MBA For Business? 5 Reasons Why It's Necessary For Success

Graduation day, your bachelor’s degree in hand, you’re finally proud of having graduated when your Dad prompts: “You need to take one last step to become a successful professional: MBA (Master of Business Administration)”. The glorious route, MBA sounds like the pill you need to swallow to decipher answers to all your unresolved issues. But is it really worth the glory? 

If you’re expecting the answer to be no, you’re going to get disappointed. Even though the thought that a mere degree is supposed to define whether or not you’ll get successful is annoying, it somehow forms the ground reality. In clearer words, yes, an MBA degree plays a major role in shaping you as an entrepreneur. 

Before we dive deeper into how an MBA degree can help individuals lead successful businesses, let's first understand what the degree comprises and how to get enrolled in an MBA program. 

MBA Degree: The Basics

MBA stands for Masters in Business Administration. It's a post-graduation degree that prepares students for a career in management. MBA broadly covers all the primary functions of a business, namely Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, and Operations (or Logistics/Supply Chain). Each of these functions has sub-categories.

The Common Admission Test (CAT) is one of the most common and one of the toughest management entrance exams in India. It's conducted by one of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM). Some other management entrance exams are XAT, SNAP, MAT, and NMAT for admission to Indian colleges and GMAT for admission to Indian and foreign universities. 

The MBA admission process is broadly divided into the following steps: 

Management Entrance Exam: CAT is the most widely accepted entrance exam.

Shortlisting Candidates: The shortlisting criteria differ among colleges, but most of them consider your entrance exam score and past academic performance. 

GD & Interview: Shortlisted candidates are invited for a round of GD and/or extempore, followed by a personal interview. 

Is MBA Necessary To Be Successful In Business?

There's never a guarantee for success but an MBA degree can drastically improve your chances of leading a successful business. MBA is an intensive course that not only teaches you the ins and outs of running a business, but also instills in you qualities of collaboration, creative thinking, and hard work. Here are five ways in which an MBA degree can help you in getting successful in business:

1. Learning the art of building rock-solid business plans

Everybody has a business plan in mind, you, your neighbours, your best friends, even school students. But how many of them actually put them into practice and succeed? Not many, that’s what the stats say. According to the Small Business Association, around 30% of new businesses fail in the first two years which goes up to 50% in the first five years of starting an enterprise.

Pursuing an MBA helps in getting a better picture of what’s essentially required to make your dream come true. It gives you an in-depth knowledge of the how and what to build a strong enterprise - one that has the potential of scaling through the years. Pursuing an education in business not only helps you develop great business plans but also helps you understand the complexities involved in starting one and making it a success.

2. Becoming a leader

A crucial role in the journey of an entrepreneur is to ensure that the team they are working with stays together and motivated. How are you supposed to bring out the rigour and zeal in your team if they don’t have the drive to pitch in their best efforts? The mere fact that the founders of numerous startups run after easy money hampers their long-term growth and thus, brings a downfall of the firm altogether.

During your B-School journey, you come across several instances which give you an idea of the primary skills required to deal with chaotic situations, helping you get trained in a simulated environment. Pursuing an MBA helps you dive deep into the criticalities of starting and running a business effectively, bringing out the best in the employees, and helping you focus on the bigger picture. In this way, you inherit the skills of a leader even before you realize it.

3. Managing finances & Knowing when to raise capital

You cannot prosper merely with an initial investment, even if you are financially strong and wealthy in the first place. In order to progress, it is necessary to understand the gravity of the requirement of an external investor. This is imperative for the growth of your firm, along with the fact that your actions need to be in line with wealth creation, thus attracting investors.

A B-School makes you familiar with the art of handling finances and dealing with competencies on these grounds. With a swift hand in measuring financial effectiveness, an MBA grad is used to playing with money. They know how and when to raise capital.

4. Being the acclaimed General Manager

To get successful in your business plan, you must be aware of the various aspects of an organization. From finance to marketing and operations, you should have a basic insight into how these functions are interrelated. You must also know which domain each function covers. Major capital investments in operations and human resources require you to understand how to make effective decisions in finance as well as marketing which does not hamper the operations and vice-versa. For instance, if an e-commerce firm decides to remove the levied delivery charges, they must fathom the effect it’ll have on their finances. Your corporate finance team shouldn’t hate you for the actions you take to woo your customers.

Pursuing an MBA helps you build a frame of thought. It trains you to think in accordance with the pros and cons of the change imposed. Playing around the various divisions of your firm and tying them in one loop is what MBA grads understand better.

5. Networking and Credibility

Pursuing an MBA from a top B-School puts you in the club of elites. You get premium access to a number of resources. Even though the realities might differ in a few instances, you do bring along a lot of credibilities if and when you graduate from a premier B-School. You witness a major change in your worldview. Apart from this, you become reliable in the eyes of the world for taking the right decisions. An MBA degree makes you trustworthy and customers would like to rely on your product. Even investors would be more open to hearing you out.

In addition to this, your college helps you network with people, and find friends, mentors and business partners. You become a part of an exclusive community, helping you bag resources that would have otherwise been distant and unreachable. 

Wrapping up, MBA degree holders do add substantial value to the world of entrepreneurs, making you successful in business. It is startling to see how a B-School refines your personality as a whole. If you’re somebody who looks forward to starting a business of your own, pursuing an education in business will have a constitutive effect on your overall growth and development.

This is your time to take the plunge. Good luck!

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