Understanding our Risks

As with any start-up venture, there are a wide variety of risks that we could encounter. The key to managing these risks is to understand the possibility for them to occur and plan carefully as to how we would deal with each risk should it arise. There are many different types of risks that we could face including legal, financial, technological, people, market and systemic risks.

For FREDsense Technologies, we foresee that key risks will be in the legal category, surrounding the regulatory landscape. As our product is designed to meet a growing market need in Alberta surrounding monitoring in the oil sands industry, successful penetration of our market will involve gaining the necessary approval for use of our product in mandated monitoring. This poses a significant risk as should we not be able to obtain this regulatory approval, we will need to identify an alternative route to market. Additionally, as a tech-based company, financial hurdles are likely to also be significant for us as we will require a significant amount of capitol in order to complete the Research and Development. We will need to carefully plan how we will compete this phase of or project using limited funds.

Risk Factor Analysis

In order to start designing a comprehensive strategy to minimize our potential risks, we have done a risk factor analysis. We have identified some of the key risks that our start up could face as well as the type of risk and likelihood of occurring for each. We then came up with possible mitigation strategies and their relative cost. Although this likely does not cover all of the possible risks that we could face, starting our risk assessment early will hopefully help us avoid making crucial mistakes.

SWOT Analysis

In order to better understand our position in relation to risk, we performed a SWOT analysis. Here we identified four key areas: our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Key Mitigation Strategies