5 Must-Have Skills For Anyone Wanting To Build A Startup

Back in the day, being a company owner meant having to invest a significant amount of capital, skill, and manpower. Fortunately, the internet enables you to start your venture for as little as $100. Get a domain and hosting provider then you’re good to go.

CMS has made it possible for anyone to design a website even if they have little to no coding knowledge. Of course, there are several skills that you need to learn before launch. , the internet provides you with many resources to get all the needed skills in little time.

Below are the 5 must-have skills for every sprouting entrepreneur:

1. Digital Marketing

When your website goes live, you are already in business. But to thrive you need to get your products/services in front of an audience and gain your initial customers. This is where digital marketing comes in. Digital marketing lets you expand your consumer reach. At the same time, it lets you attract more prospects through an attractive copy.

As your startup company grows, you need to focus on business management. Hence, building a digital marketing team will make the most sense.

In the meantime, you need to understand digital marketing and its best practices.

Acquiring this skill also helps cost-effective hiring. Hiring well-experienced digital marketers will be an expensive feat. But if you have some expertise in digital marketing, you can hire people beginners and offer to train them.

2. Sales

Customer acquisition occurs in the digital marketing phase. The goal is to acquire leads that you can, later on, convert into customers. Once leads have been obtained, the next phase would be cold calls or cold emails (mostly cold calls).

And this is where skills in selling become necessary. Part of the job is to have a lot of familiarity and understanding of the product or service that you want to sell.

Since your company is going to start as an online entity, you are required to have a stronger skill in sales. This is because you don’t get to meet your leads in person. You don’t get to use body language or gestures to convey your message. Landing a deal relies a lot on how you verbally connect with the prospect.

3. Accounting

Your finance skills are important regardless if you have an online business or a traditional one.

As a would-be founder, you need to create forecasts to see if your business idea is worth venturing into. If it is, the next step would be to create a budget for the capital investment.

And finally, when you do start your business, you need to continuously keep track of the money flow inbound and outbound. If you lack this skill, you may find that you are making less money than what you’re pushing out.

Accounting becomes crucial yet again as you start hiring more people and preparing payrolls for a larger team.

4. Time Management

Sometimes, we lead ourselves to believe that time management is as simple as writing down to-do lists. Writing down your to-do list is part of the process. But you also need to be good at finishing the said tasks.

Starting a business means a lot of responsibility on your end. To keep the company operating, you need to keep yourself aligned with what needs to be done and when it has to be done. Because the company is still young, the majority of these responsibilities would fall on your lap alone. And even when you do start to hire a team, there is still the pressure of having to keep everyone aligned. Hence, effective time management is of utmost importance.

5. Creativity

To lead your company to success, you must hone your skills not only in terms of logic and reasoning but also in your creative side.

Without your ability to spot problems and create unique solutions, you would end up having to sell a product/service with too big of a competition. If you’re competing with big brands such as Microsoft, Apple, Nike, Adidas, or even Honda, it will be extremely difficult for you to scale your company.

You can be creative in identifying a unique problem with a unique solution. This will allow you to monopolize the market. In business, if you are the first at something, you can become the market leader for that consumer base.

Another use of creativity is yet again digital marketing. Content has become a critical component in businesses ever since the dawn of internet marketing. But content will not have the desired effect on your target customers without a visually appealing image. Almost every effective content is paired with graphics or an infographic.

Since creating digital graphics is a combination of art and science, it can be quite costly to employ someone for the job on a continued basis.

If you have a bigger firm, getting a team to do the job might be a good option. However, for startups, having the capacity to do it yourself would be an excellent alternative. Canva is a free and easy-to-use tool for creating images. You can use templates and graphic elements that you can drag and drop into the workspace.

But, creating images through Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator would be better. It may need a little technical know-how to get this done. But if this is something you're interested in, there are multiple expert training courses online that can help.

Final Words

You need a combination of soft and hard skills to become a successful entrepreneur. If you need time to master these skills, you could start as a consultant at first. And you can work your way into becoming a company.

This is only the beginning. You will develop more skills in the long-run that will help you scale your business further. Being an entrepreneur is about offering solutions. But most importantly, it is also about having a growth mindset.