A lot of people come to me and ask what skills do I need and in what order do I need to acquire them. What I want to do today is I want to actually rank a tier list of all the skills with somebody who is new to business. At the end of the video, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about these skills with somebody who is trying to grow their business in a more developed company. So the first skill that I want to talk about is sales. It's essentially the exchange of

money for a product or service that you have. Now, when you're first starting off in business,

you don't need to think sales like, am I building a giant sales department, a sales org. You just

need to figure out, can you sell? Because in the beginning, the best salesperson is actually the

founder. In the beginning of every business that Alex and I started, we were the first salespeople. And at Appozachsh.com, that means

we were the first ones that were closing the first deals. It is one of the most paramount pieces of

the business because it is the bridge between the marketing and the back end. You learn so much

about the customer through doing sales that I think you

would be doing yourself a disservice in the beginning by not doing this starting out.

The more people that you talk to and have sales conversations with, the more people that you

understand who is a fit for my product or service and who isn't. Because a lot of the times

people think, oh, I just can't sell. But it might actually be that you're trying to sell to the wrong people. It was the first skill that I understood personally in our businesses, and because of it, I was able to learn so many other skills because I had that foundation. I think that the best way to get better at sales when you're first starting off is to stop labeling it as sales. I didn't read a ton of books on sales,

and I didn't know a lot about sales before I started doing sales. I was told that I was just signing

somebody up for a gym. Through that process of signing somebody up, I think it relieved a lot of pressure.

It's not convincing people, it's not coercing people. It's just showing them,

you want this, I have this, we are match. The best way to sell is just be honest with people,

to tell the truth, and state the facts about what you provide, about what you do, and about who's best for your product or service. I'm going to rank this tier S. So the second skill is is finance really just the management of money within the

company what that looks like to somebody just starting off is just simply understanding your

numbers what are the core numbers that are going to guide business decisions in the beginning of the

business what's your revenue what's your margin and what's your margin? And what's your net margin? Simply said, how much money do you make? And then how much money does it cost you to make that money? How do I make this number bigger? And how do I make this number smaller? And so you want to track those month over month. That's what you would call a P&L. I don't think that it's important that you learn this yourself. I think it's important that you learn how to read a profit and loss statement. Do you need to know how to create one? No. And I actually think it's a little bit of a waste of time for you to do that. You can outsource this for a couple hundred bucks a month to a firm that does small businesses. And then you can focus on using those numbers to drive more sales, drive more marketing,

and drive more people into the business. And so for that reason, I would say that finance is

lower on the list. I'm going to rank it at a C. The third skill to focus on is offer development.

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