Congratulations, you made it! Your small business is successful. All your hard work has paid off, and you can truly look back and say, “I accomplished what I set out to do.” You love your life, you wake up happy, and you fulfilled that dream of entrepreneurship.
What does that make you feel?
What do you think about when I prompt those things for you?
Do you have a picture in your mind of what success looks like?
What your life looks like?
What your business might look like?
Success is one of the most subjective things for small business owners, and it’s my favorite topic to talk about.
For one person, it might look like retiring at 40, having multiple passive revenue streams, selling their business and traveling the world with their spouse.
For others, it might look like a successful business that allows you to pick up your kids at school at three o’clock and take summers off because your business is running itself.
Success may be a financial accomplishment. It might be a lifestyle that you get to lead or simply a dream that you’ve been able to fulfill.
As entrepreneurs, we all crave this version of success. We have started our business to create a life for ourselves that we want, that we are aspiring towards, but we don’t always have a roadmap of how to get there. Well, I’m here to share some of the wisdom that I’ve received and pursued regarding success and want to help you make your way towards that vision of what you want to achieve in your business.
Success is one of my favorite things to talk about. I am a hearer of dreams. I love being able to talk with people about their passions, about that end result that they want to achieve. If you’ve ever met me or speak to me, you know, that one of my questions I always ask are, what are your goals and what does success look like for you.
If you could achieve anything you wanted, what would that life look like? I’d love hearing that deeper side of people and what they’re truly after, because you get to see their hearts. You get to see their passion about why they started their business and ultimately where they want to go. And it is my mission to help people get there.
That’s what this podcast is for. That’s what my business is for. That is my mission in life: to help people be successful and achieve that vision for themselves. So, here’s a whole podcast episode dedicated to my favorite topic in the world, small business success. Ready for my succeeding small framework?
Let’s dive in!
How To Be Successful In Business
First of all, we have to cast a vision of success. If you want to succeed, you have to first know what that means for you. And I know that’s kind of silly to say, but sometimes we get stuck in the grind of running our business or just living our day to day lives that we can sometimes forget.
Or maybe you’ve never even thought about it like, what is the end result? Where are we going?
Step #1: Vision Casting – Define What Small Business Success Means To YOU
We have to have a definition, a goal, an aspiration of whatever we’re striving for. And in order for this to really work, we have to be as specific as possible and I’m going to tell you why.
I’m a big believer in working backwards, especially when it comes to goal setting and vision casting. I like to start at the end and think of the brightest, biggest, ultimate result possible. If I achieved everything I dreamed of, without restrictions, without roadblocks, what would that reality of mine look like?
I like to think this way because it puts me in the position of really meditating on what I want.
What does success look like for me?
What is the end goal?
And it can inform the way I feel about my current situation, and it can inform my end goal actions going forward. So vision casting and having this end destination mind can help you make better choices as you’re always aligned towards that end result.
It can help you stay motivated and inspired in your business because you know what you’re going for. You know, what’s waiting for you at the end of it all. And when you share this vision with your employees and your team, it makes a massive difference in your business.
It changes the outlook of why everyone is doing what they do and gives meaning to people as they move forward in the day-to-day of their lives. If you are going through business without this end vision of success, it’s like driving the car with no GPS. You’re just wasting gas and going nowhere fast.
If you are laser focused on that goal of success, then nothing can tear you down. So, how do you do it?
How do you vision cast?
Step #2: Vision Casting Prompts – The Secret Of How To Run A Successful Small Business
These are my prompts that I like to use! I do this regularly, about once a year, and always try to stay in tune with it. Because like I mentioned earlier, it inspires you, it keeps you motivated, and it keeps you going.
So, here are the questions that I ask myself:
Work Backwards: What does your Ideal business & life look like?
I like to first vision cast in lenses.
For example, to start with, what does my life look like?
I can picture a timeline, you know, 10 years in the future, or maybe the ultimate version of the life I want to live for myself (with or without that timestamp) and ask myself questions like:
Where do I live?
What does my daily routine look like?
What is my family structure like?
How do I spend my time?
Do I travel?
What are my hobbies?
Do I volunteer?
What kind of things do I do with my family?
What are my finances?
How much money am I making?
Asking myself questions about what kind of debt I have:
Do I have any debt?
Did I pay off all my debt?
What do I do with my money?
Asking yourself questions like these and getting as specific as possible can really help you understand what’s a priority for you and what you’re working towards.
Remember, this is unrestrained, so don’t get caught in the trap of “Oh my gosh, I can’t get out of this situation.” If you have debt and you’re feeling stuck in where you are in your present moment, that’s not what this is about. This is about ultimate. This is about limitless. This is about the BIGGEST version of success that you can live.
For your business ask yourself questions like:
What does my company look like in that ultimate vision for myself?
What does my team look like?
What kind of services do we offer?
How is my business known in my community?
What kind of reputation do we have?
What have we been able to achieve?
How much revenue do we make?
And how much do I pay myself?
And how much do I pay my people?
Piecing together those two lenses, your personal and your business, I like to take those visions and ask those specific questions and be able to add that timestamp back in.
So, let’s work backwards and say, “okay, if this is what we want to achieve in 10 years, what does that look like in five years?
What does that look like in one year from now?
This allows you to slowly work backwards and start seeing how to progress into that ultimate vision in smaller time increments. These timestamps will become your benchmarks for success. So, in order to achieve that 10 year multi-seven figure revenue, eight-figure business, whatever you want to achieve… in order to do that in 10 years, you have to have some stepping stones in year one and year five to get to that point, right?
What Stepping stones will help you achieve your business goals?
That brings me to step number two, which is identifying the stepping stones that will take you from here to success. And now that we know where we’re going, this will be a lot easier.
Picturing that vision of success: What are the roadblocks between you and getting to that ideal place in your life and business today?
For example, if you are planning to franchise your business, you will need to have scalable operations, meaning other people could come into your business and have ready to go playbooks on how your business functions from your opening duties to your marketing strategies, your vendor relationships, and your hiring processes.
So your first to-do item, your first stepping stone will be to analyze the systems in your business.
How much do you have documented?
Are you the CEO, the bottleneck when it comes to the day to day of your business?
Do you still have things in your company that only you know how to do?
How easily would it be for somebody to come in and take over operations?
Brainstorm all the things that need to happen in order to achieve that ultimate vision of success. These are your stepping stones. This may get so overwhelming, I know from experience, but I encourage you to keep going. Just write that down until you have explored all those avenues of the things that need to happen.
These stepping stones can become your goals. You can take that list, you can prioritize it, put a timeline to it, and make it happen. You can organize it in that one year, five year, or 10 year mark. Now, because this is the ultimate vision of success, not all of these things will happen in the short term. Don’t put all those stepping stones in year one.
Don’t let that discourage you, but instead plan for the future and break these big picture to-do items into actionable strategies that you’ll start working towards year after year. That makes those big goals seem actually possible when you think about it like this.
You’re only are as good as the people you surround yourself with
Next in our success framework is number three, get a support system. If you want to succeed, you should be surrounding yourself with other people who want the same things as you. Surround yourself with positive people who have achieved the things that you are going for.
Have you ever heard of the idea that you are who you spend the most time with?
This is so important to consider if you want to succeed. You need to surround yourself with a community of people who exemplify the life, values, and success that you want for yourself. These people, they will inspire you, support you, and help you become better every day. So, I know this is easier said than done, but here are some ways that you can start finding these people and sticking with them as you continue to go towards your vision.
You can go and attend masterminds.
There are tons of virtual masterminds or paid mastermind clubs, types of things where they have successful people all in one room.
There can be some locally as well. So, check things like meetup or Facebook groups to be able to see if you can find some either in your city or in your state, possibly. Another good place to do this is to go to group coaching. If you find a business coach who helps people like you, and they have a group program coaching session, then you can go and make friends with all those people in there, be able to share your problems, be able to hear other people’s problems, and kind of just sit together as a community with people in the same space, trying to achieve the same things.
You can go to seminars and trade shows where you can meet people in your industry.
These are really fun because they broaden your perspective of who is not just in your local community, but who is in your space, and niche. So, being able to go to industry specific conferences is really cool because you get to meet business owners from all over the country, all over the world, and be able to network with them and not worry about things like competition.
Instead think: how can these people be my collaborators?
How can I collaborate with these people instead of compete with them?
You can join any organization or you can create one.
So like all good entrepreneurs have a tendency to do. If we can’t find what we’re looking for, we can create it. Just think about how you want to form your network:
Who do you want in the room beside you?
Who do you want to learn from?
How do you want to give value to your community?
Because it has to go both ways.
Think about what you can do as a servant to others and be able to create this space of sharing, of authenticity, and be able to have this true network of support as you keep aligned toward success.
Use your vision of success to map out your KPIs
So, now that you have a vision for success, you’ve identified the stepping stones that are going to need to get you there. You’ve created this support group of people to keep you accountable towards that vision of success. Here’s the next thing you need to do: Identify the key metrics to track towards your journey of success.
If you want to succeed, you have to not only know what success looks like, but you need to know how to track and measure that success.
Knowing your numbers is so important as a scaling small business, especially if we have big goals we want to achieve. So, take a look at that ultimate vision and pinpoint those items that you are able to say things like revenue, paycheck, and debt. Think about things like profit. What are those financial KPIs that you want to be tracking and be able to foresee them both towards that ultimate vision and then break it apart in that five year, one year benchmark.
If that’s the timeline you choose to go on, think about other KPIs that are going to get you there.
They can be people. So, the team and staff in your business.
Do you have employee turnover?
Do you need to be able to have employee satisfaction?
Do you need to have a great culture that people are able to come in and stay and retain?
Think about KPIs related to your clients. Things like client churn. Client satisfaction, reviews,, etc…
What are all these key metrics that are going to need to exist in your business to be able to help you get to that point of success?
Write them down, brainstorm all the KPIs, use chat GPT to help brainstorm KPIs and be able to have the spreadsheet that you track over time to be able to measure your goals.
If you want to be able to expand, you’re going to need to have marketing goals. How many people do you want to reach? How many new leads are you going to need to get?
Think about sales KPIs. How many of those sales are you going to need to close on a regular basis? Think about those benchmarks because you’re going to want to pick the most important ones, the ones that are true indicators of success, and you’re going to be able to follow those as you grow.
These KPIs and key metrics will be able to help keep you on track and give you a warning sign if you’re not close.
Now, I have a tendency to overshoot my goals. I am way overconfident at the beginning of the year, and I set a lot of stretch goals for myself. So, it’s important for me to set a stretch goal (what I really want to have happen), and another goal that’s more realistic. That way, I know I have those two things in mind. I think that’s really healthy for my mindset. I would pick the most important ones, the true needle movers. I think it’s important to track, but I definitely don’t want to get in a state of overwhelm when I’m focused on this really exciting topic like success.
You need systems that work (even when you’re not)
So, now that we have our numbers, we have our benchmarks. We’ve got infrastructure to be able to help track those data points as we continue to grow into success. We need to now focus on growth. The next thing that we need to do to succeed as small businesses is to have a reliable lead generation system.
Businesses need one thing to continue to grow customers and revenue, right? If you want big things in your company, you need a repeatable way of generating leads and acquiring customers and revenue into your business.
I think one of the biggest mistakes that scaling entrepreneurs make is to continue to do marketing and sales by themselves. The growth of their business depends solely on them, their time, and their energy. So, whenever the business owner stops, so do their leads. So does the revenue.
This is not sustainable if you want that vision of success where you work less and make more and achieve greater things for yourself, right?
You have to be able to make sure that your business has a revenue generating system that is not dependent on you. So think about that. Marketing strategies that will help attract strangers into your business. You want your most ideal client to be finding you on repeat, where you yourself don’t have to go find them.
You’re not the one going to networking groups.
You’re not the one sending cold emails.
You’re not the one taking sales call after sales call.
Because that’s a dangerous space to be in as you scale, it means the minute you catch a cold or want to take a vacation – your revenue stops. You don’t have a way of getting new leads, new business when you stop and being able to scale and achieve that vision of success.
Those two pieces have to align for your business to grow in a way that’s not dependent on your physical presence. Thinking about things like:
What gets you long term visibility?
How can you align and show up where customers are looking?
One of my favorite strategies for this is search engine optimization, especially for service based businesses.
This helps position companies in places online where people are looking for them every single day. People have a need and they go and look it up. People don’t go and browse Instagram for their next HVAC contractor or landscaper, SEO is long lasting visibility that you don’t have to pay for.
If you can get on page one of Google, and show up where your customers are looking for you, that real estate is gold! People already need your services. If you can just be there in the places that they’re already looking above your competition, this can become a powerful lead generating machine for your business. You can protect your business and continue to grow and scale, because you physically did not have to work for those leads.
And next thing you know…
Your inbox is full, your phone is ringing, and you can focus on scaling your business into that vision of success.
This is also really important if you ever plan on selling your business. If you, the CEO, are one of those bottlenecks that we talked about earlier when it comes down to lead generation and sales, especially closing leads, this is not a good sign for a prospective buyer or a business broker.
Here’s why: If you sell your business and you are the only one driving leads into your company – what is that new business owner going to do?
What is that new buyer going to have to do? Well, they are going to have to do it themselves and that does not make for a very lucrative opportunity. So, this is a really important step for people who want to scale and for people who want to sell.
And honestly, just for good business practices to allow you, the CEO, to get some of your time back and make sure that you are on the path to growing your business in a successful, sustainable way.
Setting up your business to scale
Next up in our Succeeding Small framework is to have a scalable operation.
We talked about this a little bit before when it came down to our franchise example above, and it’s going to be a little bit subjective depending on what you’re going for, but the concept at its core is being able to scale and have something that is sustainable.
The actual inner workings of your business being sustainable is so, sooo important to know as a small business wanting to succeed. You have to have things like systems and processes in your business.
How does your business function?
Do you have that documented?
What kind of services do you provide?
How do you actually do them?
You need to be able to write this down to document it. Now, this is talked about in a lot of different spaces, a lot of different ways, but you can think about it in terms of SOPs, standard operating procedures. You can have instruction guides. I’ve heard a lot of people in a lot of books and thought leaders talk about playbooks.
It’s like a playbook for how to deliver your service or a playbook for sales or anything like that. Whatever you want to call it, the concept is the same. You have to be able to write down and document all the things that you do in a way that someone could execute without your presence. I think that’s a really good exercise to be able to do.
So, think as you go through day to day, what do I need to write down? What is an essential piece of my business?
And break down all of those topics. Service delivery, team, HR, hiring, firing, performance management, finances, sales, marketing.
Think about all those core aspects of your business and make sure that you have guides, playbooks, SOPs, instruction manuals written for those things. Now, this is an ongoing never ending task.
So, I encourage you to systematize the systems, be able to put a task on your calendar every day to be able to write one thing, write down one instruction manual, and be able to do that for your employees. For example, have them write instructions for the things that they do every day, and keep it in a secure place like Google Drive or your project management software.
Be able to maintain all these documents, because this will be extremely valuable as you continue to grow in scale. This will help you do things like double your revenue, double your client intake, or double your team!
We talked about those big revenue goals in our vision casting, right?
So, think about if you want to achieve “x” much money, how many clients do you need to reach that?
What are those clients paying?
What are they receiving?
What are the services that we have?
What revenue streams do exist already in our business?
What does our staff need to look like to support that end result?
Think about how you need to scale to accommodate that level of an organization. If you support a hundred regular clients today, but you want to scale to other cities and serve a thousand customers and make multi seven figures or eight figures in revenue, then you need to have the system in place to serve those people, to hire the staff, to have repeatable processes for the day-to-day and so much more.
Think about scale as an exercise and where your operational gaps are.
A good thing to think about is “What if my business doubled today?”
What if I had twice the amount of leads, customers, and team members?
What would break in my business?
Those are the things that you need to fix, plan for, and map out that plan of success to be able to get you where you want to be.
Another important thing about planning for scale and having scalable operations is being able to plan for your absence. We talked a lot about this throughout this episode, but think seriously about what happens if you step out of your business. We asked that question of what will break, what will break if you double your business, but what will break if you exit, what will break if you leave for two weeks, for a month?
For two months?
Play that exercise in your mind and be able to put down, build the documentation, put down the instructions, train up your team, hire the roles that need to exist to be able to get you out of the day-to-day of your business. Be able to get your business in a scalable place in its operations to be able to function without you.
This is powerful. And it’s also another one of those steps that people like business brokers and prospective buyers look at if you ever want to sell your business. They want to know that your business can operate without you. So, think about that as another additional exercise for scalable operations.
Don’t be afraid to fail
Last but not least, I think it’s so important when it comes down to succeeding as a small business to embrace failure and be prepared to adapt.
Nothing goes according to plan. That’s okay. As long as you are so clear on what you want for yourself, for what you want for your business and your life and your family, if you continually take inspired action towards your goals, then you can see past the short term.
Those failures that are inevitable. Things don’t always work out like you think they will, keep your eye on what truly is important for yourself, for your life and your business, and to be able to adapt. Your dreams can change too as you grow and your efforts can adapt with them.
What Does Running A Successful Small Business Look Like To You?
Keep reminding yourself of that success and you’ll be able to take life in strides so that you keep moving, you keep growing, and keep succeeding.
So, let me ask you one more time, what does success look like for you?
Can you feel it?
Can you see it?
Does it scare you and inspire you?
I have full confidence in you that you will achieve it. And this podcast is here to help you.
You will succeed, my friend. I believe in you!
In the meantime,
Keep Succeeding Small
