“So you want to be an entrepreneur?” I asked one of my nephews as I was discussing with him his plans.  “ But why are you taking Biology for your college?”

“ Well, “ he said, “ My dad wants me to be a doctor, and besides, if I can’t make it to medical school, then I can always be an entrepreneur.  Dad never did go to business school, but he is doing ok.”

Do you have friends who are doctors, or lawyers who are also in business?  Are you just amused what they believed in?  Of course, they think they cannot be doctors if they don’t go to medical school,  or accountants if they don’t get an accounting course,  but they can always be businessmen!”

Managing a business is just common sense is as common a thinking even among my business friends.  Is management so easy?  Yet , it can’t be.  It is like basketball or golf – the game is easy to learn, yet difficult to master. ; After all, golf or basketball is just about putting a ball into a hole or a basket , is it?  And yet probably the most coveted jobs in the world and probably the best paid, are managers.  CEO’s of America’s top 300 companies purportedly earn an average of over $10 million dollars per year.  Are they being grossly paid?  Yes, many think so.  Are they being paid for their common sense?  If so, common sense is not only not so common, but could be very expensive.

One of the best books you may want to look at if you are considering to plunge into entrepreneurship is the book, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Samuel Michael Gerber.  Here he discussed some of the common myths that people choose to harbor about going into business, and one of the fallacies that he brought in was the thinking that if the entrepreneur only knows the technical side of the business, then he knows the business.

This illustrates itself on the thinking that just because you can bake a great cake means you can be in the pastry business, or if you know how to cook, you can be in the restaurant business.  This manifests itself in the legions of software programmers who think that just because they know how to write a program, they can be in the software business.

However, while knowing and understanding in depth the technical side of the business is important, it is by no means the only skill that needs to be refined.  Understanding the nuts and bolts of the business itself is equally important.  Of course, when you start your business, and there are only 2 or 3 of you, then it may not be as important, but it is.  Knowing how to negotiate, knowing how to get your first customer, knowing how to budget your money or securing finance, knowing how to allocate production, knowing how to hire your first few people – these are vital skills that is necessary in bootstrap your operations, and you will learn that in business school.

Many people start to think of getting an MBA when they hit the limit of their expansion, and they need to scale from 50- 100 people to 300 or 400.  However, while it is better late than never, an MBA might be a good degree to go for even after a few years of business experience.  Most often, the business can stand a good organizational foundation which needs to be inculcated in early years instead of trying to have to fix later.  I know various businesses where after a time, they start to do a crash course of restructuring or last minute consulting to solve issues that would have not occurred if built on a better foundation.

Five years ago, I decided to get an MBA, and two years ago, graduated with one.  What good did the MBA do?  A lot.  It used to be that getting an MBA was about networking. It  was a good way to know future captains of industry, and if you go to a prestigious school where most of them hang out, that can be invaluable.  They say that you go to Harvard not only to learn the right stuff, but also to know the right people.  But more than networking, there ARE stuff that will be invaluable tools for you to learn.  In today’s competitive world, it is important that you are on the edge, and a theoretical foundation on how to manage one on a professional manner is simply necessary.

The MBA degree will open doors for you, but success is not about doors being opened. Success is about how far you can walk into the door after it has been opened.  And for this,  the skills, the network, the  motivation, and the self confidence that you learned while getting the degree will help you go that distance.

It will open doors for you because when you send your CV, people can easily pick you out from twenty other applicants who don’t have an MBA.  It will open doors for you that the interviewer will give you five minutes more interview time to present your case because you have a degree. But at the end, it is how you maximize and go in that will mean the difference – for your career or your business. 

Do you need a coach to master basketball? Or golf? Or tennis? If you want to be a champion, can you simply rely on your talent or your smarts?  No.  In short, to be a good businessman or entrepreneur, you need all the professional learning you can get.

I started to write for SME Insights,  a national bi-monthly Small and Medium enterprise magazine last July 2006.  These are the series of articles I wrote for them which I am putting on here.