If you’re an entrepreneur or intrepreneur who wants to know what you’re truly capable of, then do a skills audit. Your skills audit makes your skill set obvious to you so that you can craft your next offer with confidence and know the next steps to take.
Your skills audit is a comprehensive list of all the skills you have and what you’re able to deliver because of them. Taking this inventory lets you see what areas you excel in and reminds you of your achievements.
When you know your greatest skills, you can leverage them through what you’re already doing and in the new products and services you decide to sell. Your skills audit paints the picture of your experiences and strengths so that you see what’s possible next. Completing this inventory makes your skill set obvious to you so that you can craft your next offer with confidence and know the next steps to take.
How to do a Skills Audit
You’re invited to write your timeline in years, list your milestones/ achievements in a column, and then list the skills they showcased /or/ what you learned in another column. For a further step, list any deliverables you created. Deliverables are things you made, like building a website, setting up a blog, and creating social media content. Finally, look for similar skills and combine them into main categories for an overview of your greatest skills.
6 – Step Skills Audit
1.) Write a timeline in years (as far back as you want to go)
2.) List your milestones/ achievements for each year.
3.) List your skills / what you learned based on each milestone or achievement.
4.) List deliverables created for each year.
5.) Combine similar skills into the main categories.
6.) Summarize your skills in a key takeaway.
This post shares my personal timeline plus a list of the skills and lessons from each achievement. Read through my milestones, achievements, skills, and lessons learned from each year.
You’re looking for what you naturally excel at and you may already know what that is. If you don’t, completing this full inventory will show you.
Lauren’s Skills Audit Example
2012
- Started Malva Marketing Services
SKILLS: Consulting | Client Liaison | Create Strategy | Creative Direction | Business Pitching | Creating Packages | Selling Offers | Getting Retainer Clients | Managing Creatives | Social Media Strategy | Social Media Management | Community Management | Creative Partnerships and Collaborations | Website Building | Business Development
- Wrote my marketing and motivation blog
SKILLS: Blogging | Blog Building | Copywriting | Building Email Lists
DELIVERABLES: Websites | Blogs
2013
- Traveled internationally to clients, creating content, building websites and managing multiple social media accounts.
SKILLS: International Business | Client Liaison | Create Strategy | Content Creation | Contractor Liaison | Team Management | Productivity | Time Management | Content Calendars | Quarterly Planning | Website design, management, and building
DELIVERABLES: Content | Content Calendars | Websites
- Started A Good Exchange
SKILLS: Community Building | Events | Collaborations
2014
- Grew my business and reopened in a new city, Cape Town.
SKILLS: Starting Over | Networking | Self Promotion | Strategic Partnerships | Community Building | Business Development | Negotiation
SKILLS: Productivity | Time Management | Content Calendars | Monthly Planning | Brand Bibles | Style Guides
DELIVERABLES: Blogs
- Bought my apartment.
LESSONS: Financial Security | Stability | The importance of having a base
2015
SKILLS: Credibility | Public Speaking | Business Mentorship
- Became Africa’s Global Ambassador of Collaborative Consumption.
SKILLS: Interviewing | Community Building | Networking | Events | Public Speaking
- Developed a co-working app.
SKILLS: Team Work | Team Management | Networking
- Continued public speaking on future trends.
SKILLS: Public Speaking
- Continued writing for online magazines and my popular personal blog: Love, Lauren
LESSONS: People are as interested, if not more interested, in my life as a creative and entertaining person than in me as a businesswoman. My lived experience and ability to express it has value to others.
DELIVERABLES: Blog
2016
- Awarded 5 accounts from Kraft Heinz.
LESSONS: I finally proved that my methodology worked with every type of business, from creative companies to startups, to private international businesses, to global conglomerates. My results were undeniable and outstanding, BUT it doesn’t matter how progressive you are if a company is committed to outdated ways of working. The alignment of values is everything. And when management is sexist, misogynistic, and predatory, it’s unsustainable. I will always choose peace over paychecks! Selling your time IS selling your life, and I wasn’t interested in doing that.
DELIVERABLES: Content
- Became a Tech Stars Associate and official pitch coach.
SKILLS: Pitch coaching | Public Speaking coaching | Fintech marketing | SCRUM working | Teamwork
LESSONS: Give First! The importance of mentorship.
SKILLS: All things book publishing on Amazon! | How to get books into bookstores.
DELIVERABLES: Book
2017
- Quit Corporate Clients for good.
LESSONS: Working for men presents a unique set of challenges that take too much of an emotional toll to ever be worth the money exchange. Most clients do not know what they actually want because they’re making it up as they go and can take it out on contractors when they change their minds or scope. Remember this when you’re hiring. Expectations change when the scope changes and trying to make work linear fails everyone.
SKILLS: Public Speaking | Presentations
- Created The Rebella Project for women’s expression.
SKILLS: Film making: Directing, Producing | Team Coordination | Negotiation | Voice overs | Performance | Public speaking | Community building | Events | Content Creation
DELIVERABLES: Film | Content
- Started Malva Business Academy.
SKILLS: Creating Offers | Training events | Business Mentorship | Idea Generation
- Took a creative sabbatical and never came back…
LESSONS: You never know which decision will change your life forever
2018
- Started Witches Rehab
SKILLS: Community Building | Online Events | Content Creation
DELIVERABLES: Content
- Started Malva PR
LESSONS: Some projects need to be shelved for a later date and need longer to marinate.
- Became a high-ticket sales closer
SKILLS: High Ticket Sales | Webinars | Sales Funnels | Sales Pages
LESSONS: There is never a simple 3-step process. It’s always 537 things, with a lot of technical support needed. And it all means nothing unless you can sell it. I can only sell what I truly believe in.
- Had a TV show called SHEEO on Roku and Apple TV.
SKILLS: TV Presenting | Interviewing
- Grew my business in America through courses, programs, guidebooks, and services.
SKILLS: Business Development | Creating Offers and Packages | Content Creation | Community Building and Management | Events – online and in real life
DELIVERABLES: Content
2019
LESSONS: Most coaches will never have real businesses because they don’t want to create evergreen packaged solutions and don’t get specific results. And coaches who coach coaches run pyramid schemes or MLMs where they hire people for their time and pay them less than they make to do work for them. It’s selling people and I’m not interested in that model.
- White-labeled Business School for VA’s.
LESSONS: VA’s don’t make enough money to afford business training and if they could run businesses, they’d run their own not someone else’s. Training other people to do work for you and then checking their work is a lot of effort when you could do less and do it yourself. Outsourcing sounds like a solution, but a creative strategy is much better and more sustainable. Always hire a business coach or creative strategist before an assistant.
SKILLS: Public Speaking
LESSONS: Your network gives you the best opportunities and referrals.
Created:
- Simply Irresistible (my signature program)
LESSONS: In hindsight, you will mix and match your programs and offers and it gets easier and easier because the work is done. It’s now just a matter of repackaging and repurposing. The biggest issue with creating offers is not the content inside but the packing around that is used to sell it. I thought that 80% is the creation and 20% is the marketing, but it’s actually the other way around. For the next few years, you’ll find multiple ways to sell the same thing with different names, at different times, in different ways.
LESSONS: Referrals are amazing to grow your business. Passive income is easy to make when your network is strong and you’ve created a structure that’s easy to follow and is a win-win for everyone. The best ideas are iterative. Leverage was a WhatsApp Group, a LinkedIn group, women only, my first group press release (which linked back to Malva PR), a mastermind group.
Again – it’s all repurposing.
- Creative council
LESSONS: And now also Content Creators as a group and DIY. So one idea morphed into another and then spilt back into 2 separate ideas. The first group evolved with the members from the basics of social media into content creation – into offers and sales. Then two intermediate groups: Content Creators who are community builders and then Create Business Council for business owners who already have offers and content and want to focus on sales. And the DIY Content Creators package and get started on your own.
- Business Optimization (1:1 program)
LESSONS: I love working with business owners one-on-one, but it’s energetically intensive and so I limit how much I do this.
- Emotional Alchemy (1:1 coaching)
LESSONS: I prefer business coaching and creative strategy to emotional work because it’s more tangible and I think most people need a 12-step program because that’s the best self-help there is. That said, I still want a spiritual/emotional offer and am incubating one under Rebella Nation.
2019 DELIVERABLES: Content
2020
- Renamed Business School for Coaches, The Creative Business School.
LESSONS: I change names a lot! From Malva Academy to Alchemist Academy to Business School for Coaches to The Creative Business School to Create Business Academy!
- Created “How to make your business your sugar daddy so you can move to your beach house.”
LESSONS: Getting more playful is always the way forward. I redid this webinar in early 2022 and realized it’s STILL too old-school based on my webinar training. I do best coaching live, being intuitive, and using my creative genius in live time instead of an old-fashioned presentation teaching so I probably won’t do a webinar again…
- Moved to my beach house in Hermosa Beach.
LESSONS: I live a life that is a permeant holiday. I have worked less and less and played more and more. That’s still happening, so the experiment and my book worked.
2021
- Self-Published my book, Business Reimagined: Love, Play, Magic.
SKILLS: All things self-publishing | Scrivener | Book cover design | Events
DELIVERABLES: Book | Book Publishing | Book cover design
- Renamed The Creative Business School – Create Business Academy
LESSONS: Yup – I like new names for offers and businesses.
- Nurtured my Business Council and 1:1 clients
LESSONS: I really enjoy weekly feedback on content.
2022: Q1
LESSONS: The same. Things lesson I’m still learning: things take way longer than I expect and even though I’ve been doing what I do for years, very few people know that, so I need to give longer lead times.
What I left out… PODCAST
I ran a podcast for 2 years called The Creativity Coach and then Creation with Lauren Wallett.
SKILLS: All things setting up and running a podcast | Audio tech| Interviews | Team management | Content Creation.
DELIVERABLES: Content | Podcast
LESSONS: I get bored interviewing people, especially men who request to be on podcasts. It’s not that interesting. But I love I know how to use GarageBand. I got better training from a TikTok singer in 30 minutes on how to make up songs than I did after years of running a podcast and figuring it out alone so I combined my podcast skills with the creative class and made this… Awkward Diary Of A Love Addict. I may continue this as a new creative project or maybe a few…
Your Skills Audit Summary
Now that you have a document with all your raw materials, look at how you can combine skills and lessons into specific categories.
After I identified all my skills and lessons, what became obvious to me are 2 main things:
I excel at creating content and cultivating communities.
Because of these two superpowers, I can not only teach others, but also use these skills for any new business or community I want to start. Igniting my phoenix magic enables me to run a luxury candle collection, run multiple blogs simultaneously, bring back Malva PR, and find new creative ways to mix my emotional alchemy together with Witches Rehab into Rebella. It’s a constant repurposing and reconfiguration of all the things I’ve done in the past 10 years and the skills and lessons from the 10 years prior (which are very similar.)
And through delivering content, I’m able to cultivate a community – which is how I’ve grown businesses.
Now it’s your turn.
Ask yourself:
1.) What do you obviously excel at?
2.) Which aspects of your achievements could you combine to create a new offer or business?
Email me with your summary and the ideas it’s sparked.
Summary
Do a skills audit to determine what services, products, and businesses you could create or the next steps to take.
Key Takeaways
6 – Step Skills Audit
1.) Write a timeline in years (as far back as you want to go)
2.) List your milestones/ achievements for each year.
3.) List your skills / what you learned based on each milestone or achievement.
4.) List deliverables created for each year.
5.) Combine similar skills into the main categories.
6.) Summarize your skills in a key takeaway.
Recommended Reading
Love, Lauren
***
P.S:
ADVERTISE YOUR BUSINESS HERE
*sponsor a blog post to advertise your business to my audience*
(with links to your website, social media, and email)
email hello@laurenwallett.com to find out more
