Business Success=Skill/Experience/Passion

Do you have what it takes to succeed in a small business?  It’s fun to read about wonderful businesses to start or franchises to buy. But no matter how fantastic these business opportunities might be, consider carefully how the business fits your skills, experience, and interests. And you need something more to succeed: a passion for this business.

This business owner has a passion for pool. But without skill and experience, he will have a difficult time being successful.  Before you jump into a business opportunity, spend some time taking a personal inventory.

What are your skills? What do you do best? Do you like writing, being creative, working with your hands? If you have a hobby or pastime, you might be able to turn it into a business.

What is your experience? Many successful business owners have taken their experience working for others and turned it into a profitable business for themselves. Do you have business experience?  Do you know your particular industry really well?  What experience do you have that can help you in your small business?

How do your skills and experience fit together? For example, if you have skill with numbers and you have experience with bookkeeping, you would probably do well in a bookkeeping business.

Why you need skills and experience. You must have the skills and experience in the type of business you want to start, or you won’t get far. Here’s why: It takes a lot of money to get started. And you burn up money by making mistakes. So if you don’t know the business and you don’t have the skills, you won’t be able to get far enough with the money before you run out. You can’t afford to make mistakes, and you umake mistakes when you don’t know what you are doing – that takes skill and experience.

Add Passion. Most people, at a certain point in their careers, have generated the experience and they have the skills. But there’s one more ingredient to finding a business that will be successful: Passion.

Akemi Gaines at yes-to-me.com says, “If you go into business with what you can do but hardly care about it, even if you can do it well, you are setting yourself up for misery.”

What is your passion? If you have the skills and the experience to start a business, but you don’t have the passion, your business may not succeed. Starting a business is tough. It means many hours, many days of work, work, work. It may take a year or more to start seeing a positive cash flow, so you can relax a little. The average business takes 5-7 years to be profitable. You have to love what you are doing all this time, to stay motivated to et out of bed each morning and do what you need to do.

Let’s take the bookkeeping business example: you might be a great bookkeeper and you might have all the skills you need to do bookkeeping, but if running a booking business is not your passion, don’t do it. Go work for someone else. Or find another business in which you can use your skills and experience more creatively, to have more fun.

Remember - it takes all three – skill, experience, and passion – to be successful in your own business. Figuring out the best small business opportunity for you takes careful thought and some real self-analysis. Do it right. Do the analysis now.

Image source: Newscom