Click here: www.nickhuber.com/portfolio   Want more of my content?  I’m @SweatyStartup everywhere: Say hello on X: www.x.com/sweatystartup LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sweatystartup Instagram: www.instagram.com/sweatystartup TikTok: www.tiktok.com/sweatystartup Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nick-huber-show/id1576120606 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7L5zQxijU81xq4SbVYNs81 Want my team and I to help sell your business? Click here: www.nickhuber.com/sell Want to buy a business that my brokerage represents? Click here: www.nickhuber.com/buy   Are you an accredited investor and interested in learning more about potential deals? Fill out this form: www.nickhuber.com/invest   Want my free PDF on how to analyze a self-storage facility? Click here: https://sweatystartup.ck.page/79046c9b03   Want to hire me as a consultant? Click here: https://sweatystartup.com/storage   Here are the links to my businesses: usiness Brokerage - https://nickhuber.com/ Personal Brand - https://sweatystartup.com/ Self Storage - https://boltstorage.com/ Bold SEO - https://boldseo.com/ Insurance - https://titanrisk.com/ Recruiting - https://recruitjet.com/ Landing Page / Web Development - https://webrun.com/ Overseas Staffing - https://supportshepherd.com/ Debt and Equity - https://bluekeycapital.com/ Tax Credit - https://taxcredithunter.com/ Cost Segregation - https://recostseg.com/ Performance Marketing - https://adrhino.com/ Pest control - https://spidexx.com/   That's all for now.   Thank you again for joining me on my Sweaty Startup journey.   Onward and upward! -Nick

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I moved to the US for a tech job. Here's 3 observations I have about America's work culture.

• Yaroslav Zubko moved to New York in 2017 after building up his tech career in Ukraine. 
• He's noticed key differences in the US and Ukraine tech work culture. 
• Zubko said people in the US overwork more and place more emphasis on idea generation.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 34-year-old Yaroslav Zubko, who lives in New York, about his experience moving to the US for a tech job. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2015, I traveled to New York for a two-week business trip. It was the first time I'd ever left Ukraine , where I grew up. I looked at all the huge buildings in the city and couldn't believe my eyes. New York was even more impressive than it seemed in the movies.

I made a promise to myself that I was going to move to New York .

In 2016, I was offered a role as a director of product design at a New York tech startup called UpTop. I hadn't been actively applying for US jobs at the time. They supported me in getting a visa, and I moved to NYC in June 2017.

Moving to America has been the biggest adventure of my life. But the tech culture is very different in the US than in Ukraine. I've had to navigate these differences and assimilate into the work culture.

How I got a job at a New York tech startup

I studied business law at college in Ukraine but decided I wanted to follow my passion and become a designer. I started studying graphic design online and taught myself how to use design tools. I landed my first job as a web designer in 2012, working for a sporting goods website.

I worked at three other companies in Ukraine before moving to the US, doing UX and product design. I felt that every role I had added to my arsenal of skills. My last role before moving was as a product designer for SoftServe, a tech giant in the country.

When UpTop gave me an offer, we discussed visa options for my move to the US. Because I didn't have a formal education in the tech field, I wasn't eligible for a H1-B visa . The company decided to apply for an O-1 visa for "extraordinary" professionals on my behalf.

They hired an immigration attorney who talked me through the documents I'd need for the process. I gathered proof of my professional competency, including awards, media interviews, and letters from previous managers. I launched my own design project, Interaction Library, in 2016, which had already gotten attention online. I think this also helped me secure the visa.

I worked at UpTop for around a year and then moved to Tinder in 2018 as a lead product designer. I left in September 2019 and started focusing on my own design agency, Zubko Studio.

People are more attached to their work in the US

The US is a great place to work with many opportunities. I love that it's progressive and more culturally diverse than Ukraine. When I arrived, I wanted to immerse myself in the community and get a feel for living here.

Related stories

In Ukraine, the tech sector is more consultancy-based. Money comes from overseas, from companies who outsource their IT needs to us. In the US, I feel that big companies are developing original ideas and patents, while in Ukraine, the biggest tech companies provide consultancy services.

I feel that people are much more attached to their work in the US because they are working on their ideas. In Ukraine, I worked with overseas clients, executing tasks for other companies and people.

At SoftServe, I was placed on a project for Deloitte. They had established brand guidelines, which presented limitations for me as a designer. I couldn't create many new user interface elements from scratch and had to use the ones from the guide. I felt less ownership over the work.

Meanwhile, I've worked on projects and products I've felt more ownership of in the US. As a product design director at UpTop, I could choose which features to research and test and decide how a certain feature would be implemented.

I loved the responsibility, but it's been much more challenging not to take my work home. There were nights when I couldn't fall asleep because I was thinking about ideas for the product.

In the US, ideas and pitching are prioritized over execution

In Ukraine, my work was about execution. Because my work was in consulting, ideas came from our clients, and I focused on implementing them.

In the US, ideation is more important than execution in the startup world, particularly because the tech scene is more saturated. Big ideas sell. They're how you sell to investors and raise funds. I think this is a positive difference — a great product should start with an idea, which you test over and over to make sure it's worth investing in.

At Tinder, most of my time was spent on idea generation and testing. I animated and presented over 20 versions of Tinder's app, and used A/B testing methods to understand what ideas were worth implementing. I worked on several products that made the user experience more seamless, including Tinder U, Tinder Gold Home, and Super Boost.

People skills are highly valued in US companies. Having spoken in Russian and Ukrainian at my previous jobs in Ukraine, I struggled with self-expression and making jokes in English when I moved to New York .

I initially found it challenging to think about structuring my thoughts when selling my ideas. It would take me a while to think of the right combination of words and I felt people around me didn't have the time to think through my convoluted explanations.

People overwork in the US

In general, I think efficiency is put on a pedestal in American culture. People value working as much as possible and making as much money as possible.

When I first joined Tinder, I would stay late in the office to finish some of my work. I witnessed people staying until 9 or 10 p.m. to finish their commitments. In Ukraine, there were times when the office would be empty at 4 or 5 p.m. Sticking to my hours and going home whenever I wanted felt easier. But the projects were more fun in the US, so I was more motivated to work longer hours.

I plan to live between the US and Ukraine when the war is over

Ukraine will always be my home, but I'm staying in the US for the foreseeable future. I wasn't in Ukraine when Russia's invasion happened in 2022. Growing up, I had nightmares about war, but I was still taken aback when it happened.

After the war, I see myself returning to Ukraine and living between the US and Ukraine. I'd like to use my skills to help rebuild the country, like a phoenix coming from the ashes.

Watch: Russian and Ukrainian restaurants in New York City get tangled in the war

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