5 business skills every entrepreneur must have

Most people get into business to be their own boss, create wealth, and achieve financial freedom.

These are all absolutely valid and good reasons to become an entrepreneur. But where most people never focus is acquiring the right skills to be effective as an entrepreneur and achieve the goals for which they started this journey.

I’m not talking about formal education that people get like MBA. There are a dime a dozen MBA professionals in this world who have zero clue about how to build a business.

And today, I want to specifically discuss the 5 business skills that every entrepreneur must possess to achieve results and success. Let’s look at each of these skills in detail now.

1. Ability to plan:

This is probably one of the most essential skills required for an entrepreneur to be well organized and have clarity in building their business.

Most small-medium businesses have zero planning on how they will achieve their goals.

Below are the areas where a business owner must have a concrete plan to build a bulletproof business:

Business planning:

Have an overall plan about your business model, understand who your customers are, how you will market, how you will sell, how you will serve, and how you will grow.

Planning each department of the business:

I want you to think of your business not as a single unit but as a combination of multiple departments working smoothly.

So you need to plan how each and every department of your business will function and the results these departments will deliver.

So, having a plan of action for marketing, sales, operations, human resource, accounts, MIS, legal, management, and research & development will help you to understand how each department will contribute to your business growth.

People and resource planning:

As an entrepreneur, you need to have a clear idea of how many people you will meet to run your business operations smoothly.

You need to know at what stage you need to hire these people, and you need to plan how you will manage and grow these people in your organization.

Once you have a concrete plan in all these areas, you will have the correct structure to lead your business.

And I always tell entrepreneurs that failing to plan is planning to fail.

2. People development skills:

I firmly believe that business is all about people. And I always tell entrepreneurs that you build people, and people will build your business.

So as an entrepreneur, you must be skilled in the following areas of people development.

  • Hiring people
  • Training/ coaching people
  • Holding people accountable
  • Providing feedback
  • Building capability

You also require skills to keep your people happy.

We always talk about customer happiness and customer delight. But most make the mistake of not considering our team members as our internal customers.

No business can thrive by keeping their customers happy but their team unhappy.

As a business owner, you should build your capability to train people well, help them build capabilities, offer them good roles, responsibilities, and money. But most importantly, create an organizational culture that makes them happy.

3. Building frameworks:

One of the biggest reasons most micro, small, and medium businesses struggle to survive is because they run ad hoc.

Most actions they take are reactive, which means they only act when something goes wrong in their business.

Let me explain this to you.

For example, most business owners are not proactive in marketing and sales.

They rely on word of mouth. And when they realize they have not generated any leads that month and need to pay salaries, the rent, the bills next month, they panic. And in desperation, they start looking for references so that they can close a few leads and ensure their survival for the coming months.

This is a classic example of a business running without frameworks or systems.

Understand this. Big businesses that make millions and millions of dollars are never reactive or ad hoc in nature.

They are successful because they operate their entire business through a set of frameworks like frameworks to manage the business, frameworks to acquire new customers, and frameworks to build people in their organization for high performance and productivity.

I always tell business owners that they need to start building frameworks and systems in their business like all million and billion-dollar businesses do. And they always reply back saying they cannot do so as they are not big businesses and it will not work for them.

Here is a fact: All those big businesses playing in millions and millions of dollars don’t have frameworks and systems in their business because they are big. They became big because they understood and built frameworks and systems in their business.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a solopreneur or have a 5 member team, or you have 500 member team.

You must possess the skill to build frameworks, processes, and structures to manage and grow your business efficiently and exponentially.

Please understand people fail systems don’t.

4. Creating new strategies:

I have interacted with over 10,000 business owners through various programs, training, and coaching sessions. And I have realized that business owners seriously lack the skills to build new strategies to keep growing their business.

A business owner must have skills in building 3 different types of strategies.

  • Strategies to consistently acquire new customers.
  • Strategy to increase revenue per customer.
  • Strategies to grow your profits.

Most entrepreneurs are clueless when building strategies or any form of tactics to grow their business.

In fact, this is a big reason many business owners get stuck at a certain stage in their business because they don’t know and don’t have the right skills to grow further.

So your role as a business owner is to keep looking and keep researching the new ways and methods through which you can grow your business.

5. Learning skills:

Everything I have told you so far will never work out if you do not possess the skill to keep learning, keep looking for solutions, and always be a student.

I have always operated from one philosophy in my life. I am not the most intelligent human being on this planet. Which means others are better at many things compared to me.

This means there is always a scope to learn something and improve me as a business owner and a leader.

Let me be very honest with you.

Growth always demands a price. You will always have to pay the price of consistently learning new skills, knowledge, and building capabilities to avoid becoming a bottleneck for your business.

Let me tell you, the skills and knowledge required to make 1 crore a year will never help you make 10 crores a year.

Reaching 10 crores will demand complete up-gradation of your skill and knowledge. And if you as an entrepreneur do not have the attitude of consistently learning from others you will remain stuck at a certain level in your life.

I always tell all my entrepreneur friends learning leads to earning.

Conclusion:

So these, in my opinion, and in my experience of working with over 10,000 entrepreneurs in India and across the globe, are the most essential skills that every entrepreneur must possess to achieve breakthrough results in their business.

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