Entrepreneur Vocabulary in English

- Hi there, I'm your English coach Christina

and welcome to Speak English with Christina

where you'll learn American culture and business know how

to become confident in English.

At conferences or business events,

people will talk a lot about their company,

their goals, their story and you can meet

all the right people and get business insights

that will help you to boost your career

and those are really valuable opportunities.

So you don't want to get stuck on essential words

that everybody uses but that you don't understand.

So, I want to help you to keep your credibility

and reach your goals and that starts with a review

of some common vocabulary from the world of entrepreneurs.

Let's go.

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First, let's define an entrepreneur.

An entrepreneur is a person who starts their own business.

Often, they'll try to cater to a specific niche

and a niche or niche, you can use both pronunciations,

well, that's a targeted segment of society

and entrepreneurs can offer both products or services.

They can lead their company and not their enterprise,

that word is not used this way in English,

but they can lead their company on the road

to being profitable and profitable just means

that they make more money than they spend.

Now sometimes instead of focusing on profits,

they can focus on growth and that means

that they want to get bigger and bigger

and when they grow their company, they're able to serve

or to help many more people from the start,

their clients, their customers,

the people who buy their solutions.

Now, what's the difference between client and customers?

Technically speaking, clients buy services

and customers buy products but in reality,

we kind of use the two interchangeably.

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Those are the basics.

Now, of course, the vocabulary for entrepreneurs

is often a bit stranger than this

and sometimes, you may wonder if the other person

is speaking English or some other strange language.

Let's look.

A business can help other businesses in B2B,

that's business-to-business, B2B,

or maybe they sell directly to private clients

in B2C, business-to-customer.

For example, Speak English with Christina

is both B2B and B2C.

We work with both businesses and with private clients.

If a business is selling software,

do they sell their software as a product in SaaP

by letting clients download and use the program on their own

or do they sell subscriptions to their software

as a service in SaaS instead?

Is it a freemium, a product what's free at first

but where you need to pay to upgrade to a better service

or do they offer a trial period where customers

can use their software for free for a limited time

before they decide to buy or not?

You might also hear about strategies

of content marketing or inbound marketing.

This means that the company creates good content,

like blog posts, podcasts or videos,

so that people find and visit

the company's website by themselves

and once you have a business idea,

you start building up your MVP.

Now, in sports this acronym means Most Valuable Player,

but in business, we're talking here

about the Minimal Viable Product.

It's the least ambitious thing that you can sell quickly,

often with very few bells and whistles or special features

and the idea behind your MVP is to have proof of concept

and that means that you prove that your concept

attracts customers first,

and then you can start improving to make it even better.

When you start growing,

it's time to think about scalability.

Does your business still work

if it gets ten times more clients

or is everything gonna fall apart

once you try to get a hundred times more clients?

Can you scale your business or do you need to stay small

and if all goes very well, you can even work a little magic.

You enter the enchanted entrepreneurial forest as a unicorn

and that is a tech company

that's worth over a billion dollars.

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When telling your own story,

you need to adapt it to your audience and to your situation.

Maybe you want to share how you finally

found the job you always wanted

or how you got a lot of help from your mentor,

someone, you know with more experience

who helped you to overcome your difficulties

or even how you finally managed to get a big break

and that is a short period of time

with a lot of growth and success.

People might want to hear about your achievement,

the actual results that you got from that adventure.

Another story that you can tell is about your drive,

your determination to get things done,

the reasons behind it.

Maybe you just want to solve the problems of your customers.

Maybe you want to add value to your clients' lives

to give them a solution

that gives them the most bang for their buck

or maybe you're a bit more idealistic,

after all, starting your own business

can be a way to make a difference in the world.

So you can tell us how you want to make

the world a better place.

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Now, you tell me, what is your story?

Tell us about you, your business or what motivates you

to get up in the morning and to do a great job.

I love stories like this.

So, please share them in the comments below.

You just need to start typing for instance,

my company is

and then tell us the rest.

It's a great way to practice your English

and if you would like to become more fluid,

more confident and work with one of my expert teachers,

check out my new program, Speak English Confidently.

It combines private training sessions

with regular conversation practice,

so that you speak more correct English more fluidly.

Details are below the video.

All right, thanks so much for improving your English

with me and I'll see you next time.