According to Brodie, who is enthusiastic at training entrepreneurs in building websites, “one of the best ways that entrepreneurs can gain a competitive edge in the current tech-fast world is by learning to code.”

In any business department—from accounting to sales to procurement to front office—technology comes in handy. So, knowing how that technology works to power the various operations in your business will put you a step ahead of the rest.

Here is a video from Ted Talk emphasizing on why teaching yourself to code is important:

Here are 7 reasons why entrepreneurs should learn to code programs for their businesses.

1. Build Relations with Your Tech Team

Businesses need to build a great team when developing their product pipeline. Specifically, having a motivated tech team will assist you realize your business objectives faster.

As an entrepreneur, learning how to code will help you understand your tech team and help them manage and schedule projects effectively.

Taking off your coat as a boss and learning to create computer programs can also enable you to plan well for the important resources required in product development such as capital and time.

It will also help you to appreciate the timeline within which your team can build a realistic product for the target market.

An entrepreneur who has learned how to create applications is in a better position to empathize with the tech team and appreciate the struggles they face. This improves teamwork and enhances productivity.

2. Circumvent Scarcity of Resources

While starting businesses, most entrepreneurs face challenges in relation to the availability of resources. Therefore, to ensure they get the venture off the ground, they are forced to get their hands dirty.

Business owners should learn to code to help their tech team manage projects within the deadlines and to boost workmanship since many hands make work light.

For instance, an entrepreneur who has web development knowledge can build or make changes to his website without necessarily interrupting his team’s work or schedules.

3. Evaluate Human Resources Effectively

Without any clue about technology or coding, it becomes difficult to determine whether the people you are considering to join your company as the technical team have sufficient expertise in the field.

To ensure that you make the most of the team, you should evaluate the available talent based on your understanding of computer programming.

This will help you to position your business for success based on the human resource choices you make.

You can identify good talent, their strengths, and weaknesses and place them in areas where their skills are best suited.

4. Enhance Informed Decision Making

While you might have the best tech team to work with, they will always turn to you for certain decisions to be made.

This means that you need to speak their tech language if you seek to make informed choices.

Familiarizing yourself with the tech ecosystem plays a huge role in running a company and learning programming languages gives you the necessary leverage to escalate your business growth.

5. Sharpen Your Critical Thinking

Successful entrepreneurship requires developing winning strategies and critical thinking is necessary to facilitate proper and sound resolutions in making decisions, especially for startups.

Learning to code helps entrepreneurs to sharpen their thinking and stay alert to logically offer problem-solving approaches.

Programming teaches you how to solve complex problems by dividing them into bits and pieces. If entrepreneurs learn to create programs, they can devise ways of breaking down gigantic business problems into smaller fragments that can easily be solved.

Coding boosts your critical thinking and helps you stay grounded when making decisions—even when the business is operating under pressure.

6. Boost Your Creativity

Understanding technology and learning how to code will greatly boost your creative juices. With increased levels of thinking, you are better placed to come up with innovative strategies for your business that will help in providing solutions for your company’s pain points.

Learning how to communicate using a computer language will expose you to better ways of accomplishing business tasks, and as new technologies are developed, you will be better placed to understand how you can leverage such technologies for your business.

With increased creativity and confidence, you will have a competitive edge in your niche, which would propel you to grow your business to unimaginable heights.

7. Save Costs

Startups usually aim to reduce business costs as much as possible even as they strive to break into the market.

Established businesses are also keen on keeping their costs to the minimum if they are to enjoy business gains. Paying a developer or a chief technical officer for their services can be too costly for a company.

Therefore, it is advisable for entrepreneurs to learn how to code so that they can chip in where necessary rather than hiring the services of a costly tech expert.

For example, when you need a website for your startup, instead of paying someone, you can use your coding skills to build one yourself and use the saved costs in expanding other areas of your business.

Wrapping Up

Learning how to code makes an entrepreneur proficient in running a business. If you know how to write lines of code, you’ll definitely stand out from the crowd and get your business ahead of the pack in the industry.

So, are you going to start learning how to code?

This article was written by  Michael Garbade  and published on business2community.com