To start a business? Take an inventory of your business skills

Almost all of the business start-up checklists that aspiring entrepreneurs will read refer to “must-have” information on legal, money management, sales, marketing, and operations. In fact, success as an entrepreneur not only depends on your knowledge and effective execution of these fundamentals, but also requires a constant commitment to continue growing and acquiring knowledge in these areas. Fortunately, there are many resources available to small businesses in the form of professional services or public agencies available to help us increase our own skills in these areas at affordable prices. As we take care to get up to speed with these technical business skills to manage day-to-day operations, it doesn’t take us long to realize that these skills, while essential, may not be enough to get your business started. succeed.

What could be missing? Maybe it’s that other less-talked-about business start-up checklist that talks about the actual successful behaviors needed to run and grow your new business. Skills or traits like judgment, confidence, agility and creativity are some of the critical intangibles that are difficult to measure, almost impossible to cultivate, but critical to the success of a business start-up. It’s relatively easy for most of us to look at the numbers and know if cash flow is good or bad or look at a marketing plan and say whether it worked or not. On the other hand, however, it may be difficult for many of us to acknowledge that we have limited knowledge or weakness, especially if we fear that admission will force us to put aside our dreams of owning a business. The fact is that we can significantly improve our chances of success in new businesses if we take the time to take an inventory of our skill set and implement strategies to improve those skills that we can and seek help and support where we are struggling.

For most of us, much of this self-discovery will take place once your startup is underway. In other words, we will learn on the job. Our hope, of course, is that it happens early enough to avoid serious consequences. However, with a little introspection and an honest assessment of our preferences or behaviors, we can examine our own tendencies and take corrective action early on.

The following simple, though unscientific, assessment is one way of taking an inventory of our abilities in some of the required non-business technical areas. It is based on the well-accepted principle that has been used successfully in job interviews for years: that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior.

Create a spreadsheet with five columns and label them as follows:

Column 1 – Skill or Trait – List the following 20 traits that are generally considered skills for starting new businesses. Feel free to add others that you know are important.

I. Agility

ii. Confidence

iii. Courage

iv. Creativity

v. Decision

saw. Self discipline

vii. Good judgement

viii. Flexibility

ix. Great worker

X. Leadership

xi. Multitask effectively

xii. Networking Capability

xiii. Objectivity

xiv. Openness to new ideas

xv. Political cunning

xvi. Resilience

xvii. Self-initiator

xviii. Interpersonal skills

xix. Risk tolerance

xx. Visionary

Column 2 – Rating: On a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself on each of these business traits: “1” means you care about your strengths and “10” means you are confident that your skills are strong in this area.

Column 3 – Example: Identify the best example from your past that demonstrates your strength regarding the business trait or skill in question.

Column 4 – Strategy – Define an action plan to address your deficiencies in any business trait where your personal score is less than 6, especially if you consider it important to the start-up of your business.

Column 5 – Sensitivity – To help focus and prioritize your efforts, rank entrepreneurial skills and traits according to their relative importance to your business. For example, if you sell widgets over the Internet, interpersonal business skills, which are always important, may be less important than agility in keeping up with Internet marketing trends. On the other hand, if you have a daycare home, agility within very strict government regulations can be a bit more difficult, and therefore you may choose to focus on your networking skills to keep and win new clients.

Column 3 is possibly the most important. It forces us as entrepreneurs to not only say how good we are, but to identify specific examples to show how we have performed in the past. If you’ve been rated high (6 or higher) and you can’t identify great examples from your past to support that rating, you may need to reconsider your self-rated scores.

After you have completed the exercise yourself, ask someone you value opinion or potential business partners to fill in a similar table with their observations about you and others. Comparing the results should give you a good idea of ​​the skills you’ve mastered and those that are potentially weak areas that you might need to address to improve your or your team’s chances of success. Think of possible solutions and be open to the fact that they can come in many ways. One entrepreneur might choose to join business groups to share ideas, another might decide to create an advisory board. No path will fit all or all business models.

Facing our fears head-on will significantly improve our chances of success in starting a business. The last thing we want as our businesses begin to grow is to find out that our skill bank is nearing depletion and that taking this personal inventory is way behind schedule. Start taking stock of your entrepreneurial skills today!