“Without intention, without value creation routines and the right timing, your important dreams (career, business, financial) will die before you” Javnyuy Joybert

If you are thinking of starting a business, you will need a set of entrepreneurial skills to succeed in today’s competitive market. You must possess the basic skills necessary to enable you to start, develop, finance, and market your own home business enterprises. Successful entrepreneurs are intelligent enough to know when to employ a particular skill during a particular season or phase of their business growth. It takes a lot of intelligence and foresight to make this work.

Good entrepreneurs know it is important to acquire the right enterprise development & growth skills and great entrepreneurs know when to utilize a particular skill to the optimum and create the right results. Are you a good entrepreneur or a great entrepreneur?

Having the right skills and knowing exactly when to utilize a particular skill will help you navigate the inevitable ups and downs of building a business. Couple with solving a problem, developing a perfect product, building the right team, some of the most successful entrepreneurs make the big difference because they match their skillset directly with the needs of their entrepreneurial endeavors in a particular season.

Starting and running a business is not something you can do overnight. It takes careful planning, goal setting, scheduling, and execution. Part of this planning include asking questions like;

Which skills should I acquire? (What skills should I learn to grow my business?)

When should I utilize a particular skill to the optimum?

When should I drop a particular skill and pick a new one?

The strategic skill utilization concept means every entrepreneur should identify and utilize the right skill at the right time in different phases of business growth. Here is a practical illustration

If you have just launched a new product in the market, you are in the phase of utilizing key skills like marketing, sales, distribution, and customer acquisition. You cannot be in this phase and you are using product design skills more.

If you are seeking for funding and or technical support, you need to employ your branding, presentation, networking and partnership building skills more

In every stage of your business growth, the usage of certain skills will decline and the usage of certain skills will rise. It is your responsibility to know when to use a particular skill. Success in business demands more than hard work, commitment and a good product. To succeed, you need to understand and to become excellent in key essential business skills and know when exactly to utilize a particular.

Know when to use your analytical skills, know when to use your leadership and team building skills, know when to use your financial management skills, know when to employ your negotiation skills and many others.

That is why in business, it is imperative to know which skills that you have and those that you will have to learn or delegate to other team members.

Note this vital fact, as your business grows, the skills your business needs to be sustainable will grow too. As your business begin to decline, the skills you need to revive your business will be different. For example:

When your business grows and you desire to enter new markets and serve new customers, your marketing may need to be more sophisticated; therefore, you will need to understand advertising, the media and digital marketing such as email marketing, social media and paid search advertising

Another example, if your expansion plans requires you to spread into other countries will need a unique set of skills for selling in various countries with different ways of doing things and different cultures (international business skills).

The skills that are important to grow your business evolve with time and evolve as your business grows or decline. The way you deal with any business challenge defines how you utilize the skill that can enable you solve the challenge.