I have always wondered if formal college and graduate school education were worth the price that an individual must pay especially at such an early stage in their career. The investment is oversized with the only bigger cost in life being buying a home.
My next guest on The Small Business Radio Show says that anyone can start and run a business with the right information; no expensive college or graduate degrees required! Omar Zenhom Co-Founder and CEO and host of the host of the $100 MBA Show with over 200 M downloads and 2000 episodes. He is also the CEO of Webninja with over 2M people having watched a webinar on this platform.
We talked about:
Why as an educator, he dropped out of Wharton business school after a semester. His professor had pulled him aside and said “what are you doing here? He told me you don’t need an MBA to be a great entrepreneur! I realized I was there because I wanted to give myself a permission to start a business. When I left, I wanted to do this for other people for $100 not $100,000. I wanted to give them enough information, so they didn’t feel like they have impostor syndrome.”
Omar says that you need to accept the fact that you will fail in business and that’s how we learn. “Whatever I teach you about my business, I can give you some universal truths, but you need to figure it out for yourself. You are going to stink at it in the beginning. But like in sports, you got to focus on the next thing after you miss a shot. You don’t have time; You don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for yourself.” He quotes Rick Steves on travel; “you are going to experience things that are not to your liking, so you need to change your liking.”
Omar feels that the people that make it, really have a strong desire. “The pain of not wanting to be poor is strong. Another good motivator is being addicted to the creation process.”
We discussed how so many small business owners are afraid to bring their product to market. Omar says that “your job in sales is to help them make a decision whether if they want to work with you are not; so your job is education.“
Omar believes you can hustle your way to $1M business, but you can’t scale you if you are making every decision. He adds “admit that you need to give responsibility to others and those decisions are only going to be 80% as effective as yours, but that’s okay. If you want to scale your business, you are managing your people not really your product or service any longer.”
Listen to the entire interview with Omar on The Small Business Radio Show.
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Image: omarzenhom
