A Guide to Improving Your Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is becoming an increasingly popular career choice for motivated, creative individuals that want to work for themselves and make their own way in life. Being an entrepreneur is defined by the personal taking on of risk in business, for example, investing money or time in a venture that may not pan out the way you’d want. Entrepreneurship is an area with high risk, but also high reward when the risk pays off. You should want to maximize the chance of reward and minimize the chance of risk, and one way you can do that is by improving your skills as an entrepreneur.
Jack of All Trades
Entrepreneurs, especially sole entrepreneurs, have to run multiple parts of their business. Areas like sales, marketing and finance will need to be attended to, and this requires a lot of time andeffort. To improve your rate of success as an entrepreneur, you should be familiar with the literature surrounding each area that you handle. This will take a lot of time, but all you need is an acquaintance with the fundamentals of each facet that you deal with. This is to avoid mistakes that may have catastrophic results (e.g., not bookkeeping), and that could be avoided with an awareness of the consequences of common mistakes. This may prove to be too much for one person to handle, so consider assembling a team. If you’re worried about paying team-members but think your idea is valuable, you should consider a ‘sweat for equity’ program, where members are paid in equity and hence help create their own compensation. Some skills are highly recommended for you to personally develop, as they interact with all elements of a business. These include interpersonal reactions and negotiation skills, which are handy for all team members. Negotiation skills training can help each member of your team get good deals and interact with people in ways that benefit your whole company.
Planning and Strategy
Think of your entrepreneurial venture as a game of chess. There are countless moves you can make, and many responses to those moves, but they will be limited by the way business operates (including the limitations provided by laws, regulations and company missions). Being able to anticipate competitors moves and reactions to your business decisions is vital when engaging in any long or short term business venture. Executing plans can be as hard as or harder than creating them, and planning needs to be realistic and has a good awareness of your assets, liabilities, and flaws.
Communication
Communicating with yourself is a crucial element of analyzingthe flaws of yourself and your company, which is needed for creating the best strategies. Communicating with your team is essential to its function, and team members need to be able to communicate with each other. This is not limited to delivering progress and potential insight, but emotional communication should be considered as well. Being able to communicate your emotions to your customers is crucial in sales (passion and excitement are transferable) and in human resources as well.
The most important part of being an entrepreneur is keeping an open mind and learning throughout your venture. Every mistake you make can be incredibly valuable as a preventative lesson. If you are in doubts about your entrepreneurial ability, you should learn by reading case studies (autobiographies by famous entrepreneurs) and thorough, specialized guides in areas that you’re unsure about.
