When you’re leading a small business, the buck stops with you. While it can be easy to fall back on the same familiar set of skills, you have to keep expanding your knowledge if you’re going to grow your small business.
Indeed, taking the time and effort to expand your skill-set can transform the success of your small business and safeguard you from the challenges you will inevitably encounter.
Here’s why:
You will be more resistant to challenges
The more you know, the better you can deal with problems. This is especially true with small business leaders, who must master a range of different skills to keep their businesses afloat. For example, while some entrepreneurs are wizards with numbers, the majority will run in the opposite direction when faced with arithmetic. There’s no shame in it, but it can be a major detriment to your business if you don’t learn basic business skills like accounting. It forms a major jigsaw piece of your financial intelligence.
Accounting makes it infinitely easier to understand the financial state of your business, where you need to invest, and where you need to cut back. Leaving the financial side solely to external professionals or even your own employees is a vulnerable place for you to be. By getting qualified with a BSBA in Accounting, you put yourself in a far stronger position, allowing you to control your business with greater ease and peace of mind.
You can hire staff you can trust
Leading on from the previous point, developing your skillset will allow you to better analyze who is a good fit for your business and who isn’t. There’s nothing worse (or more risky) than hiring candidates for a job you know little about. When you understand the fundamentals of all areas of your business life, from financial literacy to sales and distribution, you have the ability to spot an underperforming employee and recognize what they are doing wrong, rather than waiting for disaster to strike.
You can make business decisions easier and faster
Take the underperforming employee example. Without any specific knowledge about their job or a complete overview of your business, you cannot make a swift decision about hiring or firing staff. This weakens your credibility and risks damaging the company. Like anything, you can’t make an informed decision unless all the evidence is in front of you, and it’s the same with business leadership. The more information you learn, the faster (and better) your decisions will be.
You can keep your small business small
The more you can do, the fewer people you need around you. You should still hire experts in specific fields, and it’s useful to have at least one advisor or an experienced head you can trust, but by widening your skill-set, you can cut down on the number of influential consultants, specialists, and hangers-on you need on your payroll.
You will have lots of new ideas
On a more creative level, the more diverse your skillset, the more sources of inspiration you will have at your disposal. You may be learning an accounting trick that sparks an idea about your distribution method, or vice versa.
