Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In many professions, such as academics, medicine and accounting,continuing education is not only encouraged, but often required.How else, the reasoning goes, can anyone possibly keep up with newdiscoveries, strategies, laws and practices?
But when it comes to entrepreneurship, continuing education isall too often nonexistent. Once someone starts a business,there's frequently no time for or little interest in learning.In fact, some business owners wear their lack of education as abadge of honor--not, as the Seinfeld gang would say, thatthere's anything wrong with that. There are numerous enormouslysuccessful entrepreneurs who never went to college(Entrepreneur owner Peter Shea is one). But our 21st centuryworld tends to move ahead at warp speed, and it's all too easyto get left behind.
I'm certainly not advocating that you drop everything and goback to school, though there are a good number of excellentcontinuing education programs (some of which even offer degrees)specially geared toward entrepreneurs. But that doesn't meanyou can ignore the changes that seem to occur daily in yourparticular industry as well as in the overall businessenvironment.
So what's a busy entrepreneur to do? If you're readingthis, you're already doing something--you're readingEntrepreneur. One of our jobs is to provide some of thecontinuing education you need but may not have the time for. Infact, one of the reasons Entrepreneur is structured aroundthe four main business disciplines--money, marketing and sales,technology, and management--is to help you easily find what youdon't know or may have forgotten.
One of the paradoxes of business ownership is that manyentrepreneurs do much of their research, due diligence andcompetitive analysis before they even open their doors. Yes,startup entrepreneurs are often better informed than those of youwho have been in business for several years. They also tend to bemore open to taking advice, asking questions, searching for thebest ways to conduct business and emulating the best practices ofbusinesses large and small.
With all this in mind, I want to point you to an article many ofyou might ordinarily ignore. Entrepreneur is separated into twomain sections. The first (and overwhelmingly largest) is aimed atour more than 526,000 subscribers, the vast majority of whom areexisting business owners. The other part of the magazine, "BeYour Own Boss," is geared toward our newsstand buyers andoriented toward startups. (This strategy has helped make us thebestselling business magazine on the newsstand.)
In this month's "Be Your Own Boss" section,startup guru Guy Kawasaki, the legendary founder of GarageTechnology Ventures and author of the new book The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested,Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, agreedto share his success secrets. While reading the manuscript, Irealized Guy's information was too valuable to be confined justto new entrepreneurs. There's a lot that you establishedbusiness owners can learn from Guy's insights, whether theinformation is entirely new to you or if it's something youonce knew but have since forgotten. So even if you are anexperienced entrepreneur, do yourself a favor--clickhere and let Guy Kawasaki teach you a thing or two.
