Often, you’ll hear people say, “not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.” While this is true, the phrase has little to do with superficial factors. One thing that characterizes founders is their wealth of knowledge. You can gain knowledge in various areas to run your business. If you’re an undergraduate student interested in entrepreneurship, here are four degree programs to help you start your own business.
- Business Administration
Starting a business can be daunting if you’re unfamiliar with requirements and essentials like business registration, taxation, etc. Unsurprisingly, about ten percent of all new companies fail before their first year in business ends, as per a recent Forbes article.
Gaining a Business Administration degree from an accredited institution like Merrimack College can equip you with all the management principles you need to leverage different resources for profitability. Business administration degrees also help people develop efficient leadership and decision-making skills.
- Economics
Waste can be very harmful to your business operations. Sometimes, wasteful operations are hard to fish out. The longer they remain unsolved, the higher the risk of running your operation costs up.
That’s why experts advise businesses to consider lean management as an effective way to deal with operational waste in their business. A huge part of lean management and efficiency strategies is rooted in economics. Therefore, getting an economics degree can never be a bad choice.
Getting an economics degree can also help with financial management at the micro and macro levels which is a prerequisite if you want to start your business on a solid financial foundation.
- Marketing
Marketing is a basic business function. You’ll need to acquaint yourself with it, whether you’re the marketing team lead spewing all the buzzwords or the head honcho. Founders like Steve Jobs are great examples of entrepreneurs who can still use marketing to sell stories and narratives to customers rather than packaging a product and launching it. You need more than a face-value understanding of marketing and the best methods to do this.
As an entrepreneur, you need to know your target market and the best ways to reach them and keep them as customers. With a marketing degree, you can get an in-depth understanding of marketing, which gives you a competitive edge and approve campaigns that can increase your market share.
- Communication
Does every founder need to be a communication genius? Again, Steve Jobs can be a great answer to this question. In one of his speeches, Apple’s late founder expressed how he cherished a calligraphy class he took that helped him develop Apple’s minimalistic typeface and keyboard.
The thing about communication many people don’t see is that it goes beyond the message and doesn’t end after the exchange. Communication is everything. It applies to internal term members as much as prospective customers. This makes communication important for every entrepreneur. Therefore, going the extra mile to immerse yourself in communication studies can never be a miss if you want to satisfy your customers and staff.
Generally, starting a business is no easy task. However, nothing can make the journey more seamless than ample knowledge of essential business functions, from administration to communication.