Shanli Liu, a CPA, recommends recent graduates spend their first one to two years at a company with 20 or fewer employees. You'll see the entire business from ad creation through payment processing and customer retention, learning how revenue actually works. Small firms may teach imperfect practices, but the breadth beats the narrow, siloed roles you'd get at a big company.
Do you think working in some sort of company for 2 years out of school makes sense to get some foundational knowledge? Yes, I do, actually. I think there's a ton of value in a small business, so I would recommend looking at a business of 20 people or less. The reason I say that is because if the business is small enough, you'll be able to taste every component of it. If you go into something that's got 100 people, you're going to be in a department under a manager doing one specific thing, and you're never going to really see anything else. And so if you want to get into entrepreneurship, you want to get the whole breadth of the business. Like, you want to be able to draw out how a dollar appears from the ether and then becomes profit to the bottom line. Like, you need to know, okay, so we run ads. Here's how we run ads. We click these buttons, we say these words, we have this image, and it goes to a page. On that page, they put their information in. Then I call this person and I say words to them, and then they give me a credit card. That credit card goes here, and then money gets processed. After that, it goes to Sarah. Sarah then checks this list off of how we create web pages or whatever it is for this person that we're selling things to. After that, it goes to John, and John goes goes into account rep and maintenance, and then we know that the person will stay for 10 months. Like, you need to know the entire journey from click to close and ideally ascension and retention. That is why I like 20 or less, because you can take everybody out to lunch, you can ask for extra time, especially if you're young. Most people will do it. It's kind of this hard balance because on one hand, a 20-person business or less is usually not super big in terms of revenue, and the lessons they may be teaching you may be just honestly wrong. But you will still learn more right stuff than wrong stuff for the most part, because they're probably making more money than you are, which is currently zero.
