6 most critical & important skills to learn as a business leader

Education and Qualifications doesn't matters, all that matters is your capabilities. Skills and capabilities of business modeling which is becoming a necessity in every passing second.
But the most important thing to understand is many business owners have no idea what a system driven business is.
Today we're living in a highly competitive business world, it is more important than ever for leaders to have a strong skill set. There are many different skills that can help business leaders to work as smoothly as possible, but some of the most important are the ones which we're going to discuss in today's article…

#1 Content Marketing

Whether you are a B2B business or B2C business, doesn't matter, today content is the king. Content, that adds value to your customers is the best and the easiest way to grabbing attention, establishing credibility and create curiosity about your business.

As a business owner, if you're not mastering the art of content marketing, then you're actually becoming outdated because the amount of content, people are consuming has drastically increased from the past few years. 

If you don't have any idea about how to create meaningful content that grabs the attention of your targeted customer, that means you've gone out of mind because you probably heard the phrase, "out of sight is out of mind". As a business owner, you need to understand the power of a content. A content is one of the most important and sensitive technique to increase conversion & drive sales. Now…, its becoming a game of grabbing attention and the best way to grab infinite attention is "content marketing"

#2 Master The Capability Of Business Modeling

Even today, most business owners just launch a product or service & expect that to make money. Today, the times have changed. Just because you've a high quality product or service doesn't means you'll build a successful business. 

Today, success comes with a culmination of product/service in the right "business model strategy". So, if your business model strategy is not profitable or scalable, no matter what the quality of your product is you're running into a dead end route. 

Today, product and service can be made by anybody & in any industry, what differentiate the winners from the losers is a "Strong Business Model". 

The models is a culmination of ¹ knowing who your target customers is, ² Having the right product/service funnel to take the customer through a journey of impact, ³ Having the right price point which is both competitive and profitable & ⁴ Having the right channel for scale and expansion. Even if you get this 4 points right, then you've a model which is viable for today's day and age.  

#3 Understanding How To Leverage AI

The Opportunities are endless for any business to leverage artificial intelligence. The greatest advantage of a business owner is that you don't have to be technological savvy. 

You've to be able to ask the right questions. We're moving into an era of Socratic inquiry again. It's the people who have the ability to ask the right questions, will get quality answers & solutions from artificial intelligence for their problems. 

So, first, ask yourself, what are the areas in your business, in every single department where you can explore tools of artificial intelligence to minimize your "input" and maximize your "output". Artificial intelligence is going to become the core capability of every business in the coming years. So, develop your ability to ask the right questions the right way.

#4 Design Systems For Every Business Function

The problem here is, most business owners have heard this, and actually made a system driven business and not a people driven business. But, most business owners have no idea what actually a system driven business is! They don't know what are the types of system and how to build & leverage these systems for the growth of the business. The perception of most business owners is that systems cost money and systems slows things down. Which in reality is the exact opposite. Systems ≠ automations and technological solutions, system means having a predictable patterns that can lead you to predictable results. 

#5 Learning How To Fire The Wrong People

Most business owners hires but don't fire even though it is written all over the face of that person that they don't deserve to continue to work even a single day at your work. Now, whatever the reason you're not firing that person, it is going to be detrimental for your business. Just think about it. 

There are 3 kind of people who deserves to be fired; ¹ people who have an integrity issue, people who are lying, cheating, stealing or manipulating, they deserve a zer0 tolerance policy. No matter how critical their role is, these people needs to be fired as quickly as possible.; 

² People who are cultural misfits, the people who are egoistic and arrogant, don't apply the zer0 tolerance policy with them but they need to give feedback to, so that they're aligning to the culture under the workplace. Because if they continue with their behaviours of arrogance, ego, blame game or groupism, then it is only going to saturate the energy from the workplace. And talented people will end up leaving.; 

³ People who are capability misfits, These are the most critical people to fire because they're good from their hearts, hardworking or humble. But they lack the skill sets, they lack the capability to get the job done. Now in these case, many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of having such people in their workplace and not holding them accountable and the business owner end up doing the job by himself/herself only to sustain the salary of that individual. These types of people are nothing more than just with you to waste your time, energy and money. Be strong enough to fire them.

#6 Capability To Design A High-performance Culture

In most workplaces, culture is seen as an intagible element that nobody even talks about and put the effort in designing. But what you need to remember is this "No culture is also a culture, its a culture of chaos and confusion". And in some workplaces, the notion is "We're too small to build a culture and when we scale up that's when we need to build a culture". This the biggest mistake a business can make. You don't build a culture when you scale up, you build a culture "to scale up". 

These are the 6 most critical & highly important skills you need to learn if you are serious about building which is something of value, something which can be scaled up & something that will turn into a successful business. 

Thanks for reading

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