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Table 5.3 Completed decision balance sheet for starting your own venture 5 : STEP THREE – EVALUATING AND SELECTING IDEAS

Reasons to start your own venture Reasons not to start your own venture

Negative elements about current Positive elements about current
employment status: employment status:
G Company won’t modify product to G Company’s profitability is stable, job

address recurrent customer prospects appear secure
complaints G Company health scheme includes
G Low staff turnover contributes to
corporate unwillingness to experiment subsidised cover for family
with new ideas G Generous pension scheme

Benefits of starting your own venture: Disadvantages of starting your own venture:
G Exploit your insight of how product G Need for regular guaranteed income

failure could be overcome by range of to support two teenage children, plus
value-added products two dependent parents
G Strong personal relationship with G No experience of operating within
major customer experiencing product small business sector
faults G Aggressive price-cutting promotion
G Could team up with complementary and legal challenge mounted by
business skills of partner who has current employer against previous
recently been made redundant colleague who went it alone
G You’ve always wanted the freedom of
being your own boss

Then score each entry using a 10-point scale, where a score of 1 is
unimportant, while a score of 10 represents maximum importance. Add
up the scores in favour of starting your own venture and compare them
with those against. How clear-cut is the outcome? Is the outcome what
you had intuitively expected? If not, why not?

A variant on the decision balance sheet described above analyses
options in terms of four categories of expected consequences,
namely:

G Tangible gains and losses for self

G Tangible gains and losses for significant others

G Self-approval or self-disapproval

G Social approval or disapproval.

Amazon.com – ‘minimising regret’ The relevance of this technique
can be illustrated by Jeff Bezos, whose consideration of whether or not
to establish Amazon.com was strongly influenced by what he called
‘regret minimisation’.

He described the process during a revealing question and answer
session at the Commonwealth Club of California as follows: