Steve over at MyWifeQuitHerJob recently posted about why he hasn’t quit his “day job”. He makes some interesting points, though I’ve made the opposite decision for myself. Are you thinking about leaving your day job? Here are some things to consider:

1. Do you really want to quit your day job?
On the face of it, you might say yes, but really think about whether you want this. Are you comfortable with leaving a career you may have spent years building? Are you okay with giving up the steady pay check, the guaranteed health insurance, the 401k matching? Some people can’t, psychologically, feel comfortable with giving up those things.

I struggled with this myself. I was wary of leaving a very lucrative career I’d spent over a decade building. It was also a shift in thinking for me. I’d always had my own thing throughout my partnership with my husband. Leaving my day job meant being entwined professionally.

In the end, I chose to leave my day job for a few reasons:
1. I hated my day job.
2. I am truly happiest spending my time with my husband/business partner.
3. I can actually make more money leaving my day job and focusing on our growing business, and this point brings me to…

2. What are your revenue streams and financial forecasts like?
It’s one thing to want to leave a day job, it’s another thing entirely to be able to still pay your bills doing it. In order to be sure you can afford to leave your day job, it’s important to examine your revenue streams and income projections.

It’s important to map out specifically how much money you’ll make from various income sources once you’ve left your day job. Will you be doing pop up events? How many, what will the attendance be, what percentage of attendees do you expect will buy, how much will the average order be? Have you done these pop up events in past years/months/weeks? How much did you make last time?

Will you be doing wholesale? How many accounts do you have, how often do they order and what’s their average order value? How many new accounts do you project you can bring on each month and what is the average order value?

Will you be doing online sales? How many orders per month do you get? What’s the average order value? What are your costs with doing online sales?

It’s important to answer questions like these and be sure to take into account all of your costs and income. Can you still earn enough money to support yourself based on your past experience and projections?

3. What is your safety net like?
If your financial projections aren’t met, what is your back up plan? Do you have savings or assets you can leverage to get through difficult periods? Are you comfortable with falling back on your safety net if things do not go as planned? At what point will you consider going back to a day job if your projections aren’t met?

3. How serious are you about your business?
I would argue that if you are deeply serious about building an empire, you are going to have to eventually quit your day job. I can’t think of many nationally recognized brands with an owner who has a separate day job. If you want to build a large business it’s going to demand your full attention. What I mean by this is you probably won’t be the next Ed Hardy or Kate Spade if you expect to run your creative business and work a day job simultaneously from now til you retire. If that’s your ambition, you are eventually going to need to leave that day job.

Not everyone wants to be the next Kate Spade or Ed Hardy, and that’s fine too. Building a brand of that size means you probably won’t be doing any hands on making of products. It means you won’t be the person answering the phone when customers call, it means you won’t be doing it all yourself. You will have to manage staff, rent the office space, hire the lawyers and accountants, etc. It means getting a lot more corporate and a lot less mom and pop. It’s not the model for everyone and there’s certainly tons of variation between DIYer and corporate mogul. It’s important to think about where you want your own business to go and what choices you’ll have to make to get those results.

Do you toil away at your day job and scheme ways to make your living selling crafts? While this isn’t an impossible dream, it’s not going to be easy. There is no magic bullet or special trick to growing a business. It’s mostly about putting in the time and money and having a plan. Here are some signs that you’re not on track for growing a real business.

1. Your income goals are not significant enough to earn a living or grow
I often hear people say things like “If I could just sell 10 necklaces a week! That would be like $500! So much money! I could live on that!” First of all, $500 per week is going to only make you $26,000 per year, a fairly meager living. Plus, you have to factor in your costs. You’ll need to pay for supplies/manufacturing, internet/website, marketing, etc. The list can go on forever once you’re running a real business. I consider my own business fairly small and we have a six figure operating budget. If you want to grow a business, your income goals need to account for paying you and your business expenses.

2. You have no roadmap of how you plan to meet your income goals
Even if you’ve settled on an income goal, if you don’t have a plan to meet that goal it’s still no good. It’s not enough to say “I want my business to net $50,000.00 this year”, you need to specify how you expect it to do that. Will you be doing this with wholesale? Online sales? Pop up events? In order to meet income goals, you’ll need a specific plan that maps out how you plan to meet your goals. What revenue streams will you rely on and what are you goals for them each week, month or quarter?

3. You refuse to properly invest time or money in your business
If starting a business was cheap or easy everyone would be doing it.  If you want to run a real business expect to invest significant time and money. Don’t expect to build a quit-your-day-job-sized enterprise in your spare time on a shoestring. Yes maybe you’ve heard a story about someone who did that, but it’s extremely rare that things work that way. If you’re not willing to do the 60+ hour work week and invest tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars before you see a significant return you’re going to have a hard time growing a real business.

4. You refuse to do the really hard work
Owning a business involves doing a lot of stuff you do not want to do. Most creative people don’t enjoy bookkeeping, sales, marketing, etc. The creative stuff is more fun, but it is a small part of what you’ve got to do to run a business. My partner and I spend about 10% of our time doing design work. Most of our job is administrative tasks, marketing, sales, vendor relations, managing people. Sometimes it’s tedious crap work like scanning receipts and taking inventory. We’ve just started hiring help so we can be more productive, but it’s not a perfect solution since the more people we hire, the more managing we have to do. It’s all hard and most days we feel like strangling someone. If you want your business to grow, you’ve got to be willing to do anything and everything the business requires, even if it’s stuff that’s not in your comfort zone.

A common question I see on forums, in coaching sessions, etc is “Why am I not getting more online sales?” I don’t have a magic bullet solution for this problem, but the cause is almost always one of the following issues:

1. Mediocre Products
Sometimes the product itself just isn’t that great. Maybe it’s ugly, maybe it’s unremarkable. We all like to believe our creations are great, but if there’s no market for what you’re selling it doesn’t matter what the creator thinks.

The Fix: It’s hard see our own creations objectively, but if you suspect your products are the problem, test them out at a live event like a trunk show or craft show or festival. Notice how people respond to your products in person. Are they buying? Are they checking the items out? Do people seem enthusiastic about the product line?

If people seem to keep passing your display by or no one is buying then it’s probably time to rethink the product line.

2. Mediocre Website/Online Store
A bad online store is going to make it hard to sell even the coolest products on the web. I feel like I beat this horse to death, but I still see websites every day that just aren’t optimized to convert. I see bad product photos, confusing navigation, poor site copy — the works! Contrary to popular belief, products won’t just sell themselves. If your online store isn’t up to par you’re guaranteed to be losing business as a result.

The Fix: If you know your products are proven sellers (i.e. they do well with wholesale and at live events), it may be time to give your web shop more polish so your items can shine online too. Consider working with a professional designer to make your site look its best. Use a professional photographer for product photos or educate yourself on how to shoot better photos and retouch them in a program like Photoshop. Study up on conversion rate optimization, a topic I frequently obsess about here on Smaller Box. Making sure your site is easy to use and looks professional will turn those site visitors into buyers.

3. Lack of  Effective Marketing
If your products are great and your site is top notch but you’re still not seeing sales then the problem is probably marketing. People can’t buy from you if they haven’t heard of you, so it’s important to have a plan to promote your products to your target customers.

The Fix: Create a marketing plan so you know how you’ll get your products in front of customers. Consider incorporating SEO, advertising, publicity, viral marketing, live events such as festivals or craft shows, social media, etc. As you build your marketing plan make sure you’ve thought about how you’ll select and prioritize marketing initiatives and how you’ll measure the results.

When people find out what my partner and I do for a living the reaction is often the same “That sounds like fun.” We always kind of chuckle nervously. Whatever they’re thinking we do all day is probably not what we actually do. People who’ve never run a business or are new to running their own business often have some misconceptions about what that job entails. Here are a few misconceptions I see most often:

1. Owning a creative business means you get to be creative all day
I wish this was true. Ex-Boyfriend’s co-owner is our in-house artist. He designs all the products and he’s an incredibly talented illustrator and designer. He’d love to draw monsters and kittens all day, but the truth is he spends most days managing staff and vendors, bookkeeping, doing sales calls, working on PR and marketing strategies, budget planning. Our jobs are primarily management work, not creative work.

2. You can hire experts to do things you don’t know how to do
Maybe this works some of the time, but it’s not a magic bullet. In the past, we’ve tried to hire experts in online advertising/marketing and experts in PR. They were never able to help us or produce results. They didn’t understand our business or our customer demographic. They didn’t really have anything invested in our results. They applied what worked for other companies to us and what works for company A won’t necessarily work for company B.

What did work for us? Learning how to do every single thing ourselves — sales, PR, events, the works. Once we got good at each aspect of the business we were able to hire people and train them to take on these tasks and have them do things our way. We don’t believe we can effectively manage hired help if we don’t understand what they do, so we never hire anyone to help us do something we have no expertise on (save for a few very specific things like our taxes or legal issues).

3. You’ll get rich fast
If you do your job as a biz owner well, you might see a pretty good income, but it won’t be fast. It takes time to establish a business and really learn the ropes when it comes to running it. If I could go back to day 1 knowing what I know now I’d do so many things differently.

Overnight success is a rare thing, so don’t count on it.

4. If you build it they will come
I see this all the time with newbie-prenuers. People say “I took great photos, I set up on my online shop, I have great products, where are the sales?!?!” Just because you started a business doesn’t mean customers are going to come beating down your door. Building a customer-base takes time and work. If you have no sales and marketing plans in place, it doesn’t matter how great your products are, you’ll have a tough time selling them.

5. You can run a business your spare time on a shoestring
If your goal is to create a profitable successful business, it’s going to take time and investment. It’s completely unrealistic to expect to operate with zero budget and a few hours of attention each week. You can get away with that kind of thing as a hobbyist, but if you’re serious about getting to the point where your business can pay your bills, rent you office space, send your kids to college, hire staff, etc. you’ll probably need to dedicate serious time and money to it.

Over to you
What misconceptions do you think people have about running a business? Share in the comments below.

Were your product sales less than you expected last year? If so, you have to check out this new free video series, Product Marketing Breakthrough, by Andreea Ayers. Andreea started an inspirational t-shirt company, Tees for Change, five years ago and last year she sold it so she could spend more time with her growing family. She was able to get her t-shirts in more than 300 stores and over 200 media outlets, including Self, Shape, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and on TV and celebrities.

Andreea reached six figure sales in her first year of business, so now she works with entrepreneurs who have a product-based business to help them grow their product line.

In her free Product Marketing Breakthrough video series, Andreea shares some tips and strategies to grow your product line, including:

• 3 mistakes that most product entrepreneurs make and how to avoid them
• 4 strategies to get your product line into the spotlight with your customers, retailers, and the media, so you can increase your product sales immediately
• Simple tweaks you can make to your website to get more traffic, leads and sales
• Proven strategies for wholesale, publicity and more.

These videos are a must‐see if you have a great product line, self-published book or idea for a product, but don’t know how to successfully get your product into multiple stores and media outlets.

Click here to start viewing!

I didn’t realize it until I sat down to write this post, but the best thing I did for my business in 2011 is focus. This sounds cliche and no-brainer, so here’s specifically what we did this year:

Focus on our own aesthetics
My partner Matt does all the art for Ex-Boyfriend. He’s an incredibly talented illustrator who can do just about anything. This is both good and bad.  If simple lines and minimalism are in, Matt can do it. If detailed line work and heavy shading are hot, Matt can make that happen. Matt’s ability to do just about anything meant we were doing just about everything, and we wanted to stop that. We didn’t want designs that would go out of style as the trends changed, we wanted an aesthetic that would maintain its appeal regardless of the trend du jour.

While each individual piece had its merits, we spent 2011 making our line more cohesive. We stopped pandering to trends and focused on what really excited us. We kept our collection accessible, but we stopped worrying about what people seemed to be buying in general and focused on what we wanted our look to be about.

We absolutely could design stuff with mustaches and feather silhouettes, but we do not want to. We like yetis and space creatures, and we’ve found an audience that likes that too. We want a line inspired by Japanese pop art, 1960s American pop art and modern street art. We like wordplay and designs with a sense of humor that turn convention on its side. Doing what we love has allowed us to better define who we are and stand out from the crowd. It’s helped us connect with our kind of customers and given us a direction forward.

Focus on what’s important
You can make yourself totally crazy chasing the latest marketing tools. There are a ton of choose from and they all have their pros and cons. This year, we picked 3 things that we decided were the most important tools for growing our brand and we focused on them. We experimented with new things here and there, but we made it our mission for the year to do 3 things:
- Find and attend trade shows that attract our target buyers
- Find and attend retail events that attract our target consumer audience
- Get media placements and get our products on TV.

Those sound like big tasks but we made all of them happen this year because we focused on them. We broke each of those items down into smaller tasks, scheduled each of our tasks out and tackled them accordingly. As 2011 closes we’ve got bookings for Pool Trade Show, Chicago Comic Con, and our tees have been seen on The Daily Show and Modern Family (another network TV show has already filmed using our tees and will air in January).

Focus on time management
Managing our time effectively was an essential part of making things happen this year. We scheduled each week out every Sunday night and made a to-do list of every day of the week. Each day had a specific theme to it like publicity or wholesale. We found that trying to work a little on everything meant nothing got done — not enough focus!  Giving each day a theme and an itemized list of deliverables meant stuff was getting done. It also helped cut out all the mid-day “snacking” on tasks that were leading to never finishing a “meal” of a task. When you have your list of what you have to finish today in front of you, it helps you stay away from distractions.

How was your 2011? What were the best things you did for your business?

When you start a creative business it’s natural to ask your friends for input. The trouble with relying on their feedback is that it’s a little like asking them if your baby is cute. Even if it’s the ugliest baby they’ve ever seen, they’re not going to tell you. They don’t want to hurt your feelings. The fact of the matter is, sometimes babies are ugly, and sometimes there are problems with your business that are glaringly obvious to your friends. Here are 3 common things your friends are probably lying about (and what to do about it).

1. Your website
Creating an attractive, user-friendly website is not easy. There’s a reason people spend years getting a degree in graphic design. If everyone could make a great website, the internet would be a whole lot prettier. Those websites that look beautiful were anything but effortless. Most professional websites that you see were designed over weeks or months by a team of professionals. If you think a quick read through HTML for Dummies is going to get you the same results, think again.

The trouble is, when you finish your clashy, tacky, flashy, blinky monstrocity of a site and show it to your friends, they’re not going to tell you it’s bad. They probably aren’t design professionals and even if they know it’s bad, they don’t want to offend you.

The fix:
The best fix is hiring a design professional. There are lots of talented web designers out there who can give you a website to be proud of. If you sell online, that website is going to be the face of your business, so don’t let a bad first impression kill your sales. If your website is a hot mess, customers are going to think your products will be just as shoddy.

If hiring a professional is out, that doesn’t mean using their design work is. Sites such as Template Monster have thousands of pre-made web designs you can purchase. You can even have the themes professionally installed, so you can have a perfectly professional look to your website, without the steep price tag of a custom site. Template Monster has themes for most popular ecommerce programs like osCommerce, Zencart, and Magento. Most themes are under $200.00, and many are even under $100.00

2. Your product photos
The quality of your product photos can make or break your online sales. It doesn’t matter how amazing your products are, if the photos aren’t up to par, customers won’t be buying. Like an ugly website, ugly product pictures don’t engender trust in customers. They’ll think you’re unprofessional and that your products will be cheap and low quality.

Chances are your friends aren’t photographers or experts on selling online, so when they see your product photos they may not be able to critique them properly (and again, they don’t want to hurt your feelings). That doesn’t mean your photos are going to pass muster with customers.

The fix:
Hiring a professional photographer is going to be the safest way to ensure great product photos. They have the proper cameras, lighting and other equipment to get great shots and the experience to stage your products in an appealing way.

If you can’t spring for a professional photographer, get as educated as you can about product photography. Make sure you’re using a good camera. Take cues from professionals about staging product photos (look at catalogs for larger stores for ideas) and shoot with a light box or using natural light.

3. Your products and branding
With so many people trying to start a creative business these days, it’s really hard to compete. To succeed you’ll need terrific products and remarkable branding. You might enjoy stringing beads or knitting scarves, but that doesn’t mean you can start a business with it. Your friends don’t want to be the ones to tell you they’ve seen what you’re doing a million times before, even if they’re thinking it. They also might not be aware of the vast competition out there, so even if they think your items are perfectly nice, they may not understand that several other people are already doing the same thing.

The fix:
You need at least one of two things to stand out in the marketplace: exceptional products or exceptional branding. Ideally, you want both, but plenty of unremarkable products have been saved by clever branding.

Take product lines like Blue Q for example. They sell fairly mundane things like tea bags, but brand them as “Get along with your co-workers tea” and instantly a box that’s no more interesting than a $1.50 12 pack of Lipton becomes a great gag gift for the office that sells for 10 times the price it would fetch in an ordinary box.

If you’re selling something common like soap or mittens, that a zillion other people are selling, you may need to rethink your branding. You have to find some way to position your products in a unique way so people have a good reason to choose your items over the competition.

Take honest stock of what else is out there and really think about what makes your products better and more appealing than the others. Develop a list of benefits and features that your product provides that makes it stand out. If you can’t come up with anything, it’s going to be tough to convince consumers to shop with you instead of someone else.

When you started your creative business, you probably started with a product that played to your creative skills. If you’re an illustrator maybe you started selling prints, if you’re into sewing maybe you started with bags, if you’re a metal-smith you might have started with jewelry. The important thing is not to allow your creative skills to be pigeon-holed into a single medium.

When you’re using your creative talents to run a product-based business, it’s important to think about the products. This means thinking about ways you can apply your talents to products that best serve the marketplace. If you can sew
a bag, maybe you can also sew a wallet or an apron. If you can put your illustrations on prints, maybe they can also go on note cards or calendars. Having a range of products means you can keep your customers coming back for more items more often. It can also generate interest from customers who may not want items in your preferred medium. For example, a consumer might love your art but not have much space in her tiny apartment to hang up lots of prints. If she could buy your art on a mouse pad or notebook, she might place more orders.

In addition to encouraging more repeat sales from existing customers and possibly capturing new customers, additions to your product line offer even more marketing benefits. You can use a product launch as a reason to generate media attention. You can also drive more search traffic to your website. More products means you can optimize for more keywords and bring more people to your online shop. Product diversity can be great for SEO.

So how can you get ideas for diversifying your product line?

1. Holiday Lists
By now you’re probably getting some holiday wishlists from your loved ones. What are people asking for? Do they want an ipad? If so, maybe you can make ipad cases. Do they want magazine subscriptions? Maybe you could make magazine racks. Pay attention to the things people explicitly say they want and think about how you could add a product to your line that would interest them.

2. Competitors
Take note of what kinds of products your competitors are offering. This doesn’t mean you should copy them, but it’s fine to get ideas from them. If other jewelers are doing cufflinks or money clips they’re obviously starting to serve the male market, are there products you could add to your jewelry line to serve the male market?

One nice thing about spying on competitors using Etsy is that you can see not just what they’re offering for sale but what’s actually selling. (By the way, if you sell on Etsy are you sure you want your competitors knowing what your best sellers are?)

Try to look for ways you can improve on what competitors are doing so you aren’t outright copying their product line.

3. Fans
Customer focus groups can be a great way to develop product ideas. Ask your fans what they’d like to see you do next. If you’ve already got some ideas of what you could do, give customers a list to choose from and ask them to vote for their favorite option. Although people don’t always buy the things they say they would, customers can still be a helpful resource for deciding which direction to take.

At Ex-Boyfriend, when we are trying to decide between two ideas we like, we ask our fans for help. We have an invite-only mailing list for our top customers and when we’re trying to decide between two things, we let them be the tie breaker. That way we know we’re talking to people who are likely to shop with us in the future and our biggest fans get to provide input on what we offer next.

4. Existing Products
Look at your existing product line for ideas on how to expand. Could you offer your current items in a wider range of sizes? Could you offer companion items for your existing items? For example, if you sell jewelry could you offer jewelry travel cases or other jewelry storage? If you sell journals, could you offer pen or pencil sets that compliment your journals? If you sell passport cases, maybe your customers would also be interested in luggage tags.

Think in terms of ways you can merchandise your products as gift sets or packages to encourage bigger purchases. For example if you sold a passport case for $10 and a set of luggage tags for $8, you could sell a package of both for $15. You get more money and your customer feels like they got a good deal.

How can you expand your current product offerings to appeal to more customers or encourage more repeat business with existing customers?

If you’ve spent any time around sports fans, then you know it’s a matter of time before they start spouting off about what coaches or players should be doing. Sports fans will talk your ear off for hours about this if you let them, but here’s the thing: the average fan you meet is not a professional player and probably never was. They’ve probably never been involved with any sport in any professional capacity. You can love a game or a team all you want, but if you’ve never actually been on the field, your expertise is questionable.

Why am I talking about sports today? Because I feel the same analogy holds true when it comes to getting advice about your business. The proliferation of blogs about small business and wannabe business coaches over the last couple of years has been astounding. Most of these coaches, like me, came out of the crafty/handmade scene, where they either currently sell their own wares or have tried to in the past.

With so many people spouting advice, how can you tell who you should listen to? Here’s where the sports analogy comes in handy…

The Fans
A lot of the people offering advice online about business are fans. They like the handmade/craft/indie biz community. They may have even dabbled in selling their own wares. This is no different than the baseball enthusiast who’s played a little intramural softball. Just because you’ve tossed the ball around doesn’t make you a pro.

You don’t see the Yankees hiring the loudest guy on NYYFans.com as the head coach. They’re going to hire the guy with the track record and experience. And when it comes to advice for your business, you should follow this lead too. Hire a pro. It’s fine to talk shop with fans, sometimes they have interesting things to say, but they probably aren’t in a position to advise you.

How to spot a fan applying for a job as coach:

• She’s probably tried to run a handmade/indie business before but gave up after it didn’t make enough money for her to live on (if she couldn’t do it for herself, what makes you think she can help you?).
• Her about page uses lots of fuzzy speak about passion and visualizing your success and living out your dreams. These people usually avoid talking about anything too technical, objective, specific or concrete. They’d rather talk about passion, crafting your story or time management instead of conversion rate optimization or what to avoid in your wholesale terms.
• She can’t tell you about any successful business owner she’s coached who saw considerable growth in their business based on her coaching.

Coaches
In professional sports, coaches are usually former professional players. Sometimes you’ll see coaches who didn’t play pro, but they probably at least played in college or minor leagues. In those cases, those coaches worked their way up through the coaching ranks, maybe starting with coaching peewee or high school and then eventually moving on to assistant positions at colleges and finally making their way to coaching the pros. They didn’t get to the pros without a solid track record of wins and successes.

How to spot a pro quality coach:

• She’s got a client list you envy, meaning you want to be as successful as her clients are.
• Her successful clients would recommend her to other business owners.
• She has a consistent track record of improving the businesses she advises in a concrete way. This means she can tell you that a client went from 20 wholesale accounts to 200 as a direct result of her advice, or she can tell you that a client went from no search traffic to top position on Google for relevant keywords and as a result the client saw a 300% increase in sales from search traffic.
• She’s either run her own business (and I don’t meant her coaching business) in the past and sold it for a large sum or she’s a subject matter expert who’s worked in the industry (for example a coach who specializes in wholesale and was a former buyer at major retail chains for many years).

Players
As mentioned above, coaches in professional sports are usually former players. So listening to a professional player’s insights on the game isn’t a bad idea. They’ve been on the ground and know exactly what they did first hand to win. They have insight into the game that fans cannot have. I consider myself in this category, by the way. My primary focus is my own apparel business, but I enjoy geeking out about running my business and like helping others learn from the mistakes I’ve made and successes I’ve had.

How to spot a professional player:

• She’s currently running a profitable and successful business.
• She probably doesn’t coach full time because she’s running her own business, but has enough love for the game that she coaches on the side because she enjoys it and loves talking about it.
• She’s learned what she knows about business by doing. She may not have an MBA, but she’s been where you are and got herself on the right track through trial and error.

If you want to know how to win at business, either talk to someone who’s winning at business or has led other businesses to wins.

A final note about picking your coach
Football teams don’t hire baseball coaches. Basketball teams don’t hire tennis coaches. You need to hire a coach that is an expert in what you’re trying to do. Business models can vary really dramatically. Some businesses make most of their money with online sales. If that’s the kind of business you’re trying to run, don’t hire a coach who’s an expert on wholesale. Some businesses have seen a lot of their success as a result of media placements. If you don’t have the kind of product the press is likely to be really interested in, a coach who knows a lot about media placements can’t help you.

For the most part, it’s safer to avoid generalists. No one is great at everything. Pick your coach based on the specific and concrete set of skills she’s got the most experience with and make sure that experience is in line with what your business needs.

It entrepreneurship was easy, everyone would do it. It helps to have vision or an MBA or be good with numbers, but by far the following trait have served me and my partner best when running our business:

1. Time management
Entrepreneurs are busy people. There will always be more tasks than hours in the day, so it’s critical that you can set priorities and find an efficient way to get things done. You also want to delegate the right tasks to the right people once you start hiring help.

2. Adaptability
Things change almost daily for entrepreneurs. You run into problems with shipments, some new law passes that bans a manufacturing ingredient you need, a major buyer goes out of business, some new technology becomes all the rage in your industry.

To keep your business afloat, you’ll need to be the sort of person who can roll with the punches and tackle whatever comes your way. If you’re the kind of person who becomes set in your ways, hates to learn new things or freaks out in a crisis, you’re going to find your job extremely difficult.

3. Determination
Stuff is going to go wrong and you’re going to deal with aggravation and naysayers. If you are the sort that gives up on things easily, entrepreneurship is not for you. You have to be the kind of person that believes they can do anything no matter what and will find a way to make things work.

4. Genial and Outgoing Nature
You might think being self-employed means you no longer have to work well with others, but that’s far from true. As an entrepreneur you’ll probably work with more people than you ever did as an employee. You’ll need to interact with customers, vendors, and peers.

You’ll come to really depend on personal relationships with people you meet through your work. The ability to talk to people and make people like you and want to help you is critical. If you’re a wallflower or a grouch you’re going to have a tough time.

Being outgoing and friendly doesn’t come naturally for everyone. I usually see more scowls and hunched shoulders at craft shows than smiles and warm greetings. This is a real shame because being able to charm people makes a difference in your sales. It’s important to get out and practice interacting with people if this isn’t something you’re comfortable with.

How about you, what qualities have served you well as an entrepreneur?

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