Skills required for a Startup

If you want to start a startup you should have some basic startup skills to be successful.

Skills required for a Startup, There are mainly four skillsets required to start a venture.

1. Marketing Skills
2. Sales Skills
3. Technical Skills
4. Financial Skills

If the business lacks in any of the above-mentioned sectors then I doubt the business won’t be able to sustain for a long time. Business cannot be profitable if it lacks branding, marketing, and sales.

In the era of technology, people are shifting from traditional sales and marketing to digital platforms where they can target a larger group of people in a small budget. So, to start a venture the business should have a technical department that could handle things like website, mobile application and digital marketing.

Finance is the most important department which deals with revenue, budget, profits, and investments. If the financial department is weak then the company is in trouble.

Also, there are other departments in a business-like HR department but in the early stage above mentioned departments should be a major concern.

Should the founder offer equity?

The answer is Yes. If a person is bringing a skill to your company and shares the same vision as that of yours, then it shouldn’t matter to offer the person a pie of your business. Offering equity will not only align his vision to that of the company’s vision but keep him motivated at the time of recession. Even though if the company is not able to give him a paycheck at the time of recession, he wouldn’t be thinking of leaving the company which won’t be possible in the other case.

Get great people – sell them the idea, the vision and share the wealth, be generous with offering stock.

The most frequent asked question is why should I offer equity to someone:

Founders nowadays believe they can handle all the departments by themselves or hire someone on salary to look after a department or they try to save equity for future investments. Let me make it very clear if the founder is not willing to give up a part of equity/company, he won’t be able to go very far. Even if he hires people on salary to deal with a department, things won’t work. The team will lack leadership and moreover on being offered a better paycheck by some other company quality people will leave the company or they could come up to be competitors by starting a similar venture. So, to keep them motivated you need to provide ownership to people.

Instead of holding 100% of their company founders should learn to share the equity to deserving members. It will not only help in increasing sales and revenue but also increase the market capitalization of the company.

Therefore, if the founder owns 100% of the company and the company is valued at 1 million USD, he will own 1 Million USD. But if he holds only 10% of the company and the company is now valued at 100 Million USD, then he will own 10 Million USD. This can only be done by offering equity to talented people in the company who have a vision as big as yours.

A small piece of watermelon is larger than an apple. So, decide whether you want to have an apple alone or a piece of a large watermelon.