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Schools don’t teach entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur is the fastest way to get well-rounded in various aspects of the business and life.
And that’s the reason top companies look for entrepreneurial experience in a candidate. Below are valuable skills you build as you run through your entrepreneurial journey.
90% of startups fail due to various reasons. Looking at startup growth worldwide, I am excited to see next-generation product managers who will join the corporate task force with loads of experience to drive major corporations.
Do something outside of your work/school –
I always tell my friends, colleagues, kids that you need to do more than your school, office and start something in parallel that you are excited about. A daily investment on your side apart from school/office will get you far in life and make it more meaningful.
The True Meaning Of Risk
As an entrepreneur, you understand the meaning of risk because you have taken one. You have put your money, time, efforts and made various sacrifices into what you truly believe in. You are betting on yourself and your gut to make things happen. That’s a significant risk, and a lot of people don’t even think of doing it. Once you have taken those bets, other risks start seeming small. You then become fearless in taking those small risks, and then it becomes part and parcel of your lifestyle.
Many people who have not done entrepreneurship don’t even come close to understanding the true meaning of risk. For them losing a job, position, promotion, monthly salary seems to be the max risk in life, and they can’t think beyond it. Because as an entrepreneur, you have done it plenty of time, you know reward comes with a risk, and if you don’t take it, you are already lost.
Critical Thinking
As an entrepreneur, you are solving a bigger problem for your customers. You understand the problem at its depth, possible workarounds, its importance, and a good solution to it that people will be ready to try and pay for. As an entrepreneur, you constantly think about your work and roadblocks, even on weekends and holidays.
Given enough time spent on a problem, you know it becomes clear over time and no longer remains a problem. You learn about the topic, resolve your assumptions, have multiple options, validate each option, and conclude that it is fair and works long term. Once you solve it, you then grasp how much thinking and preparation has gone into problem-solving, which makes a good deal with Product Management. You don’t do or accept a mediocre job and set high standards for yourself and your team.
Sense Of Ownership
You own your success and failure. You know you don’t have anybody to fall back to when you are stuck in a problem, and you are in total control of either making it or leaving it. You don’t see your work as a job, that someone will run when you take a break. You take it as your responsibility to solve the problem at hand and drive it as per your capabilities. You get your team aligned, set the right priorities, and get going about solving the problem.
As a Product Manager, you own the success and failure of your product. If you have been an entrepreneur, it comes naturally to you, and you feel it day in and day out. Your boss doesn’t need you to be told that this is your job – you have the sense of ownership by default.
Leadership
You started a startup/company to stand for yourself and your idea. You believe in it and took the bold step to invest your time, money, efforts, and thinking behind it. You built the team to make it a reality and demoed it to the world. As an entrepreneur, no book, school, or mentor can teach better leadership if you have done this. You fail, you bounce back, and get going is a sign of a leader. If you have been an entrepreneur for long enough, you got lots of moments to lead and demonstrate your leadership. It gets ingrained in you.
Business Acumen
As an entrepreneur, build the business model, create finance projection reports, compute company valuation, understand equity, define product price, pay salaries, pay bills, monitor your expense/incomes, negotiate, optimize expenses, control operational cost, be competitive, and many more. When you do this day in and day out, you are getting a business ready. Only entrepreneurs get this end-to-end experience of managing money and business. And when you step out to become PM or a business leader, you have it in your blood.
Problem Solving
You understood the pain points of your customer and then rallied behind to solve them. It takes a thousand steps to get there to solve the problem completely. You then rally on making it affordable, usable, scalable, secure, generating profit, adding more value, fighting competition, and growing the company. Each step has its own set of problems to solve and is documented nowhere. With your critical thinking, you make decisions and keep solving different problems. These are scattered set of problems and not necessary into one bucket of technology or money, or people.
Doing it over a long time changes your attitude towards a problem, and you start looking at it as an opportunity. An opportunity to be creative, engaging and you love to step in to solve it. You then enjoy the satisfaction of solving the problem and sleep with a smile on your face. And the next day, you are ready for a newer one.
Ability To Learn Super Fast
As a founder, entrepreneur you need to learn fast about technology, business, finance, projections, pitching, people, negotiation, and many more. You are constantly pushed by the demands you get from the market, investors, customers, employees, jurisdiction, laws, government, and technology trends. You have no option but to learn fast with google/youtube and all the internet toolkit you have.
If you are deep into technology, you want to build things fast and take them to market, and this can be done by building on top of existing building blocks – open source. There are many frameworks, cloud-infra, tools, and languages to help you build what you want. You are constantly exploring and validating the options to select the best one in a short given time. This pressure leads to super-fast learning and hardly possible with schools or corporate jobs.
Communication
Communication is one of the most critical skills of an entrepreneur. You need to talk to various people and connect well to communicate your idea or a story. On a given day, you could be talking to an investor, your co-founder, your developers, your mentor, your customers, logistic vendors, your sweeper, and so many. And you need to adjust based on the individual level to zoom in or zoom out to get the work done.
The more people you talk to, your communication improves fast. You can then shrink an hour-long presentation into 5 minutes for an investor or startup event and yet get the message out. Your verbal, written, and body language gets into shape. You start valuing your and other’s time and use effective communication as a tool to optimize it and make the most of available time.
I hope this inspires you to do more than what you do at work/school. All the best.
Mangesh is Product Leader
Full Bio here – https://mangesh.bhamre.in
