Top skills to acquire if you want to run your own business someday

The following are the key takeaways from a webinar of the same name by Lawsikho's Ramanuj Mukherjee

Become a knowledge and skill acquisition machine - Anything can help. Even reading a book can help. There is nothing wrong with bookish knowledge. But it is not complete. It is important to understand that it is not complete. It is giving you a perspective, it is giving you information but nothing is final. That is why it is important be a knowledge and skill acquisition machine. There is no end to it. You keep doing it. Steve Jobs learnt Calligraphy in College. This knowledge helped him to come with better fonts while designing Macintosh. So you have to be a knowledge aficionado.

Become a World Class Communicator - APJ Abdul Kalam spoke about how one might not be a great speaker but still be a great communicator. To be a good business leader, you have to develop this skill. You can be a very good storyteller. Analogies can be other great example. Inter-personal skills – oral and writing – in both ways, you are able to communicate through writing as well as speaking.

Blogging and Article writing - One of the things that you need to make your company successful is that you have to attract good people to come and work with you. That first 10 people are very important. And people will come and work with you for no other reason but your vision. What are you trying to build? What are you trying to do? Why is it important? If you don’t succeed what will happen? If you succeed what will happen? All these things need to be articulated to get people excited to work with you.When you are building a business, the first question to ask is why have you chosen this problem to work on? When you are building a business, usually you are solving a problem. If you are not solving any problem, what sort of business are you building? But why this problem? Why should anyone care about this business? Why should anyone care about this particular problem? So when you are able to think about it and articulate it, people will come to you, customers will come to you, your initial supporters will come to you, your initial employees, co-founders or even investors will come to you because they read and they are persuaded that yes, I believe in this cause. Yes, I believe in this company. I believe in this idea. So this is very very critical.

Basic Video Skill – Today’s public speaking is at a very different level. Video communication has become very important. You can impact people through videos. There are very cool softwares which can make a video more attractive and drive a point home. The future is video communication. If you are able to ace this skill, you can build an audience and get your ideas across to the world and it can make a good difference.

Communicate with Actions and not just words

Ditch the vague and cliché – Skip roundabout bullshit. You will not be rewarded in real world for saying vague and cliché things. Lot of people have a tremendous lack of clarity. So you have to make sure that there is no vagueness in what you are saying.

Become world class at Self-Management – If you are managing yourself really well, from there your leadership starts. So you can start talking about managing others, or managing an organization etc. You should become very good at managing your mind, body, health, emotion etc.

Relationships and Networking – Are you good at building new relationships, nurturing them and maintaining them? Are you able to deliver value to people you are networking with? If you are not able to do some of these things it will have a huge impact on your prospects as a founder. It is a mindset you need to develop over a period of time and you get better and better at it.

Learning to build and manage a team. – You need to be able to attract good quality people. And you need to make them perform. Some people will not perform and you need to fire them. Some people will perform and you need to keep them excited, you have to help them to do better and better over a period of time.

Connect – Are you connecting with people who are going to be able to help you? Are they connecting with your ideas and concepts?

Inspire - Are you able to get people to move just beyond thinking and debating and ideating and brainstorming to actually committing to do something?

Set High Standards – People will do something and say this is it. This is only what we can do. Insisting on a higher standard is a very important job of a founder and a leader.

Training People – When you are a small business, you don’t have people who come trained, or you don’t have enough money to hire trained people, in such a case you will have to learn a lot of skills yourself and train people in those skills to produce the results that you want.

Manage – Managing a startup can be equivalent to managing a Nursery or KG class. People are prone to disruption, they want to get paid and do no work, even if they want to do work they want to go in different direction and not follow the policy of the company or not follow a cohesive path. So keeping people together, focusing on the right priorities and keeping them going in the right direction is very challenging.

Support as they grow and evolve – You have to be the support system for a lot of people. As they grow and evolve they will face different challenges and you have to be their friend and guide whom they can come to for guidance and emotional support.

Retain – Better than an MBA you can go to a startup and you can learn a lot. But in reality it is quite difficult. If someone is really good, big companies want to hire him. There are companies which have more money than you and which are more desperate than you even if they are smaller so they are ready to pay them more money. You can never win that race even if you are paying above average salary than the market. People will stay because they feel like a part of a tribe, they feel like they are part of something big. They feel like they are part of making history. They feel like they are part of some important work that they don’t want to go just because some people offer more money. It is much harder for anybody to offer an environment where people can thrive. Where people can feel great, where people can feel that they are doing the best work of their life. Certain people will see that environment and complain that people are working too much and will run away. It is good for non-performers to run away. The people who are high performers would want to stay. You have to create a culture where high performers are sought after and low performers go away.

Developing Leadership – As your startup grows, you would want people who provide leadership rather than just do a job. People who are not just following you but are leaders in their own right.

Integrity and Accountability – First of all, you need to have this, and then you need to promote and cultivate it in the organization. There is no culture of lying, misleading, cutting corners etc. You need to believe in these things and you need to promote these things and it is harder to produce results with these things. You might be tempted as to why don’t I lie. But if you build that culture it will pay off later.

Socio-Political, philosophical and legal perspective – Which is why you need to be a knowledge acquiring machine. Suddenly you are responsible for deciding the direction in which your company is going. If you don’t have an understanding of the socio political system, then you will not know what to do. There will be such situations where you will have to decide which opportunities to go after and which to avoid. What are the risks that your company should avoid? What are the opportunities that are going to open up in the future? How does the future look like and can you take that into account? You need to be someone who understands where the world is headed. What are the forces that are shaping the world. Once you understand those things it will have a huge impact on your business.

In order to develop this perspective, you have to be a reader – For example, is conservatism on the rise in the world? If so, why? Is identity politics on the rise in the world? If so, why? What about its impact on India? How will it impact my business? Laboratory produced meat – is it possible that this is the future of food? What are the most important trends in food? What kind of work will be there for lawyers? What kind of lawyers will be in demand? Issues like the concept of algorithmic collusion in competition law, funding of losses, predatory high pricing, killing competition with massive funding, selling things below cost etc. Will same sex marriage be allowed in India? Once you study what is happening in the world, you might get an idea about what is going to happen in India. Look at rise of concerns around privacy in the world, you will realize what is important to people. What is the priority for the next generation? How do they see the world? It is important for you to understand this if you want business continuity.

Vision – It is something where you are able to imagine a future that touches and inspires other people. This will be informed by a better understanding of the world and if it so, it will be a more powerful vision that is likely to succeed and easier for people to buy in.

Questioning the status quo – People are having problem paying change in the bus. People always take this for granted. But an Entrepreneur looks at this and says can I make a change here. Can I solve this problem? Metro cards – there is a long queue of people trying to recharge their cards. Can there be a solution that we can pay from our phone directly to recharge the card? Normally, people are taught not to question the status quo. However, an entrepreneur is different.

Developing an ability to build – Can you build something? Can you physically build a product? The ability to write a book etc.

Marketing and Outreach – A good marketer is someone who sits in front of the computer and thinks how can I tell the whole world about this product or this service. I have a project, how can I get a lot of other people to come together and participate. How can I influence a lot of other people with this idea? Do you know what kind of content to post on social media to get a lot of attention? Can you make a good newsletter? Do you understand how to run Facebook, LinkedIn, Google ads etc?

Become good at managing money – You need to be able to track the cashflow and prioritise how to spend that money if you want to succeed.