7 Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have to Be Successful

For many, owning a business or founding a company is a lifelong dream. It’s a means to not only leaving a legacy, but achieving financial independence along the way.

While entrepreneurial spirit can get you far, there are important hard and soft skills to develop as you embark on your quest to become an entrepreneur.

There are dozens if not hundreds of entrepreneur skills worth learning, but we noted seven that are shared by some of the world’s best, including Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Michael Dell. These skills will not only help you run a better business but manage people and processes better, too.

The 7 entrepreneur skills you should learn before founding a business

Public speaking.

Public speaking is the most visual way to showcase your confidence and communication skills. Whether you’re hosting a conference seminar, pitching to investors, or conducting a company-wide meeting, people want to feel comfortable with who you are and what you’re saying.

Developing your public speaking skills allows you to better engage in all types of meetings and foster more impactful relationships. A skilled entrepreneur can articulate their thoughts, put them into words, and deliver them thoughtfully.  

Financial literacy.

Naturally, to run a profitable business, one needs to be smart with money. It’s not all about creating the most revenue and being frugal about business expenses, however. A good entrepreneur finds ways to create additional income streams within the same business. They’re also on the forefront of new fintech that can help make their business successful and their customers happy.

Feedback intake and output.

Feedback loops are crucial at every stage of a business’ life. Anyone that has ever been in leadership will tell you that the best founders deliver quality, actionable feedback down to their team while also being able to receive upward feedback and apply it where it makes sense. There are many different philosophies on what those feedback loops look like, and they vary by organization. Successful entrepreneurs know what will suit their business best at each stage of its development.

Coding.

Let’s face it — most if not all businesses created from this day forward will be digitally native, if not entirely reliant on the digital space (be it on mobile devices or desktops). Coding is an important entrepreneur skill for a few reasons.

First, if you’re building an app or a program built on code, having working knowledge of what’s happening on the back end will empower you to make decisions about your product. You can also apply any feedback quickly.

Second, learning how to code teaches you more than just the act of writing code. Coding teaches you decision making skills, teamwork, data analysis, segmentation, and storage, hypothesis testing, and prototyping. These skills are unprecedented in creating a business, primarily in those early stages, and they will be invaluable as you build up your initial product and customer base.

What’s great about coding for entrepreneurs is that you can learn it in a number of ways, be it on your own time or in a more structured setting, and continue to learn new languages or skills you can apply to your business or product.

Writing.

Entrepreneurs don’t need to become full-blown authors, but the ability to document a journey and tell a story is a widely overlooked skill in entrepreneurship. Good writers — especially copywriters — are crucial to a business because they’re able to paint a picture with words and convey information to an audience. Much like with public speaking, skilled entrepreneurs can break down complex ideas into (written) words.

Growth hacking.

While the idea of growth hacking has been met with criticism, the idea behind it is especially true for any business founder. Though typically used to talk about marketing, the principles of growth hacking can be applied to nearly any idea. In short, you assess your current status, set goals, test new ways to achieve those goals, run the data to gauge success, and repeat it again.

Entrepreneurs who want to succeed will adopt a growth hacking mindset, primarily early on in the business. The ability to test new solutions, processes, messaging, or off-the-wall ideas with confidence and determine their merit is a massively important skill. This process often unlocks findings you would have otherwise never considered.

Learning.

Above all else, entrepreneurs should be lifelong learners. They’re students of everything and nothing. The skill of being able to learn and apply their knowledge quickly is more important than the skill they’re actually learning. In fact, most of the skills noted above can (and should) be learned and applied where needed.

Develop the entrepreneur skills you need to be successful

There’s never a bad time to begin honing the entrepreneur skills you need to create a successful business today or down the line.

For every budding entrepreneur, we’ve made our award-winning curriculum available entirely for free — no strings attached. With App Academy Open, you’ll learn (skill one) coding (skill two) and be financially literate (skill three) since it’s free to access forever.

Get started on your dream of entrepreneurship today.