Do you have a knack for business? How to discover and develop it.

by Alice Alessandri and Alberto Aleo.

Having explored the roles of salespeople and leaders in our previous articles, we’ve decided to broaden our perspective and ask ourselves a new question: “Are entrepreneurs born or made?”. To answer this, we need to analyse what is usually defined as a “knack for business” because there is no doubt that an entrepreneur must have one!

The basic requirements of a successful entrepreneur.

There are many recipes for the perfect entrepreneur: a series of ingredients that combined should give us a “ruler of the market” with a knack for business which allows them to almost always win.

Granted, we each have a personal idea of success, and we each define our personal challenges we want to overcome, but regardless, to succeed in “the business of creating a business”, we need a few basic requirements:

• Vision, which comes from developing a certain foresight and allows us to see things today which others can’t grasp yet.
• Courage, a quality that is considered innate and is often confused with recklessness. Instead, it’s strongly related to passion and love for what we do.
• Charisma, which allows us to involve others and direct them towards a common goal. This is all related to knowing how to correctly manage your own and others’ uniqueness.
• Respect for money as a form of energy and symbol of prosperity. To become successful entrepreneurs, we need to develop our own ethics of wealth and overcome our sense of guilt and prejudice related to it.
• Resilience, i.e., that mix of error culture, flexibility, and patience which allow us to overcome the fear of making mistakes and create the conditions to face the difficulties we have when building an enterprise and helps us learn from our mishaps.

We believe that if even one of these ingredients is missing, there is no knack for business that holds up: there will be an inevitable collapse of our chances of success in our entrepreneurial adventures.

From a knack to a sharp mind for business.

If the elements we have seen in the previous paragraph constitute a springboard to become entrepreneurs, the drive that will allow us to successfully dive into the market is based on the highly acclaimed knack for business. So, what is it? How do we develop it?

As in previous cases, there are many ideas on the topic, but most authors agree on the importance of 3 main points:

• Being able to read market trends.
• Knowing how to meet unsatisfied needs.
• Coming up with new sources of profit.

Let’s now analyse these 3 elements by defining them. This will help us broaden the concept of a knack for business and turn it into a “sharp mind for business”: in a world as complex as today’s, in fact, we need to combine instinctive and cognitive human skills.

Market trends.

The ability to read market trends is not innate and mustn’t be confused with pure intuition, as many entrepreneurs mistakenly believe. Instead, it’s especially related to detecting and analysing data, developing curiosity, learning, reading, and listening. To train this ability, we need to have the courage to get out of our comfort zone, leave our convictions behind, and face change. There are entire disciplines dedicated to this. One of these is Foresighting, which teaches you not only to read trends in a more structured way, but also to plan the future rather than predict it.

Meeting needs.

Many marketing experts are still convinced that you can create needs, as if companies were able to artificially generate them. The examples used to support this claim include successful products that previously didn’t exist and are now a “must have”, such as the smartphone. Actually, the desire to communicate and to connect have always existed, so it’s more about meeting these needs and shaping them into a new product. To develop this skill, you need to observe others, study their needs and the motivations behind their purchases, in other words, the material and psychological aspects of their choice. How can we train this skill? Why not join our training day “Why do customers say yes?” on the 11^th of October 2024.

New sources of profit.

Turnover and profits are the terms an entrepreneur mainly focuses on to assess the wellbeing of the company or to decide whether to invest. Although this is an important aspect, we often overlook a simple consideration: in order to receive, you need to first give! We call it the law of reciprocity, but it’s actually not far from being the simple principle of action and reaction in Physics. To transition from a knack for business to a sharp mind for business we need to consider that profits and turnover are the result of what, how, when, and who we invested our resources on. Therefore, we need to flip our perspective and find an answer to the question “What can I offer the market in order to achieve the economic results I expect?”.

When a knack for business isn’t enough.

Be it a knack or a sharp mind for business, at times neither is enough to ensure the success of an entrepreneurial initiative. The graveyard of business is full of great ideas that never made it. What are the reasons for these failures?

First of all, there are external factors, out of the control of a single market operator, which determine the success of failure of a business.

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Failure doesn’t mean you need to question your skills. On the contrary, your chances of future success will increase thanks to your accumulated experience and the awareness of those previously overlooked factors.

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However, there are a few aspects that should be monitored to avoid trouble.

Taking care of your network and educating it.

Ideas need consensus to succeed, so you’ll need a wide network of people who support your endeavours. Take care of your relations, internally and externally, by infusing them with trust, respect, and ethics. If you are real market leaders, able to anticipate trends, shape needs in a new way, and come up with new and innovative ways to invest and to profit, you might have developed a vision which is so advanced that it might be misunderstood. It is, therefore, fundamental to educate your listeners, bridging the information gap, picking their prejudices apart, and helping them metabolise the change you are promoting. The difference between a leader and a follower often lies in this ability to educate the market as opposed to being educated by it.

Keeping the pace.

The “time to market” is the period between the entrepreneurial idea and the product or service launch. Managing this appropriately doesn’t mean you need to rush, get there first at any cost, or cut corners. Instead, try to keep a steady pace, observe both the market and your own company’s dynamics, and try to understand whether the people who are going to take part in the enterprise are ready or not, be they clients or partners.

Time is a fundamental factor of success or failure, and it is more of a qualitative than a quantitative aspect. Have a look at our advice in this article on the topic.

Going beyond zero-sum thinking.

A while ago, we reposted a very nice article on Passodue’s FaceBook page. The article explained how many market operators haven’t been able to internalise John Nash’s idea that the best results are achieved not by solely generating advantages for yourself, but also for others. According to the author, the biases that prevent us from adopting this approach are primarily cultural: we are convinced that negotiations are a zero-sum game where one wins and the other loses and that we should especially focus on short-term results.

A successful business needs to overcome the limitations of this vision, accepting the idea that if others win, the chances of you winning increase rather than decrease! Furthermore, the idea that immediate gain is better than future gain is once again short-sighted. The past, the present, and the future are interconnected and separating them will spell doom for your business.

A knack for business: develop it by travelling.

While writing this article, the last before our summer break, we are in Sweden for our second year of work and exploration in this country. As our readers know, our philosophy is based on contamination and openness to new cultures and ideas. This has allowed us to do research, develop new models, and extend our market beyond the borders of Italy.

If we had to summarise everything we suggest in this article in a single piece of advice, it would be as follows:

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If you want to be an excellent entrepreneur and develop a knack for business, travel, leave your familiar horizons behind you, meet new people, and make space!

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See you in September. Have a great summer.

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