Translate(the business was not started - yet!), Robert & Valerie Hicks
The start of this journey can be filled with many pitfalls and disappointments but with the proper guidance, many of the mitigating risks can be reduced or avoided. We felt that having someone of our mentor's caliber was invaluable to us. Based on our meeting we know now that having a unique, differentiating category design is very essential in conditioning the market to welcome our passion for the product we intend to offer.
We are not sure as to the time needed to complete the final product at this time. As we continue working on the product, our mentor's words to us to define the uniqueness will be at the forefront throughout the entire process.
We appreciate our mentor for taking the time to share his business experiences and insight during our mentoring session. The meeting gave us a great deal to consider as an approach to creating a unique product and to strategize it in the marketplace.
We wanted to explore what happens after we sell our 27.5-year-old business, so we came to SCORE with an idea for a new enterprise we'd been hatching for a while.
We worked through the "Simple Steps for Starting a Business" assessment that was provided to us. Upon completion, our score of five was certainly not enough in the way of personal skills and capabilities to continue forward with this idea. Realistically, the right decision is not to proceed to start another business at this time.
We have decided to pursue this project as a hobby. Our plans are to continue to rely on family, friends, and focus groups to test and finalize the product. Once the product is developed another decision assessment to go or no-go will be done.
