If you are skilled in SEO, or have a great head for marketing that works, starting up on your own can be a great idea. You get to choose your own staff and who to pitch to, drive the business in the way you want, and of course, your profits are all yours. However, running a business is not just about being able to provide the service you offer and understanding your own niche. There are a huge number of additional skills that you'll need to master if you want your business to operate well, and these sit well outside of the experience of most marketing and SEO professionals.
An MBA Can Help a Lot
Of course, it is possible to outsource some things you don't understand as well as you might wish to as a business owner, like financials, but other things really do fall under your remit as the business owner – like managing people, devising a business plan and strategy, forecasting profitability, and so on. You can learn as you go along, but that often means learning from costly mistakes. Instead, it is better to get educated as early in the process of starting your consultancy as possible, and this is where an MBA can be the best option.
Doing Your MBA Degree Online
Naturally, when you are looking toward starting a business, you don't want to spend a lot of money, even if it means learning things that will help your business long term. It can be best then, to look for a good college offering an online MBA degree you can do mostly from home. This not only saves you money on the cost of the degree itself, but also on materials, travel and accommodation, compared with doing your degree on a college campus. You will still have to attend your chosen university on some occasions, however you can stay living where you do now and also work through things at your own pace, meaning you can do other things important for your start-up at the same time, implementing things you learn on your AACSB online MBA course as you go.
Are You Ready for Your MBA?
There are a few pre-requisites for undertaking an MBA, and one of these is to have a few years of professional experience under your belt already. This is so that you can make sense of the matters discussed on your course in real world rather than theoretical terms. Of course, if you don't really meet these criteria yet, it could be that you aren't really well equipped to start a business on your own, either. If you don't meet the pre-requisites, other things you might consider are bringing in a more experienced business partner, or hiring someone to serve as a mentor.
Whether you go down the route of becoming qualified yourself or bring in a partner, your consultancy will stand a greater chance of success if your leadership comes with a wide range of business skills.
Community manager at Visual Contenting. Jacqueline loves to talk about social media trends, new technology and how they help businesses accelerate their marketing efforts.
