A big problem with young companies is that aside from some very rough financial guidelines it is often very difficult to gauge whether the venture will or won’t be successful. Many investment houses have employed multi-metric project valuation and assessment approaches and at present there is ample work being done at top business universities in order to augment the early stage venture valuation process. One such a methodology is the Bell- Mason Framework.

Developed over the past 20 years, the Bell-Mason framework has been fine tuned to do just that, assess ventures utilizing 12 dimensions and 5 stages of company growth.

Fundamentally, the five stages of company growth are time oriented are consist of the following. Concept, Seed, Alpha, Beta, and Market Calibration, and are meant to chronicle the evolution of a venture over time.

Each one of these five stages is then applied to a specific dimension that is in itself grouped into four areas, Product, Market, Finance, People.

What allows you then to assess each dimension individually is a series of yes no questions, for example let’s look at team.

Is the team comprised of people knowledgable to their sector? Yes/No
Does the team work efficiently and do the team members compliment one another? Yes / No

By asking yourself a series of these types of questions, and the more the merrier, you’ll effectively be able to gauge your readiness, and stage where your company is and what you should apply resources to in order to fix / strengthen your business as a whole.

Ideally, what you can also do is map a process utilizing this framework – it will tell you in addition to any holes you may have in your business model whether or not it’s a good idea to continue with the project or to kill it. For a much more in depth explanation of this framework – be sure to grab the PDF by Ben Livson.

For more info on Bell Mason, and to access an academic PDF by Ben Livson on Startup valuation, click here