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10 TV Shows Every Entrepreneur Should Watch

7 years 4 months ago

Most people will describe entrepreneurship not as a job, but a way of life. Even when it comes to entertainment there’s a lot you can still learn and absorb from your TV hours no matter how short they may be. Here are 11 of the top shows every entrepreneur needs to watch. You can buy their DVDs or binge-watch them on online streaming sites.

1- Ramsay’s Kitchen nightmares UK version

Gordon Ramsay is one scary guy, he can bring back the memories of all your evil teachers over the years. His tough words, however, can be eloquent and educative. There’s a lot you can learn from this show about running a restaurant and managing your finances. You don’t have to own a restaurant to find this show useful, Ramsay provides a thorough analysis and practical solutions to the common problems that cause restaurants to fail (which can be applied to any business actually).

2- Mad Men

A great show to learn about sales and entrepreneurship from the best salesman and sweet-talker of the 1960s. Mad Men is a highly celebrated show featuring Don Draper, a mysterious and extremely talented salesman. However, The true star of Mad Men isn’t Don Draper, but rather his advertising firm. Over the course of the show, the firm battles to stay in the market, falls, rises from its ashes as a startup, merges, gets acquired, lands big breaks and great clients just to lose them. It’s the dramatic roller coaster of the business lifecycle you always wanted to watch.  

3- Restaurant Impossible: Food Network

Chef Robert Irvine knocks on your door, offers you $10,000 and 2 days to turn around your struggling business, what would you do?

The show follows struggling owners as they revise and modify their entire process; menu, staff, and marketing. The show helps them identify the weak points in their leadership that might be holding their business back. You may not be as lucky as theses owners to have a couple of millions and a celebrity chef guiding you, but you can still get some valuable insights to boost your business.

4- Shark Tank

Promising budding entrepreneurs from different backgrounds get thrown in a shark tank. Wait, not really!  It’s a metaphorical tank filled with five experienced, high-profile entrepreneurs turned investors. Each time this panel of potential investors listen to pitches by these fresh entrepreneurs and decide whether they will be funding them or not. This show is a must for anyone who want to work on their pitch-making skills and how to deliver enough vision, passion, and determination to bring your dreams to life.

5- The Newsroom

Entrepreneurship is all about understanding people’s needs and identifying with different social, political and economic issues influencing their lives, in order to solve them. This show gives you just that, through an immersive and fast-paced story of a newsroom staff dealing with all kinds of news stories in a critical time in US history. It’s the latest work of Aaron Sorkin, the talented writer who gave us shows like “The West Wing” and films like “A Few Good Men’ and “Social Network”.

The Newsroom is a must see as it’s a dramatized educational show that highlights the relationship between media, government, and private markets. Additionally, in the first season, the storyline of Sloan Sabbith (played by Olivia Munn) will give you the most concise yet comprehensive explanation of the financial crisis there is.

6- Silicon Valley

Personally, this show was the best source to understand the basic industry lingo and get a good insight into the world of silicon valley. It is a hilarious fictional story of a group of entrepreneurs trying to make it with their tech startup despite their own mistakes, and the people determined at making them fail. Even if you’re not in the tech industry, you’ll definitely need to watch this show to know a few things about web and software development to get it on with marketing and online sales.

7- How It’s Made

A show about how all kinds of things are made may not seem as a the best choice for your to-watch list. However, it is important to understand the complex process involved in producing simple everyday things like pencils. Because then you can relate to the process you yourself use to deliver a product or a service. Nothing is as simple as it looks and this is what this show teaches you.

8- Undercover Boss

The show follows Bosses of chain businesses as they go undercover to their own stores in various locations and various jobs around the store and interact with the employees. It’s an eye-opening and a frightening experience to realize what happens in your business when you’re not there. It will remind you how important it is to treat your employees equally and open channels of communication to understand what your staff is going through every day.

9- The Profit

This CNBC show is an obvious choice for your watch list. Host Marcus Lemonis, Camping World CEO finds struggling businesses and invests $2 million of his own funds to help these companies stay afloat in exchange for a percentage of the businesses' profits. It shows the importance of a great leader and team in running a successful business.

10- I will not live in the shadow of my father لن أعيش في جلباب أبي

We all know Abdulghafour El Boraey, the ultimate entrepreneur who starts out a struggling lad working in a huge scrap and junk trade agency, to becoming one of the industry whales later on. It is an inspiring story of the man who built an empire of nothing and moved from counting his pennies to counting his lucky stars with his lifetime companion; Fatma, the girl from the koshary kart!. This show will bring you some 90’s nostalgia but will definitely teach you a thing or two about determination and hard work the two pillars for any successful career.

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