I learned more from selling posters than 4 years of business books

Doing will always (or lets say, "on the majority") be more effective then studying, or reading, etc. I ran a painting franchise during school (such as College Works Painting, Student Works and the like), and basically learned hard sales (walking doors, then making calls for 3-4 hours a night, sometimes the same leads all week for those 3-4 hours) for ~6-7 months. Sold painting projects from $300 - $12,000 (avg $6,500), hired painters, fired, lost painters, had massive headaches, worked 90 hours a week while first starting out "production" of getting the projects completed. Advanced the next year to "build" the team, ran ~12 college students doing the same thing I did the year before (trained them up from zero).

Most business classes were funny after that (on seeing the lack of concrete applicability), but not completely worthless.

EG: Operations made "sense" when examining project management of three painting crews, hours, time to completion, planning materials of the next jobs. I was just doing simplistic planning schedules on "operations" theory.

I learned a lot from failing (having my best painting crew quit because I sucked at management) and succeeding (having another awesome painting crew groomed to take over all client relations, to where I worked 10 hours a week "managing" (as I learned from my failure of management) and just closing deals while production was completed).

Article would do better with some metrics of numbers, whether they tried (or would try) to scale it. That was the hold back in the "internship" (basically franchises) of the painting gig. Average interns did ~$30,000 in production revenue and had 90% turnover. Top performers did $80-$100,000+ (I was one, and 90% of my team were the next year) and it was just about "scale" and delegation.

Totally agree. Going through the motions of selling something will teach you so much more. A few years back, I wrote a similar blog post, except I was recommending that MBA students drop out and launch an app on the App Store instead.

The funny thing is that ever since, Google sends me traffic for everyone googling "cheap MBAs". I'm sure I get unhappy visitors :-) http://blog.foundrs.com/2009/08/12/the-cheapest-mba-program-...

It's always about the fundamentals, isn't it?

you learn more from doing something than from reading something. nothing new. might want to check Einstein's quotes

In my late teens and early 20's I had a lot of book & observation based business information contained in my brain. The most jarring thing about running a real business early on was all the ... bullshit. Most of which is unavoidable. The myriad of issues and red tape, that have nothing to directly do with creating or selling or product or marketing or managing.

The best thing to come out of those early experiences in my opinion, is the automation you properly build up that makes it possible to fly a lot faster through it all with each iteration. That part of experience is priceless. I waste a lot less time now, and know a lot better what to focus on.

I don't think any business school can teach you the kind of fast reflex adaption you acquire with experience. No two scenarios are ever the same, but with enough experience you'll find a lot of cross over similarities, things you learned over there that apply well over here. It becomes personal data that you can call upon instantly, bend, manipulate, adjust to solve new problems fast.

Data from experience is more easily available for manipulation to new problems than mentally distant 'book based' knowledge.