Applied Entrepreneurship: Scaling a Business for Success

ABOUT THIS PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATION

In this Professional Certificate program, you will learn the skills to assess your business model and plan for growth and sustainability. The biggest breakthroughs in scaling businesses have come from innovations in business models.

Is your business ready for the next level? Experienced entrepreneurs will offer you feedback about your plan to improve your business model which could transform your company!

In these courses you will learn to solidify the basics and prepare for scaling your existing business.

You will answer some of the following questions:

• Can you tweak your offering to improve your value proposition to your customer?
• Do you have the right market fit?
• Which channels will provide the biggest ROI?
• Have you prepared to add resources or new processes to scale?
• What innovations can you create or exist to evolve your business model and business?
• Is there a key area that can be modified, scaled or automated to improve your efficiencies and grow your business?
• Are you utilizing social media well?
• Should you be outsourcing any functions/processes in the business?
• Do you have the right mindset to scale your business?

Our course model is set up for your success. You will be challenged to think about where you want to go, what turning points await you, and how to utilize resources to accelerate your plans.

Starting a business is not always the hard part – it’s sustaining the business with a growth mindset and seeing opportunities to accelerate growth.

This program will provide you with the tools to assess your business model, identify opportunities for innovation and evolution, create a plan and put it into action.

By earning the Applied Entrepreneurship Professional Certificate, you will have created a viable plan to evolve your business into a thriving venture.

Learn from two top professors in the field:

Mark Grovic, J.D., B.A.
Senior Advisor to University of Maryland Global Campus, Professor and Venture Capitalist in Residence at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, Co-founder of New Markets Venture Partners, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), University of California, Berkeley; Juris Doctor (J.D.), Georgetown University Law Center; Private Equity and Venture Capital Executive Program, Harvard Business School

Michele K. Masterfano, DBA
Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus, DBA in Marketing from Argosy University Sarasota, M.S. in Management Science from Lehigh University, B.A. in Liberal Arts from Pennsylvania State University. Seminar in Entrepreneurship Education, Babson College.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Undertake a specific “design thinking” process to improve your business model
• Conduct market and competitor analysis
• Evaluate financial and staffing models
• Develop a plan for business evolution
• Apply ideation and innovation for sustainability
• Pitch your business evolution and compete for prize money

JOB OVERVIEW

• Turn your part time passion into a full-time job, create a plan that allows you to hire your first or next employees, and take your business to the next level.
• Small business ownership is a path toward upward mobility. There are high rates of small business ownership by minorities (29.3% of small businesses), immigrants (14.4%), and women (36.3%). Veterans also make up a large number, at 9.3%.