Week 5 Reading Reflection

Hey guys,

This post will be talking about this week's reading reflection coming our Entrepreneurship book written by Donald F. Kuratko. This specific reading covers Ch.9 titled "Assessment of Entrepreneurial Opportunities" which I believed to be an extremely interesting chapter.

One of the things that surprised me the most in this reading was the fact that there are nearly 600,000 new start-ups a year in the United States, which equates to 1,500 new start-ups per day! The scary thing is that only a very small percentage of these start-ups actually make it. I was also surprised about the percentage of business that said lack of internal financial management and lack of market knowledge accounted for so many of business problems. I feel that if you are going to start a new venture, these are two things that can absolutely not fail in order to be successful.

One part of the reading that was kind of confusing to me was the section that explained the comprehensive feasibility approach. Figure 6.2 was extremely confusing because I did not really know what kind of relationships or progression the chart was trying to show.

Two questions that I would ask the author:

1. If your venture does not have a high degree of "uniqueness", how can you compensate in other areas to make up for this?

2. What part of the pre-start up phase, when proper done, will provide the best foundation for success?

Once again, there was nothing I did not agree with. Kuratko is great at backing up everything he says with statistics, facts, and logic that makes it hard to disagree with the things that he is saying. Also, he comes from a pretty objective approach, making it mostly unbiased.

Until next time,

-Bryce