How to learn business as an aspiring entrepreneur

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Considering a Career Change? Things to Consider Before Getting an Advanced DegreePos September 10, 2020

If you’re hoping to start your own business and become an entrepreneur, you need to know exactly how to successfully start and maintain commercial success.

Passion alone is not enough – here’s how a business education can arm you with the tools you need to create and manage a profitable business from the ground up.

Understanding business management

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur with an idea for a new business, it can help to arm yourself with a business degree to learn more about how to successfully run an organization. For a business to properly take flight, careful planning is necessary. A business education from a reputable institution like Hult International Business School will prepare you for the journey ahead – covering topics such as business strategy, market research, results monitoring, finance and leadership. In order to start a business as an entrepreneur, you need to master the following key fundamental aspects of business management, which a formal business education can teach you.

Human resource: Managing people effectively and with consideration is a fundamental skill for any business owner. As your business develops, you will want people to come and work for you, and your approach to leadership will determine whether your venture is a success or failure. If you have good leadership and communication, people will be inspired and will want to work for you, helping to take your company to the next level.

Business operations: You need to effectively plan how your business will operate on a day-to-day basis, while continuously thinking about how you can improve operations as your business grows and expands. Operations planning involves the consideration of quality control, supply, equipment and tool requirements, marketing, design, analysis of data and so on.

Finance: Your accounts need to be effectively managed if you are starting up a new business as a entrepreneur. You will successfully need to understand how to read, analyze and prepare budgets, financial statements and balance sheets. Many new businesses fail because a strong financial infrastructure is lacking. You will also need to consider investments, how to manage capital and maximize profits as your business grows.

Competition and strategy: A business education will equip you with the tools and knowledge you need to create an effective business strategy. Whatever market you decide to do business in, there will be competition. Staying one step ahead of your competition, being a market leader and understanding good business opportunities are all sure-fire ways to success through implementing a strong business strategy.

Marketing: You need to understand and develop a strategy for promoting your company and product to the public. A successful business needs an influential marketing process that assesses consumer demand and accepts changing trends. A formal business qualification will offer guidance on targeting, branding and market positioning.

Valuable contacts

Business education institutions equip entrepreneurial students with the contacts and opportunities they need to succeed. This includes accelerator programs that enable entrepreneurs to establish useful contacts with start-up resources that they may not have had if they hadn’t studied business. Some institutions also allow students to enter competitions to gain access to funding for their business ideas, making business education a worthwhile investment.

Business leaders need to be good at networking in order for their business to grow and thrive. Enrolling on a business degree course will enable budding entrepreneurs to learn valuable skills in how to effectively communicate and work on projects with people from different backgrounds and cultures. This skill set is essential in creating a positive and inspiring working environment within a company. Students on business courses also have the opportunity to learn about global business culture through visits to other countries to learn about local practices and foreign affairs, and how these two factors can impact business trade.

Developing leadership skills

Good leadership skills are essential if you run a business, and many institutions teach their business students how to lead and communicate well with others so that they are aware of how to establish good working relationships within a company. If you are a business major, you will usually be required to take a business management course as part of your degree, so you can learn problem-solving skills and understand how to deal with any complications or issues that arise between members of staff. If you are a good leader, you will clearly know where your business is going and what is happening within it, whilst ensuring that other people who work for you are aware of how this information impacts on their role.

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, you will naturally be open to opportunity. A formal business qualification is a great investment opportunity for your future, as it will equip you with the successful skills and tools you need to make your intended business venture a success.

What does it take to be successful in business in the 21st century? Being born with an Einstein-sized brain and pockets as deep as a Rockefeller will certainly help, but so will a robust set of business skills. Below, we’ll take a look at the four most important business skills and how you can learn them:

1. Leadership

You don’t need to be told the importance of leadership for business success. Leadership tends to occupy a particularly haloed space within business studies. We tend to valorize naturally charismatic leaders and develop cults of personality around them. The truth gets exaggerated, skewed, and the station of the leader-hero figure becomes ultimately unattainable. Some people are just born leaders, we say, and continue to be followers.

The truth is that leadership is more a matter of habit and training than lucky genetics. Some of the greatest leaders in the world – Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington – maintained a lifelong devotion to self-improvement. That human beings can be changed, that natural deficiencies altered – this is the basic crux of the modern field of leadership development.

Leadership development focuses on learning the concepts and qualities that make great leaders. It requires unlearning old habits and picking up new ones. The process is long and difficult, and you will require oodles of patience, determination and strength of will to go through it to emerge a leader.

2. Sales

“Always be closing”: it’s a maxim to lead a business by, and it can often mean the difference between billions or bust.

Sales is a thankless job. The product guys get all the credit, the finance guys get mentions in WSJ, and the marketing people win AdAge awards. Sales guys get saddled with unglamorous job descriptions and unsavoury stereotypes. No wonder few young entrepreneurs want to do sales.

Yet, sales is absolutely crucial to business success. You could have the most innovative product and a social media strategy perfected to a T, but unless you are willing to pick up the phone and make that call, you will never grow from David to Goliath.

Sales skills, fortunately, can be developed. True, extroverts and ‘natural’ sellers tend to succeed more at selling than others, but that doesn’t mean introverts and ambiverts need not try (in fact, one study considers the opposite to be true). The three key ingredients of selling: pitch, product, and persistence can be learned over time.

• Pitch: The secret to be a successful pitchman is not to pitch at all. Instead, become a friend, a trustworthy helper who understands the customers’ problems and guides them towards a viable solution (even if it involves telling them that your product isn’t right for them). That old sales pitch you found floating on the internet? Throw it out; it’s the surest way to ensure that you never hear from the customer again.
• Product: Great products sell themselves. Produce something so extraordinary that it wows the customer in the first trial, and you won’t even have to put in the effort of selling.
• Persistence: Success in sales is often about good old fashioned grit. If you can outwork your competitors, you can also out-earn them.

Of course, a complete mastery of sales requires much more than the above (as this course on sales and persuasion skills will teach you). But if you get the pitch, product and persistence right, you won’t be too far from business success.

3. Networking

It’s not what you know, but who you know, the old adage goes.

Business success if often built on contacts, not merit. The best leads are always the ones you get through personal references, just as the best way to raise money is to get a personal introduction to an investor.

Networking requires you to get out of your comfort zone, particularly if you aren’t a naturally social person. It also requires that you be genuine and offer something more than a pitch to a contact. Social networking platforms, especially professional networks like LinkedIn, provide a great way to stay in touch with old friends and make new acquaintances. The best way to influence this network is to be generous in sharing expertise and helping out others. Reputation spreads easily online; when people identify you for your work, the network effect kicks in and your sphere of influence grows automatically.

This doesn’t mean you should eschew traditional networking strategies such as seminars and conferences either. But instead of being a mere spectator, try being an active participant. The best way to get noticed by a crowd is to be the guy up on the stage. Plenty of events around you could use your knowledge – how about becoming a speaker, even if it is for free? You will increase your visibility and grow your network.

4. Marketing

Marketing, it goes without saying, is a crucial component of business success. Your customers can’t pay for products they don’t even know about. Throw in aggressive competition and you can understand why the global ad spend in 2012 was $489 billion.

Marketing is a vast field that covers everything from blogging online to running a TV ad campaign. Depending on your industry, you would want to focus on a particular marketing medium. If you run a service for technology startups, for instance, you will get better results marketing on the internet and social media than through a TV spot. On the other hand, an energy drinks company might perform better with a TV ad and event sponsorship.

An increasingly larger chunk of marketing dollars is being spent online. Regardless of your industry, the internet is not something you can choose to ignore. Internet marketing consists of a wide range of activities – running blogs, engaging customers on Twitter, buying ads on Google, marketing via banner ads, etc. You can learn more about marketing through these two courses:

As a business owner, you have to don many hats at the same time. You have to be the leader, the marketer, the sales guy, the negotiator and the networker. You will often be called upon to solve a crisis, help launch a product, and lead a team. The experience can be overwhelming, but fortunately, all these business skills can be learned with a little effort and determination.

Narendra Sharma

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur who is working on polishing your knowledge to be able to start a successful business?

It goes without a doubt that to start a successful business, your educational background needs to be sound. Most successful businessmen are well learned. But learning the syllabus of your school and college is not enough, as it has been read by a bunch of other students as well. You will have to educate yourself a step ahead from others by joining an academic summer program during summer so that you can polish your knowledge about the field you are passionate about and be future-ready to be your own boss.

Apart from education, you also need to instill certain skills to become an entrepreneur in the future, we have discussed them below;

1. Learn to be Persistent:

Persistency is the foundation to be an entrepreneur. Businesses do not always profit, there are times when your attempts may fail. This does not mean you give up easily, but you need to make persistent efforts to continue running the business and make profits.

2. Visualize Your Future Success Every Day:

Like the law of attraction explains, visualization of your future would bring in all the positive forces to make it a reality. Visualizing to be a successful entrepreneur will make you work hard for it and will increase the chances of your success.

3. Evolve Every day:

You cannot become an entrepreneur overnight, it takes years of learning new things and building qualities to evolve constantly as someone who can run a business. It is not just about educating yourself but also consuming as much information as possible to develop your skills.

4. Be Honest About Your Weak Areas:

Successful businessmen reached where they are today because they knew the importance of not just identifying their strength but also weakness and work on those areas. Each person has some areas of weakness, you need to accept your weaknesses so that you can develop those skills or outsource the work.

5. Learn to be Committed:

Learning to commit to things is a must quality which aspiring entrepreneurs should possess or else they cannot be persistent in business and will soon give up.

6. Learn to Overcome Stress and Anxiety:

Becoming an entrepreneur is a tough choice as business fluctuations can take a toll on your mental health hence you need to be able to handle the stress and anxiety. Learn relaxing techniques and meditation to prepare yourself to handle stress so that this does not bleed over your career.

7. Develop Your People Skills:

Other than technical knowledge, a business owner needs to be able to work with a team of people and communicate with customers hence you will need to work on your people skills from an early stage in life so that you will be confident and ready by the time you start a business.

8. Learn to Balance:

Becoming an entrepreneur can consume a lot of your time hence keeping a balance between professional and personal life will become more difficult. Start to practice time management from today itself so that in future you will be prepared to work as per schedule efficiently which will help you have some time for yourself as well, other than running a business.

9. Face Your Fears:

When you become an entrepreneur, you are on your own and will have to face many ups and downs. Be prepared to face your fears so that when life becomes rough, you will be ready to face anything.

10. Learn from Your Past Mistakes:

You will surely fail once or twice while running a business and when that happens you will have to pull yourself up, learn from it and make sure that the mistake is not repeated. Start training yourself to identify your mistakes and learn from them today, this will bring you even closer to success, even if you have failed in the past.

11. Spend Judiciously:

When you run a business, you will have to manage your capital. Finding funds for doing business itself is a task hence you will have to distribute and use your funds judiciously. Start learning to manage your finances from today so that you are prepared to handle future finances cautiously.

12. Learn to Sacrifice:

Running a business will not give you a lot of leisure time hence you will have to make choices between your work or other commitments many times. Business owners often have to make many sacrifices to keep the company in profit, be prepared for that.

13. Nourish Yourself:

Running a business may take a toll on your health, both physical and mental health hence you need to prepare yourself to be fit and strong. Take care of your diet and start working out so that you can handle the business workload and stress while still remaining healthy.

14. Challenge Yourself to Be Better:

The biggest motivation to improve yourself is to challenge your own achievements. Every time you strive to be better than yourself, you are one step closer to being a successful entrepreneur.

15. Do the Work You are Passionate About:

Identify the field you would love to pursue as a career in the future and work towards becoming an expert in that field. Start preparing yourself to become an entrepreneur who specializes in the field you are passionate about.

In Conclusion:

You may have your entire future figured out but without possessing these skills, you will burn out soon, losing motivation and ultimately giving up. Whereas by preparing for your future well ahead, by working on yourself, you will be placing yourself ahead of others and building the path towards becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Narendra Sharma

Naredra Sharma is the editor of MarketingBag , a business blogger, photographer, passionate writer and entrepreneur. A writer by day and a reader by night.

The Business Advice Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Should Know

By: Farrah Smith

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Who am I to think I can do this?” Or even worse, do you fear hearing this kind of judgement from your friends, family, and peers?

Whenever this pesky voice starts whispering in my head, I always turn my thoughts to inspirational people like Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs, and Arianna Huffington. None of them were born masters of their craft, and they didn’t build their empires in a day, a week, or even a year.

If you are facing the festering fears of self-doubt or looking imposter syndrome directly in the face, here are three tips to success that every aspiring entrepreneur should know.

1) Get comfortable starting small.

Motivation comes from momentum, even if it’s ugly and uncomfortable. –New York Times bestselling author, high-performance coach, and speaker Brendon Burchard

Brendan Burchard has coached and studied entrepreneurs and business leaders for over twenty years. He says the majority of people hesitate to embark on their dream career or the build the business they’ve always envisioned, simply because they are afraid or too embarrassed to be seen starting small.

Even the most capable individuals are held back from reaching their full potential simply because they are too consumed by what others will think at the beginning stages of their journey to greatness. He says that we must demand more of ourselves than we are comfortable with, including embracing the messy and unglamorous fledgling stages of taking those first steps. We must hold tight and persevere forward, regardless of how hard it gets, other people’s opinions of what is possible, or how long it takes to reach the top of the mountain.

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Even Tony Robbins, who is one of the most celebrated names in the motivational speaking industry, had a mere seven people show up to his first seminar. Now he fills stadiums full of professionals who flock to hear his words of wisdom, as well as owning multiple businesses and having a net worth of half a billion dollars.

As with any goal in your life, you have to start with one small step and work your way forward. Thomas Edison was urged to give up after 10,000 attempts to create the lightbulb, but rebuffed these comments with his infamous remark:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Despite what others around him thought, without tenacity and resolve, his invention may never have come to fruition.

The same can be said for the top business leaders across the globe. They are the ones who pushed past their fears and insecurities, with fierce determination, reaping bountiful rewards for their perseverance.

[Related: Take a Leap Before You Grow Wings]

2) Sell with service in mind.

If you don’t learn how to persuade, if you don’t learn how to get people to say yes, then you are doing a disservice to the world that needs you. –American entrepreneur, real estate investor, bestselling author, and coach Dean Graziosi

Dean Graziosi says that sales and persuasion are the oxygen of every successful company in the world. The problem is that many people are uncomfortable selling. He enthuses that the way to build your confidence is to stop feeling guilty for marketing your services.

Simply put, you must love what you do so fervently that you feel you are doing people a disservice if you don’t get your customers to say “yes.” You must see a lack of sales as letting your clientele down.

Graziosi was able to go from small infomercials to running a billion-dollar business by centering on the fact he is offering a service that betters people’s lives.

When you approach sales with service in mind, you will effuse authenticity and passion, inspire people to trust you, encourage people to want to work with you, and ultimately embolden people to invest in you and what you have to offer.

3) Your success does not determine your self-worth.

I learned this from both Graziosi and Burchard, and it’s the most crucial ingredient of all. You must be confident and believe in your ability, irrespective of the results you get.

In order to reach peak levels of accomplishment, your self-worth and identity cannot be inextricably tied to the outcome of any external goal you are working on. Otherwise, you will give up at the first roadblock, first failure, or first setback you encounter.

Being a successful entrepreneur takes a lot of work, a lot of vision, and a lot of perseverance. But anyone can have a thriving, impactful, and fulfilling career with the right mindset, passion, and determination.

Dreams do not simply happen; it is your responsibility to take them by the hand and walk them into reality.

Farrah Smith is a Director at one of the world’s top environmental charities and is an esteemed member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps. She also owns Farrah Smith Coaching, where she teaches a transformational course that helps teens reach their full potential with an emphasis on mindfulness, neuroscience, and positive psychology.

Last summer, I met with a young aspiring entrepreneur. She wanted to know how I started my business, how I quit my 9-5, and how I got to where I am today. I have no idea if meeting with this bright young woman was at all helpful to her, but I do know that it was a learning experience for me. Reflecting upon the last 10 years of my life, the following points occurred to me:

1) Search Your Soul: What Do You Want? – When I finished college, I applied for graduate school because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I got into two programs, but one was in a city where I did not want to live. If the program was really more important, I would have gone there and probably have a PhD by now, but it wasn’t. I realized it was more important for me to move to New York City, so I chose that instead. My NYU Master’s program was the vehicle that brought me to New York, and eventually to my destiny as an entrepreneur. Bottom Line: You can respond to pressure and do the “practical” thing, or pause for a moment of clarity: think about what you really want. You can go with the flow or make the tough decisions that will take you where you really want to be.

2) Just Do It – Fear of failure can be one of the most paralyzing fears out there. It can play a significant role in whether you follow your entrepreneurial dream or not. Of course, fear can be a signal that something isn’t right, but fear can also be a way that self-sabotage keeps us from taking chances. Bottom Line: You can take small steps and find ways to minimize the risks inherent to business ownership, but you also need to just do it- no one else will make it happen for you, so take a deep breath and make the leap.

3) Keep Doing It – We’ve all heard stories of humble beginnings: people who start blogging and get book deals, people who sell goods online and grow successful retail businesses from there (that’s us!) We’ve been putting ourselves out there for 10 years, and are just now really blossoming and getting noticed. That means for the last 10 years, or certainly for the first seven, we were putting a lot of time and effort in and were just about scraping by. Against mountains of adversity, we kept trying and worked hard to learn from our mistakes. And we’re successful now because we kept playing the game. Bottom Line: View every event you do and every contact you meet as a means toward your desired end. When faced with a roadblock, do you need to change something in your model that doesn’t work, or does it just need more time to take off? Get feedback from other professionals. Make needed adjustments, and keep going.

4) Take Small Steps to Reach Big Goals – I didn’t just wake up today as a successful business owner. I’m where I am because of every day I’ve worked until now. Every decision I’ve made and every small step I’ve taken has made a big difference toward achieving my long-term goals. I told my husband one day, “Let’s quit our jobs and move to France.” We accomplished this goal because we saved our money (making many financial sacrifices along the way), enrolled in French classes, obtained Student Visas, made housing arrangements, sublet our apartment, bought plane tickets, and moved ourselves to Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. This sounds overly obvious, but it really was those little steps that brought us to our goal. A friend of mine has a dream to go back to school and finish her degree. It remains unrealized because she never took the entrance exam she needed, never called her old school to get her transcripts, never attended that open house she said she wanted to. Bottom Line: Write down your long-term goals (one-year, three-year, ten-year, whatever is important to you.) Then make a checklist of all the concrete tasks you need to complete to achieve them. Now just do it (#2 above!)

5) Prioritize – Remember that list you just made for Lesson #4? Look at what your number one goal is– whatever tops your list and is most important to you– and discard the rest. I know: life is complicated. We all have a myriad of work goals, family goals, and life goals that at times can seem at odds with each other. I’m not saying you can’t do it all, it’s just that you can usually be more successful with a major goal when it has your full attention. Bottom Line: Doing one thing really well can get you further ahead, and is ultimately better for your work/life balance, than doing many things not so well. When I lived in France, learning French and just being abroad was the priority. When we returned to the US, we went full force with our business, motivated to not have to return to our day jobs. Now our priority is growing our business by setting up a retail location. Kids? Maybe someday, just not right now. In the long run, I believe I will have accomplished everything I set out to do, by having focused on one thing at a time.

6) Be Hungry – If I had moved back in with my parents after college, I would have never had the financial pressure to pay for my expensive Manhattan apartment. I would not have been pushed to make money on the side in unusual ways. I would have never started selling books online, which eventually became my full-time business and livelihood. I had financial pressure all around me, and it got me thinking and moving. Bottom Line: Hunger will get you out of your comfort zone, and put pressure on you to move toward your goals. Sometimes living at home or taking a job you’re not thrilled with is necessary, but don’t let yourself get too comfortable. Remind yourself of what you want, and continue to work toward it.

7) Allow Life to Change You – If you go into life with a set plan, you’re not leaving much room for something serendipitous to intervene. Perhaps you’re just a planner and want to have every detail in place, but remind yourself to be open-minded. I moved to New York City to get my Master’s degree, but I was also interested in everything else the Big City had to offer. Out of my usual surroundings (and way outside of my comfort zone) I was rewarded with a great entrepreneurial idea. Bottom Line: Have a plan, but be aware of the untapped resources and new ideas swirling all around you. They’re out there, you just have to recognize them.

I never knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. What I wanted after college was the freedom to follow my dreams, no matter where they would end up taking me. By intense introspection, careful decision making, and allowing chance and opportunity to sometimes step in, I’ve spent the last 10 years on a path that led to me owning my own business. If your goal is to work from home, invest in a start-up, or own your own business, you’re already one step ahead of where I was 10 years ago. Got similar dreams? Go after them, and make your own unique path to get there.

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