Entrepreneurial Skills

By Jack Krupansky

If I am really going to get serious about being an entrepreneur again, there are a number of skills and skill areas that I must improve:

• Sales and salesmanship - at least starting with a more positive attitude
• Communications in general and interpersonal communications in particular
• Empathy for whoever I am dealing with as well as customers
• Negotiation - when to push harder, when to back off and give a little, and when to walk away
• Ambition - how badly do I want something, is it achievable, is it worth the costs, how to manage it
• Patience, persistence, and pacing - going the distance but not off into the weeds
• Demographics - deep understanding
• Popular culture - deep understanding
• Buzz - how to get it, promote it, leverage it, how to do something with it, how to manage it, how to keep it alive
• Passion - understanding its role, but like fire mishandling can lead to either an incendiary disaster or dead lack of activity
• Trends - which ones matter, how to measure, what to watch
• Hits and blockbusters - do they matter for a given business, how they matter, how to get them, and how to manage them
• Appearance, perception, and image - understanding their importance, cultivating them, managing them, exploiting them, evolving them as the world evolves
• Reputation - what factors are controlling it, what forms of influence do you have, responding to weaknesses, responding to attacks
• Public speaking ... ugh!
• Graphics design - their role, achieving competence and credibility, measuring value
• Brand - conceptualizing, creating, cultivating, managing, and evolving
• Value proposition - getting the elements right and then getting the formulation right, how it manifests itself in every aspect of the business, products, services, and reputation
• Generosity - role in making a business a valuable part of society as a side effect of delivering great business results and how that perpetuates a "virtuous cycle"
• Morale - how to build it, maintain it, and grow it
• Team building - not all interesting ventures can be accomplished by a lone entrepreneur
• Community - customers and partners can provide a foundation for growth of your venture far beyond the financial value of business transactions
• Inspiration - how to help people feel that they are part of something special, an opportunity to be a part of something much more satisfying than their financial compensation and work environment
• Inspiring faith and trust - the ability to get people to accept your vision and apprach because they really believe in you rather than strictly because you sway them with detailed logic
• Vision - beyond simply the product or service ideas at the heart of the business, an entrepreneur needs to supply the aspiration for the business, in "big" terms, what the business is really trying to achieve
• Creativity - the ability to handle the unexpected and even thrive when operating in uncharted territory
• Energy, reserve energy - just when you think you have no energy left to give to your venture, you need to have the ability to find more more energy than you thought you had
• Balancing long and short term - some people are good at focusing on the long term and some are good at focusing on the short term, but really good entrepreneurs figure out how to balance both
• Decision making - discarding cherished options and pursuing risky options can be devilishly difficult for many people to do
• Delegation - figuring out what responsibilities to retain and wish to offload to others can be painful as well as uncertain
• Pricing - putting a financial value on your products and services, especially if they are new and innovative or your cost structure is non-traditional, or especially if you lack the confidence to ask for more money
• Confidence - even if you have the right answer or product or service, lack of confidence destroys its value
• Self-motivation - not needing to look to others for your motivational energy or inner drive
• Leadership - the ability to set out on a path and get others to follow along with you because they find your vision and approach compelling
• Building value - beyond the value of your core innovation, how to layer additional product features and services and package them in a way to maximize total value
• Focus - pushing aside all manner of good and interesting ideas and approaches in favor or a core set of ideas and approaches that will lead to rapid success in your chosen market
• Cherry-picking - no person or business can do it all, but the ability to sort through the many options and select those options that will really matter is a critical skill
• Flexibility - ability to change and discard what may be intensely cherished as change is warranted for maximizing success of the business
• Partners - always looking for partners to leverage your resources into a larger business success than
• When to walk away - persistence is a crucial skill, but sometimes it really is best to cut your losses and move on to greener pastures
• In touch with customer needs - beyond basic market research and technical requirements, what is it that the customers in your market segment really need to feel that your products and services are worth paying for, as well as your intuitive sense for changing needs without the need for market surveys
• Peripheral vision - ability to avoid being blindsided by new competitors, new technologies, and other emerging changes in your business environment
• Improvisation - even the best of plans can go astray, as well as the emergence of unexpected opportunities that demand a response faster than normal planning would permit
• Mentoring and coaching - sometimes you or people you work with simply do not have all the answers or all of the skills, so you want to leverage the skills and insight of others or to help others leverage your skills and insight
• Good enough and excellence - sometimes good enough really is good enough and sometimes aspiring for much better than good enough is really what is needed, but balancing between the two is the critical skill
• Compelling presentation and narrative - organizing and packaging your ideas, facts, rationale, arguments, benefits, etc. in a form that comes across as an appealing and believable story that literally compels your audience to agree with your proposal. The visual and verbal are equally important.
• Humor and fun - how to balance serious discussion and serious work on the one hand with light moments and at least some amount of play or at least a playful tone, with the goal of raising the overall energy level and leaving people feeling invigorated rather than merely exhausted and spent.
• A little drama and theater - nobody wants dark melodrama in their work and business environment, but a little suspense and unexpected turns can raise the energy level and prevent people from sliding into a lower-energy rut of lower productivity
• Surprise - even modest positive surprises can dramatically boost excitement, energy, and attention
• Serendipity - being open and flexible and attentive so that you are able to fully exploit new opportunities that pop up in an unexpected manner. Setting yourself up for greater potential serendipity as well
• Situational Awareness - being hyper-aware of all details of everything that is going on everywhere around you so that you can respond promptly to things as they are rather than as you imagined they might or might not be. Sometimes things are right in front of us and we still do not see them
• Roadmap - Have a long-term succession of products and services in mind so that you can do a better job of trading off short-term gains in favor of long-term benefits
• Rapport - How to establish and build a great working chemistry with partners, colleagues, employees, customers, investors, etc., with the ultimate goal of more effective and easier communication and better and easier business results
• Making a better first impression - getting started on the right foot is a lot easier than starting with a struggle for credibility
• Managing money and a budget - it sounds easy, but so many bad decisions get made because we let income, expenses, or our cash balance get out of whack
• Connectors - Identify, cultivate, and utilize "connectors", who are those people you know who have their own network of contacts that is broader than your own immediate network of contacts. They are the people who can give you introductions and information that can really open doors that you could not open as easily by yourself.
• Overlap - Exploit opportunities to overlap projects so that you can get started much sooner and be able to complete the ramping up process much more quickly than if you had waited for current projects to completely wind down before even contemplating the start of new projects. Recognition of the length of the sales cycle is one example.
• Enthusiasm - Others can readily and effortlessly sense your passion and energy in a way that will tend to rapidly "infect" them and cause them to become interested in, if not thoroughly passionate about, your products and services.

• Plan B - Always have a "Plan B" backup plan in mind in case your primary and "best" plans run into unforeseen difficulties.

• Presence - Your appearance, focus, competence, and attitude leave those around you attentive and anxious to hear what you have to say.

• The world does not owe you anything - Success is earned through effort and merit and is never automatically guaranteed.

• Quality of introductions - A lot of networking opportunities can be dead ends, so you need to focus on arranging initial contacts that have a much higher potential both succeeding and for delivery superior results.

• Friendship - Colleagues who are also friends can be a very invigorating source of energy and ideas, helping to make your work both more satisfying and more productive

• Confidants - You need people with whom you can discuss problems with great candor, helping to free your mind to explore a wider range of alternatives in a low-risk way

Obviously there are many other aspects of starting and running a business, but those of some that I would need to improve dramatically to achieve a reasonable level of business success.

One key skill that keeps popping up on the radar for me is:

In touch with customer needs - beyond basic market research and technical requirements, what is it that the customers in your market segment really need to feel that your products and services are worth paying for, as well as your intuitive sense for changing needs without the need for market surveys

I keep coming back to that skill as one of the biggest skill deficits I have that holds me back the most.

That is all well and good, but identifying a deficit is not the same as effectively addressing it.

How does one go about developing that intuitive sense for a market?

Other than the obvious approach of spending a lot of time with customers in their environment, I do not have the answers yet.

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Updated: March 23, 2008 08:45:39 PM -0500

Copyright © 2008 John W. Krupansky d/b/a Base Technology