Venture Kid

Practicing Entrepreneurship

February 9, 2009 – 12:57 pm | by Matt Ackerson

How do you become a successful entrepreneur or a better entrepreneur? You learn to practice it, and then you keep practicing it as much as possible. Entrepreneurship and skill in business are no different from learning any other trade or skill. If you want to be a great musician and you have some baseline level of innate talent and a willingness to learn, you must practice your instrument in order to get better. If you want to be a better computer science programmer you must practice the skill in order to get better. If you want to get sharpen your public speaking skills, you will not improve your ability to do so by thinking about it. You must practice it. You must get up in front of an audience as often as possible and speak.

Entrepreneurship is the same way: the more you practice the better you will get. There’s no secret formula. Depending on the type of business you are looking to create you must develop a set of general skills and knowledge. If you are starting a web-based business, you should probably learn a little bit about programming and design. If you are starting a financial services firm that manages the assets of large, private investors, you will need to refine your communication, sales, and analytical skills.

There is a wrong way to practice entrepreneurship, and that is to not practice it. By this I mean to not act, to become too mired in your own thoughts and apprehension and circular planning that you forget the fact that to accomplish anything in business you need to do two simple things: build & sell. If your business product idea is a widget, you’ve got to build it and then sell it. If you need funding to do so, you will have to raise it. If you need the help of others you will have to thoroughly communicate your ideas to potential team members and convince them to help you get stuff done, and to get the product built.

It is simple in practice but difficult to do in reality. To practice entrepreneurship you need to constantly build and sell. If you become mired in planning and forget the importance of building and selling then you unlikely to succeed. The more you practice the better you will get and the more likely you are to succeed.