After you have selected a match of a business idea and a business opportunity that you consider the best fit both in terms of your interests, knowledge, skills, experiences, and capabilities on one hand and the market potentials on the other, the next thing you should do is to carry out a feasibility study.
THE NEED FOR A FEASIBILITY STUDY
At the point of selecting your business opportunity, you still might not be certain enough about how real the opportunity is or, indeed, whether the opportunity is solid enough to justify long-term profitable investment in it.
Even if you are sure of these, you still have to face the challenge of convincing prospective investors in your a proposed business that your project can be developed
into a growth business that can give them the desired return on their investments.
For these and other important reasons, there is the need for you to carry out a sound feasibility study on your proposed businesses, A feasibility study is like a research survey that must satisfy the criteria for a good research study. In other words, it must come up with valid conclusions that are derived from sound methods that are valid and reliable.
REQUIREMENTS FOR CARRYING OUT A FEASIBILITY STUDY
Several skills, some of which you already possess, and some of which can be purchased’, are needed to be able to carry out a sound feasibility study, These include economic skills, marketing skills, financial skills, technical skills, personnel skills.
For example, economic skills are important to be able to properly gauge the trends occurring in the economy. Marketing skills are needed to be able to do sound market analyses. And financial skills are necessary for sound financial planning and analyses and in the preparation of financial statements such as income statements, balance sheets, and funds flow statements.
Types of the feasibility study
The type of data needed for feasibility studies are as follow below
The two main types of data needed for a feasibility study are explained below
Primary data are original data collected first-hand on the specific project or business that is being proposed. The collection of primary data might require several studies in various areas, E.g a market study that is specific to a product, service, or market segment, aimed at generating the level of demand, consumers’ habits, the intensity of competition, market coverage, etc. It might also involve a study to determine various types of costs, e.g., costs of raw materials, production, distribution, manpower, etc.
Capacity studies or studies on technology might also be needed, and so on. Primary data can be collected on virtually any aspect of a planned business or project.
- Different techniques or tools are available for generating primary data. Briefly, these include:
(a) Personal Interviews
The personal interview is a very important method of gathering primary data. It consists of face-to-face interactions with the respondents, e.g., customers, wholesalers, retailers, etc. in order to collect factual
information about them. Such information may include sex, education, income, marital status, preferences, reasons for buying, habits, political preferences, religious preferences, and so on. The personal interview technique may be accomplished in part by a carefully constructed questionnaire, which is a schedule of carefully constructed questions intended to be put to the respondents for their reactions. Personal interviews can be used to obtain a great deal of information.
(b) Telephone Surveys
The telephone survey is a technique in which the researcher uses the telephone to gather the desired information or data from respondents. There is no face-to-face interaction as in personal interviews; only voice interactions between the researcher and the respondents. It is useful, especially where the respondents may not be easily reached physically. It’s a major drawback, however, is the inability to obtain detailed information with it.
(c) Mail Questionnaires
A mail questionnaire consists of a list of carefully worded and printed questions that is mailed to respondents and asking them to answer them and returning them to you by return mail. The questions pertain to what you wish to learn about them. This technique has a low response rate among other drawbacks, which it suffers.
(c) Observations
Observation is another technique that can be used to collect primary data. It consists of the researcher actually viewing a situation, people, or events in which he is interested, and recording what he actually sees. Observation can be performed from different perspectives, depending on whether the observer participates in the situation or event being observed or be not.
However, all observational methods, whether the researcher actually participates in what is being observed or not, are inferential, and such. inferences may not necessarily be correct. This is one of the key weaknesses of the method.
These are data that already exist and that have been collected for some purpose other than the one at hand, It is advisable to explore secondary sources of data sufficiently before embarking upon a primary search. Some of the advantages of secondary data include economy, relative ease of collection, provision of information that may not be easily obtainable through primary methods, amongst others.
On the other hand, some of the disadvantages of secondary data include the fact that they may not be readily suitable to the project at hand, and that they may be from doubtful sources and of doubtful accuracy, etc. You should thoroughly evaluate all the secondary data that you can collect with a view to identifying and isolating those that you consider relevant and useful to the feasibility study that you are
conducting, feasibility study sample pdf can actually be download from the internet if you need one for a review or project
