Business Plans Made Easy: Feasibility Study 101

We do a 20- to 30-minute discovery call. We have a questionnaire that's not dissimilar from our business plan questionnaire. From there, we look for all the things that SBA is requiring to be in a feasibility study, which is economic feasibility, management feasibility, production feasibility, operational feasibility. These are the things that we're looking at and assessing. We are looking through databases. We are making calls. Like in the instance of a self-storage, we may be calling around to all the competitors in the area and finding out,

"Hey, are you on a waitlist? Do you have availability? What units do you have available?"

We do secret shops like that just to see how all the competitors are doing sometimes.

If it's a business-to-consumer sort of business that we're doing the feasibility study for, we do some surveying and some sampling and find out the consumer sentiment in that particular area for this particular product. We have good luck with that. There are different ways that we validate the information that we're given. Many business-to-business feasibility studies are affirmed by contracts or written agreements, written commitments to our clients for their product or service.