You need EIGHT of these to be an Entrepreneur!
Communication
Do you have the ability to communicate in such a way that is not overcomplicated? Can you communicate ideas effectively and clearly?
Sales
You need have the ability to sell and/or you need to HIRE people who do. You need to be able to pitch to potential partners, investors, future employees.
Leadership
This is the ability to get GOOD people to follow you. We’re not talking about friends and family here. Great leadership attracts great people to your company. Attracting customers, scaling a business, etc. These ALL require good leadership.
Strategic Planning
This is the ability to reverse engineer and break a plan down into steps. It’s also knowing how to delegate responsibilities within this plan and execute it well.
Conflict Resolution
This is a constant part of business, whether it’s between myself and an employee or partner, between two employees, with a customer, etc.
Money Management
If you have a hard time managing your personal finances you’ll generally have a hard time managing your company finances. If you have bad debt personally you’ll likely accrue bad debt for your company. This is a skill you MUST have.
Negotiating
This goes along with sales and communication and leadership but I perform this quite a bit when it comes to deals. I’m constantly negotiating deals to get win-wins.
Resilience
You gotta have some ‘get back up’ in your. You’re going to take a punch that you’re going to have to get back up from. You can get discouraged sure, but only for a little bit.
Delegating
This is knowing what you do better than everyone else and getting everything else (to the extent possible) off of your plate. I have things every day that I could do, but I’ll go to my assistant first and give some of it away. Bigger items go to my partners.
Focus
Your ability to focus is paramount. When you want to achieve something, you don’t get distracted.
Every morning I write down one paragraph about what I’m focusing on in my life right now. Then I list three goals for the year and a five year objective.
