How to Get a Competitive Advantage When You Don’t Know What That Means

I am extremely lucky. As the accidental CEO of a small and growing startup, I had a great network of friends and mentors giving me advice. I had moved from software product development into executive management in a matter of months, with little or no practical business experience or training. Hey, I took two accounting classes when I got my masters!

Occasionally, I would get questions that I would invariably have to Google… “That should definitely be COGS. When are you recognizing your revenue?” “What’s your ROE?” I knew I was at a disadvantage. And over my head. But besides getting an MBA, what was I going to do about it?

Again, I was given some great advice. “Have you ever heard of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program?”

I don’t want this to come across as a shameless plug for their program. Goldman Sachs doesn’t exactly need the help, right? I do want this to be a helpful piece of advice to other small business owners who don’t know where to look to get help. All for no cost. Just a time commitment.

Going through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program (GS10KSB) has been the best possible thing that could have happened to me at this stage of my company. Honestly, also to me personally in developing my professional and inter-personal skill sets. It was a multi-month program that 1) Educated me on critical things that I needed to know to speak confidently about my business, 2) Put me in contact with a huge network of other business owners and 3) Gave me the time to take a hard, analytical look at the current state of affairs of my company.

All amazing and timely gifts that I know will make the difference in the long-term success of Epic Dog Studios and whatever enterprise comes after that.

I consider myself very lucky to have been able to participate in the GS10SB — and have access to the great inventory of resources — and mostly the fantastic network of alumni. For other small business owners that know they don’t know, but don’t know what to do, I highly recommend the program.

Sarah Williams, CEO

Sarah Williams is CEO of Epic Dog Studios. She started content creation in the eLearning space and transitioned into software development then to video content. And she really does love dogs.