From Zero to Entrepreneur

Why go to school for Entrepreneurship?

Many people wonder why an entrepreneur needs to be in business school. Maybe they think entrepreneurship can’t be taught and can only be learnt from the School of Hard Knocks or some even think if you are not a born entrepreneur you are not going to become one by going to school. I think that’s probably what people said of those who went to business school half a century back to learn management. You are either born with it or you are never going to have it. I don’t think you can argue about business schools making better managers. If you do, just don’t tell it to the corporations spending hundreds of thousands of dollars recruiting candidates from business schools. And so it is with entrepreneurship in my opinion. We just don’t know enough of this field right now. There is however a School of Hard Knocks built into the entrepreneurship rigor of every good business school. There are entrepreneurship electives that will need you to get dirty out in the field and then there are other things like business plan competitions. Business schools also offer resources for entrepreneurs that can’t be overlooked especially the network you can build. If you have a good idea and a good plan you can find funding. If you don’t have a good idea or a good plan you can get plenty of ideas in this stimulating environment and plenty of help refining your ideas. One advantage of business school that can’t be quantified is the inspiration you get here. One of the first things that started to dawn on me, as early as during orientation, was that if you have a dream you can achieve it here.  That’s powerful and many people will tell you that’s all an entrepreneur needs. And if it’s something you plan to do for the rest of your life you can’t go wrong spending two years preparing for it.

My Plan

I have no entrepreneurship experience except for selling a few items on eBay and investing in a food cart business as a partner back in India only to see my partner disappear with my money. My plan for now is to export handicrafts from India to the United States and Europe. I have worked in India’s garment exports industry for three years and I have seen how competitive it is. If we only look at the South-East Asian region the competition is daunting. Pakistan is able to produce better cotton than us and therefore produce better garments. China is too cheap to compete with. Bangladesh is also very good. They also have cheap labor but they seem to be investing more in plant modernization. There are many other countries which are also very competitive in garment exports. I believe this is true for most other industries. This is what drew me to handicrafts. Handicrafts embody the cultural and artistic persona of the part of the world they come from. Indian handicrafts are different than Pakistani, Chinese, Bangladeshi, and all other handicrafts. This offers me, the aspiring entrepreneur, more scope for product differentiation. Throw in a few ideas of your own and you can have a product that will be unique. Once I have this set up I will want to source handicrafts from other countries such as China, Japan, Jamaica and wherever I can and export them to all over the world and have a global network of handicrafts exports and imports.

Entrepreneurial Genesis?

Although things have been very busy since school started I knew I could do one of two things – focus hard on a few courses and get the grades that look good or take advantage of all the wonderful things that I can at school but compromise on the quality of time I spend studying. What do you think an entrepreneur would do? There have been some exciting developments that I am a part of – more of that in my next blog. Through my blog I hope to take you with me on my transformation to an entrepreneur and I hope to shed some light on this not-yet-well-understood subject.

Comments

[Benny]

Nice post. I feel that an entrepreneur evolves himself from the vision which he has and he is determined to achieve that at any cost. No matter what his background is,he can become a successful entrepreneur. There are have been many stories like this.An interesting article on Virtual Assistants for entrepreneurs at http://outsorcerer.com/blog/?p=17.

[Sebastian]

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