SHARIF EL-MAHDI

Entrepreneurship

Owner, Sharif Music, LLC

I’m a self-employed musician. I have an apartment in Los Angeles and I have an apartment in Washington D.C. I do a whole lot of traveling.

I wanted to go to business school, but I couldn’t stay in one place for too long.

I started looking in the online programs and actually found that there was one very good program and I could actually get the same type of degree and the same education, but I could still take my classes in Denmark and Slovenia and Guatemala.

Sometimes it’s early, but I can wake up at 3:00 a.m. occasionally for the accounting class. It’s not the traditional MBA path and this wasn’t really the traditional MBA program, so it actually fit perfectly for me.

I wanted to get my MBA because I don’t really know where the music industry is going and I don’t know what I’ll be doing in the future. I don’t know if I plan to open my own label or do marketing for any bands or open a club or a restaurant, things like that. I’m not sure where it’s going down the line, but the bottom line is I didn’t know very much about general business.

Going through this program I understand more about accounting and financial statements and marketing, just a broad overview of these things that you wouldn’t really think correlate directly to the music industry, but it’s still a business and a lot of these classes actually do on some level make sense for my personal career.

Student & Alumni Profiles ▸