Top 5 skills every successful startup founder needs

It is a huge undertaking to start a new business. No matter how innovative your business idea is, you won’t be able to sucessfully implement it without certain interpersonal skills. Is it enough to be creative and persistent? Here are the five key competencies startup founders need to possess to become highly successful. Read our article and learn more.

Startup founder skills – table of contents:

Major roles and responsibilities of a startup founder
Top 5 skills of a successful startup founder
Summary

Major roles and responsibilities of a startup founder

A startup founder should be able to create a vision of the entire business, secure funds for its development and maintain positive stakeholder relationships. Additionally, if a startup does not have a separate CEO position, the founder’s job will be to manage the whole company and delegate tasks to individual team members.

In order to handle all these duties, startup founders need to possess the right interpersonal skills. Here, we have gathered a list of the most desirable ones.

Top 5 skills of a successful startup founder

Team building skills

A startup can’t be successful without a good team. However, building a high-performing team takes a lot of time and patience. All this means that startup owners should have the ability to choose the right people and take difficult decisions related to employees.

They also need to make sure that all the team members are on the same wavelength and collaborate with each other. They ought to be compassionate, but demanding leaders focused on developing strong relationships.

Communication and management skills

Building communication and management skills has profound benefits to any organization. Effective communicators are able to motivate their teams to perform their tasks faster and more efficiently.

Startup founders who manage their companies must be able to convey clear messages and have the ability to delegate tasks. Being a business owner usually means more than communicating with employees, though. Talking to customers and other key stakeholders is key to the success of the venture.

Accounting skills

Startups face a lot of financial challenges. Losing financial liquidity is one of them. Therefore, business founders must possess fundamental bookkeeping skills so they could obtain external funding and keep track of where their money is.

They should also understand the basic concepts of pricing, revenue modeling and cashflow. Over time, as their business grows, startup owners usually hire specialists to handle all the financial issues.

Sales skills

Startup founders also need to develop some sales skills to ensure continued growth for their businesses. However, rather than selling their products or services in a traditional way, they should focus on marketing the company’s vision and presenting themselves as experts in their fields.

In a startup, selling is not simply sticking customers with a product, but trying to understand their needs and establishing a strong relationship with them.

Technical skills

Having basic technical skills is essential for every startup owner. They are especially desirable when the product being designed is immensly complicated.

As the underlying startup idea is to develop a unique solution, business founders can’t simply outsource the whole technical part of the process. Such a method should be avoided at all costs as it might affect the employee motivation and be bad for security reasons.

Top 5 skills of a successful startup founder

We have discussed a few skills that successful business founders should possess, but in fact, many more could be valuable. Strong business leaders must be open minded, persistent in pursuing their goals, and willing to take considerable risks. Startups are, after all, businesses for brave visionaries who want to revolutionize the world.

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Author: Andy Nichols
A problem solver with 5 different degrees and endless reserves of motivation. This makes him a perfect Business Owner & Manager. When searching for employees and partners, openness and curiosity of the world are qualities he values the most.
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