Becoming An Entrepreneur: 5 Life Skills You Need To Succeed
90% Of Startups Fail
These days everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. If you clicked on this, it’s likely you do too.
It’s understandable that people want to work for themselves. There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that every hour you put in is going to benefit yourself, and not your employer.
Then there’s the money…
The amount of money you can make as an entrepreneur is also often larger than in other fields. Everyone believes they can make the same 200 billion Elon has!
But it’s not all fun and games!
Social media has been glamorizing entrepreneurship, making it look easy, and highly likely that you will succeed if you just take the risk.
While you do need to take risks to achieve success in entrepreneurship, it is not easy and oftentimes, the risks don’t pay off.
Social media has been misleading many.
I am not saying you shouldn’t take the leap,
but you should be aware of the risk you are taking, and be ready for when you do take that risk. That’s why I wrote this.
To help you, warn you, and give whatever advice I’m able to give you based on all the failures, and a couple of successes I have had.
Here are the most important skills to work on if you want to be a successful entrepreneur:
(in my opinion of course)
1. Discipline.
You are going to need to be consistent in the amount of work and time you put into what you choose to do. Success won’t come in a day, and often, it won’t come in a year either.
90% of startups fail!
Many youtube videos will tell you “do this and you will see these results”. While that may be true in some circumstances, 99% of the time, it just isn’t the case.
You have to be consistent with your work and effort. Keep trying new ways to see results and then double down when you see something working.
That’s why it requires discipline because you will fail along the way, but you will need to keep going.
It’s not easy to fail, especially the first few times, and you will fail, it’s inevitable.
What you require is the discipline to keep going, and to adjust when you do fail.
2. Marketing
People are going to need to hear about what you’re selling if you are to succeed as an entrepreneur. That means working on your marketing skills.
Definition: the activity or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
There are many forms of marketing to learn. What you need to learn is going to depend on your business.
Chances are your business will require some form of social media marketing. From there, to successfully sell on social media, you will need to learn copywriting skills.
I want to quickly suggest a course for copywriting: CopyThat
It’s a simple 10-day course to help you get better at writing your sales scripts. This will be very important and helpful for your entire business.
Currently, the best form of social media marketing (in my opinion) is on the Meta platforms. The platform’s intelligence, daily active users, and overall capabilities are hard to match.
Luckily for you, there are a ton of courses that teach this, even directly through Meta.
You can either go through the Meta website or other websites like Udemy.
Aside from Meta, there are numerous other good places to advertise. Depending on what you’re advertising, there will be advantages.
Here are some options:
Twitter: Fairly low cost right now as advertisers left the platform. Increasing daily active users since Elon’s take over. Very good to get traffic to your website. It’s not perfect yet, but worth advertising on it.
Pinterest: Good if you are selling a product. The platform is mainly female users so advertise accordingly. It lets you display the product easily, and the cost to get traffic is quite good as well.
Snapchat: Incredibly good for getting website traffic and brand visibility. The users are younger on the platform, but not that much younger.
Google: They are good for pretty much everything but typically require a high budget to see successful campaigns. Definitely recommend it if you are selling a service, or need website traffic. If you have a low budget and are selling a product, you can avoid and stick with Meta in my opinion.
TikTok: The advertising here isn’t as targeted as some of the other options. However, you would be a fool not to get on this now. Organic traffic is unparalleled. Influencer marketing is also great on TikTok.
Regardless of where you choose to market digitally, it will take practice. Trial and error and learning from others’ failures are how you will adjust your ads most effectively.
Also, always focus on growing organically as well and gathering emails.
Email marketing is the only way to hold your contacts under your control without any risk of losing them. If for example your Instagram got taken away and your whole business was based there, it would be devastating.
3. Sales
Everyone has to be a salesman. Like it or not, it’s true.
You’re selling something, that’s why you are getting paid, so learn how to sell.
Don’t think of sales like a sleazy salesman at a car dealership.
If you have to trick someone into buying, then whatever you are selling is not helpful, and your business won’t work in the long run anyways.
A great product or service sells itself because it helps the person, and they need it.
Your job in sales is to make them realize why they need it, why it’ll help them.
Sometimes people don’t see that right off the bat and that’s where you come in. Your job is to ultimately help them make the right decision.
Make a good product and your job will be much easier.
So work on your sales skills, and learn how to communicate effectively and confidently.
4. Time Management
You’re going to be busy, there’s no way around that (at first).
Building a business is not easy and it requires time. You will need to become very good at managing your time.
You need to create a good routine where you are able to get everything done. You need to prioritize what is most important. You will need to be organized.
Once you learn the aspects of your business you will then be able to delegate some of your tasks to others to save your time for more important things.
Until then, work on your time management as much as possible.
On how to delegate and better organize your tasks, I recommend reading “4 Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss.
5. Networking
You would be surprised how much you can get just by asking.
On top of that, there’s no better source of information than someone with experience doing exactly what you are trying to accomplish.
That’s why it’s so important to network.
You need to figure out where people in your industry (and related industries) go to hang out, what they like doing and where they network themselves. Find your way in, connect and befriend them.
Chances are if they’re in your industry, you’ll both be passionate about similar things. It’ll be easy to get along and you’ll likely make great friends.
From there, when you have questions or need people to collaborate with, your network will be there.
This could be the most valuable skill to have on this list.
A great network will make your process easier and quicker.
Conclusion
There’s no secret on how to be a successful entrepreneur.
The important thing is that you are passionate about what you are doing. That way you will not mind, and even enjoy, putting ridiculous hours into your work. That’s what will be necessary, and that’s what will set you apart.
These skills will help you make the process easier, quicker and more effective.
They’ll also help you transition into other industries when you choose, and worst case, if you decide to close your business, they will help you excel in your new workplace.
Anything to add? Comment below.
Until next time,
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