the entrepreneurial skills you need?

Simply having the capital to start a business is NOT enough. There is usually need for skills audit .The process of identifying the necessary skills and assessing their presence is called skills audit.
As a rule of thumb, the smaller the business ,the wider the range of skills that the owner-manager will need to operate the business ,particularly in the early stages of its development.

.Technical Knowledge or Expertise:Knowlege and expertise of goods or services which you plan to provide and how the customers will make use of them .From the customer's perspective ,the supplier is the specialist who is expected to answer all of the awkward questions.

.Marketing Skils:To enable you research your market ,to design a marketing plan to promote and distribute your goods or services.Many owner managers set up a business in an area ,with which they are already familiar,and so have some basic knowledge of their market,but there is still a need to maintain objectivity ,particularly when estimating market share and sales volume.

Sales skills: These are often assumed to be the same as marketing skills, but there is a distinct difference. You may have an excellent product, and a market ripe to take it ,but you still need the skills to persuade your customers or your distributors that it is your product they should be using or retailing, rather than one supplied by a competitor. In the early stages of developing your business, you may not be able to afford to pay a full-time sales person and may have to do the job yourself.


Organizational Skills: The ability to plan and organize yourself and your business, to ensure that your staff,resources,materials,finished e.t.c are in the right place at the right time .Careful planning and attention to detail enables you to make the most productive use of time and resources and to avoid costly waste.

Decision Making:The facility to analyze problems,identify and evaluate options and to make objective and rational decisions including how they will made to work effectively.

Financial Skills: Keeping day to day account is not necessarily the best use of the owner's manager time, as part -time bookkeeper or accountant would probably be much more cost- effective. However it is still important for the owner to be able to understand the accounting procedures.In particular,it is essential to have a basic understanding of budgetary planning and control, in order to keep the business on track and to spot any potential problems. There may also be a need for the owner to be involved in credit control and debt collection.

Customer Service Skills:This is not just the case of keeping the customer's satisfied by providing a consistently high standard of service. For small firms, one of the biggest headaches in dealing with customers is debt collection and persuading your customers to pay their bills on time without the risk of offending them or loosing their business.

Staff Management: The ability to supervise, delegate work, train and motivate staff to get the best out of them. The importance of this is to often under-estimated, and for new-owner managers who have never previously been involved with managing staff. One of the hardest aspects is that of delegation-trusting the staff to get on with their jobs without constant close scrutiny, so that the owner can get on with job of running the business.