Analyse Your Skills before Diving Into the Business Sector

By | August 19, 2019

Turning a passion into a successful business is not an easy task. Evolving a startup business into a thriving enterprise needs more than desire, it needs a set of skills to overcome obstacles, manage finances, recruit workforce and manage things with resilience. 70% of the startups fail because their entrepreneurs are unable to transform their dream passion into a practical skill set. Hence, to succeed in a business, you need more than hard work, a proficient set of business skills.

Being an entrepreneur needs you to be the jack of all trades. You can always learn the skill set you need or to delegate others. You can also improve over time and hire professionals in specific departments. Another option is the engagement of professional business advisors to help grow your business skills.

Below is the list of 11 essential soft skills that you should analyse before diving into the business sector; they will help you to improve and succeed in your industry.

1. Delegation

Delegation is the art of assigning responsibilities to your team for completing a task, work or project. Ideally, you are in a position where you can take up your employees to carry out their assign routine activities for their delegated positions. Smart delegation is about achieving the necessary balance between effective control, efficient communication and letting people do their task on time. The ultimate way out is to know how to make your employees work instead of your business working for you.

2. Time management

This is an extremely important skill to master as other skills are deeply dependent on it. Time management not only helps you out in your professional life but in your personal routine as well. It will help you to get disciplined and organised. You can be more efficient and productive in this way. Learning and practising punctuality and time management will empower you to achieve your goals in a wisely and timely manner. The key is to manage things by focusing on timelines and setting priorities based upon the value you want to deliver for your business.

3. Communication

Communication skills are often taken for granted. Most people think they have excellent communication skills; however, the fact is everyone needs improvement into their communication styles. Also, you need to adopt different communication styles while communicating with different people at different levels with right impact and intent.

To be an effective business communicator, you need to know about personality styles well so that you can tackle them accordingly. Excellent communication skills also help you to hire the right person for a specific job. Furthermore, communication skills benefit you when you are pitching your expectations, problems, concerns and details of your business clearly, to potential stakeholders. You just need to be passionate about your vision and objectives to convey them into a transparent image in front of them.

4. Negotiation

We all negotiate at every level of our daily routine informally without being aware of it. However, formal negotiation is a skill that a professional person can learn through practice and experience. Professionals who negotiate frequently know how to deal with it formally and informally because they have acquired the skills through training and learning.

Experience professionals know how to lead your conversation to a win-win situation for all parties. They know what to say, how to say when to say, and where to say. The art of making concessions is what they keep in mind to obtain a favourable outcome beneficial for them as well as the other one.

5. Strategic planning

A business without a strategy is having fire without oxygen; it won’t survive for long. Strategic planning is an essential and critical aspect of any business because it leads to the preparation of the processes that define your company’s directions. It enables you to allocate useful resources of both people and capital. You can plan a three, five and ten years framework of your company’s future performance, your goal, expectation, and planning to achieve them. Depending on your mission and vision, it will help you to audit your performance and take timely measures to improve your decision making.

6. Team building

In the world of entrepreneurship, team building skills is your point of differentiation. Teamwork skills are most favourite skills of every industry nowadays. People working in teams are more prone to generate productive results, better solutions, and unique ideas when compared to those who work individually and independently. If you know the art of how to build and manage teams of professionals depending upon their personality and skills, you can take your business to the next level of employee satisfaction and delivering excellence.

7. Leadership

Leadership is the ability to motivate people to work selflessly for a common goal. In the past decades, it was believed that leadership could only be inherited, but history has proven that it can be acquired to create history.

With leadership skills, you can get the capabilities to motivate teams, mobilise their tasks, and take charge to lead them to get the things done. It serves as a pivotal element to forge a long term relationship with employees, investors, prospects and suppliers of your business.

8. Analytics

As we know that with the advancement in technologies, the world is becoming more prone to the complexity of digital analysis. Analytical skills are critical to have to depend upon the industry you are dealing in. With the increase in technological advancements, the need for analytical thinking skills is also increasing exponentially. You can assess the current state of your business and determine the future needs by suggesting the ways to bridge the gap between today and tomorrow of your enterprise.

9. Sales & Marketing

If you know how to craft an appealing pitch to target the right audiences, you can definitely generate new leads for your business, and you can convert them into profitable revenues. This is called the art of sales and marketing. A good salesperson is a good marketer because he/she knows how to establish successful policies from advertising to pricing and from targeting to selling techniques that benefit for the growth of your business. You can also analyse the market size, industry trends, and keep an eye on your competition to build an efficient sales and marketing strategy.

10. Management

Management skills involve the purpose of coordinating and controlling the direction of activities to accomplish a goal. You can develop a management system that is workable enough to manage daily operations, comply with feedbacks, nurture employees, satisfy stakeholders and support the growth of your business.

11. Financial Management

Financial management is an integral part to successfully and profitably run an organisation. You can keep a record of your expenditures and profits to plan an inevitable income. This will help you to predict expenses and reduce the risk of investments.

Financial management is the utmost statement to identify the elements for profitability; hence if you want to interpret your financial statements correctly, you need to get good in numbers.

Get yourself ready!

Businesses run on multiple skill sets and a blend of knowledge and experience. They combine to convert startups into reputed enterprises. A will to learn and improve can help any entrepreneur to succeed and make dreams come true. The only need is to analyse and acknowledge the gaps critically.