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Learning how to speak up in a group and make your voice heard is an essential professional skill. Anyone who's worked on a group project knows how difficult it can be to ensure each person's thoughts and opinions are heard. When there's a lively discussion happening, there will always be a few people who dominate the conversation and try to take the lead. However, it's important to be able to politely interject and advocate for your ideas. To help you do this, a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council members shared their best insights. Here's how they recommend making your voice heard in a group setting, and why doing so is an important skill for all professionals and entrepreneurs.

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Being a business leader means being the boss. It means being at the top of the company, making key decisions that affect not only the business, but also those who work for it. But being a successful business leader also means being humble and understanding that you are not alone in your trials and that you can trust your teams to help you through the harshest of times. As business leaders themselves, the members of Young Entrepreneur Council have learned many lessons about humility throughout their careers. Below are a few of those lessons and how they’ve helped these entrepreneurs become better leaders and people (and how you can become one too).

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Our patterns inform our processes, which in turn become our method of problem-solving and decision-making.

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Popular television shows, books, movies and the media in general often paint an idyllic picture of entrepreneurship, but it’s not until you’re actually in the thick of business that you fully understand what it means to be a business owner. While it’s perfectly OK to view entrepreneurship as a positive goal to aspire to, it’s important to be aware of the reality behind working for yourself and running a business to ensure you start your entrepreneurial journey with the right expectations. To offer their insights, nine members of Young Entrepreneur Council share some of the most common misconceptions about being a business owner and why they’re not always true.

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Communication breakdowns can occur at any time and in any work environment, but can seem especially prevalent in remote work situations. While remote work has its own unique benefits, it also means employees and managers are relying more on written, phone or video communication and less on the in-person communication and body language cues that can be so helpful for clarity.  So when that clarity is muddled and an employee is consistently feeling like they and their manager aren't on the same page about a project or expectations, what route should the employee take to remedy the situation moving forward? To provide the answer, a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council members offer eight ways employees can seek to resolve this miscommunication and gain more clarity in the future.

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In the business-to-business (B2B) world, there’s a digital marketing “spectrum of sophistication." It’s not about the marketing itself, but rather it has everything to do with measurement.

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Actively building my tribe helped me get through the hump last year and grow my business. As we move forward, finding a community that works for you is one of the best investments you can make.

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Members of the Young Entrepreneur Council weigh in on whether a long-term or campaign-by-campaign content strategy works best for brands. One important consideration in any marketing strategy is whether you should use a long-term approach, take things campaign-by-campaign, or forge some combination of the two. Of course, neither is inherently better than the other; each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Understanding the value of each strategy can help you determine when and how to best use that approach. To help with this, 13 members of Young Entrepreneur Council share their insights on their preferred approach and why it works for them. Use their insights to inform your own content strategy.

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Many entrepreneurs will concede that their worst problem is overthinking complex decisions. The issue with overthinking is not only that it stifles creativity and innovation; it also erodes your confidence as an entrepreneur and can make you second-guess yourself. In the world of business, this lack of self-confidence could spell disaster. The best way to avoid overthinking is to focus on the problem at hand and recenter yourself, but doing so requires a bit of effort. To help, these 12 experts from Young Entrepreneur Council discuss a few practical ways to recenter yourself and avoid overthinking as an entrepreneur.

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If you want to lead, you may want to nurture these traits first. Many people want to be influential, to be able to lead and solve problems and create real change in the world. But not everyone knows what it takes to get there or what qualities one must have in order to achieve that influence. If you study someone you find influential, however, you’ll likely find they have certain characteristics that help them seem that way.  But what are these elusive traits? Here, 13 professionals from Young Entrepreneur Council examine this by answering the following question:

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When an entrepreneur starts a business, the immediate concern is how much it will cost to set up. Cost can sometimes seem like a barrier to entry for those hopeful business owners looking to get started on a budget. Luckily, evolving tech has provided many free alternatives to the paid tools other professionals use. But with so many of these tools on the market, you could spend months sorting through them to find the ones that work best for you and your business. To help you narrow down the list, 15 leaders from Young Entrepreneur Council offer their best suggestions for free tools that solopreneurs can use to help keep startup costs down.

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If you're just getting your feet wet in business, there are many things that can be overwhelming. One of the biggest sources of overwhelm, however, is finances. With so many numbers to track, livelihoods to be responsible for and rules to follow, business finances can quickly become too much for new entrepreneurs to handle. However, following a few key steps and having a basic plan can go a long way to simplifying the entire financial process. Below, eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council discuss a few pertinent tips that may help first-time entrepreneurs get a little more comfortable with business finances and set themselves up for a successful financial future.

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Your energy levels are a key factor in how productive you are during the day. For an entrepreneur, maintaining high energy levels throughout the workday is necessary for maximum efficiency. But with so many things playing a part in how energetic we feel, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how best to manage those energy levels for work. To provide some guidance, eight leaders from Young Entrepreneur Council discuss several tips for keeping energy levels high to maintain peak performance and accomplish more in your day. When you feel your energy waning, follow this advice to help you stay on track.

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It’s far easier to stay where you are. But that won’t help you build an empire.

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Between investors, customers, employees and all other people with particular interest in a company, business leaders can have a difficult time trying to please all their stakeholders. But because the performance of a business is directly related to how the stakeholders feel about the company, aiming for overall stakeholder satisfaction is a necessary goal. So what is the key to impressing them? Stakeholders each have their own points of view on what counts as success in the industry. Yet, they still share some overlap, and finding that common ground will be key for any entrepreneur. Below, six members of Young Entrepreneur Council examine some strategies for ensuring stakeholders are satisfied with company performance and explain why these techniques are helpful in impressing them.

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Members of Young Entrepreneur Council share some foolproof ways to break down a complicated concept for your target market. You come up with a great idea. On paper, it makes perfect sense. You and your team talk about it together all day long, but when you go to explain the idea to your target audience, the idea just doesn’t translate well and you lose them. It can be frustrating to not have the skills or words to properly articulate your concept, but effective communication is a core skill for any entrepreneur. That’s why the members of Young Entrepreneur Council shared some simple ways you can successfully explain challenging concepts to their audience. Try these strategies to help you get your idea across, no matter who you’re talking to.

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Marketing is a crucial element of any successful business, and even small business startups will need to begin building their marketing department as soon as possible. However, some marketing roles are more critical to your business’s success than others. To help you determine which role you need to hire for first, 13 experts from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) answer the following question:

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At a time when in-person meetups are typically off the table, virtual networking platforms like LinkedIn can be valuable resources for business owners. The opportunity to connect regardless of location can open doors that just aren’t possible without these online tools. But while LinkedIn has some of the same features as traditional social media sites, its purpose, and therefore its use, should differ. To help professionals leverage LinkedIn and other virtual networking opportunities correctly, eight associates of Young Entrepreneur Council weigh in with their best advice on how to effectively utilize virtual networking to achieve your goals and how these practices might differ from in-person networking.

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Your employees’ personalities and work ethics have a direct impact on how effective and efficient you and your company are at getting anything done. Because of this, putting together a well-functioning team isn’t always straightforward. For an entrepreneur who needs to have team members they can count on, a few personality traits stand out as necessary. Below, eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council discuss some of the attributes they consider nonnegotiable in potential hires for their companies and how these traits impact the ability to complete good work.

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Like a well-oiled machine, businesses can only function if all elements of the company are in sync and working toward shared goals. Getting each department, team and employee on the same page, however, requires a certain level of transparency. Yet, so many entrepreneurs miss this vital detail when it comes to managing their business. Implementing greater transparency doesn’t have to be difficult, but it might not always be clear where to start. To offer some advice, eight leaders from Young Entrepreneur Council discuss how they intend to increase transparency in their businesses this year, and include advice for how other entrepreneurs can do the same.

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Every hard conversation is a learning opportunity.

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Information can be a valuable resource, and having enough of it is key to helping business owners make smart decisions. But lack of information or experience can also have an impact. Even seasoned entrepreneurs have regrets or moments when they wish they had done something differently if they knew at the beginning what they know now. Here, seven members of Young Entrepreneur Council reflect on their current knowledge and business experience in order to share some of the steps they wish they would have taken before starting their businesses.

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When doling out praise, leaders never expect it to have a negative effect on the team culture. But if a leader offers praise to one employee and not the others, those employees may begin to resent their teammate or even the leader themself. This envy can end up causing a negative domino effect that could impact the whole team. However, that’s not to say that excellent work should go unrecognized. To offer guidance on how to praise employees the “right” way, 11 members of Young Entrepreneur Council weigh in on how leaders can showcase an employee's good work without eliciting resentment or generating feelings of favoritism among team members.

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Businesses never stay the same size forever. An entrepreneur may yearn for the early days when their business was just a handful of people. But over time, businesses find great success and become entities that may span several offices and regions. The positive part of this expansion is that the business is doing well and bringing in more income. The downside is that, with so many new people, the company culture may start to suffer. In order for a business to retain its identity, keeping the company culture intact is crucial. For guidance, eight experts from Young Entrepreneur Council weigh in on how to maintain a company culture despite a massive expansion of business.

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Last year's challenges were too many to count, but one of the most ever-present ones was the shift to an online workforce. Remote workers are nothing new—they've been around for at least a decade in some form or another. However, they've been mostly contractors and freelancers, not full-time employees. With the widespread focus on remote work still necessary, business leaders need to find a way to capitalize on the growing remote workforce. To help, nine professionals from Young Entrepreneur Council discuss practical ways business owners can make the most out of this revolutionary change.

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Though simple, the equation requires all three components, and you can’t weigh one more than another.

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As an executive, difficult conversations often come up in the workplace. It may be something as sensitive as expressing a concern to an employee or explaining why the company's letting someone go. Part of being in a position of leadership is learning how to navigate those conversations. These difficult conversations are part of the territory, and even though it may be challenging to deal with them, they must be dealt with head-on. So how can a professional best deal with these kinds of situations? We asked eight executives from Young Entrepreneur Council about their most successful strategies when dealing with difficult conversations in their daily work life. Here's what they suggested.