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Starting & running a business

Business & Economics

Building a company and keeping it running: the product, the money, the team.

This suits you if…

You would rather decide what not to do than be told what to do, you can sell without embarrassment, and irregular income is something your circumstances can genuinely absorb for a few years rather than something you are hoping to survive.

Look elsewhere if…

You need a predictable salary, or you are waiting for the right idea to arrive. Most new businesses run out of money slowly while the founder works harder than everyone around them. Joining a small company early teaches the same lessons on someone else's money.

What the work actually is

What the work is actually like

Whatever is most broken that day. Talking to customers, chasing an unpaid invoice, hiring, firing, fixing the thing the supplier got wrong, and doing the unglamorous administrative work nobody else will. The founder's actual job is deciding what not to do, and then selling to customers, to staff and sometimes to investors, for far more hours than the product work you imagined.

The catch

Most new businesses don't survive their first years, and the failure isn't usually dramatic. It is running out of money slowly while working harder than anyone around you. The income is irregular in a way that is hard to plan a life around, and the responsibility for other people's wages doesn't switch off at weekends.

What people get wrong about it

That it starts with an idea. Ideas are cheap and nearly always wrong at first; the businesses that work are the ones that found a real, repeatedly painful problem someone will pay to remove, and then survived long enough to fix it properly.

The jobs inside this area

  • Founder
  • Operations manager
  • Product manager
  • Business-development lead
  • Small-business owner

A list, not a recommendation. You narrow it, we don’t.

What this kind of work usually offers

Independence · Earning well · Making thingsA generalisation about the sphere, not a promise about a salary. Pay and security vary enormously by country and employer.

How you get there

The one-line version

Any degree, or none: you learn by doing it. Sell something small now; a startup or pitch contest is a real start.

Stage by stage

  1. While you are still at school

    Sell something small and real: repairs, tutoring, a service for local businesses. Keep the accounts honestly. Earning the first money from a stranger teaches more than any competition.

  2. What you study

    Any degree, or none. What a business or economics degree gives you is the shared language of finance and the network; what it can't give you is customers. Many strong founders study something else entirely and start on the side.

  3. How the first years actually go

    Two routes, and both are respectable: start something tiny yourself, or join a small company early and watch how the whole machine works from close up. The second is the lower-risk way to learn the same lessons on someone else's money.

Where this work lives, and how you reach it

What you would study for it

Each says what the first year is really made of, and who should study something else instead.

17 countries · 29 cities · 33 institutions named for this field. Each one states its catch as well as its appeal.

Without leaving home

2 of the routes that need no visa and no move lead into this field.

Test it this month

Free, and finishable in a few evenings

Find one person with a problem you could solve this month and try to charge them for it, even a very small amount. Their answer is worth more than any business plan you could write.