Who Needs Management Training?
One of MIBOSO’s personal branding client firms offers outsourced management training to corporations that lack internal training departments. After a few years of delivering their management training curriculum, their instructors found that while the bulk of their “students” were employed professionals, significant numbers of entrepreneurs and small business owners had signed up for their management training programs as well. Why? Because as their businesses or professional practices grew, they began taking on employees and partners. They also began doing more negotiating with suppliers and clients. This exposed their need for strong management skills. Here’s an example.
I think we’d all agree that a personal trainer has no great need of strong management skills. But what happens when an entrepreneur leverages his personal training skills to create an on-line personal training enterprise? Another MIBOSO personal branding client, John Allen Mollenhauer, is the founding genius behind MyTrainer.com. His website utilizes all of the latest technical innovations to serve its community of burned out professionals who are fed up with being out of shape, overweight or exhausted. Today John manages a highly skilled team whose competencies his business relies upon to attract and support a diverse global community.
So while management skills are clearly necessary for ambitious managers or employed professionals wanting to progress in their careers, management training is equally important for entrepreneurs and independent professionals wanting to grow their “practice” or consulting business into a larger entity. Actually, it may be even MORE critical for the entrepreneurs to get this training. While the trends today indicate that successful entrepreneurs have a somewhat higher percentage* of college degrees than the general population, a number of VERY successful entrepreneurs** are college or high school drop outs, and in even greater need of management training, on demand…
- Michael Dell dropped-out of college at age 19 to focus his energy on starting PC’s Limited, which later became Dell, Inc.
- Richard Branson dropped out of school at the age of 16 to start his first business venture. He went on to establish the Virgin brand and the 360 companies it owns.
- Bill Gates was a college drop out who started the world’s largest computer software company, Microsoft Corporation
- Debbi Fields started Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chippery as a 20 year old housewife with no business experience
- Steve Jobs attended one semester of college before quitting to work for Atari. He went on to co-found Apple Computers.
- Mary Kay Ash founded Mary Kay Inc. without any formal education or training
*Research Source: “Nascent Entrepreneurs in Canada: An Empirical Study,” a 2002 study found that: Among Canadians “more Nascent [beginning] Entrepreneurs had university education than the general population.”
** Statistics source: college-startup.com
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