Take inventory of your personal skills Here's an idiom tailor made for too many entrepreneurs: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” To build a great business, you need to stick to your strengths and avoid your weaknesses—if you know them, that is. Do you believe you’re good at everything? If you’re not careful, such thinking could wind up being your downfall. “A lot of entrepreneurs deceive themselves into thinking they can do the whole thing on their own,” says Stewart Thornhill, executive director at the University of Western Ontario’s Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship. “There’s almost no more sure path to disaster than that.” It’s essential for business owners to evaluate their own skills and growth, since nobody is above them to conduct regular performance reviews and provide ongoing feedback. “Self-awareness is what will make or break your business in the long term, because every entrepreneur will at some point run up against his or her own limitations,” says Connie McCandless, president of Toronto-based Candomore Management Consulting. Identifying your weaknesses and filling the gaps early on can help your business prosper. When you’re ready to accept the possibility that you may not be perfect, follow this advice for taking your personal skills inventory. Begin by asking yourself if your business is everything you want it to be, advises McCandless. If it’s not growing as quickly as you’d like, or your products aren’t as innovative as they could be, reflect on whether these shortcomings can be traced back to any of your own personal weaknesses. For example, if you have a high turnover rate that’s affecting your company’s ability to grow, you may want to closely examine your management style and begin conducting exit interviews if you don’t already do so. Analyze how you spend your time, and what roles you’re filling in relation to roles being filled by employees. If you’re serving as CEO, VP Sales and CFO and your books are suffering because you’re not adept at or enthused with accounting, it may be time to hire an accountant. Or, if you’re spending most of your time on sales but sales are still weak, you may have to face the fact that you’re just not very good at it. Sign up for a 360-degree performance review. It’s one of the most effective ways to determine your skills and social style, because it can incorporate anonymous feedback from staff, peers and even your clients. Look up an HR consulting firm that has experience administering 360-degree appraisals. Pay attention to soft skills. “It’s common for an entrepreneur to become very task-focused, market-focused and product-focused, and to start off with very few employees who are loyal. It then becomes difficult to expand and find employees and delegate and build a company,” says McCandless. Recognize that social skills can be just as important as technical skills, and be conscientious about how you interact with others—from your clients to your staff. It could be as simple as asking how someone’s weekend was before jumping into business-related discussions, or making an effort to smile to seem more approachable. Take a test to evaluate your personality traits that may impact your leadership style. “One thing that a lot of large companies do that entrepreneurs often don’t think of is personality inventories,” says Thornhill. “People have different problem-solving styles, communications styles, leadership styles and so on.” Vancouver-based Consulting Resource Group, for instance, offers a variety of assessments online, including the “Entrepreneurial Style and Success Indicator.” Becoming more aware of your natural inclinations, like being controlling and stubborn, for example, could help you realize that you may be micromanaging your staff.  Ask someone to give it to you straight. “You need one or two people who you can really trust to provide the kind of candid feedback you need. Someone who can say, 'Look, you may think you’re a great people person, but you’re not.' Or, 'You may think you’re really creative, but you’re not,'" says Thornhill. This constructive critic may be a friend or even your spouse. Sometimes, says Thornhill, you need someone to just blurt out what everyone else is dancing around or afraid to say. For example, if you have a personal hygiene problem that’s keeping you from getting callbacks to meetings with potential clients, that’s something you need to know about. Says Thornhill: “You know who your blunt friends are.” — By Annette Bourdeau NEXT WEEK: Identifying where you can cut costs