Most small businesses are started by skilled workers, you make good pizza so you open a pizza restaurant, you’re a great dentist so you open a clinic, you’re a great lawyer so you open a law firm.
That’s the natural progression of things, right?
The issue is that running a business is a skill on its own, and you probably haven’t been trained on it.
And that’s why most small businesses fail.
Not because of lack of resources or lack of “technical” skill, but rather because of lack of “business” skill.
So what are the business skills you need to have in order to succeed in your new adventure?
Robert Kiyosaki and the Cash Flow Quadrant:
In my early career life I read Robert Kiyosaki’s famous book Rich Dad, Poor Dad and I was impressed by it.
One idea that caught my attention is the idea of the cash flow quadrant. On the left side of the quadrant you got the employee and the freelancer. And on the right side you got the big business and the investor, these are the four ways you could make money in our society.
As a great employee you could smoothly transition into a freelancer, you keep doing the same tasks and you manage a one person team. But when running a big business with 10s, 100s, and maybe 1000s of employees, that’s a whole different monster.
Scaling
Scaling is one of the hardest challenges that face the new entrepreneur. As an employee you were only concerned with developing your own talent and upgrading your own skills. But now as a business owner you need to know how to pick the right talent from a wide pool of candidates to let them in on your team.
Not every great player is a great coach. And not every great employee is a great business owner.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t become a great business owner, that means you need to learn a different skill set.
Marketing
As a skilled worker your area of expertise is probably not in marketing, and in this era you most certainly can’t survive without it.
Your lack of knowledge of the discipline of marketing is a huge disadvantage. Imagine playing chess without knowing how each piece moves, it’s going to be a disaster.
You need to educate yourself about the basics of marketing in order for your business to survive. One amazing resource, and it’s free, for such education is Gary Vee’s YouTube Channel, it contains hundreds of hours of marketing knowledge that you can reach with a few and simple clicks.
Marketing is the core of businesses at the modern era, you need to educate yourself on how to use the internet for your advantage, your resources are probably already limited so you need to maximise the efficiency of every resource you have as much as possible to achieve positive results.
People Management
If you succeed in people management you will probably succeed in your business and if you fail it’s probably going to be a disaster.
When you were an employee all what you needed to do is to manage one person to do what is required to do. Now you need to manage 10s or 100s of people. Do you have any idea how to do that?
It’s not as straightforward as you would imagine.
The most critical element in any business is the human element.
Generally speaking, people want to maximise profit and minimise effort. That’s where all the games of office politics kick in in your company.
If you don’t have a plan on how you’re going to structure and manage your team you’re probably going to be disappointed with the results.
The Input Under Your Control
Starting a business is not a picnic, it’s a kind of war.
And in this war the only variable that is totally under your control is your time and effort.
These are the things that you own. How much effort and how much time you’re going to dictate to your business is going to play an important role in the success or failure of this business in the long run, especially at the starting phase.
You need to use your time wisely and you need to put effort in your business because nobody cares about your business as much as you do.
Conclusion
The game of business is complicated, and the results aren’t guaranteed.
But I believe success in business is achievable under any circumstances, all you have to do is to master the foundational skills that rule any business and have the persistence it takes to get your business to the next level.
