Stephen Garden on Why an MBA is the New Path to Entrepreneurship?

A recent study revealed that more than 85% of MBA students were interested in pursuing entrepreneurship as a career path. With younger generations eager to establish careers where they can ultimately work for themselves, independently as entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship has sparked the trend of starting and building new businesses in younger demographics. These days, graduates hardly consider the notion of a nine to five, as entrepreneurship is the new trend among up-and-coming, young professionals. 

As finding the path to entrepreneurship continues to grow in popularity among MBA students, one graduate student is the perfect example of an entrepreneur who used graduate school as a launch pad for his career. For Stephen Garden, though he completed his MBA from London Business School in 2013, a program ranked 2nd globally by the Financial Times, he now encourages students not to wait until after graduation to launch their businesses. With no prior experience in launching a business, he went on to grow a leading cloud services company called Onica with several hundred employees and offices across the globe.

Why did you pursue your MBA? Did you always plan on starting a business after you graduated?

My thinking behind pursuing an MBA was to use it as a career pivot into entrepreneurship, either through joining a far growing start-up or by launching my own company. Having spent the first part of my career working inside large 10,000+ person organizations I needed a transitional period to be able to evaluate the right opportunities and spend some time formulating a plan of action. The added benefit of the MBA was picking up extra skills to support the next phase of my career. 

What kind of business did you launch when you graduated?

After finishing my MBA from London Business School in 2013 I went on to launch a specialist consulting company in the field of Cloud Computing Technology by the end of that year. I picked a traditional business model of services/consulting because of the well-researched best practices in the space but by focusing around a fast-growing era of expertise (Amazon Web Services Cloud Platform) the company was able to scale rapidly. 

Does the MBA program prepare you for becoming an entrepreneur?

In my case it most certainly did, without taking an 18-month career break I doubt I'd have found the time to properly think through my business plan or strategy. The MBA classes gave me great insights into a broad range of topics that proved to come in useful during the 6 years I operated my company prior to being acquired. Another aspect of the MBA experience was getting to meet dozens of inspiring entrepreneurs who would join classes or evening presentations to share their stories. 

Which businesses suit MBA’s as founders the most?

I’d say that more traditional business models with execution/operation focused strategies in particular suit MBA graduates. The type of companies that are often backed by private equity groups, I found that these investors greatly valued my MBA experience. 

How should someone go about launching their company post MBA?

My advice would be not to wait until you’ve finished your MBA! Typically, the programs can offer a lot of support similar to that of an incubator so the sooner you can start getting wheels in motion and testing different aspects of the plan the better.