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The 3 Most Important Concepts Business Schools Teach

As mentioned in a previous post, you don’t necessarily have to have a business degree to be a successful business owner. You do, however, usually need to have an understanding of certain business concepts to run a profitable business. If you skipped business school and are in the process of starting up your own business, here are a few concepts you should be aware of:

1. Globalization is here to stay

Everything you do in the business world will be affected by global business trends. Even if you open up a brick-and-mortar store, the price of the inventory you order will most likely depend on how much it costs to make the inventory in another part of the world. More and more businesses are outsourcing work to cut costs and selling to the global market. Because of this, business schools teach students that they need to learn to think about global business trends. If you didn’t get your degree in business, you need to be aware of how big of a role the rest of the world will play in determining the success of your startup.

2. Cash flow management is key

Sales matter, but they don’t matter as much as cash flow. You can have record sales numbers and not have enough money to pay your bills on time if you don’t manage your cash flow well. Ultimately, you have to get paid enough from your customers at the right time to be able to pay everything you owe for your office, inventory, etc. Cash flow management is a very important balancing act that business schools spend a lot of time teaching students about. Since you probably don’t have time to go back to business school, you should know that you’ll need to carefully monitor your inventory, orders, payments, and bills to ensure your company’s finances stay on the right track.

3. Your success depends on the profitability of one unit

This is one of the simplest and most essential business concepts, and it’s one you should definitely be aware of before you start your own business. When you’re developing your business plan, you should think about whether or not one unit of what you’ll be selling would be able to make a profit.

If you’re going to be selling smoothies, for instance, you have to consider how much the ingredients to make one smoothie cost, how much it costs to pay an employee to make the smoothie, how much you’ll charge for the smoothie, and whether you’ll be able to make a profit with all these things in mind. If you are able to make a profit, your business, in theory, should be able to make a profit. Business schools stress the importance of the profitability of one unit for a reason, and it’s absolutely critical that you keep this concept in mind as you make business decisions.

If you understand that business is global, sales aren’t everything, and you have to be able to sell at least one unit to succeed, you’ll be just as prepared as all those business grads for the wonderful, crazy, and daunting adventure of owning your own business.

About the Author: Patricia Garza is a freelancer and blogger who primarily writes about education, online college accreditation, business, and technology. When she’s not writing, Patricia likes to spend time with her kids, discuss current events, and paint. Please feel free to leave your comments and questions below. Patricia appreciates your feedback.

Employment Background Screenings: It’s Not just about Criminal Offenses

Even as a small business owner, you need to be extremely cautious when adding new hires to your staff. After all, your employees will represent your company as a whole and you’ll want to make sure that you don’t hire someone who could potentially taint your image or ruin your company altogether—for example, you wouldn’t want to hire someone accused of embezzlement. That said, conducting a background check is important. While background checks are great at highlighting someone’s criminal history, they shouldn’t be the only thing you reference when determining whether someone is a good fit for your team or not. To be 100% positive that you’re making the right hire decision, you might want to consider the options below.

Background screening
Image by John Dalrymple

Check Social Media Sites

Before you even ask someone to meet you for an interview, it’s best to see what kind of online trail your applicant has. A simple Google search can bring up a plethora of information, but sometimes it’s just best to go to the direct source—meaning plug in your applicant’s name directly in various social media search bars like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn just to see what pops up. Most social media accounts will be set to private (as any smart applicant’s profile should be) but you might just be able to get a feel for what the person is like by reading his or her’s “about me” section and checking out his or her profile picture. If you do have free access to the applicant’s Facebook it’s best to check before and after the interview to see if the candidate says anything negative about the company or sounds too pompous in general, like “nailed that interview.” Some employers are now asking for applicants to log-in Facebook during the interview. I personally think it’s a bit extreme, but if you feel it’s necessary it’s definitely an option.

Verify Degrees

I cannot stress this enough. Just because an applicant says he or she graduated with a certain degree from a certain college doesn’t meant that it’s true. It even happens in the corporate world too: earlier this summer Yahoo’s now former CEO got the ax when it was discovered he lied about having a degree he never earned on his resume. That said, some applicants lie. To make sure that the information is legitimate, all you need to do is call the Registrar’s Office of the college the applicant claims he or she went to and they’ll be able to say whether they earned their diploma from there or not.

Always Call References

Last but certainly not least always follow up with references—at least then you can confirm that your applicant did in fact have prior work experience at another place of employment. You also might want to do a quick informal background check on your applicant’s references just so you know they’re not related to the applicant or anything like that.

About the Author: Jane Smith is a freelance blogger for www.backgroundcheck.org, a website that helps employers and consumers learn about the ins and outs of a thorough background check. She welcomes all questions and comments at janesmith161@gmail.com

Top Ways To Manage Your Business More Efficiently

So many factors go into the successes and failures of a business. Success might come from a stellar product, a dedicated team at the helm and enough freedom and accountability to make daily time management as smooth as possible. On the flip-side of things, a company may hit a few missteps along the way because of how understaffed they may be against the number of projects coming in, or they may be overflowing in one department and not enough in another.

The latter problem isn’t a cinch to fix by any means, but it’s also not a daunting task, either. A majority of businesses may need help in only a few areas, while others may need a helping hand for a much longer period. Either way, getting down to the root issue of management issues and structure as a whole is the first order of business.

Here are some others to follow from there.

It Starts At The Top

Any good business knows they didn’t reach the apex of success by dogging it within the management ranks. Any business needs a solid leader in place to not only hire qualified and passionate managers and supervisors below them, but instill a positive direction to the staff as a whole.

Being on top of your game as a CEO requires intelligence to know which structure works best for your staff and how they complete projects and roll right along at a comfortable, but productive pace.

Because Time Management Is A Telling Factor

Dollars and cents tell the big picture at the end of the day. Regardless of whether your staff is bright, motivated and give their due diligence to each and every project laid before them, if the time and labor costs start rising more and more above any net gains, it’ll chip away over time at the core success of your business. This is the one area where you’ll have to survey if a department feels understaffed, and if that’s the case you go out and hire more capable employees to join the already capable staff. While you might be thinking that would deduce the profit margins from the onset, then you might have to look out how your customer pricing model looks and make changes where needed.

Have An Effective Tracking System

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of project tracking software available. Some are geared towards very intricate tracking where multiple projects are being worked on from dozens of departments in your office. And then there are others like Trello, which has a much more simplified approach to the interface. Basecamp is another popular method that comes to mind.

You can find other choices here.

How Liberating Is The Office Environment?

One of the most looked-over time savers for a business is the company atmosphere itself. How are your employees responding on a daily basis, or more importantly, is the cubicle feeling too constrained for its own good? While you went out and hired the best team around, if your office doesn’t reflect a welcoming, more open vibe, there could be little dips here and there with how invigorated your employees are. Projects and deadlines could soon carry over towards similar sentiments if you at least don’t poll the office as to what their likes/dislikes are with their work environment.

Always Be Thinking It Can Run Even Smoother

No matter how many changes and tweaks you do to both the company structure and how projects are drawn up and executed, the mentality should be there’s always an extra minute or two to shave off next. Part of that speaks to keeping an eye on motivation highs and lows, but mainly it’s reviewing and comparing past project management sheets with the current one. Basically, think of it as one, long marathon and your entire office is practicing each and every day hoping to best their run time from yesterday until they’ve hit that barrier to where they feel confident enough to stick with that stride.

And that last part about knowing when the best formula’s arrived is crucial because you don’t want to risk burn-out with your team, nor do you want to affect the quality of the projects. It’s just that any good business is never satisfied with the present, because they expect the future to be even brighter.

Author Bio: Kyle O’Brien is a freelance writer and has covered many topics on the business side of things, including corporate structure tips, leadership intangibles and much more. He’s consulted for ej4, a performance improvement company that helps develop cohesive e-learning video platforms for businesses.

Don’t have a business degree? Good!

Why you are probably better off without a business degree.

It seems crazy, but it’s true: an undergraduate degree in business isn’t a door to wealth. Parents think they can’t go wrong by sending their kids off to business classes at the university, but business school, unlike most other vocational fields, doesn’t offer experience or a big pay-off.

Business majors learn fewer applicable skills.

Let me break it down for you. A recent high school graduate who goes to school to learn to be a mechanic actually gets his hands dirty and works with physical parts, gaining knowledge that can be directly applied to his vocation. Business majors learn how to respond to theoretical scenarios in the sheltered vacuum of a classroom. It’s a little like learning to drive a submarine by playing a video game and then being expected to survive once you’re unleashed on the open waters.

Becoming a business leader takes a variety of skills – psychology, mathematics, communication – but it also takes creativity. Many students who aspire to make money in business fail to make the correlation between imagination and ingenuity. It was, in fact, Andy Warhol who called business “the best art.”

business graduates
Image by Rob Chan

Some undergraduate liberal arts degrees are even father down on the pay-scale than business (which ranks 35 out of 75), but for some graduate programs, a liberal arts degree is more promising than an undergraduate degree in business. Students who study philosophy and English literature are well-versed in analytical thinking and are constant practitioners of sharp communication. On the other end of the spectrum, mathematics majors understand the language of economics and statistics.

Your life can become overrun by work.

Degrees in business are extremely common, so once you graduate; you’re going to be forced into an oversaturated market with high levels of competition. In this case, becoming a small business owner is a great option, but most college students don’t have the resources to fund a startup right after college. With no career history or savings, most people are starting from scratch.

In a study completed by labor economists, business majors working in the finance and consulting sectors were shown to have extremely difficult times juggling their work and lives. The fields are so competitive that they demand constant participation, and those who go on leave or drop out of the race for even short periods of time, face great challenges and penalties in terms of resuming their careers and moving forward.

If not business…then what?

By all means, if you find the right business degree program and you are confident that you will have a job after college, go for it! Some people thrive in competitive environments and can juggle project and personnel management with a happy home life. Creating your own small, independent business is a great way to exercise business skills, but there has to be a passion beyond making money, and that is what a business degree fails to nurture.

A business degree isn’t necessary to becoming a business leader. Higher education is a way to improve the skills you already have while exploring new territory, and you can pair any degree with business classes if you are interested in becoming an entrepreneur.

About the Author: Melissa Miller is blogger and freelance writer for associatedegreeonline.com. She is interested in all things education and writes to help recent college graduates navigate the challenging world of first-time employment, adult responsibility, and finances. Throw your questions to melissamiller831@gmail.com.

3 Easy Ways to Organise your Workspace

If you work from home, whether self-employed or owning your own business, or simply in need of a space to perform office work like bills etc., separating your workspace from where you relax is essential to being able to carry out what you need to, when you need to. Ideally you don’t want to turn your home into the same place you associate with tedious work, or you’ll feel like you can never properly relax. On the other hand, you may not be able to get anything done, if psychologically you know you’re at home. If you own a business, this can be a major problem if financially, you have something at stake and need to work.

Below are three simple tips you may want to consider when organising your workspace to be more efficient:

1. Think ‘Work’

If you’re aware that you’re home, then you’ll be tempted to relax and not work as hard as you would do if in a public office environment. The process of commuting to an office and then being in public essentially, means one is psychologically more prepared to get on with what you need to do. If you’re self-employed and work alone then you also don’t have anyone to answer to other than yourself, so you don’t really have the same authority to push you. Put any distractions like a television or games console in another room, or at least out of sight. Ideally, you would have a different room to work in which you wouldn’t enter much outside of working, like an actual study. This is not always possible when spacing is an issue. You also don’t want these things to infiltrate your workspace, so ensure your desk isn’t cluttered or a place where things that not work-related are just left, like magazines or books.

2. Personalisation

If you had an a cubicle at work, you would be allowed to personalise your workspace somewhat even if there were some restrictions, so don’t think that you need to recreate a sterile office in your home to get into that mindset to work; after all, you’ll probably have to sit in that space for many hours, everyday, so it needs to fit you and be a place you can be happy in, even if you have to work. Add personal photos of family to your desk, though don’t go too overboard as this can clutter and distract. Additionally, something which can inspire or motivate you but doesn’t look too boring or dull can help, such as a fish tank or a painting/print of a majestic landscape, can help (preferably something which doesn’t take up too much space). Some find that said motivational posters remind them too much of being in a stiff office environment so perhaps stay away from those; plus they’re quite generic and you should make the most of being able to work from home. Everyone gets those moments of stress or when they just need to breathe a bit and think, so invest in something quality for those moments. Again, the most important thing is that you can work, so don’t clutter your desk with too many things that can distract you.

3. Health and Safety

To give you some perspective, you may want to think back to some of the health & safety considerations from a previous office (or other workplace) you have worked in. Keeping drinks without lids on an alternative side table would avoid spillages on paper, or worse electric equipment, which would need replacing and can result in lost work. Speaking of, make sure the fan for any computers is not obstructed so it doesn’t overheat and create similar computer problems. Consider yourself but also anyone who may come into contact with your workspace. Make sure things can’t be pulled off the desk by children or pets in the vicinity, like loose papers or books. Additional bookcases, shelves or cabinets will mean you don’t have stacks of books, documents or folders taking up space on your desk, which could fall over and cause more chaos. In fact, the positive of having a separate room to work in, means that not only do you separate it from your leisure psychologically, but anything valuable in there, like computers or records are secure from intruders and can be locked away; if you have kids or pets who like to wander in, they will be prevented from doing so.

Paul has worked in a variety of office environments. He currently works in digital marketing, and is in the process of putting together his own home-office, which has required consulting various sources on how to put together the best workspace at home.