Should you create a business without experience in that field?

Luis (No)

While everyone is free to make any business decision, it’s highly recommended to prevent creating a business if you don’t have any experience in the field in which you plan on getting involved. You’ll start with a high chance of having an inadequate network, considering that the competition already has established numerous networks of mentors, partners, and contacts—not to mention a reputation and credibility in the business. Without these connections or exposure, you’ll have difficulty finding investors, reliable suppliers, and customers. 

Starting a business in a field where you lack experience can be a time-waster for you and your team, as insufficient industry knowledge might significantly constrain the company's growth potential. The more mistakes you make as the leader of that business, the more time and money are wasted. Because not knowing the main obstacles of a business prevents you from anticipating challenges, your experiences in the first few months or years will reveal how prepared and equipped you were to handle inevitable setbacks and hurdles. Also, choosing to start a business this way, without much industry know-how, would create difficulties in building trust with your workers, investors, and even customers if they start to mistrust someone who doesn’t have the proper experience in that business sector.

Doing this only makes it so you face an unnecessary learning curve that will force you to spend more time learning the most important things about the industry instead of focusing on growth. That situation likely means you lose precious money or other commodities in the process. Creating a business is a delicate process. Knowing how, why, and to whom you are going to reach and the strategies around that before going in is the wiser step. 

Rob (Yes)

Starting a business entails a lot of different factors that all contribute to how successful it becomes. The absence of one or more of these factors may mean failure for the business, regardless of how experienced the owner is in that particular field. In fact, core business skills such as leadership, problem-solving, negotiation, and marketing are far more critical to a new business than prior experience in that particular field.

Undoubtedly, experience can make things more familiar and easier, but it's not entirely necessary. Today, one can easily outsource knowledge from the internet on the ins and outs of any business or industry they’re venturing into. There are a lot of courses and tutorials on practically any topic available on the internet. They can also hire mentors or seek consultations from more experienced people in the field.

In fact, a lack of experience can sometimes be a blessing in disguise. Experience may sometimes stifle creativity, and new entrepreneurs could come in with fresh and innovative ideas that may give them a competitive edge in the market. History also gives many examples of renowned entrepreneurs who became successful despite starting without prior experience in their industries. Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla), and Howard Schultz (Starbucks), to mention a few, all started without experience, but leveraged their skills and capital to build some of the most successful business empires in the world. So yes, experience can be helpful, but it is definitely not a prerequisite for starting a business in a new field.