Your clients are growing, orders are flying, and business is growing. But this period is crucial because you’ll need to scale your business effectively if you want business to truly succeed and grow. Scaling up a business is an exciting, but challenging time for any business owner, and there are certain skills entrepreneurs need to scale their business. In this blog, we look at 5 of the most essential skills entrepreneurs need to scale, and how to adopt these skills.
1.Communication/ Interpersonal Skills
Clear communication is a skill that a lot of people take for granted, but if you’re looking to effectively scale your business, it’s a crucial skill to have. Effective communication includes the ability to listen attentively to employee’s, investors and customers/clients’ needs, having attention to detail and understanding their emotions.
It is also important to have good interpersonal skills, because quite frankly, if you’re challenging to get along with, people aren’t going to want to work with you. Managers with strong people skills are approachable and likeable, and staff are more likely to respect them, work harder and go to them with any problems or concerns.
2. Networking Skills
As well as communication & people skills, you must also be able to network well in order to scale. Developing a strong PR network is the key to success in the long run and you should build a network of collaborations with both people and organisations. For example, suppliers, service providers, sales partners, as well as customers/clients. These engagements may take the form of a formal alliance and when that happens, scalability becomes achievable with minimum effort.
3. Leadership Skills
It goes without saying that leadership skills are essential for any successful entrepreneur, and are especially crucial during scaling. Somebody needs to be on top of everything, as with scaling comes new challenges. If you’re able to lead yourself and your team through adversity, you’ll be able to overcome the obstacles that come with growth and scale your business effectively.
4. Entrepreneurial Resilience
Entrepreneurial resilience is a skill which is absolutely essential when scaling and will allow one to overcome huge entrepreneurial challenges and continue as an entrepreneur in the face of adversity.
Scaleups today face all sorts of challenges, but the success of the business is determined by how the entrepreneur deals with these challenges. The best way for entrepreneurs to bounce back from these difficult events is building resilience, which will allow them to look past short-term setbacks and focus on long-term goals.
For some, resilience may be natural. But for others, it might need some work. Here are 3 ways in which entrepreneurs can build resilience:
Focus On Developing Your Skills
Practice makes perfect and the challenges of entrepreneurship are no different from exercising or developing a hard skill. It takes time and perseverance. Over time, your brain and muscles strengthen up, you move onto more complex challenges and keep progressing slowly but steadily.
Prepare For Adversity
To build a tougher skin as an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to accept failure and mentally prepare for any challenges you may face. Failure is a natural part of life and in many cases can teach you valuable lessons.
Remember Your Mission
Focusing on your purpose and your main business goals is an effective way to deal with the tougher times and maintain perspective. Resilience is about constantly adapting to change, and helps to know that one thing will stay constant: your goals and mission.
5. Evaluation Skills
Bringing in clients or orders isn’t enough to ensure effective scaling. A successful entrepreneur knows how to evaluate a situation and respond accordingly. In some cases, this could mean delaying the satisfaction of expansion until your company is 100% ready. If you can’t handle 5,000 new customers, don’t take 5,000 new customers. You need to strategise effectively and decide which aspects of your business need priority when scaling.
Written by Kate, on behalf of Tramshed Tech.
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