What comes to mind when you hear the word “entrepreneur”?
Maybe you picture a talented college dropout, or a seasoned business professional with a knack for predicting the next big thing. Whatever the persona, replace it with yourself.
There’s no specific demographic or personality profile of a successful entrepreneur. No matter your age, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or upbringing, you can be an entrepreneur if you have the dedication, drive, and business skills.
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Whether entrepreneurship is a mix of innate traits or learned abilities is a constant debate. While risk tolerance, resilience, innovation, and creative problem-solving can provide a head start, they aren’t the only qualities to becoming an effective business owner.
Unlike personality traits and demographic details, you can learn and practice entrepreneurship through education, training, and experience. By taking advantage of growth opportunities, you can build valuable skills and generate innovative ideas to achieve business success.
If entrepreneurship is a path you’d like to pursue, use this list to take stock of your strengths and weaknesses and determine which skills to develop before launching your venture.
Check out the video below to learn more about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!
6 Skills All Entrepreneurs Need
1. Finance Skills
Finance skills, such as budgeting and financial statement analysis, are necessary for running a business.
Creating a reasonable budget and sticking to it can be the difference between your venture’s success and failure. By learning this essential finance skill, you can avoid overspending and appropriately allocate company resources.
It’s also imperative to know how to read and prepare financial statements, including a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. Aside from being required for reporting and tax purposes, these documents help you track performance, make future projections, and manage expenses. They can also be useful to investors and banks that are considering funding your startup because they show your business’s financial progress.
2. Networking
Your network is one of your greatest assets. Networking can enable you to not only meet like-minded professionals but build your future team and keep a finger on your industry’s pulse.
Your professional network can comprise:
- Former and current co-workers
- Alumni from educational institutions
- Professors and teachers
- Industry leaders and speakers
- Past and present clients
- Friends and family members
- Business professionals in your geographic area
- Fellow entrepreneurs with similar interests, responsibilities, and goals
Identify and reach out to people in your network who can guide you in your entrepreneurial journey and inform your decision-making. Ask them about their businesses, how long they’ve been in their industries, and lessons they’ve learned from successes and failures. Perhaps they’ve started several companies and can offer valuable advice about raising funds, developing products, and building a client base. They may even be able to connect you to contacts whose work aligns with yours.
In addition to leveraging your network, expand it. One way to do so is by signing up for networking events in your area or industry, such as HBS Online’s annual Connext conference, where learners from around the world come together to network, engage, and learn from HBS leadership and faculty.
LinkedIn is another valuable way to connect with others. Using the platform’s feed and recommendation algorithm, you can find professionals with whom you have shared connections and similar interests and job titles. Don’t be afraid to send a note introducing yourself to a new contact.
Related: How Leaders Develop and Use Their Network
3. Speaking Confidently
The importance of speaking confidently as an aspiring entrepreneur can’t be overstated. Whether pitching to investors, communicating with clients, or making conversation at an event, the way you talk about your business and its potential can influence how others see it, too. Showing a lack of confidence can deter investors from funding your venture and lead customers to question their decisions to buy from you.
Remember: You are your business’s biggest advocate. If you’ve achieved a milestone like product-market fit, share that with others.
People may doubt you along the way, but you should never be one of them. Confidence can make all the difference when it comes to attracting and retaining customers and investors.
4. Accepting and Acting on Feedback
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must be eager to receive feedback and act on it. This requires staying humble and accepting that your idea of your product’s perfect version may not resonate with your target customers.
“Pinpointing your target customer is a critical early step in the startup business model development process,” Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Jeffery Bussgang says in the online course Launching Tech Ventures.
One way to gather feedback is by conducting customer validation interviews to solicit constructive criticism regarding your product, proposed business model, and assumptions you’ve made about users.
You may also garner feedback from investors, more experienced entrepreneurs, and friends and family—and some of it may be unsolicited. You’re not required to implement all their advice, but it’s beneficial to consider it. Would their suggestions increase your product’s quality, value, or user experience? If the answer is “yes,” make those improvements.
Related: 5 Key Pieces of Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
5. Recognizing Patterns
Pattern recognition—in data, market trends, and user behavior—is an often-overlooked entrepreneurial skill.
For instance, identifying patterns in cash flow statements can enable you to make predictions about future cash flows. When observing market sales data, you can identify seasonality or other time-related trends that inform long-term goals.
Recognizing patterns can also help you to excel in your industry. If entering the tech space, you must understand the common challenges and patterns of what Bussgang calls “tough tech ventures” in Launching Tech Ventures. For example, health care settings involve many ethical issues around patient-facing products due to data privacy and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.
When observing how users interact with your product, pay attention to how they react to specific elements and what questions arise. If your product is an app, perhaps you identify a pattern among teenage users who download it and immediately open the chat function. You can use trends to learn more about customers’ motivations and improve your product to better fit their needs.
Related: 7 Questions to Ask for an Insightful User Interview
6. Maintaining a Growth Mindset
As an aspiring entrepreneur, it’s critical to have a growth mindset. A growth mindset involves perceiving intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and capable of improvement, as opposed to a fixed mindset, which entails believing those same traits to be inherently stable and unchangeable.
One professional who demonstrates the growth mindset is Maggie Robb, vice president of operations at Spire Health. Robb knew she had a lot to learn when making the transition from a large corporation to a Silicon Valley startup and decided to take the online course Entrepreneurship Essentials to strengthen her entrepreneurial skills.
“While I have a deep business background, I wasn’t well versed in several important aspects of entrepreneurship, like investment structure, fundraising, and valuation,” Robb says.
In addition to bolstering her knowledge of those topics, Robb says the course helped her recognize the value of testing and iteration in the entrepreneurial process.
“While not something I was completely unfamiliar with, I realized the importance of it within a startup,” Robb says. “It made me look at our resource allocation in a different way, compared to traditional companies with established products.”
Robb’s story imparts a vital lesson: Your skills aren’t fixed but rather result from effort, practice, and persistence. By maintaining a growth mindset, you can avoid taking your skills for granted and capitalize on opportunities to grow and improve throughout your career.
Developing Your Entrepreneurial Skills
Entrepreneurship is a journey that requires dedication, drive, and hard work. One thing it doesn’t require is fitting a specific demographic.
With financial literacy, networking skills, confidence, the ability to accept feedback and recognize patterns, and a growth mindset, anyone can pursue entrepreneurship.
As long as you’re willing to strengthen your entrepreneurial skills, you can successfully position yourself to start your own company.
Are you interested in bolstering your entrepreneurship skills? Explore Entrepreneurship Essentials and Launching Tech Ventures, two of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses. If you aren't sure which is the right fit, download our free course flowchart to determine which best aligns with your goals.
This post was updated on July 28, 2023. It was originally published on August 25, 2020.
