A shifting trend has witnessed many millennial entrepreneurs joining the ranks of young business owners – 18% started their own companies in 2014 according to a global report.
Additionally, an ever increasing number of millennials consider themselves “entrepreneurial”; 70% were cited as saying that they would ditch working in traditional businesses to become full-time entrepreneurs, while one in five would quit their jobs and form their own company to become young entrepreneurs.
Did you know that the average millennial will most likely have four or more careers in his or her lifetime? No matter what industry you choose, as a young and ambitious entrepreneur, here are five skills and attributes you’re going to need to be successful in your line of business:
1. Tap into Your Emotional and Social Intelligence
In the hyper-digital world where news gets around fast, you need to learn how to sharpen your emotional and social intelligence skills. The power of social media lets us easily connect with thousands to millions of people around the world. However, many believe that this has led to a general lack of creating real connections and meaningful person-to-person relationships. It’s important for a number of reasons and helps in building and retaining clients.
Communication mediums like email and instant messaging tend to put a cap on our ability to display certain emotions such as empathy and sincerity. As a millennial entrepreneur, you must understand the limitations these platforms pose, and learn a thing or two about effective communication. It’s all about making your client feel special and approaching them the way they’d like to be approached.
2. Be Your Own Best Manager
The number of professionals and freelancers working from remote locations has more than doubled over the past decade – millions today are seamlessly working without the need of any direct on-site supervision. However, to maintain high efficiency, you must develop exceptional self-management skills such as managing your own schedules, lines of communication, daily tasks, projects etc.
Nobody knows your priorities or mind as well as you do. It is important to be in control of yourself and be your own manager. While you may need someone to manage your work, never count on them to manage you.
Tools like Basecamp, for example, can help you stay on top of daily to-dos and stay in touch with your team at all times to see what milestones are being achieved in real time. These tools also work great to let teams do “daily check-ins” and keep tabs on what they were able to achieve on a day to day basis. It’s exactly this type of consistent communication that allows every team member to own up to their tasks and eliminate the possibility of any bottlenecks.
3. Save Time by Utilizing More Productivity Tools and Third Party Resources
Being a millennial entrepreneur means you need to understand early on that time is one of your most valuable assets. You must know how to make good use of your working hours. Consider registering yourself on platforms like Upwork where you can save plenty of time by hiring experienced freelancers to oversee some of your daily business functions.
Personal productivity tools such as Feedly and Evernote make it more convenient to stay organized, act on actions quickly and communicate with your team more effectively. As your business start to explode and the time comes when you have to register your company, make sure you are with pros and cons of setting up different types of companies.
4. Capitalize on Mobile Digital Marketing
In the days of old, entrepreneurs had to make do with hard-to-scale and expensive marketing channels. As a millennial entrepreneur, however, you have the luxury of mobile digital marketing which makes its much more practical and quicker to identify your prospects’ needs, work on product ideas and test those ideas extensively before making your offer available.
Millennials are spending most of their time on smartphones – more than 65% of Facebook’s 8 billion video views come from handheld devices.
If you truly want to be successful at selling and be an influential figure in today’s online business economy, you need to know how to tap into social media to get your message across. There’s such an overwhelming amount of meaningful content being produced every day on social channels that you need to stand out as a millennial entrepreneur. You might want to consider hiring a digital marketing firm with an established track record to take care of this aspect.
5. Understand How Financing and Investments Work
Owing to the 2008 worldwide financial crisis, a number of millennial entrepreneurs are still intimidated by the financial system. They’re using bots and computer programs instead of real financial advisors just to play it safe, and in some cases, not investing at all.
Financial information is something many people find overwhelming – to make matters worse, there are conflicting opinions or complex investment routes that millennials are often not willing to bet on. In reality, all you need is a good understanding of financial elements like debt vs. equity, cash flow statements, compound interest, balance statements and tax implications with regard to various financial decisions. Understand these and you’ll have full control over your financial goals and personal budget.
Good to know:
- A new generation of millennial entrepreneurs is outperforming their baby boomer counterparts.
- Millennials are embracing entrepreneurship much earlier than boomers did.
- Millennial entrepreneurs today are generally more open to failure than boomers. They are also far more likely to keep going.
- Millennials are focusing on much larger profit margins; 75% expect their profits to increase in the following year, which was 42% for boomers.
- Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg was a young millennial entrepreneur at the age of 31, when he became one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of over $42 billion.
