By Steven Rogers

You're a student on a college campus, and you have entrepreneurial dreams. Before you forge ahead, listen up: This is your professor speaking. As a chaired entrepreneurship professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, I teach students like you. And my message is that it's OK -- in fact, it's probably preferable -- to slow down and delay your entrepreneurial pursuits for a year or two after graduation.

I speak also from the perspective of having run my own company, Akar Corp., a collection of two manufacturers and a retail concern in the lampshade industry, for seven years in the 1990s. In fact, as a student at the Harvard Business School in the 1980s, I had attended for one reason: to acquire the skills necessary to launch a company. A classmate and I were rather cocky about this objective, foolishly ridiculing classmates as "sellouts" for pursuing jobs.

Flash forward to today. Having learned from the toughest teacher of all, namely experience, that building a business is grueling work, I now advise students that it's perfectly acceptable to put on a suit and go to work for a company that isn't their own. I tell them that it's a good idea to learn the ropes on someone else's time and someone else's dime.

VOICE OF EXPERIENCE.  Most students lack experience in one or more of the critical disciplines, such as management, sales, marketing, and finance, necessary to build companies. Moreover, they generally aren't adept at dealing with the continual vagaries of entrepreneurial life in the real world.

In my case, shortly after graduating from business school in 1985, I rejected an offer to buy a McDonald's (MCD ) franchise in Boston, because I felt the purchase price was too high. I had participated in the formal owner/operator training program for two years, learning everything about running a restaurant and franchising. Instead, I went to work for Bain & Co., the Boston-based consulting firm, to build a financial cushion and learn the applied science of problem-solving.

Then my wife and I moved to the Midwest, where we wanted to raise our family, and I launched my entrepreneurial dream by purchasing Fenchel Lampshade, a family-owned manufacturer. With two subsequent company purchases, I had formed Akar.

In my view, business is about being a generalist, with a wide range of experience, confidence, and competence, rather than pursuing a specific idea. I agree with most business specialists who argue that entrepreneurship is about being able to execute on a plan. My four years at Cummins Engine (CMI ), supervising union employees and negotiating contracts for diesel-engine parts, along with the two years each at McDonald's and Bain, had given me the confidence that I could operate a company.

ON-THE-JOB TRAINING.  At Akar, however, I soon learned that building a business was tougher than I had expected -- so tough that the Akar story has become a Harvard Business School case study. In an industry that was no more than $100 million, I wasn't able, as I had planned, to increase revenue through organic growth. It was hard taking business from competitors, and the number of potential retailers was declining.

Managing cash flow proved to be a monthly crisis. Collecting from customers was tougher by a factor of 10 than the discussions we had had in finance classes. Instead, I learned that collecting was related to the vagaries of getting and keeping customers, and the entrepreneur's expectations for those accounts. You may think you are assured an account, for example, only to get a call saying the customer is dropping you.

Businesses, in short, rarely operate according to plan. They are living and breathing organisms that change frequently. After seven years in business, my sales had reached a little less than $5 million and profits were solid, but I concluded that I wouldn't be able to reach my goal of building a $50 million company in an industry that wasn't expanding. Those years, however, had allowed me to live and learn the countless realities of entrepreneurship.

LESSONS FROM THE TRENCHES.  So, with the entrepreneurial experience under my belt and a Kellogg offer in hand, I sold my company and turned to full-time teaching, which I expected to do for a couple of years while I looked for another, larger business to purchase. This enabled me to find my true passion in life -- teaching entrepreneurship!

Therefore, as a professor and former experienced entrepreneur, I am not a sideline cheerleader for entrepreneurship. Please don't get me wrong. I absolutely love it. I understand that our country (and, indeed, our global village) desperately needs high-growth entrepreneurs, because they create jobs. I have said repeatedly that these people are my personal heroes and she-roes.

It's just that, as a professor, it would be something akin to malpractice if I were not completely honest about the difficulties involved. It is also my duty to downplay the romanticism of it. Rather than prodding students to become immediate entrepreneurs, I want them to be successful when they decide to pursue it.

From my own entrepreneurial experience, I've compiled six lessons that fledgling campus entrepreneurs might want to consider before taking the plunge:

The Odds.
Your chances of success with a campus-launched business are very, very slim. To let megafounders, such as Gates (MSFT ), Jobs (AAPL ), and Dell (DELL ), persuade you otherwise would be like attempting to become an NBA player straight out of high school because of the success that Kevin Garnett has had. As my colleague, Professor Lloyd Shefsky, says: "Open a business as a student only if you think you are the next Bill Gates or Michael Dell. Otherwise, get more business experience first." For every Microsoft, there are at least 10,000 entrepreneurial failures.

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