education is the key to business success
posted 2004.05.28
BusinessEurope.com reports that most entrepreneurs are 'unprepared and uninformed':
The vast majority of UK entrepreneurs have gone into business without any practical training, new research reveals.
I hate to break it to them, but it's not just in the UK. I'm in a position where I now speak almost daily to small-biz entrepreneurs, and I can tell you that a dismaying number of them have no training in how to run a business or how to do things online. Which basically means they're floating along.
Even simple concepts like marketing, salesmanship - the very foundation upon which most companies depend in order to succeed - are concepts foreign to a number of entrepreneurs.
Unfortunately, even in these years since the dot-com crash, there are a distressing number of people who believe they can slap something up, shove some products that are unremarkable into a nearly unusable shopping cart, do no marketing or branding, and make enough money to live out their dreams.
Reading. I honestly believe that reading is the thing. Read blogs, web sites, magazines, books, everything and anything you can get your hands on about how businesses succeed. Take notes, remind yourself, and know that no matter how much you know, you still have a long way to go. In my opinion, that's the only way to not stand still - to succeed.
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I agree that most small-sized business owners do not have any business train what-so-ever. It's usually the case that they had some money and an idea that they thought would work.
Besides that, the thing that I've noticed here in Greece, is that a lot of business do not take the web seriously and don't look at it as a communication medium that can save them money in the long run. As a result, they are unwilling to invest in a well planned and well designed site. Quick and dirty design companies rule the market right now, that put up template based sites for a couple of hundred bucks, without much planning or testing. When I come along and give them a quote for a couple of thousand bucks... they all tell me the same thing, "But this company can do it for thousands cheaper." It's a tough sell and i always remind them that they get what they pay for, but most of them dont consider it worthwhile to invest that many resources on a project.
Hopefully, now that Greece has finally gotten broadband, the general opinion of the internet will change.