Entrepreneurial Skills

A skill is simply knowledge which is demonstrated by action. It is an ability to perform in a certain way. An entrepreneur is someone who has a good business idea and can turn that idea into reality. To be successful, an entrepreneur must not only identify an opportunity but also understand it in great depth. He or she must be able to spot a gap in the market and recognize what new products or services fill the gap. He or she must know what features it will have and why they will appeal to the customer. The entrepreneur must also know how to inform the customer about it and how to deliver the new offerings. All this calls for an intimate knowledge of a particular sector of industry. Turning an idea into reality calls upon two sorts of skills, these are:

• General management skills and
• People management skills

      I)   General Management Skills: These are skills required to organize the physical and financial     resources needed to run the venture. Some of the most important general management business   skills are:

F Strategy Skills – An ability to consider the business as a whole, to understand how it fits within its market place, how it can organize itself to deliver value to its customers, and the ways in which it does this better than its competitors.

F Planning Skills – An ability to consider what the future might offer, how it will impact on the business and what needs to be done to prepare for it now.

F Marketing Skills – An ability to see past the firm’s offerings and their features, to be able to see how they satisfy the customer’s needs and why the customer finds them attractive.

F Financial Skills – An ability to manage money; to be able to keep track of expenditure and to monitor cash-flow, but also an ability to assess investments in terms of their potential and their risks.

F Project Management Skills – An ability to organize projects, to set specific objectives, to set schedules and to ensure that the necessary resources are in the right plat of the right time.

F Time Management Skills – An ability to use time productively, to be able to priorities important jobs and to get things done to schedule.

II) People Management Skills: Businesses are made by people. A business can only be successful if the peoples who make it up are properly directed and are committed to make an effort on its behalf. An entrepreneurial venture also needs the support of people from outside the organization such as customers, suppliers and investors. To be effective, an entrepreneur needs to demonstrative a wide variety of skills in the way he/she deals with other peoples. Some of the more important skills we might include under this heading are:

•  Communication Skills – An ability to use spoken and written language to express ideas and inform others.
• Leadership Skills – An ability to inspire people to work in a specific way and to undertake the tasks that are necessary for the success of the venture.
• Motivation Skills – An ability to enthuse people and get them to give their full commitment to the tasks in hand. Being able to motivate demands an understanding of what drives people and what they expect from their jobs.
•  Delegation Skills – An ability to allocate tasks to different people. Effective delegation involves more than instructing. It demands a full understanding of the skills that people possess how they use them and how they might be developed to fulfill future needs.
•  Negotiation Skills – An ability to understand what is wanted from a siturations, what is motivating others in that situation and recognize the possibilities of maximizing the outcomes for all parties.

All these different people skills are interrelated. Here entrepreneurial performance results from a combination of industry knowledge, general management skills; people skills and personal motivation (see the figure shown below). The successful entrepreneur must not only use these skills but learn to use them and to learn from using them. Entrepreneurs should constantly avoid their abilities in these areas, recognize their strengths and weaknesses, and plan how to develop these skills in the future.