Today’s WSJ has an article on a trend in business schools these days. With jobs few, business grads are turning into entrepreneurship.

This is in our opinion, a good trend. Entrepreneurship will teach them a number of things that a regular job will not – and quickly. Business plans, cash-flow management, customer service, value to a customer, competition, recruiting, etc become not just terms or concepts these business school grads are familiar with but real issues to deal with directly! It also helps boost the economy as they generate net jobs and value to investors.

A quick bit of advice. Make sure you have a good business plan – We leave it up to you to decide if you want to write it out or just think it through. Here is a quick article on why it is very important to have a business plan.

The MBA tutors at GraduateTutor.com salute this trend and have been helping aspiring entrepreneurs with business plans in a variety of ways. If you are looking at developing a business plan, our MBA tutors can help you in a number of ways be it collaborating with you to write the entire business plan, reviewing your business plan to suggest areas to improve it, providing you research support to find critical data points or building a financial model for your business plan. Read more about our business plan services here. Our MBA tutors have helped a number of our customers who have included business school graduates who just want a second opinion or those who are unfamiliar with business and need a lot of help. We can also draw upon specialists from our pool of finance tutors, accounting tutors, economic tutors and other research specialists depending on your need. We are happy to assist and welcome more entrepreneurs into this world.

The NYT is running a great debate on what a Master’s degree is worth?

While people have strong opinions on both sides of the scale, it seems clear that MBAs are worth a lot more than many other master’s degrees.  I have my strong opinion but I leave it to you to read the comments and decide which side of the fence you are with.

What do entrepreneurs need to understand about finance!?  Why do they need finance tutoring!?

Often people think starting a business is simple.  It is simple in many ways but as you get further into the business, there are important decisions to be made that will impact the long term sustainability, profitability and returns of the business / owners / investors.  Here is a sample of terms you need to know when structuring investments:

• Pay to Play
• Anti-Dilution
• Liquidation Preference
• Protective Provisions
• Information Rights
• Registration Rights
• Redemption Right
• Conversion
• Right of First Refusal
• Restriction on Sales
• Voting Rights
• Vesting
• Employee Pool
• Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement
• Indemnification
• Initial Public Offering Shares Purchase
• Precedent Conditions to Financing
• Drag

Be smart.  Work with our finance tutor or our accounting tutor to get the basics right.  Small decisions could make a large impact!

Graduatetutor.com assists b-school students with tutoring in a variety of subjects.  We are now thrilled to formally launch our business plan tutoring services.

There has been a spurt of new entrepreneurs and we want to do our bit to support them.   See this special report on entrepreneurship in The latest edition of The Economist.  According to this NYT article, more people are now forced to start a business.  It may be that people are tired of looking for work like the title of this article says or it may be that you have less to lose once you are laid off!  Whatever your reason for starting a business is, it always helps to plan well before you do so.
Starting your business is a risky venture.  Statistics show that only one in ten or more businesses succeed.  What can you do to increase your odds of success?

Answer:  Write a business plan before you start a business.

We believe putting down your ideas in a business plan before you start really helps in many ways.  See our business plan tutoring page to read more on how a business plan can help before you start a business and how GraduateTutor.com can assist you.
People get ideas all the time  but unfortunately ideas alone will not create a successful start up.  The idea needs to be implemented.  But even  implementation is not sufficient to create a successful business.  The idea must be implemented in a manner that it must produce more revenues /cash flow than it costs to bring the product or service to the market.

Writing a business plan before you start a business will help you evaluate if your business idea can produce more revenues /cash flow than it costs to bring the product or service to the market.  If the answer is a resounding yes, then it is a wise decision to move forward.  If not, pause and think of a new idea.
We believe that if more people had written business plans before they started their businesses, the statistic that  nine out of ten startups fail would have been so much better!  So take our advice and write a business plan before you start a business!

(full disclosure:  We offer business plan tutoring services! Please don’t feel obligated to work with us.  Just write a business plan before you start a business.)