The Best Skills to Learn as a Fastlane Entrepreneur

[Mikkel]

There are plenty of threads about which books you should read, but these books span the gambit of different topics. If you ended up reading each one of these books, you'd be mediocre at many of these skill or incredibly knowledgable with nothing to show for... because you spent all your time reading with no action. Anyways, you always hear people saying, get good at 1 or 2 things and hire people to do the rest.

My question to you Fastlaners is this, what skills have you learned that have proved most beneficial for you?

For myself, I have taught myself branding and social media in my spare time to help build large followings on social media platforms.

Pros: One of many techniques to get eyes on your company/product.
Great way to interact with your customers/followers.
Branding is incredible important when trying to help people envision what your product will help them do, the lifestyle they can live etc.

Cons: You need PLENTY of other skills to sell a product. Simply having a social media account will not bring in money. You need to provide value and make sure your customers know that.


Some ideas that I have heard are:
Writing copy
Coding
Learning about stocks
SEO
AdWords
Etc.


Now the list above is not necessarily the best things to learn, but rather examples.

What skills do you find useful to help you succeed?

I hope this will thread will surface some skills that people may have not though of previously. This is not meant for someone to learn all the skills listed but rather choose what may be most beneficial to them, so they can hone in their skills on one or two things.

 

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[Yoda]

Selling.

The premises of Entrepreneurship are based on selling something. For you, branding is the marketing and attention arm, but you need to sell something. It's selling you (or your time), or a product you're offering.

 

[GuestUser155]

Finding problems to solve.

Everything else can be outsourced.

 

[The-J]

Sales, first and foremost. If you cannot convince someone that your solution is the best solution, then you're not going to make it. How else are people gonna give you money?

Effective communication. This goes along with sales but isn't exactly the same thing. Effective communication essentially means making sure you and the other party are understanding each other on multiple levels. One sentence to you may mean something completely different to the other person. Your job is to make sure that what they hear is what you mean.

Emotions and vision management. Everyone who is in your corner needs to be on the same page. Again, this goes hand in hand with communication but it's more about applying it to different contexts. Customers, investors, strategic partners, employees, they all need to believe in what you see. They need to believe in your vision. Not only that, you need to keep them feeling good about your vision. They need to always feel like your vision is going to benefit them in some way. (Also, your family needs to believe in your vision. If your wife doesn't believe in your vision, guess what? She'll be gone soon.)

None of these skills have anything to do with computers or money, but they have everything to do with people. Think about how human you are, how unique you are, the stresses you feel... well every customer, business owner, decision maker, manufacturer, or employee you come across is just as human as you are. No more, no less.

There's also a lot that has to do with oneself as well. You need your head on straight in order to succeed at this. People who are wavering and weak do not become successful entrepreneurs.

 

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[MakeItHappen]

What skills to learn obviously depends on the kind of business you are in and the goals you have. You want to make sure you know the most about the business you are in.

Besides that without good marketing and selling you will have a very hard time no matter what business you are in.

However one of the key skills that I am looking forward to acquire is human resource management.

If you have the skill to get the best employees (& keep them) and create a great culture you will have a huge competitive advantage in pretty much every market. It is also a skill that can only be mastered with a lot of practice and failing which creates a great barrier.

"All a company is is a bunch of people together to create a product or service." - Elon Musk​

Of course if you want to create a small automatic one-man business, a lifestyle business as it is called by many, than HR might not be of any importance to you.

However, all create fortunes of the past have been build by entrepreneurs who had a lot of employees. Even today pretty much all big businesses are no one-man shows.
I remember a time when you could make a lot of money via affiliate marketing as a single person. Today all the big time affiliates have teams (employees). You just can't compete as a single person against an affiliate marketer with a team of 20 very smart, motivated people.

So to me the skill of HR seems to be a very important one.

As Elon Musk says, a company is just a bunch of people together with the goal of creating/offering a great product/service.
If you have the skill to get the best people in your industry and create a great culture your competition will have a very hard time competing with you.

 

[Harti]

The most important topics for me are (in this order):

• Emotions (if you don't know how to work with them, you won't EVER reach your goals)
  
• Marketing (especially: buying traffic, copywriting)
• Identifying opportunities according to CENTS
• Outsourcing (how to find the best people for your budget)

 

[devine]

The best skills entrepreneur should have have nothing to do with entrepreneurship actually.
Sales? Can be outsourced.
Delivery cannot.

Copywriting? Can be outsourced.
Linguistics cannot.

Business management? Can be delegated.
Personal management cannot.

Invest in yourself, develop personal qualities, take a road less traveled.

 

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[The-J]

Sales? Can be outsourced.

Not when you're trying to convince a group of VCs to give you money for your vision. That's a form of sales.

 

[devine]

Not when you're trying to convince a group of VCs to give you money for your vision. That's a form of sales.

That's called delivery. And how well you deliver depends on your linguistic skills.
People who can deliver and are fluent in practical cognitive linguistics own people who can sell, any day on week. Jordan Belfort wasn't a salesperson, unlike many people think.

 

[Andy Black]

I don't think it's about hard technical skills.

If you're selling a service, then sure, you need skills that people will hire you for, then you need to be able to sell those skills or you'll go hungry. A hired gun who isn't hired doesn't need to be much of a gun-slinger.

After you get beyond thinking of yourself as "The AdWords Guy" or "The Social Media Marketing Guy", you should start hiring those people and thinking of yourself as the business owner.

Then I think the most valuable skill is "problem solving", and the ability to keep moving forward.

Can you call "persistence" a skill?

I put my money on someone who's relentless over someone with skills any day.


We all here need to get skilled at building businesses that make us money. How about that?

Anyway, here's some aha moment I had recently:

• www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/youre-selling-the-wrong-product-4-mins.68704

 

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[healthstatus]

If you are in charge, you have to know how to sell. You sell ideas to employees, vision to investors, products to consumers and bs to bankers.

Networking, you need to be able to walk into a room and meet people in a way that interests them in you and that means you being interested in them. This skill can really pay off.

 

[Mikkel]

Damn. All of these responses were fantastic! Definitely not was I was expected, but exactly what I was hoping for.

Major takeaways - It is not so much the skill but rather how you can influence people through communication.
Persistence is always talked about in this forum, but as a skill rather than a trait is new to me! @Kak has a fantastic forum post on just this right here.

 

[Interesting Life]

Getting yourself to take the actions you need to take when you need to take them.

 

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[TonyStark]

LEARN TO LISTEN

 

[safff]

It depends on your business really. Some are core, some that seem core aren't so much.

Selling to a degree, it depends on your goals. But then we're constantly selling our own image to get people's buy-in so it becomes not limited to just sales..

Similarly - Copywriting is something that I had vastly underestimated until recently and you don't have to be building websites or selling products for it to become an essential.

Coding - if you're not going to need it then less so and could be time poorly spent.

Learning 'people skills', or as a course I did refereed to them as people mechanics. Learn how to strike a chord with people, influence people and make people want to know you. It's amazing where the most obscure connections can lead you. True story, I recently got talking about hobbies to a guy at the airport, and now I'm on the verge of selling him a product through someone local to me with a small finder's fee in the form of a few free products. I'm typically a recluse in public and was determined to strike up a conversation with at least 10 complete strangers on my trip that day to break the habit - made me realise the potential if you could harness that approachability day to day..

I think the single biggest skill is life management and 'self understanding'.

What I mean by that, is a level of control over your belief systems, emotions, level of focus, self motivation that can only be developed, not flicked on like a lightbulb. Once you truly know what makes you tick, how to get yourself out of a jam, how to take a step back before reacting, what your real hapiness is, why you react negatively to certain situations etc, will you truly reach a level of constant drive that is conducive to entrepreneurism..

 

[Yoda]

LEARN TO LISTEN

What?

 

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[Jake]

Testing

Test products until you find something that people will pay you for
Test specified groups of individuals until you find your audience
Test marketing channels until you find the most cost effective way to reach your audience
Test your sales platform to improve your conversion rate

Once you've got that figured out the next skill to obtain is to care about your customers. Go out of your way to make your customers feel great.

 

[Siberia]

If you are in charge, you have to know how to sell. You sell ideas to employees, vision to investors, products to consumers and bs to bankers.

Networking, you need to be able to walk into a room and meet people in a way that interests them in you and that means you being interested in them. This skill can really pay off.

 

[Siberia]

The entrepreneurial charisma opens any door and is always the reference skills. Without this ability that others perceive just meet the person, I think it can not qualify Entrepreneur.This quality and skill raises for the person on the indefinite and annoying background noise.

 

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[townhaus]

What skills to learn obviously depends on the kind of business you are in and the goals you have. You want to make sure you know the most about the business you are in.

Besides that without good marketing and selling you will have a very hard time no matter what business you are in.

However one of the key skills that I am looking forward to acquire is human resource management.

If you have the skill to get the best employees (& keep them) and create a great culture you will have a huge competitive advantage in pretty much every market. It is also a skill that can only be mastered with a lot of practice and failing which creates a great barrier.

"All a company is is a bunch of people together to create a product or service." - Elon Musk​

Of course if you want to create a small automatic one-man business, a lifestyle business as it is called by many, than HR might not be of any importance to you.

However, all create fortunes of the past have been build by entrepreneurs who had a lot of employees. Even today pretty much all big businesses are no one-man shows.
I remember a time when you could make a lot of money via affiliate marketing as a single person. Today all the big time affiliates have teams (employees). You just can't compete as a single person against an affiliate marketer with a team of 20 very smart, motivated people.

So to me the skill of HR seems to be a very important one.

As Elon Musk says, a company is just a bunch of people together with the goal of creating/offering a great product/service.
If you have the skill to get the best people in your industry and create a great culture your competition will have a very hard time competing with you.

I'm not sure about this...there will always be plenty of smart/talented people that can get the job done and they are almost always replaceable IMO.

 

[TonyStark]

I think your ability to think in a first principles mindset helps you a lot.

Say you want to improve a part of your business (or your business as a whole), then you need to know how to make that happen.

Thinking in first principles means you break things down to their core truths, and go from there.

 

[Siberia]

I think your ability to think in a first principles mindset helps you a lot.

Say you want to improve a part of your business (or your business as whole), then you need to know how to make that happen.

Thinking in first principles means you break things down to their core truths, and go from there.

Y

 

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[Siberia]

Y

Yes. You have to find ways to make things happen. We must create the conditions necessary because 'the luck we smile. I find the acronym below mentioned very interesting. LUCK: Labour Under Correct Knowledge

 

[Guest34764]

The ability to win anyone over to your side, to get them to say yes.

While you could probably check it off as just "sales", It's more than that.

It's being clever, using things to your advantage, and getting people to agree with you.

Did Andrew have the best selling skills?Well, they were damn sure good, but he was able to sway people over to his side much more, and especially the people who worked for him as some of them carried special talents above himself.

Andrew was able to create a tsunami of agreements, and all of those agreements started to pile up and give him unimaginable wealth.

I believe that's the best skill as an entrepreneur can have.Your selling skills could be second, but if you can get someone much smarter than you to hop aboard with just words, than that I believe is amazing.

(too tired to write rest of skills needed, but I just wanted to put my two cents.)

 

[Tomekmeister]

Discipline.

 

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[kytro360]

The best skills you need for an online business (this after after talking to multiple 6-7 figure marketers) are:

- A solid grasp of direct response marketing (aka get good at copywriting and what makes people tick)
- List building (aka how to build a large email list)

...and of course you need to have a clear mindset that you will be successful no matter what.

 

[Mr. Gray]

The most important topics for me are (in this order):

• Emotions (if you don't know how to work with them, you won't EVER reach your goals)
  
• Marketing (especially: buying traffic, copywriting)
• Identifying opportunities according to CENTS
• Outsourcing (how to find the best people for your budget)

CENTS?

 

[Mikkel]

CENTS?

It is an acronym for:

Need
Entry
Control
Scale
Time

Read the book, it will make much more CENTS. Probably the best books I've read in terms of valuable information.

 

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[jon.a]

CENTS?

http://www.themillionairefastlane.com/download.php

 

[GMSI7D]

the best skill to learn is mastering yourself

if you can't master yourself, you won't master outside obstacles

mastering yourself begins with believing that you can succeed

if you come from a poor background, odds are that you can't believe you can have the good life

self image, faith, etc : all these things are your innergame and innergame is the most important asset

discipline, will, energy, etc : all these military-like things will lead you nowhere if you don't believe that you can succeed



because your subconscious mind will sabotate or help your effort to fit your beliefs















just remember that one man with a strong faith in himself can lead millions of people and even master the entire british army
as Gandhi did.