What a Feasibility Study Is Actually For

Feasibility studies have a reputation as a formality: a document produced because a bank asked for one. That reputation comes from studies written to justify a decision already taken, which is a different exercise entirely.

A feasibility study earns its place when it translates. A founder's conviction about a market is not something a head-office finance committee can approve, and it is not something a lender can price. The study is the artefact that converts one into the other: demand assumptions made explicit, cost base built from actual local inputs, and a range rather than a single confident number.

The group's first work, in the early 1980s, was appraising and funding manufacturers in Kot Lakhpat. That order (read the numbers, then write the strategy) has not changed, because the alternative is a strategy nobody can fund.

The useful test of a study is simple: does it change what you would do? If every scenario inside it leads to the same decision, it was written to reassure rather than to inform.