Skills That You Should Master Before Starting Your Business

There are a lot of skills that new entrepreneurs should have to be successful in their chosen business. Entrepreneurs will have to wear multiple hats in the startup phase. When you’re first starting out, you will need to know a little about a lot. You will either be overseeing the work that is being done by other people for you, or you will be doing everything by yourself.

Many people think that all you need to start a successful business is an idea and enough startup capital. However, in the world of business, a combination of a great idea with a great source of funding is not necessarily the recipe for success. Countless numbers of companies can start with a cool idea and a decent-sized budget, only to be forgotten.

What about the smaller businesses that start operations and never see success? They will see a little bit of income at first and then start struggling. Think of an online business, or your local barbershop and beauty salons. For example, some writing services will appear and disappear in a matter of weeks, on the other hand, other cheap writing services will be successful for years.

So, what’s the difference between these businesses?

Yes, the condition of the industry matters, and yes, the local economy matters. But, it all boils down to one thing when you compare two closely related businesses that began operations at the same time with identical ideas and finances, the owner’s engagement within the business.

You may have enough funding and a great idea to start your own small business. But do you have the necessary skills?

What Are Business Skills?

Your ability to complete the necessary tasks for your business are your business skills. For example, a skill that you made need to market your small business to gain new customers is Facebook Ads.

What Business Skills Do You Need?

Do the words hard skills and soft skills sound familiar?

These are not just catchphrases. If you want to succeed in any profession, especially small business, you will need to develop your potential in two factors. Mostly hard skills are relevant for programmers or doctors. On the other hand, sales professionals would need to focus on their soft skills.

Both soft and hard skills are equally important when you are starting your own small business.

What are these skills?

Hard skills are skills that are developed through learning. These are abilities that can be measured. Typing, math, presenting, programming, and graphic design are all skills that can be learned. Every profession will have its own requirements when it comes to hard skills. If you choose to be a graphic designer, you will obviously need artistic and technical skills.

Soft skills aren’t as easy to measure. These skills are gained through personal growth and not through training. Soft skills for many professions are more or less the same. Such as proper etiquette, listening, teamwork, stress management, the ability to inspire others, and leadership. Rather than your professional skills and experience, this is more about your personality.

How Can You Develop Your Business Skills?

Developing your business skills can be done in a few ways, the top three are:

1. Trial and Error

Action is the most effective way to build your business skills. You won’t learn as much just sitting and watching some else make YouTube video content as you would if you created a channel and started creating content yourself. That is why practicing a business skill is the number one way to develop it. When your doing something for the first time it may feel extremely intimidating. You may start to worry about the mistake you are going to make or how everyone will see you. However, you can help yourself to efficiently learn these new business skills by pushing through that anxiety and fear.

2. Learn From Others

Signing up for an online course is another great way to develop your business skills. You can subscribe to different podcasts if you are interested in learning from a variety of successful entrepreneurs, you can even read their books or watch their content on YouTube. This way you will learn some of the most up-to-date strategies that are being used by other entrepreneurs. There is no shortage of online courses for entrepreneurs that are also free, they will teach you skills such as Facebook ads, email marketing, and more.

3. Look For Patterns

Studying what other people are doing is the third way to develop your business skills. Study how they are achieving the success that you want for yourself and aim to find their patterns. You can spend time studying the highest ranking sites for various keywords if you are looking to learn more about search engine optimization (SEO). Or, if you are looking to create more viral content for social media, you can take the time to look at the most popular posts for multiple hashtags. You can also study the business leaders that you admire and take notes on what they’re doing differently if you just simply want to develop your leadership skills.

What Hard Skills Should You Have?

Hard skills usually entail budgeting or accounting and financial literacy within the business world. These skills are what you can learn at business school.

You will still need suitable experience to get these skills. You can not simply learn entrepreneurship from books. Do you think you will be able to use the principles of accounting without the proper practice after you have only read a book? We don’t think so.

So what are the hard skills that you will need to develop before you start your own small business?

1. Business Plan and Business Proposal Development

Not many people would think that writing and planning skills will help to start a business. But the truth is, there aren’t many people that have their finances ready to go. That is a very rare situation. Funding from an outside source is necessary for most of us.

When speaking to investors, you will suggest a business proposal. This will be a well-written, detailed document that tells your idea and predicts the profitability through a realistic financial projection, usually over the course of 5 years.

You will still need a business plan even if you don’t plan on connecting with investors because you already have the money. This will be a realistic vision of the chances your idea has to be successful. This plan will give you a solid foundation to take the necessary steps to set up and grow your business.

• The best thing that you can do to develop your proposal and business plan writing skills is to take a course. Take a course if you’re already in school if there is one available, and pay attention. If you’re not in school, a website called Coursera is always a great option.
• You can also hire a professional to do the writing for you if you aren’t sure of your plan development and proposal skills. Just keep in mind that a collaboration between you and whoever you hire will be necessary. The expert you bring on will scan your industry and give you financial details. Since it’s your idea that you’ll be discussing your input will also be necessary. You will need to be the one to place the unique idea in the appropriate business setting.

2. Financial Literacy

Daily, you will need to know how much money comes into the business and how much goes out. To keep your business profitable, you’ll need to learn how to keep the balance between income and expenses.

Your business will lose sustainability if there is even the smallest lack of discipline and prudence. This is the reason why so many new small businesses head towards bankruptcy before seeing any success.

Soft Skills That Are Important

A subject that is always up for debate is if entrepreneurship is teachable. You can still fail with your own business if you don’t have the necessary soft skills, even if you went to business school and developed all of the necessary hard skills.

Studies have shown that traditional entrepreneurship education will play an important role in the success of a small business, but when it only teaches knowledge on business creation it is not as effective. It has been recommended that business programs should focus more on the soft skills that are needed.

Maybe the program that you attended doesn’t cover the practical aspects of entrepreneurship, maybe it does. Maybe you’re not even planning on attending traditional schooling but you still plan on starting your own business. The soft skills you need are dependent on your efforts, not something that you are taught.

1. Ability To Inspire Others

Modern leaders empower their employees to give the best that they can.

You will want to make the people on your team excited to show up every day to work. They will usually do the bare minimum to earn money if it is a boring job. However, they will do their best if they have a leader who inspires them towards personal and professional growth.

2. Courage

This is a skill, it’s a leader’s capability to take on a challenge even if it means risking something.

Risk is always going to be a factor in the business world. As a small business owner, you will need to use new tools, make new hires, invest in new equipment, try a new marketing strategy. This all means that you will have to invest money.

You will stay in a bubble of safety that will burst when you start to fall behind your competition if you don’t have the courage to take risks that aren’t guaranteed to be 100% successful.

3. Stress Management

You will quickly realize that you are not the only one who is stressing out about all kinds of things that are business-related when you start to concern over the start of responsibilities. Your employees will be stressed as well.

Stress will turn into frustration over time and that frustration will turn the company into a hard place to work for. It is your job to stop that from happening as the business owner.

So What Now?

Developing business skills will help you to succeed as a small business owner. You will need to find a balance between the hard skills and soft skills that we talked about. You can build a successful business by taking the time to master these skills. You will also be able to pass the skills along to your employees during training.

If you need help developing these and other necessary skills to run a successful business, sign up for a membership and speak with our small business experts.