Alan, Simon and Henry run through their skills to being a successful entrepreneur.
Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present.
So what skills? Do you need to be an entrepreneur? It’s one of the questions we get asked all the time, what do you need to get going?
One of the things that’s on top of my list, and I know what you’re gonna say he’ll always say this, but it is I do agree with him. But one of the things that’s been on top of my list lately, is resilience. Now, you don’t go to school to do a GCSE and resilience, you don’t get an A level in it. There’s no BTEC in resilience. And I’m pretty sure that for nine grand a year, there isn’t a degree in resilience. If there is please leave it in the comment below, I’d be really interested to see what contents in that one. But the thing about the resilience is being able to get up tomorrow morning, and do it all again, when the previous day didn’t go. So well. The thing about resilience, being able to get up and do it all again, it’s been a game changer for me when we’ve been growing our business.
Yes. And my opinion, well, if you look at all the skills I learned at school, and college and throughout education, I don’t use any of them. In my business, the things I use everyday in my business are communication skills, are you sales skills, I use negotiation skills, how to run good meetings, how to pull together a team, there’s lots of skills I use in business that I haven’t been taught at education. And we’ve been inspired, whilst we’re here in Oxford, to think about, what do you actually need to get going. And Simon’s top of his list is resilience, you need that, or bounce back ability, as I would call it is that word, it’s actually in the dictionary now. But the skill I think you really need is sales. Because it does not matter how good your idea is, as a business owner, if you cannot sell it, your business will not succeed.
Now, people skills are really important when becoming an entrepreneur, because that’s the things that you use to build rapport with people, build your relationships, and really get on with people, you can be absolutely amazing at what you do. But if you haven’t got the people skills to really sell it and get along with them, you might as well not have the skill.
If there’s one thing you’re going to face repeatedly throughout your career as a startup or an entrepreneur, is rejection. People are going to reject your ideas, they’re gonna reject your proposals, they’re gonna reject your sales calls. And that is part of life. If you are not being rejected, you aren’t making process progress fast enough. So one thing you’ve got to get really comfortable with dealing with is rejection.
The next one is having a positive outlook. Now, it seems it seems like a really simple point. But recently, we’ve gone through a lot of we’ve done a lot of learning about stuff. And we realised that the more positive you are about everything, the more opportunities you find, the more cool things happen. You don’t know You don’t focus on the bad stuff. If you just focus solely on the positives, and just drive forward for the positivity. Brilliant things are gonna happen to you in your business.
I’ve been told that I have an unreasonable sense of urgency to make things happen, Jack, we need to film videos, Henry, let’s do stuff. I always want to make things happen. And as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to realise it starts with you. It starts with you, your energy, your desire to make things happen. That’s the spark and the flame that will build your business and get things going quickly. So the next one is your energy, your spark, your unreasonable sense of urgency.
The next one is money management. Now, I don’t mean just set up a savings account and chuck all your cash in there and then bring some out every time you need some. There’s some there’s some really cool ways you can do it. You know, there’s, there’s investing, there’s putting a certain amount aside for your taxes and all that kind of stuff. And there’s, there’s quite a few different ones that we teach, especially our workshops, we go a little bit more in depth. I’ve been doing a lot of money management stuff myself recently. And you’d be amazed at how you can maximise on what you have. If you have the way I do it is I separate out my money from the stuff I need to pay for the things I want to spend money on myself, my long term savings and my investment. I’ve got so much more money than I would have. If I didn’t do that. If I just put it in one go. If you manage your money, things become so much easier and you won’t run out of money anytime soon.
In business, everything you want to achieve is done through or with other people. It is all about the people. So your ability to network and find the people you need to talk to whether that’s other businesses, whether it’s customers, whether it’s people that you need to help you and work in your business, your ability to network and find the right people is going to help you grow your business faster.
Now the next one is technology. Now this is a barrier that quite a lot of our participants. sometimes find it hard to go over some people, no problem. If you you need to have a basic understanding of technology. It it will help you absolutely so much. If you can use a computer if you can use a phone you can upload stuff you can take photos, you can build your website sight, it’s so easy to do, all you need to do is just grasp it with both hands and go for it. Make the mistakes fall down, get back up, learn from what you’ve learned. And just go for it. Technology is such a brilliant thing and it can excel your business
knowing. So three ways for you that you can develop these skills of an entrepreneur. The first and my favourite, this is what I always do. Get a book on the subject. Doesn’t matter which one of those skills or things you need to learn, there is a great book on that subject that can help you learn. If you want some recommendations, then please put it in the comments below. And we’ll tell you what books have most helped us in business. So the first is books. The second, we’re going to be doing a series of expanded videos on each of these skills to help you develop them. So watch out for the upcoming videos, or
the best one really, is to come on the course. Come and join us come and see the whites of our eyes. Come and meet us and we’ll help you out with your business idea. We’ll help you become a brilliant entrepreneur. We’ll give you all of the skills and all the tools you need to
do. So check out the Events page, PopupBusinessSchool.co.uk forward slash events to find out where the next event is, and come along.
First thing you’ve got to do is sell your idea or sell your product sales skills, so many ways to improve your sales skills. That’s an excellent point.