Business Degrees Don’t Teach Small Business | Edmonton Business Coach

Hi, thanks for joining us for another edition of ask spurl CPA. Today we’re talking about how business degrees don’t teach small business skills. Um, I’m here with Laura. Laura, how was your weekend this weekend? Anything interesting happened? A lot of studying. Okay. So Laura is doing that a business degree that I’m about to rag on here. So that’s a little bit, that’s a little bit interesting, but um, you know, the quote that I have is, uh, Michael Gerber author our favorite e myth. And in it he says, people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know, but because of their insatiable need to know more. Um, no, the statistic that we’re always trying to improve is 50% of all Canadian small business go out of business within five years. Edmonton Business Coach, and you know, they really go out of business for three reasons.

They can’t find customers. They run out of cash and they can’t build the right team. And you know, the, the, the story that we see that, that repeats are, you know, business owners, they think these failure rates aren’t going to apply to them because they had a four year business degree. So they think that just because they had that, they’re not going to be one of those 50%, but all too often, you know, we see that, you know, when those business degrees don’t make that much of an impact on that failure rate. Uh, so Laura, what do you think are the questions that these business owners and they have a business degree should be asking, do business degrees prepare you to run a business? So I would take the, the position that business degree or they’re very, they’re useful in terms of they’re trying to teach you how to work in a business.

They’re assuming you’re going to work for someone else and, and they want you to know, um, a lot. They want you to know, I guess a little about a lot is the best way. You know, they wanted you to know a little bit about accounting and a little bit of a marketing and a little bit about HR. The don’t really expect you to run it all the way through. You know, they, they don’t say, you know, hey, here’s how you post the ad. This is what you do when you come in the interview. This is how you check there for this is how you put up the contract. And they teach you high level theory about it and that’s how the same way they do it. I’m with the marketing and, and Edmonton Business Coach, other functions of the business. So they teach you a little about, a lot with the expectations that there’s going to be other people in that business that you start to work for, that know how to do it from beginning to end.

How important is your daily schedule and do they teach scheduling school? Yeah. So I, you know, I don’t know about uh, what you seen Laura, but I didn’t get taught anything. I want to schedule. Did they ever see, show you a schedule of a, of an accountant and what they do at eight in the morning, what they do at nine in the morning. And this is the same. It’s not just, you know, you had a business school would be an accountant. I bet you, you know, there’s a bunch of plumbers and electricians and general contractors out there and they never once put in front of you what people do, who are effective in your industry at each hour of the day. Um, but generally if I’m looking at a business owners calendar, I can normally tell if they’re going to be successful or not. If I look at what they have planned to do each and every day coming up, um, that’s a good, you know, predicator if they’re going to be successful or not. And they just don’t teach it and not, they don’t just teach it and not business school, but they don’t teach it another, uh, technical schools either. And I think it’s, uh, you know, one of the, probably the most important thing, uh, on determining your success is what your calendar looks like and what your plans for that calendar. And they simply don’t teach you how to organize it,

who has a more regimented schedule, students or successful entrepreneurs. So here is a big one, especially for the people who come straight out of school and they started a business. Um, and there can be, there can be the culture shock of what that, that schedule needs to look like. You know, you’re in school and you’re taking one class at, at, uh, you know, 11 and then you’re taking another class at one on Tuesday, Thursdays and Monday, Wednesday, Friday, maybe you have, you don’t want it nine and you know, want it to and one at four and you have these breaks throughout the day and you’ve got some time off, you know, and some days you can start later than others. Edmonton Business Coach, well I got the news flashes that, you know, as soon as you go to, even when most students go to the regular work world and it’s a, it’s a grind from medium to five, now we’re starting to look at entrepreneurs and some of these guys are putting in, you know, 50, 60, 70 hours a week and they’re diligent about what time they start and what time they finish. Um, and that can be a huge, huge culture shock. And it’s not that they can’t do it, it’s just that they haven’t had to do it yet. Right. So sometimes, you know, starting that skill, um, you know, from scratch rate as school can be very, very difficult. And it’s like anything else, if you haven’t practiced that, your chances of success are, or just, uh, uh, smaller.

Okay.

Do most customers care more about your degree or the value you can bring it? Yeah. Here’s the other one too, is some people think that, hey, I have a business degree and I’m going to put those letters after my name and, and customers are just going to sign with me. Um, I guess what the customers don’t care. They for the most part, they don’t care about the letters. They care about the value and the reputation in the um, you know, the, the differentiation factors of the business. Edmonton Business Coach, you know, there might be some, um, professional, uh, businesses where you know, people, um, you need that in order to be achieved that designation, uh, or that credentials. But after that it’s more of a pass or fail type thing. You have it or you don’t, they’re not going to valley you, uh, as much as what think in your business career. Just because you have a business degree after awhile it starts to not matter as much to the customer and it’s what you’ve learned at it as important. But the customer is not going to give you a, uh, a contract or a sale just because you have a degree.

Okay.

What are the three reasons businesses fail? Yeah, so the, the three reasons is they, they can’t get enough customers, number one, a, and this is in order to, if can’t get enough customers, number one. Number two is they run a cash. Number three is that can’t find the, uh, the right team.

Does the real world value long form written content link school? No. The real world hates longform written content. Most people won’t even read a book ever. Uh, but in, you know, you want a good market school, you’ve got to write a nice long paper and it’s got to be, you know, four, five, six, seven, 10 pages or whatever the professor wants and what, guess what? Most of the times when you had a, a customer at 10 page written paper with no pictures of words or third, you’re going to throw that thing out. Like the real world does not value longform written content like the academic world values it. Um, so being good at longform written content, just because you can make that argument or prove your polling tr or make an analysis in longform written content, you know, the, the, in the real world, it’s, you know, the people who can prove that point and make that argument in a concise manner is normally more valuable with the pictures or less words, uh, is more important.

Okay.

Our business schools keeping current on new age marketing tactics? No, no, they’re, they’re not. I, I mean, I have, uh, I, I’ve, I’ve met some people recently on, uh, um, marketing objectives and you know, I felt even when I went to business school was the marketing, you know, super practical and super up to date years and years ago. Uh, when, when I went to school, um, I didn’t feel it, but I thought, you know, with all these changes in marketing initiatives and, and the advent of digital marketing initiatives, you know, how up to date are the business schools, but they’re not, they’re not up to date. Um, it’s, it’s difficult enough for, uh, the average marketing firm. I would say most of the marketing firms out there are doing it poorly. So how can we expect that the, uh, you know, the academic world to be a on top of it even more so than the practitioners who were in it every day who are struggling to keep up.

Do you get any sales training in business school? Absolutely not. You get like zero sales training. Maybe. Like if you’re going to do one day or something like that. But a lot of people go all through business school and they’ve never prepared a proposal to a client, handed that proposal across the table, asked for a signature and tried to collect payment on it and deal with any objections that they have had zero experience in this. So they have great ideas and great knowledge and great how, but they can’t get a single customer to sign on the dotted line saying they want this and no one has given them a single skill or, or tool in their tool belt that they can use to try to sell a client. Edmonton Business Coach, you know, and if there’s any, you know, curriculum writers out there, you know, shame on you guys, you guys need to put stuff in there.

There needs to be sales training for, um, you know, people getting business degrees because the number one reason that businesses fail is they can’t get enough customers. And you know, even if they have an effective marketing plan, what happens when the phone rings? Then people don’t know how to carry that through rate to two contract. Do you get any practice writing templates and checklists? Zero, zero you know, checklists and templates and you know, that’s what, you know, businesses are, we have to get an effective marketing campaign out there. We have to know how to sell that client when they come through. Um, and then on a small business, you know, you have to write the checklist and the templates, you know, what are the checklist that you’re going to do to make sure that the job or the scope of work gets done correctly and what are the templates that you’re going to use that you can give to the rest of the team members that you can operate at a consistent level and save time by, by not having to do the same thing over and over again.

Um, you know, checklists and templates are one of the biggest things. When people buy a business they buy, they want to see, hey, what’s that operations manual look like? What are the checklists and templates that we’re going to follow. But you go to a business and uh, you know, they, they talk very theoretically about, you know, what happens in a business, but the value of the business is often what’s in those checklists and templates. Edmonton Business Coach, he can get enough. You don’t give me any or certainly enough practice writing them in school. Is it harder to get business financing than most business students? Yeah. Yeah. So you’ll, you’ll deal with a lot of business problems and they’ll think, oh, we’re going to raise capital this way or we’re going to get a loan that way. And they make it sound in school. Like that’s a foregone conclusion.

But usually the answer, when you go out in the real world and asked for someone to invest in your company or you know, uh, go to a bank and ask for a loan, that answer’s no. People are just not going to hand that over. They don’t, they, you know, they, you read all these textbooks and they are, or how do you handle this financing or that financing? What, in the real world, you can’t get the financing that you need to do to execute your business plan. So often you have to adjust your business plan and scale out down and bootstrap the business in a certain way. And you know, some of the initiatives you might want to do have to be initiatives that you do in the future, uh, and you have to work towards them. So, um, you know, getting the financing, whether it’s capital investments or loans in the real world is significantly harder than they make it sound in business school.

Um, and so they need to do a better job probably on, you know, how to adjust a business plan and make a business plan that can be bootstrapped in, you know, at least partially how has building and developing a team more of a numbers game. Yeah. So here that they do talk a lot in business school about culture and team and that gets brought up a lot, but they don’t really tell you how to execute it. You know, they don’t really drive home the point that yeah, you want to make a good hire, but how many people do you have to meet before you can make a good hire? Edmonton Business Coach, you know, you, you have to meet how often a hundred people to make one good hire and they make it sound like you can just do your interview better and ask better questions that I interview.

Well, if that person’s a bad candidate, it doesn’t matter what questions you ask them, there’s still a bad candidate. You just need to see more candidates. And then once you have them on the team and you have this idea for it, you know, what’s our corporate culture? People think that I can just write a, you know, um, you know, problem, vision, mission and values and somehow everyone’s going to read it once and get it. It’s like, no, you need to communicate it all the time to the team. You know, how effectively you build that corporate culture and the training and the team, you know, revolves directly on how often you meet as a team. Often. And you see a lot of businesses and they’re like, well, we’re going to have a monthly staff meeting. And that monthly staff meeting normally gets postponed or delayed or canceled some months.

And then I got a news flash. If you really want a corporate culture, I mean, again, you can look in your calendar and determine if you have a shot at it or not. Because if you have a monthly staff meeting, best case scenario is you can maintain an existing culture, but if you want to improve it, meet every single week, you know, meet every single week, you’re meeting, you know, 48, 50, two times a year depending on when the holiday’s workout. Edmonton Business Coach, and see a hundred candidates for every time you bring on one. Those are the numbers that we’re talking about. So, you know, people think of, you know, culture and values and it’s wound and some sort of motivational and a part of it is, but the other part of it is you just have to have enough numbers for that to work. You have to see enough candidates, you have to have enough training sessions with your team. Um, and, and that is black and white. It doesn’t matter what the intended culture is. If you don’t have enough at bats, it’s not gonna work out. So I think that’s what we have here for today. Thanks so much for, for joining in again. You know, please hit that like, and subscribe buttons so you didn’t you deliver you, uh, tips on how to beat the odds at business. And as always, you know, please leave any comments below and we’ll do our best to address them in future videos. Thanks very much.