Are you bored of being an employee and yearn to become your boss? Have you the required skills to run a small business? In this article, I look at the type of skills that people need to possess to be able to successfully run a small business.
My name is Allen Mutum and I have been running my own business for around five years now. Previously I had been employed by a major IT company and even though I progressed well during my time there, I always wanted to run my own business, to choose my hours of work and have no one to answer to, etc.
I am now a Sales & Marketing consultant helping Small Businesses to promote & market their products/services and I also help people to promote their websites as a form of web marketer or digital marketing.
I am not bound by what hours I work, for example, nine to five. I sometimes work late at night when I do the web promotion work but have the day free to relax. This is not to say that I do not work hard, because I think that I do work very hard.
Self-belief is an important skill required to be your boss. If you have an inner belief and self-confidence that you will make the business succeed, then you will have a great chance to make it work. There will be times when during a month you only earn a small amount of money but in other months you should earn quite a lot.
Some people prefer to know exactly what their income will be each month and these people may struggle to be their boss.
Small Business Mastery
Discipline is another requirement if you are to be a success at running your own small business. It is very easy to become lazy and to watch too much television or to have an extra couple of hours in bed in the morning. Even though you may have nobody to answer to, you have to be of the character to ensure you put in the required number of hours and work.
I also think it is important to have a positive attitude. There will be periods when business is slow, this is where you may start to think negatively. This can lead people into becoming very stressed and even depressed.
By thinking in a positive way and working even harder to attract more work is the only way to react in this situation. This of course is not that easy to do but in my opinion, there is not enough time in the day to get depressed.
Lastly is the ability to always try and improve yourself and to learn from any mistakes you make. We all make mistakes which is fine and natural.
There is again not enough time to beat ourselves up over these errors, all we need to do is to learn from them and then move on. We should always be looking at ways of improving the business as well as our knowledge. Standing still and treading water is no way to continue.
Allen Mutum 