How to be a successful entrepreneur in the 21st century?
There are some essential traits, which hardly change over the centuries. See for example: 7 essential characteristics to become a successful entrepreneur: Vision, Passion, Motivation, Risk-taking, Curiosity, Creativity, Confidence.
But in the age of internet, we need new skills, too.
Some people say, if you don’t have a website and you are not present on social media, you don’t exist. Well, at least not for long.
Therefore some useful skills are: website programming and design, SEO, setting up and managing social media pages, integrating a web-shop with credit card processing (so you need digital competencies and web literacy). Many of these tasks are not as difficult or expensive, as it sounds. See our blog post: The 100$ webshop.
Most of the recent success stories are tightly attached to the web (see for example Airbnb, Uber and Booking – just to name a few). We can call these web-based businesses – without massive internet presence they would not even exist.
In fact, web-based businesses give SMEs and even solo entrepreneurs a fantastic opportunity: you can connect and sell to very large geographical areas, often to the whole World.
To make a web-based business successful, you need further skills.
If you are patient enough, you can become a subject expert, write countless numbers of blog entries, one after another. Build trust and attract traffic. Then offer something valuable and exclusive, and ask for an email address in return. Continue with email campaigns (you know, when you receive an email from an author every day, until you unsubscribe …).
An alternative or parallel way is advertising, in most cases online. That gives the opportunity of a much faster ramp-up. However, it is not easy to run ad campaigns with a net ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) higher than one. You have to be very careful with spending your ad dollars, euros, etc. While you cannot expect miracles at the beginning, you can learn a lot, then refine your ad strategy and the ads themselves.
And here comes an extremely important, although often overlooked skill: good analytic and number crunching capabilities. Numbers are an entrepreneur’s best friend 😉
There are countless ways to analyze the results of your ads, often supported by tools and dashboards on the ad platform, or Google Analytics.
However, sooner or later you will need deeper insights. Professional advertisers download all relevant data from the advertisement platforms, Google Analytics, the webstore and so on. Next come the calculation of KPIs and following the customers through the funnel. For this purpose you will need an expensive platform or program with Business Intelligence built inside. Or …
You use Microsoft Excel ™ or something compatible. However, not a single program is fully compatible with Excel and as knowledgeable as the desktop or Microsoft 365 version of Excel. You may take the first steps with Google Sheets, or the free Microsoft Excel apps, but sooner or later you will need a much more knowledgeable program, at least the free LibreOffice for desktop. However, my experience is that appetite comes with eating.
You will want to solve a special problem. You search the net, and the answer is that you can do that only with the desktop or Microsoft 365 version of Excel. The good news is that you can subscribe to the online version of full featured Excel for only a few bucks a month (for 30 days you can even try it for free).
With a ready-made BI solution or an own solution with Excel you will have deep insights into the data and can make sound judgements and decisions regarding your online activities. That refers not only to advertisements, but all kind of campaigns, such as email campaigns, increasing your organic traffic (SEO), etc.
That is how professional entrepreneurs squeeze the results from every dollar of their ad spend and budget, get more customers and become massively profitable. That is the way.