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6 Vital Entrepreneur Skills

The richest UK entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, but there are six skill sets which the wealthiest business people in the UK have learned, honed and developed. These are the backbone, the framework that gives them the freedom to make the decisions and take the actions required to generate vast sums of money.
Anyone can learn these skills for themselves; you have probably picked up and mastered elements of these without even realising. The objective of this report is to highlight the importance of these personal assets for building your own fortune. When you come to the end of this briefing paper, you’ll be able to identify the areas where you are already qualify as a Ninja specialist, and those abilities that will be worth your while polishing, to take you to the next step of entrepreneurial success.
Before we leap into the skills exhibited by the wealthiest business people in the UK, it’s going to be handy to dispel the myths that have blocked my vision in the past, and may be acting as an obstacle to your acceleration right now.
1. No requirement for qualifications
43% of the UK’s richest self made entrepreneurs didn’t go to university.
Richard Branson often talks about his dyslexia and lack of academic ability, inspiring budding entrepreneurs to just go for it….
Lord Sugar was demotivated by school, but as soon as he left, he started Selling Car Aerials and electical goods our of a van he’d bought for £50; this proved to be the ultimate “higher education” for a phenomenally successful life in business.

2. No need to be outgoing personality / classical salesman
There are a few salesmen in the list, like John Hargreave who started out as a market trader selling M&S seconds before setting up his first Matalan store in Preston in 1985 – the chain has had a few ups and downs, but is still worth over £1.3bn to Hargreave and his family.

Even the most flamboyant characters in the UK’s 100 Richest people will tell you that they studied hard to learn how to talk on camera and honed their public persona…
– Richard Branson was by no means a natural public figure. He pushed himself in front of the camera because he realised that was good for business. Most of the self made entrepreneurs are not natural limelight seekers.
I’m going to skip through the next 6 myths, just so we can get to the meat of this report sooner….

3. No need to be a computer wiz, there’s fair share of Luddites in the top 100, people who are quite open about their aversion to new technology…
4. You don’t need the powers of prophesy – to see into the future – many of the businesses that made the fortunes of people in the top 100 are nothing new – just reinventions or tweaks to existing ideas and commercial ventures that tip the balance to turn them into financial powerhouses.
5. No need to have a perfect family life, many of the top 100 have chaotic home lives – although they seem to calm with age…
6. No need for capital, 40% of the top 100 started with zero capital…
7. No need for family history of business – just as many disasters as successes – being born into a family business can be a great advantage, but even more families have dropped from the top 100 in the second or third generation. Hans Rausing and his family, inherited the Tetra Pak empire – built on the 0.5p per milk carton over half a century… the money still comes piling in, but the family life takes the edge of the financial success with scandal over Drug addiction and murder….

So let’s get on to the key skills you need to be a successful entrepreneur

Skills of an entrepreneur: On the surface, the richest people in the UK appear to be a pretty diverse bunch – thin, fat and mildly plump; many old, antique and toothless, but some quite youthful, many with more hair than me…. some even more bald (barely possible!)…

But looking below the surface, there are six key skill sets that almost all have acquired to enable them to achieve the astonishing cash success, that means that they can order any meal that they desire at any time of day, they can do anything they want to do, drive any car they want to drive and live anywhere they want to live….

1. The first skill found in the UK richest, from-scratch, multi-millionaires, is, wait for it…. Da Daaaah…. an Enquiring Mind. Yup, they all spent their early years in business looking for the system, the model to take them to success. They recognised and believed that there is a method to it. Almost without exception they took existing successful business models and duplicated that success in their chosen market.

2. Focus on the marketing. Even the engineers in the top 100, like Sir James Dyson (£1.4bn from Dyson Vacuum Cleaners) and Sir Terry Mathews (£1bn from Mitel Telephone Systems), recognised the importance of Marketing. They made it their job to totally understand the feelings, emotions and desires that bring their customers to life. And to discover and develop efficient processes to connect with those customers and satisfy their needs.

3. Take calculated risk. Another way of looking at this is the acceptance of failure as a step closer to success. There are countless examples of tests that they have run in the start up years. The Barclay Brothers, now worth £2.25 Billion who started out by Painting and Decorating in East London, rented a shop in Kensington called Candy Corner, but after a couple of years they were made bankrupt for not paying the rent… Within two years they’d paid off their debts and the bankruptcy was reversed. They were free to start a new business and began to build their fortune.

4. Mentors and Mastermind Groups – tap into ‘mastermind’. Anyone who’s tried it will understand the power of talking through ideas with other people with similar goals.
The Barclay Brothers were closely connected with the Tetra Pak founders – Hans Rausing and his family, and they met regularly with Tom Hunter (a Sports Shoe Millionnaire) to talk through and develop ideas.
Mahdi al-Tajir was mentored by Mohammed Al Fayed, who helped him to raise £1m for one of his early ventures.
Joe Lewis linked himself to George Soros, who introduced him to the idea of a Foreign Exchange business – which is how he made his £2.8 billion fortune.
Lord Ashcroft was inspired by and met regularly with David Wickens, owner of Lotus Cars who helped to guide and drive him forward in the early days.
Sir Terry Matthews who created Mitel tone-based telephone receivers was good friends with Kent Plumley, the Venture Capitalist, who helped him work out how to finance the early stages of his empire.
Others, like Sir Philip Green, found their inspiration from history and books, reading about the early pioneers of retail, that helped him develop the “Theatre of Retail” concept that runs through many of Green’s successes.

5. Decisive. These people at the top of the wealth food chain in the UK are not wishy washy. None of them meander through life waiting to see what might happen. They set themselves goals, actively seek out the opportunities, weigh up the benefits and the risks, make a decision which to go for and then give it a go… Richard Desmond started around 40 specialist magazines with minor successes, that allowed him to buy Penthouse and start Asian Babes, before really accelerating his business with OK Magazine, the Daily Express and other tabloids.
Peter and Denise Coates borrowed £15m to launch their online betting empire, but they’d taken many smaller steps building their Bet365 high street chain to get to this point.

6. Think beyond the boundaries. Many of us enjoy having a few rules – they can make us feel secure – so we embellish and even create imaginary lines in the sand to govern many of the things we do.
The folk who sit in the Top 100 UK Rich List seem to have a healthy disregard for the law, and conventions. Even seem to enjoy pushing the boundaries and challenging the law.
Jon Hunt, founder of Foxtons Estate Agents, is now worth £850m, broke the rules in his industry by working weekends and evenings. He recognised that house buyers don’t want to take time off work to look round houses.
Ajay Kalsi who made his fortune in Oil Exploration had a logistics issue to solve, when he bought some equipment from an ailing competitor. His neighbours woke to see a huge oil rig sitting in his back yard – it remained there for a few weeks, before being deployed on the next job…
Richard Branson tells a story about one of his early ventures importing music from Europe, he was caught trying to circumnavigate Customs and Excise and spent a night in jail before being bailed out by his mum!

You can develop the six money spinning skills sets exhibited by the UK’s top wealth mongers, just by understanding what they are…

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Walo Emerson

Charlie Wynne
Business 1Million
Your Quickest Route to 1 Million Sales

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