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What Are 6 Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have?

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Having the skills necessary to be successful can make running your own business easier and less stressful. It can also make it easier to navigate your way through challenges that arise, such as those we faced in the last year with the COVID-19 pandemic. If entrepreneurs don't have important skills, they can feel overwhelmed, stressed and stuck where they are.

If you are the full owner or major shareholder of a company, you as an entrepreneur can make good profits when things go well; but as an entrepreneur you also take more risks - much more than an employee. This entrepreneurial risk can take various forms, including financial risk, career risk, emotional risk or general business risk.

With so much at stake when it comes to starting and growing a successful business, there are very specific skills that an entrepreneur usually needs to be successful.

Insight into entrepreneurial skills

Entrepreneurs play a key role in any economy, using the skills and initiative necessary to anticipate needs and often bringing good new ideas to the market.

Entrepreneurship that proves successful in facing the risks of setting up one start up, is rewarded with profit, success and continued growth opportunities. Entrepreneurship that fails, leads to losses and often fewer opportunities for those involved.

While the prospect of becoming your own boss and bringing in a fortune is attractive to enterprising dreamers, the potential downside of starting your own business is also present.

Income is not guaranteed, employer-sponsored benefits pass you by and if your company loses money, your personal belongings could potentially take a hit as well; not just the bottom line. But adhering to a few tried and true principles can go a long way in spreading risk.

Following are 6 key attributes required to be a successful entrepreneur.

Communication

Every entrepreneur must be able to communicate effectively. Whether you are a solo entrepreneur or need to run an internationally operating business, it is important to be able to communicate effectively with all stakeholders and potential stakeholders that you deal with as an entrepreneur.

It is imperative that an entrepreneur can communicate with employees, investors, customers, creditors, colleagues and mentors. If an entrepreneur cannot convey the value of his business to others through effective communication, it is difficult to grow the business successfully.

Among other things, communication & sales are important skills for you as an entrepreneur (fig.)
Among other things, communication & sales are important skills for you as an entrepreneur (fig.)

Mastering all forms of communication is important, including one-on-one and face-to-face conversations, group conversations, written communications, and email or online messaging.

Sales

The soft skill of sales goes hand in hand with the communication it takes to be successful. As an entrepreneur you have to be able to sell anything and everything. An entrepreneur must sell the business idea to potential investors, the product or service to customers and himself in turn to potential employees.

If you are able to communicate effectively as an entrepreneur, you are better equipped to sell ideas and physical products.

In the beginning, it is quite normal for entrepreneurs to be the first salespeople within the company. Those sales skills are then needed to demonstrate value to all stakeholders inside and outside the company.

Patience

Not everything is going to happen overnight. Even the most successful companies take time to grow. Apparently sudden successes usually have a foundation that has been spent years behind the scenes before they "suddenly" get off the ground. Learn to be patient by staying mindful and celebrating the little milestones that come your way. It's important to realize that things take time and to focus more on the progress that is being made along the way.

"To build a successful business, you must start small and dream big." - Aliko Dangote

Focus

The road to successful entrepreneurship is full of ups and downs. There are the highlights of it successes and the despair of setbacks. A successful entrepreneur must be able to maintain focus so that he or she can stay on track - even when the going gets tough.

This skill can also be seen as thinking with purpose. Whatever struggle an entrepreneur goes through, a successful entrepreneur has the focus needed to keep a close eye on the end goal and can push himself or herself to continue taking steps to achieve it.

Inquisitiveness

The ability to learn is one of the most important skills in life, let alone entrepreneurship. However, if someone is building a business, the ability to learn is a prerequisite for success.

Most important skills you must have as an entrepreneur (Youtube)

The ups and downs that an entrepreneur goes through are inevitable. An entrepreneur needs a high learning ability - and a desire to keep learning. If you as a person can learn in any situation, including making mistakes and failures, then you have the skills necessary to become a successful entrepreneur. Failure can actually help increase a person's knowledge and understanding of things.

Strategic thinking

Although a successful entrepreneur has built a successful business, the skill of business strategy is actually the fifth most important skill that an entrepreneur needs. Often, entrepreneurs achieve success in their businesses through their own willpower.

By applying effective communication skills, sales skills, a deep focus and a high learning ability, an entrepreneur can learn how to apply a business strategy along the way.

When structuring and growing a business, it is important that its structure and growth strategy are based on common sense and skills. A successful entrepreneur must have a solid strategy to move his business from good to better to highly successful.

Finally, about skills for you as an entrepreneur

You too have the ability to build a successful business. Thousands of people have already done it who are not much different or can do more than you. To succeed, they simply learned the necessary behaviors including the above-mentioned key traits to make their dreams come true and took consistent action to achieve their goals. You can do the same!

Sources ao BusinessCollective (link), BXNO (link), Forbes (link), Investopedia (link), Patch (link)

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