In the tech startup culture, MBA’s have traditionally been looked down upon for a number of years, with many CEO’s and tech innovators arguing that MBA’s reduce creativity when it comes to launching startups and instead turn them into plain, old-fashioned businesses.
However, this trend is rapidly changing. The chance of making it as a Silicon Valley start-up, for example, is higher than ever before for MBA students. Many modern tech companies are realizing the value of highly trained MBA graduates, which is the reason why many startups are hiring graduates straight from university. Is an MBA useful to you as a startup owner?
Marketing
Having a good marketing strategy is a crucial component of any company and not just a tech start-up. For most startup owners who do not have any marketing experience or training, this area is what becomes their downfall.
However, MBA training covers extensive marketing techniques and provides you with professional marketing skills so that you know exactly how is best to market and promote your business.
Marketing demands specific expertise, and by completing an affordable online MBA you will gain the essential knowledge about market analysis, segmentation, targeting, pricing, need identification and need generation, and many other areas that will be crucial to the success of your business.
Related: 4 Ways an MBA Can Help You on Your Startup Journey
Business growth and Expansion
A startup is more than a product. The company needs to manage money, it needs to identify and reach customers, it needs to strategically partner with companies to lock out its competitors.
Every startup eventually needs to grow into a fully functioning organization. This is a process which cannot be done without first documenting your best practices, developing channels of communication, building processes, and laying foundations for a scalable organizational structure.
You may not necessarily need an MBA to start and grow a business, but the skills can significantly improve your thought processes when you have to run growing business than needs expansion.
It’s possible to run a startup of 5-10 people based on mutual understanding, however in order to oversee the running of a company with 100 or 200 employees, it’s important to have proper policies and procedures in place.
Having an MBA will ensure that you understand organizational hierarchies and the importance of having well-defined policies and procedures for growth.
Market Research
Market research and analysis is a crucial process for start-up businesses to grow and compete in this new era of web based businesses and technology start-ups. There are dozens of various tools for enterprise level market research and analysis out there available to start-up owners in order to help identify trends and make more informed decisions.
However, these tools are only fully effective if you know how to run them. Having an MBA will ensure that you have acquired all the necessary knowledge for analyzing, interpreting and finding actionable trends in complex data.
Networking
Studying for an MBA opens a host of opportunities for building strong network groups with influential business owners and decision makers. Networking is useful for finding new ideas and also for funding, and you will learn good networking skills as part of your MBA course as well as how to build and expand your professional business network. It’s also a good way to meet new potential business partners, investors and even early evangelists for your product.
If you complete your MBA before launching your startup, it’s likely that you will already have built a professional network which you can use to your advantage.
At the startup stage, it’s okay to try out different strategies and arrive at a model that brings in steady revenues. You probably may not need an MBA for that. But, once the revenues become steady then it is important to think about other things to sustain and remain profitable in the long-term.
Most businesses hire senior level CEO’s with business skills to take them further through the expansion phase. This is the stage where a company needs to build efficient processes, think competition, build long-term plans, etc. Doing MBA at this stage makes a lot sense.