BUSI 4002 Week 11 Complete Venture Report Example

Keen Edge Mobile Sharpening: A Venture Report That Carries One Idea From a Four-Way Screen Through a Feasibility Pilot, a Market Section, a $50,900 Cost Estimate, a Ten-Line Risk Register and a $63,800 Funding Plan, With Every Number Reconciled

Student Name

Walden University

BUSI 4002: Small Business Ventures

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Keen Edge Mobile Sharpening: A Venture Report That Carries One Idea From a Four-Way Screen Through a Feasibility Pilot, a Market Section, a $50,900 Cost Estimate, a Ten-Line Risk Register and a $63,800 Funding Plan, With Every Number Reconciled

Executive Summary

Keen Edge Mobile Sharpening will be a one-van service in Des Moines that sharpens restaurant cooks' own knives on site every week and fills its afternoons with salon shears and landscapers' mower blades. It was chosen from four ideas because it fits the founder's nine years in professional kitchens and brings recurring revenue. A six-week pilot produced ten restaurants paying $45 a week. The plan projects about $106,800 of first-year revenue against about $61,000 of operating costs and loan payments, leaving about $45,800 before depreciation and taxes. The $63,800 it needs will come from three places: the founder ($20,000), a community lender ($35,000) and an equipment lender ($8,800). The largest risks are the van, the founder's hands and an untested salon estimate, and each has a response in place. The venture is feasible on the evidence, with a narrow but positive margin.

How the Idea Was Chosen

Four ideas were scored against five weighted criteria: evidence of paying demand, startup cost, skill fit, recurring revenue and competition. Mobile sharpening led at 4.20 of a possible 5; pet waste removal followed at 3.50, then pressure washing at 2.85 and a shoe repair kiosk, which failed the demand threshold. The margin came from skill fit and demand evidence. An opportunity belongs to whoever holds the knowledge to see it (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), and here that knowledge is nine years on a kitchen line.

The Concept

Keen Edge serves chefs and kitchen managers at independent restaurants whose cooks lose time and take cuts with dull knives. The offer is weekly on-site sharpening of the cooks' own knives by someone who has worked the line, unlike exchange firms that replace a kitchen's knives with rentals.

Feasibility: The Condition That Mattered Most

The venture depends on about thirty independent restaurants paying roughly $45 a week within six months. Of 26 chefs interviewed, 4 committed to a paid trial and 9 said they would consider it, suggesting between about 33 and 74 possible accounts among the 214 nearby independent restaurants. Because stated intentions often overstate purchases (Morwitz et al., 2007), the test was settled by behavior: in a car-based trial lasting six weeks, 11 restaurants paid and 10 stayed, clearing the threshold of ten set in advance.

The Market

The first-year revenue estimate comes from three groups.

Table 1

Reconciled First-Year Revenue

Polk County establishment figures: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Everything else in the table is a planning assumption for a composite venture.

Polk County had 391 full-service restaurants, 167 beauty salons, 16 barbershops and 177 landscaping businesses in 2024 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). The plan needs about 84 accounts across all three, a small share of each pool. The restaurant figure rests on the pilot; the landscaping figure on counts and five conversations; the salon figure on advertised prices only, which makes it the weakest.

Costs

Startup outlays total $50,900, nearly four-fifths of it for the van, buildout and equipment. Recurring costs are about $4,105 a month, including a $2,500 owner's wage. The risk register added a $600 backup kit and about $35 a month of disability coverage. Kahneman and Lovallo (1993) warned that planners underestimate costs, which is why the $12,300 three-month cushion sits inside the funding total.

Risks

Ten risks were rated by likelihood and impact. The three highest were the van out of service, an injury to the founder's hands and salon accounts falling well short. Each has a trigger and a response decided in advance: a roadside plan and a portable kit, gloves with disability coverage and a backup sharpener, and twenty salon visits before launch with a fallback to landscapers and hardware stores. The register also tracks the founder's weekly hours, since capacity is the limit a one-person business reaches first.

Funding

Table 2

Reconciled Funding and First-Year Cash

Figures reconcile with the cost estimate and funding section; loan terms are planning assumptions.

The funding mix relies on owner equity and debt rather than outside investors, which Robb and Robinson (2014) found is typical of new firms. The loans will carry personal guarantees, so the founder's savings and credit are both at risk.

The Founder

The report rests heavily on one person, and that is both its strength and its weakness. Nine years in professional kitchens give the founder credibility with chefs, knowledge of how knives are used and abused, and a network that produced the pilot's first accounts. The same concentration makes the founder's time, health and judgment the venture's most important resources, and the hardest ones to replace if something goes wrong in the first year. The risk register's responses to injury and overload exist for that reason.

Checking That the Numbers Agree

Every figure in this report was checked against the section it came from, and where a later section revised an earlier figure, the later figure is used throughout. The revenue total, $106,800, matches the market section. The startup total of $50,900 plus the $600 kit and the $12,300 reserve equals the $63,800 requirement. Monthly costs of $4,105, plus about $940 in loan payments and $35 for disability coverage, equal about $5,080 a month, or about $60,960 a year, consistent with the $49,260 and $11,700 in the funding table.

Limits and Next Steps

The plan rests on a short pilot with restaurants that knew the founder, an untested salon estimate and loan terms that are not yet offers. Before buying the van, the founder will visit twenty salons, obtain two loan offers and bind an insurance policy. Delmar and Shane (2003) found that new ventures whose founders planned before acting were less likely to be abandoned; this report is meant to be updated with each of those results rather than filed, and the next version will replace every assumption it can with an invoice, an offer or a signed account.

References

Delmar, F., & Shane, S. (2003). Does business planning facilitate the development of new ventures? Strategic Management Journal, 24(12), 1165-1185. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.349

Kahneman, D., & Lovallo, D. (1993). Timid choices and bold forecasts: A cognitive perspective on risk taking. Management Science, 39(1), 17-31. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.39.1.17

Morwitz, V. G., Steckel, J. H., & Gupta, A. (2007). When do purchase intentions predict sales? International Journal of Forecasting, 23(3), 347-364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2007.05.015

Robb, A. M., & Robinson, D. T. (2014). The capital structure decisions of new firms. Review of Financial Studies, 27(1), 153-179. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhs072

Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. (2000). The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 217-226. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.2791611

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages: 2024 annual averages, Polk County, Iowa [Data set]. https://www.bls.gov/cew/