The Skills You Need to Start a Great Business
Entrepreneurship is not a destination; it's a journey. On this journey, successful
entrepreneurs don't expect “arriving” at some finish line. If you do have that expectation,
you won't continue to push yourself to step outside of your comfort zone and grow. You won't
seek out the things that truly help your business experience an explosive results because
those things require you to stretch yourself.
Becoming a successful entrepreneur means understanding hard times, when you need to push.
When there are obstacles, here's what you need to do. On any journey, you have times of joy
and more than a few setbacks. During times of joy, you feel like you can accomplish
anything. It gives you the strength and motivation to continue to put in the work that helps
your business. During hard times, negative feelings and emotions can easily take over.
A person needs to be a leader who can inspire his or her employees as well as be visionary
and a person with a sense of mission as the entrepreneur must motivate and drives the
venture. This means that leadership, values, team-building skills, and managerial abilities
are the key skills and attributes that an entrepreneur needs to have.
An entrepreneur is someone who develops a business model, acquires the necessary physical and
human capital to start a new venture, and operationalizes it, and is responsible for its
success or failure. Apart from this, he needs to have excellent organizational and people
management skills as he or she has to build the organization or the venture from the scratch
and has to bond with his or her employees as well as vibe well with the other stakeholders
to ensure the success of the venture.
By the skills and capabilities that he needs to have, first and foremost, he or she has to
be an innovator who has a game-changing idea or a potentially new concept that can succeed
in the crowded marketplace. Note that investors usually tend to invest in ideas and concepts
which they feel would generate adequate returns for their capital and investments and hence,
he needs to have a truly innovative idea for a new venture.
Entrepreneurs need to follow some basic principles which would serve as guidelines and beacons for their success. Based on the research conducted over three years and by interviewing more than 150 entrepreneurs, noted author and management expert, Bill Murphy came out with a book about entrepreneurship which was published by Harvard Business School.
How to come up with an interesting startup idea?Here are the five basic principles of entrepreneurship as put forward by Bill Murphy through his research and analysis.
- It is always better to find the right opportunity even if it takes time instead of chasing mirages.
- Invest in people and build successful teams.
- It is always not enough to have everything in place. Execution and Delivery are what matters.
- Must be self-actualizing visionaries
- They should make money fast and this should not be the goal.
Entrepreneurship must be seen as a starting point to transform oneself and in the process
become a change agent. For this to happen, they must be able to fulfil environmental,
social, and economical expectations from the larger system and at the same time, must drive
themselves in the pursuit of their dreams. Indeed, the balance between inner aspirations and
external expectations is the most important determinant for success.
Despite of all of these hardships, every year, thousands of entrepreneurs embark on this
journey determined to bring their vision to fruition and fill a need they see in society.
Some entrepreneurs become successful only after doing well in another career: maybe they
mastered work as a consultant or an executive officer and used the skills they acquired to
build their enterprise.
Any leadership position, or position within the industry you plan to enter can vastly
increase your chances of success. If you don't get the experience you need there, you'll
need to make up for that fact through trial and error in your first business. Being a
successful entrepreneur means more than starting new ventures every other day. It means the
right attitude towards a business and the determination and grit to achieve success.
Here are the top five reasons for the failures of new ventures, there are other reasons as well including differences between the promoters as well as other personality clashes and issues.
- Problems with Funding
- Staffing Issues
- Cash Crunch and Drying up of Liquidity
- Operational Mismanagement
- Peaking too early or too Late
Set your goals and create a business plan If you do not have a business idea yet, you could apply several strategies to brainstorm and align with your goals, and here is the idea about How to raise funds for the business?
- Identify upcoming or emerging technologies or advancements that may change the business landscape as you know it. Can you stay ahead of the curve?
- It revolves around breaking the norm. Most businesses prefer to do things in a particular manner because they've always been done that way. Providing a fresh approach to things could make you stand out.
- The faster, cheaper, and better approach works every time! If you have a business idea that is not entirely new to your target audience, focus on how you can make your service faster, cheaper, and better than the competition.
- Seek advice from industry leaders. Reach out to those who have been in your desired industry and experienced success.
A successful entrepreneur always has a strong sense of self-confidence and a healthy opinion of their skills and abilities. Their personality is assertive and strong. This is what makes them different from the rest.