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Being an exec in someone else's business and running my own show, the hardest things have been the most basic: 1) Managing people. 2) Collecting from clients. 3
by poulsbohemian 8y ago
Being an exec in someone else's business and running my own show, the hardest things have been the most basic:
1) Managing people.
2) Collecting from clients.
3) Finding and cultivating clients for the long run.
It's that simple. What's interesting is, I don't recall ever touching on those issues with any depth in my undergrad business classes. Sure we studied "best practices" in hiring, managing, layoffs, etc, but that's very different than the day-to-day of building a team from scratch and getting people to produce at their best level. Likewise, I took a lot of financial management and accounting classes, but that's totally different from some jerk customer who decides they just don't want to pay their bill out of spite, forcing you to litigate, where the dollar amount represents potentially months of payroll. There are so many things like this that are _basic business_ and yet until you've been there, it's hard to really know how to prepare for it or build the skills for it.
- mediaman 8y agoI agree. I never did an MBA, but have talked with a lot of people who did. Collections, financing (not the high falutin' corporate finance they teach, or corporate accounting, but small business finance: small business loan mechanics, covenants, banks versus ABLs versus factoring vs equipment leases), basic labor regs, how to sell, how not to underprice, how to discover customers' "real problems", how to manage performance, how to deal with an otherwise good employee going through personal problems, how to write a good job posting that doesn't read like it was written by an HR drone, etc are all things that don't seem to be commonly covered subjects. The only solution seems to be to go do all those things and make the mistakes, but I think much of it could be accelerated through good training.