IELTS Speaking Part 3: Success in business
7 Part 3 discussion questions on success in business, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Why do some people open their own business?
Autonomy is usually the deepest motive, even when people frame it as being about money. After a few years of asking permission to take a Friday off and watching decisions you disagree with get made above your head, the appeal of answering only to yourself becomes almost irresistible. A cousin of mine walked away from a stable bank job to open a small coffee shop, and what he talks about isn't the profit, it's the fact that he chooses the suppliers, the music and the hours. The other real driver is the ceiling on employment, because a salary rises in predictable increments regardless of what you do, while a business carries no upper limit whatsoever. Somebody who can see clearly that their work generates ten times what they're paid eventually starts wondering why they're handing that margin to someone else. Frustration and ambition together are what usually tip people over the edge.
Is it better to have your own business than work for a boss?
It depends entirely on how much uncertainty a person can stomach. Running your own business hands you control and unlimited upside, and for self-directed people that freedom is worth a great deal, since they'd rather earn less on their own terms than be comfortable and bored stiff. What people underestimate is that ownership means the risk lands squarely on you, so if a client doesn't pay in March you still cover the wages and the rent, and the anxiety never switches off at six in the evening. Employment, on the other hand, buys you something genuinely valuable, a predictable income and the ability to shut your laptop and stop thinking. A friend who runs a small logistics firm earns far more than I do and hasn't taken an uninterrupted holiday in four years. So neither is simply better; it's a trade-off between security and freedom.
What do you need to start a business?
Less capital than people assume and considerably more clarity than they expect. The first thing you actually need is a genuine problem that somebody is already paying to solve, because businesses fail far more often from building something nobody wanted than from running short of clever ideas. Before opening anything, I'd want to have spoken to thirty potential customers and heard the same complaint thirty times over. The second requirement is enough of a financial cushion to survive the gap between launching and turning a profit, which is almost always longer than the plan promises. A restaurant in Baku might take a year to build a regular clientele, so opening with two months of rent in the bank is really just a slow way of shutting down. Beyond those two things you mainly need a tolerance for uncertainty, because the first year of trading will bear no resemblance whatsoever to the business plan you drew up.
Do you agree that nowadays it is easier to set up a business than in the past?
Mechanically it's far easier, yes. Thirty years ago you needed premises, a landline, printed catalogues and a distributor willing to stock you, whereas today somebody can register a business online, take payments through an app and reach customers on Instagram without renting a square metre of space. I know people selling handmade jewellery from their kitchen table to customers in three countries, and their entire start-up cost was a phone and a ring light. What's become far harder, though, is getting noticed, because that same low barrier means you're competing with thousands of identical small sellers rather than the two shops in your district. Attention is the scarce resource now, not capital, and a lot of new owners discover that marketing costs them more than production does. So starting has never been simpler, but surviving the first year probably hasn't got any easier at all.
Do people in your country like to work in big companies or small companies?
Traditionally the pull has run heavily towards large organisations. A job at a big oil company, a bank or a ministry carries genuine prestige here, partly because it guarantees a proper contract, a stable salary and social protection, and partly because families still measure success by the name on the employment record rather than by what you actually do all day. Parents will openly steer a child towards a state institution for exactly that reason. That said, there's a clear shift among people under thirty, particularly in IT, where small firms and startups have grown increasingly attractive. In a company of fifteen people you're doing meaningful work within your first month instead of photocopying for a year, and the flexibility and speed of promotion matter more to that generation than the security a big name provides. So it splits fairly neatly along generational lines, with security still winning among older workers and autonomy increasingly winning among younger ones.
What challenges and difficulties do people face when they try to have a successful small business?
Cash flow is what finishes off most of them. A small business can be profitable on paper and still collapse, because the money owed to it arrives in ninety days while the rent, the wages and the suppliers all want paying this month. I've watched a small printing firm lose everything simply because two large clients delayed payment at the same time. The other constant difficulty is that the owner has to be everything at once, the accountant, the salesperson, the recruiter and the person fixing the website at midnight. Nobody is genuinely skilled at all of those, so something is always being neglected, and it's usually the strategic thinking that gets sacrificed to daily firefighting. Competing on price against big chains that buy in bulk compounds both problems, which is why the small businesses that survive tend to win on service or specialisation rather than on cost.
What makes some companies more successful than others?
The companies that pull ahead are usually the ones that stay genuinely close to their customers rather than to their own assumptions. It's remarkably easy for a successful firm to fall in love with the product that worked ten years ago and stop noticing that people now want something entirely different, and Nokia is the classic illustration, since it wasn't short of engineers or money and simply misread what a phone was becoming. Adaptability, not size, is what separates the survivors. The second factor is the quality of the people and how a company treats them, because strategy is worthless if the execution is careless. Firms with low staff turnover accumulate genuine expertise, and somebody who has handled the same clients for six years spots problems a new hire would miss entirely. Culture also decides how quickly decisions get made, and speed compounds enormously over a decade.
Reading a model answer is not the same as saying one. The sample above shows what a strong Part 3 answer sounds like. What it cannot tell you is how yours sounds — whether you hesitate, repeat the question back, or run out of things to say at forty seconds.
You can record an answer to this exact question and get it marked on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and pronunciation — the same four criteria the examiner uses.
Common questions
How is Part 3 different from Part 1?
Part 1 is about you; Part 3 is about people in general. The questions move to society, causes and consequences, and the answers are expected to be longer and more developed — an opinion plus a reason plus an example, rather than two sentences.
What if I have no opinion on the question?
You are not marked on the opinion, so pick one and support it. Saying you have never thought about it and stopping there leaves the examiner nothing to assess.
How long does Part 3 last?
Four to five minutes. The topics develop out of your Part 2 card, so the discussion is usually connected to what you just described.
Model answers written and reviewed by The English All-in-One IELTS team. They are teaching models showing what each band looks like, not real candidate scripts.