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As a business director or owner, it's essential that you can identify and meet the core skills your business needs to be successful.

These skills will be the same whatever business you run - whether you're a sole-trading graphic designer or you head a manufacturing company employing dozens of people.

There are intangible skills you will need, such as leadership skills, the ability to cope with long hours and hard work, and the inner resources to deal with stress and risk-taking. This also includes strategy-setting and the ability to build and manage a team. Step-by-step guide to starting a business.

Essential business skills

There are also functional skills that all businesses need. The smaller your business, the more of these skills you will need personally:

Financial skills

Including cashflow management, how to attract investment, and handling relationships with your bank and accountant

Marketing skills

Including digital marketing, advertising, social media promotion, and market strategy and planning

Sales skills

Including pricing, negotiating, customer service, market research, and tracking competitors

Procurement and purchasing skills

Including tendering for contracts, managing contracts, stock control, and inventory planning

Administration skills

Including record-keeping, billing, accounts preparation, and payroll handling

Personnel skills

Including recruiting staff, managing conflict, staff motivation, staff performance, and managing training

Core business skills

Including IT, written and oral communication, and organisational skills

Recognise your limits

To run a successful business it's essential you recognise the limits of your abilities.

So, as a business owner or director, you also need the skill to know when it's best to hand over tasks to others by delegating, recruiting, or outsourcing.

Skills requirements for a growing business

As your business grows, the skills your business needs to access will grow too. For example:

Financial skills

As your financial arrangements become more complex, you'll need staff to manage company accounts and find and manage outside investment.

Marketing skills

Your marketing may need to be more sophisticated - therefore you'll need to understand advertising, the media, and digital marketing such as email marketing, social media and pay per click and paid search advertising.

People management skills

The number of employees may increase to a point where you need to hire HR professionals, who may also help your business comply with employment law.

Health and safety knowledge

If your business is involved in a sector where health and safety is particularly important, eg, construction or manufacturing, you may need to hire health and safety professionals.

Technical skills

New equipment and/or processes in your business may mean that you need to hire technical specialists.

IT skills

As your IT system becomes more complex, you may need to have in-house IT knowledge.

Knowledge of export markets

If your business expands into export markets you will need a unique set of skills for selling in various countries with different ways of doing things and different cultures - see basics of exporting.

As the owner or director of a successful growing business, it is essential that you recognise when new skills are needed and you take the right steps to meet them.

Meeting the skills gap

You are unlikely to be able to find the time or have the ability to meet most of them yourself.

You could consider:

• building a management team
• delegating responsibility to other staff
• recruiting to fill a skills gap
• outsourcing the work to a specialist contractor
• training existing staff to meet your skills needs

Strong leadership and a sense of direction are hallmarks of almost all successful businesses. Good leaders offer direction to people, get them to share their vision for the business, and aim to create the conditions for them to achieve results.

Essential business leadership skills

Identifying and developing the following skills will help you become an effective business leader:

Communication

Communicating effectively with your staff ensures they know their role, what is required of them, and how much you value them. Ensure you give staff the credit for a job well done and provide constructive criticism when required. See employee engagement.

Listen to your staff and customers

Listening to the concerns of your staff as well as your customers can help you identify issues with your business that you can address before they become troublesome. Staff are motivated when they are listened to and feel involved in key business decisions. See staff feedback, ideas and forums.

Delegate

Delegating gives staff ownership of key business tasks. This gives your staff greater motivation but also makes you more efficient by enabling you to focus on other priorities to help you grow and develop your business. Delegation skills for business owners and directors.

Take responsibility

Your business is your responsibility. You must take ownership and responsibility for the business decisions you make, whether successful or not.

Get organised

Being organised is essential for good leadership. Your time is wasted if you are disorganised as you will not be able to find essential business information when you require it. See planning business growth and set up a basic record-keeping system.

Be decisive

Effective business leaders must be decisive and brave to take calculated risks to take advantage of business opportunities. If you aren't decisive, you could miss out on a valuable business opportunity. It's important to trust in yourself and your business decisions. If a business opportunity doesn't work out, be honest with yourself and your staff about why it wasn't successful and see if you can learn from it.

Follow others

Following others can help you learn, eg, encouraging your employees to communicate, brainstorm, and be open can provide you with inspiration and ideas you may never have come across otherwise.

How to lead your staff

You can show leadership to staff by:

• involving them in decision-making
• providing personal encouragement
• recognising and rewarding good performance
• helping to build their confidence to use their own initiative
• inspiring them with a vision for success
• ensuring good two-way communication

Both you and your directors will need to use different skills at different times - there's no 'one size fits all' approach to leadership. Lead and motivate your staff.

In addition, the right leadership style will depend on your business and your own character. A softer, mentoring style of leadership may be appropriate, or you may opt for a more charismatic approach.

All businesses need a strategy to succeed. A business strategy is different from a business plan. It is more detailed, looks further ahead, and is more visionary.

Why focus on business strategy?

It's easy to lose sight of the larger context when you're busy running a business, particularly a small one. But spending time on business strategy will help you:

• know where your business is heading and how to position it to get there
• understand the challenges and opportunities your business faces and the best ways to address them
• improve the overall performance of your business

Importantly, the task of forming a strategy for your business should not be delegated. Rather, as your business grows, you can spend more time on it as others handle day-to-day activities. Strategic planning for business growth.

Business strategy tools

Many business tools can help you determine strategy.

SWOT analysis

A popular one is a SWOT analysis, in which you:

• consider all your business strengths
• consider all your business weaknesses
• identify any business opportunities
• identify any threats facing your business

Analysing your results carefully will show you how to build on strengths, resolve weaknesses, exploit opportunities, and avoid threats. See our SWOT analysis example.

Gap analysis

Another strategy tool is a gap analysis, in which you analyse in detail where your business is now and then consider where you want it to be in the future. Next, you analyse the gap between the two to find ways to bridge it.

Forming your business strategy

A business strategy should be realistic, putting in place measurable targets for the medium term. It should be reviewed regularly. Measure performance and set targets.

Delegating involves passing on the responsibility for completing a task or controlling a process to another individual or group of individuals in your business. You may find it difficult and time-consuming if you are used to completing most tasks yourself.

Some business owners and directors fear losing control. Others fear nobody will be able to do a task as well as they can. Some resent the time it takes to train people to take over, and some insist they want to remain in touch.

Business benefits of delegating

The effective delegation, however, makes good business sense because it:

• frees up your time to prioritise planning and innovative business thinking
• ensures your team's potential is maximised but giving them responsibility for completing important business tasks
• builds trust between you and your employees as you give them ownership and responsibility for essential business tasks
• helps develop the skills, experience, and abilities of your staff

How to delegate

Write a list of everything you do. Ask yourself whether it is essential that you do all these tasks. Could your time be better spent? Could others be trained to take over? Might others even be better suited to the task than you?

Delegate if it will prove more cost-effective to do so.

Some points to note on delegating tasks

Remember though:

• Training can take time. Don't expect to reap dividends immediately.
• Others may do things differently from you, but their way could be better.
• Your team members should feel 91香蕉黄色视频ed and have their work reviewed. However, overbearing supervision can prove counter-productive.
• Good communication makes good delegation.
• Delegation might be best achieved through outsourcing.

Remember that you remain ultimately responsible for delegated tasks. You cannot delegate control of your team or your final responsibility for its success or failure.

Above all, you cannot delegate your responsibility for the direction in which your business is heading.

A single director or manager rarely has the combination of skills that are required to run a business successfully.

Therefore, for your business to succeed, you will have to build a successful management team.

Skills a management team requires

Before recruiting managers, you must first analyse what skills the business requires and consider your own strengths and weaknesses.

It's important that the skills in any management team complement rather than duplicate each other. Therefore, you should aim to recruit managers whose strengths are in areas of the business where you think you are weakest. Recruiting directors and managers.

Key skills for managers

You may need to recruit managers who have expertise in, for example:

• finance
• production
• administration
• sales and marketing
• procurement and buying

The exact skills mix will vary from business to business. While all businesses need sales and administration skills, for some, production will be critical, while in others, buying ability will be more important.

However, whatever the skills mix, the business will benefit from having its overall direction and goals viewed from different perspectives.

Note that you might only need certain types of expertise from time to time. In these circumstances, it may be better to:

• use outside directors or non-executive directors
• outsource, eg, use a financial consultant on a short-term basis during a capital expansion phase

It is worth remembering that management teams can also operate at different levels. Consider establishing teams to help run particular locations or divisions. This provides additional opportunities for staff development and involvement and will benefit your business.

Building a management team: key considerations

When building a management team, you should:

Progress review

Review your business' progress to date and decide what direction you want it to go in - measure performance and set targets.

Performance measurement

Measure your performance in the market against your competitors. Analyse any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats - commonly known as a SWOT analysis - to identify what gaps there are between where the business is and where you would like it to go. SWOT, PESTLE and other models for strategic analysis.

Identify skills within your teams

Discover what skills, potential, and ambitions your existing staff have and consider less-defined skills such as leadership qualities.

Identify skills gaps

Establish if any existing staff, perhaps with some training and development, could fill skills gaps. Consider reallocating responsibilities to create a genuine team, rather than a group of individual managers. Staff training and development.

Recruit the right people

If you conclude that you do need to recruit an employee, find people who are team players, who trust each other, and who will interact well.

Define roles and responsibilities

Define everybody's role and responsibilities within the team clearly. Relate these roles to your business strategy.

Clearly outline business goals

Ensure the new members of your management team are in tune with the goals of your business and how these will be achieved.

Reassess skills gaps

Re-examine any skills gaps and take steps to fill them.

If your business is to work at maximum efficiency and achieve its full potential, all your employees need to work together as a well-functioning team. This means you must acquire team-management skills.

You may have different teams that need to be managed in different ways. For instance, it's just as important to manage your senior management team as it is to manage your more junior staff members.

How to manage your teams

For your teams to work well, you should:

• ensure everybody knows their role
• set clear goals and communicate them
• put in place clear lines of communication
• clarify lines of responsibility
• involve all team members in decision-making as much as possible
• introduce ways to manage and resolve differences
• learn how to lead effective meetings
• encourage training and personal development
• build in regular reviews
• be a ready and willing listener
• encourage and promote diversity
• motivate team members
• reward initiative

When you take on the role of a company director, you take on very clearly-defined responsibilities.

An obvious responsibility is ensuring that certain documents, such as annual returns, are filed with Companies House. This may not sound onerous, but, on average, each year, more than 1,000 directors are prosecuted for failing to do it. .

The sets out the statutory duties of directors. This formally sets out the obligations of company directors and includes the duty to promote the success of the company and, in doing so, to consider the wider factors such as the environment and the community.

Other skills company directors may need

There are also non-legal obligations for directors, such as the requirements to form a strategy and to manage your team well, which are necessary to ensure your business succeeds.

See strategy skills for business owners and directors and managing your team.

Institute of Directors 91香蕉黄色视频

Training can prove very helpful for building both legal and non-legal skills. The Institute of Directors (IoD) runs training and development courses produced by directors for directors. .