Before moving ahead with your social business, consider your critical success factors.
What are the things that absolutely must be in place? Also, think about potential risks and how you can keep them from harming your enterprise.
Critical success factors for your social enterprise
The critical success factors of your social business include a range of considerations. For example, is the project dependent upon the acquisition of premises? Is there a particular contract that must be in place? Achieving these goals is a priority, so you should put together a plan.
If there are several critical success factors, how do they relate to each other? What is their sequence? For example, you may find a conundrum such as a lease agreement which requires an incorporated business, but incorporating before all the pieces are in place could be a costly mistake. How will you handle that?
Social business risk analysis
People who read your feasibility study will be looking for evidence that you have considered and taken steps to mitigate against risks. There are various ways you could do this, but at this stage a SWOT analysis would probably be appropriate. To do this, get the steering group to list all the project’s:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
Once you are satisfied that the lists are complete, consider ways to eliminate, reduce or minimise the weaknesses and threats.
Finally, define your contingency plans and exit strategies.
For each of the things that could go wrong, what would you do if it did? How could you scale down or close down without risking what you and others have invested?
List the critical factors and potential risks for your social business using our template:
