We go to school to acquire a formal education so we may become experts in our chosen fields of study. This makes those who study hard enough, well grounded to take on a career after graduation, but still leaves almost all, unprepared for the business angle of the real world.
While formal education may be a great way to gain credibility before any employer can really say you’re good at what your resume claims, starting/running a business straight out of college with no deeply rooted entrepreneurial experience or essential business skills will leave you shaken up in the real world.
If you want to start a business right out of college but are not sure of how to get prepared, here are 5 important business skills you will never learn in school, but must be an innate part of you:
1). Leadership Skills:
Leaders are symbols. The people who follow them do so, because of the absolute trust they have in their ability to deliver on their promises, goals, and projections.
When asked if a person has leadership skills, everyone mostly rises up to proclaim how much of they leader they believe themselves to be, but fail to realise they are mostly very far from it.
The core foundation of leadership is sacrifice, and anyone who cannot give up on his or her own desires for the greater good of their followers or everyone around them, isn’t qualified to be one.
If you aim to be a successful entrepreneur backed by a smart, loyal, and strong team every time you call, you must learn to put their desires before yours.
Rather than caring less of what people think, care more about how your actions can affect their lives. If you constantly make people rally around you to seek advice, help you in whatever you get stuck in, or simply want to be close to you, then you may have core leadership skills that’d place you ready to take on the real world.
Leadership qualities are core business skills you must acquire if you’d eventually successfully make your team or even customers follow and defend your brand.
2). Networking Skills:
Your network is your net worth. Who you know, and that knows you, will determine how successful you can be in anything you set out to achieve.
Strong networking skills are important for anyone aiming to succeed as an entrepreneur. You need to know how to strike up a conversation with a total stranger, how to get people to believe in your ability to do what you claim, how to get a prospect to really want to get your business card, and how to make people always want to have you around.
Networking skills are at the core of successfully raising an investment, landing a new client, and even finding the smartest partners. You must know how to read people and speak their body language.
When you’ve mastered the art of successful or influential networking, you’d have mastered one of the most important business skills that will determine whether your business will succeed or fail.
3). Perseverance:
This is the single most important skill for any entrepreneur’s success. Perseverance means moving forward when the tides are against you. It means trying again when all other things have failed. It means never giving up even in the face of imminent disappointment. And it means you’d have a remarkable success story to tell when you eventually become successful.
If you lack perseverance even in the little things that you currently do, then you’re not cutout to be an entrepreneur.
Learn to sit it out, adjust your strategies, ask questions, try again, and keep at it, till you find a breaking point.
See How Successful People Recover From Mistakes
4). Marketing Skills:
Sales is crucial to the success of every business. If you can’t get customers to buy your products, then you have no real business running.
To succeed, you need to acquire a minimum amount of customers or clients that are willing to pay for your products or services recurrently.
If you have trouble convincing people to do anything you want, it may be a great idea to take on a marketing course, or hire a sales pro to work for you, so you can learn through them and get better at your selling skills overtime.
Without effective marketing, you’d run out of operating capital, and your business would eventually die out before it gets a chance to breathe.
5). Attention To Detail:
How you already notice the often overlooked behaviours, trends, and events could determine how much of a great entrepreneur (or not) you could turn out to be.
As an entrepreneur, you need to be able to pay a close insane attention to detail. You need to know what your customers love most about your products, what they hate, why some customers aren’t coming your way, why some are leaving, what is helping your competition, how government policies are affecting businesses, how the economy determines your next move, and what to do every step of the way.
These things usually require acute observation skills, which only the most successful entrepreneurs or visionaries easily spot.
If you’re going to be an entrepreneur everyone would admire and wonder how you attained your success, the ability to pay extra attention to detail is one of the most important business skills you must hone to perfection.
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