Operating a business promises great rewards like financial freedom and being your own boss, but it also comes with its fair share of challenges. However, education provides all the tools you’ll need to tackle the obstacles in your path in your small business, and it will help you thrive amongst your competition in the long run. Here are a few tips on how to use higher education to make yourself a better business owner.
Risk Management
Taking risks is an integral part of owning a business. This is because investments are often a gamble, but the rewards for investing successfully can be immense and transformative. Taking it upon yourself to get a masters in global risk management online can prepare you to invest wisely. Pursuing this kind of degree will teach you pertinent skills and offer you the knowledge you’ll need to assess the risk of a given investment. This will in turn allow you to weigh the risk of an investment against the reward it entails. These skills are relevant to more than simply analyzing investments, however, and they can also be applied to elective expenses. For example, business and technology evolve together, and that means that businesses need to keep up with cutting edge tech in order to stay competitive or to get a leg up on the competition. Being able to assess the risk of such expenses is therefore vital, as adopting new technology without a clear idea of how it will shake out can incur major costs without ever offering you the promised benefits.
Business Administration
Everyone is familiar with the concept of workers being a cog in a machine, a metaphor that seeks to convey that operating a business successfully depends on keeping numerous individuals on task in order to make the company more efficient. A masters degree in business administration is then comparable to an engineering degree. Working toward a BA degree, you’ll learn all of the skills necessary to wrangle any number of employees who are divided into disparate teams into one cohesive unit. This requires organizational skills, as keeping track of multiple teams will ental receiving and accurately transcribing various data points. Likewise, business administration requires interpersonal skills, because you’ll need to communicate with team leaders and likely even subordinate members of those teams in order to make sure everyone knows what they need to be doing, how they need to do it, and more. These skills will be all the more crucial when it comes to mediating between team members who are engaged in a conflict with one another.
Economics
An economics degree is incredibly advantageous for business owners, because the underlying rules of commerce and business strategies are defined by economics. Obtaining a degree in economics will expose you to various skills that deal directly with the mechanics of money. For example, economics curricula will entail accounting, an utterly vital skill when managing the finances of a business. Keeping an accurate record of your business’s revenue and expenses are an integral part of measuring profit, and profit margins provide much needed context for the overall performance of your business within a given timeframe. An economics degree will also prepare you to broker better deals among business partners, something that is integral for creating the most efficient and cost effective supply chain.
When pursuing a degree with owning a business in mind, there are a few distinct options that can help you lay the groundwork for success, and it can be difficult to nail down exactly what would be best for you and your future business. However, it’s crucial to note that there is overlap between each of these degrees that can produce a well-rounded business person in and of itself. Likewise, you can specialize in multiple fields by majoring in one and minoring in the other, or you could pursue multiple degrees. Using these tips, you have the information to make the decision that best prepares you to run a business successfully.
