If you started your business in recent years and had to live through Covid and the current credit crunch and high interest rates, it may feel like the business landscape is all doom and gloom, but here are five life skills I gained out of running a startup business that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

1. Crisis Management | putting out all types of fires imaginable

When you run a business or are part of the senior management team, it may feel like you’re doing crisis management every day. I joke about sitting in the middle of a permanently raging dumpster fire in my business. Just when you thought you put out a fire, another one hits.

We’re talking about life-or-death issues for the company, like running out of cash and credit, deciding how to react when hit by a pandemic, working on compensation packages that attract the best talent with what you can offer, juggling resources to dedicate to different urgent projects, setting client rates and payment terms to hedge and safeguard your cash flow. These planning and strategic skills are survival skills that would help you if you ever find yourself in a tough life situation. You make the calls and have to live with them when the going gets tough.

Nothing surprises me anymore after a decade of doing this. Do I still get stressed out by it? Yes. Do I know that the sun will still rise tomorrow and that problem will still be there if I don’t solve it? Yep.

2. Sales Skills | Learn how to sell anything to anyone

If you’re lucky, you start your business with some capital, and you can hire people to delegate tasks you don’t want to do to them. However, I highly recommend you try doing the sales for your company. There are a few reasons why this experience will be valuable for your company.

The first reason is that it puts you at the front line to get customer feedback on your product or service. Nothing like a customer telling you your offering sucks and you should return to the drawing board. Second, it makes you observant and attentive to others’ needs. Most people spend their lives talking and thinking about themselves; being capable of doing the opposite to place your attention on others is an invaluable asset. Third, it helps you build grit. A good salesperson knows that no means they didn’t give the customer a good enough reason to buy. The current offering isn’t attractive enough, and no means no today; you can always try again tomorrow.

Many people I talk to treat sales as a dirty word. I think it’s one of the most essential life skills to learn that will benefit you for the rest of your life.

3. Money is Your Friend | Learning how to manage your cash flow

Before managing my cash flow for the business, I didn’t give much thought to structuring cash flow. I didn’t understand the importance of it. Why would it matter if my customers paid me at the beginning or the end of the month? It’s OK to extend our payment terms by another 15 days, right? I also had credit card debt piled up from my university years that I would much rather forget about; unfortunately, debt doesn’t magically go away. I had to learn to save every dollar to achieve my entrepreneurial dream.

Once I figured out that banks have accounts that pay you interest calculated according to your daily ending balance, I saw how it mattered. Having cash in hand for an extra week could generate more revenue. In addition, it would allow me to pay our suppliers faster to build better credit for my business.

Payment terms also matter because your monthly cash inflow fluctuates based on it, but your business expenses are fixed. For example, your business income taxes are due quarterly or annually by a specific date, you must pay your employees at set intervals, and your office utilities are due at various points throughout the month. These are fixed expenses. You could be in a cash crunch if you don’t set payment terms for your accounts receivables from clients to ensure you have enough cash inflow to handle the fixed expenses.

4. People skills | MOVING PEOPLE TO TAKE ACTION

It’s hard enough to motivate yourself, but now you have to motivate a team. If you’re in a leadership position managing a team, no matter how big or small, you’ll find that most of your time is invested in motivating them to help you solve problems. After all, there’s only one of you, and if you’re handling the front end of the projects, such as strategy and planning, you need to rely on others to help you execute.

When you run a startup or a small business, it’s likely your monetary compensation isn’t as high as other corporate jobs, and each team member may need to wear multiple hats if someone calls in sick; your task is to motivate people to do more with fewer resources.

Managing a team has helped me become more observant of nuances in people’s behaviour. Are certain team members more organized compared to others? They likely value structure and processes in their workflow. Do other members value creative freedom over set policies? You would want to carve out the creative component of the project for them and keep them away from deliverables that require organization.

A leader needs to pick out the best qualities of each person and figure out how to build a role around each person to let them shine.

5. Curiosity | Keeping Your Inner Child Alive

When we’re born, we’re curious about everything. What are all these new objects around me? What do you use that for? Why is that thing that shape? As we learn about everything around us and grow older, we lose that curiosity little by little. However, running a startup business means you must stay sharp and keep your ears to the ground to pick up new trends and stay ahead of consumer needs. Curiosity is a crucial ingredient to help you do that.

Some people can walk down a street without noticing any shops and signage. Entrepreneurs are intrigued by everything in the shop windows. They ask questions such as, ‘Why did they put that in the window?’ Or, ‘I wonder if we could use the same colour scheme or pattern for our signage?’

I wonder why people buy a particular brand over another. I wonder how they consume a product in their daily lives. I wonder what they would buy next. So many questions, and I find all of them interesting to learn about the consumer and provide inspiration for my next business idea. My mentor always said to keep the gleam in my eye, and I’m 100% certain my entrepreneurship path helped me do that.

If I had the choice, I would do it all over again. Running a business gives you a front seat to life’s realities, and gives you the training to develop the persistence and grit needed to succeed. They say the failure isn’t in falling down, it’s in staying down. Owning a startup means you’re the only one accountable, and your staff is counting on you to get back up again and again to fight the good fight to stay in business. Can you get the same experience if you were doing a job? I would say that it’s not the same thing because you don’t have as much skin in the game. If you lose, you can quit your job and look for another one. If you run your business into the ground, you have to tell your staff about your failure, probably file for bankruptcy, and feel horrible about it for a long time.

The stakes are high, but as with everything else, the risk-to-reward ratio makes it worth it.