Must have Skills and Qualities to Succeed as an Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs are business owners that not only earn money but significantly contributes to the growth and wellbeing of the society, its people and communities. To become a successful entrepreneur one should have a set of skills that distinguishes him from other ordinary business owners.
These entrepreneurial skills are of great importance in building a successful venture. Let us explain about these entrepreneurial qualities and skills, in the most simplest manner that will help you in selecting your friends, work environment, career and work-life approach.
Read More, How to Find Your Passion and Interests while starting a Career or a Business
Important Skills required to become a successful entrepreneur
1. Business Understanding
Every entrepreneur must have a certain basic Understanding of business which will help him/her to breakdown any business idea into its scope and challenges, strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This understanding will help any entrepreneur to decode any business idea like a jigsaw puzzle. He will calculate the risks and challenges associated with an idea.
And also, its chances of viral success. A commerce student or a person who has spend most of his childhood in learning and seeing his family business grow day by day. A family business is the important internship a child gets from his family, and where nothing is hidden and his involvement is appreciated and promoted always.
If you have a family business, you can easily learn some basic understandings of a business.
2. Managerial Skills
These are actually manpower handling skills an entrepreneur is required to possess. A manager is the one who know how to get work done from others. If he is capable of keeping the manpower happy and dedicated towards their work, with highest level of efficiency and participation, than it is a win win situation for any business.
3. Communication Skills
Good communication with staff members, teams and labors, and also communication with vendors suppliers, service providers, in-general public and also customers and clients, helps in building an image of a business. The way an entrepreneur communicates, gives an impression of his brand and business he/she has created.
Take an example of Steve Jobs, co-founder of apple. His speeches and presentations were so captivating that people still remember him as an icon.
Having great communication skills usually helps in better business growth by motivating employees, pushing the boundaries of Marketing and Sales team, cracking deals with vendors and business partners and bursting competition.
4. Negotiation Skills
A well negotiated partnership deal will give you much more bigger size of the cake than the poorly negotiated one. Negotiating and cracking deals in his/her own favor is what always required in any business. Negotiating salary when hiring managers or like giving contracts to contractors, negotiation always plays a vital role.
5. Financial Understanding
Business is nothing but “Profit and Loss”. So, understanding of finances and making better use of it by maintaining cash flows and profitability is very important. Every entrepreneur must have or should learn these financial accounting skills where role of funds plays an important role in keeping the wheels of any business in action, that too going in a right profitable direction.
Making a good turnover with limited funds, more and more quick cash cycles will create space for more business and its profitability. This is what any entrepreneur will be always looking for.
6. Salesman Skills
All businesses require to sell some idea product or service. There is no alternative to this. A business can earn and grow only by selling these, and here comes the picture of an entrepreneur who requires to play a role of a salesman. Therefore an entrepreneur must know the product or service they sell.
He/she also must know how to pitch the clients and customers, to sell his idea or product or service. This helps in building relationships and growing businesses which also brings more repeat sales. A good salesman can easily become an entrepreneur because of his/her sharp selling and lead conversion skills
7. Customer-centric Mindset
The customers are an important aspect of any business. A successful entrepreneur never sell and forget his/her customer after the sale. Because, he/she knows that cost of acquiring a new customer is much more than, attracting repeat sale from old customers. Thus, always try to retain old customers and have a lasting and healthy relation with old customers.
8. Time Management
Completing a task in given time frame is what makes an entrepreneur successful. It requires multi-tasking and deploying tasks to subordinates, along with proper managing the allotted time to complete tasks, projects, etc.
Making proper and effective use of time, results in on-time completion of projects and meeting deadlines. Along with increasing overall productivity of a business. The most prioritized task can be handled separately and completed beforehand as compared to other deployable tasks.
9. Team Management and Organizational Skills
An entrepreneur must know how to delegate tasks to their subordinates and manage the complete organization by setting goals and motivating them with a work-life balance in their organization’s work culture. Allowing different departments to merge and effectively manage the teams and making use of other team members to gain maximum but reasonable output without discriminating employees.
10. Creative Mindset
An entrepreneur not only build a business but actually builds a brand. The brand building process requires a creative mindset to create an impact among the masses. The brands like Nirma, Parle G, Reliance, etc. are some of the old and evergreen brands built in India. These entrepreneurs were having a mindset that took them so long in their businesses. Nowadays, with the advent of Digital media and AI, creativity has gone completely to the level one has not imagined few years back.
11. Strategic Thinking & Planning
Anticipating the challenges and planning beforehand requires a different level of strategic planning. To avoid bottleneck issues and leveraging optimum use of funds and resources, and taking minimum risk for maximum benefits, are some work ethics of a successful entrepreneur. Planning and proper implementation in business operations assures smooth flow in business activities. Overcoming challenging situations, and being ready with necessary resources as and when required, are the important aspects of any successful entrepreneur.
12. Ability to Change and Adapt
Just building a successful business is not enough, in todays evolving business market. Every business should be ready to change and adapt to changing environment and circumstances, whenever needed. The change in peoples perspective and the age old design of any business may conflict. This necessitates a truly evolving and adaptable presentation of any business to their potential customers. Nokia, a tech giant fails to cope up with this evolving market change, and after ruling the mobile industry for more than a decade they got out-washed by more challenging and competitive brands.
13. Problem Solving skills
Every now and then businesses faces problems, from minor to major, emotional or technical, manpower shortage or funds shortage, etc. Such problem should be solved on highest priority before they get converted into huge losses. Before the sand slips out of your hands, an entrepreneur must manage resources and manpower and take reasonable risks to overcome the problem. Such problem solving skills are not developed overnight, this requires a typical approach that only an entrepreneur can sense and proceed to tackle problems by taking responsibility on his/her own shoulders.
14. Risk Taking Mindset
Risk is always good for business, when it is well-calculated and taken for the sake of business growth and not for proving anything. Risk when taken in any business, can make or break a business. But, there are other aspects where risk-taking approach has proven to build many successful empires. If an entrepreneur has that ability to calculate risks and associated factors, he/she can convert it into an opportunity. Entrepreneurs are always hungry for opportunity, and therefore they work towards converting risks into opportunities.
15. Leadership Qualities
Entrepreneurs are not a one man Army. An entrepreneur is nothing without his team or staff, in the way where a leader is nothing without his followers. An entrepreneur, cannot do everything with his own hands, there are many business operations where employees and staff work together under the guidance and direction of an entrepreneur. This manpower co-ordination and motivation requires leadership qualities, therefore we can say, that all successful entrepreneurs are great leaders
16. Visionary with Positive Thinking
Creating a vision for his/her business is what an entrepreneur does in the very beginning and even before the inception of a business. Visionary like Dhirubhai Ambani, Ratan Tata, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, are the best examples of such qualities where they always stood up with their positive thinking and visionary approach, that had took them to achieve such great heights.
