Redefining Success: What Does a Successful Business Actually Look Like to You?
When we think about what a successful business looks like, we often go straight to the more obvious business goals. How much do I want to earn? How many clients do I want? What offers do I want to create? What do I want to achieve next?
And don’t get me wrong, all of that is important. We need goals and direction, and we need to know where we want to go. But our business is more than just our business goals, and I think there’s an important part that we often miss when we’re so focused on the outcomes we want to achieve.
How do you actually want to work?
Because there’s more to our business than our offerings, what we sell and what we share. There’s also how we do it, how we spend our days, how we feel about the work we’re doing and how much energy we have left at the end of the day.
What Does Success Look Like in Your Everyday Life?
When we set goals, we often focus on the outcome without really considering whether the way we’re trying to get there actually aligns with us — our values, our strengths, our capacity and what’s important to us in life.
Maybe you love travelling and having the freedom to be away regularly, but you’ve built a business that relies heavily on you being somewhere in person. Or maybe personal connection is really important to you, but you’re trying to build everything online because that’s what you think a business should look like.
Even something like wanting a four-day working week might sound like the ultimate version of a spacious business, but perhaps five shorter days would actually suit you and your energy much better.
We can so easily pick up ideas about what a successful business is supposed to look like from other people, without really questioning whether that version of success works for us.
And if we miss that part, we can end up building a business that maybe even looks successful on paper, but doesn’t actually feel good to run. We might be chasing someone else’s version of success, building the offers we were told to build or working in ways that don’t really suit us, and then wondering why we keep getting stuck, overwhelmed or eventually burning out.
Success Isn’t Just About the Outcome
Reaching a goal also doesn’t really tell us anything about how we reached it.
Maybe you reached the income goal or filled the programme, but getting there left you utterly exhausted and with very little space for your actual life. Maybe you were constantly overworking, pushing past signs from your health that you needed to slow down, not taking enough breaks or constantly thinking and worrying about the business.
Of course there will be phases where we work harder, where things feel busier or we need to put more energy into something. But long term, it shouldn’t come at the expense of our wellbeing.
So I think there’s another question we need to ask alongside all the usual business goals:
What does a healthy business actually look like to me?
Not to somebody else, but to you.
Building a Business That Actually Works for You
This is something I’ve had to learn myself too. One of the reasons I originally left my employed job was because I had experienced burnout and wanted to be able to support my health better. I wanted the freedom to work in a way that actually supported me, but somewhere along the way, while building my yoga business, I forgot about that and ended up burning out again.
I remember teaching evening yoga classes because that seemed to be when successful yoga classes happened. But evenings are when my energy is lowest, and I often had to convince myself to leave the house and go and teach. I was trying to make myself fit around a way of working that I thought I should be doing, rather than asking whether it actually worked for me.
Over the years I’ve started listening much more to my own needs, strengths and capacity and changing how I work around those things. It’s still an ongoing process, but there are lots of small changes that have made a huge difference.
I can take time off now without spending the whole time worrying about clients or coming back to immediate overwhelm. I struggle with migraines at times, and I’ve created enough space in my diary that if I need a slower morning, I can usually have one rather than having to immediately push through.
They might seem like small things, and they’re probably not the things we usually think of when we talk about business success, but to me they’re a really important part of it.
What Do You Actually Want From Your Business?
It starts with taking some time to pause and actually ask ourselves what we want, because our vision for our business isn’t only about what do I want to achieve?
It’s also:
What do I actually want my experience of running this business to be like?
How do you want your days and weeks to look? How do you want to feel while you’re working? How much energy do you want left at the end of the day, and how much space do you want your business to leave for the rest of your life?
Because the day-to-day is such a big part of running a business. There will always be another goal, another idea or something we want to work towards, so finding a way to make the process itself more sustainable and supportive matters too.
Success can absolutely include income, clients, growth and all the things you want to create. But it can also mean having space in your diary, being able to take time off, having energy left for your life and being able to slow down when you need to.
Your business is more than just your business goals. How you get there matters too.
How do you want to feel while running your business?
I’d love to know — what insight are you taking from this?
What’s coming up for you as you reflect?
What is your biggest takeaway?
Gentle support, if you’d like it:
✨Your Business, This Time Next Year — Free Live Workshop
If this episode gets you thinking about what you actually want from your business, this is exactly what we’ll be exploring more deeply in my free workshop on 1st October.
We’ll spend an hour stepping back from the day-to-day and reconnecting with what you’d genuinely love your business — and life — to look like this time next year.
Let’s Connect:
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LinkedIN: @fabienne-belgardt-systems-expert
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