When I speak to my audience, I love to ask warm-up questions at the beginning. If I ask them whether they know what they need to become an entrepreneur, most of them answer in one voice - “Capital”, “Capital”, “Capital”. True, capital is one of the major requirements to start a startup. And most of them consider the capital in terms of financial aspect only. Capital is more than just money and there are more other forms of capitals equally or even more important than money to become an entrepreneur. Yesterday, I discussed about the Integrity as the ultimate requirement for excellence in business and in one of my previous posts, I discussed on Innovation as the mantra for survival in business. Today I will discuss on one of such essentials, the capital and their other forms:

Emotional Capital
I have not seen coaches on Entrepreneurship spoke on this capital, the emotional capital. This is your aspiration, passion and perseverance that always keeps you thriving to excel and drives to become successful entrepreneur. If you can not keep your emotional capital leveled high, in many cases the start-up entrepreneurs tend to pull back themselves so often even at small waves. In another way, emotional capital is an entrepreneurial instinct, which is a well-rooted desire to have your own business. You must have that instinct, loyalty and dedication to be fully directed towards your goal. The indulgence towards your goal is likely if you love your business.

Knowledge Capital
Academic certificates may prove your academic intelligence, but Knowledge capital mean more than the scholastic achievement. I like it to call it an “entrepreneurial brains”. To become a successful entrepreneur, you must have a knowledge, appropriate experience and skills about the business you plan to start before you start it. The knowledge capital is made up of the knowledge, experience and skills in you and your startup team. Team members with distinguishable knowledge capital in different business domains may have synergistic power to push the startup ahead. They can outperform if together than each of them ever could do individually.

Networking Capital

“It’s not only what you know, it’s who you know”.

Professional networking, business networking, social networking, community networking, global networking and all sort of contacts fall upon the networking capital that help you to promote, sell and reach to your real business market. Each of your startup team members should use these contacts to promote business.

People Capital
Select right people. You will be successful only if you have right people around you. People capital may mean the skills to do the things, experience doing the things before, specific trainings on the business you are doing, knowledge acquired over the time, that you should be able to use from the very first day of your venture. You are not supposed to develop each of these skills from scratch by yourself,

Cultural capital
There is a big challenge today knowing multi-culture business norms, when we are talking about competing in the the same playing field. You and your team must posses knowledge about cultural ethics, do and don’t, quality standards, people preferences and aspirations of the specific culture. You should be well aware about different geography, ethic groups, communities, country norms and based on that your actual target market. You may read my one of previous blog posts on challenges on going global.

I will discuss on other requirements for entrepreneurship in my future posts.
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