Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

In the coming years Africa will become more important than at any time in the modern era. Over the next decade its share of the world’s population is expected to reach 21%, up from 13% in 2000, 9% in 1950 and 11% in 1800. As the rest of the world ages, Africa will become a crucial source of labour: more than half the young people entering the global workforce in 2030 will be African.  This is a great opportunity for the poorest continent. But if its 54 countries are to seize it, they will have to do something exceptional.  

Africa is defined by a depressing record of stagnant productivity. African countries are experiencing disruption without development. They are going through social upheavals as people move from farms to cities but without accompanying agricultural or industrial revolutions. Services, where ever more Africans find work, are less productive than in any other region—and barely more productive than in 2010. Poor infrastructure does not help. For all the talk of using digital technology and clean energy to leapfrog ahead, Africa lacks the 20th-century kit needed to thrive in the 21st. Its road density has probably fallen. Less than 4% of farmland is irrigated and almost half of sub-Saharan Africans lack electricity.

The problem also has another, under-appreciated, dimension. Africa is a corporate desert. In the past 20 years Brazil has spawned fintech giants and Indonesia e-commerce stars, while India has incubated one of the world’s most vibrant corporate ecosystems. But not Africa. It has fewer firms with at least $1bn in revenues than any other region and since 2015 the number looks to have declined. The problem is not risk so much as the fragmented and complex markets created by all the continent’s borders. For investors, Africa’s balkanised stock exchanges are an afterthought. Africa accounts for 3% of world GDP, but attracts less than 1% of its private capital.

What should Africa’s leaders do? A starting-point is to ditch decades of bad ideas. These range from mimicking the worst of Chinese state capitalism, whose shortcomings are on full display, to defeatism over the future of manufacturing in the age of automation, to copying and pasting proposals by World Bank technocrats. The earnest advice of American billionaires on micro-policies, from deploying mosquito nets to designing solar panels, is welcome but no substitute for creating the conditions that would allow African businesses to thrive and expand. There is a dangerous strand of development thinking that suggests growth cannot alleviate poverty or does not matter at all, so long as there are efforts to curb disease, feed children and mitigate extreme weather. In fact in almost all circumstances faster growth is the best way to cut poverty and ensure that countries have the resources to deal with climate change.  At the same time governments should build a political consensus in favour of growth. 

Narrowing the Africa gap calls for new social attitudes towards business, similar to those that unleashed growth in China and India. Instead of fetishising government jobs or small enterprises, Africans could do with more risk-taking tycoons. Individual countries need much more infrastructure, from ports to power, more free-wheeling competition and vastly better schools.

Another essential task is to integrate African markets so that firms can achieve greater economies of scale and attain an absolute size big enough to attract global investors. That means advancing plans for visa-free travel areas, integrating capital markets, plugging together data networks and finally realising the dream of a pan-African free-trade area.

If you were to use TikTok’s own vernacular to describe its current state, you might say the vibes are unsettled. A law banning the app in the US is set to go into effect on Jan. 19, though it’s anyone’s guess whether it actually will. Legal experts have generally described TikTok’s path to salvation as narrow—lower courts have sided with the Biden administration, and President-elect Donald Trump cannot himself squash the ban he first proposed in 2020 once he takes office. But the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the app’s appeal, and Trump has asked the court to delay the ban’s implementation until after he takes office in hopes of brokering a deal with its parent company, ByteDance Ltd. ByteDance, too, could head off the ban by selling its US business, but the Chinese company has said it has no intention of doing so.

What hangs in the balance is a platform that, for better or worse, has emerged as a vast engine for cultural production. The app says it has more than 170 million active users in the US, and according to a Pew Research survey almost two-thirds of adults under 30 use it regularly. In early 2024, Bloomberg reported that ByteDance was aiming for more than $17 billion in US sales for the year via TikTok Shop, which allows users to buy products they encounter directly on the app. From this milieu, trends emerge constantly and ceaselessly. 

But what happens on TikTok doesn’t stay there. Instead the app has become something of an assignment editor for the internet at large, pushing the ideas of TikTok creators—girl dinner, everything shower, quiet luxury—out into traditional media and onto other platforms, as well as into the marketing plans for all kinds of products. The app’s memes and trends can spout seemingly at random—do we all remember “very demure, very mindful”?—and saturate the internet in a matter of days, influencing an enormous amount of economic activity, both on and off the app. The most successful TikTok creators are able to quit their day job in favor of reviewing Amazon products or producing recipe tutorials, and brands that catch on among users, such as e.l.f Beauty and Duolingo, have seen their revenue soar. Sometimes that’s thanks to sales directly through TikTok Shop, but more often through the force of the app’s influence on all kinds of spending.

TikTok’s speed and scale have forced many sectors of the US consumer economy—beauty, fashion, health and wellness, hospitality, food and fitness among them—to remake themselves in its image to a degree that couldn’t have been predicted even five years ago. According to a report by MediaRadar, brands spent an estimated $4 billion on TikTok ads in 2023. That figure doesn’t include all the more oblique ways brands spend money to get their products in front of social media users.

Now there’s a very real chance that all of that will vanish.  If TikTok falls, where will the trends sprout from? The most obvious place would be Instagram, which was itself the dominant social media driver of consumer trends before TikTok surpassed it in the past few years with YouTube a somewhat distant second.

The internet will continue spitting out an endless and baffling series of trends even if TikTok’s ban goes into effect—it did before the app existed, after all. So the question isn’t whether the internet trend-industrial complex will endure, but to what extent it will be diminished, and what the nature of its output will be.

Full economic empowerment is achieved when a household can afford basic goods and services, go to work, contribute to economic growth, and focus on more than mere survival. To measure empowerment, we use the empowerment line, a metric developed by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) that estimates the cost of a basket of essential goods and services—including housing, healthcare, food, and transportation—for a frugal yet decent quality of life.

Empowerment thresholds vary widely from economy to economy, increasing from a global floor of $12 per person per day in purchasing power parity terms and range from $ 4 to $ 70 in nominal terms.  

Establishing each economy’s threshold makes it possible to size its empowerment gap, which is the boost in spending power needed for everyone to reach the empowerment line.  In 2020, approximately 60 percent of the global population—4.7 billion of the world’s 8.0 billion people—lived below the empowerment line and struggled to make ends meet. Every populated continent and country has people below the line.

What lifts people into empowerment? The answer has many layers. For 4.3 billion people residing in lower- and middle-income economies—accounting for 95 percent of the world’s people below empowerment—GDP growth is likely the most powerful path.

20 percent of the population even in higher-income economies that are not economically empowered—and that number is stubbornly consistent even as GDP per capita grows. In other words, countries can’t seem to grow their way out of the issue and economically empower the final 20 percent of the population. Costs of essential goods and services have been rising faster than overall inflation in many markets, making empowerment out of reach for some households, even as GDP per capita increases.

There are many elements influencing economic empowerment on both the income side and the spending side. Macro-level analysis of 120 economies (home to more than 90 percent of the global population) breaks down into nine such elements—including four labor market metrics and five major components of cost of essentials—into measurable dimensions to capture the relative scale.  These nine elements are: for Income Elements (Working age population, labor participation, job opportunities, and stable jobs with sufficient wages); and for Affordability Elements (Housing, Food, Transportation, Health, and Education).  

At the country level, the proportion of the population that can be counted as economically empowered varies significantly, and for different reasons. Context clearly matters—there are significant variations even among economies with comparable levels of GDP.   Empowerment challenges can vary significantly among people with different education levels and members of different demographic groups.  Understanding what matters most in each economy is important not only for the public sector to set effective policies but also for private-sector actors. With this view, companies can better serve the needs of the populations where they operate.

The private sector employs most of the global workforce and helps keep the cost of essentials affordable. Companies are also experiencing pressure to create social impact.   We see companies all over the world contributing to the economic empowerment of billions of people. Companies do this through their core businesses as well as their training programs, retention benefits, social initiatives, and other actions.

Given that companies are already big players in economic empowerment globally, even modest increases in their positive impact could help lift vulnerable populations wherever they are found. To complement MGI top-down look at empowerment from the country level, the authors also take a view from the bottom up, asking what individual companies are doing now and what they might do better. 

Looking across this group of 100 companies that span both regions and industries, we find in company reports that there are about 70 different ways to contribute to economic empowerment across seven of the nine elements.  These actions or investments increase empowerment beyond what companies are already doing—either pursued as part of their core business serving customers, employing workers, and doing business with suppliers, or through CSR activities delivered to their communities.

With so many efforts under way and the often-significant expenditure they entail, how should companies go about prioritizing whom they serve and how?

With a wide range of empowerment challenges across economies and numerous company initiatives already under way, where should companies focus their efforts? Connections, contexts, and capabilities can serve as a guide, helping companies find their focus area of engagement.  Companies could design made-to-measure initiatives with three considerations: (1) connections: taking stock of which stakeholders within reach cannot afford basics and what their needs are; (2) contexts: identifying major barriers to empowerment in particular locations; and (3) capabilities: understanding what advantages a company’s core products and services, as well as its assets and operations, offer to empower its stakeholders.

For the last couple of years MIT team have had a go at predicting what’s coming next in AI. A fool’s game given how fast this industry moves. But we’re on a roll, and the team is doing it again.  

Generative virtual playgrounds .  If you guessed generative virtual worlds (a.k.a. video games), high fives all round.  We got a tiny glimpse of this technology in February, when Google DeepMind revealed a generative model called Genie that could take a still image and turn it into a side-scrolling 2D platform game that players could interact with. In December, the firm revealed Genie 2, a model that can spin a starter image into an entire virtual world.  Other companies are building similar tech.   That could also be used to train robots. World Labs wants to develop so-called spatial intelligence—the ability for machines to interpret and interact with the everyday world.

Large language models that “reason”.  Most models, including OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4, spit out the first response they come up with. Sometimes it’s correct; sometimes it’s not. But the firm’s new models are trained to work through their answers step by step, breaking down tricky problems into a series of simpler ones. When one approach isn’t working, they try another. This technique, known as “reasoning” (yes—we know exactly how loaded that term is), can make this technology more accurate, especially for math, physics, and logic problems.  It’s also crucial for agents.

It’s boom time for AI in science.  One of the most exciting uses for AI is speeding up discovery in the natural sciences. Perhaps the greatest vindication of AI’s potential on this front came last October, when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper from Google DeepMind for building the AlphaFold tool, which can solve protein folding, and to David Baker for building tools to help design new proteins.  Expect this trend to continue next year, and to see more data sets and models that are aimed specifically at scientific discovery. 

AI companies get cozier with national security.  There is a lot of money to be made by AI companies willing to lend their tools to border surveillance, intelligence gathering, and other national security tasks.   The US military has launched a number of initiatives that show it’s eager to adopt AI, from the Replicator program—which, inspired by the war in Ukraine, promises to spend $1 billion on small drones—to the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell, a unit bringing AI into everything from battlefield decision-making to logistics. European militaries are under pressure to up their tech investment, triggered by concerns that Donald Trump’s administration will cut spending to Ukraine. Rising tensions between Taiwan and China weigh heavily on the minds of military planners, too. 

Nvidia sees legitimate competition.  Nvidia emerged as undisputed leader of chips used both to train AI models and to ping a model when anyone uses it, called “inferencing.”  A number of forces could change that in 2025. For one, behemoth competitors like Amazon, Broadcom, AMD, and others have been investing heavily in new chips, and there are early indications that these could compete closely with Nvidia’s—particularly for inference, where Nvidia’s lead is less solid.   A growing number of startups are also attacking Nvidia from a different angle. Rather than trying to marginally improve on Nvidia’s designs, startups like Groq are making riskier bets on entirely new chip architectures that, with enough time, promise to provide more efficient or effective training. In 2025 these experiments will still be in their early stages, but it’s possible that a standout competitor will change the assumption that top AI models rely exclusively on Nvidia chips.

Strategy, it is often said, is about choosing what not to do. But when it comes to sustainability, many companies toss that advice aside and try to tackle too many issues at once. The result? Scattered efforts that fail to generate either business results or meaningful impact. In extreme cases, overpromising and underdelivering can even lead stakeholders and watchdogs to assume that the companies are greenwashing.  

Why does corporate attention get spread so thin when it comes to sustainability? And how can companies get more focused when setting their sustainability strategy, just as they do for corporate strategy?

A materiality analysis is—on paper—the way a company winnows down environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues to focus only on those that have a material impact on its financial performance.  Because reporting is costly, firms do try to reduce the number of issues they report, and they often resort to creating a materiality matrix with two axes, one listing the firm’s interests and the other those of stakeholders and society.   The trouble is that this approach does not provide focus.

Core premise is that achieving a tighter focus requires a firm to hold two tensions. The first is between outside-in and inside-out perspectives: Leaders must understand the major social and environmental issues of our time and the perspectives of regulators, customers, investors, employees, and suppliers. Without it, they are operating within a bubble.  The second tension is between perception and reality, or the subjective and the objective. Although data-driven insights and financial metrics are crucial, a firm’s success often hinges on stakeholders’ perceptions, which are sometimes ill-informed. 

To manage these tensions and clarify which issues are most critical to address, companies need to apply four lenses: business value, stakeholder influence, science and technology, and purpose. The Business Value Lens i.e, What Affects Our Bottom Line?  The Stakeholder Influence Lens – What Are People Trying to Tell Us?  The Science and Technology Lens – What Does the Data Tell Us About Our Impact and Future?  And The Purpose Lens – What Do We Stand For?

The types of data and the methods of inquiry are different for each of the lenses. And each lens will bring a particular set of issues into focus. Companies should invest in, innovate around, and build strategic coalitions for issues that fall at the intersection of all four lenses. Doing so will help them balance the tensions between an outside-in and an inside-out approach and between the subjective or intangible and the objective or quantifiable modes of inquiry.

From 2004 to 2015, the Lego Group was on a tear, growing revenue an average of 17% per year. Then growth stalled and sales flattened. In 2017, an outside CEO joined the toy company and chief commercial officer Loren Shuster transitioned to the role of chief people officer. The new leadership team, Shuster recalled, had a classic realization: “‘What got us here won’t get us into the future’ — which led us to develop a new business strategy.”

At the same time, the top leaders also “embarked on a journey to define what leadership culture we need to operate in the world today,” Shuster said. The team began to think through what type of culture it wanted and what to take forward or leave behind. The Lego Group had accumulated dozens of different leadership models and change programs over the decades, and Shuster wanted to take a unified approach. “Like many organizations, particularly ones that have been around for 92 years, there are … different models and processes and artifacts and articulations. We wanted to clean all that up,” he said.

The process produced the “leadership playground,” which Shuster described as the “articulation of the leadership culture that we are looking to nurture and develop within the Lego Group.” Three core behaviors — being brave, focused, and curious — are “represented in the language and the principles of how children operate or feel free to operate in a playground, an external environment, where it’s relatively safe to experiment,” Shuster said.

Prioritizing these behaviors enabled the Lego Group to execute its new business strategy, which required “choices that could be considered brave, or maybe we hesitated [over] before, like going after [sales to] adults in a big way. Would that sacrifice our kids business?” Shuster noted. Some of those decisions were not self-evident and required a lot of curiosity and bravery. The leadership playground became an “integral component” of executing the strategy, Shuster said.

Backed by these changes, the company has rekindled its growth, with revenues increasing an average of 10% annually over the past five years (compared with 3% for Disney, Mattel, and Hasbro) while maintaining industry-leading profitability. Shuster tips on articulating and embedding updated leadership behaviors throughout a large, global organization are:  Articulate the organization’s leadership principles from the bottom up.  Use simple rules to guide the process of defining culture.  Embed the leadership principles widely, using volunteers.  And avoid a mechanistic approach to evaluating leadership performance.

Walmart founder Sam Walton died more than 30 years ago, but his influence is still felt at his Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer.  Though Walton retired as CEO of Walmart in 1988, the retailer’s success has ballooned in the years since. Walton was dubbed the United States’ richest man in 1985 by Forbes, and the Waltons still hold the title of the country’s wealthiest family with a net worth of $267 billion. Today, Walmart has a market cap of $736 billion.

Walton built his company on a business blueprint of 10 rules, which he outlined in Made in America. Here are three of those key principles. 

1. Motivate partners beyond money.  Many of Walton’s rules for business have to do with disrupting the status quo, including setting lofty goals and outside-the-box solutions for employees to meet. “Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.”  Walton exhibited his maverick attitude before even opening the door to his first Walmart store in 1962.  “First he learned all the rules,” Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow wrote in his 2001 book Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built. “Then he broke all the rules which did not make sense to him—which meant almost all of them.”
2. Exceed customer expectations.  Walton also adopted a customer-is-always-right attitude encouraging employee accountability.  “Give them what they want—and a little more,” he said. “Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don’t make excuses—apologize. Stand behind everything you do.”  Walmart has appeared to continue to successfully abide by this piece of advice. Over the past year, the retailer has not only succeeded in retaining low-income customers looking for deals, but has also attracted relatively high-income consumers earning more than $100,000 annually because of its delivery options and better-for-you-branded private-label foods.  “The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed,’” Walton said. “They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.”
3. Swim upstream.  Walton’s unconventional means of motivating employees extended to his business decisions. If competition was going to zig, Walton would zag.   “Sam Walton did not become a billionaire because he was a genius (although he was without question smart, shrewd, and astute),” Tedlow wrote in his book. “The real explanation for his success was that he had the courage of his convictions.”  Walmart has maintained an edge over Amazon for this reason. The discount retailer, in addition to maintaining brick-and-mortar stores, has continued to expand e-commerce and delivery offerings, optimizing its omnichannel retail strategy. A 2024 working paper estimated that retailers’ pushes toward omnichannel could claim $100 billion worth of market share from Amazon.  “Ignore the conventional wisdom,” Walton said. “If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”

Exhausted reporters covering forest fires invariably point to signs of rebirth, small green shoots emerging from the devastation. The appearance of independent consultants from the wreckage of downsizing and artificial intelligence implementation is a similar sign of hopefulness. 

There’s a surfeit of meaningful advice out there to help those now in the hunt. Search “how to be a good consultant,” and you are presented with a bromidic barrage, including such Captain Obvious advice as being a good listener, deploying critical thinking, and establishing trusted relationships.

According to the author having been a consultant for a decade and a half, plying his strategic, marketing and branding wares, he has some hard-won advice to share, both in terms of how to build a pipeline, and what the best project work looks like.

1. The How: Don’t expect, expand.  Are you expecting consulting projects from those you have worked with in the past, including those you’ve supported? Good luck with that illusion of reciprocity. The perception of debt is usually one-sided. No one wants to admit that their success isn’t attributable to their own celestial greatness.  Don’t stew when the work you believe you are entitled to doesn’t come knocking. Instead, expand your network using proven techniques.  Entrepreneurship is a muscle that needs to be developed, especially if you were cosseted in the safety of a large but stunningly un-beneficent enterprise.
2. The How: Write deep and pointy proposals.  Proposal writing at its best is an act of imagination. As you use it to problem-solve, speak in a natural voice that captures your personality and doesn’t default to corporate speak. Express a strong point of view. Don’t hide behind wishy-washy qualifiers and caveats. Think of a proposal as an early form of a recommendation. Give prospective clients a walloping sense of the value you bring, and what it will be like to work with you. 
3. The How: Don’t bend your experience to fit, when it doesn’t.  Often, you won’t have spot-on domain experience. Rather than contorting yourself into an untenable position by making forced, unconvincing connections between previous work and a potential client, demonstrate the power of not being caught in industry shibboleths.
4. The What: Start with a hypothesis, but a malleable one.  You’re an expert, right? Act like one. Develop a hypothetical mapping of the problem and the solution. The same applies whether your consulting gig is marketing, supply chain, human resources, or finance.  Somebody internally couldn’t meet the challenge, or they were too busy, and now they are turning to you. You are the bright shiny outside object that you hated so much when you were inside the system. Seize that window of permission.  Of course, your hypothesis may change but don’t be over-directed by the client.
5. The What: Maintain your half-sider status.  You must know enough about the company and the competition to speak with the authority of an insider, but you must simultaneously maintain the wide-eyed ignorance of the outsider.   Your superpower is something that no one inside the walls of your client possesses: the ability to ask the big dumb question that is an insight in disguise.
6. The What: Ignore the ‘next phase.’  The joke is that a consultant starts selling the second phase of a project on the day that the first one starts.  Don’t do that. The best way to stay engaged is to avoid the obvious “you need me around” ploy. Clients are smart. They are onto that game.  Make it clear that you want to solve the problem, leave the roadmap in your client’s hands, and let them follow the GPS instructions you’ve built. Plus, to my earlier point, it’s best to expand your client base than be too narrow.

As the calendar flips to 2025, now is the perfect time to reevaluate your business and establish New Year’s Resolutions for 2025 – if you haven’t done so already!  The new year is a time for self-assessment, evaluating opportunities, and plotting a way forward for new challenges.  Every business is unique, after all. But to make your resolutions effective, try the following for 2025:

1. Revisit Your Business Plan.  A business plan is not just a document written during the startup phase in order to raise capital. Rather, it should be viewed as an evolving roadmap for where you want to take your firm. The business plan outlines the strategies and tactics you’ll use to grow your company, helps you anticipate challenges, and sets milestones for gauging your progress.  Your business plan is meant to be updated as your business grows. 
2. Continuously Gather Market Information.  If you have a loyal base of customers, use them for feedback about your performance compared to your competitors. Keeping abreast of market trends, evolving customer needs, and successful competitor strategies will help you identify opportunities and gaps in the marketplaces.
3. Manage Your Cash Flow More Effectively.  Start by creating a 6–12 month cash flow forecast at the beginning of the year. This projection should list expected sales and returns on investments you have made, along with cash outflows (expenses, debts). Keep track of changes in revenue, expenses and, most importantly, your business earnings. If your expenditures are rising faster than your revenues, look for ways to both increase sales and cut costs.
4. Take Advantage of Technology.  Technology can immeasurably help small business owners increase their efficiency. For instance, FreshBooks is a subscription-based accounting product for small and medium-sized businesses that offers near-instant invoicing, accounts payable, expense tracking, time tracking, purchase orders, payroll integrations, and other accounting functions and reporting.
5. Invest In Your Staff.  The new year provides an opportunity to assess your company’s talent pool and determine if your workforce is equipped with the skills needed to navigate evolving challenges in the future. This is especially true if you are in an evolving field, such as information technology (IT) or finance.
6. Create A Positive Work Environment.   Creating a positive working environment that includes hybrid work situations can help keep workers happy and productive, thereby reducing the likelihood that they will look elsewhere for satisfaction.
7. Invest In Marketing.  Even companies that are doing well need to invest in marketing. If your business is unable to afford TV commercials or other high price advertising, invest in social media marketing and earned media (public relations).   Keep in mind that establishing and nurturing personal connections is still invaluable in growing your business. Establish a goal of making and connecting with at least one new contact each month. 
8. Promote Your Personal Brand.  Every business owner has a personal brand to promote. Use social media, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok to build your brand – especially if you are trying to reach a younger demographic.
9. Take Care Of Yourself.  Identify and manage the stressors in your life, at work and at home. It’s not easy for business owners to relax; as an entrepreneur. However, it is important to take time to enjoy what you have accomplished in the business world and try to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
10. Take Care Of Others.  Gen Z tends to be more socially conscious and politically active than previous generations. They are using their voices and social media influence to bring attention to issues such as climate change and social justice. They typically prefer companies that support causes — financially and through volunteer efforts — that they believe in.  It can help boost morale and provide a sense of caring about your employees and their interests.

According to the author when he graduated from law school at 21, he felt prepared to tackle any legal challenge. He had case law and courtroom strategies down cold. But what no one prepared him for was the reality of running a firm. In many professions, whether you’re a lawyer, doctor, contractor or chef, you go through intense training to become an expert in your field, not in running a business.  Here are some lessons he had to learn on his own — lessons that professional training often overlooks but are critical for anyone stepping into entrepreneurship.

1. Financial literacy: The foundation of a successful practice or business.  Managing money effectively could be the difference between growth and just getting by.  Whether you’re a doctor, a restaurant owner or a law firm founder, financial literacy is essential. Every business owner needs skills for managing cash flow, understanding taxes and keeping overhead costs in check. Financial management wasn’t part of the curriculum in law school, but it’s crucial if you’re planning to build a sustainable practice.  For anyone looking to take the entrepreneurial leap, remember that financial discipline is just as important as your professional expertise.
2. Marketing and communication: Building a brand and connecting with clients.  In today’s digital age, being skilled at what you do is only part of the equation — you also need to reach clients and build a recognizable brand.  This isn’t just a challenge in law. Professionals across industries — construction, healthcare, hospitality — face similar hurdles. Building a client base means going beyond traditional referrals; it requires a digital presence and a solid marketing strategy. Whether it’s SEO, social media or simply effective networking, every business needs to stay connected to its clients.  Effective communication is equally important. Clients want to feel informed and valued. In a law firm, if you don’t manage client expectations and stay in touch, it affects trust. The same goes for any other service-based industry. Understanding that clear, consistent communication can make or break relationships is something professional training rarely emphasizes but is essential for business success.
3. Efficiency: The key to a well-run business.  Efficiency is a skill that professional training doesn’t usually teach, but it’s vital for running a business. In law school, the emphasis was on deep analysis and thorough understanding — yet, in business, time is money. The faster and more effectively you can deliver services, the better for your clients and your bottom line.  This concept extends far beyond the legal field. If you’re running a medical practice, an efficient billing process can help you see more patients and reduce costs. In construction, streamlined project management ensures that you meet deadlines and avoid cost overruns. In every industry, efficiency translates to client satisfaction and business growth.