Pertinent Perils

School in Guinea

As this economy prompts more and more people to look at bootstrapping their way to small business independence, I thought it helpful to share my own experience. One of the issues that is quickly surfaced in the entrepreneurial process is the need for more education. As someone else’s employee, your responsibilities are likely narrowly defined. Large corporations have functional departments to deal with every need, whether it be the company website or the marketing department. As a small business owner, you have to become a Jill-of-all-trades and manage everything. And your prior corporate experience has left you unequipped to do it! So you need to learn and need to learn fast. With 50% of small businesses failing in the first year of operations, you have little margin for error. But how do you finance this education when resources are scarce? That is where entrepreneurial creativity comes in. In an earlier blog posting, I described how I took Saturday classes for eighteen months to become proficient in website design. That was part of my education. I took a week-long executive education program at the Harvard Business School, Strategic Finance for Smaller Businesses, paid for by a grant from the Families of Freedom Foundation.  The Foundation provided scholarship assistance to those in the immediate impact zone of the World Trade Center on 9-11-01 for which I qualified.

Thereafter, I participated in Owner President Management, a program of the Harvard Business School for founders of fast-growing entrepreneurial enterprises. OPM, as it is known, met three weeks a year for three years on the HBS campus and was truly a tranformational experience. A Professional Development Grant of the American Association of University Women covered part of the cost. I also participated in “Strategic Thinking and Management for Competitive Advantage” at the Wharton School of Business with my tuition and all expenses paid as the winner of the (ft-summer-school-2003) “summer school” competition of the Financial Times newspaper. The image attached to this posting, by the way, is a sign at a school crossing, showing a boy and a girl holdng hands to safely cross the street. I took this photograph in Guinea, a French-speaking country in Sub-Saharan Africa when I was working on a project there.  “École” is the French word for school. African parents make tremendous sacrifices to send their children to school, where school fees can be quite onerous for the poor. They do so because they want better futures for their children. This image always inspires me.