What Are The Essential Skills Of An Entrepreneur?

The average successful entrepreneur makes £45,000 per year, nearly £8,000 more than average full-time employees whilst benefitting from the experience of running their business venture journey. The infinite earning capacity and higher reports of happiness from entrepreneurs inspire many to make the journey. To make it to this enviable level requires a person to employ a lot of entrepreneurial skills, however, and few know the ins and outs before they set out on the journey.

But what are these entrepreneurial characteristics? In this article, Real Business will outline the essential skills entrepreneurs require, so that you can get a flying start on your business venture.

What Are The Most Powerful Skills Of An Entrepreneur?

The successful entrepreneur is constantly developing their skills, understanding that whilst they may never master them, they will become proficient enough to rise the ladder consistently.

1. Curiosity And Insight

Successful entrepreneurs are curious, and this curiosity leads them to actively pursue new knowledge, a trait that is useful to identify opportunities via market research in the form of filling gaps or being ahead of emerging trends:

• Innovation – Innovation is a huge part of economic success, with advancements in the market being driven by those who can solve problems that consumers struggle with, or don’t even know they have. Perhaps the most obvious example is Apple’s iPhone, which effectively created the modern smartphone by combining a phone, various tools and the internet into one device.
• Foresight – Knowing your market through analysis and networking skills gives you the ability to predict where the market will shift, and be there to meet it. This enables you to become dominant in a slice of the market. Lego famously conducted a four-year study involving 3,500 girls and their mothers to understand feminine play preferences to appeal to toy markets that emphasise creativity, of which there were much fewer options available to young girls.

2. Self-Discipline

Successful entrepreneurs have to be self-disciplined. There is no boss to fall back on whenever things get hard – the responsibility for your business is yours. You require a solid business plan and consistent schedule to ensure productivity drives you towards larger goals. Discipline can be broken down like so:

• Leadership – To be a good leader, you need to be an example, not a dictator. You need to embody the qualities you want in your business to provide parameters and guidelines to follow to ensure an efficient work environment.
• Conflict – Self-discipline not only increases your self-belief, which is one of the most powerful tools a person can have, but it also ensures you’re ready at all times. You have to fight against your lesser nature, crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s at all times to ensure you are in a strong headspace. Strength plays a key role when the pressure is on and you have to overcome challenges.

3. Time Management

Time management skills are some of the most foundational entrepreneurial skills because they provide a structure for ensuring productivity throughout working hours to meet your large goals:

• Efficiency – To increase something’s efficiency is to increase something’s value, meaning how you use your time can improve your life and business. Great entrepreneurs make a big deal of this, often outsourcing longer, low-quality tasks and keeping the in-house team on the high-value, involved tasks that affect the bottom line.
• Goals – You only have so many hours in the working day. Being able to manage your time means staying on top or ahead of targets that your product or service is looking to meet. Only through careful planning can you choose your calculated risks and set up for maximum returns.
• Personal time – All the best entrepreneurs tend to spend most of their time working. Your work/life balance will likely be worse than that of average employees, but you’ll likely use the time you do have to much greater effect.

4. Perseverance

To be a successful entrepreneur, you must have some fight in you, because as rewarding as the journey can be, it’s also very draining:

• Endurance – Long hours aside, there will be plenty of moments where you feel more like you’re cutting your losses than counting your wins. That’s why it’s important to maintain a growth mindset. Simply play your cards as close to your solid business plan as you can.
• Understanding – You learn from failures and grow differently as a result. Only by learning both faces of the coin can you understand yourself and the market. Bill Gates himself suffered many early failures, including the now-closed “Traf-O-Data” company, before co-founding Microsoft.

5. Soft Skills

There are very few businesses in the world that don’t benefit from social interactions. Whether through sales skills or networking skills, budding entrepreneurs have to learn how to speak to and inspire others:

• Sales skills – Sales skills go beyond selling your product or service, but also your company as a whole. At various parts of your entrepreneurship journey will you need to find investors, make partnerships etc.
• Inspiration – The soft skills of an entrepreneur should develop their leadership from providing examples to inspiring others. Motivational ability can motivate others to place their trust in you and enhance the personal growth of your closest allies.

6. Risk-Assessment Skills

This is among the most powerful entrepreneurial skills to master. New opportunities will often carry risks to your business, and how you assess them will make the difference between being a successful entrepreneur and having to return to the drawing board:

• Know yourself – Lay out your strengths and weaknesses, as well as the unique advantages that you have over the competition.
• Know your competition – Know who the major players are in the market, and do market research on them. Why are your consumers buying from them, and how can you change their minds?
• Value – What is the value of the risk in question, versus the risk of failure? Know yourself and your competition to evaluate the possibility of a successful business outing.

7. IT Skills

Today’s world is digital, and mastering skills from social media administration to web development is unavoidable if success is what you’re after:

• Analysis – Data analytics tells you how well your business is doing, what it’s capable of, and how it can improve.
• Protection – With everything going digital, knowing how to protect yourself, from extra protective measures to simply knowing who to tell what information will protect your company from unwarranted interruption.
• Efficient function – By pushing everything digital, you can make processes much more efficient. For example, going from carrying cash to simply scanning your phone to make payments.

8. Financial Management Skills

Being able to manage your finances means being able to grow your business with efficiency:

• Power – Knowledge is power. Tracking your income, tracing your expenses and knowing when to save or invest can mean the difference between scraping by till the end of the financial year to pouncing on opportunities to maintain a successful business.
• Taxation – Employees don’t have to worry about calculating and paying their taxes, because their bosses do it for them. However, that’s not the case when you’re the boss. Knowing how to pay taxes and take advantage of brackets, exemptions etc. allows you to comply with regulations.

9. Problem-Solving Skills

Problem-solving is central to capitalism. People spend money to solve problems. Your product or service, as well as your daily business operations, must do the same:

• Constantly develop – Take breaks, but outside of that, always develop. Developing skills and using them to succeed will create understanding, understanding gives you insight into your business, and that allows you to better understand the problems your market aims to solve.
• Try new things – Refining your product or service at the highest levels of the industry typically, inevitably, leads to competing on more narrow ground. But by employing new ideas, you can find yourself breaking into untapped market shares.

10. Marketing Skills

Successful entrepreneurship requires marketing skills to build a brand identity. People don’t just buy a product, or hire a service, they interact with a unique value:

• Branding – What is your brand about, and how will people recognise it? Communication of your purpose and long-term goals is how you build reputation, so long as you provide what you’re posting.
• Conversion – Reaching potential customers via social media or other huge platforms is one thing, but converting them as customers means engaging with them. Making engaging content revolves around understanding your customer, and how best to keep their attention, such as via content generation.

11. Customer Service Skills

Customer service may seem more like an entry-level position requirement rather than core entrepreneurial skills, but that’s wrong. Service starts at the top and trickles down:

• Convenience – Providing a convenient service means running a service where the client doesn’t have to exert more effort than necessary. For example, Amazon became the global behemoth that it is by launching Amazon Prime, which offers both next-day delivery and easy returns.
• Individualisation – Customers do not like being thought of as a stat on the database. They prefer speaking to someone who knows their queries and makes it easy to find a solution. This is why CRMs are so important, they detail a customer history for every customer service rep you find.
• Ease – By mastering your soft skills, you make customer interaction many times easier. Many service reps will tell you that many of their angry customers turn apologetic once met with compassion combined with competence.

12. Networking Skills

Networking skills are a bit different from the customer service skillset:

• Making partnerships – Knowing how to talk to people and illustrate a good value proposition will increase the likelihood of positive transactional outcomes between companies. Even though many see businessmen as cold and unfeeling, many deals happen as a result of pure energy and confidence.
• Skill development – You can develop your skills by making connections with industry experts and learning from them. By strengthening your professional network, you have achieved authoritative information on how to adapt yourself and your business.

Conclusion

Each of these entrepreneurial skills is a journey in and of itself and requires a lot of practice to become proficient at. That being said, they are not only useful for prospective business owners, but also for people in their personal lives too. If you’re interested in starting, consider picking up a hobby or craft that will enhance some of these entrepreneurial skills, so that you can hit the ground running.