You’ve done it. Against all odds you overcame the barriers to building your own business and have built a brand that has made a positive impact on the lives of your clientele. Moreover, you’ve provided rewarding jobs for dedicated, hardworking and talented people. That’s pretty incredible! But when your business is up and running, it can feel as though every day is a struggle for productivity, profitability and (that metric to rule them all) gross profit margin. However, there are other aspects of success besides your top and bottom lines. In this post, we’re going to look at some ways in which your business may well be highly successful that don’t necessarily show on your spreadsheets… but that doesn’t make them any less important.
Your relationship with your team
One of the great things about starting your own business is the ability to recruit and assemble your very own team of awesome individuals who don’t just have great skills and experience but have personalities that make everyday a pleasure.
However, when your eyes (and your mind) are always on the bottom line, you can spend a little too much time in your office poring over data. And they may instead assume that you’re locking yourself in your ivory tower away from them.
Take the time to let your team know just how special they are.
Your happiness and inner peace
You’ve done great things. You deserve to be happy and at peace. Sure, a little stress is inevitable. And to a certain extent it can be a good thing. Still, you deserve to take the time to find ways to work on your sense of inner peace and happiness. Whether it’s following organizations like https://www.wopg.org/, sparing a few minutes for mindfulness meditation or yoga or simply making the time to spend with family and friends. Keep yourself from becoming yet another burnout statistic.
Your pride in your accomplishments
They say that pride is a sin. And while vanity and self-aggrandizement will certainly do you no favors, there’s no shame in being able to look back and take pride in your accomplishments. In business, we’re conditioned to believe that our best is never good enough. That even when we’re successful there’s a neglected KPI that we could have performed better on. But when you don’t allow yourself to celebrate the successes (both large and small) you could find that your motivation and mood quickly begin to flag. You (hopefully) take the time to recognise and celebrate your employee’s accomplishments. Perhaps you should afford yourself the same courtesy.
The difference you make in people’s lives
There’s a lot of talk in marketing circles about the importance of social proof. Essentially, no matter well how written your marketing copy may be, consumers will always take anything you have to say about yourself with a big chunk of salt. They’ll trust the word of other consumers more than they trust you.
As such, it can be easy to see all those 5-star ratings and enthusiastic reviews as a mere means to an end- a way to attract more people to the business. But this is an unfortunate fallacy. Every 5-star review represents someone’s hard work, attention to detail and commitment to quality. Moreover, it represents a time when your brand has made a difference in someone’s life. That’s amazing! And it needs to be acknowledged and celebrated.