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Why Entrepreneurs Need an MBA

The Reality of Being an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs are creative, passionate and motivated to enter into new business ventures. The most effective capitalists understand how to analyze and calculate the likelihood of venture success or failure before taking on any investment. Those wishing to become business innovators are encouraged to pursue an entrepreneurial MBA degree to acquire the knowledge and skill sets needed for success.

Risks of Entrepreneurship

The risks involved with entrepreneurship are determined by what is invested in the venture. The type of challenges can vary. Thus, understanding the business plan and taking time to evaluate details is crucial before undertaking a new project. Even the late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, had some initial entrepreneurial ventures that failed to strike success, such as the NeXT Computer Co.

Challenges can be mitigated by conducting risk and market analyses. Assessing the investment and earnings potential are also approaches that can help alleviate risks. While passion and intuition are important motivators for entrepreneurial success, a certain degree of professional preparation is important to cover the technicalities associated with becoming an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurial Success Factors

Professional degrees, such as a Master of Business Administration (MBA), provide business leaders with a competitive edge. The skills acquired through higher education are valuable for making strategic decisions. MBA degrees facilitate:

  • The ability to thoroughly analyze data and statistics.
  • An understanding of long- and short-term financial concepts and their relationship to other business-related measures.
  • A sensibility about incentivizing and motivating teams of employees toward a common goal.

There are several characteristics that entrepreneurs who are most successful should have. The best entrepreneurs are:

  • Passionate and invest in what they enjoy.
  • Focused and hardworking. Entrepreneurs recognize that setting goals and staying motivated to achieve them is imperative to success. They understand that new business ventures require effort and a strong will to succeed.
  • Strong with intuition and knowledge on how to be a leader, who to hire and promote, when to invest, when to walk away and with whom to do business.
  • Altruistic, because achieving success is rarely a solo effort. Giving back to those who helped along the way and maintaining ethical standards is not only reputation-building, it is also a way to benefit the community.
  • Personable in that entrepreneurs get to know their customers and clients and investors well, so they can have a relationship with them and anticipate their needs, thus maintaining a steady client base.

How an MBA Impacts Entrepreneurial Success

Professional Preparation
As noted, general advantages of earning an MBA are that graduate degrees result in learning new skills and facilitate networking, both advantageous in competitive business environments. Prospective students who want to gain knowledge in starting a business or investing in start-ups should enroll in specialized MBA programs, such as an MBA in Entrepreneurship. According to a recent survey, 28.4 percent of those pursuing an MBA were doing so to start business. That number reflecting an increase of 4.4 percent from 2006.

Advantages of an MBA

Benefits of a specialized MBA help students learn how to handle responsibilities that are not intuitive, like managing finances. Given constantly changing tax laws and codes, an MBA can help ensure that business innovators are not exploited by a highly complex financial legal system. As can be observed from reality television shows focused on saving small businesses, the most crippling factor in running a business is lack of business savvy, particularly pertaining to financial management.

MBA programs merge academic theory with real-world experience. Though being an entrepreneur means learning from one’s own mistakes, learning from another’s mistakes (and successes) can even more beneficial. Entrepreneurs who start with a solid foundation of analyzing what does and does not work are generally less likely to repeat errors. Furthermore, programs can give students the opportunity to pilot new ideas and run risk assessments in a secure environment.

Mega-successes like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, inspire the level of accomplishment most entrepreneurs wish to reach. Entrepreneurial neophytes do not go in dreaming of mediocrity. Rather, they idealize professional grandeur, and why not? Certainly, having diving aspirations for success is important. However, a sense of reality is necessary as well. MBA programs prepare future entrepreneurs for the reality associated with going for the gold.

Personal connections forged in an MBA program can root deeper than those created through traditional networking means. Going through the courses in academia gives future entrepreneurs time to get to know others in terms of work ethic and personality. When evaluating partners later in their careers, entrepreneurs know whose advice they can trust and potentially with whom they can go into business.

An MBA provides the kind of real-world preparation and skills needed to navigate a competitive professional environment.

About Benedictine University:

Benedictine University Online is a regionally accredited institution of higher education. Because entrepreneurial success is driven by an ability to learn from experiences, intuition, applying knowledge and making connections, there is no better place to prepare to be an entrepreneur than in Benedictine University's online MBA program. By taking courses online, students have the flexibility to continue working while earning an MBA degree in as little as one year.