The previous post was titled “I need ideas to start a business as an entrepreneur” in which I promised to follow up with the #1 skill entrepreneurs need to be successful in business. These things are like secret golden nuggets that’s not always exposed to people. The few that know it, just use it and see tremendous progress in their business.
TLDR: The number one skill an entrepreneur needs is to learn to be the organizing force. You as an entrepreneur are THE ORGANIZER.
The entrepreneur’s job is to be the organizing force and not to do the work. What this simply means is that you do not want to be the one who works “in your business”, but you want to be the one who works “on your business”.
Organizing is about bringing together people who are more skilled than you to accomplish a business objective. Which is to provide products or services that solve problems for your targeted audience.
This is one of the functions of management, as I remember learning it at the University. This is one of the defining skills of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. They didn’t know how to build Spacecrafts or iPhones from the beginning, and it won’t be a surprise if they still don’t.
Getting a team of smart people who can be given a challenging task, and they work together to solve it any way possible as best as they can is what Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are good at. You don’t need to know anything or everything to be an entrepreneur.
Even if you know something or know it all – the question is “Can you do it all alone”.
I was reading Carol Dweck’s book titled MINDSET: The New Psychology of Success – and she mentioned that people usually think that Thomas Edison on who is credited with the invention of the light bulb worked alone. Actually several smart inventors worked with him on the light bulb project consisting of Glassblowers, Chemists, Mathematicians, Engineers and Physicists. Edison didn’t do it alone.
I keep writing blog posts and telling people that these are some skills that will make you a successful content marketer – graphic design, video editing, writing, and so on – If you know them, that’s fine. But if you don’t. That’s also fine.
Some entrepreneurs keep saying things like – ehh yes, I know how to do this and that – which is actually doing the work. You are not an entrepreneur if you are always doing the work, you are a worker or employee in the business. And this is not where you want to be.
If you work in the business as an employee entrepreneur, it would be difficult to look at the big picture (vision) and drive the business essentials now (mission), to get to the vision.
Knowing these skills is fine if you are starting with no capital, but have time to invest in the business during the take-off stage. But as soon as you raise some capital, ensure you leverage the skills of others by getting them involved in the business. Hence, you get the time to think about how to actually grow the business and make more profit, not working on it.
In this modern society, every role of the entrepreneur can be outsourced or leveraged. You may be harming the growth and success of your business if you are doing everything on your own. A seriously-minded group of people can come together and beat you in your own industry. You will never stand a chance with their speed of growth proving service or product, whether online or in brick-and-mortar.
Here are my last words. As a content creator, I want you to try to write 10 blog posts a day and see how long you can sustain that. Your quality of content will suffer, and you may put your health at risk.
Organizing both human, capital, and material resources and using them to achieve business goals will define our overall strategy as an entrepreneur. A one-man business can only go so far. There is an African proverb that says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”.
Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the results. When we consider the makeup of a team, we see that they constitute people who are experts in different fields, using their efforts to do different tasks. And when the results are in, they are multiplied many times over than the team members can handle alone.