3.1 Entrepreneurial Skills and Tools

Welcome back to this career readiness course on the essentials of entrepreneurship. This is module three, and in this module we’re gonna be looking at the skills and tools of entrepreneurship. Now how do you take all the many different skills an entrepreneur needs, and all the hundreds of tools that we use, and boil this down into one small overview session? But what I did is, I really looked at what are the most essential things, just in my own life, and in my own progress as an entrepreneur. What have been the most essential things that I absolutely couldn’t have done without? What are my most important skills and tools? So I boiled those down into basically five topics that we’re gonna cover in this module. Leadership and management, marketing, human resources, operations and processes, and then metrics and dashboards. This is what I find myself using all the time, and this is what I find that I’ve used consistently throughout my own growth and my own journey as an entrepreneur. Okay, so the first skill that we wanna talk about is leadership and management. And I’ve just fooled you basically cuz yes, these are two different skills. Those who are leaders and those who are managers. And honestly, very rarely do you find a single individual who exemplifies both. You might be a bit more of a leader and struggle with management. You might be a better manager and struggle with leadership. I don’t care which one it is, if you’re gonna be an entrepreneur you’ve got to start operating in both. The one that comes naturally to you, great. The other one, you’re going to have to put time, effort. You’re going to have to read up on it, learn more, try harder, okay. It’s hard to be an entrepreneur. It’s hard to create a corporation, a profitable competing business entity out of nothing, and you’re going to need to be on your game both in terms of leadership and in terms of management. What I want to talk about here is, I want to just introduce you to what I believe is the fundamental difference between the two. And the way that we use leadership, and the way that we use management. So what I’ve done is I’ve come up with this little graph. It’s a 3D graph that kind of shows what I believe happens with leadership, and what I believe happens with management. And in the graph, what you will see is we have two different kinds of change. We have directional change and we have resource change. When I say directional change, it doesn’t necessarily mean doing something completely different, going in a completely new direction, although it can, okay. But directional change is when we shift the course, primarily of where we’re going, and that is one of the fundamental skills of a leader. There’s an old saying, right, you think you’re a leader, you wonder if you’re a leader. Look behind you, see if anybody’s following. If nobody’s following, you’re not leading, therefore the opposite is true. If you look behind you, and you see people following, you have people following you, you are leading. So what a leader does is a leader actually affects directional change. Now, while that happens, while a leader affects directional change, there’s almost always a change in the utilization of resources, or the types of resources utilized. So, leaders do affect resource change, but their primary effect is in the realm of directional change, okay? Leaders understand the difference between a group and a team, and calling a group a team doesn’t make a group a team, okay? Leaders set vision, leaders set mission, leaders set goals, and by doing so, they take a group and transform it into a team. People who actually work together for a common goal, a common purpose, a common mission, following an actual vision. This is one of the hallmarks of leadership. This is the area in which leaders operate, and like I said, the skills of a manager, they’re not mutually exclusive. Leaders don’t completely stick to their areas and managers completely stick to their areas. As you’re about to see, they overlap a little bit. So if leaders are concerned with directional change, what are managers doing? What do managers do? Well I’ve already eluded to it in the leadership part. Managers affect resource change. That’s really primarily the job of a manager. I’ve heard it said that management is changing one’s reality. That’s management. Management is changing one’s reality. You get into a department and you say, wow, this department’s a mess, this department’s unorganized. You gonna complain about it or you gonna change it? Change it, make it an organized department. My team is not motivated, motivate them. Change your reality. Our competitor is huge, right? Change it, take his market share, make him smaller, all right? Change, changing reality, that’s management. Managers do this by affecting resource change. They can change the type of resource used. They can hire people, they can fire people, right? Changing the human resources, they can change the utilization of resources. We used to use it for this, but now we’re gonna use it for this. We’re gonna re-employ that resource differently. So whether it’s changing the nature of the resource, the size of it, the amount of it, the quantity of it or changing the utilization of the resource, managers affect resource change. Now as you can see in my little diagram you can see that while they affect resource change, they can also effect some directional change. Changing the way you use something might change to a degree, the direction that somebody’s taking, okay? So yes, again, they step on the ground of leadership. They do exhibit leadership skills and affect a little bit of directional change just as leaders often affect a bit of resource change. Okay, so, two different skills primarily concerned with two different aspects of running a business, but intertwined. As a entrepreneur, you’re gonna have to do both. There’s no way of getting out of it. Yes, you’re probably strong in one and consider yourself weak in another but you’re gonna have to brush that up. You’re gonna have to learn. You’re gonna have to develop. To the point where as I often say, my weakness is probably stronger than most people’s strength.