10 Ways to Develop Your Entrepreneurial Skills

Are entrepreneurs born or nurtured? There are many people that you come across who seem to be born for this life of innovation, risk, success, failure and high-energy and high-octane living. Sometimes you meet people who probably never thought they were entrepreneurial until later on in life. Whichever of these categories you feel you’re in, these tips can help you develop the skills you need to succeed at the entrepreneurial life.

1. What is it that impresses you?

In an organizational context, what lights you up when you see something impressive? It might be a new product and how it functions. It might be the way that a company has set up its service that marks it out from others. But the root of this is your curiosity and your interest in understanding how things work.

2. Think harder about why something impresses you

The likelihood is it’s about the uniqueness of propositions and your ability to see a gap in the market where nobody seems to have thought about placing a product or a service.

3. Your ability to look at how something could be different

This is a skill you want to develop. You want to be able to see or analyse how to do something new. Successful entrepreneurs are those who slot their product or service into a space where nobody else has thought to tread before. Entrepreneurism by definition is an idea that comes into a new space. Whether it works or not is a separate issue.

4.  Feed your curiosity

For different people this occurs in different ways. For extroverts, who get energy from other people and from things, they’re going to be out and about being energised by their connections’ stories and activities. The more introverted will feed their curiosity by thinking, reading and being in their own head. Maybe they’re in the laboratory or the library or the museum or the study.

5.  Market attractions

Where do you actually enjoy being? It might be you have a fascination with the supply chain and logistics and you want to understand more about how distribution companies or good airports operate. If you are more of a technical persuasion, you may be interested in the software that helps individuals with accessibility issues or companies that have to handle high levels of flow. Getting plugged into different markets that attract you helps develop your entrepreneurial eye.

6.  Understand customer value

Can you put yourself into the position of a customer and understand what it is they want and, critically, what it is they will pay for and what it is they will pay? Market testing of price-to-value will help you understand the market. Go to the market and research it to understand more about what's going on.

7.  Network and connections

Your best method of finding out stuff is through people that you know or people that you know introducing you to people that you want or need to know. Never underestimate the power of your connections and their ability to leverage you into interesting opportunities. Entrepreneurs who stay connected in this way feed their entrepreneurial skills and development.

8.  Choose who you work with

As an entrepreneur it is critical that you find the right people. Your entrepreneurism provides huge strengths in certain areas and you need to identify what other kind of strengths you need around you. Similarly with people you work with externally, whether they be international lawyers or banks or accountants, you must have the right professional relationships to feed you excellent advice.

9.  Know when to fold ‘em

Entrepreneurs have a natural gift for knowing where value is and knowing when to take equity over a cash payment, for example. They know there is an endgame, like a potential change of control in three, five or 10 years’ time. They are able to initiate, at the point of start up, a plan that will enable them to stay until they know when to leave.

10.  Commercial business know-how

Entrepreneurs are not naturally the type of people who are going to want a long list of credentials that prove someone’s ability to do something, such as degrees and diplomas. They’re much more practical, hands-on learning types and want to roll their sleeves up, get dirty and prove stuff. Entrepreneurs do fail and it’s failures that they learn from. Where they want to be learning is from what has worked commercially.