After almost a year of tariffs, many businesses are getting used to a new normal—higher costs, more reluctant consumers. It’s funny: as an entrepreneur, you’re always resistant to departures from the normal.
The reality is, though, in business ownership, there is no true normal. Conditions fluctuate constantly. External variables are always looming, ready to wreak havoc with the business you’ve created.
Developing flexible plans and systems is what helps you seize a crisis and enables you to capitalize on any situation you find yourself in.
Do you need a degree in business to make a strong business plan?
Naturally, entrepreneurship does not have a paper ceiling. If you have money, a vision, and an LLC, you’re pretty much ready to go. In fact, this is what many people find appealing about entrepreneurship.
Nevertheless, there is value in at least considering a graduate-level education in business administration. A couple of reasons why you might want to give it a try.
First of all, it will expand your potential resume. No one wants to think about what will happen if their business fails or if they get burnt out from being on their own. But a backup plan is still helpful to have.
You could frame it in a more positive light. When businesses mature, they often require considerably less direct supervision from the founder. There might come a time in your future when you don’t need to get a job, but you might want one. In which case, your MBA will qualify you for very lucrative work.
See how we put that in a positive light?
Backup plans notwithstanding, a master’s in business administration is going to give you skills that are genuinely impactful.
Big businesses are run by people with MBAs. Small businesses benefit from the same skills. You’ll learn how to develop systems, make a business plan, balance your budget, and manage other people.
All of these skills you’re going to need to acquire one way or another. You can do it in real time on the job, but that’s slower, harder, and more filled with frustration. On the other hand, learning them from a good college will get you where you want to be in a predictable timeline and improve your resume in the process.
Yes, a graduate degree costs money. Yes, there are certain cases where it would be more prudent to put said money into your business rather than your education. As an entrepreneur, you will, of course, need to make that choice for yourself.
Here’s a common business idea that you’re probably already familiar with: money buys speed. Speed beats everything. If your graduate degree accelerates your business’s success timeline by five years, is it worth absolutely every penny that you spent on it.
Keep in mind also that you don’t necessarily need your degree to be in business. For example, a degree in computer system analysis could accomplish similar things. It will pad your resume. It will also equip you with many skills that are useful for a wide range of businesses.
The key? Find a program that equips you with the skills you need to learn. Business owners wear a lot of different hats, so this will look like different things for different people.
What it looks like
Okay, so what does flexibility look like in the context of a business plan? Isn’t the point of having a plan that you know how you’ll react in specific situations? Yes.
Being flexible in business does not mean abandoning your original ideas—unless, of course, your original ideas are proven and inefficient. What you want instead is a series of pre-programmed alternative ideas. Systems that you can reach for when markets change.
For example, you might have pricing strategies designed to accelerate sales in slow markets.
A willingness to sacrifice your margin in the short term to continue growing your customer list even during a recession or a bad international trade environment.
That’s a flexible plan that still cooperates with your original goals. The idea in business is to always have a canned response for whatever’s going on, but that should include challenging situations.
Flexibility in Action
Imagine that you run a landscaping company. During the spring, you are booked out six weeks in advance. However, as the initial beginning-of-the-season rush slows down, you find that leads begin to dry up in the summer. By the wintertime, they are basically non-existent.
Of course, the bank is not very interested in seasonality. You have trucks, you have a shop, you have loan payments, and you also have a secretary who requires a salary even when your phone isn’t ringing very much.
You have a few options. You can accept seasonality and hope that the high revenue of your busy season is enough to counteract the almost non-existent revenue of your slow season. Or you can introduce an enhanced element of flexibility into your business plan.
You can leverage smart pricing strategies to increase the profitability of your busy season when you’re booked out, say, three months in advance.
You pivot into your profit-based pricing strategy. Your prices increase so that you make more money off of each job while also cooling off an unsustainably high level of demand for a while.
On the other hand, when your bookings slow down to a pre-assigned extent, you initiate a growth-oriented pricing strategy. You lower price to increase your close rate. The idea, of course, is to both maximize your profit and optimize your scheduling.
For the seasonality aspect, you can be flexible in the services you provide. Instead of trying to cut grass in the winter, you can integrate snow services, property cleanups, and subscription-based maintenance plans that keep you at recurring customer properties year-round.
This flexibility will ensure that you’re as profitable as possible. It will also reduce the volatility of seasonality considerably. And while some of this advice is specific to landscaping or at least home services, the mindset is certainly transferable.
There are lots of ways that any business can modify its pricing, its advertising, and its approach to business to match circumstances.
At the end of the day, flexibility just means being ready for anything. Any business can benefit from that.
