How to climb up the entrepreneurial ladder as a university student
TLDR:
- Everyone has the same 24 hours to work with, it’s all about what you prioritize.
- With the time your prioritize, structure it in a manner that best maximizes your productivity.
- To differentiate yourself from your competitors, build your personal brand.
- You can’t bear the burden of the entire world on your shoulders, outsource if possible to focus on what you do best.
- Expect the unexpected on the journey of building your business. Embrace flexibility and adaptability.
On the side, university students indulge in many things with whatever spare time they have left in the week, whether for leisurely purposes or to create something that can be encompassed in a grandeur manner. And one of those grandeur creations is building your own business. But depending on how many credits you’re currently taking this semester, it can be quite tedious or even logistically impossible at first glance. If you find yourself in this boat and need some guidance, irrespective of how many credits you’re taking this semester or your class standing, here are 5 starting points you can use as a spring pad to build your own business.
1. Prioritize Your Time
Everyone has the same 24 hours each day. It’s all about what you’re prioritizing while you’re awake. That few hours you have after university to do whatever you want, begin to dedicate some of it towards building your own business. Brainstorm what is the vision of your business, the expectations you’re setting for yourself and the business, how much time per week you know you’re able to allocate toward building it and define your unique selling proposition (USP).
Prioritizing your time will help create a balance between both your university schedule and business objectives simultaneously. Just remember that Rome was not built in a day; everything takes time.
2. Structure Your Time
After you’ve figured out how you’ll prioritize your time on a day-by-day basis, the next thing to do is to structure your daily schedule. You can begin to do this by using a digital calendar (like Google Calendar) to organize your coursework, study sessions, business tasks, and other miscellaneous things in your life, allocating specific time blocks on the calendar for classes, studying, building your business, and leisurely time, and setting boundaries between your academic and business hours, ensuring there is no significant overlap at all.
3. Build Your Personal Brand
If you want to truly differentiate yourself from the rest of your competitors, build your personal brand. You have to be recognizable and represent your business even when you’re not working at both a conscious and subconscious level. Look to establish an online presence on as many relevant platforms as possible, and create relationships with people who are in the community of the niche you’re looking to target (if you’re thinking of creating an app that targets a specific niche, (check this out), and use AI to help build your personal brand, for which we have a free eBook on how you can use ChatGPT to boost your personal brand that you can download here.
Even if you have very limited time to dedicate to your business because of university, the benefits of having your own personal brand are one you’ll reap for quite a while in the long-run.
4. Outsource and Delegate
If it is possible for you, look to outsource and delegate when possible. Recognize that akin to how you cannot bear the burden of the entire world on your shoulders, you cannot do everything on your own, particularly when you’re just a university student. If you’re a natural at one aspect of your business’ vision, double down on it and hire complements who have the talents for the other vital aspects, such as freelancers for content creation, graphic design, and administrative work. You can also leverage virtual assistants to help manage emails, scheduling, and other administrative tasks and implement automation tools for routine tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and customer service if applicable. This would not only help you save time but also enable you to fully maximize the potential of your business’ vision by being able to solely focus on what comes to you naturally with the time you dedicate, and that is irrepelacable.
5. Embrace Flexibility and Adaptability
At the center of it all, remember that not everything can go as you’ve planned it everyday, especially when it comes to the process of building a business.
Adjust your plans and strategies for those inevitable midterms and finals you have to study for, and circumstances that are completely out of your control, for you can only control what you can, nothing beyond that. Embrace for setbacks (you’ll face many of them consistently throughout this process), and rather than seeing them as the end all be all, take it as a mere learning curve and an opportunity for improvement, and apply those learnings to your business strategies based on what works and what doesn’t. It is important to also acknowledge that the hunger of building your own business will take quite some time to satiate, for as we’ve said earlier, Rome was not built in a day; everything takes time. If you’re not seeing instant progress, it’s not that you’re failing necessarily per say, but its all a part of the process. For the vast majority of university students, these 4 years are the most free time you’ll ever get in your life. And if this is the route you want to take, you’ll have to trust and love the process; be patient with all the time you’ve got.