You don’t need a degree to start your own business. You do need a lot of skills that are often found on the other side of a college education—marketing, finance, sales, management.
Successful entrepreneurs need to have a reasonably high command of all of these things, and that’s on top of having a good idea for a business to begin with.
You want to start your own business. What skills do you need, and how can you get them? Let’s get into it.
Understand Consumer Psychology
Sales is one of the highest-leverage skills you can have as a business owner. Arguably, if you can only be good at one thing, this is where you should direct your focus.
It’s by understanding consumer psychology that you put jobs on the board, rack up sales revenue, or perhaps get customers to step through the door of your coffee shop with a cause.
Whatever the business, you need to understand what motivates consumer choices and how you can tap into that psychology to start stacking revenue.
Psychology programs are a natural way to learn more about how people think and how emotions motivate decision-making. If you’re wondering what can I do with my psychology degree as a business owner, the answer may be quite a bit more than you think.
You can also improve upon this consideration with time as you begin collecting data on your marketing strategies and overall sales figures.
The more you understand about who purchases from you and why, the more revenue you’ll be able to build.
Marketing
Many businesses, particularly e-commerce platforms, use marketing as the primary sales engine, funneling customers organically to the checkout page.
Marketing, naturally enough, is its own professional discipline—not necessarily something a person with a passion for engineering ergonomic office equipment or replacing gutters will have a natural affinity for. There are a few routes you can take.
You can go in blind, of course. Feel your way through, launch campaigns, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and refine continuously from there.
This is the least expensive option in terms of upfront costs, but it can actually be more costly in the long run for several reasons.
For one thing, you’ll wind up throwing lots of money at campaigns that don’t do anything. You’ll also lose opportunity through sluggish, underperforming campaigns that don’t convert the way you want them to.
A second do-it-yourself option would be to enroll in either a college-level program or a crash-course, bootcamp-style class that teaches you everything you need to know about Facebook ads, AdWords, or whatever other platform you’re interested in mastering.
This route will cost money on the front end and also require time, but it will equip you with an extremely high-impact skill that you can use to drive revenue for years and years to come.
Another option, of course, is to hire a marketing professional. This option is, once again, costly, and it also requires you to put a relatively high level of trust in a stranger. The benefits will depend on the quality of the collaboration.
Finance
Entrepreneurs are usually entirely responsible for financially managing their business for at least the first one to three years. For most businesses, this is relatively achievable in the beginning, but it’s a task that grows considerably more challenging as you scale.
You can work with a CPA to offload some of the time commitment, but you still need a level of financial literacy that allows you to understand your cash flow and make well-informed decisions that shape the direction of your business.
This is particularly important if you have a large loan or credit card debt.
It’s not exactly that businesses fail because they run out of money—not most of the time, anyway. Usually, it’s that they can’t quite figure out how to manage the assets they do have.
Being able to assume the role of an active participant in your business’s financial future is a good way to maximize the impact of your choices.
You don’t need a degree in finance, but a short-term online course or even just a few do-it-yourself textbooks can go a long way toward keeping you informed.
And if you do wind up working with a CPA, don’t be afraid to ask them lots and lots of questions. The more you know, the more empowered you’ll ultimately be.
Administrative Management
Finally, you also just need to know how to put all of the pieces together and ensure a level of cohesion and organization that first meets your business’s current needs and second is engineered intelligently enough to scale. As a business owner, the buck stops with you.
Education programs that focus on administrative management are arguably the least exciting route you can take to education, but they’re also among the most impactful.
A well-planned business is so much more likely to succeed than one that runs on improvisation and the entrepreneurial equivalent of duct tape.
Conclusion
Do you need college if you’re going to be an entrepreneur? There are a few schools of thought on this. One is that the best thing a business owner can do is to start. It’s so easy to drag your feet, waiting for the moment when you’re fully ready. Progress can’t even begin until you’ve actively launched your business, which has led many people to assume the mindset that momentum beats preparation.
On the other hand, the average business loan is something like $600,000, and that kind of overhead requires some level of consideration. Getting a degree, or at least a skill-based certification, can help you prepare and develop skills that are valuable outside of the business setting.
It ultimately depends on how you view the investment. A degree can very easily cost $100,000. Is that the best way you, as an entrepreneur, can spend that kind of money? There’s no definitive answer to that question, but if you’re not going to get the degree or develop the skills yourself, you need a clear plan for how your business will get them.
There are loads of different ways to be successful as an entrepreneur. Find the one that makes sense for you, and get at it.
