Get On the Ball In These 4 Areas To Be An Expert At Your Own Biz

Last Updated on May 26, 2019 by Jessica Adams

When you first start working for yourself, you either know exactly where your business acumen lies or you need to know fast! Whether you freelance or you’re gearing up to launch your own business, you most likely know what areas you excel in. What is that ONE thing you love to do AND you’re good at? If you had it your way, you would just focus on that one thing and let everyone else do the rest of the work!

Besides, you can always call your friend who’s really good at web design to help you with your website. Oh, and making spreadsheets? Definitely call your friend who is a wiz at Excel AND Google Sheets, if you need a spreadsheet of any kind. You can probably get away with doing things initially, on your shoestring budget. But if your freelance or growing business is sustained, you can’t keep delegating fundamental business tasks that you should know as an Entrepreneur.

There are about 4 main areas that come to mind as being essential for you to get to know ASAP in your business. What you need to do, is get on the ball in each of these 4 areas, to be an expert at your own biz.

Get On the Ball In These 4 Areas

To Be An Expert At Your Own Biz

Become a Conversationalist

In every single business, there comes a time when you will have to communicate. You could be dealing with a vendor or fellow business owner. Talking in person or over the phone. Either way, you need master to art of being a Conversationalist. Learning both, how to talk face-to-face and in writing, are equally important. It may sound a bit odd since, of course, you can communicate. But running a business and making sure you come across professional, requires a slight departure from what you’re used to.

You’d be surprised with how ‘business speak’ dominates the email communication between businesses. Apart from business communications, you might want to consider a course in public speaking or debate. Running your own business relies a great deal on your ability to connect to people, deliver a strong message and overall good impression of yourself. Delivering a strong elevator pitch can be the difference between losing or closing a client.

Become an Excel Wizard

Remember that friend who was a wiz at whipping up spreadsheets? Those were the days, when you’d call her up and ask her to do, practically all of your bookkeeping. Now, you have become “the wiz” (or at least, you’re attempting get through an Excel tutorial). Who knows, you might prefer Libre Office to Microsoft Excel. Or you could secretly be an avid Google Sheets fan. Either way, you need to master the art of creating and maintaining spreadsheets. It could be for something as simple as keeping track of your contacts database. Or handling all of your accounts received and accounts payable. Of course, you’ll probably want to use software such as Quickbooks to do the actual bookkeeping. But having a copy of all the numbers going in/out on a spreadsheet is a great backup!

Become Web Savvy…ish

It’s 2018 and whether your business is online or out there in the real world, your business needs a website. Now, there are web designers out there who are educated and trained to build you a website and would offer to build you one, for a price. If you decide to hire a web designer, you want to make sure that they know what they’re doing. This is where things get a little tricky. How are you to know if they know what they’re doing or if they’re just telling you what you want to hear?

And this is where I’ll recommend that you learn “the basics” of web design, HTML/CSS and WordPress. There are tons of fabulous courses all over the Internet and most of them are absolutely FREE! Knowing what your site needs and having the ability to communicate that need to your web designer can make a huge difference in the overall process. In fact it could mean the difference between getting a web design quote of a few hundred dollars or a cool two to three thousand….

If You Still Need….Go, Get Some Help!

If you still find that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to run your amazIng business AND attempt to acquire all these new skills, a time management or project management application (most always FREE on smartphones) will help you out a lot! Another great way to acquire some extra help would be to hire Virtual Assistant to help you work more efficiently, overall. On that topic, you can find plenty of resources online to teach you all the skills mentioned. However, it might be less time consuming to follow a structured course such as the ones that Training Connection offers to those of us here in the greater Los Angeles area.

Soon, your business will be well underway to finding its way to an IPO. And you’ll finally be in the position to fork over the cash and hire an Excel Specialist to maintain some of those fancy Excel files for you!

This has been a guest contribution from Anna Carson, in the Small Biz “Mini-Post” Series. 1K words or less & open for Guest Posting!

Edited by Jessica Rose Adams