Top Tips for Successful Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneur – a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.
Brad Sugars (ActionCOACH Founder) definition of an entrepreneur:
Someone who takes an idea and turns it into a profitable enterprise that works without them.
Too often now, we think entrepreneurship or owning a business is about being busy. The key for a business owner is to make sure the company is busy, but not themselves. This gives time for thinking, preparing and planning.
Top 10 traits of a successful entrepreneur:
1. Communication
Transferring information from one place, person or group to another.
You’ve got to be excellent at both listening and speaking. Active listening is the ability to listen with the desire to understand, not listening with the desire to respond.
2. Sales
A transaction between two or more parties.
You need to be able to sell yourself and your business. You need to be capable of selling the concept of working for your company, to make people want to work for you. You need to be able to sell to customers, so that they will buy from you.
Sales is the ability to professionally help people to buy.
3. Marketing
Activities to promote the buying or selling of a product or service.
To be a great marketer remember that sales is ‘going to the market’ and marketing is about making the ‘market come to you’. Sales is about one sale at a time whereas marketing is about getting 100 sales at a time.
Get good at getting the market to come to you, in this day and age that includes online and social media.
Marketing is slowly dying and testimonials/ratings are winning the war, so remember the importance of your online presence.
4. Recruitment
The process by which a business seeks to hire the right person for a vacancy.
Hire great people and mentor them. You can’t succeed without good team members. Always be on the hunt for great people, always be looking for inspiring people and hire the best of the best. Most of the great people will already have a job, you want to find someone who wants to be even more successful and with a desire to grow.
Get good at marketing so you can get good at recruiting.
5. Management
The act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives, using available resources efficiently and effectively.
Management needs to be a day to day skill. It’s about creating competent, productive people. As a manager you need to measure their results. You may need to micro manage certain peoples skills. You should want to build your people up.
6. Leadership
The art of motivating people to act towards achieving a common goal.
Leadership is about inspiring people and making sure they love their jobs. Leadership is passion with direction. You want to have passionate and focused team members. If you have passionate, focused people within your business you know you are doing well at leadership. Leaders need to give direction, set the goals and know where you are going as a team and, or, business.
Its hard to kick a goal, if you don’t know where they are.
7. Money
A current medium of exchange that is accepted as payment for goods, services and debts.
You need to know how to manage money. You need to be good at looking after and investing it. Investing money back into your company and staff is key. You need to be aware of how much you have, where it is, where it’s going, what you’re owed and what you owe.
The faster your business grows the more intelligent you need to be with money. Cash flow is a killer for many businesses.
8. Relationships
The way in which two or more people (or things) are connected, or the state of being connected.
If you want to be a great entrepreneur, you need to build a long term business and a long term business succeeds through great relationships. This includes the relationships with team members, suppliers and customers.
Study relationships, people, human nature, behaviours and communicational styles.
9. Planning
The process of defining goals for future direction and determining the resources required to achieve said goals.
In the beginning of business it doesn’t always seem so important to plan because everything is usually in your mind. As the business grows, planning becomes more and more important and usually vital. Planning is the key skill, you need to plan what you do daily, monthly, quarterly and annually. Set goals, write lists and prioritise.
The bigger the business, the bigger the planning needs to be and therefore more time needs to be invested into the planning. You should be able to utilise your team for this, especially when brainstorming.
10. Learning
The acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, experience or being taught.
Learning is THE key skill of an entrepreneur. If you read up about any of the great entrepreneurs or watch any interviews, one thing you will note, and that they always advise, is to always be learning and reading.
So keep growing!
Start your ActionCOACH journey today, with a gifted coaching session – Gifted Business Coaching
