Is an MBA Worth It for Entrepreneurs?

In today’s complex, fast-moving and sometimes unpredictable global economy, new business concepts require more than great ideas and exuberant pitches to make them work. Your passion, creativity and energy as an entrepreneur may be powerful, but earning an MBA can help establish a level of credibility with prospective business partners and investors who may be vital to your startup. You may find these individuals, who are likely to have already achieved success with their own companies, might be MBA graduates themselves. In this context, earning an MBA could enable you to:

Having a well-developed professional network is vital in any career. An MBA program can help expose you to other growing professionals, entrepreneurs or business leaders who could be instrumental in helping you to launch and grow your own business ventures.

Team projects within MBA programs give you a chance to form relationships with classmates, and many schools offer various opportunities to network with alumni who could also become important connections.

Working in teams, equally talented MBA students from varying backgrounds can brainstorm ideas from multiple perspectives and pool their strengths. This collaboration allows you to understand cultural differences and points of view, improve communication and increase the quality of project deliverables.

Earning an MBA can prepare you to pursue a broad variety of options to begin your career or to help you pursue new heights after gaining several years of hands-on experience. Coursework in a general MBA program, encompassing accounting and finance, marketing, operations management, organizational leadership and other core business principles, can help you develop skills that you might find in any industry or management position. This provides a solid foundation of business administration knowledge without emphasizing any specific area of business.

Later in this article we’ll describe how MBA programs can be augmented by specializations in various business disciplines and introduce you to our MBA entrepreneurship specialization here at DeVry.

MBA programs can sometimes provide access to business leaders who contribute to the program as guest lecturers, adjunct faculty or in some other capacity. These established business professionals may function as mentors to MBA students. According to the employment website Indeed, mentorship is important for both mentee and mentor for reasons that include:

As outlined by Indeed, an MBA program can help you to develop skills like critical thinking, communication, teamwork, time management and leadership that could make you a great asset in a variety of roles— that’s why they’re called transferable skills. Developing them successfully could make a significant difference in your ability to meet your career goals.

Leadership is a particularly important skill for any aspiring entrepreneur, because you must have the ability to rally individuals and teams around a core ideology and keep them motivated as they work to achieve a series of incremental goals.

The importance of learning business administration concepts, methods and practices in the context of a global economy cannot be overstated. Aspiring entrepreneurs realize they may find themselves trading in a highly competitive global marketplace, or managing global supply chains to manufacture and deliver their products.

MBA programs sometimes attract students from diverse ethnic backgrounds and different parts of the world. This can be especially true in online learning environments. Exposure to this diversity helps expand your awareness of business practices beyond what you’re familiar with, enhancing your understanding of different cultures, points of view and business practices.   

The traditional MBA provides education in a broad skillset, intended to prepare business professionals for success in any industry, from financial services to tech and anywhere in between.

When you add a specialization to your MBA at DeVry, core courses are followed by a wider selection of electives that allow for additional education in areas such as accounting, finance, marketing, information systems management and project management, among others.

Here at DeVry, we offer several MBA program specializations, including an Entrepreneurship Specialization.

To those who ask, is an MBA worth it for entrepreneurs, we emphatically say, “Yes.” Potential MBA benefits like expanded networking, diversity, leadership training and access to experienced mentors can be indispensable to entrepreneurs as they pitch ideas, plan new ventures and map out strategies for funding and growth. In some cases, entrepreneurs may break new ground, developing business models for which there are no established benchmarks. As an entrepreneur with an MBA, you may be better equipped to navigate against the headwinds of conventionality and those who say, “It’s never been done that way before.”