The Skills You Need to Be a Successful Entrepreneur

If you want to get wealthy, you need to have equity.

You need to own a piece of a business or have ownership in some type of revenue generating asset. It sounds simple enough, but the reason you might be struggling to build your business is because you don't realize that entrepreneurship is a skill.

Let's imagine you are a brilliant carpenter. Your carpentry skills aren't going to help you build a carpentry business. You need to develop other skillsets to help you use your carpentry skills to make money.

In this article, I will go over the most valuable skills you need to develop to become a good entrepreneur.

Let's get started.

Great writing is a super power

There is no skill more valuable than great writing.

Writing is the skill that is ubiquitous and overlaps all the other skills. For instance, with writing you can sell, organize, persuade, and communicate.

Most of all, the reason writing is so impactful in entrepreneurship is because writing forces you to think.

It's impossible to be a writer unless you're willing to look directly at a problem and work out solutions to those problems. Writing takes courage, because in order to solve a problem you need to be willing to address the problem head on.

Most people find ways to avoid problems. Writing forces you to look directly at the problem and work your way through a solution.

Any piece of writing is an exercise is thinking, learning, and articulating your stance or argument on a subject.

You can always correlate great writers with great thinkers. Therefore, you can correlate great writing with competence.

And above all, to succeed in business, entrepreneurship and life, you need competence.

Mastering the art of persuasion

I used to think that becoming a better salesperson meant talking people into doing things.

But that's not right.

Persuasion is about finding people who already need a solution to a problem, and showing them why the solution you present is the best way for them to solve their problem.

Let's imagine you want to sell your personal training services, it doesn't make a lot of sense to pitch your services to someone who is already in great shape.

The first step of persuasion is alignment. Once you found a way to isolate prospects who are in need of the solution you offer, then the art of persuasion becomes much more relevant.

To that extent, persuasion is absolutely a skill that can be learned, practiced and developed. Other than writing, there is no skill more valuable than persuasion, and in many instances, persuasion can actually generate much more direct revenue than writing.

Persuasion in entrepreneurship means learning how to systematically guide someone through a conversation which continuously highlights all the benefits of your product or service while simultaneously addressing potential rebuttals over price and value.

Persuasion is not the same as debate or negotiation. Although both debate and negotiation are extremally valuable skills within their own right, they won't help you generate revenue in the same way persuasion will.

Learning to sell will set you up for life and will open you up to an entire new world of possibilities.

Management wins wars

We love to hear about the visionaries who had an idea and believed in something so much they simply willed their vision it into existence.

But those examples are anomalies. Most of the time, visionaries fade into nothingness. You never actually hear about them because ideas don't build businesses.

Management does.

Effective management is the reason why some businesses are able to succeed while others deteriorate. Management most acutely applies to ...

• managing resources

• time allocation

• contracts and paperwork

• communication

• accuracy of data

Management is the ability to organize resources and point them in the right direction. It's entirely possible for you to build a wildly profitable business off the back of great management.

Great managers don't need to be great sales people, but they know how to get great sales people on their team and leverage their skills. The same is true for Most importantly, management leads to the product and the service being well received by customers. Happy customers means better business.

I'll give you an example.

In my company, the management of clients is a very difficult task. Every client needs different work done and different strategies executed on. It's customized work. With 25 clients, the management is very challenging.

However, effective management facilities us completing the work on time and this leads is us generating amazing results for our clients. Subsequently, this leads to referral business.

You can be a great entrepreneur by being a great manager. You will need to fill in some positions that help you grow, but it's a valuable skill nonetheless.

Code and software development

Thomas Edison generated massive amounts of wealth for himself by being an amazing inventor.

In the modern age, coders, developers, computer science professional's and software developers are the new inventors. They are the ones creating the tools that make our lives easier.

No matter what, a great product always has a punchers chance of becoming a successful business.

With that said, it's unlikely that a great product on its own can cut through the noise and generates revenue without sales and marketing. However, understanding code and being able to write different programming languages gives you ability to create products that can change the world.

There's absolutely no doubt that you can build a multi million dollar business off the back of code writing, software development and computer science.

But in most cases, great builders need great sales people to help them grow.

Content creation and the new type of entrepeneur

There is a new kind of entrepreneur. We call them "creators."

For the first time, you have the opportunity to build a business by simply creating content and monetizing off of the content itself.

Granted, there has always been a place in the world for creators, but in the past, that usually meant selling books at scale or selling artwork for high dollar amounts of creating movies for the masses.

Now, you can create content and get paid for the content itself.

There are so many ways to do this. You can start a paid newsletter or create a large social media following and leverage the attention to generate revenue.

The point is that the skill of content creation is a legitimate form of entrepreneurship, and one you should take seriously.

Graphic designers, writers, video editors, meme lords and everyone in-between, there is now a place in the creator economy for you.

Putting it all together

I want to finish this article with a point about execution.

All of these skills will be valuable to you and I highly encourage you to learn a skill and dedicate yourself to improving it.

But in my experience, many of you have the skills needed, you simply lack the ability to execute.

Execution is habitual. People aren't good at executing, people make a habit of execution. The skills only matter if you put them to use and if you do so in a way that will move the needle forward.

So always remember, the skills are great, but it's better to be a mediocre writer that publishes your work than an amazing writer who hides in the background.

Get out there and get after it!