Starting your business journey: Essential skills for success

By building these essential skills, you can ensure your business is a success. We take a look at the business skills every entrepreneur needs, and how you can build on them to achieve success.

Running a business is an art, and having good business skills can make or break a business. And with the somewhat harrowing statistic that 20% of businesses fail within the first year, you’ll want to know what you can do to make your business succeed in an increasingly competitive and crowded marketplace.

But how do you identify the skills you need? And how do you go about building those skills? No matter how good the idea for your business is, and no matter how much you know about the area, without the necessary skills, you won’t get far. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the essential skills you’ll need to consider.

From key business and management skills like great communication and interpersonal skills to web development and financial management, these tools could bring great success to your business. Armed with these, you will put yourself in a much better position to succeed.

What are business skills?

So what are business skills? Business skills are skills that are necessary to be successful in your business management. Many business skills change depending on the requirements of the job or the nature of the business. On the whole, there are some key skills that can be used across all roles and industries, which are primarily designed to help your business succeed.

We’ll take you through some of the best skills you can have in your toolkit for a business. These include soft skills, as well as more specific hard skills that you can leverage to make your new business a success. Some of these skills you may already have – but building on and improving them will help you succeed in your day-to-day operations.

>> Discover our collection of online business and management degrees

Soft skills

Here we’ll take a look at some of the more general skills required for your business. These include soft skills which are skills that come through via your general experiences and previous employment. Of course, it’s always worth looking to expand and build upon these skills if you can, as it will further your potential for success.

Curiosity

Real innovation comes from thinking outside the box. Curiosity can often get overlooked, but learning, exploring, and thinking are essential to finding the best solution to any problems you might face. Being curious about the world around you can trigger other people to follow suit and express their own curiosity as well.

New businesses thrive on ideas. By developing curiosity you can help to drive innovation and change in your business.

Effective communication

Communication and interpersonal skills at work ensure clear expectations and will improve relationships between co-workers as well. Effective written communication, as well as verbal, will assist you in building solid relationships with your clients, customers and suppliers. How you communicate should be a reflection of your business and the image you’re looking to project.

Resilience

With such a high rate of failure for new businesses, having resilience at work is incredibly important. You will certainly meet resistance in many different forms as you continue down the road to business success, but don’t let this knock you down.

Patience is important – you won’t be making millions overnight, after all. Be resilient in the face of adversity, and you’ll reap the rewards.

Creativity

All businesses must try and be different from what has come before. If your product or service is the same as other things in the market, why would anyone want your product or service? This is where creativity steps in.

Improving your creative thinking will mean you become more innovative, as you’ll create new ideas and consider new and novel ways of improving and developing your product or service.

Networking

Building good relationships with others will help your business get the support it needs and encourage growth too. Networking is the best method of doing this. Effective networking can help you share knowledge, grab new opportunities, and build your reputation as well. You can also meet other small businesses and help each other out.

Networking can often get overlooked when you’re setting up a business – after all, you’ll find yourself with a thousand and one different things to do simultaneously. But building professional networks is so important and well worth the time and effort. You’ll end up with more knowledge, and you’ll also build on your confidence by speaking and networking with people.

Hard skills

Once you’ve aced those soft skills, and have brushed up on your previous knowledge and understanding of each area, you can start to consider hard skills that will help start your business, for example digital marketing and project management.

It’s really easy to feel under-qualified when starting a new business, especially when you look at the competition. By brushing up on these skills, and familiarising yourself with the different minutiae of each one, you’ll put yourself in a much better position to succeed with your business, as well as building your self-confidence.

Project planning and processes

Starting your own business means juggling multiple projects at once, making strong project planning and management skills essential from the very beginning. Understanding how to break down and delegate tasks effectively will help you move faster and more efficiently toward your goals.

Strategising these projects goes hand in hand with the planning stage. To get the best possible results, you need to focus on solving the right problems and optimising your resources. Writing a business plan helps you define your direction, align your priorities, and transition smoothly into a broader business strategy.

Equally important is building the right processes. By putting clear systems in place, you’ll be able to streamline your workflows and make your business more scalable. Understanding how your business functions and how performance can be measured and improved will put you in a strong position to manage growth effectively. With the right strategy and processes in place, you can take your business forward with confidence.

Financial literacy

Not only do you need financial backing to start your business, but you also need to maintain a stream of finances to stay in business. And while you don’t need to be a financial professional, it’s beneficial to have a solid understanding of business finance. This will help you understand your budgets and financial performance.

As your business grows, you might hire someone with a much better understanding of finances to focus on that aspect of the business. Nonetheless, it’s worth having an understanding of all things money. Planning, budgeting, and forecasting are essential aspects of financial analysis, and understanding these things will give you a much better overview of the business.

Digital marketing

Growing your business is one of the main goals, and the most effective way of doing this is by focusing your efforts on digital marketing. Before taking the plunge into the world of digital marketing, you’ll want to make sure you have an understanding of marketing basics as well. This will introduce you to more traditional marketing methods, which can be applied to digital marketing as well.

Marketing not only pits you against your competitors, but it helps to reach out to an audience and make you seem like a more compelling option for them. This can generate significant revenue, so having a marketing strategy in place will facilitate this process. Digital marketing can also help you hire new employees as well, which will grow your team and put your strategy into action.

Start your business journey with FutureLearn

• Starting a Business 1: Vision and Opportunity by the University of Leeds
• Starting a Business 3: Customers and Competitors by the University of Leeds
• Fundamentals of Business Strategy by Sentinel|9
• Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Creative Management for Business Success by Sentinel|9
• Developing New Business Ideas for Commercial Success by the University of Reading
• Success and Failure in Entrepreneurship: Discover the Key to Business Success by Coventry University