- 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.