Do You Have What it Takes?

“Do I have what it takes?” is a question most budding entrepreneurs will no doubt ask themselves when deciding to start their own business.

Google “entrepreneurial skills” and you’ll be rewarded with about 628 million results you can explore to see if you have the skills (qualities, attributes, characteristics) you need to make it happen.

Day 2 in Green Village explored the skills an entrepreneur requires in the personal, entrepreneurial, and technical domains. The class learned quickly that while there is no right or wrong answer, some of the desired qualities ranked higher than others.

Curiosity and learning, networking, self motivation, being an effective communicator, and having a process orientation were firm favourites in the class. Class members presented to the class their preferred skills and defended their choices with questions from the floor.

The second half of the morning explored the concept of ideation, the creative process of generating new ideas, in the business context. For those entrepreneurs short on ideas – Brainstorming, Mind Mapping, Walt Disney’s Creative Strategy, and the Five Whys were introduced as foundational tools anyone can use to support the idea creating process.

But ideas on their own remain ideas unless they are evaluated and earmarked for further development. The Validation Board, the first of the one pagers, is a useful tool to help entrepreneurs test their ideas and identify those that require further modelling.

Who is your customer?; What is their problem? How will you solve it? What are the assumptions that underlie the answers to these questions? For most if not all of the class these questions have never been asked or explored before committing their hard earned money in support of their hustle.

Time to apply these concepts!

The class spent the remainder of the workshop using the tools to create, explore and test business ideas. Asking questions, collaborating as a group, and standing up in front of a group of your peers demonstrating how to use the tools is always the real test of one’s understanding.

And on Day 2 there was no shortage of volunteers!