Education

They say the smartest people in business know one thing: They know nothing. Teaching entrepreneures that when they look at building a network, the goal is to build knowledge through your network. Surround yourself with people that challenge you and make you better. It is important to teach students how to seek knowledge and assemble a team.

It is difficult to teach something you haven't done yourself. So if you're teaching someone about roofing, it would be difficult to know all of the little things unless you've done it yourself. So, if you're going to be teaching Entrepreneurship and you've never done it, you should consider attending other entrepreneurship instructor’s classes. Like we teach our students, teams with similar goals and diverse skills generally have better outcomes; the same applies to our teaching. To improve your classes, find people who have a different set of skills and experiences than you and collaborate with them. Bringing in outside business owners to share their experiences is also a great way to engage students. If you’re an entrepreneur and you decide to become an instructor, find an educator to mentor you. You might know everything about building a company, but nothing about lesson plans, handling students that don't care, etc...

When I decided to become an entrepreneur, I quickly realized that my classes hadn't prepared me for accepting credit cards, building a database of customers and suppliers, understanding customer satisfaction, and so on... You will soon realize that you need experiences to learn these skills and often times we partner with people to minimize the learning curve. If you're an educator, I recommend teaching students what to look for in a future business partner. Bring in business owners who have had failed partnerships and explain why and what they would do different if they could do it over again.

So many entrepreneurs think that money holds them back. I've learned over the years that investors want to see someone who figured out how to make it work with little to no money. When someone can figure it out this way, loaning them money to improve operations and scale makes much more sense. Teaching students how to do things on a budget, and how to be resourceful and utilize their surroundings is an extremely valuable skill that often is never taught.