The problems with aspiring entrepreneurs
5 March 2011
As I have mentioned before, I am an Entrepreneurship student at Kansas State University. Last I knew there were around 50 students in the program, which is fantastic for the program. However, I’m not sure of the value these students are getting. The program does teach you a lot of the ins and outs of different areas of business, but I’m not sure if the training is really focused on creating high potential entrepreneurs or if it is inadvertently creates business students who will make great startup employees.
There are a few major problems I see in many of my peers:
They aren’t knowledgeable. They don’t read about entrepreneurship in their spare time, don’t understand the basics of a basic business model, or understand that creating a tech company usually requires you have a technical person as a founder. Hell, I doubt most of them could tel you the advantages of a partnership vs a corporation, something that is brought up in 50% of class and if they could it would be something memorized from a textbook.
They are in it for the glory. Being an entrepreneur sucks most of the time. Its a roller coaster ride only the mentally unstable would enjoy 100% of the time. Most businesses fail and with that fail goes all the time and energy you put it.
They think a perfect business plan will make a business automatically successful. I hate the focus of building plans and writing 30-40 page documents describing the ins and outs of your business from the idea stage all the way to 3-5 years down the line. It’s ridiculous and it’s time better spent working on your product, or in the case of most entrepreneurs learning a way to bootstrap the initial version of that product. I think this planning mentality is one of the main things that has hurt me, I feel the need to plan a business so much that it gets in the way of actually creating a product. Sure planning can be beneficial, it helps you identify areas in which your knowledge is lacking or key decisions you will have to make down the the road, but a little planning goes a long way. Those key decisions should also be made down the road if they are not directly effecting you now because in the moment of those key decisions are when you will have the most knowledge about it.
They don’t value different skill sets. What sets me apart from 90% of my peers is that I have multiple bases of knowledge, if I decided I wanted to quit school tomorrow, I have the skills necessary to get hired to do a number of different jobs. Most of the people around me have only what they learned in school. They don’t value knowledge and being able to executes without 3rd party help. If you want to start a website you, or one of your founders, need to know how to write HTML and CSS.
They don’t ask for help. I am in a class right now that is working on a marketing plan for one of my many venture ideas and 4 weeks in and they didn’t understand the business model. I sold you on this idea, yet you don’t understand how it will make money? I wouldn’t have signed up for that without fully grasping the concept and doing research into it’s viability.
**They aren’t leaders. **Leadership actually hinges on multiple of my previous points however it is a skill you need to have if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. You should understand what needs to be done and be able to at least take action on your own, if not be able to direct others to help you take action. Hell, K-State even has a leadership degree, but I doubt it teaches you much of anything useful in the real world.
**They aren’t creative. **Entrepreneurship is an art, not a science. Creating new and viable business models is very hard, probably downright impossible, for the creatively challenged. If you don’t have the ability to think creatively then it’s going to filled with hardship and lots of mimicking of others. Drawing between the lines never got anyone killed, but it also never created the next facebook.