What are the Skills and Experience Required for Entrepreneurship?

I was recently asked this question and thought that since I invested some time in replying, that perhaps it was worthy of a post – I’ll let you decide…

My entrepreneurial experience so far indicates that it’s a constantly changing mix of Investment, Vision, and Risk…

Investment takes the form of financial, human, and physical resources that constantly require adjustment because change is the only constant in today’s business environment. Financial investment is the easiest of the three – it comes from either self-funding/personal investment or infused-funding from outside sources.

Vision’s a little more tricky… it requires experience, insight, agility, and the ability to effectively direct your resources to achieve today’s goals,while identifying and moving the organization to realize tomorrows opportunities. Experience comes from the hits and misses and is a refining process that over time defines the leader. Simplified, insight is a combination of market understanding and gut instinct. Agility is the capability to move quickly within the marketplace and to adjust to changing demand – not an easy task by any means. Directing resources requires leadership recognition by everyone involved, and presumes that everyone on the bus is headed in the same direction at the same time – again, not an easy task but achievable.

Risk is by far the coolest attribute of entrepreneurship. It’s the driving force behind vision and investment that gets the job done – or not. Risk takes many forms. It’s a decision to right-size current operations or expand into the future. It’s the resource investment in the next big product or innovation that’s going to change the game; and conversely the wrong decision to invest in something that takes you down an inappropriate road that could crush your ambitions. The successful entrepreneur learns how to correctly balance or manage risk against reward. Noone’s perfect at balancing risk against reward, everyone makes mistakes, the important thing is to learn from them and to keep moving forward.

Well, that’s the reader’s digest version I’ve come up with anyways – hope it’s helped you in your quest to understand the entrepreneur (at least this one) a little better.

The bottom line really is to simply enjoy what you do and to do it well.

Best Regards,
Chris Ballard
CEO, Pacific Northwest Print & Fulfillment, Inc.