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startup business needs learning business skills

Growing Pains of a Startup Business – Learning Business Skills

Continuing on with the series of videos I’ve been creating where I describe my own struggles as a startup business in the early stages. My first business, a portrait photography business, started very differently from my second one. I realized that I was making a huge mistake by not learning business skills that is essentially like oxygen for any startup.

Learning business skills isn’t impossible

When I started up my first business, which was for portrait photography, I was completely self-taught in both business skills and photography. I had no idea that learning business skills wasn’t as hard as I’d made myself to believe it was. I made really costly mistakes in my pricing and business strategy. I was at the end of the rope before I realized that I would have to stop investing in photography equipment and make some really important decisions about investing in learning business skills.

The turning point in my entrepreneurial life was acknowledging I needed to invest in learning business skills. So, I would advise every aspiring entrepreneur to take the time to learn about business. Business skills don’t come naturally to everyone, but it doesn’t mean learning business skills is an impossible task. Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it.

If it seems hard, it’s because you’re probably trying to learn too many things at the same time. It’s important you start with the basic things first – for example, learn how to price your products or services. But the most important thing you need to learn is marketing. When you learn that, you will find your business really taking off.

Invest in learning business skills that will increase your ROI

When we start a business, we’re naturally prone to bootstrapping. It can be excruciatingly painful to find the money to do everything in our powers to start with a big bang! This is true especially for those startups that don’t get external funding.

More often than not, we tend to overspend in the wrong places. This is a big reason why a lot of startup businesses can’t sustain themselves because they have no money. Believe me, been there, done that and if I don’t watch out, I could fall into that trap again!

The saving grace in my favour was that I was working full time in corporate and therefore, I had my income from that to pull me through. A lot of you might not have that and that’s where you need to make really informed and well thought out decisions about where to spend your money.

Of course, you definitely need to invest in providing the highest quality of what you’re trying to sell. Whether it’s a product or a service, it needs to be the best. But that’s only half the story!

Watch this next episode of the “Growing Pains” series to hear the limiting beliefs I had when I started on my first business and how I turned it around.

If you missed the previous episode, you can find it here where I talk about starting up my second business and how different it was from the first time I started.

Stay tuned for more and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel!

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