Skills Worth Having if You Want to Run a Business
Want to run your own business one day? It sounds like the ultimate dream on paper doesn’t it. Being your own boss, setting your own hours (and never having to ask a line manager if you can take a random Tuesday morning off to wait for the boiler repair guy). But the reality is usually a lot less about sitting in your office with your feet up telling people what to do, and a lot more about crying over a spreadsheet at 11pm because the numbers just don’t make any sense. If you're thinking about taking the plunge eventually, you really don’t need a fancy business degree or an MBA. What you need is a good mix of practical and everyday skills that will help you survive the absolute chaos of working for yourself. Here are the things worth working on before you hand in your notice.
Actually, understanding money
We all know how to spend money but managing business cash flow is a completely different beast. You don’t need to be a fully qualified accountant, but you absolutely have to know the difference between profit and cash in the bank. You might sell ten grand worth of stuff in a single month which feels amazing, but if your suppliers demand paying today and your customers have 30 days to pay you then you’ll be stuck eating beans on toast for dinner all month. Part of it will also be that learning the hard way that just because there’s money sitting in the current account, it doesn’t mean it’s actually yours because a massive chunk of that belongs to HMRC for taxes or VAT. Getting comfortable with boring things like profit margins, chasing unpaid invoices without feeling guilty, and basic forecasting is essential. Doing an accounting course or something to do with business finances in your spare time could be useful even if you don’t plan on dealing with all your own finances forever as it still makes sense to be able to understand them.
Selling (but without sounding sleazy)
Sales is a dirty word for a lot of people. It makes you instantly think of slimy car salesmen trying to flog you a motor you don’t want with loads of extras you don’t need. But if you can’t sell your idea, your product, or your service then you don’t have a business. You just have a very expensive, very stressful hobby. Selling isn’t just pitching to massive corporate clients in a glass boardroom. It’s writing an Instagram caption that makes someone want to click the link in your bio instead of just blindly scrolling past. It’s replying to an email from a hesitant customer and reassuring them that your product is exactly what they need to solve their very specific problem. You must get over the cringe factor of self-promotion. If you don’t shout about what you do, literally no one else will do it for you.
De-escalating angry people
Customer service when it’s your own business is deeply, painfully personal. When you work for a massive corporation and a customer screams at you over the phone, it’s annoying. When it’s your own business, it feels like a direct physical attack. Learning how to put your ego in a box and de-escalate a situation is a massive skill that takes time to learn.
Someone will inevitably kick off on your Facebook page because the courier left their parcel in the recycling bin on bin day and it got taken. It’s not your fault, but you still must be the one to fix it. You need the ability to type out a furiously angry email, delete the whole thing, and then send a perfectly polite, professional response that diffuses the situation and offers a sensible solution. It’s exhausting, but losing your temper online is a quick way to ruin the reputation you’ve spent months building up.
Extreme self-discipline
When you work a normal job, a certain amount of your day is dictated by other people. You might show up at 9, have a meeting at 10 and take your lunch at 1. When you run a business (especially in the early days when you might just be working from your kitchen table) that structure completely vanishes. The main problem with working from home is that all your domestic chores are just staring at you all day. It takes a monumental amount of discipline to ignore the massive pile of laundry that needs doing, or the dishwasher that desperately needs emptying and sit down to write boring SEO descriptions for your website instead. You must become your own strict manager. If you just do the fun, creative bits of the business and ignore the boring admin because you just don’t feel like it today, things will fall apart incredibly quickly.
Tech tolerance
You absolutely don’t need to be a software developer to run a business these days, mostly because of platforms that essentially do the work for you. But you do need a very high tolerance for tech induced frustration. Your website will almost certainly crash right when you launch a new product. The printer will completely refuse to connect to the Wi-Fi when you have twenty shipping labels to print before the postie arrives to collect them (let’s face it, has any printer ever ran smoothly, ever?!) You might forget the password to a crucial account and get locked out, then must spend forty minutes on a live chat with a bot with your blood boiling. So being able to take a deep breath and just Google the error code and figure it out is always going to be helpful when you don’t have a big IT department behind you at first.
Negotiating
It’s not true for everyone of course but most people do tend to avoid conflict usually. But in business, you must run straight at it and you need to be able to have uncomfortable conversations without completely crumbling. That might mean ringing a supplier to haggle for a better rate for your lab supplies because your margins are too tight. It might mean having to fire a freelance graphic designer who keeps missing their deadlines. Or, worst of all, it might mean telling a really demanding client that you are dropping them because they’re taking up too much of your time and destroying your mental health. You must learn how to be firm, fair, and totally unapologetic about protecting your own business interests.
There are no performance reviews or HR departments to hide behind. You just must crack on and deal with it.
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