17 Dec Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs to Master

“A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals.” – Larry Bird

Starting a venture and leading a company is a great opportunity, how you use this given opportunity is what will define your success. Talking about the big vision, goals, achievement, success mantras of those who have already achieved success is very easy. But when you become an entrepreneur and step into the world of entrepreneurship, you will start to realize that what sounds easy in theory does not happen overnight. In fact there are a lot of much smaller components that go into building a great team and a successful company.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”- Steve Martin

This implies that you should be the best you can so others cannot ignore what you are doing. Most of the entrepreneurs know the importance of investing in themselves building valuable skills and improving their strengths over time. During my journey as an entrepreneur, I have managed to narrow down certain skills that I believe every entrepreneur must have apart from the obvious ones in order to succeed. Here are a few skills you must develop to lead your business towards success.

Ability to learn

“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” – Brian Herbert

It is easy to say that you will learn but you will soon realize that learning requires willingness and right attitude. Your willingness to learn and grow will generate a lot of learning from various sources which will make your startup a success. Having a business does not make up an achievement, making it successful is what will make people to look at you as an achiever. So don’t go around networking to crack deals instead network to learn. Meet people and ask them for tips and strategies on how to make your business even better.

Making plans

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Planning is the key to every business because of the uncertainty of success and less room to make mistakes. When it comes to success and achievement, it has always got to be planned. Another important thing is that any success that was not planned will soon be gone. We all have come across people who had an overnight success that made them really rich but they lost it all in no time because of not knowing how to handle the success. Even success needs planning and preparation. Think of the success you really want and make appropriate plan for achieving it.

Progress is better than perfection

There’s a big difference between completing a progress and perfection. Perfectionism frequently works against the drive for completion. A final product doesn’t have to be perfect to produce strong results. However, the project must be essentially complete. A good example for this is a mediocre but complete film script can still be made into a movie. Whereas a beautifully crafted but half-finished script is largely worthless. Hence it is very important to deliver, and deliver fast. With several hundred tasks, it becomes increasingly important to deliver. There is nothing wrong about being perfect, but in your initial stages focus on completion as it generates results. Progress, on the other hand, is about advancement; about moving towards a goal. Progress is about value. Progress gives us feedback and allows us to make choices and refine our offering, and occasionally gives you insights to truly innovate.

Patience is a virtue worth developing

“Patience is a noble virtue, and, when rightly exercised, does not fail of its reward” — George Washington

Patience can be said as the gatekeeper between the two worlds of our unconscious impulses and our conscious choices. Patience is a skill that must be learned and practiced. It isn’t something which comes naturally to us. We see a lot of people who master patience become more successful than those who can’t. Patience is like a muscle in our body that needs to be used in order become stronger. If we don’t use it, then we will lose it. No one prepares us for this. Success happens the day after we have completed years of hard work. Everything around us is fast paced and in a business, where you are constantly working on innovating and trying to change the world, you have to dodge and deal with several variables. If we learn to wait just a few seconds longer each time, the habit becomes stronger. If we learn patience, the time we wait doesn’t seem so bad. It’s rightly said, “Patience is a virtue and the best things in life are worth waiting for.”- Julie Spira.

The ability to forecast the future

“When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.”- Elon Musk

Like any entrepreneur will tell you, you need to be able to understand and fulfil a consumer’s desire. Now, this desire may be in the form of a product, service, or a combination of the two. Whatever it may be, I believe the constant endeavor should be to stay ahead of it, and offer product/service enhancements that make your product highly desirable by its users. To do this, one must have the foresight that helps guide the company and business in turns that make you stay ahead. Steve Jobs was just such an innovator. When he was the CEO of Apple, his advisers warned him against moving into music and mobile phone business. It was the time when the digital music industry was tarnished by illegal downloads, and internet access for mobile phones was weak and slow. He didn’t make the decisions based on what was popular at that time but he took the decision knowing what would be popular in the future.

Flexibility is Necessary

As an owner of a business, the single most important skill that you must possess is flexibility. Flexibility is a necessary entrepreneurial trait. While flexibility is very necessary when your business is taking unexpected twists and turns; I think that flexibility, in general, is a wise trait for entrepreneurs to cultivate, even in times where things are feeling certain and going well. You will come across situations and times where you must change the way a particular process is planned to function. We all know what happened to Nokia when they rigidly refused to adopt Android despite the growing popularity of the OS! There may be times where you need to don multiple hats and change your organizational structure as well, and you have got to be up for it. There is no fixed formula that applies for all business with which one can move ahead. That said, I do believe that if you do good work with ethics, success will follow.

Closing Thoughts

Being a successful entrepreneur requires you to prepare yourself in such a way that you boost the success rate of your business. I don’t assure you that possessing these skills will guarantee that your business venture will be successful. Unforeseen challenges may come up, and sometimes you will simply be unable to meet them due to circumstances beyond your control. However, if you take the time to work on these traits and make no mistake you can substantially lessen the chances of ending up among the 90 percent who do not make it. Mastering these skills to be successful is certainly not going to happen overnight. However, the sooner you begin, the more results you will see down your entrepreneurial journey.