The Importance Of Entrepreneurial Skills

Entrepreneurial Skills at Work

One of the hardest jobs I have had in life was being an entrepreneur. I was not one of those students who just had a hobby and tried making some extra money; I was a true entrepreneur. Back in 2010, while attending Texas State University, my best friend and I co-founded an online marketing company. Once we finished the legalities of starting a new company, we were finally prepared to set out and build our business, Row.net. In the article by Jayson Demers titled, 7 Communication Skills Every Entrepreneur Must Master, he highlights 7 critical skills that did, and would have helped me in my short time as an entrepreneur. I will be going over 4 of the 7 critical skills and how they helped my short tenure as an entrepreneur

As he break downs everyone’s daily communication percentages, he states that a whopping 45% is attributed to listening. At our company, Row.net, one of our primary objectives was to listen what the customers had to say and create exactly what they requested. More specifically, we designed personalized websites, put them on the map in Google and landed them onto social media sites. To figure out what the customer wanted, our job was to listen to their ideas, details, and objectives. Dempsy correctly states, "solid listening skills help you more effectively serve clients [and] make sales." At row.net, we did do quite of bit of talking, but when we wanted to provide better customer service, we listened to everything our clients had to say. Perhaps, at times, we may have talked too much during our sales pitches and should have listened more deeply on what exactly the client

Unfortunately, this was a skill we could not master. As I was began working in Dallas, while he was in San Marcos, Texas, communication and meeting specific deadlines was difficult for us to accomplish. Dempsy explains that you must "under-promise and over-deliver." What the author is conveying is that you should not make promises to your clients that you cannot keep, and when you deliver your results, you deliver the heck out of those results! My friend and I would try and keep specific deadlines, but since both of us were in school and not in the same office, we often times could not keep those deadlines. Although, we did try to over-deliver our results and bring in new ideas for our clients, but at times, it was not enough to be excused for our late deadlines. If we focused primarily on setting easy deadlines and accomplishing those results, plus more, we may have had better customer satisfaction. Although Row.net is still up and running in San Marcos, this was a large enough problem for me shuffling school and other part-time work in Dallas and eventually backed out of the