Category Archives: Starting a Business

5 Rules for Working with Business Attorneys

Advice, Starting a Business, ,

With due respect to the do-it-yourselfer incorporation and legal tools, and particularly my long-term friends at Nolo Press, if you are going to have your own business then you want a long-term relationship with a business attorney.

This is a litigious world. Avoiding attorneys is false economy. Normally you start with a small business attorney. As you grow that might expand to include an intellectual property specialist and maybe an employee law specialist.

I’ve worked with several excellent attorneys. I’ve made some mistakes, and I’ve learned a few things. Here’s my advice on that:

1.  Take time to select carefully.

If you own a business you need to have relationships with at least one attorney and at least one accountant. Take the time to find compatible competent professionals. Start by asking around (friends, relatives, business people you know) for recommendations.

Don’t just jump with the first person recommended by your friends or relatives, find at least three candidates. Look at their websites (an aside: I won’t deal with professionals who don’t have competent websites; it’s 2011), see if you can find their content offerings in blogs, follow them on twitter if they’re there, and – by far the most important – meet them and talk to them. Ask them about rates, and average monthly costs. Ask them for a client list and check references. If they’re shy about giving you names, that’s a warning sign.

If you have an attorney in the family, think about this example: The smartest attorney I ever worked with was my older brother. It’s great to have somebody you trust. But that also got awkward occasionally because he worked for me for free, and it was hard to ask for help when it was free.  When I changed attorneys because we moved, my next attorney was delightfully proactive with making sure we had proper filings and minutes and such.

Forget all the mythology about sharks (and I have to apologize for my choice of illustration here; I couldn’t resist). I’ve run into some nasty dishonest attorneys, but I’ve had no trouble finding smart, honest, and easy-to-like attorneys. The attorney jokes and all that are the obvious phenomenon of a few bad apples giving the whole barrel a bad reputation.

2.  Do your own homework to minimize costs

There’s so much good information and advice available, on the web and in books, that you can reduce legal fees by doing your homework first on things like choosing between sole proprietorship and corporation or LLC or partnership, for example, so you understand the main terms, and the most obvious tradeoffs. Then you optimize your situation by going into the attorney talk already knowing a lot of the basics. Let the attorney help you with the fine tuning.

3.  Watch the billing details carefully.

Be straight with your attorney about money. If there is an occasional business lunch or social meeting, make sure you’re clear about whether any of these are non-billing occasions. Be clear with phone calls too. I liked to set the terms myself, specifying as I got into the conversation that I wanted some legal advice over the phone, and that I expected to pay for it; or, in some cases, that this was just social or community work or logistics, and I didn’t think of it as a billing call.

Then read your bills. Look at the time charge amounts, and question them when they aren’t obvious. Question them when they are bundled up into general categories only, like research, for example, rather than itemized down to the detailed incidents.

4.  Distinguish between legal advice and business advice

Help your attorney manage this important distinction. You want your attorney to give you legal advice, but the borders get blurry. For example, you’re trying to do a contract with a big company and their contract has disputes being settled in their home jurisdiction. That happens a lot, and when it does, the biggest dog wins. If you don’t handle the difference between legal advice and business advice well, you can end up with your attorney wasting your time and money, and even screwing up the deal, by insisting on controlling the theoretical venue of theoretical future disputes.

Great moments in attorney business: I worked for years with an attorney named Tom Hoyt who had the sense to make the distinction clear. “That’s a business decision,” he would say. “My job is to tell you the legal side, but you have to decide whether or not you want to take the business risk.” That avoids the awkwardness that happens when the attorney advises one thing, for legal reasons; and you do the other, for business reasons.

5.  Demand and accept responsibility

There are some things attorneys are supposed to actually do for you, as professionals, rather than just advise you. For example, keeping files of corporate minutes, fling the annual paperwork for the corporation, tasks that involve just doing, not asking. Tell your attorneys in the beginning of the relationship that you expect them to take responsibility for these tasks; you will be billed, but you won’t be paying the penalties incurred if they do it wrong.

And, as the reality of point number 4,  accept the responsibility for choices you make because you have to, the business choices, when they have bad outcomes.

(Image: egarc2/Flickr cc)

Business is Where Home is Good

Business Mistakes, Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business, , , ,

Yesterday I posted Home is Where Business is Good here. Today, the exact opposite. That seems like a contradiction, I know; but it isn’t really. I I love a good paradox.

Yesterday’s post was about living where you have to when it’s not your choice. Generally, employees have to move. They get transferred.

Entrepreneurs, with some exceptions, get to make a choice. You start a company. You move a company. And sometimes you move yourself to start a company. Usually it’s your choice.

My wife and I have made our choices several times, with varying results. The illustration here is Eugene OR, which is where we’ve lived for 18 years after moving Palo Alto Software here from its original location in Palo Alto CA. I posted here about that. We moved from Eugene to Mexico City once for a job, and we moved from Mexico City to Palo Alto for a job. We tried and failed to start a company in Mexico City, where the location was a disadvantage for our particular venture at that particular time. I was a founding director of a company that moved from the heart of the Silicon Valley in San Jose to the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains, in Scott’s Valley, and went public in less than four years.

I really don’t recommend moving from where you are to someplace else because the new location is better for the business you want to start. Move because you want to, yes; particularly if you’re young, and not tied down, and more so if it’s somewhere you want to move to. And move if you’re in the middle of nowhere, with to infrastructure, so you’re at a huge disadvantage. But don’t move because people say some other location is better. The business advantage you get is really unlikely to make up for the personal disadvantages of moving from somewhere you know and like.

The United States is a national economy. Sure there are the startup clusters, but success stories are everywhere. So are Internet access, Fedex, UPS, Kinko’s, and commercial airports. Some people swear by the cities, some prefer the towns. Some like a lot of action, which comes with a lot of smog and traffic and such; some don’t. If you’re going to build your own business, you get to choose.

One of the best moments of my years owning a business was when my wife said:

If we’re going to put up with all the downside of owning our own business, let’s get some of the upside, and move to where we want to live.

So we moved to Eugene. And 18 years later, we’re still glad we did.

(Image: I picked it up from a Eugene city website)

The Paradox of Location vs. Technology

Bootstrapping, Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business, , , ,

Did you see this piece over the weekend? In Start-Ups Follow Twitter, and Become Neighbors the New York Times presents several San Francisco companies (including klout.com, my personal favorite) that purposely located offices near Twitter for good business reasons.

Steve King called it The Real Magic Comes from Being in the Same Place in his new blog on coworking. He quotes the Times piece:

‘Even though it’s all about tech and the Internet, the real magic of Silicon Valley comes from people being in the same space,’ said Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify.

He calls it "Accelerated serendipity"

It is a belief that coworking increases the generation of business ideas and productivity.  The concept is when smart people from diverse backgrounds come together in a coworking community, good things happen – including business innovation.

Which is all cool, for sure. And of course, in my years in the Silicon Valley from 1981 through 1992, I saw that happening a lot.

But still, wait a minute: Isn’t this the opposite of 2011 and beyond? Aren’t we all – you reading this blog, me writing it, and all the information we both share on Twitter and Facebook – braking the barriers of physical space and geography with a new online landscape? One that brings us closer despite the distance in miles? Haven’t we seen lots of accelerated serendipity online?

In a comment to Steve’s post above, I quoted his (well, his company, Emergent Research) trend number 7 for 2010, from a piece about a year ago, the convergence of social, mobile, and cloud computing. And, come to think of it, trends number 4 and 5, the new localism and the growth of home businesses, are also counter to the idea of being in the same place.

My conclusion: I love a good paradox. And business is full of them.

Business Planning for the ‘Lean Startup’

Business Planning, Plan-as-you-go Planning, Starting a Business, ,

(Note: I wrote this first for my business planning column at entrepreneur.com. I’m reproducing it here, with permission of the publisher, for the convenience of my readers here. Tim.)

There’s lots of talk these days about the so-called “lean startup.” Most would think that just meant a startup without a lot of outside capital. According to thought leaders Eric Ries and Steve Blank, a lean startup is one developed along a build-test-revise-build-more-test-more strategy. It’s closely related to what they call agile (or rapid) program development. It’s product development that doesn’t mean spending forever planning a project before getting started. Instead, it’s a cycle of build, test, correct, then build, test and correct.

And that idea, the cycle, the test and revise, the small correction, and the quick pace, is ideal for a next-generation style of business planning. So I’d like to explore here what kind of planning might be related to the lean startup. And I hope, as you read this, that it sounds like a better planning process for a lot of organizations, not just the lean startups.

  1. Keep the planning simple and practical.
    The plan should live online, not on a document printed out somewhere. It could be in the cloud, on an online application, or a local area network. The key players can grab it from where it is, work on it and put it back.
    It doesn’t need any extra frills of editing for the sake of appearances. It doesn’t include an executive summary or a description of company background or management team. It’s a plan, not a sales brochure. If you need that document later on, you can start with the plan and add the extra descriptions, summaries and editing required for showing it to outsiders.
    Your plan should include strategy, steps, dates, deadlines, metrics, accountability, and basic projections, plus a review schedule. The review schedule is critical: When will we review and revise? This keeps the plan alive.
  2. Grow it organically.
    The worst thing you could do is develop a plan before you take any action. Start with the heart of it–what’s most important–and build it like an avocado grows, from the heart outward. Don’t put anything off for planning; plan as you develop your business.
    What comes first? Probably strategy, but not necessarily. Some people build their plan all around a sales forecast. It’s all modules, like blocks, and you do it in whatever order fits your personality.
  3. Think it, plan it, test it.
    It’s not like you’re not going to plan, manage and steer your company just because it’s a lean startup. On the contrary, you need to stay on top of the quickly changing plan, managing your assumptions as the reality emerges. As assumptions withstand tests–or don’t–you can quickly make adjustments.
    That agile development website took off even faster than hoped? Cool. Your plan tells you how those dots were connected so you can adjust everything else. Did it take longer than expected? Same thing: Go back to the plan; look at how everything related.
  4. Match your agile development with agile planning.
    I love all the similarities between rapid development and plan-as-you-go planning. So let’s bring the vocabulary together. Real-world business planning, particularly in this rapidly changing real world we live in, should also be pretty damn agile. And rapid.
    Plan it, build it, revise it, plan it again. That’s called the planning process, and without it you don’t control your destiny. You can’t move quickly enough. You’re always reactive and you’re not optimizing.
  5. Lather, rinse, repeat.
    Planning has to be like steering, a matter of constant small corrections within a broad navigational plan. The details change, but all within context of the long-term direction. A good planning process is cyclical. You’re always reviewing and revising.

To me, all five points seem to be a pretty good way to build planning into your business, whether you’re a “lean startup” or not.

5 Reasons Why and 5 More Why Not to Start Your Own Business

Advice, Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business

This post started with a conversation I overhead while walking on a sidewalk. I didn’t want to hear it, but they were very loud. I’ll spare you the details. It did get me thinking about these two lists: first why, and then why not to start your own business.

First, a note about the outcome and the impact of the outcome. You don’t know for sure, as you start the process of building your own business, how it’s going to turn out. I’m sure that all of us would rather jump into a time machine to a few years in the future, look at it then, and use that to decide. But we don’t get to.

That is why you want to plan that business before you start. Not the big formal document necessarily, but definitely the plan, with strategy, milestones, basic numbers, cash needs, and a review and revise schedule. The plan reduces the uncertainty. If the planning process turns up real problems, and stops you from starting a bad business, then it’s done you a big favor.

Beyond that obvious fog-of-war blindness about the actual future, here are five good reasons to start a business:

  1. People need or want it. Are you filling a void? Do people really want what you’re selling. How cool is it to provide something that makes people feel better, sleep better, learn better, live better, and so forth.  Look at some successful startups, and they were built around things that made life better: computers, transportation, web applications, organic food, tutoring, a whole world of new and better things and ways to do things.
  2. You’ll be better off.  This spans a wide range of situations, from making more money, to sharing home and child time, to living in a better place, having more time; this is such a fundamentally good reason that it spills over to the others to follow. And don’t forget your relationships, as in family and loved ones: don’t think you’ll be better off if they aren’t. (Or if that sounds good to you, do you and them a favor and get out of that relationship).
  3. You’ll be happier.  For me, looking back, one of my main drivers was wanting to do things my way, wanting to spend my time on tasks that interested me. I wasn’t sure I’d make more money or make my family better off, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make less, and they wouldn’t be worse off, while I would be doing something I liked and believed in. I’m not the only one.
  4. You’ll control your own destiny. When you build your own business, success or failure depends on you, not your boss, your company, and much less politics or being a team player. I’ve always liked that feeling myself. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.
  5. Change the world for the better. Build a business, employ people, give them something meaningful to do, and you make the world better off. Is it possible this is the same satisfaction that you got from building a sand castle on the beach, when you were a kid, except longer and stronger and more real? Not to be dramatic, but starting a business, if it lasts, adds something to the world. More so if the business has a purpose

And, on the other hand, once again suspending the critical point of whether or not it’s going to be successful (plan it well, please), here are five reasons not to start that business:

  1. It takes a lot of work. I’ve been dealing with entrepreneurs for more than 30 years now, and I’ve never seen even one of them who worked less while building a business than when he or she was an employee, or a student, or something else.
  2. It causes a lot of worry. It’s hard to avoid. You don’t know the future, you live in uncertainty, and, if you grow, people depend on you. You take risks like credit lines and money owed to you and money you owe. You spend money based on future projections. If you’re Zen enough, maybe you don’t worry; but most people do worry. There’s a lot of stress.
  3. Failure can cost you big time. Businesses do fail, and not always through the fault of the owner. Even good decisions have bad outcomes. There are a lot of factors you can’t control. I know people whose business failure cost them their sense of self, plus their life relationships. If you can’t deal with the possibility, don’t go there.
  4. You won’t be your own boss. It’s funny how often we equate owning your own business with being your own boss. That’s only partly true. You do get the independence I mentioned in number 4 above, controlling your own destiny. Usually you can set your time schedule, and often even your customers. But consider this: you’re not your own boss; your customers are your boss.
  5. You will make mistakes. If you can’t live with mistakes, don’t start your own business. You’re doomed. You can’t go through this forest without making some wrong turns. The good news is all businesses make mistakes, and most of them survive them. But if you can’t live with your own mistakes, keep your day job.

Conclusion: this question of whether or not to develop your own business is yet another of these questions that get answered poorly, with a lot of generalizations. It’s a matter of pattern recognition, planning, work, and knowing who you are and what you can do and what you see as a successful outcome.

It’s not for everybody. Is it for you?

5 Points On Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

Current Affairs, Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business, , , ,

Go ahead, you can ask: what do I know about this? I’m an old white guy, so take what I have to say here with some healthy skepticism. Woman's handsBut I like to think my eyes were opened up to gender inequality by my pre-hippie question-authority mother back in the early 1960s, and kept open by 40 years of marriage to a smart, strong woman and 38 years of fatherhood to four now-grown-up, well-educated, and successful daughters (and one son).

So here’s what I know about this:

1.  The statistics are confusing at best.

Statistics on entrepreneurship, startups, and the like are hard to decipher. It looks like women start more companies than men, but it also looks like those companies get less capital and financing. Some will argue that women-owned businesses perform differently, tend to grow slower, or stay smaller.  The truth, however, is that we really don’t know. There are lots of different studies with different results. I can find statistics or studies to justify just about any conclusion I want on this.

2.  Women are under represented in high tech and startups.

We can argue the causes, maybe we could find competing statistics if we search hard enough, but startups and high-tech companies are disproportionately male. The playing field isn’t level. It’s not statistics, it’s seeing the obvious. Women are under represented in startups. Professional investors are mostly men, and venture capital and angel investment goes much more to male-dominated teams. And commercial loans favor men. I say this from what I see myself, as a frequent judge of business plan competitions, an angel investor, and as an entrepreneur who speaks at public forums.

3.  I don’t believe the stereotypical explanations.

Some people say women are under represented by choice, because they choose not to grow, or they like to stay at home, or because of similar reasons. Here too, if you search hard enough, you’ll find studies and statistics and experts to sort of support that idea. I don’t believe it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the differences I’m aware of between men and women. Gender difference is the spice of life. But I don’t believe those differences have anything relevant to do with who’s starting companies getting funded, getting loans, or growing their businesses.

I was once in a discussion on how we could make Business Plan Pro more attractive to women. I was angry, back then, with the tone of the discussion. What, make the box pink? That was years ago, and it still makes me mad. Business planning has absolutely nothing to do with gender. Entrepreneurship has nothing to do with gender, except that the field isn’t balanced.

4.  We men don’t know how tough it really is.

Sad but true: none of us men really know how hard it is. We look around and we see lots of women working side by side; things are certainly a lot better than they used to be. But let’s not kid ourselves.

For example, men don’t have to deal with some significant percentage of the population — wrong, of course, but still — assuming we’re bad fathers if we work hard; or that we should be at home taking care of the children; or that the house/home work is ours, because of our gender, regardless of the rest of what we do.

We don’t get up to the podium in a business plan contest as a woman looking out on a sea of male faces in the audience . We don’t stand up in a venture capital conference room or angel investment group as a woman looking out at 90% male faces.

5. So what do we do about it?

That’s the real question. I wish I had a better answer. At the very least, the men in the crowd can recognize that it’s there, think about it, and make sure that we’re not contributing to the problem. Where we can, like in our local angel investment group, we can seek out successful women who qualify to be accredited investors and invite them, maybe even urge them, to join. We can at least know that those women we meet in startups along the way have overcome a lot of mindless stereotypes, and are still fighting them. We can wake up and at least recognize the imbalance. Then maybe we can fight it one situation at a time.

On the larger scale, entrepreneurship is contagious, so we should respect and encourage the women’s entrepreneurship groups, the women’s banks, women-oriented investment funds, and the official government efforts (like the SBA’s Women’s Business Centers).

Hooray for gender differences, yes; but not for gender differences in opportunity, education, freedom, or chance to make your own success.

On Fred Wilson’s 10 Ways to Start a Business

Advice, Starting a Business, , , , ,

Hooray for Fred Wilson, a VC (Union Ventures) with a blog named A VC, for this brilliant 20-minute talk called 10 Ways to Be Your Own Boss, posted on his blog as online video. Fred calmly and carefully blows apart the way-too-common assumption that starting a business is about finding investors. He does this with a simple list of examples, each of which is a happy healthy business, most of which started and grew without outside investment.

He begins this talk with a couple of absolutely great quotes. The first, from a comment on Fred’s blog:

“Entrepreneurship exists in the tiny space between madness and genius; and its journey requires a few cross border violations across both madness and genius to get to the final destination.”

The second, from a tweet, shown here on the right, highlighting addiction to a monthly salary.

What I really love is the point he makes with the list. All 10 of these start-your-business instances seems perfectly understandable.

  1. The one-man show. He uses Matt Druge of the Drudge Report as an example.
  2. The two-man show with a partner.
  3. The husband and wife team. You already have a partnership. Assuming your marriage works, you already have a partnership that works. Designer and programmer, marketer and programmer. I know this one very well. Palo Alto Software started like that.
  4. The small office boutique. Fred says Union Ventures is one of those; six people. Small and happy.
  5. A federation of small businesses. He mentions Allen & Co., a New York investment bank. A lot of independents sharing a name and overhead. This works for professional services, like architects, attorneys, consultants.
  6. Projects: films, books, recordings … be an entrepreneur going from project to project to project. A good model for people with unique skills, if they can get work whenever they want.
  7. A cool website, as a small business, He mentions The Hype Machine at hypem.com, which started as a one-person website, remains small, but also profitable. It works as a one-person business, with some freelance resources, managed via laptop from places around the world.
  8. The small team bootstrapped startup. He shows redstamp.com, virtual cards that can be physical cards. This is a small-group quintessential startup, moving fast, flexible, having fun.
  9. The eventually-got-funded startup that started out as a few people working for free. Get it going, get it funded, then make it right.
  10. The startup that was spun out from another company. Twitter is an example. It was a piece of a business that got split apart.

That’s just 10, he says, and he limited his list to 10 only because he had only 20 minutes. He implied he could have gone a lot longer.

The point, made very powerfully in a delightfully cumulative way, is that only two of these 10 raised outside investment money. And one of those two got well on its way first, with people working for free, believing that the future would repay them.

One small detail that bugs me here is the “be your own boss” description of starting a business. I decided to put that into the 140-character tweet format as I was writing this. Here it is:

Strategy Fundamental: Do One Thing Really Well

Starting a Business, , , , ,

Raise your hands now, how many remember that scene in City Slickers? And, just in case you don’t, I found it – only 32 seconds long – on YouTube (click here for YouTube source page):

The grizzled old cowboy (played by Jack Palace) tells the newbie character (Billy Crystal) the secret to life is …

Grizzled cowboy: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t.

Newbie: That’s great, but, what’s the one thing?

Grizzled cowboy: That’s what you gotta figure out.

Fast forward to startups and small business, and it’s called strategy and strategic focus. It calls up lots of related business buzzwords, like positioning, and differentiation. You can’t do everything well, so you have to do the right things well. And what’s the right thing? That’s what you have to figure out for your business. It’s different for every business. What is it for yours? Can you survive on focusing on that one thing? Can you grow that way? Or is that a failure to diversify? Good questions all, and, like the grizzled old cowboy says, that’s what you have to figure out.

(With a tip of the hat to Sramana Mitra who posted Startup Strategy Roundtable: Do One Thing Really Well last week on Read/Write Web’s startup channel. In that post, she retells the stories of three startups from the latest roundable.)

Co-Working: Rent Some Colleagues

Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business, , , ,

Back in the 1980s, more than 20 years ago, we didn’t have a name for it quite as cool as co-working. But it did happen occasionally. I worked mostly alone in a small rented office on Forest Street in Palo Alto, but I envied the group a couple of blocks away that rented desks in an open space with shared copiers and FAX machines.

It’s amusing to me that back then, like 1986, the Internet connection wasn’t even an issue. If we did Applelink or Compuserve or the Source, our advance versions of online connectivity, a phone model was the only option anyhow.

What did matter more was the sharing and community. Instead of working completely alone, isolated in their startup, my friends in that open office space had somebody to talk to. They could ask questions, share ideas, and feel like they had an office community.

That idea has become co-working. I noticed it this morning in a post at The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp. And that post links to this article: Co-workspaces: No colleagues? Why you should consider renting some. Then I Googled “co-working” to discover how much of this is now going on.

Meanwhile, I’ve been watching it up close up and personal, in the San Francisco Bay Area. My youngest daughter is now on her second job since graduating from college, and both of them have been for small startups that share space in co-working buildings. And in both cases, the collection of small startups has been a great atmosphere for small groups to grow in.

What a good idea. If the home office doesn’t work for you, here’s an interesting option, not a lot more expensive, with a lot of advantages.

MBA or Start My Business?

Advice, Business Education, Business Planning, MBA, Starting a Business

Question: I’m 35. I feel like I hit the rock bottom in my career path and I’m totally lost. Some people I know recommended getting an MBA. scales and booksOthers say it is a waste of time and money, since I am too OLD by the time I get the degree, and no one would hire me. Actually I know some unemployed MBAs around me. It is scary! So my question is, does MBA open a lot of doors? Or, should I just keep the money to start my own company?

That’s a tough one: MBA vs. start your own business.

If ever there were a good reason for business planning, this is it. Do that business plan first, to break your uncertainty down into more manageable pieces. Be honest about what you can sell, how much, and how much it will cost you. It’s not just generic start a business vs MBA, but rather, start this specific business, given this business plan, vs. MBA. That’s a huge difference. Are you hitting  the startup sweet spot or just dreaming?

If you come to me with some generalized idea of a new business, or looking for what kind of business to start, selecting from lists of interesting new businesses, then forget it. Do the MBA. Or don’t. But a vague general longing to start some business or other isn’t the same as wanting to start a specific business, based on your strengths and weaknesses and what you want to do, defined in a business plan that makes sense and indicates it is a viable business.

I suspect you emailed me because of my Read This Before You Get an MBA post on this blog earlier this month. And for your situation, I stick with some of the things I said in that post. Specifically:

  • Don’t do it for the money
  • Don’t do it if you hate school
  • Don’t do it if you can’t afford it

To your specific question, though, about an MBA opening a lot of doors: not necessarily. A lot of MBA programs include strong career resource programs that put a high priority on placing their graduates into good jobs; but some are better than others. Some times are better than others. I was 33 when I finished my MBA, and being that old was not a disadvantage at all. But times change. I had classmates at Stanford who were in their late 30s (a very few) and some thought their age was a recruiting disadvantage.

What worked for me, and might work in your case as well, was the MBA came at a time when I was bored and uninspired with the career I was in, and looking for a change.

But you also should realize that there are no guarantees. There are a lot of unemployed people with fancy degrees, and that includes MBAs. The degree is something you do for yourself, for your own personal growth, and not just to find a job. Or at least that’s what I think.

So do a business plan. Then ask yourself that question again.

(Illustration: Daria Filimonova/Shutterstock)