New Business Venture or Product Introduction Team
Many companies gather high-level employees and form a “New Business Venture or New Product Introduction” team. This team is leading a startup or responsible for launching a new product or service in current and new markets.
The team is often a collection of individuals with readily available resources and no accountability. For them, expenses are part of corporate overhead, and revenue is an afterthought. All this while the team pretends to develop a new product to enter a new market.
The whole endeavor is far removed from the realities of starting and operating a new business or introducing a new product. Revenue generates cash inflow. The expense is a cash outflow. Either make cash inflow higher than the cash outflow, or your venture is dead.
Corporate-financed New Business Ventures or New Product Introduction teams ignore this fact. Sitting in the womb of the company, they have no skin in the game. There is no urgency to capture market share, turn a profit and be an actual, sustainable high-growth enterprise. Do not be a corporate startup. Start an actual business. Worry about bills, payroll, customers, and profit from day one.
As an executive coach, I have heard some say, “Oh! Let’s make a perfect product internally (to increase the company’s value – which is a myth). We will worry about making it a major market success and profitable later.” These people are delusional. A venture without a clear path to capturing a meaningful share of a new market and making a profit isn’t a business. It is a daydream.
The leader must set the goal and direction. Challenge the team to create its path to get there. The leader should strive to remove internal or external barriers from the team’s path. What are some of these barriers? Organizational fiefdoms controlling access to and use of resources such as technology are among them.
Give the NPI team a certain level of freedom to outsource the needed capabilities, for example, technical development. Or, recommend creating a Joint Venture with an external entity to get to the market in the right way quickly.
I would love to hear about your experiences! Please forward it to those who could benefit from my newsletter. Please share your stories at satishmehtausa@gmail.com. They can subscribe to it here or by clicking on the link below.
Thank you,
Satish Mehta
Author, Speaker, Coach
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