How to Write a Business Feasibility Report That Gets Leadership's 'OK'

As enterprise LLM adoption spread rapidly, new security risks such as prompt injection and sensitive-data leakage emerged. The company had to decide quickly whether to enter this market, and I took on the business feasibility study on my own. The result: executive approval. Here are the report-writing principles I took from that experience.

Don't force the conclusion

A good proposal does not force a conclusion; it lets decision-makers reach one on their own. The moment you write "We should pursue this business," the report turns into a pitch and the reader gets defensive. Instead, show in order how the market is moving, what our existing assets make possible, and what we stand to lose if we stay out, and the conclusion takes shape in the reader's own mind.

Frame market size in SOM, not TAM

Everyone knows the TAM (total market) is big. What leadership asks is, "So how much of it can we actually capture?" When estimating TAM/SAM/SOM, what deserves the most effort is the evidence behind the SOM. Calculate the SOM from your company's sales channels, technology assets, and the people you can actually commit, and even if the number gets smaller, the report gains credibility. The bigger the TAM, the more the evidence behind the SOM matters.

Try competing solutions yourself

Building a competitor feature table from desk research and signing up to test a solution yourself yield information on entirely different levels. By benchmarking domestic and global competing solutions hands-on, I verified what no feature table shows — onboarding friction, actual detection performance, loopholes in the pricing structure — and this was the part of the report that drew the most questions.

Start the entry scenario from the company's assets

Whether a market is attractive and whether we can enter it are two separate questions. A report should always end with an entry scenario that starts from "what we already have." Show concretely how existing technology assets and customer channels can be reused, and the new business starts to look less like a gamble on unfamiliar ground and more like an extension of the existing business.

Closing thoughts

A feasibility study is not a document that issues a go/no-go verdict. It is a document that lets decision-makers act with confidence. Leave the conclusion blank and fill in the evidence. The reader draws the conclusion.