6 Typical Weaknesses of Entrepreneurs
When you hear the word weakness…what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? I’m guessing something bad? Well, when I hear “weakness”, I think of opportunities and of beauty because once you understand your weaknesses and you can deal with them, there is nothing holding you back.
So today, we’re going to look at six typical weaknesses of an entrepreneur, how we can deal with them, and why it’s important that you ask yourself the question: What am I not perfect at?
As an entrepreneur, specifically as a solopreneur, you will need to learn a lot of things. Usually, we have been trained in something very different. We are very good at the content of the niche that we are providing our service or our product in, but all the rest is sort of new territory and some of it will come very easily to you and some of it will not. So here are some aspects that can be difficult for you.
What are entrepreneur weaknesses and solutions?
#1 Marketing
Marketing is really a talent that you get with practice and with education — seeing what is working in terms of psychology, persuasion, what is trending, and also literally having a hunch and a gut feeling of what works but also knowing how to calculate a budget. So marketing is a huge animal that companies usually have a separate department for. But if you are just starting out or if you’re running a small business, you will do this in-house, which means you and (maybe) your virtual assistant who has actually no business in giving you marketing advice, will do all the work. So, if you are not good at marketing I highly suggest that you do make the investment to talk to someone who is great at marketing, who can pinpoint ideas with you, and who can also help you to find the right person to support you with that.
# 2 Copywriting
Very close to marketing and one of the most important pieces in business is copywriting. Most people don’t even know what it is. Copywriting is all the text that you are writing to convey your message to consumers and to your people. For the longest time, it was so easy for me to write copy for my clients, but it was impossible to write it for myself. But throughout the years I’ve taken a lot of courses and written a lot of copy, so I was able to become better at it. It is still not a strength of mine, so in the beginning, I did outsource this a lot because otherwise, nothing would have happened.
# 3 Lack of strategy
A lot of entrepreneurs and new small business owners are very excited about their new idea, but they’re not very strategic. That means that they don’t see the milestones that it takes to get to a certain result. It’s something that I excel at. When I look at businesses, I can look at them, I can listen to the owners bubbling and giving me all their ideas, and I see the roadmap straight away. I can see that immediately and I can get a timeframe more or less depending on how much time my people have. However, most people just don’t have that. They have their idea, and they wanna get there, but it’s really difficult for them to see how. So it’s definitely not something that is a given for everyone and it can be a major weakness that is going to burn your energy and your money. And again, if this is not your strength, I highly encourage you to get educated in that or to get some help in that.
# 4 Public Speaking
Not every business will need you to be able to be a public speaker, but whatever you do, at some point you will most likely need to talk about it. You need to be talking about your service, about your product, you might do conferences, you might do networking, etc. So if this is your weakness, there are ways you can support yourself, like getting coached. But if you really cannot do it, you should maybe find someone who will do it for you, like a partner in your company.
# 5 Vision
Being a visionary for me is also not a given. Not everyone has that vision, which makes it difficult sometimes to manifest the energy that you need to pull through because a journey can be quite long. But if you have that vision, if you can feel that vision and it’s very personal, it will give you the energy you need.
#6 Perfectionism
Perfectionism can really get in the way a lot because you have such a diverse portfolio and if you are a perfectionist, it will be very difficult for you to move on. You will burn a lot of energy and you will be so much slower than if you recognize your weaknesses and you can outsource them.
Hopefully, this has been helpful for you to recognize what you might not be great at. And it’s not something to be ashamed of. A weakness is normal. None of us can do all of it. But make sure you understand your strengths and our weaknesses.
