Three Critical Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have! Posted: November 7, 2011 @ 11:11 am

These are the critical skills every entrepreneur should have.

1. Leadership (Not Management)

John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Fund, the largest mutual fund in the world, defines leadership as knowing what’s worth doing. Management is knowing how to do it.

A leader needs to be able to decide what’s important and what will actually impact the company’s bottom line. They need to be able to make moral decisions about when to go for profit and when to sacrifice profits for long-term values.

They need to be able to identify what’s really best for everyone involved, including clients, employees and shareholders, and make business decisions for the greater good.

A manager is someone who understands things like time management, project flow, tracking employee performance and such. But they aren’t necessarily the right people to steer a company.

A good entrepreneur needs to be a great leader. It also helps if they’re a good manager.

2. Persistence and Patience

In “Good to Great,” one of the most highly acclaimed business books of the century, Jim Collins studies eleven public companies whose performance consistently beat the market average for 15 years in a row.

One of the key factors he found was persistence and patience. He likened it to a giant spinning metallic flywheel.

If you had to take this giant metallic wheel and make it spin, in the very beginning it won’t budge at all. You can put in immense amounts of effort, only to find it still not moving.

Yet once it does start moving, slow at first then getting faster and faster, it’ll build up momentum until it starts to move on its own. At that point, it would actually be harder to stop the flywheel than to push it faster.

Building a business is like that. In the beginning, you’ll be swimming upstream. But as momentum builds, it’ll get easier and easier. The trick is to have the persistence and patience to stick it through.

3. Team and People Focus

“Take my 20 best people and, virtually overnight, Microsoft becomes a mediocre company.” — Bill Gates

Whether it’s Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, one thing is consistently clear across the most successful companies: a relentless drive to hire the best people.

More than anything else, the success of your company is going to be based on the kind of people you hire.

Aim to hire people who are smarter and more competent than you. Don’t try to hire a team that you can lead, but a team that can lead your company and you to better results than you alone could create.

These are a few of the key skills every entrepreneur needs. These skills aren’t developed overnight, but they’re absolutely skills that anyone who’s committed can learn.