One Person, Many Hats: The Different Roles Of The Business Owner
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If you’re starting a business with a partner or two, it’s easy (and wise) to split responsibilities. The person with the better personal skills will handle the employees and the clients, while the more practically minded individual deals with all the inner-workings. When you’re starting a business on your own, however, you’re going to have to be able to cope with a much broader range of tasks and challenges. Here are four hats you need to be prepared to wear before you go into business alone.
The leader
Unless you’re working for yourself, you’re going to have team members that look to you for leadership. What exactly does that mean? It means having to take responsibility, first and foremost. You must be able to commit to a direction and get the team on board. Then you must be able to be the one who accepts the blame if that direction proves wrong. Learning management skills to make sure your team is progressing to the same objectives is crucial.
The administrator
What informs those goals? A practical knowledge of the workings of the business. Being able to spot the business’s needs, its challenges, and changing how the team operates to face them is going to add the practicality to the context of your leadership. MBA online degrees are a tool used by many great leaders to give them the expertise they have to go with the drive and the motivation. Without it, you might be convincing, but you might not be leading your team in a way that makes sense.
The hype-man
It’s not all about the internal workings of the business, either. You have to be able to make a splash externally, too. Many of the communication skills of the leader are going to apply to a good hype-man and public figure in the business. You need personal charisma, but you also need a knowledge of how public relations and marketing works. Making use of social media, content creation, trade shows, and PR opportunities are essential to building the brand awareness that leads to more sales, more profit, and more growth.
The firefighter
You can’t assume that everything’s going to go smoothly, even with great planning, either. There will always be issues that crop up in business. Your ability to spot and solve problems is what is going to get you back on the right path time and time again. The steps to effective business problem solving include taking the time to properly analyze and issue, to update your understanding from different angles, and to be able to make decisions in prioritizing multiple solutions. Without that adaptability, many business leaders find themselves paralyzed by their first real test.
As the business grows, it may be possible that you’re able to shift some of those responsibilities to a team of leaders. However, it’s important that you learn how to take the reins whenever you need to. You will be the one to set the course, and you have to know how to right it when your team can’t.
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