Congrats. You just graduated with your master’s degree in business administration.
You have paid in excess of $100,000 for a degree that is in vogue right now. Many large companies and consulting organizations want you to run projects, divisions and businesses, but your passion is toward the entrepreneurial side of things. You want to make a difference by starting your own business. Rather than work for the man, you want to be the man.
Are you really ready? Good. Now forget everything that you just learned in business school. All of those discounted cash flows. All of those business cases. All of those financial statement analyses. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to think like an entrepreneur and that means two things: product and business development.
I’ll admit that I was turned down for business school admission back in the summer of 2002.
I was at a crossroads in my career and thought that business school would be the next logical step after my undergrad engineering degree, my seven years of Internet technology and my pending start at a global e-commerce company. Fortunately, I didn’t get accepted and I was able to focus on my startup, which developed into the 260-person global e-commerce firm, cleverbridge.
Don’t get me wrong. You didn’t just waste $100,000. There is value in what you paid for, but the point here is that being an entrepreneur is not taught in business school. In fact, being an entrepreneur cannot be taught anywhere.
You have to have the fire in your stomach to build something. You have to have the passion for a topic. You have to have the vision to see what others don’t see. If you have that, you can be an entrepreneur.
Sweep away the distractions
When starting a business, the two most important things are creating a great product and talking with potential buyers.
I’ve never seen a product build itself, nor have I seen customers pay for nothing (Cubs tickets notwithstanding). Too often, I have seen master’s degree in business administration graduates spend their time seeking all reward with no risk. “I want to raise venture capital with a half-baked idea and can’t understand why no one will believe me that I’m the next Elon Musk. What’s wrong with investors?”
Well, the truth is that many entrepreneurs are successful because they focused on the most important thing for their business — product and customers — and didn’t get distracted with all the other things that go along with running a successful business, like financials, managing teams and stock option plans. There is a place for that knowledge, it’s just not the first thing you visit when starting a journey to a successful business.
So now that you have earned the highly coveted degree, put it away and start focusing on solving a problem that you know well. Get out and talk with prospective customers for your solution. Get creative in how you acquire your first customer and your first paid customer because that’s often a different thing.
Once you have done those things, your business school training will become very useful. ●
