Before starting your business, you will do well to do a personal value analysis.
Personal values represent your philosophy, guiding principles, outlook and aspirations for your prospective business. These are non-monetary values. They indicate your personal attitudes towards the business. They also represent the kind of satisfaction you like to give to your clients, employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders as well as for yourself.
In the course of analyzing your personal values towards a proposed business, ask yourself these questions:
- What are my guiding principles in business?
- How do I expect to satisfy my customers?
The answer to these questions may be any of the following:
- High quality, high price
- High quality, medium price
- High quality, low price
- Medium quality, high price
- Medium quality, medium price
- Medium quality, low price
- Low quality, high price
- Low quality, medium price
- Low quality, low price
Let’s say, you want to open a restaurant. You have to decide what kind of restaurant it will be: A fastfood restaurant? Or a fine dining restaurant? Will it focus on a particular type of food such as chicken, hamburger, or vegetarian food? Or specialize in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Korean, Italian or Filipino dishes? Who are the target clients? What kind of satisfaction will it give to customers?
In a fastfood establishment, food is served within five minutes or less. In one restaurant, customers are entertained with live bands playing onstage. In another, cooks, waiters and guards serenade you while you eat. How different will your restaurant be from those currently in operation?
Personal value analysis should answer questions of strategic importance because they specify what you, the owner, want to do with your business. Personal values can affect the policies of the company in setting quality standards for the products and services to offer your customers.
From: Introduction to Entrepreneurship, published by SERDEF and UP ISSI, 2007.