As business owners, we all share a common dream – to make our business a success.
But what happens when we get there?
Your version of a successful business probably looks different to mine, but you do have a vision in mind of what success looks like to you. It might be 50 regular customers, a six-figure income each month, helping x number of clients achieve their dreams, or something as simple as earning enough to provide for your family while working from home.
Now you’ve achieved that, what are you going to do next? (and if you haven’t got there yet, enjoy some fun daydreaming and imagine that you have).
Managing that success is just as important as managing your business to become a success
The first step is to celebrate the win!
Success needs to be enjoyed, it took a lot of effort and hard work to get to where you are now so sit back and appreciate how far you’ve come.
Do something special to mark the occasion – treat your family, go on that holiday you’ve been planning for ages but haven’t got around to taking yet – do something you’ve always wanted to try but never dared to before.
Celebrating your success helps your mindset by rewarding the effort and promising more ‘good times’ when you reach your next success. It’s something to strive for and enjoy when you get there.
Learn from your success
This is the biggest opportunity for you to grow as an individual, and as a business owner.
Take the time to reflect on your success and how you achieved it. Try journaling and ‘mind dump’ all the thoughts going on right now onto paper and see if you can figure out what created the success, and how to use that to be even more successful.
Some journaling prompts you might find useful are:
- What was the turning point that led to this success?
- What actually worked in my business and directly led me to this point?
- What has indirectly led me to be this successful?
- What do I need to remember for the future?
Try not to focus on the mistakes you’ve made, or any regrets you might have as this can bog you back down into a “maybe this is as good as it gets for me” kind of mindset.
You’re feeling positive right now so take advantage of that and use the momentum to drive you further forward.
Don’t become too complacent with your success
It’s all too easy to think “that’s it, the hard work has paid off, I can relax now”.
As soon as you get complacent, that success may well be short-lived.
Clients will be able to tell you’re not putting in the same energy and effort, you’ll find yourself running out of creative juice and generally begin to feel stuck again.
When you’ve reached a dream, it’s time to dream bigger.
If your idea of success is working less, now is the right time to be taking on associates or outsourcing to other businesses. By training them up to do things the way that’s worked for you, or only outsourcing to like-minded entrepreneurs that share the same values and vision you can continue to keep your business a success while enjoying the lifestyle you’ve been dreaming of, whatever that might be.
Create a new 5-year goal for your business
This might be an entirely new business if you’ve had ideas you’ve put on the back burner, a collaboration with another successful business, or adding new products/services to the mix.
You’re now in a strong position to think forward and experiment a little with things as you have your already successful business as a safety-net. But that doesn’t mean you should completely change the direction of your business or branding. You’re successful because what you’ve done so far has worked, so keep doing it!
A lot of successful business owners will start a side-business as a coach to help other entrepreneurs reach the same level of success, while others might decide to focus on what they really love about their business and specialise further.
Whatever you decide to do, create a new plan of action and use what you’ve learned from your current success to drive it forward.
And those are my top tips for managing success. Well done for getting this far, now you know what you can achieve dream bolder and see what else you might be capable of, I’m sure it’s more than you think possible!