By: Gabe Vargas
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of businesses fail within two years of opening, 45% within five, and 65% within 10.
Entrepreneurship is a journey that demands resilience and determination. Usually beginning as a simple idea, a radical transformation of that idea must occur from turning something from a dream into a reality. There are steps that need to be taken to ensure that the idea turns into the foundation of a healthy business, and from there, steps to ensure that this new business will be successful long term.
A misstep can lead to failure at any point in this process. The idea will fail if it doesn’t fruition into a tangible business. The idea will fail if the business starts on a great idea but doesn’t have the resources to keep it moving. This is why nearly half of businesses fail by five years: many things have to go just right to keep the company afloat.
No one knows this more than Alejandra Santos. After obtaining a finance degree at George Mason and an MBA from Pepperdine, Santos gained valuable experience working in finance at household names such as Merrill Lynch, CliftonLarsonAllen, and Vegamour Hair Products. From working at various big-name firms, Santos gained extensive experience in operations, strategy, financial analysis, financial and accounting consulting, and expertise in multi-million dollar equity acquisitions.
More recently, however, Santos took her business expertise into a new venture: a consulting firm that builds new businesses from the ground up. Startup Tandem offers CFO-COO fractional services to venture-funded startups in the fields of tech, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and e-commerce. Providing a wide array of business consulting services, Startup Tandem is the business professional that everyone needs to elevate their company to the next level.
Alejandra Santos: The Educated CEO
Since 2021, Santos and Startup Tandem have found immense success in helping businesses achieve their goals. Santos and her team have assisted numerous small to medium-sized companies in scaling up to become full-blown enterprises In the wake of her success with Startup Tandem, Santos is launching another venture, an education platform on her business coaching and entrepreneurial networking website, The Educated CEO.
The Educated CEO is a business education and coaching platform that offers many resources for aspiring entrepreneurs and small-to-medium-sized businesses in retail, as well as mom-and-pop shops that want to scale and plan for a successful future exit. These include educational courses, a community of fellow business owners, and world-class business coaching from proven professionals who have scaled businesses from startups to enterprises.
Drawing upon the success of her startup business and education platform, Santos has launched a new business education program that extends beyond the previous services she already offers. According to Santos, The Startup Blueprint, launched on The Educated CEO website, helps aspiring visionaries “come as entrepreneurs and leave as business owners.”
An MBA-level education without the cost
The Startup Blueprint is an online MBA-style course that blends formal education with experiential-based learning to help business owners build the foundation they need to run a successful business without the fees and tuition associated with a formal MBA diploma. The “real-life experience,” which Santos provides through her 17+ years in the field, sets the course apart from a traditional MBA from a conventional two-year graduate program.
The Startup Blueprint’s education package is comprehensive. It gives the entrepreneur the “knowledge, tools, and resources to get in front of investors or banks to get funding.” It helps businesses launch successful online marketing campaigns that “convert website visitors into customers.”
Beyond attracting customers, The Startup Blueprint teaches entrepreneurs and business owners how to set a foundation for a business in a volatile economy by emphasizing the importance of developing a strong business infrastructure in operations, finance, and marketing. Once a financial and business blueprint is developed, the curriculum focuses on helping entrepreneurs create marketing funnels to ensure that sales of products and/or services increase exponentially. Using the business frameworks employees use from massively successful companies like Walmart, The Startup Blueprint offers business owners insights into what it takes to develop an incredibly successful enterprise.
Beyond providing a comprehensive business education course, The Startup Blueprint offers a year of access to The Educated CEO Gold Membership. This provides entrepreneurs with a network of CEOs and other startup business owners, additional educational resources, weekly check-ins with a business professional, and strategic business planning. The Gold Membership helps business owners support each other with operations and strategy, serving as a cross-collaboration tool for business owners to help one another through their business endeavors.
The Startup Blueprint and The Educated CEO Gold membership are part of Santos’s greater effort to provide entrepreneurs and business owners with a top-tier educational course and a valuable network of successful, supportive business owners that ensure business growth and success.
Beginning in the corporate world, Santos saw a need to help emerging entrepreneurs find their footing and expand their businesses to scale. From there, she developed a comprehensive communications and networking platform to spread her reach, ensuring anyone with an idea can turn it into a successful business. Now, Santos is taking her service a step further by providing a business education curriculum based on real-world experience that blends the benefits of her networking platform with the cost-effectiveness of online MBA training.
Santos has worked diligently to infuse Startup Tandem’s culture and values, as well as her MBA learnings and 17+ years of professional experience, into The Startup Blueprint’s mission. By leaning on her experience and expertise to provide keen insights into the executive-level knowledge today’s leaders need to meet their goals, she is rapidly transforming how entrepreneurs can take their ideas from concept to reality and succeed in the modern business world.
Published by: Khy Talara
