With high motivation and drive to pursue your business idea, you are well and truly on the right track to starting your new business. However, without developing essential business skills, your thirst to immediately initiate your business may lead you closer to failing then succeeding. Maintaining and improving on key proficiencies will allow you to grow your business at a faster rate, as well as allowing its viability and sustainability. Mere passion is not nearly enough to maintain a competitive edge ahead of rivals within your industry, especially in an increasingly aggressive competitive landscape. Here are 7 integral skills that you should develop prior to starting a business.
- Financial
An integral skill that you will need to develop is understanding the key measures of profitability and sales growth. Ensure to create a business plan prior to the start of your business. Showing your positive annual forecasts and feasibility of your business will ease your ability to attain business loans. Formulating financial statements and accounting budgets will also allow you to evaluate profit achievements and check whether you are meeting your set targets and objectives. By evaluating the financial data, where it be annually, monthly or even daily, you will be able to properly budget and invest in areas that are required for you to boost your business? growth. Your financial reports will stand as proof to partners and stakeholders that your business is increasing in profit and is a sustainable business to invest in and partner with.
- Employee wellness
As a manager in your organization, it is important that you have a solid understanding on how to effectively manage your employees. You must ensure that you are able to maintain employee satisfaction to reduce turnover rates, absenteeism and increase productivity in the short and long term. This can be achieved by focusing on promoting a healthy work environment for your employees to thrive in. Encourage health practices through group sport and physical fitness sessions that will also be able to foster teamwork and collaborative work effort. Promote healthy eating by providing healthy food options such as installing a healthy convenience store or Healthy Vending Machine within your work office. It is highly integral to encourage a supportive social environment by promoting inclusivity and diversity and stressing the negative impacts of workplace bullying and degrading work environments.
- Technical knowledge
Being tech savvy is a fundamental skill to attain prior to starting your business. You will require technical skills to record financial and inventory data into software, programs, and spreadsheets to manage your business spending. It is integral to understand the formatting of website development programs to attain a greater reach to consumers outside of your geographical office location as well as to allow for e-commerce consumers. Through high proficiencies in social media, you will be able to reach out to your consumer base through various marketing platforms and better adapt to changing digital marketing trends. By taking advantage of emerging technological trends and opportunities that arise, you can capitalize the technology to improve your business? operational processes, marketing and even core product or service. Through your technological knowledge, analyze what areas of your business are driving business growth and which target market is your business attracting by measuring digital marketing metrics.
- Leadership
Influencing and empowering your employees is a quality that is essential to starting up your own business. Leadership is a quality that encourages innovation and creativity from employees that can be used for the business. Effective leadership also improves employee morale which will increase the overall productivity of the business. Develop a clear company vision, set goals and develop a pathway for your employees to be inspired to follow. Become a guide, mentor and role model to align your employee?s passion and motivations to your own.
- Organisational/management
One of the most integral skills to develop prior to establishing a business is organizational skills. To effectively schedule, manage and be time-efficient, a high use of organizational skills is required. Organisation is needed for planning what goals should be pursued and which objectives should be met. This also accounts for tactical level plans such as the attendance of meetings and coordinating with suppliers and other stakeholders. Organisation is essential when involving the scheduling of tasks for your employees, focusing to avoid under or overworking your staff.
- Communication
Ensure you are continuously communicating the organizational goals to your staff and stakeholders in a clear way. Allow for the opportunity for feedback and ideas, enabling a 2-way flow of communication to foster discussion and creativity in problem-solving. Maintain a positive and supportive interaction with stakeholders and well as develop networking skills for external connections. Developing high communication skills will enable you to confidently pitch ideas to partners, stakeholders and the public to showcase the passion of your business and knowledge on is the purpose, aiming to confidently show progression in your business. With effective communication, you will be able to cultivate loyal employees and capitalize on their innovative ideas and charm customers and suppliers to remain with the brand.
- Learning and development
A skill that is often neglected but is highly critical for rapid business growth ongoing learning and development. Seeking to improve and educate your skills and knowledge on your product will assist you to develop a better product or efficient business processes. Embrace a mentality to strive for improvement and not be complacent with how your business is currently. Always be willing to innovate and explore new opportunities and trends within your industry.
No matter the purpose of your business, aiming for profitability will only be achieved through your initial drive and development of skills to boost your business growth. Which key skills do you think are essential to developing, prior to starting a business?
