A study found 55% of people start their own business with the idea of being their own boss. The same study found 30% of entrepreneurs completed high school and only 9% held a bachelor’s degree. This indicates that having an academic background is not all it takes for your business to succeed.
So if education is not the root of prosperity for business owners, then what is? To run a business, there are a specific set of skills that should be adopted by entrepreneurs if they do not naturally possess them. Nepal Realistic Solution (NRS) is a management consultancy that has been working closely with startup companies in Nepal and have noticed many of the owners lacking in these necessary skills.
Communication skills are at the root of everything. It seems so easy to do in this technologically advanced world we live in today yet professional and consistent communication is not always fulfilled. Unfortunately, it has been found poor communication between a business and its customers and employees has contributed to its failure. Networking is also a skill complemented by your ability to communicate, it is the ability to exchange information and ideas with individuals and groups that share similar interests. You develop sustainable relationships with people for mutual benefit. The inability to network limits the growth of a business.
Marketing skills include… Creativity, attention to detail, data analysis, and COMMUNICATION! Marketing at the core is about communicating with an audience, knowing how to communicate with a specific group of people is a skill. Business owners often fail to think about marketing strategy. There are countless benefits to forming a strategy but the most important are; it provides an organization an edge over its competitors, it helps in developing goods and services with the best profit and it helps in creating an organizational plan to cater to the customer needs.
Another core skill is problem-solving. We often face problems in our daily lives and the more risks we take the more problems we potentially face. When running a business there is a skill in knowing which risks are worth taking. Problem-solving shall help when mistakes have been made but would you believe that there is an easier way to avoid such situations? Creating a business plan helps you to not only plan everything down to the minor details of operations but identify all risks your business is likely to face and in this plan, you create solutions and mitigations. Business owners that NRS has helped always failed to provide a formal written business plan, a variety of problems arose after a certain period of time and they had been caught off guard by complications they did not plan for.
Creating Professionals Program by NRS has been specifically designed to help individuals who are interested in or currently owning their own business with improving these essential skills. Based upon all of the experiences NRS has had with startups in recent months, it has chosen four course topics in the most failing areas from the businesses. If the owner had only enrolled in this program previously, they could have avoided many of the problems they came to NRS with.