What would you say are the top three skills needed to become a successful entrepreneur?
You need to be innovative, you need to be enthusiastic, and you need to be fired up,
ALL the time. You need to hit the ground running every day. So energy is extremely important
for an entrepreneur.
I think you need a million skills and you
need to have a good balance with that but if I do need to say the top three, I would
say you need to be great at sales. Selling your product, selling your business, selling
yourself, selling your company, selling everything. Obviously, you can outsource it but in my
experience, I always say the greatest entrepreneurs are the best sales people. Secondly, I think
you need to be super positive, the economy is gonna crash down, you're gonna lose clients
and if you're a pessimist and you're always gonna see the negative side, you will
never survive in this world. So I think you need to be optimist times a thousand. And
lastly, I do think you need to be great with people. We sometimes see about the entrepreneurs
who are terrible with people, but I think they get it right in other ways but, you're gonna
need to convince clients, staff to work with you, you're gonna need to build a great team
and people who are not great with people very seldom get that right.
So you have to have people skills. VERY important. People don't do business with ass-holes. So,
chances of you getting return clients is because you are good with people, you understand people.
And also don't be arrogant, so your people skills have to be really on point if you suck
at that, get somebody, get a, you know one of those life coaches to teach you how to deal with people,
because those are valuable skills that you have to have. And then also the numbers,
numbers are very very important, understanding the numbers in your business because that's
how you are able to get a sense of where are we financially and where should we be if we
want to grow. Having a grasp on your numbers is very very important. A lot of business
schools can actually help you in that. And then also I think one skill that you should
have is having a thick skin. Knowing that sometimes it's not about you and then sometimes
you know, you have to be able to push back, you have to be able to assert yourself. And
it's something that is built over time, it doesn't just happen, but you need to know
that you have to have thick skin because it's sometimes not about you.
Oh no I think there's a million skills and every entrepreneur I know is good at many, many
different things. I think the idea is to know what skills you have and make sure that you
correct for the other ones. So if you are a salesperson, make sure you correct for somebody
who is very operational. If you're a , if you have operational-sales, then maybe get
somebody who's got a mindset for financial numbers and things like this. You need to cover all
of those things. You need to make sure that, you know, there's somebody that can sell, there's somebody
who understands the numbers and what you need to do to grow, you need to know there's somebody
who can run the business. They may all be your skills, but it's okay if they're not.
Everything is purchasable.
Well, I'm not sure if they're skills or not
but you have to kind of be optimistic, you have to be able to work hard, and you have
to, you know, not give up. You know, I'm not sure if I've ever been very good at resilience
etc, I just didn't have options, so I never gave up, because I couldn't get a real job.
But it's good to have an attitude of "Don't give up".